In 1928 archeologists working in a 4,600-year-old Iraqi cemetery uncovered a trove of treasures that easily rivaled those discovered barely five years earlier in the Egyptian tomb of Tutankhamen.
They had found the royal tombs of Ur, where exquisite gold, silver and gems adorned the skeletons of ancient kings, queens and their servants.
Because Ur was one of the very first cities, dating to the beginnings of recorded history, the contents of the royal tombs are also among the most scientifically valuable in archeology.
Saturday, an exhibit of about one-quarter of the riches opens at the Oriental Institute’s museum on Chicago’s South Side. The artifacts are on loan from their permanent home, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, while it is being remodeled.
Most of the 157 objects on display are works of art, breathtaking for their beauty and accomplishment and vivid in their portrayal of life during those early times.
“Looking today at these artifacts reminds us again how accomplished this culture was,” said Karen Wilson, director of the Oriental Institute museum.
The most spectacular piece in the show probably is an odd, extraordinarily elaborate golden headdress worn by a queen called Puabi. It is an enormous contrivance with a spray of flowers at the back of the head and garlands of delicate leaves and flowers.
Also on display are her cape, made of 50 beaded strands of silver, gold, agate, lapis lazuli and carnelian, and the 10 rings she wore on her extremely slender, delicate fingers.
“She was a very small woman, less than 5 feet tall,” Wilson said. “While we were installing the exhibit, I couldn’t stop thinking that I hoped she got to wear this stuff and have fun with it while she was still living, that it wasn’t just ritual burial ornamentation.”
A British forensic scientist working in Iraq with lead archeologist C. Leonard Woolley determined that Puabi was about 40 years old when she died. None of the human remains found in the tombs are in the exhibit.
Visitors to the museum can view one of the oldest existing musical instruments, a lyre decorated with a golden bull’s head, and one of two small ram statues that caused a worldwide sensation when they were discovered.
Many thought the rams were connected to Abraham, the great biblical patriarch who was born in Ur. In Genesis, God ordered Abraham to take his young son, Isaac, to the wilderness and sacrifice him as a test of faith, relenting at the last moment by letting Abraham sacrifice a ram instead.
Today, most archeologists believe the rams–made of gold, silver, lapis lazuli, copper, shell and bitumen–have nothing to do with Abraham’s story.
The people who populated Ur were Sumerians. Living in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, they invented writing and started the first advanced civilizations. Later Sumerian kings and queens are known to history, but those whose remains Woolley found in the tomb in Ur are not.
“These people in these tombs reigned roughly from 2600 to 2500 B.C.,” said Oriental Institute Director Gene Gragg. “This is just the beginning of written history, when almost all the Sumerian texts written were economic texts, records of commercial transactions. There is a Sumerian king list written a few hundred years later enumerating former kings and queens, but these were too early to be remembered.”
Some matters, such as how and why the Sumerians at that time buried royal retinues, are still shrouded in mystery.
Puabi, for instance, was laid to rest with the bodies of three regally dressed attendants, at least one a male armed with daggers.
“This practice of burying servants and slaves with the royals seems only to have occurred for a short time in Sumerian history,” Gragg said. “We don’t know exactly what happened, whether they committed suicide or were slain.”
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Usually, the bodies were laid out in similar poses, many on their sides with legs bent. They often were arranged as though they were at a banquet, still surrounded by exquisitely crafted cups, bowls and drinking straws made from gold, silver, shells or stone.
The scores of slaves and servants found in the royal tombs may well have taken part in burial rituals, then drunk poison or been killed on the spot. The vast majority of them were women.
The richness of the buried artifacts demonstrates the ingenuity of the Sumerians, who lived in an area with virtually no natural resources other than semidesert soil and two rivers.
Inventing irrigation, they made their lands bloom, and by using their food for barter they established long lines of trade–to what is now India and Afghanistan for sea shells, gold and gems; to the Arabian peninsula for copper; to Egypt for gold; and to what is now Turkey for tin, gold, silver and lead.
The sophistication and knowledge they gained from their travels flowered when history’s first cities sprang up and civilization, art and architecture took root.
Woolley, an Englishman, was hired by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania to dig out an unexcavated ziggurat, or ancient palace, at the Ur site.
The excavations of his joint British-American team eventually unearthed the cemetery. When he came upon the royal tombs, he simply had to rub the dust from the welter of golden objects to understand their worth.
Afraid to broadcast his find publicly, he sent messages in Latin by way of Western Union to the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania: “I found the intact tomb, stone built and vaulted over with bricks, of queen–adorned with a dress in which gems, flowers, crowns and animal figures are woven. Tomb magnificent with jewels and golden cups.”
Most of the 16 royal tombs Woolley uncovered had been robbed of their riches long before he arrived, probably shortly after the deaths of the royals. How Puabi’s tomb and a couple of others escaped that fate is unknown.
In those years before World War II, the customary practice was that half the artifacts recovered in a dig belonged to the host nation and the rest to the excavators. Half the contents of the royal tombs at Ur are in Iraq’s national museum, one-fourth at the British Museum and one-fourth at the University of Pennsylvania. It is unlikely that all the artifacts will ever be pulled together for a single exhibition.
The exhibition at the Oriental Institute, 1155 E. 58th St., runs through Jan. 21.