The most lavish Mesopotamian tomb ever found | Hacker News Reader

The most lavish Mesopotamian tomb ever found

atlasobscura.com

89 pointsBrajeshwar55 comments

I think the ziggurat has been completely restored. The old pics from when it was first photographed have it look like a lumpy mess. I suspect that even the current bricks are new.

https://images.app.goo.gl/T3HxJqqHgMYzTca88

Yes, by order of Saddam Hussein

The part that bothers me most is that servants must have been killed in order to be buried with the queen.

Maybe useful as an incentive to not assassinate you?

I had to look this up, it’s called a retainer sacrifice. The act was apparently largely phased out by the time this queen lived, so it’s a bit curious they found this.

The idea behind it is the pharaohs were seen as deities, and as such needed their servants to come with them to the afterlife. The servants most likely were quite willing to do this due to that belief.

> pharaohs

There weren't any of these in Mesopotamia.

Fair point. It seems even when it comes to the ruling elite, there is some notion of afterlife that is at play.

"The most lavish Mesopotamian tomb ever found", and yet not a single picture or illustration of said tomb.

This disappoints me greatly. When I was 13 I wondered what did Tutankhamun's tomb looked like, and yet it took me over 20 years until I saw an actual illustration. Looks like reporting on ancient tombs hasn't gotten any better since.

In case anyone else wonders what the tomb looked like, I found this layout:

http://www.arth.upenn.edu/522/puabi/puabi.html

You got me to find pics of Tutankhamun's tomb and indeed I never saw much either

https://www.vintag.es/2015/11/the-discovery-of-tutankhamun-i...

some shots are surprising.. the mess, the simplicity yet the eternal feeling of it

> the mess

The mess is because it was raided in ancient times, then hastily cleaned up and re-sealed.

Maybe. Another theory is that Carter and Lord Carnarvon faked the ancient raid to work around an Egyptian law that assigned untouched grave finds entirely to the state, but previously raided tombs would be split with the finder.

In the end they didn’t get to ship that half of the treasure to British Museum and the NYC Met as they’d planned, as the newly independent Egypt asserted its rights more quickly than they’d expected.

Just like we saw recently with the Robert Capa article.. history is often fuzzy right :)

Incredible!

It might not be lavish in terms of architecture or decorations, but merely in terms of grave goods. Of course, a picture of the tomb itself would also make that clear.

It was found in the 1920 so there may not be any photos, or good ones of the original site.

Photography was well developed by 1920. I have a number of very good photos of family members from that period of time.

Photography was yes, of course, but it's use in archaeology was pretty basic, usually just recording artefacts. It was nothing like as advanced as crime scene photography, which was very well developed and regularised by that time. The context within which finds were discovered just wasn't as valued back then. All I'm saying is that the chances that such photos exist, while not zero, is fairly low.

> "The most lavish Mesopotamian tomb ever found", and yet not a single picture or illustration of said tomb.

That's because it's clickbait

I feel dumb for not realising Meereen in Game of Thrones was based on the Ziggurat of Ur.

The Tyrell Corporation building in Bladerunner too, I suppose.

> The Tyrell Corporation building in Bladerunner too, I suppose.

Thank you for pointing out the connection! What an excellent use of symbolism in a film rich with it. (And D'Oh. Why didn't I think of that?)

The Taj Mahal was also built for a woman.

And the gender parts of the article made me think of the Taj Mahal a lot: that one is rarely seen as a demonstration of any power held by that woman, it's seen as a demonstration of the power held by the man she left behind. Dead people don't commission lavish tombs. Widowers do (or perhaps widows, in a culture with women in power)

> Dead people don't commission lavish tombs.

The pyramids.

Commissioned long before death afaik, due to some cultural oddity that made leaders care a surprising amount about long term storage of personal remains.

Wealthy Romans also did this a lot; typically under the guise of building a _family_ mausoleum, and in no way centered around the builder, goodness no.

Actually, ‘mausoleum’ is an example in itself; the building that the word derives from was almost certainly built during the lifetime of the guy who was buried there.

The pyramids weren't commissioned by dead people.

Yes, that was the point. It was a reply to parent’s claim that tombs are commissioned by the survivors, not the deceased.

Allow me to point out the Prince Albert Memorial.

The Hanging Gardens was as well, although we have much less of an idea what that looked like

At least we now have a better idea where. Not Babylon, as usually reported, but most likely Nineveh, now Mosul.

Nineveh had an elevated aqueduct long before Rome built theirs.

Also: the Neo-Assyrians were notably unpleasant people, even by standards of the day.

The picture of the Great Ziggurat of Ur is pleasing.

It is not surprising. Women use to be heads of clans even before the "modern civilisations". There are lots of indicators of this in Asia and America(mostly in South America).

I really hate to be the person to raise this controversial opinion, which will probably annoy most readers (and moderators alike)...

But this article really feels like its trying to squeeze feminist women empowering blood from stones. And I really don't necessarily see it. Here's some examples of the language used in the article that I find particularly misleading or unnecessarily loaded.

---

"British archeologist Leonard Woolley uncovered the most lavish Mesopotamian tomb ever discovered. ...But the resplendent grave goods are not the only reason the discovery rocked the world in the early 20th century: this tomb belonged to a woman."

Is it particularly noteworthy or impressive that an ancient tomb belonged to a woman? Is it out of the realm of possibility that this isn't just the only tomb they've found that wasn't robbed in antiquity?

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"Though no contemporary documents mention Pu-abi, scholars believe she may have ruled in her own right since her seal mentions no husband."

That's quite the logical leap

---

"There were very large workshops where women were engaged in the production of woolen objects. And within that group, there were actually women who were managers."

It would be nice to find more supporting citations of these kinds of statements, but this will be a problem explained later on

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"But if I hadn’t studied Ur’s ancient women, I would have thought that the entire country was ruled by men and that all of the things that occurred in civilization, the beginning of civilization, was about what men did. And now I know that’s just one part of how civilizations develop"

The author's own statements don't demonstrate a neutral point of view on this subject

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"Archeologist and textile expert Rita Wright, professor emerita of anthropology at New York University, is the first to ever study Pu-abi’s garments based on the only surviving image of her. Her findings have just been published in the new book Art/ifacts and ArtWorks in the Ancient World. Atlas Obscura spoke to Wright about the role of women in ancient Ur, what we know of Queen Pu-abi’s life, and why textiles are so often overlooked in archeology."

This person is basically a gender studies professor specializing in ancient Mesopotamian textiles based off of her previous publications. And she is literally the only person to have written any papers or books about this particular niche that I could find on researchgate. I am not an anthropologist or archeologist, but I cast heavy doubts about articles and publications like these where you essentially have one singular subject matter expert focused on a thin niche that more or less only they know about casting wide generalizations about their field of study.

I don't see how she's casting "wide generalizations". She's simply pointing out that this kind of status for women in Ur was a new discovery; it was in no way foreseeable from previous sources about Ur. And I don't know why you're calling her a "gender studies" professor; Textiles were not trivial "women's work", especially not back then; they involved serious developments in technology. This scholar has done what seems to be interesting and novel work about the iconography of this queen's attire, which lets us draw new inferences about how textiles in Ur worked.

I never claimed that textiles were trivial women's work. I call her a gender studies professor because most of the published work on her bio page are in reference to gender relations. https://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/departments/anthropolog...

In my opinion, there's a particular bias here that is mostly based off of inferences. The wording of the article attempts to showcase a perspective that I feel should be met with some skepticism.

I imagine it would be hard to study gender-specific crafts in the ancient world without also touching on gender relations. Why is it that so many people seem to think "crafts" are irrelevant or unworthy of academic study? Are we still that bound to silly notions about what should carry 'prestige'? This isn't even about gender since there are male-associated crafts too.

> Why is it that so many people seem to think "crafts" are irrelevant or unworthy of academic study? Are we still that bound to silly notions about what should carry 'prestige'?

Are you mulling about some general state of affairs, or are you making a targeted inference about me? I don't understand. I never claimed that textiles or crafts were irrelevant or unworthy of academic study.

That came a bit out of the blue in the article as well.

On one hand it makes sense of that activities that were not written about and did not leave much artefacts behind (say, like textile and cooking) are less known that things (like warfare) about which epics were written and that left a lot of traces as weapons, skeletons, etc. On the other hand, we do actually know a thing or two about textile making in antiquity (see here for example, with loads of references: https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-t... ).

It is not absurd to assume that historians (with their own perspective and interests) were not necessarily that interested in what they could see as trivialities such as cooking and textile production, because of their frame of reference.

But asserting that we know nothing about “women’s works” because of sexism is quite the leap.

Textile craft even does make its way into epics and cultural imagery, at least in the Homeric tradition Penelope's weaving as a significant plot point in the Odyssey.

You can add Arachne to this list.

Yeah, there's a whole bunch of examples. The fates, too.

Ah, yes!

> A metaphor for the lifespan of an individual, as generated by Clotho, measured out by Lachesis and terminated by Atropos.

Given the role of textiles in the industrial and also information revolution (Jacquard looms used the first punch cards and helped inspire Babbage’s Difference Engine), I think any historian would take it very seriously.

Also, as my sibling comment points out, weaving even made its way into the myths.

Jacquard came up on the post a few days ago about gender stratified words as a highly female-known one.

I think it’s the professor who cheapens her own work by seemingly counting the ways to work gender politics into everything.

Textiles, Ur, and the social structure of ancient societies are legitimate and informative fields of study. It deserves an even-handed treatment.

What if the author had an obsession with, say, democracy, or the colour red; and looked high and low for evidence of it in the world of textiles in ancient Ur. It would detract from her main work.

Half of the population is a different sex. It seems like understanding gender might be somewhat important in studying ancient societies.

…which is why I said she should be studying the social structure, not finding ways to bring as many points of gender politics into every facet.

It reads like medieval Christian literature, where every last thing is meant to portray the glory of god in some obscure way.

She does study social structure. That's what being an anthropologist means. Have you read anything Wright's written? I couldn't find anything recent that could remotely be described as "finding ways to bring in as many points of gender politics". The books she edited in the 90s about studying gender in archaeology focus on the subject out of necessity.

If all you're going on is TFA, you might have missed the context that it's a pop history interview by a writer at Atlas Obscura who focuses on historical women. It's not the entirety of Wright's area of study.

What really bothers me more about this type of article than the ideological slant is the hyperbolic nature of the claims that end up decontextualizing them. People in the 1920s would not have been 'rocked' at all to discover the existence of an ancient Mesopotamian queen. They were raised on stories of Semiramis and the Queen of Sheba - in fact, I'd bet quite a bit more of the 1920s population knew who these two people were than the 2020s population, since education and even pop culture then was much more informed by classical literature.

Telling the story like this totally transforms the context in a way that makes it just wrong, to make it more impressive to the modern reader. This is really common nowadays in news articles, too.

I agree, but its all about showing women doing stuff no matter how trivial

> no matter how trivial

Is "Ruler of Ur" trivial?

Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. They're tedious and repetitive. They also usually turn nasty. They're also against the site guidelines:

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

Note this one also:

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We spent so much time studying Mesopotamia in elementary school... but essentially NEVER heard of it after that.

So strange.

It did come up in the news when Saddam Hussein was deposed and then lots of people were raiding museums and ancient dig sites for artifacts to sell on the black market.

Otherwise, it really depends on if you read anything about history, language, writing, etc.

The most lavish Mesopotamian tomb ever found was probably most likely belonged to a man and got found by a grave digger. Tutankhamun's tomb was entact because people had forgotten about him shortly after his reign.

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