Ur III Dynasty

The Third Dynasty of Ur, founded by Ur-Nammu about 2112 BC, was the last great flowering of Sumerian civilisation. From the city of Ur on the lower Euphrates, Ur-Nammu and his son Shulgi (c. 2094–2047 BC) built a tightly centralised kingdom that controlled all of southern Mesopotamia and reached up the Tigris to the Hurrian and Elamite frontiers. Ur-Nammu issued the earliest surviving written law code, predating Hammurabi by three centuries, and built the great ziggurat of Ur, a stepped temple-tower to the moon-god Nanna whose massive lower stages still stand today in southern Iraq. Shulgi reformed the calendar, the weights and measures, and the army, and divinised his own kingship. The dynasty fell in 2004 BC when Elamites from the east sacked Ur and carried off the last king, Ibbi-Sin. The fall is mourned in one of the oldest preserved Sumerian poems, the Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur. Genesis 11:31 places the family of Terah, including Abram, in this Ur — a wealthy, sophisticated, and pagan city — before God called Abram out and into Canaan.