Historical scholarship proposed candidate locations for the city of “Calneh”, but it is now considered most likely, in a suggestion going back to W.F. Albright (1944), that the word did not in origin refer to a city but has been corrupted from an expression meaning “all of them”.
William Kennett Loftus visited the site of Uruk in 1849, identifying it as “Erech”, known as “the second city of Nimrod”, and led the first excavations from 1850 to 1854.