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Didn’t Sir Leonard Woolley find a 12-foot deep layer of sediment while excavating Ur that he attributed to the local flood described in Genesis?
Yes sir, he certainly did that. But that layer, geologically was not wide spread. It didn’t even cover Ur which continued to exist
“Following its publication in 1929, his Ur of the Chaldees became the most widely read book on archaeology ever printed.”
“However, subsequent trenching at Ur, in the neighboring tells that surround Ur, such as Abu Shahrain (biblical Eridu), and in those extending north to other equally ancient settlements, such as Tell el Oueli and Choga Mami, have invariably failed to encounter this same silt layer. After much probing by trench and drill to trace its extent investigators have determined that the surface area of the deposit was localized and perhaps only a single breach in a levee of the Euphrates River, forming what modern hydrologists call a 'paly deposit,'covering at most a few square miles of the lateral floodplain. No archaeologist today considers Woolley’s silt layer at Ur to be any more significant than a thousand other silt layers spewed from the two great rivers during and since the last ice age. None of these local floods apparently had more importance than any other in serving as a major divide in human settlement in Mesopotamia.” ~ William Ryan and Walter Pitman, Noah’s Flood, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), p.55
“Since Smith’s death, the search in Mesopotamia for the signs of a largescale catastrophe has suffered its ups and downs. A bright moment came in 1928 when Leonard Woolley chanced upon a thick layer of homogeneous silt in the ruins of Ur such as would have been laid down by an overbank spill of the nearby Euphrates River. Not long after, another deposit was uncovered upstream in the excavations of Shuruppak, the ancient city mentioned by the poet Sin-leqi-unninni in his Babylonian version of Gilgamesh. The reporting of these observations in the popular press stimulated the public’s imagination across Europe and North America until the much awaited confirmation failed to trace the deposits laterally for any substantial distance–indeed, even from trench to trench within a single archaeological site. Accordingly, the engaging idea that a single grand deluge had engulfed all of southern Mesopotamia fell from favor. What remained in its place, except for those who read the Bible as literally true, was the raw myth unpredictable, and sometimes devastating spring floodings of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers during the snowmelt in the Taurus Mountains, or to a figment of the human imagination distilled into a remarkably uniform account by the smoothing action of retelling by a hundred generations of guslars.” William Ryan and Walter Pitman, Noah’s Flood, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), p. 247-248
Just so you will know that Ryan and Pitman are not alone in this belief, this is on the web:
"Woolley’s first test pit was very small, so during that and the next season he had dug a number of other test shafts, including an enormous pit, seventy-five feet by sixty feet and sixty-four feet deep. In this main pit, he encountered a deposit of clean, apparently water-laid soil up to eleven feet thick. Evidence of the Flood was absent from several shafts and uncertain or disturbed in a number of others. But in many, Woolley felt he had certain evidence of the Flood (1955).
Just slightly before Woolley’s initial discovery, S. Langdon and L. Watelin encountered smaller flood levels at Kish (Watelin, 1934). Although the Kish discovery actually predated Woolley’s find at Ur, Woolley published first (Woolley, 1929) and received the lion’s share of the initial publicity. Woolley, moreover, produced a highly successful popularization of his work in which the Flood finds were recounted in a manner that is at once simple, authoritative, and filled with references to familiar biblical materials (Woolley, 1929, 1954, 1982). The finds from Ur achieved and maintain a predominant place in the public mind.
Initially, some assumed with great eagerness that the flood levels at Ur and Kish were identical and provided marvelous evidence for a historical kernel of the Genesis Flood story (Peake, 1930), but the enthusiasm could not be maintained. The level of the great flood at Ur was sandwiched between remains of the Al Ubaid cultural phase, the last purely prehistoric period of southern Mesopotamia, and a layer of debris from the early Protoliterate period. The great Ur flood, thus, can be dated with a high degree of certainty to about 3500 BCE. Kish, however, produced evidence of two floods at the end of the Early Dynastic I and beginning of the Early Dynastic II periods, around 3000 to 2900 BCE, and a still more impressive flood dating to the Early Dynastic III period, around 2600 BCE. All three of the Kish floods were much later than the great flood at Ur. Watelin argued that the earliest of these three was the deluge of the Bible and cuneiform literature.
Within a few years, excavations of a third Mesopotamian site, Shuruppak, also uncovered a flood stratum (Schmidt, 1931). It is of particular interest because, according to the Mesopotamian legend, Shuruppak was the home of Ziusudra, the Sumerian Noah. (The Sumerian Ziusudra means “life of long days.” The Akkadian equivalent, Utnapishtim, is “he found life,” while the alternative Atra-hasis means “exceedingly wise.”) This flood level separated late Protoliterate and Early Dynastic I remains and dates from around 2950 to 2850 BCE. Perhaps, but not certainly, the Shuruppak flood may be equated with the earliest flood at Kish. No other Mesopotamian sites have produced flood remains of significance (Mallowan, 1964)" The Flood: Mesopotamian Archaeological Evidence | National Center for Science Education
So, how did Woolley estimate the size of this ‘flood’? It wasn’t from actually digging trenches over the 400 miles long and 100 miles wide, it was from estimating how deep he thought the waters had to be to deposit 11 feet of shale–(which can be done slowly). Here is what Woolley said:
“Both at Ur and on other Mesopotamian sites there has been found evidence of local and temporary water action occurring at various times in history; sometimes this was no more than the effect of rain in an enclosed area, and never is there anything approaching what we found in our ‘Floodpit’. There, it can safely be said, we have proof of inundation unparalleled in any later period of Mesopotamian history. We were lucky to find it at all because a flood does not of course, pile up silt everywhere–on the contrary, where the current is strongest it may have a scouring effect; the silt is deposited where the current is held up by some obstacle. to settle this point we dug a whole series of small shafts, covering a large area, in which the depth of the mud differed considerably, and thus were duly plotted it was clear hat the mud was heaped up against the north slope of the town mound which, rising above the plain broke the force of the floodwaters; on the plain east or west of the mound, we should probably have found nothing. Eleven feet of silt–the maximum–would probably mean a flood not less than twenty-five feet deep; in the flat low-lying land of Mesopotamia a flood of that depth would cover an area about three hundred miles long and a hundred miles across; the whole of the fertile land between the Elamite mountains and the high Syrian desert would disappear, every village would be destroyed and only a few of the old cities set high on their built-up mounds would survive the disaster. We know that Ur did survive; we have seen that villages such as al 'Ubaid and Rajeibeh were suddenly deserted and remained desolate for a long or forever.” Leonard Woolley, Excavations at Ur," Routledge, 2013) p 35
But as we know, subsequent investigation showed that the various layers of shale were different ages and it wasn’t one massive river flood. I made sure to say ‘river flood’ because one guy N. A. Morner says the clay layer was due to sea level rise which inundated areas east of Ur. I don’t know the truth as I just ran into Morner’s article so I will look at it tomorrow.
In any event, the Mesopotamian flood has no high mountains to cover, pushed any floating ark into the Indian ocean in about a week so what is this about landing on mountains in turkey? I know of no riverine flood that has lasted a year. And one could walk to the Zagros mountains in a day or two. Why build an ark?