The Ur-Flood? Uncovering the Deluge

“Well, of course, it’s the Flood,” Lady Woolley casually remarked when her husband’s excavation team uncovered an 8-foot-thick layer of soil that contained no evidence of human activity, sandwiched between two layers of pottery.^a In the photo above, two Arab workmen stand beside part of what came to be known as “the Flood deposit.”

Sir Leonard Woolley excavated Ur, in southern Iraq, between 1922 and 1934. Below, he displays a second-millennium B.C.E. statuette discovered in one of the site’s many wayside shrines.