A site about twenty kilometres from Ur in Thi Qar province, southern Iraq, excavated from 2013 by the Ur Region Archaeology Project under Stuart Campbell, Jane Moon and Robert Killick, the first foreign-led excavation in southern Iraq since the era of Leonard Woolley. The principal find is a large fortified public building with a distinctive plan, together with administrative tablets, jar burials and a statue of the healing goddess Gula. The excavators published it as an administrative centre of the Sealand period, roughly the mid second millennium BCE, a phase of southern Mesopotamian history that is poorly documented and which the tablets help to fill in. Heather Lynn reported the excavation in The Sumerian Controversy (2013) and returns to it in the final chapter of The Anunnaki Connection, where she describes being granted one interview and then hearing nothing further, reads the tablets listing men and their fathers as a possible king list and record of elite bloodlines, and follows the project’s funding to Baron Lorne Thyssen and from there to the Thyssen family’s financing of the Nazi party. The king list reading is not the excavators’, the published dating is about four thousand years later than the events her book is concerned with, and the funding trail is genealogy rather than evidence of intent.
Connections
Anunnaki · Zecharia Sitchin · Knowledge Filter · Great Pyramid of Giza