 | 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) |
 | SM | The meaning of this excavation area abbreviation is not clear, but its location is known to be immediately southeast of the giparu (KP) extending to the ehursag (HT) in the east. Badly preserved remains of a building were found here, distinct from the giparu. On a tentative reconstruction of the ground plan, Woolley suggests the original structure measured some 35x40 meters. The building remains date to the Isin-Larsa/Old Babylonian period and many small tablets recording business transactions were found within. T.C. Mitchell, editing the UE 7 volume published after Woolley's death, notes that many of these tablets actually date to the reigns of Shulgi and Amar-Sin. According to Woolley, some of the tablets were twisted together as if in the process of being recycled to reuse their clay for new tablets. He also suggests, very tentatively and based only on a few minor and out-of-place bricks, that this building was originally a temple to Nin-Ezen. | (none) |
