Jon Hurdle
Reuters
PHILADELPHIA: A flattened human head draped with gold and lapis lazuli jewelry lies in a glass case at the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, its teeth the only recognizable feature. It’s all that remains of a female courtier to a Mesopotamian monarch who was buried around 4,500 years ago with all of his or her wealth, including the humans who attended the royal court.
The attendant, together with several hundred others, was discovered in 16 royal tombs that generated international headlines in the 1920s when they were unearthed by British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley at Ur, near modern-day Nasiriya in southern Iraq.
Now the remains, together with some 220 other objects from the site, are going on display at the Penn Museum for the first time in more than 10 years in a show that sheds new light on one of the great archaeological discoveries of the 20th century.
“Iraq’s Ancient Past: Rediscovering Ur’s Royal Cemetery,” a long-term exhibitionthat opened on October 25, places the Ur treasures in the context of a region known as the “cradle of civilization,” and tells the story of their excavation between 1922 and 1934.
The objects have been on tour at art museums throughout the US over the last decade, and have now returned to Penn – co-sponsor of the original 1922 expedition – which is emphasizing their historic and cultural significance rather than the aesthetic value highlighted by art museums, said co-curator Richard Zettler said.
Contrary to what Woolley suggested, Zettler proposes that the royal attendants found in the tombs were not poisoned but killed by blows to the back of the head with a sharp object, a theory supported by recent CT scans by the University of Pennsylvania Hospital.
After death, bodies were dried out and treated with preservatives so that they could be used in tableaux such as a banquet, demonstrating the monarch’s continued wealth and power even in death.
“These people were made to look like they were part of a funerary ritual,” Zettler said.
During burial, the remains were covered with such a weight of earth that skulls were crushed, explaining the flattened shape of the heads on display.
The centerpiece of the show is the Queen Puabi headdress containing 4 kilograms of gold and 3,600 beads made of carnelian and lapis lazuli.
The exhibition also includes a lyre topped with a golden bull’s head and the “Ram in the Thicket,” a rare figurine made from gold, copper and lapis lazuli, showing a goat nibbling the leaves of a tree.
The opulence of the Ur treasures shows the prosperity of the Mesopotamian civilization, said Zettler, and its success in trading with distant regions such as the Indus Valley and the eastern Mediterranean, which supplied precious metals and stones in return for textiles and agricultural products.
“It provides a picture of a really elaborate high civilization,” he continued.
To help tell the story of how the Ur tombs were excavated, the exhibition highlights some of the characters who visited the site. They include T.E. Lawrence, who became a middleman between the archaeologists and the British government, and the English crime writer Agatha Christie, whose “Murder in Mesopotamia” was based on her experiences there.
More recently, the treasures of Ur have been largely shielded from the war in Iraq. The most important pieces were moved from the Iraq Museum to bank vaults before the 2003 US invasion that led to the looting of the museum, Zettler said.
The exhibition notes suggest that the site of Ur itself has been “spared the worst of the looting” because of its position on the edge of the Tallil airbase, one of the largest in the Middle East.
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