‘Treasures From the Royal Tombs of Ur’ at University Museum
by Dea Adria Mallin
When the Women’s Committee of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology named its recent, sparkling fundraiser “The Lure of Ur,” they weren’t merely rhyming. “Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur” is breathtaking and seductive, and though 4,500 years old, of a timeless beauty. Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, called it “the finest, most resplendent, and magical works of art in all of America.”
The museum’s collection, which most Philadelphians took for granted until it went on a 10-city traveling exhibition schedule in 1998, is back — albeit temporarily, until May 29, 2005 — with more than 200 objects.
Every aspect of this exhibition comes replete with story and significance, because Ur was the very cradle of civilization, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, a pivotal place in human history. The materials in the exhibit document the transition from hunter-gatherers to sedentary farmers and then the move to cities and the existence of kings, complex economies and administrative systems.
Ur was the city of the Sumerian moon god; it was the site of the Garden of Eden; it was the traditional home of the Biblical patriarch, Abraham; and its language, Sumerian, was the world’s first written language. It was also in what is now Iraq. The artifacts recovered from the excavations of the 1920s and 1930s were shared by the National Museum in Baghdad, the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum.
In the language of archaeological discovery, the royal cemetery at Ur ranks next to the discovery of the intact tomb of the boy pharaoh, Tutankhamen. An expedition in the late 1920s was led by British archaeologist C. Leonard Woolley in a joint venture by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum. They uncovered 1,859 burials, and at the end of the excavations in 1934, Woolley was awarded knighthood.
Woolley was considered a genius by his peers, not only at meticulously getting artifacts out of the soft and unstable soil, but at reconstructing them. Also a man of legendary stamina, Woolley would work at his desk until 2 or 3 in the morning, and be back at work in the field a half hour after sunrise.
He and his wife, Katherine, and one assistant did all the detailed digging themselves. Using knives and brushes, Woolley recalled “brushing and blowing and threading the beads in their order as they lay.” He said, “You might suppose that finding three-score women all richly bedecked with jewelry would be thrilling, and so it is, in retrospect, but at the moment, one is more conscious of the toil than the thrill.”
The extraordinary art, ranging from the flamboyant to the sublime, is associated with the elite class, and the art from the Royal Tombs was all functional — for adornment of the body, as decoration on containers used to hold food and drink, and to enhance magnificent instruments used to accompany songs of praise.
Though many questions remain about this glorious ancient Sumerian culture at its zenith (2600-2500 B.C.), the burial rituals of Ur seemed to require that the dead king or queen be accompanied to the netherworld with their retainers (who drank poison in the tomb) and their best material goods, their oxen, and food offerings and gifts. These would assuage the wants and needs of the gods of the underworld and assist in the maintenance of an afterlife for the king or queen.
Woolley deemed sixteen of the burial pits “royal” because of their wealth, peculiarities of structure and evidence of ritual. One royal tomb held 63 retainers, mostly women, and another had 73. Inside were gold helmets, gold and silver lamps, tools and weapons, musical instruments, sculpture, bowls, tumblers, jewelry and cylinder seals.
The artists were adept, and their tiny fauna on the Standard of Ur, in the British Museum, were an impeccable blend of abstract shapes with naturalistic observation of detail, rendered in mosaics of cutout pieces of shell, red limestone, and lapis, set into bitumen with incised drawings. Even the rhythm of the donkeys is rendered by a change of gait and positioning of the donkeys’ legs from left to right, from a walking stance, to cantering, to a full gallop.
The metalworkers of Mesopotamia were incredibly skilled, and controlled smelting, refining and soldering as well as designing and decorating with ridges, grooves and fluting. The electrum tumbler on display at the museum is finely hammered inside and out and fluted into 28 ridges. Opposed herringbones and double zigzags decorate the rim and base, and on the bottom is a rosette with eight petals on a bed of concentric arcs.
The word “treasure,” used so lightly today, sits regally on the Great Lyre and on the Ram-in-a-Thicket — actually, said a colleague, “ a goat eating a plant in the usual goat fashion.” Here, fauna and flora are linked with regeneration and fertility, as the striding goat places its forelegs upon a plant with enormous buds.
The story of one of the bull’s headed lyres is a marker of Woolley’s consummate skill. He noted two rectangular holes angling into the soil and connected at the top by a horizontal hole, and he inserted wooden sticks and wires, and then poured liquid plaster around them. When he cleared the soil from around the hardened plaster, he uncovered a complete lyre, with the copper head of a cow and a shell plaque attached to the sound box. The plaster even reproduced the instrument’s ten strings, though the wind quickly blew all traces of them away.
Jewelry was thought to be the most impressive of offerings to the netherworld’s deities, assuring quick entry. Women today are transfixed by the jewelry, returning more than once to the display cases with their deep blue lapis, bright and rich yellow gold, and red-orange carnelian. And who will not be astounded by the exquisite artifacts from Lady Puabi’s tomb, intact when Woolley uncovered it, having escaped looting over the millennia. She wore an elaborate headdress of delicately-veined gold leaves wound with gold ribbons and strands of lapis lazuli and carnelian. In her hair was a tall golden comb, with seven flowers inlaid with gold, lapis lazuli, shell and red limestone. She was bedecked with chokers, necklaces, golden rings on every finger and a pair of large crescent earrings of hammered gold. Her upper body was covered in strings of semi-precious stones and precious metals stretching from her shoulder to waist, thought to be a cape that would have shimmered as she moved — which would have had to be slowly, from the sheer weight.
Among the ribbons hammered out of thin gold or silver sheeting to dress and drape the hair in festoons on each side of the head, Woolley found, in one death pit, a long ribbon of silver coiled into a spiral and clutched in the hand of a young girl. The archaeologist imagined the young retainer being late for her funereal fate and running to the death pit, ribbon in hand, before she could complete her hair arrangement.
At the Women’s Committee fundraiser, a harpist played in the low lighting of the Dietrich Gallery as guests ogled the enormous lyre, the Ram-in-a-Thicket, and the dramatic gold, lapis and carnelian jewelry — the chokers, the wrist cuffs, the necklaces, the finger rings. The collection all “wears so well” that even as the dynamic Christie’s auctioneer raised money for the museum, one woman after another, like Chestnut Hiller Schuy Wood, a vice-chair of the event, wished for this gold and lapis bracelet, that leaf necklace, a set of those golden tumblers from Ur .…
To accompany the traveling exhibition, UPM published the first catalogue of its collection, the 175-page Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur ($75 cloth; $50 paper), abounding with 230 color photos plus black-and-white archival material. Essays by the museum’s scholars tell the complete and fascinating story of the expedition, its excavations, geography, history, concepts of death and burial, and of Woolley’s remarkable, painstaking reconstructions. Surely this is a book to pore over and savor, and while the treasures are here, an exhibit to pore over and savor.
University of Pennsylvania Museum; 3260 South Street; Tues. through Sat. 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Sunday 1-5 p.m. (except summer through Labor Day); closed Mondays. $8 adults, $5 seniors and students;. www.museum.upenn.edu; 215-898-4000.