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Photo Pages: Ur of the Chaldees - Ancient Village or Settlement in Iraq
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Submitted by AlexHunger on Saturday, 27 February 2010 Page Views: 5501
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 Site Name: Ur of the Chaldees Alternative Name: Ur
Country: Iraq Type: Ancient Village or Settlement
Nearest Town: Nasiriyah Nearest Village: Tell el-Mukayyar
Latitude: 30.962500N Longitude: 46.103000E
Condition:| 5 | Perfect | | 4 | Almost Perfect | | 3 | Reasonable but with some damage | | 2 | Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site | | 1 | Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks | | 0 | No data. | | -1 | Completely destroyed |
no data
Ambience:| 5 | Superb | | 4 | Good | | 3 | Ordinary | | 2 | Not Good | | 1 | Awful | | 0 | No data. |
no data
Access:| 5 | Can be driven to, probably with disabled access | | 4 | Short walk on a footpath | | 3 | Requiring a bit more of a walk | | 2 | A long walk | | 1 | In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find | | 0 | No data. |
no data
Accuracy:| 5 | co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates | | 4 | co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map | | 3 | co-ordinates scaled from a bad map | | 2 | co-ordinates of the nearest village | | 1 | co-ordinates of the nearest town | | 0 | no data |
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External Links:          Ur of the Chaldees submitted by h_fenton
Ancient Settlement in Iraq.Remains of early Sumerian city and royal cemetery. The mud brick Great Ziggurat, dating to the Middle Bronze Age (2100 BC), is the most notable structure on the site. It was rebuilt in the 600's BC, and a partial reconstruction was performed in the 1980's.
A modern airbase was built near the site in the 1970's by President Saddam Hussein. The airbase was heavily damaged in the 1991 Gulf War and the Great Ziggurat was also damaged by bullet holes. During the 2nd Gulf War, Ur was surrounded by a perimeter that also included the airbase, which was completely reconstructed by US and other collation forces. In May 2009, the entire ancient site, was turned back over to the Iraqi government. Very limited public tourism at Ur has started in 2010 Iraqi.
Note: "This site will become perhaps more important than Giza." Unearthing the splendour of Ur in Iraq
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 Ur of the Chaldees submitted by DrewParsons
Site in Iraq: The Ram in a Thicket now at the British Museum and photographed there in September 2008. One of the absolute delights of Iraq's ancient treasures.
 Ur of the Chaldees submitted by DrewParsons
Site in Iraq: The Standard of Ur now at the British Museum where I photographed it in September 2008. I visited Ur in October 1963 - not much to see at that time and as Iraq was then under Martial Law we had some trouble travelling around.
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At Ur, ritual deaths messier than thought (Score: 1)
by bat400 on Wednesday, 09 December 2009
(User Info | Send a Message) | Submitted by coldrum ---
A new examination of skulls from the royal cemetery at Ur, discovered in Iraq almost a century ago, appears to support a more grisly interpretation than before of human sacrifices associated with elite burials in ancient Mesopotamia, archaeologists say.
Palace attendants, as part of royal mortuary ritual, were not dosed with poison to meet a rather serene death. Instead, a sharp instrument, a pike perhaps, was driven into their heads.
Archaeologists at the University of Pennsylvania reached that conclusion after conducting the first CT scans of two skulls from the 4,500-year-old cemetery. The cemetery, with 16 tombs grand in construction and rich in gold and jewels, was discovered in the 1920s. A sensation in 20th-century archaeology, it revealed the splendor at the height of the Mesopotamian civilization.
The recovery of about 2,000 burials attested to the practice of human sacrifice on a large scale. At or even before the demise of a king or queen, members of the court — handmaidens, warriors and others — were put to death. Their bodies were usually arranged neatly, the women in elaborate headdress, the warriors with weapons at their side.
A new exhibition of Ur artifacts opened Sunday at Penn's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Researchers took CT scans of skull bones and applied forensic skills to arrive at the probable cause of death.
Source: This link. | [ Reply to This ]
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Re: At Ur, ritual deaths messier than thought (Score: 1)
by coldrum on Monday, 04 January 2010
(User Info | Send a Message) | From Ur's Royal Tombs
C. Leonard Woolley's first excavations at Ur, in southern Iraq, coincided with Howard Carter's 1922 discovery, in Egypt, of King Tutankhamen's tomb. This grand-scale archaeology captured the popular imagination: Its practitioners were hailed as heroes, their theories were trumpeted in the mass media, and their finds influenced fashion.
[ur] Penn Museum
The British-born Woolley's expedition involved 12 seasons of digging with hundreds of workers, until the Depression closed the funding tap in 1934. Its focus was the Royal Cemetery, whose tombs were filled with exquisitely crafted artifacts from Mesopotamia's Early Dynastic period, about 4,500 years ago. The venture would inspire Agatha Christie's 1936 mystery "Murder in Mesopotamia," in which expedition members, thinly disguised, pop up as characters.
Six years earlier, Christie had married Woolley's field assistant, M.E.L. Mallowan, who said of his boss: "Woolley's observations missed nothing, and his imagination grasped everything." The comment is highlighted in a new long-term exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, "Iraq's Ancient Past: Rediscovering Ur's Royal Cemetery." But it has assumed an ironic cast. While Woolley was careful and conscientious, the show says, he was not quite the paragon Mallowan describes, and many of his conclusions were wrong.
"He told good stories," says Richard L. Zettler, the exhibition's co-curator and associate curator-in-charge of the museum's Near East section. "And when he made stories up, he stuck with them. And that occasionally blinded him to evidence that could be contradictory."
"Iraq's Ancient Past" celebrates the return of the Ur artifacts to the Penn Museum after a national tour. But it also aims to place these mostly familiar works—the massive lyre with its gold and lapis lazuli-bearded bull's head, the "Ram Caught in the Thicket" statuette, the astonishing beaded jewelry and gold headdress of Queen Puabi—in an updated archaeological context.
'Iraq's Ancient Past'
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
"What we attempted to show is that these . . . are not just dusty artifacts sitting in a curio-cabinet museum," Mr. Zettler says. "These are artifacts that still have plenty to say to us. If we pose the right questions, we have the right methodologies, the right technologies, we can make these objects speak again."
Crammed into a single large gallery, the Penn Museum show—filled with delicate cylinder seals and alabaster pots, and glittering strings of gold, carnelian and lapis lazuli beads—is at once frustratingly old-fashioned and deliberately retro in its design. Musical selections from the expedition's record collection play in the background. The texts are well-written but long and somewhat dense. They are supplemented by archival and contemporary images of the site and computer terminals displaying the exhibition's Web site and other Web resources and offering visitors a chance to "live blog" about the show.
The exhibition's most startling contention is that the attendants buried in the so-called Great Death Pit and other royal tombs did not voluntarily imbibe poison to join their sovereign in the underworld, as Woolley had hypothesized. Recent CT scans of two skulls, belonging to a gold-helmeted soldier and a female attendant, indicate that the cause of death was blunt-force trauma and the murder instrument was likely a pick, Mr. Zettler says.
Not addressed in the show is whether such practices were kept secret, who the murderers were, and how so many—there were 74 skeletons in the Great Death Pit—could have been lured to their deaths. "They may have drugged them all, and then killed them," says Mr. Zettler. "It's a puzzle."
The suicide theory was not Woolley's only misstep. Ever the romantic, he suggested that Queen Puabi chose the location of her tom
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Re: Iraqi archaeologists find ancient Sumerian settlement (Score: 1)
by coldrum on Wednesday, 13 January 2010
(User Info | Send a Message) | Iraqi archaeologists said on Friday they have discovered a 2,000-year-old Sumerian settlement in southern Iraq, yielding a bounty of historical artefacts.
The site, in the southern province of Dhi Qar, is in the desert near ancient Ur, the biblical birthplace of Abraham.
"There are walls and cornerstones carrying Sumerian writings, dating back to the era of the third Sumerian dynasty," said Abdul Amir al-Hamdani, head of the provincial government's archaeology department.
Hamdani said the artefacts, which included sickles and knives, largely dated back to around 2000 BC, during the rule of King Amarsin, the third king of the third Sumerian dynasty.
He said the site "changes our perceptions about the Sumerian settlements, because they used to be near water or rivers, and this one is located in the desert."
The newly discovered site lies around 80 kilometres (50 miles) southeast of Nasiriyah, the capital of Dhi Qar, and is close to the ancient city of Ur.
Ur of the Chaldees was one of the great urban centres of the Sumerian civilisation of southern Iraq, and remained an important city until its conquest by Alexander the Great three centuries before Christ.
http://www.france24.com/en/20100108-iraqi-archaeologists-find-ancient-sumerian-settlement | [ Reply to This ]
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Unearthing the splendour of Ur in Iraq (Score: 1)
by bat400 on Saturday, 27 February 2010
(User Info | Send a Message) | Submitted by coldrum ---
The buried antiquities of Ur could one day outshine those of ancient Egypt, archaeologists at a large-scale excavation in Iraq believe. With the country ravaged by war and strife since the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, Baghdad's struggling government has had greater priorities than funding large-scale digs at Ur - the birth place of Abraham and one of the cradles of civilisation - where only small teams have been working since 2005.
"When the (large-scale) excavations restart, tons of antiquities will see the light of day, filling entire museum wings," enthused Dhaif Moussin, who is in charge of protecting a site that has been prone to looting.
"This site will become perhaps more important than Giza," he added.
That may not be just an idle boast.
In the early 1900s a British archaeologist, Charles Leonard Woolley, made some stunning finds when he unearthed 16 tombs of Ur's elite. Inside he found some of the greatest treasures of antiquity, including a golden dagger encrusted with lapis lazuli, an intricately carved golden statue of a ram caught in a thicket, a lyre decorated with a bull's head and the gold headdress of a Sumerian queen.
Those treasures have been compared to the riches from the tomb of the Egyptian boy-king, Tutankhamun, but they excite archaeologists even more because the graves at Ur are more than 1,000 years older.
Archaeologically, the most astonishing find of Ur has been a remarkably well-preserved stepped platform, or ziggurat, which dates back to the third millennium BC, when it was part of a temple complex that served as the administrative centre of the Sumerian capital.
"Some archaeologists estimate it will take more than 30 years to dig out the entire city," said Moussin, surveying the site.
"It is certain that much more material remains to be discovered," said Steve Tinney, professor of Assyriology at the University of Pennsylvania which, together with the British Museum, sponsored Woolley's excavations between 1922 and 1934.
Ur is thought to have reached its apogee under King Ur-Nammu, an accomplished warrior and founder of Sumer's third dynasty, who is believed to have lived between 2112 and 2095 BC.
During his rule, the kingdom was governed by a real administration and code of laws. Sumerian script, called cuneiform, is the earliest known writing system in the world.
Tinney said he hoped for the discovery of texts that would shed light on the culture and polytheistic religion of the Sumerians. "We do not have literature on Ur-Nammu and his successors, the Sumerians or their rituals," said Tinney.
The site would be unequalled in the world if it proves to be the birthplace of Abraham, revered by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, said Moussin. Woolley wanted to prove that Abraham had lived in Ur, after discovering Abraham's name on a brick unearthed there.
"Much remains to be done, and an endeavour must be authorised together with the central government if Iraq wants to benefit from its enormous potential as a Mecca of tourism," said Anna Prouse, an Italian diplomat in charge of a regional rebuilding team in the Iraqi province of Dhi Qar.
For more, see telegraph.co.uk. | [ Reply to This ]
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