its form and inhabitants, entrancing a generation of readers of The Times and the Illustrated London News with his descriptions of such places as the workmen's houses at Akhetaten, birthplace of Tutankhamun, and biblical Ur; the site that Abraham and his family would have inhabited in the shadow of the royal palaces and famous ziggurat somewhere around 2500 BC.

Now there's an idea for the new millennium - a joint British Museum/ Whitechapel Gallery tribute to Woolley and the unveiling of Ur of the Chaldees.