Abraham from ki-uri?: About a new interpretation of "Ur of the Chaldeans"

An attempt at deriving the biblical local name "Ur" from the Sumerian geographical term ki-uri encounters some serious difficulties: 1) the Sumerian sources do not give the precise extension of the ki-uri and, if one wants to seek the homeland of the Patriarchs of Israel in the region around north-Mesopotamian Haran, the geographical connotations of the term akkadû, which serves as a translation of the Sumerian ki-uri into Akkadian, seem to speak strongly against the opinion that ki-uri included that area; 2) ki-uri, being a Sumerian term, is hardly to be found as the starting point of a tradition of the Semitic nomadic tribes whose language, culture and perspective of their own world are different from the Sumerian ones; 3) many non-Sumerian local names for various lands and regions of the northern Mesopotamia are attested from the Old Akkadian and especially Old Babylonian periods, which makes it quite improbable that the Semitic nomads should have called their lands with a Sumerian name. The term ki-uri could only stand at the beginning of a tradition if its originators had lived in the Sumerian southern Mesopotamia and had felt themselves Sumerians.

Keywords: ki-uri; Ur of the Chaldeans; Patriarchs