 | City Wall | CLW | The meaning of the excavation area abbreviation CLW is not precisely clear. Some references to it state that it is the central portion of the northeastern city wall, thus it might mean Central Long Wall. Field notes with the abbreviation, however, refer to excavation squares along the entirety of the edge of the mound where the outer city wall once stood and thus it more likely to refer to the City Long Wall as a whole.
H.R. Hall dug a 12 meter trench across the city wall in 1919, but Woolley began his investigations of it in February of 1929. In a period of a few days he exposed 100 meters of the length of the wall behind his dig house. In the next season he set his workers to tracing the entirety of the wall, which ran approximately 2.5 miles around the city. To uncover it they simply followed the outer line of the wall to no great depth and made cross cut trenches to assess the width of the wall at intervals. Despite the great extent, the tracing of the wall took only one month. In a report sent from the field in February of 1930, Woolley said, "...the wall is a complete ruin; not a vestige of the burnt-brick wall proper has been discovered and in few places does more survive than the weathered stump of the huge mud-brick rampart along which the wall originally ran."
The investigations showed the original wall to be between 25 and 34 meters wide and Woolley estimated that it once stood to a height of 8 meters. On the central portion of the east side, he found and excavated partial houses. Woolley believed that for portions of Ur's history, the backs of these houses formed the defensive wall itself. Many of the objects marked as CLW come from this specific area of houses along the wall, and this is likely the reason that CLW in abbreviation lists is said to be the central portion of the northeast city wall.
The sloping revetment that was often found in CLW squares was evidence of the bank of a canal running along the east side of the city. Some of the CLW squares also contained other excavation areas, such as the North and West harbors, the so-called Kassite Fort, the Rim Sin temple (RS), and the Nin-Ezen Temple (NT). | (none) |