The excavations at the Royal Cemetery at Ur were concentrated on the most elite burials. During his five years at the Royal Cemetery, Woolley excavated some 2,000 burials, including 16 royal tombs and 137 "private tombs" of the wealthier residents of the Sumerian city. The people buried at the Royal Cemetery were members of the elite classes, who held ritual or managerial roles in the temples or palaces at Ur.
Early Dynastic funerals depicted in drawings and sculpture often include musicians playing lyres or harps, instruments that were found in several of the royal tombs. Some of these lyres held inlays of feasting scenes. One of the bodies buried in the Great Death Pit near Queen Puabi was draped over a lyre like this one, the bones of her hands placed where what would have been the strings. Music seems to have been extremely important to Early Dynastic Mesopotamia: many of the graves in the Royal Cemetery contained musical instruments, and quite possibly the musicians that played them.
Scholars believe the panels on the bull-headed lyre represent an underworld banquet. The panels on the front of the lyre represent a scorpion man and a gazelle serving drinks; an ass playing a bull lyre; a bear possibly dancing; a fox or jackal carrying a sistrum and drum; a dog carrying a table of butchered meat; a lion with a vase and pouring vessel; and a man wearing a belt handling a pair of human-headed bulls.
Figure Caption: “Bull-headed Lyre†(Head Height: 35.6 cm; Plaque Height: 33 cm) from the Woolley-coined “King’s Grave†royal tomb of Private Grave (PG) 789, constructed with gold, silver, lapis lazuli, shell, bitumen and wood, ca 2550 BCE at Ur. The lyre’s panel depicts a hero grasping animals and animals acting like humansâ€"serving at a banquet and playing music typically associated with banquets. The bottom panel shows a scorpion-man and a gazelle with human features. The scorpion-man is a creature associated with the mountains of sunrise and sunset, distant lands of wild animals and demons, a place passed by the dead on their way to the Netherworld.
Sources
Cheng, Jack 2009 A review of Early Dynastic III music: man’s animal call. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 68(3):163-178.
Pollock, Susan. 2007. The Royal Cemetery of Ur: Ritual, Tradition, and the Creation of Subjects. pp 89-110 In Representations of Political Power: Case Histories from Times of Change and Dissolving Order in the Ancient Near East, Marlies Heinz and Marian H. Feldman, editors. Eisenbrauns: Winona Lake, Indiana.
Rawcliffe, C., et al. 2005 Laser Engraving Gulf Pearl Shellâ€"Aiding the Reconstruction of the Lyre of Ur. Lacona VI. Unpublished paper given at the Lacona VI meetings in Vienna, Austria, September 21-25, 2005. Free download
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