Tablettes archaïques d'Ur — Comptabilité du temple et premières listes de noms

The archaic tablets of Ur, discovered by Leonard Woolley during his celebrated excavations (1922–1934), constitute one of the oldest administrative corpora of southern Mesopotamia. These proto-cuneiform documents, from the sacred quarter of the moon-god Nanna (Sin), record economic transactions, ration distributions, and the earliest lists of personal names. Ur is the city that Genesis designates as the homeland of Abraham: « Terah took Abram his son [...] and they went forth together from Ur of the Chaldees » (Genesis 11:31). Whatever the debated question of the exact identification of biblical Ur, these tablets document the urban, literate, and prosperous civilization that biblical tradition associates with the origins of the patriarch. The temple of Nanna, the lunar deity, illuminates the polytheistic religious context that Abraham is said to have left — a departure that the Midrash (Bereshit Rabba 38) interprets as the first monotheistic break in history.