Great
Lyre from the "King's Grave"
Object ID B17694
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"Treasures
from the Royal Tombs of Ur"
Full Exhibition Returning to Penn Museum on or after 2012
Special Display of Selected Objects Now On View
CURATOR'S
ESSAY
Southern Mesopotamia has long been recognized as the "cradle
of civilization." Cities dominated by temples and states
ruled by kings had emerged there by the late fourth millennium
BC; writing was "invented," perhaps at Uruk, at roughly
the same time. Ancient Mesopotamia was indeed the earliest of
the world's primary civilizations and provided, along with ancient
Egypt, the foundations of western civilization.
As the word "Mesopotamia" (Greek for "between the
rivers") implies, the Tigris and the Euphrates are the region's
dominant features. Rising in the mountains of Turkey and fed chiefly
by melt from winter snowfalls, the two rivers thread through the
Turkish Mountains, cross the Syrian and Kurdish uplands, and emerge
onto the floodplain north of modern-day Baghdad; they unite at
Qurna to form the Shatt al-Arab, which flows on to the Persian
Gulf.
Traditional site of the Garden of Eden (Gen. 2:10-15) and homeland
of early Mesopotamian civilization, the southern floodplain lies
between the Arabian Desert plateau on the south and west and the
Zagros Mountains on the east; it gives out to the southeast, where
the rivers lose much of their water into marshes. The area's inadequate
and unreliable rainfall makes agriculture possible only with irrigation.
Although irrigated land, riverrine thickets, and steppe vegetation
provide important natural resources for the traditional subsistence
economy of farming and herding, southern Mesopotamia is otherwise
resource poor. Commodities such as hardwoods, stones other than
locally available limestones, and metallic ores must all be imported.
This seemingly unpromising land had been settled since at least
the seventh millennium BC. By the third millennium's Early Dynastic
period, the area was divided into competing city-states and alliances
of city-states, among the most important of which was Ur, on the
southwestern margins of the floodplain. It was during this same
period that the kings and queens of Ur were being laid to rest
in a royal cemetery just outside the temple complex dedicated
to the city's tutelary deity, Nanna, the moon god.
–Richard L. Zettler
This essay is an excerpt from the exhibition's companion
book, available from University Museum Publications.
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