 | EM Site | EM | The excavation area abbreviation EM stands for Extra-Mural because this area lies outside of the southwest Temenos Wall. H.R. Hall investigated a portion of the high ground at this site (his Area A) in 1919, finding the remains of domestic structures. Taylor had also cut a trench here in 1853. Woolley first tested the ground early in 1926 (season 4) and then dug more completely in season 5, concentrating on about 60x40 meters of space and excavating to a depth of approximately 5 meters from the surface. He dug through Kassite and other late remains that were particularly fragmentary. He reported two Kassite houses (which he dubbed High House and Hill House) that were complete enough to map, and eventually uncovered twelve houses of the Isin-Larsa/Old Babylonian period. There were many graves beneath the floors and tablets were also relatively common. Most of the tablets have to do with the business of the temple, so the houses here probably belonged to temple workers.
Woolley named the streets he found in areas EM and AH. He felt that by naming the streets he could more easily identify any particular house, giving them numbers along the street with odd numbers on one side and even on the other. Many of the street names recur in the English city of Bath, where Woolley owned a house.
The northern portion of area EM ('Quality Lane' on Woolley's map) was excavated as area DP in season 4. This was higher ground than much of the rest of EM and is mapped with only partial houses that are not published in any detail. The houses of EM are more completely published, but their various phases of construction and rebuilding are not detailed. The domestic space represented by these houses likely continued eastward into area EH in the Isin-Larsa/Old Babylonian and Kassite periods, then was cut through and partly destroyed by the foundations of the Neo-Babylonian temenos wall. | (none) |
 | TTD | TTD is shorthand for Trial Trench D, one of two initial trenches dug in season 5 to extend TTA from season 1. Woolley dug TTD and TTE to search for graves in what he believed was a potentially vast cemetery. Neither of these trenches were ever mapped and no aerial photos show them, as by the time of the 1930 RAF photograph the trial trenches had been so extended that most of the Royal Cemetery area had already been exposed. Luckily, Woolley's field records allow us to reconstruct the direction and extents of the trench. He states that it ran from the head (northeast end) of TTA and extended southeastward to the east corner of the Neo-Babylonian temenos wall, making it about 65 meters in length. Though he does not tell us its width it is likely that it was about 4 meters, the same as the measurable trial trenches A, B, and C.
TTD did not reveal much, but it was only excavated to a depth of around 2 meters. As Woolley reports in the Antiquaries Journal volume 7 page 1: "The trench to the temenos angle produced no sign of buildings, but for the greater part of its length a floor of beaten mud, lying about 1.75 m. below the present surface, at which level we stopped short." It had just missed the south corner of the Mausoleum of the Ur III kings, and when area PG was expanded beneath the level of TTD in season 8, many graves were recorded here. | (none) |
