Treasures of Ur

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 230, 17 December 1927, Page 9

Treasures of Ur

CHALDEAN PRINCE’S GRAVE

Five Thousand Years Old

By Cable.—Press Association. — Copyright.

Received 10.30 a.m. LONDON, Friday. MANY gold relies are among discoveries made at Ur of the Chaldees, according to the report of a joint expedition from the British Museum and the Pennsylvania University.

A ROYAL prince’s grave, dating probably 3,500 8.C., contained a gold head-dress and a gold wig. Nearby were golden bowls, a lamp, beads, earrings, rings, silver daggers with gold hilts, gold-mounted spears, and many articles of silver and lapis lazuli. Other finds showed that women once wore their hair in a net woven of gold ribbons, from which hung beads of lapis cornelian, also huge ear pendants.

A later fashion decreed the weav ing of ribbons round the tresses, which were looped overhead. The earrings were quite small.—A. and N.Z.-Sun.

The British Museum and Pennsylvania University have been at work in Mesopotamia for some time. New excavations on the Temple of the Moon God, 140 miles south-east of Babylon, began at the end of 1924. The expedition in

three years has uncovered half of the walled enclosure of Tremenos, or Sacred Place of Ur, making: it possible to obtain a truthful picture of Ur when Ab-aham walked the brick-paved streets. Ur was an ancient city of Babylon, whose site was near the junction of the Shat-el-Hai with the Euphrates. Ur rose to importance in the earfifer period of Babylonian history. >

The researches of this expedition revealed for the first time the appearance of the city in Abraham’s time. The ruins show narrow streets filled with comfortable two-storeyed houses, resembling: the best houses in modern Bagdad. As it was the custom to bury the dead beneath the houses, many discoveries are reported of clay coffins in brick tombs, with food in various vessels. An unusual discovery was a long, narrow room in No. 7 of a quiet street, containing an altar and 30 bowls filled with the bones of children. It is believed to have been a shrine dedicated to a deity kindly to children, and to which relatives brought infants for burial. Numerous tablets giving lists of square-root numbers up to 60, also hymns and records of the earlv kings, have been unearthed.