THE FINDS AT UR

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 77, Issue 154, 2 July 1934, Page 10

THE FINDS AT UR

, WORK OF TWELVE YEARS A TREASURE TROVE We have now finished the last season’s work which the joint expedition of the British Museum and the museum of the University of Pennsylvania will, as such, undertake on the site of Ur, and it is satisfactory to record its complete success, writes C. Leonard Wooi'ey in The 'limes. As the main work went on and the great pit which was to lay bare the cemetery of the Jemdet Nasr age grew more formidably deep, it was impossible not to wonder sometimes whether one’s calculations might not have been mistaken and all this labour and expense undertaken in vain; at a depth uf 50ft. there was no more evidence than there had been on the surface of any underlying burials. Then w’ithin a few inches of the level we had marked in anticipation as that of Jemdet Nasr there came to light the big bowls inverted in the soil which 'witnessed to the graves below. la the space of a few days everything was changed and instead of shifting barren earth as fast as the basket-men could be persuaded to x-linib the Jong flight of stairs leading ito wagon-head we wore working with knives and brushes and the pit’s bottom was thick with vessels of alabaster and gypsum, limestone, and [diorite, grouped round the crumpled rednains of skeletons whose attitude, with the thigh-bones brought, up at right angles to the spine and the knees tightly bent, is peculiar to that Jamdct Nasr period which it was our chief purpose to investigate. Wealth Of Stone It is extraordinary in this stonelvss river valley, digging down through earth in which not so much us a pebble ran be found, to come suddenly on such a wealth of stone. In the latter part of the period, represented bv the higher graves (for these lay one below .•mother, forming a stratum nearly 10ft. thick), stone practically ousted the native clay as the material from which vessels should be made. All the stone was inported, some from Northern Arosopotamia, some from the Persian Gulf, far to the south. It, was a luxury which had. become a commonplace. A single grave produced 33 vases Though this was exceptional and though many of the graves had been anciently plundered and retained but a fraction of their original ’contents, yet in one day wc noted and collected a hundred stone vases, any one of which would have seemed a rarity but a. short time ago. The materials are foreign, but the vases arc of local manufacture and so tend to conform to a limited range of types dictated by fashion or utility. Certain shapes arc appropriated to certain kinds of stone and are definitely intended to bring out the quality of the materials in some gypsum or ahba.ster vessels where the flat rim is trimmed to an almost paperlike thinness or where working in hard diorite the craftsman has produced a clean, strong outline whith reminds one of (‘lassical Greece. Sometimes he is frankly vulgar, as in the case of twin vases on a four-legged stand, carved from one piece of alabaster. Sometimes he is fanciful, as when to a five-wicked lamp whose form is taken from the tridaenus shell (the real shell was so used) he adds a bat’s head, so that, seen from below, the shell becomes a realistic bat in flight. Sometimes he is imitative, as when he makes a diorite (tumbler whose base is pinched to a square as though it had been leather rather than stone; and the more vouventional ornament comes in with a limestone cup decorated with figures of oxen and oars of barley carved on it in relief, the direct precursor of some of the finest examples of Sumerian sculpture. Little-Known Period. Altogether, from 200 graves recorded in our shaft, we recovered 770 stone vessels. With them were a number of copper vases and bowls and. on the necks and at the waists of the Bodies, innumerable beads of lapis lazuli am.l cornelian, crystal, shell, marble, and chalcedony, and one of gold, beads for the most part finely cut and polished and showing the same high quality of vraftsmanshij) as do the vessels. In the lower graves, belonging to the earlier part of the. period, stone was rarer and pottery vessels correspondingly abundant. Some of these were painted red and burnished to a beautifully lustrous surface; some, fired in a “sruotherkilu.’' were grey or black in colour and of shapes copied from stone originals. A few were of tho typically Jemdet Nasr ware decorated with painted geometrical designs in three or four colours; that the latter were not more common may be due to the fact that they started as a luxury ware which in poorer centres continued long in fashion but in the wealthy city of Ur was soon supplanted by stone. What rue have excavated is but a part, and perhaps not the richest part, of a cemetery whose extent we have no means of guessing. But it has given us a wonderful collection of objects fine in themselves and most precious for the reconstruction of a little-known period. When the graves appeared the hulk of the workmen were drafted off to other sites so that- the recording of the tombs might keep pace with the digging. Our second objective for the season was the tracing of the limits of the Sacred Area as it existed in the time of the Third Dynasty or Ur and down to the twentieth centurv 80. The, wall of Ur-Engur (2300 8.C.) was found and followed up and gave us an entirely unexpected line, reducing the Temenos to an area much smaller than it possessed in the days of Nobuchad-•H-zzar. the only period about which we had hitherto been certain. Meanwhile the remainder of the men ; -Icared the interior of some Persian •ami Neo-Babylonian houses whose outI lines had been traced in a former seai 'ion. We have thus forked out in do- : tail a largo section of the resideutal [quarter of Ur as it was in this late period, and have secured the, complete ground-plan ■ of one large and import- , ant house curiously like the largest priI vate house excavated at Babylon. From I this house came a number of NeoBabylonian school tablets and what I may be an “omen” text. A small ihopse close by yielded a collection of Persian letters and a unique little do]l »r amulet in polychrome glass. Our season’s work has touched on ■verv period, from the Persian of the fifth century B.C. back to Jemdet Nasr nd the beginning of the fourth millendum. It is a not unfitting conclusion twelve rears of research.