The Hebrew Scriptures make it quite clear that Abraham’s home was originally in lower Mesopotamia, specifically the city of Ur of the Chaldees. He was born there in 1975 BCE when his father Terah was 130 years old. The qualifying phrase “of the Chaldees” is not an anachronism as many critics hold, but simply a later gloss to explain to a subsequent age, when Ur and its location had vanished, that the city was located in southern Babylonia. We do not know when Terah relocated his family to the city of Haran in northwestern Mesopotamia but Abraham spent the first 75 years of life in Mesopotamia. Culturally Abraham and Sarah and their extended family were Mesopotamians.

The Bible tells us that Nahor (The Older) and his father Terah were idol worshipers (Joshua 24:2). The idolatrous Mesopotamian environment out of which the Hebrew patriarchs came has been illuminated by the excavations at Ur. In 1854, J.E. Taylor conducted some simple excavations there which yielded cylinders stating that Nabonidus of Babylon (556-539 BCE) had there restored the ancient ziggurat of Ur-Nammu. Further excavations by H.R. Hall in 1918 and notably by C.L. Wolley from 1922-1934, made Ur one of the best-known ancient sites of southern Babylonia and revealed that it was one of the largest and wealthiest cities of that area, particularly at the time biblical chronology suggests Abraham left it with his father. 

The ziggurat of Ur-Nammu of Abraham’s day was probably erected on top of a smaller structure which may have been as old as the reign of Mes-Anne-padda of the First Dynasty of Ur (c. 2800-2600 BCE). But its upper part was the work of Nabonidus. The bulk of the great artificial mountain, however, had been constructed by Ur-Nammu, and his name and title were discovered stamped on the bricks. The tower was a solid mass of brickwork, 200 feet long, 150 feet wide and about 70 feet high. The facing, covering the inner core of unbaked brick, consisted of baked brick set in btumen, eight feet in thickness.

The ziggurat was thus a mountain of brickwork, a “high place” or artificial hill made by men who had once worshipped gods on mountain tops — or so it is supposed. Finding nothing of the sort on the flat alluvial plain between the Tigris and Euphrates, they set to work to build one. They called it “the hill of heaven” or the “mountain of God”. They planted trees and shrubs on its stages, in imitation of the real hills of their native home. The lines of the walls were built on calculated curves to give the appearance of lightness and strength.

Originally the shrine of Nannar, the moon god, stood on the uppermost stage, for Ur was dedicated to this deity. Numerous other gods were worshiped, but at Ur Nannar was supreme. Other deities might have their temples, but at Ur a whole quarter of the city was set apart for him. He was called “the Exalted Lord”, the “crown of Heaven and Earth”, “the Beautiful Lord who Shines in Heaven”, and similar epithets.

The city walls enclosed a rough oval comprising an area some two and a half miles in circuit. Within this tract in the northwest part, was a second enclosure, consisting of a rectangular space about four hundred yards in length and approximately two hundred yards in width. This was the TEMENOS or sacred area of Nannar. Originally it was a platform raised above the general level of the town. But gradually it had been dwarfed by the constant rise of the residential district, where dilapidation and reconstruction upon preceding debris and ruins were much more common than in the carefully kept temple enclosure.

As to Haran, the biblical site is closely identified with Harran, now a village of Şanlıurfa, Turkey. Since the 1950s, archeological excavations of Harran yielded limited data pertaining to the site’s patriarchal era. The earliest records of Harran come from the Ebla tablets, ca. 2300 BCE. Harran’s name is said to be from Akkadian harranu, “road”. Cuneiform references to Haran (“Harran” in the texts) indicate that in patriarchal times Haran was a prosperous city, being the junction of caravan trade between Carchemish and Nineveh.