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FEBRUARY, 1926

ABRAHAM'S 'HOME TOWN'

BY GEORGE BYRON GORDON

And they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan. GENESIS XI. 31

READERS of the Bible will not need to be reminded that Ur is mentioned in a passage that occurs not far from the beginning of the Book of Genesis. It is one of the substantial facts contained in that Book of Beginnings, a long-forgotten fact that is now being verified in the most miraculous way as excavation proceeds and we see the ancient city emerging from the sands that have covered it for ages. The eleventh chapter of Genesis is a most arresting human document, recording as it does the beginning of a great adventure. It opens with the building of the Tower of Babel and it ends with the simple statement that Abraham went out from Ur of the Chaldees to go into the land of Canaan - that is to say, the land we call Palestine to-day. We are not told at this point why Abraham emigrated with his family from Ur, and we are left at liberty to assume, if we choose, that his motive was not different from that of many emigrants in all times and places, and that he left the city of his fathers to seek a home among strangers and to be the founder of a new inheritance, under

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that divine guidance that becomes his ruling motive and his chief incentive as his adventurous journey continues and as his astonishing story develops.

Abraham may have had other reasons for leaving Ur. We shall never know, but it is worthy of passing note that he did not depart by divine mandate. That came to him later. He and his father Terah, and his nephew Lot, and Sarai, his wife, and their little band of followers traveled north till many days' journey lay between them and the city they had left, ‘and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there,' and Terah, Abraham's father, died in Haran. It was then that he received the commandment that was to remain throughout the rest of his life his supreme possession and guiding principle ciple the mandate for Palestine, 'the land of Canaan,' for himself and for his posterity forever; for it was made known to him at Haran that he would become a great nation. To phrase it in modernist fashion, his Oriental imagination became possessed with that idea and he formed the

purpose of making the dream come the Chaldees, and in compiling the true. So he left Haran and continued

his journey.

We are assuming that Abraham was a real person; and indeed, though his name has not yet been found on any contemporary document, it is probable that such a person lived about the time assigned to him in the Scriptures. 'And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother's son, and all their substance that they had gathered, and the souls that they had gotten in Haran; and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan; and into the land of Canaan they came.'

Here for the time being we may take leave of the Bible, for we are not now concerned with the wanderings of the Patriarch, but with the history of his birthplace, Ur of the Chaldees. That city is not again mentioned in the Book of Genesis. To fill up the blank we must turn to some of the most wonderful discoveries of modern times -the finding of buried records extending backward to a period four thousand years before Christ, and the yet more miraculous discovery of the key to these writings.

But why should a city of such considerable antiquity be called 'of the Chaldees'? The Chaldeans are known to have been a small Semitic tribe of which nothing is heard till a relatively late date, whereas Ur, till long after its prime, was a city of the Sumerians, who were neither small nor late nor Semitic, but a great people who played their part before any Semites appeared on the Mesopotamian plain. The explanation is simple. The Book of Genesis was written long after the Sumerians had fallen on evil days, when the Chaldeans lived in some of their cities. The Persians were then masters of the land; and the captive Jews in Babylon, learning that the Chaldeans lived at Ur, called it Ur of

Book of Genesis so wrote its name. But Ur was then a city fallen from its place and power. It was in a halfruinous condition, and Babylon had long since confirmed its supremacy over all cities, however ancient. To the Jews of the Captivity, it was Ur of the Chaldees, the heritage of a small tributary tribe; but to their father Abraham, fifteen hundred years before, it had been a royal city of the Sumerians, and the tradition that he, a Semite, was born there would involve the presumption that at an early date it harbored aliens of the race that actually came into possession of it in its later and less glorious days.

Before laying down our Bible and taking up the pick and shovel to pursue our proper quest, let us bear in mind the fact that the Book of Genesis, the Book of Beginnings, depicts the valley of the Euphrates as the cradle of civilization. To-day men are at work turning over the sands of that desolated valley, and in the light of their labors the plain watered by the Euphrates is revealed once more as the place where civilization began. Indeed, that desert plain might itself be described to-day as the new-found Book of Beginnings, because as the excavators go on turning over layer after layer of sand, as one turns the pages of a book, they read backward through millennium after millennium, in clear and tangible outlines, a wonderful story that carries us toward the very dawn of what we know as history. It was not a false dawn, for the light that rose on the Sumerian horizon, though many times obscured by storm cloud and eclipse, has never been totally extinguished. It penetrates our own historical background and survives in some of the replenished lamps of our religious and economic life.

II

Ur of the Chaldees was one of the oldest cities in the Euphrates Valley. It was situated about ten miles west of the river, surrounded by the desert; and, till our excavations began, its ruins were completely covered by the sand that wrapped itself around the towers and temples and palaces as one wraps a flower bed with litter in the autumn to protect it from the weather. This wrapping-up in the desert sand has preserved the ruins from total obliteration; for Ur was lost to human knowledge, swallowed up in the desert, its very name forgotten, for more than two thousand years.

To understand how that name came to be restored to the pages of history and geography we must come down to the middle of the nineteenth century, when the circle of human knowledge was rapidly widening, and Sir Henry Rawlinson, the great archæologist, was traveling down the valley of the Euphrates and through the neighboring land of Persia. Searching for clues to the past, he picked up some writings on stone and on clay tablets, in an unknown language and in strange characters. His discovery of the key to these writings is one of the great triumphs of the human intellect. Since then thousands of similar documents have been unearthed, and these obscure records can be read by scholars to-day about as readily as we read the equally obscure headlines in a newspaper. Among these documents, preserved for ages in the sand, were some that mentioned the city of Ur, gave the names of some of its kings, and enabled Sir Henry Rawlinson and others to go to the very spot where the proud city once stood and stir the sand and conjure up the hidden secret of the Arabian desert. That was the magical beginning of our late recovery of the lost history of Ur.

I have said that the discovery of the lost key was one of the triumphs of human ingenuity; but, like many great discoveries, it looks very simple when you know how it was done. The writings are inscribed in characters called cuneiform, because they are wedge-shaped. We know now that they were invented more than six thousand years ago by the Sumerians and adopted by their successors, the Babylonians, who employed these cuneiform signs to write documents in their own language, a language entirely different from that of the Sumerians. Much later still the Persians borrowed and employed these symbols to reduce to writing their own language, the Persian. The Persian kings, when they wrote inscriptions on their monuments, often took the trouble to place side by side with the Persian text the same matter in the older Babylonian language. Now, when Rawlinson saw these two columns of writing side by side in cuneiform characters, it occurred to him that they might contain the same message in two different languages. Moreover, he noticed that certain groups of signs occurred in the same position in the two inscriptions. These combinations of signs he guessed to be words. Then he ventured on another guess. Knowing that personal names are usually written down in different languages without languages without changing their sounds, he concluded that these words, repeated in the two inscriptions, must be the names of kings, assuming that the symbols stood for sounds. But of what kings? As certain of these inscriptions, of special prominence, were carved on a rock near an ancient royal city of the Persians, Rawlinson hit upon the idea that the names, if such they were, must be those of Darius and Xerxes, the greatest of the Persian kings. All his guesses proved correct, and he now had in his possession the

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