Royal Cemetery of Ur: Queen Puabi and the Great Death Pits

The Royal Cemetery of Ur is a burial ground in the Sumerian city of Ur, in southern Iraq, where some of the richest graves of the ancient world were laid down around 2600-2450 BC. Excavated by Leonard Woolley between 1922 and 1934, it produced the gold headdress of Queen Puabi, the Standard of Ur, the Ram in a Thicket and the oldest known game boards of the Royal Game of Ur. It also revealed “death pits” filled with attendants who died to accompany their masters, one of the clearest cases of human sacrifice in the early history of civilisation.

Ur in the Early Dynastic period

Ur lay near the old course of the Euphrates, close to the head of the Persian Gulf, at the site now called Tell el-Muqayyar. In the third millennium BC it was one of a dozen or so rival city-states of Sumer, each centred on a temple of its patron god; at Ur this was the moon god Nanna.

The cemetery dates mainly to the Early Dynastic III period, conventionally c. 2600-2350 BC, when Sumerian cities were ruled by kings who fought and traded with one another. The Sumerian King List records a First Dynasty of Ur, and inscriptions from the cemetery name rulers such as Meskalamdug and Akalamdug, who are not in that list. Ur was already an old city: writing had been in use in southern Mesopotamia for several centuries since the invention of cuneiform.

The burial ground grew up on a slope of rubbish outside the sacred precinct. It was used over several centuries, so most of its graves are ordinary ones; the famous royal tombs form a cluster within it.

Woolley’s excavation

From 1922 to 1934 the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum ran a joint expedition at Ur, directed by Charles Leonard Woolley. In the first season, a trial trench turned up gold beads and other signs of rich burials. Woolley deliberately postponed digging the cemetery until 1926, judging that his team and his local workforce needed more experience before tackling something so delicate.

Between 1926 and 1932 the team excavated about 1,850 graves. Woolley numbered them with the prefix PG, for “private grave”, and set apart 16 that he considered royal because they had a built stone or brick tomb chamber, exceptional offerings and the bodies of many attendants.

The work was slow and meticulous by the standards of the time. Woolley pioneered methods such as pouring plaster into the hollows left by decayed wood, which allowed the shapes of lyres and other objects to be recovered. His wife, Katharine Woolley, helped reconstruct finds, and his assistant Max Mallowan later became a leading archaeologist in his own right. The finds were divided between the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, the British Museum and the Penn Museum.

Queen Puabi and tomb PG 800

The best preserved royal burial is PG 800, the tomb of Puabi. Her body lay on a bier in a stone chamber, covered from shoulders to waist by a cape of gold, silver, lapis lazuli, carnelian and agate beads. On her head was an elaborate headdress of gold leaves, rings and ribbons, with a tall gold comb at the back and large crescent earrings.

A lapis lazuli cylinder seal found by her shoulder is inscribed with her name and the title nin, which can be translated as “queen” or “lady”. Whether she ruled in her own right or was the wife of a king is not known. Her name is Akkadian rather than Sumerian, a small hint of the mixed population of the region.

Several attendants lay in her chamber, and a separate pit beside it held more bodies, together with a wooden sledge and the oxen that had drawn it. Totals vary depending on how burials are assigned to her tomb, but two dozen or more people died with her. Her grave goods included gold and silver vessels, a lyre and jewellery for her retinue.

The Great Death Pit and the other royal tombs

The largest mass burial was PG 1237, which Woolley called the Great Death Pit. It held 74 bodies, 68 of them women, arranged in neat rows. Many of the women wore headdresses of gold leaves and lapis lazuli beads, and the pit also contained four lyres and the pair of goat statuettes known as the Rams in a Thicket.

Next to Puabi’s tomb was PG 789, sometimes called the King’s Grave, whose robbed chamber was surrounded by a pit holding about 63 attendants, wagons and oxen. Among its finds was a lyre with a bull’s head of gold and lapis lazuli.

Not every rich grave held attendants. PG 755, the grave of a man named Meskalamdug, contained a helmet beaten from a single sheet of gold alloy in the form of a wig, one of the masterpieces of Sumerian metalwork. Because it had no sacrificed retinue, Woolley did not class it as a royal tomb, though Meskalamdug appears as a king on another seal from the cemetery.

Famous treasures

The Standard of Ur, found in PG 779, is a hollow wooden box about 50 centimetres long, inlaid with shell, red limestone and lapis lazuli. One long side shows war, with four-wheeled chariots driven by donkey-like equids trampling enemies and a line of captives presented to a king. The other shows peace, with animals and goods brought to a banquet where seated men drink to the music of a lyre. Woolley guessed that it was carried on a pole, hence the name, but its real function is unknown.

The cemetery yielded several lyres with sound boxes decorated with animal heads and inlaid panels, among the oldest surviving stringed instruments. The Rams in a Thicket, one now in the British Museum and the other in the Penn Museum, show a goat rearing up against a flowering plant, made of gold leaf, copper, shell and lapis lazuli over a wooden core.

Boards for a race game, now known as the Royal Game of Ur, were found in several graves. Its rules were partly reconstructed by the British Museum curator Irving Finkel from a cuneiform tablet written some two thousand years later, in the second century BC.

Trade and wealth

The materials in the tombs show how far Sumerian trade reached. Lapis lazuli came from Badakhshan in north-eastern Afghanistan, more than 2,000 kilometres away. Carnelian beads, some etched with white patterns, came from the Indus region or were made with Indus techniques. Gold, silver and copper had to be imported, since the alluvial plain of southern Iraq has no metal ores and little stone.

This long-distance exchange, running by land across Iran and by sea through the Gulf, made it possible for Ur’s elite to display wealth on a scale that astonished the world when the finds were published.

Human sacrifice: what happened to the attendants

Woolley found small cups near many of the bodies and concluded that the attendants had walked into the pits, drunk poison or a sleeping draught, and lain down calmly to die. This peaceful picture shaped popular accounts for decades.

Later research has challenged it. In 2009 researchers at the Penn Museum used CT scanning on two skulls from the cemetery, and the results, published in 2011, showed fractures from heavy blows, consistent with being killed by a sharp or pointed weapon. The bodies also appear to have been heated and treated with mercury, possibly to preserve them for a lying-in-state before burial.

Why the attendants died remains debated. Most scholars see it as a way of displaying royal power and providing servants for the afterlife. No written text from Ur describes the practice, and retainer sacrifice on this scale is not known from later Mesopotamia.

Myths and facts

Myth: the cemetery was full of kings. Only 16 of about 1,850 graves were classed as royal, and even their status is uncertain. Most burials were ordinary people with a few pots or tools.

Myth: the attendants all died peacefully by poison. That was Woolley’s interpretation, but scans of surviving skulls show that at least some were killed by blows to the head.

Myth: Woolley’s finds at Ur proved the biblical Flood. In 1929 Woolley found a thick layer of water-laid silt in deep pits at Ur and linked it to the story of Noah. Today it is seen as evidence of a local river flood that did not affect other Sumerian cities at the same time.

Timeline

• c. 2600 BC: Main period of the royal tombs begins; Puabi buried around this time or somewhat later.
• c. 2600-2450 BC: Royal burials with attendants, including PG 789, PG 800 and PG 1237.
• 1922: British Museum and Penn Museum expedition under Leonard Woolley begins work at Ur.
• 1926: Systematic excavation of the cemetery starts.
• 1927-1928: The richest royal tombs, including Puabi’s, are uncovered.
• 1930: Agatha Christie meets Max Mallowan at Ur; they marry in September.
• 1934: Woolley publishes Ur Excavations, Volume II: The Royal Cemetery.
• 2011: CT studies showing that attendants were killed by blows are published.

Why it matters

The Royal Cemetery of Ur gave the modern world its first vivid picture of Sumerian kingship: dazzling craftsmanship, trade routes stretching to Afghanistan and the Indus, and rulers powerful enough to take dozens of people with them into death. Its treasures remain centrepieces of museums in Baghdad, London and Philadelphia, and the site is part of the long story of Ur that continued with the Ziggurat of Ur and the empire of Shulgi.