Royal Treasure

The land of Mesopotamia, located in what is now Iraq, has always been recognized for its great antiquity. Its most ancient region, known as Sumer, lay about 250 miles south of modern Baghdad, between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Here, nearly 5,000 years ago, the ancient Sumerians built the world's first cities, and with them laid the foundations of Western civilization. Long after the Sumerians faded, their important achievements in politics, literature, science, and the arts remained the core of all Near Eastern culture, hardly improved upon by the great kings of Babylon, Assyria, and Persia. This month the museum will host Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur, our first-ever special exhibition focusing on this fascinating region of the ancient Near East, organized by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. As an introduction to the Sumerians and their art, there is no better place to start.

Of all the cities of ancient Sumer, the most celebrated was Ur. Far from embryonic, Ur was a sprawling city of 200,000--nearly half the size of the city of Cleveland today--and a political and economic giant whose soaring temples and towers dominated the ancient landscape and were the inspiration for the legendary Tower of Babel. Ur was the ancestral home of the biblical patriarch Abraham, the sacred city of the great moon god Nanna, and the traditional site of the Garden of Eden. Its merchants and kings were savvy traders and assembled vast inventories of wealth by establishing the city as the hub of an international trade network that constituted the world's first global economy. Luxury and precious raw materials were their specialty.

The discovery in the 1920s and '30s of a group of royal tombs dating back to the city's earliest dynasties ranks among the greatest archaeological finds of all time, rivaled only by the nearly simultaneous discovery in 1923 of the tomb of the Egyptian king Tutankhamen. Among the tombs' contents was a rich and diverse collection of art objects made of gold, silver, ivory, precious stones, and exotic woods. The objects' unparalleled beauty and high quality rank them among the highest achievements of over 3,000 years of Mesopotamia art. Nothing like them had ever been found before, or since.

Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur brings together more than 150 of the most beautiful, important, and famous of the objects from Ur. Among these are elegantly fluted gold and silver vessels, delicate works of inlaid shell, a queen's regal headdress, jewelry made of semiprecious stones, and statues and other decorative elements incorporating every exotic and precious material from the then-known world. The landmark exhibition represents the first time that any of the objects have traveled as a group since their discovery almost 75 years ago.

Inevitably, these extraordinary objects would be compared with the contents of the tomb of Egypt's King Tutankhamen. Though the discovery at Ur lost out on widespread popularity, it was the clear winner in terms of quality. The objects' sleek, ultrarefined, and sometimes fantastic forms make the Egyptian boy-king's treasures look fussy and almost garish. Part Bugatti, part Fabergé, the objects from Ur must have been instant classics in their own day. The reference to the later masters is not misplaced: the first scholars to examine them were so struck by their high quality and beauty that they suggested the objects were not ancient at all, but perhaps works from the Italian Renaissance or 19th-century France. The errant supposition--made almost five millennia later—--offers further testimony to the timeless splendor of one of the world's first great cities.

Ken Bohac, Department of Egyptian and Near Eastern Art

In Pit X, one of the largest excavations, some 400 workmen removed 17,000 sq. ft. of earth to take the depth of the excavation to 50 ft.