John Peters on Late Third Millennium Housing

[p. 209] We soon began to find tablets in large amounts. Our first finds of importance were in a gully just to the northeast of the first year's trenches, at the point marked E on the plan of levels. Here were houses of the same character as those found in hill V, built of mud brick with doorways and baseboards of burned brick, which had been destroyed by some conflagration. In the rooms of these buildings, mixed with the earth which had fallen from the roofs and from the walls, we found quantities of tablets of the period of the supremacy of Ur, 2500 B.C. [now dated to 2112-2004 B.C.] and thereabouts. Many of these were case tablets, chiefly of a rather small size. Very large numbers of them were marked with seal impressions, several of these seals bearing the name of Gimil-Sin [now read Shu-Sin, reigning 2037-2029 B.C.] of Ur. One of these seals reads: [Shu-Sin, the powerful king, King of Ur, King of the four regions; Lu-Utu, son of Ur-Ashgi, governor of Adab, your servant]. Many of the seals contained a representation of the god Bel [Enlil] with a votive inscription. On two or three of the seal impressions I [p. 210] noticed an interesting form of the sun symbol, namely, a square cross in a circle.

Mixed with the tablets in these rooms, and in general in the stratum on hill X, we found grotesque and, from our point of view, obscene clay figures of a naked female holding her breasts, and with the sexual parts exposed. The noses of these figures were absurdly prominent, and the hair looked like a court wig. Below they were shaped like mummies. There were also clay figures of a bearded man carrying something slung over his shoulder. Occasionally other figures occurred, but the workmanship was always rude to grotesqueness. The houses in this gully were very heavily plastered, but the conflagration which had destroyed them rendered it impossible to determine whether the plaster had been tinted or decorated in any manner. Many of the tablets from these houses also showed marks of the conflagration.