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Ancient River Beds and Dead Cities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Dorothy Mackay
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Extract

Close acquaintance with the geographical situation of the ancient sites of Iraq, and also of the Indus Valley, inevitably leaves two questions to haunt the mind. C Why did early man choose such inconvenient and inaccessible places, as many of them now are, for his settlements when he gave up nomad life ? And why after a site had been deliberately chosen for a city was it so frequently abandoned, though its occupation might already have extended through several centuries ?

These questions were first brought home to the writer in vivid fashion by a visit twenty years ago to the lonely and insignificant little mounds of Jemdet Nasr, some twenty-five miles from the ruins of Babylon and about halfway across the wide unin- habited desert between the lower Euphrates and Tigris rivers.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 19 , Issue 75 , September 1945 , pp. 135 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1945

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References

1 Ellsworth Huntingdon, Civilization and Climate, pp. 227 ff.

2 Frankfort, Cylinder Seals, pl. III, d and e.

3 Woolley, Ur Excavations, II : The Royal Cemetery, p. 71, pl. 169a.

4 Mackay, Further Excavations at Mohenjo-daro, 1927-31, pl. LXXXIX, A, and LXIX, 4.

5 Maps of Iraq with Notes for Visitors, 1929.

6 Frankfort, Cylinder Seals, pp. 224, 227 and 293.

7 E. Mackay, ‘A Sumerian Palace and the “A” Cemetery a Kish’, Anthropology Memoirs, Field Museum, Chicago, vol. 1, no. 2, p. 81.

* Compare the air-ph. of marks near Ur, ANTIQUITY III, 342.

8 The Antiquaries Journal, vol. X, pl. XXXIII.

9 Gadd, History and Monuments of Ur, p. 1.

10 Mackay, Further Excavations at Mohenjo-daro, 1927-1931, p. 4.

11 Le Strange, Lands of the Eastern Caliphate, chapters II-V.