Ur

The endonym for the city in its own language, Urim, written with the signs ŠEŠ.UNUG and the place-determinative ki (the spelling URIM₂; a variant ŠEŠ.AB gives URIM₅). The name is bound up with the moon-god Nanna, whose chief cult-center Ur was, though its exact etymology is uncertain. It is attested continuously in Sumerian administrative and royal texts from the Early Dynastic period, through the great Third Dynasty of Ur of Ur-Nammu and Shulgi around 2100 BCE, whose kings styled themselves “king of Ur,” into the Old Babylonian period when Sumerian remained the language of scholarship.

Urim is the headwater of this page, but a headwater that barely flows: where the Sumerian name of Babylon coursed outward into a dozen languages, the name of Ur stayed almost wholly within Mesopotamia. The form is the original that the Akkadian Uru reads off the same signs, and the distant ancestor, by way of the Bible’s “Ur of the Chaldees,” of the only foreign names the city ever acquired. A city that once ruled Sumer, it gave the world a name chiefly by being, much later and perhaps wrongly, remembered as the home a patriarch left.

The Akkadian name for the city, Uru, read from the same ŠEŠ.UNUG logogram that Sumerian read as Urim. The city is named in Akkadian texts from the Sargonic period onward and remained a place of importance into the first millennium: the Neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, rebuilt the temple of the moon-god at Ur in the sixth century BCE and installed his daughter there as high priestess, recording the works in his inscriptions. After the Persian conquest the city slipped into decline and was eventually abandoned.

The Akkadian entry is the parallel reading beside the Sumerian, the second voice pronouncing one set of signs, much as on the Babylon page Bābilu stands beside Kadingirra. Here, though, the logogram is not glossed into a phrase of meaning in either language; Sumerian and Akkadian alike simply name the place, the one as Urim and the other as Uru, two pronunciations of a city whose name neither tongue seems to have parsed.

The Hebrew name for the city, ʾŪr, which appears only in the phrase ʾŪr Kaśdîm, “Ur of the Chaldeans,” as the homeland that Abraham’s family left for Harran and Canaan. The form is identical in spelling to the common Hebrew noun ʾûr, “flame, fire,” a coincidence that later Jewish tradition seized on to tell of Abraham delivered from a fiery furnace at Ur. Whether the biblical Ur is the great Sumerian city of the south is disputed: the patriarchal narratives move through the north, around Harran, and some scholars locate ʾŪr Kaśdîm at a northern site rather than in Sumer, while the qualifier “of the Chaldeans” reflects the first-millennium Chaldean south and may be a later gloss.

This is the entry on which the whole later life of the name turns, and it does so under a question mark. Every non-cuneiform form on this page, the Syriac and the Latin, descends from this Hebrew phrase, and yet the Hebrew phrase may not name this city at all. Ur is thus famous twice over and securely only once: securely as a Sumerian capital that the cuneiform world knew, and famously as the home of Abraham, a fame that rests on an identification the evidence does not settle.

The Syriac name for the city, ʾŪr, in the phrase ʾŪr da-kaldāyē, “Ur of the Chaldeans,” as the Peshitta Old Testament renders Abraham’s homeland in Genesis. Because the Peshitta Old Testament was translated directly from the Hebrew, it kept the toponym that the Hebrew has, where a translation from the Greek would not have; the same identification debate that hangs over the Hebrew ʾŪr hangs over this form, which simply carries the Hebrew name into Syriac dress.

The Syriac entry preserves a revealing split within a single language. The Peshitta Old Testament, working from the Hebrew, writes ʾŪr; but the Syriac New Testament, translating the Greek of Acts, where Stephen says Abraham came “out of the land of the Chaldeans,” has no Ur at all, only ʾarʿā da-kaldāyē, “the land of the Chaldeans.” The same Syriac Bible thus both keeps the city’s name and loses it, depending on whether the verse in hand was Englished, so to speak, from Hebrew or from Greek.

The Latin name for the city, Ur, in the phrase Ur Chaldaeorum, “Ur of the Chaldeans,” in Jerome’s Vulgate. Jerome translated the Old Testament afresh from the Hebrew rather than from the Greek, his Hebraica veritas, and so his Genesis keeps the toponym Ur exactly where the Hebrew has it; the Old Latin versions made earlier from the Septuagint, by contrast, had only “the region of the Chaldeans.” The same dispute over the city’s identification that attaches to the Hebrew form attaches to the Latin, which takes the name directly from it.

Latin is the entry that carried Ur into the modern Western world, and it did so only because of a translator’s principle. Had the Latin Bible followed the Greek, as it once did, the name “Ur” would have vanished from European memory entirely; it survives in English Bibles and atlases because Jerome went back to the Hebrew. A Sumerian city that the classical world never knew owes its place in the modern imagination to a decision made in a monk’s study about which language to trust.