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Comment by probably_wrong | Hacker News Reader

"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

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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!

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

That's because it's clickbait

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.

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