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The Royal Cemetery of Ur and Sumerian Kingship in Ancient Mesopotamia*

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The Royal Cemetery of Ur and Sumerian Kingship in Ancient Mesopotamia* OpenStax-CNX module: m64912 1 The Royal Cemetery of Ur and Sumerian Kingship in Ancient Mesopotamia* Avary Taylor Marian Feldman This work is produced by OpenStax-CNX and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 Abstract This module serves as an introduction to the Royal Cemetery of Ur, one of the greatest archaeological nds in Near Eastern Studies. The archaeological and art historical evidence found within the Royal Cemetery is this module's primary focus, with emphasis placed on the Cemetery's social signicance, especially in relation to early kingship in ancient Mesopotamia. 1 The Early Dynastic Period of Ancient Mesopotamia The Early Dynastic (ED) Period (c. 29002350 BCE) designates a time of major social, cultural, and political changes in southern Mesopotamia (what is today southern Iraq). The period is divided into four sub-periods: EDI (c. 29002700 BCE) EDII (c. 27002600 BCE) EDIIIa (c. 26002450 BCE) EDIIIb (c. 24502350 BCE) Table 1 The Early Dynastic Period saw the development of several major innovations. Fully developed writing is just one example that emerged during this period (its earliest stages 1 having started around 35003100 BCE during the Late Uruk Period). By the end of the Early Dynastic Period, historical documents and written narratives, such as the Stele of the Vultures2 (c. 2450 BCE, g. 1), which commemorates the victory of the king of Lagash, Eannatum, over the neighboring city-state of Umma, were being created in southern *Version 1.3: Sep 1, 2017 10:22 am -0500 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 1https://tinyurl.com/y8lcjxx3 2http://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/stele-vultures http://cnx.org/content/m64912/1.3/ OpenStax-CNX module: m64912 2 Mesopotamia. An introduction to the development of the monument in Mesopotamia from the Uruk Period (c. 3500 BCE) to the Akkadian Period (c. 2250 BCE) can be read here3 . Figure 1: Stele of the Vultures. Obverse and reverse. Paris, Musée du Louvre, AO 16109, AO 50, AO 2346, AO 2348 4. ©RMN/Hervé Lewandowski. The Early Dynastic Period is named after yet another innovation: dynastic rule. This period provides the earliest evidence for dynastic kingship (although whether dynastic kingship rst occurred in the Early Dynastic Period or a previous period, namely during the Uruk or Jemdet-Nasr periods, is still a matter of debate among scholars). The Early Dynastic Period is characterized by competing city-states ruled by kings. These rulers controlled territories consisting of major cities and surrounding towns and villages that, due to the undened borders separating them, often came in conict with one another. These leaders who ruled over city-states such as Umma, Lagash, Ur, and Uruk (g. 2) shared a common identity, Sumerian, named after the primary language of the period. 3https://cnx.org/contents/YUbLWN2X@1/The-Victory-Stele-of-Naram-Sin 4http://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/stele-vultures http://cnx.org/content/m64912/1.3/ OpenStax-CNX module: m64912 3 Figure 2: Map of the Near East during the Early Dynastic period. (Created by A. Taylor.) Despite years of scholarship on Sumerian culture, many aspects of the culture remain unclear to us today. Textual evidence, though appearing in this period for the rst time, is scarce, particularly in the periods before 2450 BCE. As a result, to better understand the Early Dynastic Period, scholars heavily rely upon archaeological and art historical evidence, as well as textual evidence from later periods such as the Sumerian King List5 , which describes the movement of kingship from one city-state to another in early Mesopotamiathe latest version of which dates to the Old Babylonian Period, ca. 20001600 BCE. The Royal Cemetery, located in the city of Ur, oers a major contribution to the understanding of Sumerian culture and the Early Dynastic Period. Although the majority of what we know today about cultural and social changes in the Early Dynastic Period comes from the archaeological and art historical evidence found at the cemetery, the same evidence also raises numerous questions about the period. One of the greatest discoveries of Near Eastern studies, the excavations, led by the early 20th-century archaeologist Leonard Woolley6 (g. 3), revealed a large cemetery with thousands of graves, some of which he deemed royal due to their more elaborate construction, wealthy grave goods, and associated death pits. Who exactly the people buried in these tombs were, why they died, and what the signicance of the cemetery was are questions that continue to puzzle scholars. 5http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section2/tr211.htm 6https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/sir-leonard-woolley/ http://cnx.org/content/m64912/1.3/ OpenStax-CNX module: m64912 4 Figure 3: Leonard Woolley excavating at Ur. He holds in his hands the bull head of the "Great Lyre" (see below). ©The Trustees of the British Museum. 2 The Royal Tombs of Ur Ur (g. 4) (modern-day Tell el-Muqayyar) was a prominent city for ve millennia, from around 5500 BCE to about 400 BCE, when the course of the Euphrates River changed and the city lost its main water supply. The site was excavated by Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s and 30s on behalf of the British Museum7 and the University of Pennsylvania8 . Woolley's large-scale excavations typically focused on major architectural monuments, such as the stepped pyramid, or ziggurat9 , (g. 5) built during the Third Dynasty of Ur10 (c. 2100 BCE2004 BCE). When Woolley began excavations in the southeastern end of the precinct of the moon god Nanna, he did not have any expectations of what he may nd. Over a series of four excavation seasons, he would uncover what has become known as the Royal Cemetery of Ur (Woolley 1955). The discoveries from the tombsthe magnicent artifacts and evidence of human sacriceshocked both archaeologists and the general public in the 1920s and have continued to intrigue scholars today. 7http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/research_projects/all_current_projects/ur_project.aspx 8https://www.penn.museum/sites/iraq/?page_id=26 9http://www.mesopotamia.co.uk/ziggurats/explore/zig.html 10https://cnx.org/contents/MPG7vGNB@3/Ur-III-Continuity-and-Erasure http://cnx.org/content/m64912/1.3/ OpenStax-CNX module: m64912 5 Figure 4: Plan of the precinct of Nanna. The Royal Cemetery is located on the southeastern end, "site of early royal graves." From Woolley 1934. Courtesy of the Penn Museum. http://cnx.org/content/m64912/1.3/ OpenStax-CNX module: m64912 6 Figure 5: The restored remains (constructed by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s) of the ziggurat of Ur-Nammu at Ur. Image courtesy of user "Tla2006" via Wikimedia Commons. The Royal Cemetery (g. 6), the stratigraphy and plans of which can be explored at Ur Online11 , was a large cemetery complex in use from around 2600 to 2100 BCE and that contained around 2,000 simple shaft grave inhumations. In addition to these graves, Woolley distinguished sixteen so-called royal tombs 12 by their rich grave goods, stone chambers with associated large pits, and evidence of human sacrice or self-immolation. These royal tombs are dated more closely to 2600 BCE (EDIIIa) and spanned about 100 to 150 years. The royal tombs have been extensively studied and have engendered signicant archaeological and art historical scholarship, some of which will be discussed below in relation to several specic burials. A review of the interpretations of the tombs concludes this module. 11http://www.ur-online.org/location/25/ 12http://www.mesopotamia.co.uk/tombs/explore/exp_set.html http://cnx.org/content/m64912/1.3/ OpenStax-CNX module: m64912 7 Figure 6: Royal Cemetery at Ur. From Woolley 1934. Courtesy of the Penn Museum. The most extravagant tomband the tomb associated with one of the largest death pitswas PG 800, which belonged to a woman named Pu-abi (g. 7). Pu-abi is identied by a cylinder seal associated with the skeletal remains (g. 8). Cylinder seals13 are small, cylindrical objects carved with an inscription or design (or both) that, when rolled across wet clay, create a continuous frieze. These objects had many uses throughout time, functions such as the authentication of transactions (like a modern-day signature), the sealed restriction of access to containers and rooms, amuletic or aesthetic uses, or as a marker of personal identity or professional aliation. Pu-abi's cylinder seal depicts a banquet scene (see below for more on scene types) and contains the inscription Pu-abi, NIN. The Sumerian logogram NIN has been translated as lady or queen (Marchesi 2004). Queen Pu-abi was buried with three attendants in her stone chamber and was likely associated with a death pit containing another nineteen attendants and the remains of two oxen (though Paul Zimmerman challenged Woolley's reconstruction14 in a 1998 University of Pennsylvania master's thesis). Elaborate gold and stone objects, such as headdresses, musical instruments, a sledge chariot, and a game board were found associated with the remains (see below for more on some of the objects). Aside from the Royal Cemetery, the only other example of attendants buried alongside a deceased individual occurs at the site of Kish (g. 2) to the north. The Y cemetery at Kish, contemporaneous with the royal tombs, 13https://cnx.org/contents/hj0fKLrZ@5/Cylinder-Seals-and-the-Develop 14https://www.penn.museum/sites/iraq/?page_id=225 http://cnx.org/content/m64912/1.3/ OpenStax-CNX module: m64912 8 contained at least four burials with chariots and the remains of bovines and equids in pits. In one pit, at least ve people were found. The grave goods and overall sizes of the pits are signicantly smaller than those found in the royal tombs at Ur.
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