Ur

You see the ziggurat long before you reach it. The plain south of Nasiriyah is so flat, so absolutely without feature, that the Great Ziggurat of Ur rises from it like a statement — a massive stepped pyramid of fired brick that the eye keeps trying to fit into some familiar category before giving up. I had seen pictures. The pictures do not prepare you for the scale, or for the silence, or for the profound strangeness of encountering something this old in a landscape this empty.

Ur was one of the world’s first cities. At its peak, around 2000 BCE, it may have housed sixty-five thousand people — an almost incomprehensible number for the time, a city larger than anything in Europe would be for another two millennia. The Sumerians who built it invented writing, mathematics, the wheel, the concept of law, the idea of organized religion as architecture and bureaucracy. When you stand in the dust of Ur, you are standing in the place where civilization, in a very direct sense, began. The ziggurat — dedicated to Nanna, the moon god — was the religious and administrative center of this world, and it was built around 2100 BCE and has been here since.

The site is managed modestly and visited by few — when I was there, the only other visitors were a group of Iraqi archaeology students from the University of Baghdad, who moved through the excavated areas with notebooks and a focused attention that made me aware of how casually most tourists (myself included) tend to approach places like this. Their professor was explaining something about the death pits — the Royal Tombs excavated by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s, where servants were buried alive alongside their monarchs, and where the gold headdresses and lapis lazuli jewelry he found are now in the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania — and the students were writing it all down in the dusty shade of a temporary shelter as though the information was urgent.

What Woolley found here was a civilization with aesthetics sophisticated enough to rival anything that came thousands of years later. The gold headdresses with their intricate beading. The bull-headed lyre. The mosaic standard showing scenes of war and peace. All of it pulled from this flat, unremarkable ground and scattered now to museums across the world, while Ur itself remains here in the Iraqi desert, visited rarely, maintained with insufficient funding, holding in its soil incalculable amounts of what we have not yet found.

The house traditionally identified as Abraham’s birthplace — a modest mudbrick structure near the ziggurat — is marked with a small sign and draws visitors of all three Abrahamic faiths, who arrive sometimes in organized groups from Jordan or Saudi Arabia, sometimes alone. I watched a man pray quietly there for several minutes in what I took to be the posture of someone who had waited a long time to stand in this specific place. Whether the identification is historically accurate is irrelevant to what that man was doing. The landscape has been holding the weight of people’s needs for so long that a few more hardly register.

When to go: November through March. The site is exposed and shadeless, and summer temperatures at this latitude and elevation (essentially at sea level on the Mesopotamian plain) regularly exceed forty-five degrees. Winter days are mild and clear, and the low sun on the ziggurat’s brickwork in the late afternoon produces a quality of light that justifies the journey entirely.