The Golden Splendor of the Royal Tombs of Ur ongoing at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The Golden Splendor of the Royal Tombs of Ur ongoing at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

The Penn Museum joined with the British Museum to support excavations at Tell al-Muqayyar (ancient Ur), directed by Sir Leonard Woolley, from 1922-1934.   The best known artifacts are from the Royal Cemetery of Ur, a burial ground with more than 2000 internments, including those of the kings and queens who ruled the city-state ca. 2500 BCE. They include the personal jewelry of Puabi, the queen, and the “ram-in-the thicket,” a statuette of a goat rampant in a tree. The “ram-in-the-thicket” is made of shell, lapis lazuli, gold, and copper and typifies early Mesopotamian composite art. Other objects on display include a gilded bull-headed lyre, the remains of a young attendant wearing a gold headdress and jewelry of gold, lapis lazuli, carnelian, and shell, and electrotype reproductions of a bull-headed harp ornament and soldier's helmet. Soldiers were among the human sacrifices found alongside their queen in the burial pit.


Image: Famous "ram in the thicket" sculpture recovered from the royal cemetery of Ur in modern day Iraq dated 2550-2450 BCE, photographed at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Penn Museum) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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