Where Did They Bury the Kings of the IIIrd Dynasty of Ur?

Abstract

This paper was first read, as the Bonham Carter Memorial Lecture, to the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, in London, in June 1981.Although the “Royal Cemetery” at Ur remains among the best-known archaeological discoveries ever made in Iraq, it still offers many complex and teasing problems of chronology and interpretation. These have to be resolved before the evidence it offers may confidently be used to illustrate particular aspects of Sumerian custom and society in the third millennium B.C. On present reckoning this concentration of hundreds of superimposed graves, cut into successive levels of rubbish, extended over at least 600 years from about 2650 to 2050 B.C. In Woolley's view it included two groups of “royal” burials. The earlier, of the archaeological period Early Dynastic III A, is the better known of the two, comprising sixteen shaft-graves or “death-pits”, with multiple burials. They were separated by an interval of between four and five centuries, and by numerous single private graves, from the rather less well-known building complex described by Woolley as the “Mausolea” of the Ur III kings (c. 2112–2004 B.C.). In 1977 I attempted to elucidate the status and social function of the people buried in the Early Dynastic “royal” graves, suggesting that it was too soon to assume that all the rulers of Sumerian city-states at this time had been buried in this particular way. Not only is it to be doubted whether the men (?) buried in the three tombs 1618, 1631 and 1648 were of the same high rank as those in the other thirteen “royal” tombs, but they may even have been of men, and more particularly of women, whose status and special privileges had more to do with the character of the cult of the city-god of Ur than with any secular authority such as kings and queens in the modern sense.