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Updated: May 31, 2025
This king erected some buildings at Mugheir; but he is best known as the founder of the very curious town whose ruins bear at the present day the name of Abu-Shahrein. A description of the principal buildings at this site has been already given. They exhibit certain improvements on the architecture of the earlier times, and appear to have been very richly ornamented, at least in parts.
We are therefore unable to decide whether Layard's draughtsman has accurately represented its condition or not. Ruins of Staged Towers. In describing the first of our four types we had occasion to point to the buildings at Warka and Mugheir, which enabled us to restore what may be called the Lower Chaldæan form of temple.
The temple at Mugheir was built in honor of the Moon-god, Sin or Hiuki, who was the tutelary deity of the city. The Warka temple was dedicated to Beltis. At Calneh or Nipur, Urukh erected two temples, one to Beltis and one to Belus. At Larsa or Ellasar the object of his worship was the Sun-god, San or Sansi.
When the Sumerians first settled by the banks of the Euphrates it must have been on the sandy plateau to the west of the river where the city of Ur, the modern Mugheir, was afterwards built. At that time the future Babylonia was a pestiferous marsh, inundated by the unchecked overflow of the rivers which flowed through it. The reclamation of the marsh was the first work of the new-comers.
Taylor at Mugheir, and the plan of some chambers was made out at Abu-Shahrein; but these are hitherto the only specimens which can be confidently assigned to the Chaldaean period. The house stood on a platform of sundried bricks, paved on the top with burnt bricks.
Such is the character of the remains at Mugheir, which are thought to contain nothing of later date than the close of the Babylonian period, B. C. 538; and such is, still more remarkably, the character of the ruins at Abu-Shahrein and Tel-el-Lahm, which seem to be entirely, or almost entirely, Chaldaean.
But the only arches now standing occur in the better preserved monuments of Assyria. On the other hand the tombs of Lower Chaldæa furnish more than one example of that false, corbelled or off-set vault, that we have already encountered in Egypt. The chamber figured below is taken from the necropolis of Mugheir, formerly "Ur of the Chaldees." It is built of crude brick bound with mud.
Terra-cotta cones inscribed with prayers had been thrown into the interstices. Sometimes, as at Mugheir, the mound thus formed is surmounted by a paved platform upon which open the drains that traverse the mass. In most cases these mounds have been turned over in all their upper parts by the Arabs.
Some of these temples were very ancient, those at Warka and Niffer being built by Urukh, while that at Mugheir was either built or repaired by Ismi-dagon. According to one record, Beltis was a daughter of Ana. It was especially as "Queen of Nipur" that she was the wife of her son Nin. Perhaps this idea grew up out of the fact that at Nipur the two were associated together in a common worship.
The material used consists of the ordinary sun-dried and baked bricks; and the basement platforms bear the inscriptions of the same king who appears to have been the original founder of the chief buildings at Ur or Mugheir.
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