Case file · High strangeness
Woolley's 'Flood' layer at Ur
Excavating at Ur in 1929, Leonard Woolley found about three metres of clean silt beneath the city and announced he had found evidence of Noah's Flood.
1929 CE · 30.96, 46.10 · status: explained
The account
The claim made world headlines and fed decades of popular books. Mesopotamian flood stories, older than Genesis, appear in the Atrahasis epic and Gilgamesh.
The sceptical view
The layer was a local river flood. Flood deposits at other sites (Kish, Shuruppak) date to different centuries, and Ur's own deposit did not cover the whole city.
Connections in the atlas
- Ziusudra of Shuruppak survives the flood