And Terah took Abram . . . and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees.' The city Abraham left behind him - a city with good claims to being the oldest in the world - was rediscovered in 1854 by the then British Consul at Basra. But not until the end of World War I was serious excavation undertaken there. The results were so encouraging that four years later a joint British-American expedition, directed by the author of this book, worked on the site. The story of their discoveries made during years of work and covering the successive cities which were built on the site from days far beyond the flood until Nebuchadnezzar King of Babylon, is here told, and the daily life of the peoples who lived through more than four millennia beside the Euphrates recreated in word and picture.
About the Author: Sir Leonard Woolley received his university training at New College, Oxford, and afterwards became Assistant Keeper in the Ashmolean Museum. He went with the Eckley B. Coxe Expedition to Nubia from 1907 to 191 I, and was in charge of the British Museum Excavations at Carchemish until 1914. During the war of 1914-18 he did intelligence staff work in Egypt, and received the Croix de Guerre. He was a prisoner in Turkey for two years until the war was over. He was in the Intelligence Department from 1939, and from 1943 was Archaeological Adviser to the War Office, responsible for the protection of the monuments of art and history in war areas. From 1922 to 1934 he conducted the excavations at Ur for the Trustees of the British Museum and the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. In 1935 he began an excavation in the Hatay near Antioch, in the hope of tracing further the relations between the civilisation of Greece and of the East, and in particular to find out whether such relations existed between the earliest European civilisation, that of Crete, and the old cultural centres such as the Mesopotamian, and also the Hittite. He has been given the honorary degrees ot D.Litt. by Trinity College, Dublin and of LL.D. by the Uni¬versity of St Andrews, and is an honorary A.R.I.B.A. and Huxley Medallist for 1942. His Digging Up the Past has been published as a Pelican No. A4, and he is the author of a King Penguin, No. K25, entitled Ur: The First Phases.