Where is Ur of the Chaldees today?

The mound of bitumen

The Hebrew Bible names the city only four times: three in Genesis and once in Nehemiah 9:7. The key verse starts the family on the road.

Terah took Abram his son, Lot the son of Haran, his son’s son, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram’s wife. They went from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan. They came to Haran and lived there.

The Ur most scholars mean is a low mound in Dhi Qar province, in southern Iraq. Local people called it Tell el-Muqayyar, “mound of bitumen,” for the tar that bound its bricks. In the mid-19th century, inscribed bricks from the site, deciphered by Henry Rawlinson, gave back its ancient name. In its prime Ur stood near the mouth of the Euphrates, close to the shore of the Persian Gulf. The coast and the river have since moved, and the ruins lie well inland.

What Leonard Woolley found

Between 1922 and 1934 Leonard Woolley dug at Ur for the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania. He uncovered the Royal Cemetery of about 2500 BC, with its gold, lyres and the Standard of Ur, finds now shared among London, Philadelphia and the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. Woolley also made the identification with Abraham’s Ur popular, and even announced that a thick layer of clean river silt was Noah’s flood; later work showed it came from a local flood.

Above it all stands the ziggurat, a stepped temple mountain built by King Ur-Nammu in the 21st century BC for Nanna, the moon god, and restored by Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, in the 6th century BC. Its lowest stage and great stairway were rebuilt in the 1980s.

Why “of the Chaldees”?

The Hebrew says Ur Kasdim, Ur of the Chaldeans. The Chaldeans were a people who settled in southern Babylonia around the 9th century BC, about a thousand years after the date tradition gives Abraham. The phrase describes Ur the way later readers knew it, in the age of Nebuchadnezzar’s Chaldean Babylon. The Septuagint, the Greek translation, has no Ur at all, only the land of the Chaldeans, and Stephen follows it in his speech in Acts.

Then he came out of the land of the Chaldaeans and lived in Haran.

The northern Ur: Urfa

Another tradition looks nearly 1,000 kilometers to the northwest, to Şanlıurfa, in southeastern Turkey, about 40 kilometers from Harran, the Haran of Genesis. Islamic tradition shows a cave in the city as Abraham’s birthplace, and its pool, Balıklıgöl, full of sacred carp, marks the place where, in Jewish and Islamic legend, King Nimrod threw Abraham into a fire. Hebrew ’ur means flame, so “brought you out of Ur of the Chaldees” (Genesis 15:7) could be heard as rescue from a Chaldean furnace, and the Quran tells how the fire became cool and safe for Abraham (21:69).

Defenders of a northern Ur point out that Abraham’s relatives carry names of towns near Harran, Nahor and Serug, and that he sends his servant to find Isaac a wife in “Mesopotamia, to the city of Nahor” (Genesis 24:10). Most scholars still prefer the southern city. Ur and Harran were both great centers of the moon god, Nanna to the Sumerians and Sin to the Babylonians, which may explain why Terah’s family moved from one to the other. Joshua remembers that “they served other gods” (Joshua 24:2).

Ur today

In 2016 UNESCO listed Ur, with Uruk and Eridu, in a World Heritage site covering the marshes and ancient cities of southern Iraq. Visitors are shown a restored house labeled Abraham’s; it is a modern reconstruction. In March 2021 Pope Francis came to Ur and prayed with leaders of several faiths at the city of Abraham. For the rest of the journey, see who Abraham was.