Great
Lyre from the "King's Grave"
Object ID B17694
|
"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
ABOUT THE EXPEDITION
Perhaps
no excavation in the more than 150 years of archaeological work
in Mesopotamia has excited as much public attention as C. Leonard
Woolley's work at ancient Ur in the 1920s and ealy 1930s. Ur was fabled as the city of the Sumerican moon god Nanna and the
traditional home of the biblical patriarch Abraham (Gen. 12:4-5).
In the thirteen years of excavations, newspapers around the world
printed countless articles. The Illustrated London News, England's
"window on the world," reported the results of Woolley's
discoveries at Ur in some thirty features, at least two with color
illustrations.
Of all Woolley's discoveries, the mid-third-millennium BC tombs
of the Royal Cemetery of Ur, with their rich inventories of gold
and evidence of human sacrifice, received more intense coverage
than any other. Woolley's excavations competed only with Howard
Carter's discovery of the intact tomb of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamen
for public attention. As a result of the extensive publicity,
Iraqis and tourists from all parts of the globe, including European
royalty and even the author Agatha Christie, flocked to the inaccessible
site in the Iraqi desert. Christie later married Woolley's young
assistant, M.E.L. Mallowan, and set her 1936 mystery Murder in
Mesopotamia amid an excavation in Iraq. She attributed Ur's prominence
in the popular media not only to the intrinsic interest of Woolley's
discoveries but also to Woolley himself. As she wrote in her autobiography:
"Leonard Woolley saw with the eye of imagination:
the place was as real to him as it had been in 1500 B.C., or a
few thousand years earlier. Wherever he happened to be, he could
make it come alive. While he was speaking I felt in my mind no
doubt whatever that the house on the corner had been Abraham's.
It was his reconstruction of the past and he believed in it, and
anyone who listened to him believed in it also." (Christie
Agatha. Agatha Christie: An Autobiography, New York: Dodd,
Mead. 1977.)
–Richard L. Zettler
This essay is an excerpt from the exhibition's companion
book, available from University Museum Publications.
Ur, Iraq, 1933-1933, Photograph by Yahia el Hamoudi, Excavation crew standing in Pit X, created through through the removal of 13,000 cubic meters of soil. (img. 141589) |
