THE HERITAGE OF UR

Evening Star, Issue 21742, 9 June 1934, Page 20

THE HERITAGE OF UR

TREASURES BURIED IN A MARSH [H. N. Bkailsfokd, in the ‘ Observer.’] At school our teachers drilled into us the fact that the rediscovery of Ancient Greek culture at tho Renaissance was a formative event in the history of Western civilisation. When a later age looks back on our time it may rank tho work of our archaeologists as a comparable influence in shaping our view of life. Our horizon has been rolled back in time by several millenia. A now family tree hangs on our walls. We arc like an upstart generation that has suddenly gained a whole gallery of ancestral portraits.

It began to happen when Napoleon fought the Battle of the Pyramids, but it has come in a broad torrent of revelation during tho last thirty years, and, especially since the war, Cretans and Hittites and Mayas have come alive for us. Sir John Marshall and Dr Mackay have uncovered an Indian civilisation that was venerable a thousand years before tho Aryan invaders had crossed tho Himalayan snows. But of all the buried riches that now make our heritage, nothing has stirred our imagination quite so forcibly as Mr Woolley’s discoveries in Ur of the Chaldees. Thanks to his literary gift and the art with which he displayed his finds year by year at the British Museum, that derelict mound in its dreary desert has become for us a homely city, and we realise its life more intimately than we grasp anything in the story of our own island before the Romans came. His two vivid little books (‘ The Sumerians ’ and ‘ Ur of the Chaldees ’) have enabled the general reader to seize the significance of his work. There is now available the final and elaborate record of his excavations in that part of this rich site which yielded tho most valuable treasures —the royal cemetery. The two bulky volumes, one of text and the other of plates, are destined for scholars and university libraries, for the bulk of their contents consists of minutely accurate catalogues with details that describe every step in his bold and ingenious processes of digging and restoration. But they should appeal to many who are not specialists, for they are beautifully and lavishly illustrated in colours.

THE ENGRAVER’S ART. Here, superbly pictured, are those masterpieces of the goldsmith’s and engraver’s arts that had delighted us when we saw them in the museum—the graceful and lively ass that adorned the rein ring of Queen Shubad’s chariot, the golden helmet of Prince MesKalamdug that reproduced every lock of his hair, the harp on which the devoted musician played as he followed his dead aueen to the sky world, the exquisite inlays of comic animals, the over-elaborate headdress of the queen, the ram caught in the thicket, and the many drinking vessels of a sensitive shape We owe the preservation of these riches to a fortunate, if not very sanitary, habit of the people of Ur; they threw their rubbish over the city wall into the marsh that lay outside it. As the centuries went on the marsh was transformed into a high and extensive plateau. Into this deep mound one of the earlier royal families of the city, which throve some centuries before the House that ranks in the chronicles of Sumeria as the First Dynasty of Ur, took to sinking the roomy and elaborate shafts in which it housed its dead. These buried kings lay smothered in antiquity. Under them are strata that contain bricks and fragments from the primitive days of the city. Round them, yard over yard, is the accumulated dust that earlier generations had laboured to discard. Above them—for the mound still rose—are the graves of commoners belonging to the age of Sargon of Akkad, the Semitic conqueror, who stood out, even before these excavations, as an authentic historical figure who could be dated. A NAMELESS DYNASTY. As one learns from Mi- Woolley's account to visualise this inordinate mound of rubbish one realises dimly the antiquity of these treasures buried in the royal graves. They come from a nameless dynasty that was prehistoric even for the annalists of ancient Mesopotamia. Yet they were sung in debris which even a populous and busy city could have accumulated only in many centuries. Before these delicate things were chiselledi this kingdom had survived the Flood, and an age of pioneers had made all the primary inventions that together constitute civilisation—an ingenious syllabic script, the potter’s wheel, the loom, seafaring ships, wheeled vehicles, the true arch, and an exquisite craft of working in metal. This was already a ripe and venerable culture, perhaps, as artists think, a trifle decadent, a little past its fresh prime of invention. What are we to say, then, about the crude barbarism that Mr Woolley _ unearthed, mixed with all this delicate art?

We owe these beautiful harps to the still surviving practice of human sacrifice. These deep and spacious shafts were stages for a tragedy enacted with unflinching realism. The king was laid in a domed and vaulted chamber, with his treasures round him, his jewels, his weapons, his drinking cups, and a chequer-board with which lie might while away the of eternity. A little boat, modelled in silver, lay near him, in wnich, it may be, his soul would journey across the waters that encircle this earth to the home of his ancestors in some %ky-world. Around the House of the Dead lay stretched the remains of the servants, the guards, and the courtiers, anything from six to eighty persons, who were slaughtered with the beasts that drew his chariots, that they might accompany their master. A DEEP REPOSE.

Tho story,. as Mr Woolley tells it here, in detail, loses something of its horror. The skeletons seem to sit or lie in an attitude of repose. There is no mark of violence, and no sign of a struggle. Beside nearly every skull there is a cup. Perhaps they drank of some opiate, and lay in deep sleep when the earth was thrown upon them. Mr Woolley may he right when ho suggests that they died a voluntary death. If the later Sumerian view of the hereafter prevailed at this date, it was a gloomy underworld of shadows.. One asks (though Mr Woolley does not himself suggest it) whether possibly in Sumeria, as elsewhere in antiquity, kings went to a brighter sky-world, while commoners went below.