Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
ash, rubble, and pottery fragments lay the soil upon which southern Mesopotamia's earliest
farmers had built Ur. Long before Abraham's day, an ancient flood had buried the birth-
place of the biblical patriarch.
When he found a similar sequence of flood deposits burying cultural debris at two more
locations near Ur, Woolley claimed to have unearthed deposits from a great flood that
swept away early villages. He lost no time telegraphing London to report his supposed geo-
logical footprint of the biblical flood. Returning the following year, Woolley's team found
ten feet of water-laid sand deposited atop yet more cultural debris at another location. Con-
vinced he had found evidence of a regional flood, he concluded that here, surely, was the
signature of Noah's Flood.
Woolley's discovery was a sensation. The news he had uncovered evidence of the biblical
flood electrified the public as it spread across headlines, radio, and newsreels. Suddenly,
the hunt was on again to find more proof of Noah's Flood.
Working at Kish, an ancient Sumerian city well upstream of Ur and eight miles east of
Babylon, a team of Oxford archaeologists led by Stephen Langdon found more flood de-
posits. Langdon's and Woolley's teams promptly began bickering about who had unearthed
the biblical flood. Defending the sanctity of his deposit, Woolley maintained that eight lay-
ers of sediment containing distinctively different cultural debris, and therefore representing
the coming and going of several societies, separated the Kish and Ur flood sands. Wool-
ley insisted that Langdon's deposits could not represent the same flood. Naturally, his Ur
flood was the real Flood; Langdon's later Kish flood, Woolley maintained, was just another
garden-variety Mesopotamian flood.
Soon both Woolley's and Langdon's stories were called into doubt by archaeologists'
inability to find similar deposits at nearby Tell Obd. Subsequent borings and trenches re-
vealed Woolley's flood deposit could not be traced very far. All signs pointed to a local
deposit formed when a burst levee inundated a few square miles of floodplain. If one of
these deposits recorded Noah's Flood, it was a very local affair.
Through decades of academic squabbling, Woolley promoted his Ur flood as the real
thing. In 1956, writing in the
Palestine Exploration Quarterly
, he claimed that cuneiform
tablets dividing the reigns of Mesopotamian kings into periods before and after the Flood
confirmed his discovery. Entombed beneath the silt at Ur lay ruined houses with distinctive
