Ur

5 definitions found

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  Ur \Ur\, Ure \Ure\, n. (Zool.)
     The urus.
     [1913 Webster]

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:



  Urus \U"rus\, n. [L.; of Teutonic origin. See {Aurochs}.]
     (Zool.)
     A very large, powerful, and savage extinct bovine animal
     ({Bos urus} or {Bos primigenius}) anciently abundant in
     Europe. It appears to have still existed in the time of
     Julius Caesar. It had very large horns, and was hardly
     capable of domestication. Called also, {ur}, {ure}, and
     {tur}.
     [1913 Webster]

From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:

  Ur
       n : an ancient city of Sumer located on a former channel of the
           Euphrates River

From Easton's 1897 Bible Dictionary [easton]:

  Ur
     light, or the moon city, a city "of the Chaldees," the
     birthplace of Haran (Gen. 11:28,31), the largest city of Shinar
     or northern Chaldea, and the principal commercial centre of the
     country as well as the centre of political power. It stood near
     the mouth of the Euphrates, on its western bank, and is
     represented by the mounds (of bricks cemented by bitumen) of
     el-Mugheir, i.e., "the bitumined," or "the town of bitumen," now
     150 miles from the sea and some 6 miles from the Euphrates, a
     little above the point where it receives the Shat el-Hie, an
     affluent from the Tigris. It was formerly a maritime city, as
     the waters of the Persian Gulf reached thus far inland. Ur was
     the port of Babylonia, whence trade was carried on with the
     dwellers on the gulf, and with the distant countries of India,
     Ethiopia, and Egypt. It was abandoned about B.C. 500, but long
     continued, like Erech, to be a great sacred cemetery city, as is
     evident from the number of tombs found there. (See {ABRAHAM}.)
     
       The oldest king of Ur known to us is Ur-Ba'u (servant of the
     goddess Ba'u), as Hommel reads the name, or Ur-Gur, as others
     read it. He lived some twenty-eight hundred years B.C., and took
     part in building the famous temple of the moon-god Sin in Ur
     itself. The illustration here given represents his cuneiform
     inscription, written in the Sumerian language, and stamped upon
     every brick of the temple in Ur. It reads: "Ur-Ba'u, king of Ur,
     who built the temple of the moon-god."
     
       "Ur was consecrated to the worship of Sin, the Babylonian
     moon-god. It shared this honour, however, with another city, and
     this city was Haran, or Harran. Harran was in Mesopotamia, and
     took its name from the highroad which led through it from the
     east to the west. The name is Babylonian, and bears witness to
     its having been founded by a Babylonian king. The same witness
     is still more decisively borne by the worship paid in it to the
     Babylonian moon-god and by its ancient temple of Sin. Indeed,
     the temple of the moon-god at Harran was perhaps even more
     famous in the Assyrian and Babylonian world than the temple of
     the moon-god at Ur.
     
       "Between Ur and Harran there must, consequently, have been a
     close connection in early times, the record of which has not yet
     been recovered. It may be that Harran owed its foundation to a
     king of Ur; at any rate the two cities were bound together by
     the worship of the same deity, the closest and most enduring
     bond of union that existed in the ancient world. That Terah
     should have migrated from Ur to Harran, therefore, ceases to be
     extraordinary. If he left Ur at all, it was the most natural
     place to which to go. It was like passing from one court of a
     temple into another.
     
       "Such a remarkable coincidence between the Biblical narrative
     and the evidence of archaeological research cannot be the result
     of chance. The narrative must be historical; no writer of late
     date, even if he were a Babylonian, could have invented a story
     so exactly in accordance with what we now know to have been the
     truth. For a story of the kind to have been the invention of
     Palestinian tradition is equally impossible. To the unprejudiced
     mind there is no escape from the conclusion that the history of
     the migration of Terah from Ur to Harran is founded on fact"
     (Sayce).
     

From Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary (late 1800's) [hitchcock]:

  Ur, fire, light, a valley