Woolley & The Flood

We watched this video the other week, Leonard Woolley Found the Flood Layer Beneath Ur in 1929 — His Funding Was Cut the Same Year, and while it sounds good, its content does not line up with more respected reference materials. We do not know if his funding was cut, as that information is not usually found in public access records.

What is found in other reference material is the depth of his dig. This video claims it was:

This was the first piece of information that caught our attention. We knew the discovery was not that shallow, but we had forgotten how deep he really dug. BAR has an article on this excavation and here are the accurate measurements:

Woolley first discovered evidence of what he and his wife called the Biblical flood in 1929 in a small shaft. Acknowledging that “one could scarcely argue for the Deluge on the strength of a pit a yard square,” Woolley decided to cut a 75-by-60-foot pit, which eventually extended 64 feet down. As shown in his drawing of the various occupational layers discovered in the pit (below), the first eight layers, labeled A-H and running from 17 to 10 meters (55 by 33 feet) above sea level, contained mud-brick walls. These architectural ruins ended suddenly about 10 meters above sea level, and a 5.5-meter layer of broken pottery began. Scattered throughout this layer, Woolley discovered kilns and a potter’s wheel, leading him to suggest this had been a pot factory.

Directly beneath the pottery layer came the so-called Flood deposit, measuring up to 12 feet thick and dating to the mid-fourth-millennium B.C.E. (The only intrusions into this layer were later graves.) Woolley observed that the silt had been deposited all at once, was water-laid and matched that of the Middle Euphrates region. During the Deluge, he speculated, the overflowing Euphrates had deposited the soil here. (source)

This may be a minor point, as no one seems to agree on the depth of the excavation and discovery. They do, however, agree that the depth was more than 11 feet:

Excavating at Ur of the Chaldees in Mesopotamia, near the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, at a depth of about 12 metres (40 ft) he found a 3-metre (10 ft) layer of silt and sand that did not contain any human artefacts.1,2 ( source)

Some sources do not say how deep he went. They just mention the mud layer under debate:

Sir Leonard Woolley’s excavations at Ur uncovered a distinct layer of alluvial silt, approximately 3.7 meters thick, separating earlier occupational phases from later ones. He attributed this “flood stratum” to a sudden, localized change in the Euphrates-Tigris fluvial system, dismissing broader flood narratives as mythological. Woolley’s conclusion aligned with mid-20th-century archaeological paradigms, which prioritized site-specific explanations over regional climatic factors. However, his work established Ur’s flood as a pivotal event in Mesopotamian studies, sparking debates about its scale and causes. ( source)

The video also states that Woolley never recanted his claim about the flood layer:

We know that is not true as well. From the BAR article, last paragraph we read:

Woolley later retracted his identification of the Flood stratum, arguing that the deposit was too old to have resulted from the Biblical Deluge. Nevertheless, it offers strong evidence of flooding during the regional wet period that may have inspired the Flood story of Genesis 7:6–8:14. ( source)

The playing fast and loose with historical facts is not a smart move. Of course, the video does not list its reference material to get to its content. We can only conclude that their work was more AI and to present one narrative that never existed.

This is something amateur archaeologists and historians need to be on the watch for. Video and other historical creators do not present accurate details in their content. For whatever reason they may have, they allow false information to exist in their material.

With all of our studies, we think Woolley did discover the flood layer. Not a local flood but the global one. The problem with producing corroborating mud evidence is that there has only been one global flood.

No one knows what the layer would look like or how wide and deep it was. Experts have looked at different flood layers and come to their assumptions about what the evidence looks like, but they do not know and do not have any evidence to compare their discoveries

What this means is that any evidence to the contrary may not be evidence to the contrary. Flood layers look pretty much alike, but we do not think that local floods would deposit a 12-foot, approx., depth of virgin mud in any given area.

As an example, a recent local flood in the lower mainland of BC, Canada, was cleaned up and did not reach the depth that was found in Wolley’s discovery:

The Canadian province of British Columbia on the Pacific coast declared a state of emergency on Wednesday following massive floods and landslides caused by record-breaking rainfall in the last several days.

Authorities have confirmed one death from a mudslide on Monday and anticipate the death toll to rise. Officials also said it could take weeks for the province to recover from the storm’s torrential rain, which hit southern B.C. between Saturday and Monday. Thousands of people are stranded and seeking shelter.

The government of Canada has deployed its air force to the area to aid evacuations and support disrupted supply chains. The flood conditions have cut off transportation routes between the lower mainland of B.C. and the province interior and cut all rail access to Canada’s largest port in Vancouver

We know that this ‘flood layer’ was cleaned up by the farmers, road crews, etc., leaving very little, if any, evidence that it took place. Would not the ancient inhabitants of Ur do the same thing with their many local floods?

Would not the inhabitants of Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates, do the same thing since they needed to farm the land the next farming season? With these examples, we doubt the 12-foot, approx., layer would have remained intact if it were part of a local flood.

The arguments against Woolley’s declaration may need to be reexamined. We are not sure about the other flood layers because what evidence separates them from the global flood?

Depth is not a key bit of evidence since a uniform layer everywhere is an assumption not based on fact. We do not know how much of those so-called layers were damaged by erosion.

It is a good thing we do not have to rely on flood layers to determine the reality of Noah’s global flood. We have other evidence to support the biblical record.

Originally published at http://theoarch.wordpress.com on June 9, 2026.