 | Great Nanna Courtyard | PD | The meaning of this two-letter designation is unclear. It may derive from Woolley's search for Shulgi's palace and may thus stand for Palace of Dungi. Woolley came to realize, however, that it was an enormous courtyard surrounded by rooms, and at times in the excavation it was simply referred to as the Ziggurat Courtyard. The path through the court led to the ziggurat terrace and eventually to the temple atop it. The court was likely a gathering place for special occasions of worship to the moon god (whose name Woolley read Nannar, but which we read today as Nanna). Therefore, Woolley eventually dubbed this space the Great Nannar Courtyard.
Area PD is the large space to the east of the ziggurat terrace, substantially lower in elevation than the base of the ziggurat. It had many floors over many periods. It consisted of a large paved courtyard (some 50 x 75 meters) surrounded by rooms that may have been used for storage. Because of indentations in some of the wall faces, Woolley believed there was once an inset wooden colonnade along some of the walls. | (none) |
 | Ziggurat | The ziggurat was a focus of Woolley's work in many seasons. It was covered in millennia of dirt and it took the initial seasons just to clear this away. In the process, many artifacts were discovered but Woolley did not assign a separate excavation area abbreviation other than Zig. and this does not always refer solely to the Ziggurat but also to its immediate surroundings. When Woolley listed Ziggurat or Zig as the context for an artifact, he usually included that it was at the foot, along the south wall, or some other region of the ziggurat itself. In 1931, however, he began using the code Zig.31 to indicate the deep cuts across and in front of the northern terrace that were essentially under the excavation area PDW. Many of the artifacts with the excavation area abbreviation Zig.31 come from the Ubaid period. The terrace was packed with soil gathered from earlier deposits at Ur, and thus the fill itself contained very early remains.
J.G. Taylor first investigated the ziggurat in 1854,R. Campbell Thomson in 1918 and HR Hall in 1919. Hall uncovered the southern portion and dug into the ziggurat itself to retrieve foundation cylinders of Nabonidus. Woolley worked extensively on the ziggurat, stating that there were only three seasons where it was not worked on in some form. In some of these seasons, however, it was really the ziggurat terrace and its buildings that were the main focus. | (none) |
