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:
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1000
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T.C. Snowman lech.
Horse rider - Traces on back of a cloak. or shield decorat_d w. circles:
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TC. Statuette-Head. hands missing. Rough models. circular below waist Hollowed(Bell shaped.) Nebuchad temple. Outside NE side of Temenos:
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E
Beard_d man hold_g lamb to breast.
Broken below waist.
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-37-
Draped man
clasped Worshiper
Rt hang_g-bucket
Lt "
Rt extended
v
Suilla
{Holds club & bird initially indicated then crossed out]:
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-34-
Mould
Group-Walking forward
Twins-Feather crown
LiFal
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-36-
Monkey man
Flute monkey:
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v
Buff. su-illa
fem. mitre. forearms raised
to sh. head & trunk only.:
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v
Fr_t Su-illa
Fem. w coiled plaits.
H. raised towards chin:
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$25,000.00. The edition should be of not less than 2000 copies, to be sold at $15.00. The money recovered by slaes would be used for the production of the second volume, and that from the joint sales for the third, and so on.The sum of $25,000.00 would, it is hoped, in this way finance thepublication of all the archaeological volumes contemplated by the Expedition. The retail price of the books being frankly non-commercial, the initial fund would be gradually exhausted and in the end would rank as a loss. The advantage to archaeology would on the other hand be great and fully commensurate with such expenditure.A grant in aid of such publication made to either of the two Museums could be used by it for their joint purpose without putting any obligation on the other Museum.:
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& The silver bull head & the copper lion head & the little [drawing - scale ? - (artifact: semi-circular volume ?)] box with nice engraving & the sledge with small lions heads, and the donkey. We could [?]oss the the queen's crown on a reconstructed head against a belt of blue lapis with all the small gold animals, branches and pomegranates.This would disposed of the most difficult and precious objects. But Dr H consulted reserves his opinion, and I was told to think it over for the week. I think the groups are as good as possible in a bad case. I will only insist on drawing lots to avoid chosing and feeling sore. You may notice that the famous tomb groupprinciple has been abandoned at once by all as impossible for the main tombs.I was told that W. is leaving next week. He is actually in Bath. I will be glad to see him if he comes to London. But I will not write. I have enough trouble without looking for more.I will write soon. Yours sincerlyL. LegrainRemember me to friends around.:
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< OBJECTS SOLD TO THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUMTomb Group I (789-B)CBS 16983 Necklace of lapis and gold conoid beads. L. 67 cm.CBS 16984 Necklace of lapis ovoid and conoid beads. L. 52 cm.CBS 16985 Diadem of 2 strings of carnelian and lapis beads and 14 gold leaves. L. 38.5 cm.CBS 16986 34 pieces of gold ribbonCBS 16987 2 three-coil silver ringsTomb Group II (P.G. 1237)30-12-668 Silver pin with lapis head. L. 19.5 cm.30-12-669 Lunate gold earring. Diam. 7 cm.30-12-670 Lunate gold earring. Diam. 7 cm.30-12-671 Necklace of gold and lapis triangles. L. 22.5 cm.30-12-672 Necklace : 4-strand, of lapis ans gold conoid beads; each string about 52 cm. long30-12-673 String of small lapis, gold, and carnelian beads. L. 18 cm.30-12-674 String of small lapis, gold, and carnelian beads. L. 17 cm. >:
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< THACKERAY HOTEL GREAT RUSSEL STREET LONDON, W.C. 1> Sept 20 <192>8
Dear Miss Mc. Hugh. The division progresses nicely. Today we attached objects from the 6th campaign actually on exhibition: our share are two head dresses of ladies of the ha[?]em[?] among the jewels of the queen. The seal of queen Shubad goes to the Br. Mu. and we have the seal of king sagpadda and the biggest gold and lapis beads. We have the gold diadem made of [drawing -scale ?- (shape of diamond with pattern and two irregular lines linked to both ends)] and many lovely necklaces. We obtain the diadem of all small gold animals and pomegranates but loose the electrum donkey. We keep the gold adze [drawing - scale ?- (adze handle)] and loose the [drawing - scale ?- lines ?] gold lances. All together we are rather well off. I had to cancel passage on 29th.Yours trulyL.L.:
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< WESTERN UNION Received at 3038 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, Penn.3 POL 6HM NEW YORK NY 824A OCT 10 1928J MCHUGH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM ALL RIGHT BACK THURSDAY MANY THANKS LEGRAIN 843 A >:
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<BRITISH MUSEUM>March 12th, 1936Dear Dr Legrain,Sir Leonard Woolley is busy with his final preparations for going away, and asks me to write to you.He left your volume (Ur Exc. iii) on Archaic Seal-impressions for me to put through the Press. You should by now have received a first page proof of the whole of the volume and pulls of the half tone and line plates 1-58. I hope that you will still have this material by you when this letter arrives, as without it my query may be troublesome to reply to.I have checked on the printed pages all the numbers of catalogue entries in the \"Analysis of Decorative Motives\" a and b. Some of these I found were incorrect, and where I was certain what change to make , have done so. I have not always been able to insert a no. in place of one which was wrong , but at least I have selected the wrong one. And I now hope that my changes are satisfactory. I seemed to:
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<BRITISH MUSUEM LONDON, W.C.I>April 16th 1937Dear Dr. Legrain,Many thanks for your letter of April 6th enclosed with the copy of the catalogue of Ur Excavations Vol IV showing your allocation numbers. I am glad to hear that the catalogue [?cards?] and photos of seals reached you [?safely?]. When Sir Leonard Wolley gets home - which [?] will not be till July - I will show him what you say about the photo of Baghdad museum terracottas:
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<L. LEGRAINUR EXPEDITIONIRAQ>Jan. 18th 1926Dear Miss McHugh, Thanks for your long letter so full of details. Time is passing terribly quick here. Scarcely time to shave and wash for dinner. Work after dinner most of the time up to midnight. As you will see in Woolley's report the dig is quite good and gives us many valuable objects after the wild hunt for Dungi's palace on the South end of the temple area, and finding just a cemetery on the top of presargonic ground, we have moved nearer to the old ziggurat. This time we have uncovered the shrine or house of Ningal the wife of moon god. It is a most complete temple with enclosure, gates, court, altars, shrine room, base of statue, steps leading to it, pedestals of many - gone - statues and stelae. No end of statues, stelae, vases, dishes in stone, alabaster, clay, and a lot of tablets which make my despair. I have just time enough to brush, stick together catalogue, inspect and pack away on a ledge, till the final packing in March. Many a day I could not leave my office to run:
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<POSTAL TELEGRAPH - COMMERCIAL CABLES>QUEBEC QUE SEPT 24/27 MCHUGH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM PHILADELPHIA PA
BACK MONDAY MORNING SO GLAD
LEGRAIN.:
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<Thackeray Hotel>April 30th 1926Dear Miss Mc Hugh,Your long letter has just arrived, full of news. Thank you. I am afraid I shall not be in time for the opening of the new wing about the middle of May.I have spent a week in London and saw all the officials at the British Museum. Wolley has not yet arrived. Sir Frederic K. was very gracious. He expects W. at the beginning of May. While waisting I will go North and visit friends at Hull.I had a conference with Gadd and Smith about publications. We agreed about six \"recommandations and wrote them down. 1°) There is enough material for one volume including all the building inscriptions (historical) . 2°) It should be a joint publication of Smith, Gadd and myself. 3°) Transliteration, translation and minimum notes should accompany the cuneiform text. 4°) a photograph of the [? most ?] important pieces should be added. 5°) the form of paper recommanded should be the cuneiform Texts of the British museum (for size). 6°) Printing should:
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<Thackeray Hotel>Sept. 18. 28 Dear Miss Mc Hugh,As you see I am on the job and not an easy job. I am so glad that I stuck to my guns and would have no further delays.Scarcely arrived I saw Smith and Dr Hall and Gadd, finally Sir Fred. K. Smith suggested that I go slowly over the business and start with the last year collection. He had already made some arrangement and we devided some minor objects. I proposed at once as a principle of division that we make two equal groups of a certain amount of objects and then call one group : [? 1 ?], the second group. 2. The numbers are inscribed on a slip of paper and mixed in a hat and we draw. Both parties are[on the left side of the letter] I dined at Smith's Monday evening . Weather fair and warm. Left the car at Boulogne and miss it, and many other persons and things.:
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<Thackeray Hotel>Sept. 21. 28Dear Miss Mc Hugh,Work is progressing slowly but well. We divided more gold spears and beads and necklaces. The gold saw falls to our share. I accepted two beautiful vases one of blue lapis, the second of green alabaster against one of black obsidian which Smith wanted badly. I will not insist on detail just now. I want to fix some general points1°) Smith and Gadd are strongly of the opinion that the division must take place every year. Too much trouble with delay and pi[?]ing up. Only W. and accidentally the Director could insist on such an idea, because they have not:
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<Thackeray Hotel>Sept. 28.28Dear Miss Mc HughI received your telegram. Thank you. I am sailing on the \" Paris, from Havre Oct 3rdAll the division is over and I said good bye to all the authorities at the Br Mus. Sir Fr. Kennyon was especially graceful, and I am under the impression that we are all satisfied.- They insist to know when you want the collection sent over.- Sir Fr. K. wonder electrotypes cannot be made as well in U.S.A. as in London.:
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<Thackeray Hotel>Thursday Sept. 27. 28Dear Miss Mc HughThe big division is over. Thank God! Our share of the spoils consists of:- The gold bull's head with lapis horns and beard- The ingraved plaque with musician and dancing animals- The queen's head dress as reconstru[?] by Wolley and wife. (Published in Illust [?] Lond N.)- The Bull silver head- The Lion silver head- The semi circular box silver with lion on ram inlaid on lapis- The ostruch gold egg- The fluted gold tumbler [drawing- scale ?- (artifact: fluted tumbler)]- The fluted oval cup gold [drawing - scale ? - (artifact: oval cup)]- The plain gold oval cup [drawing - scale ? - (artifact: oval cup)]NB - All the gold daggers go to Baghdad. London keeps the copper dagger with gold and (reconstructed) silver handle. We have our share of gold spears lances, jewels etc.:
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<The University Museum University of PennsylvaniaPhiladelphiaApril 3, 1936Dear Dr. Legrain:-I should like to report to you that yesterday we shipped to the Department of Classics, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, the boxes containing the squeezes of the Hittite inscriptions which where collected by B.B. Charles in connection with the Cornell Expedition to Asia Minor. This return was made after correspondence with Cornell University which expressed its eagerness to preserve these squeezes with their other collections from the Expedition. Very truly yours, >Jane M.M Hugh<Secretary.Dr. Leon Legrain, Curator, Babylonian Section.>:
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<THE UNIVERSITY MUSEUMUNIVERSITY of PENNSYLVANIAPHILADELPHIA >June 16, 1933Dr. L. Legrain, Curator,Babylonian Section,University Museum.Dear Dr. Legrain:At a stated meeting of Board of Managers of the University Museum, held on March 17, 1933, the Director was authorized to sell the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, two groups of jewelry from the Royal Tombs at Ur.The objects selected and purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art are covered on attached list which I am sending you for records.Very truly yours,Jane M. McHugh [handwritten]Secretary.:
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'''ACCOUNTS FOR NOVEMBER 1923.'''A. Travelling Accounts. S s d3 Foremen, from Jerablus to Ur 50. 17. 11B. Wages.Workmen on dig, Nov. 10 Rs/1052. 13Nov. 17 1244. 1Nov. 24 1167. 1Dec. 1 1278. 10______4742. 9 = 316 3 5Foremen 19 0 0Local Agent 6 0 0Chauffeur 9 13 4Hamoudi, retaining fee during summer 20 0 0Guards, Oct. 13 to Nov. 30 Rs/982.0sergeant, back wage 240.0travelling allowance 85.0_____1307.0 " 87 2 8_____C. Preliminary purchases.Motor car and spares Rs/430.11 = 28 4 3British Petroleum Co., lamps, 9 13 10Oxford Press, overprints of report, 5 11 0D. Excavation expenses. Trip to Sheikh Munshid, Rs/600.0 = 40 0 0Water contract for the month, Rs/430.0 = 28 13 4Local purchases Re/243.5 = 16 7 1Posts & telegrams Rs/35.12 = 2 5 0E. Work on expedition house.Contract for new rooms, Rs/200.0Matting, glass, whitewash Rs/13.0Mattresses & pillows Rs/47.3Roof repairs Rs/19.0______Rs/279.3 = 18 12 5F. Living expenses.Cash purchases, Nasiriyah, Rs/456.5Ditto, Ur Junction Rs/165.0Ditto, Basra Rs/154.0Cook's wages, Rs/85.0Houseboy's wages, Rs/50.0______Rs/1910.13 = 60 14 5G. Salaries.C. L. Woolley 50 0 0______Total £768 18 6______N.B. These accounts give to rupees the nominal flat rate of 15 = £1st. This isliable to modification in accordance with the bank rate.Director [signature] Leonard WoolleyJoint Expedition of the British Museum and the Museumsof the University of Pennsylvania to Mesopotamia:
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(1) A table of inscriptions, which will explain itself. I have had to leave a certain number of blanks, some of which I hope you will be able to fill up. The object of this table is, to present in one place and with the utmost convenience, all the external facts (as it were) about each text, and thereby to free the actual translations from accompanying explanatory matter.(2) Index of (a) Names of Gods (b) of men (c) of places (d) of temples (e) of canals. I think such an index adds greatly to the use of the book.(3) The translations themselves.(4) The autograph plates.(5) The photographic plates. With respect to (3) I have, as you will find, in various places made a number of suggestions in pencil, and in particular the extent of notes has become rather greater than we had hoped to see. But in certain places rather important matters arose, and I felt it would not do to pass over them without notice since such omission would really seem to miss the points of the inscriptions, which ought as far as possible to be explained as well as translated. In a few cases you will see that I have drawn up a sort of draft of notes, with which pleased deal as you think good.In the form of the translations there are one or two points of uniformity which will save trouble and cost in proofs. I would suggest that all long (or longish) inscriptions should be printed straight ahead, like this 1. - ------ 2. ------. 3 ----- etcc. rather than in columns of short lines, as 1--- 2---, 3--- for this is a great saving of space, and no inconvenience. Other small points are: the universal use of d._ _ _ _ for the [?symbol?] determinative, whether in Sumer. or Semut; it is only a symbol, & variety of usage is confusing. Also the place-suffix KI will have to be rendered uniformly: I suggest small italic capitals.In spite of these there are certain to be many small inconsistencies which will have to be cleared away in proof. I am afraid a good deal of work awaits you in going through the MS. but I feel sure it will make a really good book.:
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(2) Horn_d beard_d God-w. no side curls. Head only :
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(British Museum Letterhead)4th September, 1947Mr. Percy C. Madeira, Jr.,The University Museum33rd & Spruce Streets,Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.A.Dear Mr. Madeira,I have at last been able to complete my examination of our position in regard to the publication of the Ur Texts. I can hardly ask you to excuse my long delay in this matter and in answering your letter of March 13th, but it has been due to the fact that neither I nor anyone now in my office has experience of previous agreements and arrangements, and the urgency of our present work of reconstruction necessarily takes precedence of other obligations. Not that the latter are less important, but our prior needs are those of mere existence which present themselves from day to day. However, I now send a complete statement of our joint publication of the Texts. The present position is that(i) we are printing off Part 2 (Text) of Volume III (Legrain's Business Documents). This is estimated to cost (pound symbol)800 which we expect to pay by the end of March 1948.(ii) We are also ready to print Plates and Text of Volume IV (Figulla\"s New Babylonian Documents). That is estimated at (pound symbol)700 exclusive of the cost of employing Dr. Figulla, and should be paid off by March 1949.(iii) We propose to begin printing Plates and Text of Volume V (Figulla's Old Babylonian Tests) next year. Much of the preparatory work was done by Figulla at our joint expense in 1939. The cost of printing is estimated:
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(British MuseumW.C.1.)July 11. 1928.[handwritten note illegible]Dear Miss MacHugh,I am sending you with this my statement of accounts carrying things up to the close of my financial year; the only thing to which I need call attention is one about which Sir Frederic Kenyon will have written to you already, namely the extra allowance to Mallowan and myself for work done in London. The fact is that the original agreement which provided for the work necessary for the exhibition did not contemplate present circumstances; in the early years a fortnight or three weeks spent in London was enough: this year I have been hard at work for over three months and this has meant the extra cost to myself of living in London (incidentally it has decided me, much against my will, to sell my little house at Bath because there is so little time left in which to enjoy it and I cannot afford to keep it for 12 months and then live in it for six weeks only!): so I applied for a \"grant in aid\" and Kenyon agreed in principle and was to write to you about it. I hope you agree too!I send also my programme for next season. I have arranged to have a complete set of all photographs made, with a typed copy of titles, and sent to you as soon as possible; I should have looked after this myself but at last we have got away from London and the rush of the exhibition and are having a blow at the seaside. The exhibition has been a tremendous success; we have had the Queen there, Princess Beatrice and Princess Marie Louise and the King of Spain and lots of other distinguished people and we are only afraid of being summoned back to town at any moment to do the honours to others. The Louvre staff are coming over in detachments and are most enthusiastic - one of them paid us the compliment of saying that no other expedition, especially a French expedition, would have got the stuff out in such good order, and that is a real compliment as they are naturally upset at seeing that the Louvre will no longer:
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(cf. complete vase on 4 wheels VIII Ur. u. 1446i in Cemet.)
Hand modelled. Head of any animal. 70 x 35 mm:
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(cf. u. 3150) nude h model Pem
Glazed bleach_d white-Broken below breast.
Fem-supporting in l. h. a harp which leans over l. sh. Hair done up in a bag w fillet over the fore h. Thick plaits of hair on either side of head. Falling on sh. Neckl.-Rt. h. appear_g enag_d in play_g the harp, l. h. supporting it:
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(cont_d)
Drapery [photo hides several words written] crescent shaped curves, pointed over the breasts, rounder below, from neck to feet (sealed) or to:
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(error mark_d 12789)
Mould_d TC. Fem Fig. Full Face clasp_d below breasts-Nude to waist wearing below a plain skirt to the ankles.:
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(Hotel Cerminus & Buffet gare de Bordeaux Saint-Jean Letterhead)March 23, 1929Dear Miss McHugh,Yesterday I closed the deal with Mr. Laporte after checking up the objects with his catalogue. I had seen the collection on the 20th the day we got here, and had proposed to him the price of 175000 francs, which he did not definitely refuse, but which he did not seem inclined to accept. As he wished to revise the information contained in his catalogue he asked me to come back yesterday. He had shown me fifteen masks and figurines which he said his wife had asked him to keep and which consequently he had not included in the catalogue. I had intended to propose, if he would not consent to taking:
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(Hotel Germinus & Buffet gare de Bordeaux Saint-Jean letterhead) to have it sent to Philadeliphia on condition of the expense of transportation and insurance being paid on its arrival. As there is for the moment nothing else to be done here, and as the money for which I cabled you last night will probably not arrive before Tuesday, we shall most likely run down to St. Jean de Luz for the week end.Pleas give my best to everybody. I hope you are feeling quite fit again. \"woolley Week\" concludes to.day, doesn't it. you will be glad to have that over with.Yours most sincerelyH.U. Hall.:
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(Insert on p. 2.) Over their fallen bodies had been placed two statues of bulls; both were of wood, which has perished, with metal heads. One head is of copper with inlaid eyes, the second is of gold with eyes, hair, beard and the tips of the horns in lapis, and on the chest of each is a row of shell plaques engraved with mythological scenes.:
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(letterhead of the Thackery Hotel)2tomb- as Philadelphia received one gold dagger Past year, it seems more natural that they should keep the gold dagger this year- But then the silver cup seems to tempt them very much and they cannot make up their mind. Besides we have a claim because a bronze stag unpacked Past year and supposed to be very bad turns out to be acceptable exhibition objectThe rest includes three skeletons lots of painted and unpainted dolls- lots of painted pottery- some bad stone vases, and mumerous:
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(logo of NATIONAL SCHEME FOR DISABLED MEN) DEPARTMENT OF CERAMICS AND ETHNOGRAPHY, British Museum,LONDON, W.C.1.The Editor,The Museum Journal,University Museum,Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.A.25. x. 22.Dear Sir,My friend, Mr. C. L. Woolley, has asked me to send you the enclosed note; he is now en route for the East, & did not know your address.I remain,Yours faithfully,[signature] T.A. Joyce [?]Deputy-Keeper.:
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(October 9, 1947- Continuation) -2Questions which remain in my mind are as follows:1. Does the British Museum contemplate expending on its own account the [pound symbol] 3000 sum required to complete the scheduled volumes of the Texts or do you expect the University Museum to advance [pound symbol] 1500 on this account.2. Have you arranged to reduce the cost of publishing the Texts in this post-war period by reduction of length, i.e., elimination of transliteration, indices and commentaries, and do you contemplate a simpler, less expensive format? I understand from Father Legrain that about 50% of his Part 2, Volume 3 manuscript has been eliminated through reduction in commentaries, transliterations, etc.3. Do you know if Sir Leonard has contemplated a similar reduction in length and format to complete the archaeological publications?As in your case, there is no one here who is familiar with previous agreements and arrangements regarding these publications and therefore I hope that we may be able to reach a clear understanding of our mutual obligations in this matter. I realize that you are urgently occupied with reconstruction work and that this rather complex matter is troublesome. My particular concern at this time is to clear up past arrangements for previous work in the Sumerian area before determining plans for continued research in that region.Very best wishes for your success in reconstruction.Sincerely yours,Froelich RaineyDirectorSir John Forsdyke British Museum London, W.C.I EnglandFR:GS c.c. Mr. Madeina[?]:
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(Release Monday Feb 14)The Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania at Ur has had during December a month more varied than usual but not less successful. There were a number of points on our plan which needed further work before the full history of the buildings concerned could be put on record, and circumstances induced us to embark on these separate tasks all at once instead of tackling one large site.Very useful from a topographical point of view were two excavations, one of which filled up a big gap in the ground-plan of the early Temenos by proving the existence of a large building of the Larsa period (circ. 2100 B.C.) between the old royal palace and the temple of the Moon Goddess, while the other settled the character of the buildings surrounding the Ziggurat terrace from the times of Ur-Engur (2300 B.C.) until those of Nebuchadnezzar. To Nebuchadnezzar's Temenos an entirely new aspect was given by the discovery of a great entrance gateway at a point where in 1922-3 we had failed to trace the line of his enclosing wall; it not only completes the Temenos plan, but throws into true perspective the great courtyard and practically confirms the view that this was itself the main temple of the Moon God. Interesting from more than topographical reasons was the excavation of a large building standing over a mile outside the limits of the Sacred Area, a great hall - it might have been a royal audience-chamber - put up by king Sin-idinnam shortly before 2,000 B.C. The remarkable feature about it was that it had undoubtedly had an arched and vaulted roof, and until recently such would have been judged wholly impossible at such an early date. But the finding of arched doorways in private houses of the same period, and the fact that contemporary brick tombs were sometimes barrel-vaulted justifies a restoration of this building which upsets all the views that have been held about the history of architecture in the East.:
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(sphinx?)
TC. relief-upper pad. Fem.headed Fig. holds before its waist a kind of tray on which stand 2 small (fem:) Fig. & 2uncertain objects lie horizon tally before them. Lower part missing.
cf. Nippur. TC. cat. no 198 IV Exp. Field Ph.206
Also: U.1731. fr_t 2 lions couchmt on a sort of tray:
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(stationary header)KINGS'S WORTHY COURT,NR. WINCHESTER.WINCHESTER 3672August 6th 1958Dear Miss Baker,How very kind of you to write, & to enquire about my eye trouble. While it (?) it was very bad, and most painful, and I certainly did not appreciate spending two months in a darkened room, not knowing whether it would ever get better. But actually I had a marvellous recovery and now see as well as before, and have been able to get on well with all my work. It is a wonderful relief. While I was laid up, I had to comfort myself with the recollecton that I hadn't spend a day in bed owing to illness for sixty years = and now it's difficult to remember that I ever was ill! My biggest work, the story of man's advance during the Bronze Age, part of the huge Unesco History of Civilization, is finished and off my hands: it should be published in 1960; that is the longest book I've written, though of course the Ur Publications, when they have all appeared, will add up to a much. I'm glad to say that there is another volume at the printers now, and all my work on the whole series is finished.I have left my former house near Shaftsbury and am now two miles out of Winchester in a very:
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(text centred on page throughout)THE MUSEUMOF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIATHIRTY-THIRD AND SPRUCE STREETSM....................................................INVITESM...........................................................TO ATTEND THE ILLUSTRATED LECTURE BYMR. C. LEONARD WOOLLEYFIELD DIRECTORTHE RUINS OF UR; THE SPLENDOUR OF THEPREHISTORIC KINGS; UR IN THE TIME OFABRAHAM; THE LAST DAYS OF THE CITY(STEREOPTICON VIEWS)IN THE AUDITORIUM OF THE MUSEUMON SATURDAY AFTERNOON, MARCH 23, AT 3 O'CLOCKRESERVED SEAT CARD. SEATS ARE HELD UNTIL THE HOUR OF THE LECTURE:
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(Tuck's Post Card Date Stamped London July 23 1929)Thackery HotelJuly 23. 293arrived yesterday and saw Dr. Hall and Gadd. The division will be easy enough.-Found Mrs Van Buren, and Mrs Dohan here. I will write later to give detailsYours sincerelyL. Legrain(addressee)Dr. W. JayneDirector of the University Museum Philadelphia Pa U.S.A.:
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(Type U. 16634)
White. frit Frog. Coarse workmansh_p.:
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(University Museum letter head)August 6, 1931Dear Miss McHugh:-I've had to leave several things at loose ends for you to tie-up properly and I'll try to jot down as many of these as possible and more or less as they occur to me, so this will be a pretty disjointed letter .Financial matters first of all:1. Beidler is definitely going with Speiser on the Tell Billah excavations. The arrangements are that he is to engage passage on the Fabre Line and they will send the bill to you for payment; $217 pd. (?) his travel allowance is eight hundred dollars, the balance of which, after paying the bill is to be given him before going plus 4 months salary at $125.00; the remaining 4 months are to be paid him later, whenever you and he agree. I think he means to sail about SeptemberAugust 30th but he'll be down from Lehighton before then to gather his ticket and funds.2. Miller I have arranged to send, as you know, to Rowe and I have asked Rowe to cable him when he wants him, so when he hears he will come to you for the necessary funds. Unfortunately the anonymous contribution promised for July has not yet come in but I have definite assurance it will materialize in the next fortnight, and it is prefectly safe to draw against it. You have, I think, a memorandum as to how much Miller's share of this is to be, and I haven't it by me, since I am writing at home. He might as well have it all at once and make such arrangements for applying it as he wants, provided this is satisfactory to you; if not, work out any schedule of payment agreeable to you both. I do happen to know he is a little short of funds and it might convenience him to have it all now3. Mason required innumerable sets of prints and enlargements of his photographs which I didn't see loading on Witte who has a good deal on hand anyway, so he has farmed the work out and the costs can be charged against the Johnson Expedition balance (if any). It is by now so small that it is almost useless to beleive it can be of material aid towards work next year, so I beleive it best to let it bear all of last year\"s burden that it can. By the way Mr. Madeira seems to have produced a very possible solution to the dilema of next year's personnel at Piedras Negras, which I shall tell you about anon.:
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,P.PG 691</p><p>D[angle] 214
C[angle]99
</p><p>depth below surface 380 [?] [angle] 235</p><p> Inhumation grave matting lined Head SW bones much decayed body on R. side.
</p><p>1) Near shoulder copper axe U.9687
</p><p>2) Touching (1) copper bowl and crushed bowl hemispherical. Finger bones in bowl. diam. C. 011 III
</p><p>3) Near knees cylinder seal green stone much decayed. U.9688
</p><p>No(1)[drawing (artifact:tool)] Diam C. 012 Ht. 010</p>
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- 2 - with fluted sides. We had found that of which we were in search and had leant from it much about the burial customs of the earliest kings, but the crowning reward of royal treasure had been snatched from us. While disgust yet rankled luck turned. A slender copper rod stuck upright in the soil led us down to a tomb shaft at the bottom of which numerous vessels in copper and stone began to shew up. Along one side of our cutting the imprint of the wooden side of a coffin could be distinguished - the wood itself perished long since - and we were wondering whether we were working in the grave proper or outside it when a startling discovery solved the question for us. The gang working next door at a higher level came on a copper spear-head upright in the earth; following this down we laid bare a gold-mounted shaft, and found that the spear had been set at the further corner of the coffin, which had still to be dug out. In fact the pit for the grave was about seven feet square and the coffin, which measured some five feet six inches by two feet, was placed against one side, the free space along three sides of it being used for offerings to the dead. Against each end spears were planted upright in the ground; ranged along side away from the coffin were vases of alabaster, steatite and clay; at the foot end were forty or fifty metal vessels piled together, many of them now so corroded into each other that we could not separate them, but from the mass we have recovered three silver bowls, fluted copper bowls, pots and cauldrons. Nearer to the coffin were tools and weapons of copper, - chisels and saws, lance-points, axe-heads, a mass of studded copper which may have been a shield, and daggers. One dagger had a silver hilt now ruined by corrosion, one a gold handle with a broad lunate top, one a handle of gold and silver with its guard and pommel enriched with gold studs. In strange contrast to these was a little group of flint-arrow-heads! At the head of the coffin was a collection of more precious vessels. Resting on a big copper platter was a tall libation-vase of silver, exactly the vase that we see represented on very early reliefs; by this was a:
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- 2 -that he was suffering from some mental trouble, and on September 23rd he was examined by a magistrate and certified insane. Doctor Taylor, of the Holborn Institution, tells me that he is very violent at times, when a single attendant is unable to control him, and has to call for the assistance of other attendants.I understand that Mr. Hunter is to be removed to an insane asylum almost at once pending a definite decision as to what should be done with him.Doctor Woolley of the British Museum has now sailed for Mesopotamia, but before leaving stated to me that he, through the British Museum, would be responsible for the return of Mr. Hunter to the United States, and the necessary expenses and so forth, and also agreed to notify the University Museum in Philadelphia of Mr. Hunter's condition. This I assume has been done, but would ask the Department to verify the same.It seems best that no immediate effort be made to send Mr. Hunter to the United States as his condition may improve temporarily in a short time, when his transfer to the United States would be more feasible. I shall therefore await advices from the University Museum, or Mr. Hunter's relatives and also wait for further reports as to Mr. Hunter's improvement before taking steps to arrange for his return home.I have the honor to be, Sir,Your obedient Servant,IRVING N. LINNELL.American Consul in Charge130.INI.MH.:
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- 2 -under such regulations as may hereafter apply in general to archaeological research in Mesopotamia.2. I propose a joint expedition on the part of theBritish Museum and of the University Museum to make excavations on the site of ancient UR, and objects thatmay be found in these excavation and allotted to the joint expedition, o be divided between the twoInstitutions by mutual agreement. Each Institution willprovide such share of the funds of the joint expeditionas might be agreed upon; and each would furnish its ownqualified excavator. (As the University Museum has notin mind at this time any such qualified excavator, I wouldsuggest that the appointment should be made upon the recommendation of the British Museum). The records of the joint expedition will be the common property of bothInstitutions, and the rights or duties of publicationmight be assigned by mutual agreement according tocircumstances.The first and chief consideration of the University Museum in making this proposal is a well-considered desireto establish with the British Museum a co-operativerelationship in the interest of scientific research. Theunderlying thought is that such a joint undertaking would,if fairly tried, give mutual satisfaction. With this Thought in mind, I am prepared with your approval to laythe proposal before the Board of Managers of the University Museum, and make an effort to raise the necessary fundsfor the proposed undertaking.In putting forward these proposals, I desire to saythat in both matter and form they are subject to such adviceand recommendations as you may be willing to give in the interestof all concerned.I am uncertain how long I may be in England at thistime. I shall hold myself at your service in case you shouldwish to discuss the subject with ce further. I should be very glad if you would be good enoughto inform me at what time Mr. Hall is expected back from thenear East. If he should return while I am here, I shouldappreciate an opportunity of hearing of his experiences.Very faithfully yours,Director, University Museum ofPhiladelphia.Address:c/o Brown Shipley & Co.,123, Pall Mall,S.W.:
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- 3 - large bowl of pale gold or electrum, and inside that we found a small electrum drinking cup and an oval bowl of bright gold beautifully fluted and engraved. All these things were in the nature of offerings made to or for the dead and were not necessarily his personal property; the more intimate belongings lay inside the coffin. At the feet lay a silver lamp. Behind the hip - the body, terribly decayed, lay half on its back, half on its left side, with the legs bent up as usual - was a mass of beads in gold and lapis lazuli, many of them very large and the stones selected for their fine colour; amongst them were lapis amulets in the form of a ram and a frog, and a copper pin with a head in the shape of monkey exquisitely modelled in gold. On the other side was a mass of ear-rings in gold and silver, finger rings, a gold pin with lapis head, a wreath of gold mulberry-leaves strung on rows of lapis and carnelian beads, a gold and lapis bracelet, and, hidden amongst these, an electrum axe-head. Round the waist was a silver belt from which hung a dagger with a gold blade and a handle of silver and gold in a silver sheath, and a whetstone of lapis on a gold ring. By the shoulders were a lamp and two bowls of gold, and on the right side an electrum double axe. But the most astonishing thing was the head-dress which had fallen from the broken skull and lay by the shoulder; this was a perruque in red gold, a complete covering for the head from the forehead to the nape of the neck, modelled and engraved to represent the hair. The hair is parted in the middle and brought down in crisp waves over the ears, a long heavy tress is wound round the head above a plain fillet of ribbon, and at the back there is a small chignon; the ears are modelled and pierced and below them are cheek-pieces on which are shewn the formal curls of the whiskers. On each of the gold vessels found in the coffin is inscribed the name of the owner, Mes-kalam-dug. No title is given, and the name does not appear on any list of kings, but the name, \"Good Hero of the Land\", might well be royal from its meaning and in form would accord with known names of early kings.:
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- 4 - But it would be safest not to assume too much. The wearer of the golden perruque can hardly have been a commoner, but he need not have reigned; the furnishing of this grave sets it far above all others that we have found, but the grave itself is of normal type and contrasts strongly with the stone-built tomb which we found plundered. Mes-kalam-dug was probably a prince of the royal blood living some little while before the First Dynasty of Ur, about 3,500 B.C., and history would have nothing to say about him, but his tomb has made history for us by throwing new light on the splendours of the early days of ur.----------:
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- 94° in the shade - and a delight full ocean passage, I found here a perfect English climate, storm fog and rain, sunshine and showers. Thank God, there is a fire in the dining room. But the weather man announced [?] more sun in august after the Bank holyday. Please give my regards to the museum staff which has still survived the heat, and believe meYours sincerly L. Legrain[Next page] Rosslyn Lodge Hotel July 31.37 Hampstead. LondonDear Mr Jayne,I am crossing the channel tomorrow after spending a fortnight in London. I am pleased to report a good progress on the printing of the \"Business Documents of the third Ur Dynasty\" which is the third volume of the Ur Texts. It will be as you know a twin volume. The volume of cuneiform Texts is printed and nicely bound, and I received as a gift my first copy. I brought to the Br. Mu. part of the mss [?] of the translations, some:
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- The gold lamp [drawing - scale ?- (artifact: lamp ?)]- The last year [lime st ?] relief (broken) with chariot- The (half) gaming board with animal engraved(The best of this year goes to BaghdadThe good one from last year ... to London)- The queen's [dress?] of thousand beads *London keeps the inlaid stele the chariot (gold lion head) the harp (calf's head) the gaming board etc * The Director and the three assistants declared that they were satisfied of a friendly and fair division. * Questions of transport, insurance, and packing will come to you. I refused to answer any of them. I just think that it would be useful to fix a date and to cut any further delay.Question of copies and duplicate [?] reproduction of objects either in London or BaghdadQuestion of exhibiting in Phila important pieces property of London (Stela at least).I am now busy making a short inventory of our share.An assistant clerk checks it with me and keeps a copy.Hope to be back in Paris Sunday Sept. 30.Yours trulyL. Legrain:
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--including three of the Indian type--copper objects, pottery, beads--and \"the gold wire\" from below water level in front of the Ziggurat..very important according to Mr. C. L. Woolley.The best was the discussion which took place between Smith, Gadd, and myself, on the projected scheme of publication. Six volumes are in hands--including my own on the Third Dynasty tablets actually in the Office in the University Museum--The other tablets are in the British Museum they have been classified by Gadd, and besides those already assigned for work, many more--like the Neo Babylonian and [?Seleucid?] tablets, the mathematical:
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-10-
Archaic. H_d model_d
Plaque
Nude Tympanon:
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-10-the stratigraphy of certain important structures. A full report of his work is not yet at hand; it must suffice to say that his researches met with unusual success. and already his scientific discoveries have awakened much interest and brought a considerable amount of favorable comment from those who are concerned with like problems. Work such as his is not calculated to yield spectacular results in the form of specimens to enhance the beauty of the Museum's collections. It is, therefore, particularly pleasant to note that Mine was Mr. Sabberthwaite didunearthed in the course of his investigations not only one fragmentary pieces of carving dipicting the Maya ball game--probably the most illuminationg of the very illustrations of this subject extant--but also two great stucco masks that were originally part of the nowalmost vanished architectural decorations of the principle buildings, as well asa considerable quantity of eccentric flints, fairly complete but broken pottery vessels, potsherds, and small objects that are the more usual by-product of investigations, such as these have been. To turn from the Museum's work in to the New World to that in the Old World: (Hand inserted arrow moves this line to before the sentance that starts'The pre-Roman town) Excavations were resumed at Minturno, Italy by the Museum's expidition Minturno, Italy early in March. Work has been concentrated in the Theatre area, investigation of the tempting quarter under which lie the remains of The pre-Roman town having to be deferred because of hindrances arising as to in the acquisition of this strip of the land. Yet, with a generosity characteristic of this site since the inception of the Museum excavations, the uncovering of The Theatre and its Scena has consistently yielded most interesting and important objects. Sculpture in marble of the Republican Augustan and later periods has been of frequent occurence-portrait heads, large portions of life sized statures, a series of six figures just under life-size, including representations of Bacchus, Venus, the Muses and other mythological chatacters (obviously architectural decorations of the Theatre) all these are reported:
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-12-the School of Archaeology. I am very hopeful of favourable action. Should this occur it will provide, in addition to the money, a very useful incentive for raising the total fund necessary for the establishment of the School.:
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-13- of the living conditions of the Assyrian city dwellers will be achieved. In last year's report the work of the first season of the Damghan, Persia Persian Expedition under Dr. Erich Schmidt was reviewed and an indication given that the investigations of the prehistoric mound of Tepe Hissar would be somewhat extended during the summer. Thanks most particularly to the generosity of Mrs. William Boyce Thompson and through welcome aid from the American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology, it was possible not only to continue the investigations but to complete the scientific study of this site and to add a superb collection of unusual objects to the beautiful material already unearthed by this most successful undertaking. It is not possible here to describe in any detail the character of Dr. Schmidt's results and it is less needfull to do so inasmuch as the following current issue of the Journal is devoted to the Damgham Expedition, and rather full reports have been published in each issue of this year's Bulletin. Yet it is pertinent to note that not only did the Expedition complete the scientific studyof the large prehistoric mound of Tepe Hissar, revealing unsuspected culture horizons and racial contacts, but by excavationg the Susanian Palace it added materially to scholarly knowledge of the architecture and decoration of this later epoch, and sounded many other neighbouring sites, so that the total of information gathered represents an unusually rich and extensive corupus of scientific material.:
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-15-Prospects for the year immediately ahead seem to be on the whole better than could have been expected. Given the same generous support from those interested in the Museum's past and future, and the same cooperation from the Board of Managers, it should be possible, even under the heavy burdens of hard difficult times, to continue to show an advance in scientific research and in services to the public.Horace H. F. Jayne DIRECTOR:
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Enkidu
Gilgamesh:
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Chariots
Wheels:
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-2- 12/6/33to be restrained in expression -- ill advised. Even at the most favour-able exchange of $3.25 to the pound sterling, this sum exceeded by severalthousand dollars the amount you knew was allocated to the Museum by the Carnegie Corporation for the Ur publications. No doubt you had arrange-ments with the Oxford Press to underwrite this discrepancy, but it wouldhave been well, we feel, not only to have obtained Mr. Hill's authority have been well, we fell, not only to have obtained Mr. Hill's authority forthis obvious over-expenditure, but also ours. As a matter of fact, as Imentioned above, Mr. Hill had no authority at all to approve or disapproveyour commitments, but plainly you did not realize this, and hence it is not necessary to worry this point. Not for a minute did I believe youwould exceed by even a small sum the amount of the total grant in bringing out these initial volumes; indeed I believed there would certainly be some thing left over for overhead expenses until the next could be issued, and hence your statement of the total expenditures gives me chagrin, especiallysince I feel strongly that at least a word of warning from you would havebeen in order. The above paragraphs written, as I am sure you willunderstand, merely to clarify the situation, and are not to be taken asbeing unduly critical of your actions. Differences arising from financialdifficulties are very repugnant to me, and I would not have this cloud the pleasant relationships that have existed between the Museum and you, quite apart from my personal feelings. I feel entirely confident that aftergiving careful consideration to the above statements you will come to sharemy viewpoint to no small degree.I intend in due course to confer with the authorities of the Oxford Press in New York and come to a successful modus operandi, and Ianticipate no difficulties in that direction. Legrain tells me you hopeto have the book out before Christmas, and if there is time enough for usto take advantage of the holiday season for sales it will be of considerablehelp. We are anxious to see the volume which is no doubt sumptuous. We were particularly pleased to learn you felt it possible to resume the work at Ur this year. We have not as yet had anyinformation to indicate why you had altered your earlier decision not to go out. But no doubt this will soon come to hand. I think we kep allAmerican institutions in line (save the always irrepressible Oriental Institute) with Mr. Hill's suggestion of a united front against digging un- less the proposed alterations in the Antiquities Law were abandoned, and hence it will be a satisfaction to know of the results of this effort.I am sending a copy of this letter to Mr. Hill, with the thought that, since you may have already started for the Near East, nodelay in appraising him of its contents may occur. Yours sincerely, Horace H.F. JayneDIRECTORC. Leonard Wooley, Esq.,c/o The British MuseumLondon, England.:
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-2- 11/24/34what arrangements as to commissions you have with your booksellers; we get sixty per cent net for all sales, which for us are handled by the University of Pennsylvania Press. I am assuming you have a parallel arrangement when I say that the sale of 180 copies will serve to liquidate this debt entirely; I cannot think this will mean more that a year of waiting. I shall not communicate with Oxford, however, until I hear from you that this arrangement is agreeable. So long as the manuscripts are in hand ready to publish it does not, as I see it, matter vastly if their formal publicaton is delayed a year or eighteen months.Yours letter in reply to mine of October 23rd has just come since I started writing this. Because the situation has, I believe, become clearer after my talk with Mr. Keppel, it seems unnecesary to discuss the point about who is to assume the deficit should it not be possible to apply the current proceeds to it.May I hear from you on the above points at your early convenience, for until I have your decision I cannot give Oxford a definite program, and I am desirous of so doing.Yours sincerely,Horace H. F. Jayne DIRECTOR.Sir George Hill, Director,The British MuseumLondon, W. C. 1, England.:
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-2- 12/23/32believe so. your subscription plan would make it available to all those directly concerned with its contents, i.e. students, libraries, and the like and it is to those that the low price is essential. The general public can perfectly well afford to absorb the dealers' commission and a book, it is my opinion, sells just as easlily over the counter for $15. as for $12. I think it would be well for both museums to circularize as widely and thoroughly as possible the people who might subscribe, even though ithis might necessitate some outlay in the form of an attractive announcement with perhaps a sample of the colour plates. If you could forward me your general ideas along these lines I could have prepared a tentative scheme for such a circular which might save you time.Pleas accept my best wishes for a good season, not only archaeological but in every other way, and believe me,Always sincerely yours,Horace H. F. Jayne DIRECTORP. S. Legrain's head of Queen Shubad is abandoned. We have the coronetes and comb separately shown. It is a considerable improvement.:
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-2- 2/12/35edition of 800 copies, unbound. Since our present remittance to the Oxford Press of £381/05 includes approximately £128 borrowed from this Museum's general funds to be paid back out of future sales of Volume II, it will not be possible for us to remit anything toward a forthcoming volume during the calendar year 1935. I have already expressed my sympathy that this should delay the appearance of Woolley's further reports; except to agree to shoulder a portion of the moral blame for the deficit, I will not press the subject further. As soon as it can be demonstrated that further sales of Volume II on your side, over and above the total of £920 reported by you on December 11, 1934, justify our risking the speculation of printing Volume IV, we shall give authority to proceed with its publication; but we feel that this time the responsibility for potential deficits should be fixed in advance. As you point out, in my letter to Woolley of December 6, 1933 I accepted without question for the University Museum the obligation of Woolley's commitments with the Oxford Press up to that date, in view of the fact that Woolley was acting as our agent. I accept it anew but in so doing I remind you that by the same token the Trustees of the British Museum are acting as our agents in the sale of these volumes and are bound to make payments from receipts as we require and only such payments as we authorize them to. I am sorry that I must speak precisely. I shall estimate that sincerity of their concern for the Oxford University Press by the promptness with which your Trustees pay over the balance of the account, in the sum of £920, out of proceeds from Volume II already in hand. In the words of your letter of December 11 1934, we do not appreciate the rightness of the course which you propose. Mindful of Mr. Keppel's expressed desire that every means should be used to effect an agreement between the two Museums rather than that he be called upon to adjust the matter, I have tired of find new viewpoints and new ideas to bring to bear upon you, but after repeated readings of your letter of December 11 it would seem that our positions on this one matter may prove irreconcilable. I am sincerely filled with regrets that this difference should have clouded a very successful relationship of twelve years between the two institutions; it is still my hope the present trouble is not an augury of any further difficulties. Humanly speaking, I think you can count on our eventual assistance, in addition to the proceeds from sales, after our deficit is met, in publishing late volumes of the series with other Museum funds. AS for Woolley's own situation, about of the series with other Museum funds. AS for Woolley's own situation, about which you show concern, it will please you to learn that my managers are favourably disposed to my proposal to continue paying our share of Woolley's salary through June 1936, and we are all gratified by the progress he is showing. You must realize as well as I, though, that if they are to continue amenable I cannot appear too often before them with apologies for the British SituationVery sincerely yours,Horace H.F. JayneDirectorSir George Hill, Director, The British Museum, Long, W.C.l:
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-2- In view of the grant of $3500 from the American Philosophical Society for the publication of volume 4, the proposed price of the volume, five pounds, 15 shillings, seems too high-a price of four pounds per volume more reasonable. In the long run this might bring in more money. However, the final decision on the price we leave to you. If all this seems satisfactory to you and forms a basic agreement on the coming publications of the Ur volumes, may I then suggest that the whole matter be left in the hands of Barnett and Kramer, who could carry out all the essential details. As one final comment, Woolley's impending volumes 6,7,8 and 9, rather give me the creeps after the incredible difficulties we had with the last volume. Would you be very unhappy if we stalled the next publication for awhile This is not to avoid the moral responsibility, which we both have to see that the data exentually is published.Most sincerely,Froelich RaineyDirectorFR:ad:
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-2- 3/5/34However, no matter what criticims are advanced, I do believe these volumes do our two institutions a great deal of credit--and of course the Carnegie Corporation. Yours sincerely, Horace H. F. Jayne DIRECTOR:
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-2- 10/26/32satisfaction to all of us, as I know it will be to you, the father of the plan.Yours always sincerely,Horace H. F. JayneDIRECTORC. Leonard Woolley, Esq.The British MuseumLondon, England:
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-2- 3/15/35subject further. AS soon as it can be demonstrated that further sales of Volume II (the Royal Cemetery) on your side, over and above the total of £920 (it should, as explained above, be more like £820) reported by you on December 11, 1934, justify our risking the speculation of printing Volume IV, we shall give authority to proceed with its publication; but we feel that this time the responsibility for potential deficits should be fixed in advance\". As I pointed out in my letter to Dr. Jayne of 11th December last, if the original grant intended to be used for the entire series of volumes be saddled with a heavy deficit on the first volume, the whole scheme collapses. It is not a question of delaying the publication of next two volumes for a year or eighteen months; it will take about that time to pay off the balance of the deficit and thereafter publication would have to wait until sales had yielded enough to cover its cost; and in the actual state of the book trade there can be no question of raising by sales a further sum of £1,500 within anyresonable period of time. If the scheme collapses, the rputation of both Museums will suffer, since they will have failed in their obligation vis a vis the Iraq Government to publish an adequate report of their excavation. In the present state of anti-foreign feeling in Iraq this would be most unfortunate. At the present time Mr. Wolley reports that Vols. III and IV of the series are ready for publication: the cost estimated by the Oxford Press for the production of these is, Vol. III £561, Vol. IV £1,556. The sums now in hand from the sales of the Royal Cemetery would, if devoted to their original purpose, justify the Joint Expedition in proceeding with the printing of these volumes. Volumes V and VII of the series are now in preparation. My Trustees will be greatly obliged if the Executive Commitee of the Carnegie Corporation will give their authoritative interpretation of the terms of their Grant, and trust that should the Corporation be otherwise disposed to modify the original intention of those terms they will take into careful consideration the points enumerated above. I am, Sir, Yours obedient ServantS/ George Hill Director and Principal Librarian.:
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-2- 7/6/31It is very gratifying to learn that your work on the cemetery material is progressing; it must indeed be an immense task; but a satisfactory one to do when you find your earlier conclusions so well verified.Please give my kind regards to Mrs. Woolley and Mrs. Mallowan and believe me,Yours sincerelyHorace H.F. Jayne DIRECTORC. Leonard Woolley, Esq. British Museum London, W.C.L. England:
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-2-10/15/34Since then requests for payments by the Oxford Press and Mr. Woolley seem not to have been honored, although Mr. Jayne now informs you that they have been holding and apparently are still holding over $5,000. of the Corporation's Grant.Mr Jayne now says that this grant has at all times been carried as a separate account \" fully secured by uninvested cash in the Treasurer's hands.\" I do not doubt his statement. But anybody, I think even he, will admit that the extracts I've made from the quotations of correspondence that Mr. Woolley has sent me are enough to make me wonder what has happened to the money the Carnegie Corporation had paid and the Oxford Press could not obtain. It never occured to me that, in an institution like the University Museum, the vacation season and the illness of one employee would suspend the orderly administration of this grant.Third-There is no need for me to write about the differences in judgement concering the timing of remittances to take advantage of the exchange.Fourth-Similarly I will not now write about the problem of the deficit which might have been avoided.Fifth- But I do want to say that Mr. Jayne seems to have fallen into an unfortunate misunderstanding concerning the purpose of the gift. Mr. Woolley says that as the Carnegie Corporation's grant was made on the basis of the memorandum which he submitted to you he filed copies of the memorandum both in the University Museum and the British Museum. As this would have been the obvious thing to do and as he is most businesslike and orderly in such matters, I shall be a good-deal surprised if it is made to appear that he did not thus advise the University Museum of the plan upon which the grant was basedYours sincerely,s/ Henry James.:
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-2-10/15/35The Museum news would not be complete without the announcement of the arrival on October 12th of an 8lb.;? oz. daughter in the Dam family. WE are all well and as busy as beavers--how do you manage to accomplish so much with the many visitors, inside and out, most of whom have axes to grind. I hope you and Mrs. Jayne had a good time in Persia and Iraq. My very best regards to you both. Sincerely yours,:
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-2-12/5/32I hope we may have a good season with plenty of success to report. My best regards to your wife and all good wishes for the (approaching) season.Yours very sincerely,s/C. Leonard Woolley:
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-2-12/6/33it is not necessary to worry this point. Not for a minute did I believe you would exceed by even a small sum the amount of the total grant in bringing out these initial volumes; indeed I believed there would certainly be something left over for overhead expenses until the next could be issued, and hence your statement of the total expenditures gives me chagrin, especially since I feel strongly that at least a word of warning from you would have been in order.The above paragraphs are written, as I am sure you will understand, merely to clarify the situation, and are not to be taken as being unduly critical of your actions. Differences arising from financial difficulties are very repugnant to me, and I would not have this cloud the pleasant relationships that have existed between the Museum and you, quite apart from my personal feelings. I feel entirely confident that after giving careful consideration to the above statements you will come to share my viewpoints to no small degree.I intend in due course to confer with the authorities of the Oxford Press in New York and come to a successful modus operandi, and I anticipate no difficulties in that direction. Legrain tells me you hope to have to book out before Christmas, and if there is time enough for us to take advantage of the hokiday season for sales it will be of considerable help. We are anxious to see the volume which is no doubt sumptous.We were particularly pleased to learn you felt it possible to resume the work at Ur this year. We have not had any information to indicate why you had altered your earlier decision not to go out. But no doubt this will soon come to hand. I think we kept all American institutions in line (save the always irrepressible Oriental Institute) with Mr. Hill's suggestion of a united front against digging unless the proposed alterations in the Antiquities Law were abandoned, and hence it will be a satisfaction to know of the results of this effort.I am sending a copy of this letter to Mr. Hill, with the thought that, since you may have already started for the Near East, no delay in appraising him of its contents may occur.Yours sincerelyHorace H. F. JayneDIRECTOR.C.Leonard Woolley, Esq., The British Museum, London.:
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-2-13. The University Museum paid $530.96 miscellaneous expenses here (cables $26.86; Bailey $489.70; Phila. Blue Print $14.40)14. The University Museum rec'd from sale of vols. to Mar. 31, 1935 $1473.5 less charges $234.10 $1,239.4015. The university Museum paid to the Oxford Press, Mar. 1935 £391/0/5 ($1825.09):
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-2-5/25/34Review CopiesLondon: Illustrated London News The Times Daily Telegraph Morning Post Antiquity Journalof the Royal Asiatic society Expository Times Antiquaries JournalPrague: Archio OrientalniRome: Rivista degli Studi OrientaliJerusalem: La Revue BibliqueDania: Acta OrientaliaLondon: Burlington MagazineTotal 13Of these 6 were exacted by the Copyright Law; 16 are in our departmental libraries; 13 were sent out for review; the rest were presented to individuals who contributed either by writing or work or money.I think it would be well if a limit were fixed on both sides.Yours sincerely,s/ George Hill:
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-2-8/1/33P.S. I have just seen Woolley. He agrees to your proposal about Hamoudi. He thinks that the utmost that would be wanted would be (pound symbol)50 a year, and he would, if it were made up to him, take the responsibility of paying it over, for a limited term, so that it should not be regarded as a pension.As to the question of the text being revised here, there seems to be a grave difficulty. Woolley himself said nothing, when I mentioned the matter, except that a great deal of the MS. was already in the printer's hands; to which I replied that then he could submit the proofs. However, Sidney Smith takes a different view. Revision by him or Gadd may mean one of two things. Either it means merely responsibility for checking references and inventory numbers. If so, Smith simply has not got the time himself or the staff to do it. (Gadd is just off to constantinople, by the way, for some weeks). Nor is it really the kind of work which ought to be done by him. I fancy, however that what you mean is the other alternative. As you know, Woolley holds certain views about dating of tombs, etc. He is perfectly entitled, as excavator and a man of great experience in Mesopotamian archaeology, to hold his own views. But Smith and Gadd do not agree with him. What your experts think, I am not in a position to say. But this is clear, that if Smith were to read the proofs, he would be bound to say that such and such views were wrong, and as Woolley would stick to them, there would be a dead-lock. And if Woolley's views are allowed to pass, it must be made clear that the experts take no responsibilitiy for them. It seems to me, then, that the proper course to take is to allow Woolley to take his own line, and prefix a Preface, of a purely official kind -- you and I could sign it jointly, if you like --saying that the excavator and the other experts are each responsible for the opions expressed in their several sections. What do you think? Meanwhile I will tell Woolley he can continue on his own for the present.s/ George Hill:
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-2-8/8/33The circular would, of course, have a specimen page; would you wish copies of that also to be sent to you?I did, I think, write and thank you for the blocks of the bull's head and for photographs which reached me safely. I was also glad to get Miss Baker's plate of beads, though I am very sorry that it could not be completed--there were two or three things for the illustration of which I had relied on the colour drawings and I am grieved to miss them; that however cannot be helped, and the loss would not warrant damage to her eyes!In order not to deal with too many subjects in one letter I am writing a second; it seems just as well that it sould be separate. So here endeth the first epistle.Yours sincerely,s/ C. Leonard Woolley:
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-2-9/10/34While on this subject my President instructs me to say that in undertaking to pay Mr. Woolley's salary for the current year, our Board does not necessarily assume any obligation to continue such salary payments beyound this time. I have no doubt we shall be in a position to do so, but with the disturbed state of finances we cannot bind ourselves to any extended program of expenditures.Also, could you let me have, at your convenience, a statement of the amounts received by the British Museum, either directly or through its agents, on the sale of the Ur Publication, Volume II? These, as the amounts we have received, must, of course, be applied to the printing bill, and until I have the figures it is difficult to draw up a program of payments to the Oxford PressFinally, let me express my thanks to you for keeping us informed of the situation in regard to the Iraq Antiquities Law. We are this year resuming work at Tepe Gawra; while we have not registered a protest at the changes in the law I think I have made it plain that in all respects we are in substantial agreement with the objections you raise in your communication. Since the continuation of our work in Iraq is not directly dependent upon receiving a share of the finds, etc., I could not feel we were in a position to threaten wholly to withdraw our expeditions unless alterations in the law were made, but I believe it is clear that we consider it will be just as irksome to us as the other institutions, to work under newly enacted provisions.Yours sincerely,Horace H. F. JayneDIRECTOR:
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-2-artistic material; while the importance of its Egyptian, Chinese, Greek and Etruscan collections, similarly derived, are fully as well recoginized. And its collections of Alaskan, of Mayan and of Peruvian archaeologi are of primary importance.Africa and the South Seas provided an opportunity to assemble outstanding collections of the second category: no american Museum can better the University Museum's collections in these fields, nor can the richness of the groups of South American ethnology be equalled.This is a satisfaction but it is also a challenge. It is not unduly conceited to say -- and it is derived from actual experiences --that no Philadelphia institution is as really well know abroad as is the University Museum. Vast resources for years enabled it to forge ahead in its particular field of development; and thus to achieve great distinction. It is a matter for congratulation that despite severe financial reverses this outstanding Philadelphia institution has shcceeded in carrying on.The natural history museums send forth parties to every quarter of the world; so does the University Museum. But the University Museum's expeditions are not constantly moving from place to place; their's is not the obligation to provide specimens in bulk nor to light upon new species. It is, rather, to gather methodically the data revealed by the remains of past ages. Twelve long years were spent at Ur of the Chaldees before it was felt proper to call anhalt to the work in order to leave something for secceeding, more fully informed, excavators to unearth. Eight years at Beisan, five years at Tepe Gawr and at Piedras Negras --these figures serve to indicate how little haste is possible in archaeological research.But important as its Expeditions are, the University Museum's collections cannot be disregarded as important to Philadelphia's cultural:
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-2-CASE B.M.21 continued. ( 1 large gold lapis & carnelian. beads.( 2 \" lapis beads.( 1 three strand. with gold rings.( 2 Gold.( 1 \" leaves (2 strand).Necklaces. ( 2 lapis & lapis & Gold.( 1 carneln. & gold beads.(1 \" (large).( 1 \" 1 long & 3 small gold beads.( 1 long lapis.2 Necklaces.1 Whetstone with gold wire ring.1 Frontlet with one long carneln. bead.9 lapis roundels with 4 gold surrounding rings.1 Obsidian bowl.1 Gaming Board with pieces.1 Whetstone.2 Ivory Roundels.1 crushed helmet & skull.1 clay female figurine.1 handle black & white rings.26 small Bronze objects.7 \" Terracottas.15 \" Miscellaneous objects.CASE B.M.22. 8 Alabaster & Stone pots.1 Silver Stand.CASE B.M.23. 15 Copper Weapons, implements, bowls, etc.1 Syrian axe.1 Gold leaf earring.1 \" Ring.1 Silver Pin.1 Cyl-seal.1 Lapis Necklace.3 Stone vases.1 \" handle for dagger.2 Whetstones.:
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-2-considerable time had been spent in uncovering an area some forty feet by seventeen feet.\"The first object found was the harp,\" Woolley states in his report. \"A staff-head of gold was turned up, and then several copper nails with large gilt heads. Discovery of these inspired a careful search which disclosed a hole running down into the earth, from the side of which nail-shafts projected into the void left by the decay of the original wood of the harp.\"A stout wire was inserted and the hole filled with plaster of paris, thus making a cast of what proved to be the upright beam of the harp with the remaining nails, which were the keys, in their correct positions. The beam was bound with gold below and ended in a shoe of bitumen, probably employed as a non-conductor of sound.\"The base of the instrument was boat-shaped, of wood edged with a narrow band of gold and lapis lazuli, and on it stood the sounding-box from which the twelve strings had been stretched to the upright beam. This was of wood, also completely decayed, but its exact form was preserved by the inlaid border of red, white and blue, made from haematite, shell and lapis.\"It was a narrow box rectangular on three sides but raking forward in front and ending in a large calf's head of gold with top-knot and formally curled beard of lapis lazuli and shell, and lapis eyes. Below the beard the front of the box was decorated with shell plaques engraved with mythological scenes and coloured with black and red paint.\"The second big discovery was a chariot. Here too, the wood all had perished, leaving only hollows in the soil, but the decoration again enabled us to recover the original design. And the decoration was marvellously rich. All the woodwork had been outlined:
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-2-desertion of the city) cut across the Temenos not far from the east corner of the Ziggurat; its deeply eroded channel had been filled with wind-blown sand attaining a depth of more than three meters, and since part at least of the channel comes within the limits of our work very heavy preliminary clearing was involved. Already where the upper levels are preserved we are beginning to find walls which may be those of the Third Dynasty buildings surrounding the Ziggurat of Ur-Engur; in the more eroded parts all traces of such late periods have vanished and immediately below the sand we encounter heavy walls of burnt bricks and bitumen which date from the First Dynasty and rest on mud-brick walls probably of still earlier date. No objects worth mentioning have been found, but for the history of the site things promise very well.:
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-2-former director of the Pennsylvania Museum, of the second Fogg Expedition which centered its activities in the Gobi desert and Chinese Turkestan. The new director of the University Museum is responsible for the publication in 1928 of the journal, \"Eastern Art\", which is the only publication in this field written in English. Langdon Warner, and the Hamilton Bell, curator of the John G. Johnson collection, colllaborated with Mr. Jayne in this effort, and Mr. Warner and Mr. Jayne are still editors of this magazine.In addition to his magazine work, Mr. Jayne in 1920 edited and puclished two volumes of the letters of his grandfather, Horace Howard Furness, the noted Shakespearian scholar. He also was responsible for organizing the Persian Exhibition at Memorial Hall in connection with the first international congress on Oriental Art which was attended by Gaston Migeon. Lawrence Benyon and other international authorities.The new director's family has long been associated with the University of Pennsylvania. Mr Furness was for many years a Trustee; Mr. Jayne's father, Horace Jayne, was dean of the College for a number of years. In addition, Horace Howard Furness, Jr. Mr. Jayne's uncle, was recently elected a Trustee of the University. The family has also endowed the Jayne Course of Lectures, part of the Univereity extension, in memory of Henry LeBarr Jayne, an uncle.:
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-2-moment that it is a ruinWhile the excavation of Nebuchadnezzar's temple was still in progress the division of the antiquities found during the season between the Iraq Government and the Expedition was effected. Those allotted to the latter filled fifty-three cases. Amongst them are many of the oldest objects that have yet been unearthed in the Mesopotamian valley.:
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-2-Persia (continued)Schmidt here by mid-April Arthur Upham Pope substituting for him tomorrow's lecture. Has visited Damghan, etc. Schmidt's cableRussian ProjectDesirability of going forward therewith: a. Invitation from State Academy to participate in Expedition b. Golomshtok's abilities and accomplishments studies of Paleolithic in Russia placing of papers by Russian scientists in Am. periodicals A. J. A., Am. Anthropologist, S.A.O.S., Science News Letter, etc.c. Saving previous investment in this work - almost $5000.- 1931 trip east$ 1931 trip red. Present expedition would keep Golomshtok in our employ at least until his work was completed or until times were improved.e. Cost $5250 including share in costs of excavations, etc. and money for purchases - part of which certainly resalable.Guatemalan ExpeditionMexican trip - visit to Chichen, etc Shipment of monuments - installation thereof Museum of Modern Art - loans:
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-2-stone construction deep under ground, a thing unique in the cemetery - indeed the only stone building yet found at Ur, where stone is a far-fetched luxury, - which had been plundered in antiquity and gave us only such things as the robbers had overlooked. Then in a grave of normal type and only somewhat larger in size than most we found the burial, absolutely undisturbed, of a royal prince who lived some hundreds of years before the First Dynasty of the Kings of Ur, perhaps as early as 3500 B.C., Mes-kalam-dug, as his name was written on the gold vessels which he took with him to the grave, does not claim to have been a king, but of his royalty none can doubt who sees the character and the quality of his possessions. The most remarkable of them was a head-dress of beaten gold padded inside with cloth; it fitted over the whole head, covering the neck and cheeks; on it the elaborately dressed hair and whiskers are represented in repousse work and engraving, so that it might well be called a gold wig, though whether it really was a ceremonial head-dress or a helmet to be worn in battle there is no means of saying. Nothing of the kind has ever been found before in Mesopotamia nor do the texts speak of any survival of such a thing into later periods, so that the discovery of the actual object was more unexpected than any we have yet made. Close to the head were two bowls and a lamp of gold, each inscribed with the name of the owner, Mes-kalam-dug \"The good hero of the land\"; a battle-axe of electrum lay by the shoulder, and by the side another axe-head also of electrum; from a silver belt hung a dagger with golden blade and hilt of silver and gold. On either side of the body were heaps of beads in gold and lapis lazuli, gold and silver ear-rings, a gold pin with lapis head, a pin with gold head in the shape of a sitting monkey, finger-rings and other small objects of personal wear. In an annexe outside the coffin there were masses of vessels in clay, in steatite and alabaster, in copper and silver, two electrum bowls and one bowl of yellow gold beautifully fluted and engraved; on the ground:
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-2-the Director & the Trustees of the British MuseumJune 6th 1942- Letter of C. J. Gadd. \"Authorized to say that they (the Br. Mu. Trustees) would doubtless accept your proposal to take over the existing materials for Vol III of the Ur Excavations Texts, and to complete the publication in the form an by the means which you have indicated...\"Feb 10th 1945- Letter of C.J. Gadd to Dr. L. Legrain \" May I ask, unofficially, whether any progress has been made with the project of finishing your III Dynasty Texts in America;?... having heard nothing since 1942..\"N.B. Mr C. J. Gadd. it was agreed, supervised the publication of the CuneiForm Texts.B- Archaeological series is published for the Trustees of the Two Museums, and by the aid of a grant of the Carnegie Corporation of N. Y. under the direction and control of Sir Leonard Woolley.Vol. I, II, III, V. have already been publishedVol. IV. by Sir L. C. Woolley, is in manuscript ready for publicationVol VI \" Ur Terra Cottas ,, by Dr L. Legrain is almost finished (98 plates of photo. reproduction), and a catalogue-The financial aspect of the undertaking, is beyond the competence of the present Reporter L. Legrain:
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-2-the time. Gazelles and scorpions are the most common, but impressions of coiled serpents, asses, dogs, fishes, birds, bulls, and lions were also discovered. One of the seals displays a cattle byre and milking scene.The Joint Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania Museum and the British Museum is now entering upon the seventh year of its work. The last month of the old year ended auspiciously with discoveries further corroborative of a state of civilization as advanced as that of the Egyptians.:
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-28-
Chair
Back & seat
w. relief impress:
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-3- From the material referred to and quoted about I con-clude that all charges incurred up to 10/27/39 for the publica-tion of Volume III of Ur Excavations: Texts have been paid in accordance with agreements made from year to year between the British Museum and the University Museum to bear charges equally. No further charges have been incurred. There is no present legal obligations to proceed with the publication of Volume III of the Text. The is presumablyently no right in the British Museum to incur charges joint liabilities in connection with the publication of this volume. If it is now desired to complete publication of the volume,negotiations may be entered into between the two museums looking toward an agreement for incurring liabilities and sharing the expenses of printing the balance of the second part of Bolume III of the Texts and of any collateral work which may be required in order to complete the publication of this volume.Very truly yours,Howard A. Reid [hand written signature]Howard A. Reid Attorney:
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-3- 11/16/33presented by the Oxford Press until publication is complete and by that time the rate of exchange will certainly be even more unfavourable that at present and the capital will not suffice to meet the bill.Since all instructions to me as Director of the Joint Expedition are supposed to come through the British Museum I referred the matter to Dr. Hill. We sent two cables, one in my name and on in his own, which were dispatched to you on November 9, explaining the evil consequences of delay; your cable in reply to the first of these , sent on November 14, was submitted by me to Dr. Hill and answered by him on November15.I would remark that the sum of $5,000. remitted by you in January last, when rates were no longer so favourable, produced (pound symbol)1493.13.0. The difference between that and the November 1932 rate on the one hand and the actual andprospective rates on the other is indeed catastrophic: and contracts were made in 1932.You will understand that two things concern me. The success of the scheme for financing future volumes of our series out of the proceeds of this--and it was that scheme which elicited the Carnegie grant--is endangered if out of those proceeds we have to make good the deficit on publication price: as the person responsible for the grant I feel this deeply. Secondly the sudden change of policy on the part of the Board seems to reflect so adversely on myself as to make my position most difficult. I appreciate your personal reluctance to forward thse decisions of the Board, but I would ask you to point out to the Board that in submitting their instructions to Dr. Hill I have conformed to the recognized procedure of the Joint Expedition.Yours sincerely,s/ C.Leonard Woolley:
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-3- Education Dep't. Report 32 talks to School classes totaling 1069 children11 talks to adults, including Chinese lectures,with total attendance of 178. GiftsMrs. A. L. Howe, Sioux pipe bag, war club and arrowS. W. Fernberger- Ocarina from Costs RicaJ. Alden Mason - archaeological objects from DelawareMrs. Dwight Robinson - Mexican pottery head.:
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-3-9/21/34of texts also. The Director of the British Museum has suggested that the latter point ought to be submitted to the Carnegie Corporation. If there be any doubt as to their original intention; on the former he holds that the terms of the grant are clear and that the proceeds of sales of this volume are intended to finance the publication of the next. Here is the difficulty of my position. I have two volumes virtually ready for the press, but cannot approach the Oxford Press for an estimate while they are still unpaid and do not know when they will be paid for the work already done. It is proposed to divert to the payment for the first volume the money which I had regarded as the natural advance-payment for subsequent volumes (on this point I would remark that both Museums have money resulting from sales, and I had counted on the joint sum); I feel that the scheme with which I approached the Carnegie Corporation, and to which they gave practical approval, is being seriously compromised and that the lines of action approved by them are not being followed. I am likely to stand condemned in my own eyes of having obtained their money under false pretences. The Board of the University Museum was no party to the negotiations which I undertook with the Corporation and it certainly interprets the terms of the grant very differently from what was, on my side at least, intended by those terms - did so, in fact, from the moment when it passed the moneys received from the Corporation into its general fund; and I can fairly say that the results so far have been bad. If I am right in thinking that the memorandum submitted by me was indeed the basis of the grant and if in the opinion of yourself and other members of the Corporation and terms of that memorandum ought to be and are not being observed, I wish that a word to that effect might be passed to the President of the Museum Board; if I have been mistaken throughout, I have only myself to blame, but if I have been right in my view of the matter I should welcome a hint to the Board which might relieve my personal position, now become almost intolerable.Please forgive me for bothering you at all, and for bothering you at such length.Yours sincerely,C. L. Woolley.:
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-3-a flower carved in relief, one with cattle in relief; the latter, though not of fine workmanship, is particularly important as serving to date other known examples. Two stamp seals and one cylinder seal, beads of carnelian, shell and lapis lazuli and a few copper objects also came from the graves; but perhaps the most important result was the securing of a number of skulls, some in very good condition; only one fragmentary skull of the period was on record hitherto, and our collection may go far towards clearing up a very vexed racial question. The Jemdet Nasr graves lay in rubbish containing quantities of al'Ubaid potsherds of the later type and rested on or were dug into the surface of the now habitual bed of silt which we must connect with the flood; we have dug through this into the lower occupation-strata in which the pottery is exclusively al'Ubaid (we got here one complete painted cup, fragments of figurines and an interesting bead of carved baked clay) and are approaching sea level and virgin soil this shaft will substantiate in a most useful way the conslusions based on the stratification of the \"Flood pit\" dug three seasons ago.It has been a short season but, I think, an eminently successful one, for in each of our objectives we have had results better than I had ventured to hope for, and the work in the deep shaft, which was not part of the regular programme, has p roved most remunerative both in its upper and in its lower levels.\":
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-3-a wholeIn addition to developing the direct educational activities of the Museum, under Mr. Jayne the Museum's research expeditions have been greatly expanded and increased, its various lecture series have been developed and its collections mad available, in a variety of ways, to a far larger public than heretofore. Despite the fact that the institution has had very severe losses in revenue from all sources, its organization has been kept intact and its services to the schools and the public have been definitely increased.Mr. Jayne, in addition to his post at the University Museum is a Director or Manager of the following learned bodies.Library Company of PhiladelphiaFairmount Part Art AssociationPhiladelphia Art AlliancePennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Arts and SciencesGeographical Society of PhiladelphiaAmerican Institute for Persian Art and ArchaeologyEducational Council of the University of PennsylvaniaEdwin Forrest HomeAnd is also a member ofAmerican Philosophical SocietyAmerican Oriental SocietyAmerican Council of Learned Societies, Comittee on Indic StudiesArchaeological Institute of AmericaVisiting Committee, Department of Archaeology, PrincetonOriental GesselschaftAssociazion Internazionale Studi Mediterranei:
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-3-equipment. indeed we can boast of their preeminence over that of other cities. What chiefly characterizes the Museum's collections in general is their quality not their quantity. In Chinese sculpture, for example, no single collection anywhere can in quality touch the assemblage of pieces in the University Museum. Yet it is not that many pieces are it is rather a small collection. But of what quality! The glazed pottery Lohan--best of his tragically reduced family-Flanked by Tai Tsung's horses; the great Ming temple frescoes; the dated stone Kuan Yin and her two gilt bronze colleagues; the Buddha meditating in dry lacquer, and the three severely dominant figures of the Chi dynasty--these objects never to be forgotten. In Egypt all the lower floor of the Coxe Wing is a treasure house of the years of the Museum's work at Memphis; the great columns of the palace of Meranphtah spring upwards and crowned with their lotus capitals; the Arabic room with its ingenuously carved wood and stone, its translucent glass traceries, its varicolored pottery and mosaic fountain basins. While on the floor above, the mummies rest wrapped in silence and the cloaks of ages, and the sculpture ranged in the most perfect of clerestory light is the envy of many a more extensive museum. Yet the collections on view are but a small part of the Museum's usefulness. There are the study rooms packed with duplicate materials, the laboratories for the restoration and rehabilitation of delicate metal objects, the photographic plant, the repair rooms and the large number of scholarly helpers--largely volunteers--who further the research that is the Museum's fundamental aim. Back of all the work within the confines of the Museum itself are the Expeditions. By it constantly with new collections, new information, new realms of discovery, they are basically the reason it advances, they are the:
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-3-lay daggers with hilts of silver and of gold, and against the ends of the pit there were spears stuck upright in the earth, one of them with its shaft mounted with gold. It was indeed a royal treasure that rewards us thus early in the season, and were the remaining months of work to prove barren we could still be content with a success beyond anything we have yet known at Ur. ------------:
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-3-with narrow bands of inlay in blue and white, or red and white, against a black background.\"A rail ran around the top, decorated in this fashion with blue and white circles; attached to the rail and facing outwards were little heads of lions and bulls, all of gold and six on each side of the chariot. From each side of the body of the car projected three larger lions' heads, also of gold, the eyes inlaid with lapis lazuli, and the manes, waved across the chest, represented in lapis and shell.\"Two large panthers' heads of silver stood out from the front uprights and in front of these a rail ran for the width of the body decorated with smaller silver heads and with inlay. On the pole of the chariot was a rein-ring of silver surmounted by a 'mascot' of electrum in the form of a donkey which for realistic modeling must rank as one of the masterpieces of ancient art.\"We had never hoped to recover from the salt-laden soil of Iraq the design of things so perishable as these. Now, for the first time, we can realize the extraordinary richness of the furniture which a Sumerian king might possess in the middle of the fourth millenium before Christ.\"The chariot had been drawn by two asses, and at the head of each ass lay the groom, as if still holding the reins, while a third groom lay by their side.\"The whole group reminded one of the description that Herodotus gives of the funeral of a Scythian King, though whether here the animals and the men had been impaled as in Scythia, or merely killed and permitted to lie in their places, there was no evidence to show.\"On three sides of a 'clothes chest' and under the offerings:
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-4- Anthropological Society of Philadelphia Philadelphia Archaeological Society Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology Numismatic and Antiquarian Society Shakespeare Society of Philadelphia:
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-4-8/6/31Miss McHughMiss Caldwell can show you to whom I have written and a list of possibilities that have not been approached and I must ask you to bend every effort to achieving these needful others.I am leaving a letter for Woolley apologizing for my absence when her arrives. You will be on hand to act as referee, when and if needed, between him and Dr. Legraian and I shall be back at least to pick up the feathers.Gunn should not arrive until I am back, but if I am delayed and his coming is imminent will you engage the necessary rooms for him at a 'pension'; you can see his needs by referring to his last letter to me. Strathhaven Inn at Swarthmore occurs to me as a possibility, or, if he prefers the city, something in West Philadelphia. But I do not think this matter will trouble you, since I calculate to be back by September 20th at the latestFor our own lecture program I have worked out with Mr. Brock a form that preserves the appearance of our little red book yet gives the very pleasing results obtained by Miss Moore's Junior Membership leaflet. But this cannot be printed until it is definitely known whether Woolley will speak on October 31st. I have had no word from him confirming this, but otherwise the copy is ready and can be printed whenever you say so.I really believe that is all, except to tell you the addresses at which I can be reached, and these are (so far as I can now determine) as follows:August 17th - 23rd Care American Express, RomeAugust 25th - 31st \" Morgan & Co., ParisSept. 1st - 12th \" Brown, Shipley, LondonI may try to go to Czechoslovakia to see Fewkes & Co. sometime during the last two periods but I sahll leave forwarding directions if I do. You will, I trust, offer prayers for success with Oberlaender.For your information you had better read the recent letters:
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-4-life blood of its vitality. So long as its expeditions are maintained as Philadelphia's outposts of discovery the University Museum will continue to be foremost among the City's vital institutions.:
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-4-piled against it, we found human bodies, not properly laid out for burial but huddled up as if death had overtaken them suddenly. The body at the chest seemed to be that of a person of some standing, for round its forehead was a frontlet of beads of gold and lapis and two lengths of gold chain, while gold ear-rings were in the ears. Perhaps the keeper of the wardrobe carried on his duties to another world.\"In a shallow trench sunk in the floor of the main shaft and a little to one side of the chariot lay the bodies of five men, and a sixth was on the trench's edge. These had nothing to distinguish what service they were to render for their dead master.\"At the far end of the shaft the harp with the golden calf's head stood at the head of a trench in which were thirteen bodies. One body was crouched against the harp, the arm-bones actually mingling with the decayed wood of the sounding-box, as if death overcame the harpist as he played.The rest of the bodies lay in two parallel rows. Two were of children, the rest apparently of women, and all were dressed alike. At least, each wore on her head the same elaborate headdress, crescent-shaped gold earrings grotesquely large, a veil held in position by a slender copper pin, over the veil a sort of net of narrow gold ribbons which crossed on the top of the head and ran in two bands across the brow, and between these two bands a double string of lapis and carnelian beads from which hung gold pendants in the form of mulberry leaves.\"There could be little doubt that these women comprised the harem of the king. It was a curious point that they had with them none of the objects which appear uniformly in common burials and may be regarded as the necessary equipment for the next world, but:
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-5- 10/9/34But the interpretation of this situation is in your hands, of course. We can but abide by whatever you decide and naturally with willingness. If, however, you decide that the first course is the one to be taken, then the question arises how is the deficit to be handled, and again I shall be only too happy to abide by your decision. My feeling would be that it should be shouldered by both institutions equally, but if you deem it necessary that we underwrite it wholly it will be grievious burden when we are just struggling into an even keel, but it is one that we can, of course, assume.I do most deeply apologize for the length of this letter. I should rather have talked the various angles of the matter over with you but perhaps you can imagine the unpleasantness of resting unspoken under implications which, as they come to me, could not but be regarded as anything but deeply concerning. I am at your service, of course, to discuss the whole matter most exhaustively, either on any of the points set forth above, or on any that I am not aware that Mr. Woolley has mentioned in his letter. If discussion is needful (and it would be a great help to me in formulating my course) I can come to New York anytime to suit your convenience. In any case I trust you will not let me long remain in a difficult shadow which can be, I wish to assure you, immediately and entired dispersed.Sincerely yours,Horace H. F. JayneDIRECTOR.F. P. Keppel. Esq., President Carnegie Corporation of New York, New York, N.Y.:
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-5-should be liquidated from the sale of the publication. The two Museums not having come to a satisfactory agreement on this question, an opinion has now been asked of the Carnegie Corporation by the British Museum and their decision is awaited before final action can be taken\".:
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-5-talks; on the other, the public through tours conducted among the collections, continues to extend its usefulness and bring out the educational value of the Museum's collections.:
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-5-the fact that such lack was not due to poverty is proved by the richness of their head ornaments.\"It must be that they, like all the others buried here, were subordinated to a common purpose; it was not their grave, but the king's; there was no question of supplying their wants in a future life because they died expressly to satisfy the wants of one greater than themselves.\"For there is no question here of the faithful servant dying and being buried with his master. The grooms at the asses' heads were killed in cold blood. They were chattels which the king took with him in case he might have need of them hereafter, just as he took his silver and gold vessels, his heavy copper adze, a set of spears with golden heads and shafts bound with gold and silver bands, the women of his harem, and his gaming board and dice.\"In one part of the shaft area we found no objects of any kind, but here was a rectangle of large rough limestone imbedded in clay. It was only one course thick and sloped down from the side of the cutting toward the centre of the grave. It may well be that this was the altar on which wore sacrificed the human victims to the king's majesty.\"The gaming board found in the king's grave is not so richly decorated as one found last season at Ur, but is made more interesting by the fact that beneath it were found in neat piles the two sets of playing-pieces and the dice. One set of 'men' is composed of simple black squares inlaid with five dots each; the other is of shell squares engraved with animal scenes. One set of dice is of shell with lapis dots, the other of lapis with gold dots.\"Among the offerings piled against the 'clothes chest' were stone vases, jars of white calcite or alabaster, great bell-shaped:
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-6-chariot had been dragged to the door of the tomb, and the asses drawing it and the grooms leading them slaughtered there. The abundance of strikingly beautiful objects, and the light they throw on the prehistoric age in Babylonia make these discoveries the most important of this century in archaeology, and it is a rare privilege of Philadelphia to have contributed to their discovery, and to have here our share of the finds, on public view in the University Museum, where, if you will come to see them, the docents will be glad to tell you more about them:
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-6-steatite bowls, a circular pomade-box with close-fitting lid of steatite, a vase of black and white granite, an oval bowl carved from a large block of obsidian, and a spouted cup of lapis lazuli.\"One very charming object was a small semi-circular silver box, with a lid of inlay work, revealing a lion in white shell engraved with a red set against a lapis background, and close to this was a little gold toilet set of stiletto and tweezers on a gold ring.\"There were a few copper tools and weapons, the most interesting being a pair of axes of a very primitive type such as are represented on shell reliefs found at Kish, and, even more surprising, a set of gold chisels and a full-size saw also made of gold, perhaps the last thing one would expect to find in that metal.\"At one end of the box lay a sceptre of lapis and gold; among the stone vases were two large silver lions' heads, and at the other end of the box was a mass of vessels more or less carefully arranged according to material.\"There were piles of copper bowls and tumblers, one inside the other, and facing these were fifteen silver tumblers nested in sets of five; silver bowls, round and oval, and a tall libation jug and a patten.\"Right against the earth wall at the back of the shaft we found four magnificent gold vessels, the most precious of the offerings dedicated to the dead man. Two were plain and two decorated with fluting and engraving.\"Of the plain vessels, one was a lamp with a long trough spout; the other, a chalice so beautifully proportioned that any applied decoration would have been out of place. One decorated vessel also was a lamp, but of a different type, and the other was a straight-sided tumbler.:
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-6-There is nothing dry about modern archaeology, despite its forbidding name . And few things in museums today attract such widespread interest as the things that have just ben unearthed by the museums expeditions at work. But it must not be lost sight of that the things in themselves are not everything; though they may be beautiful or interesting, it is what they tell us of history tht makes them valuable. They are the sole records, in many instances, of people who lived and laughed and sorrowed and died in the Past of the human Race.:
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-7-\"These four pieces must rank with those from the grave of Mes-kalam-dug as the finest examples of gold work ever yet unearthed in Mesopotamia.\"Taken as a whole, this royal grave which belongs to the oldest series - although it need not be earlier than 3500 B.C., and might even be a century later - has illustrated the extraordinary degree of material civilization which Mesopotamia enjoyed in the fourth millenium B.C., and how much this country was in advance of contemporary Egypt.\"Indeed, it has done more than that. It makes clear that the art of that day already was old and stereoptyped, even decadent, for if the figure of the donkey on the rein-ring is startling in its realism and was the work of an artist who drew his inspiration from nature, the heads of lions and bulls, the commonest of all subjects, are informed by a tradition already hard and fast, so one feels that these from the tomb are likely to reproduce faithfully originals some hundreds of years older than they are.\"But the moral aspects of the early civilization which the grave presents are wholly new and unexpected. Probably here too we have a survival of a much earlier custom. Certainly the graves of the common people show nothing of the kind, and by the time men began to write history, they had either forgotten or were ashamed to record the barbarous practices of their forefathers.\"In Egypt the graves of the kings of the first Dynasty illustrate the latter stages of a similar custom - perhaps another link between the Nile Valley and the Euphrates at that period - and the wooden figures placed in later tombs may bear witness to the same primitive ideas finding expression in a more humane make-believe,:
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-8-carried on scientific investigations for the Museum for the last eighteen years ore more. The major part of our outstanding collections of Maya art and archaeology are due to his activities and his unequalled knowledge of the area and his careful investigations of little known sites have, when published by us, add greatly to our scientific standing in this field.Mr. Burkitt's latest report describes an inportant group of objects acquired for our collections which, as favourable opportunities present themselves, will be forwarded. The report includes also a financial statement which shows that the sum of $2200 $2500 is owing Mr. Burkitt, nothing having been sent him for the past eighteen months or more. I will ask you to approve an appropriation in the sum of $2500 to be forwarded him that he may continue his valuable work in our behalf.The internal activities of the Museum continue to advance. A rearrangement of the American section is in progress, whereby the fine South American ethnological collections made by Dr. Farabee are being transferred to the lower entrance hall where, more advantageously displayed, they will receive the appreciation that is their due. The Eskimo Hall is being repainted and reinstalled and the other galleries in the lower west wing will at the same time be rearranged, it is hoped, more effectivley. The new suites of offices are virtually complete and by the next meeting can be shown to you in actual use.:
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-8-these people will always be the most attractive.Of these expeditions, those working in Cyprus, in Egypt. at Meydum, at Beisan, at Tell Billah, Tepe Gawra, Fara and Ur, all have autumn or winter seasons and their reports of progress come regularly to your attention during the coming months. I wish , therefore, now to tell you particularly of the summers results of the Persian & WA Italian expeditions, whose discoveries in the past few months have been of outstanding interest.:
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-8-\"But that such a custom of burial as that just discovered ever prevailed in Mesosopotamia, we had no knowledge until the spade brought to light this tomb-shaft with its final pomp of royalty, the gold-decked women of the harem laid out in ordered rows in a place apart, the musicians and the servants at their tasks, and the men on guard.\"For the history of civilization the discovery is of the greatest importance in both its aspects. It has supplied definite information which is absolutely new to science, and it affords material for theories still more far-reaching.\":
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-9-has close and pleasant relations of many years standing to assist us at this time and permit us to carry on without impossible curtailments our scientific work and the dessemination of its results for the education of the citizens.One matter more requires your action. When the current operating budget was drawn up last May we were obliged to look upon the darkest side of the picture and eliminate every single thing that was not essential to the operation of the Museum. One of the last to go and especially to be regretted was the fund for the purchase of books. It is among the provision of the George Leib Harrison Foundation that a part of the income may be used for increasing the Library, and it has been customary regularly to make appropriations, therefore, for this purpose. there is a small existing deficit now in the Book Fund amounting to a little ove a hundred dollars; to cancel this and enable us to make certain essential additions to the Library I am asking that you make an appropriation of $500 from the accumulated income of the G. L. Harrison Foundation for this purpose.The Educational Department, despite curtailments of staff and of resources, is carrying on very effectively. From October 16th to November 16th a total of 53 classes were given lectures in the classroom with a total of 1769 students. This compares favourably with the attendance of last year and the demand for appointments is greater than ever before.:
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-BM. UnivMu: share costs of exc.-No arrang ts about publications-Woolley obtained Carnegie grant(for Vol II- Royal Tombs)-proceeds of sale to finance success. vol. (III & IV).-Ready in 1937. IV. VI. VII. VIII. IX (X. Terra Cottas)-Grant did not come from the Trustees!W still titular director of Joint -Exp concerned raising/using.-Terms of grant: Could only sell(no free copies on exchange agreement)- Money ear marked for Further publication No report from Univ Mu. sell cash. Br Mu. still holds (pound symbol):520 American?-Might sale. Vol II at sacrifice price. Future vol. more economic. Looks at Vol IV-Would like. Vol. on TC. sent to him.:
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10 Dec. 1926Dear Dr. Gordon,I am at present correcting the proofs of al-'Ubaid, and as Woolley had to leave for Ur before he could see his page-proofs, I have had to settle many queries on his proofs for him. On the enclosed p. 80 you will see a description of an object at Philadelphia, a small [?] head, for which he planned to [get] an illustration, but of which no photograph or any other reproduction exist here except the rough sketch in the Excavation:
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10.[centred text] BRICKS.ADDU[?]-ADAD.N[centred below opening bracket]New inscription of this hitherto unknown patesi. One example.UR-ENGUR.Type 1. Inscription known, see S.A.K.I., p.186, Backstein B. Found in situ in main wall of Dr. Hall's building. Two examples.Type 2. Inscription known, see S.A.K.I., p.186, Backstein A. Found in situ in first storey of ziggurat. Several examples.Type 3. Inscription known, see S.A.K.I., p.186, Backstein C. Found on surface. Several examples.Type 4. New type of stamp. Found in socket-box in main-wall S. of E-NUN-MAH. Two examples.SULGI (DUNGI). [superscript \"v\" over S]Inscription known, see S.A.K.I., p.190, Backstein B. Found in situ built into a pavement in Dr. Hall's building. Two examples.BUR-SIN. Type 1. Inscription known, see S.A.K.I., p.196, Backstein B. Found in situ in outer wall of E-NUN-MAH [subscript \"v\" under H]. Several examples.Type 2. Inscription known, see S.A.K.I., p.196, Backstein C. Found on surface. Several examples.Type 3. Inscription is the second column only of S.A.K.I., p.198, Backstein D. Found loose outside N.E. wall, E-NUN-MAH [subscript \"v\" under H].:
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1020: T.c. relief. Bearded male. Horned mitre spiral curls. (w.cross)
1369: Lower fragt. pleated skirt. Emblems on either side:
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11 photos 2 given for pressBRITISH MUSEUM,London: W.C.1.7th January, 1929.Dear Mrs. McHugh,I enclose Woolley's report, which elucidates his cable. As this will go by the mail of Jan. 9th, it should reach you by 16th or 17th at latest; but to leave a margin for arrangements, and in case of accidents, I propose Jan. 22nd as the date of publication.I propose to allow the Times two photographs, viz. one of the bull's head and one of the harp, which I have marked with a X, reserving the rest, as he requests in a covering letter, for fuller publication when he has sent some additional photographs.I trust these arragements will commend them- selves to you.Yours sincerelyF.G.Kenyon:
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11 plates of photos attachedUR.November 30, 1924.Sir,I have the honour to report to you as follows on the progress made by your Expedition.The main work has been in the area between the Ziggurat and the NW wall of the Temenos, and although much remains to be done here I can already say that good results have been obtained. The work done has sufficed to prove one thing which I had for some time past suspected, namely that the Temenos wall traced during the first season was wholly late in date, belonging to the Neo-Babylonian period and not necessarily coinciding with the line of any earlier Temenos wall. This of course is most important for the restoration of the ancient city and it also means that our work in future need not be confined to the limits which the discoveries of 1922 - 1923 seemed to determine. / As regards positive results, I might summarise as follows. Ur-Engur's ziggurat was built on a raised terrace of which we have found the NW wall; this is built of mud brick, is steeply battered and decorated with shallow buttresses like those of the ziggurat itself: we found the inscribed nail-like cones of Ur-Engur driven into the wall face at regular intervals, a discovery which will finally put to rest the many theories current as to the use of these cones. A later ruler, probably Dungi, strengthened the original wall by adding to it a facing of burnt brick, and this was again hidden by a second facing wall due to one of the Larsa kings; on the terrace thus enlarged a shrine of the Sun god seems to have been erected by the high priest En-an-atum son of Ishme-Dagan king of Isin in honour of Gungunu of Larsa, while other building operations were carried out by Arad-Sin and the patesi Silli-Adad. In the 16th century B. C. Kuri-Galzu incorporated part of the areain the westward extension of his great columned court; by this time the limits of the ol d terrace had been lost and the level outside it considerably raised; the sacred area was defined anew when the Neo-Babylonians put up the mud-brick Temenos wall. Nabonidus when he restored the ziggurat swept away virtually all the constructions between it and the temenos wall and buried their remains under a new platform level which was kept clear of buildings; a few huts put up in the Persian period only served to mark the decline of the site.I hope, before stopping work on this site, to be able to shew the main line of the ziggurat platform and its subordinate buildings at each period; the work is heavy, but the scientific results [struck out single letter] obtained are quite new. The site does not yield much in the way of objects, and for the most part is not likely to do so, though I trust that later, when we come to dig behind Ur-Engur's retaining wall we may find remains of the older buildings underlying the 3rd Dynasty platform.As it seemed robable that I should have to bury under a dump-heap the E. angle of the Courtyard building I had cleared first, and the result was peculiarly interesting in view of the fact that my report of columns being found last year in Kuri-Galzu's Court has been vehemently attacked by the German school of archaeologists, who would not admit of columns at so early:
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11 September 1948. Dear Dr. Rainey, As I am just about to go off to Turkey for about three months I must write to you to report progress. Progress has not been quite what I hoped. In my letter of 9th July I told you that I proposed to bring out vol. I as being within the limits of the funds at my disposal; but I was then reckoning on remaindering vol. II, and since then the Trustees here, while adhering to the retail price of the volume at £2.50 (9 dollars) have decided against wholesale remaindering, so that I am short of the capital I had hoped to realise on it. Moreover, owing to the absence on hiliday of the head of the Oxford Press in New York, I have not yet heard whether or on what terms that Press would agree to undertake the distribution of future volumes. That being so I have decided to go on at once with the printing of Legrain's volume (Vol. X.) on the seals; that is a small volume, well within my means, and although I have asked the Oxford Press for an estimate I have none the less instructed them to take in hand for an estimate I have none the less instructed them to take in hand forthwith the printing of at least part of it, so that by my return to England things ought to be well under weigh. The question or distribution can just as well be settled later; and when we have the estimate or cost we can settle the selling-price. I am tempted to suggest a relatively high price so that proceeds, even if sales are not above the average, may leave the fund at least not worse off than it is now and facilitate the issue of the next volume; but that is a matter to be settled not by me but by the Trustees on both sides. P.T.O:
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11.[centred text] BRICKS(ctd.).ISHME-DAGAN.Known inscription, Found lying between E-MU-RI-ANA and E-NUN-MAH [subscript \"v\" under H]. Several examples.ENANNATUM.Known inscription, see S.A.K.I.p.206 (2). One example. Surface.NUR-ADAD.Two fragmentary pieces of an inscription probably to be assigned to this king. Surface.SIN-IDINNAM.Two fragments, probably duplicates of S.A.K.I.p.210 (d). Found loose in E-NUN-MAH [subscript \"v\" under H], Room 33.KUDUR-MABUG.Known inscription, see S.A.K.I.p.210 (6), Beckstein A. Found in walls of E-NUN-MAH [subscript \"v\" under H]. Several examples.ARAD-SIN.New inscription recording the building of a canal called \"Nannar is king\". Found loose on S. side of E-NUN-MAH [subscript \"v\" under H].KURIGALZU.Type 1. Known inscription = B.M. 90,029, 90,050, 90,060. See Guide(3) p.63. Found fallen from walls of E-NUN-MAH [subscript \"v\" under H]. Two examples.:
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11/8/26Photographs of these specimens are desired by Mr. Gadd:
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12.[centred text] BRICKS (ctd).KURIGALZU (ctd.).Type 2. New inscription recording restorations in E-GIS-SIR-GAL [superscripts \"v\" over both S's] and on same wall. Only one example found and left in situ in Room 33 18 of E-NUN-MAH [subscript \"v\" under H].SIN-BALATSU-IKBI.[subscript (?)'(?) under T and K]New inscription recording restorations in E-GIS-SIR-GAL [superscripts \"v\" over both S's] by this Chaldaean governor of UR in the reign of Ashur-bani-pal. Found loose between E-NUN-MAH [subscript \"v\" under H] and E-MU-RI-A-NA. Two examples.NEBUCHADNEZZAR IIType 1. Known inscription = B.M. 90, 138-41. Found built into pavement and probably fallen from walls of E-NUN-MAH [subscript \"v\" under H]. Several examples.Type 2. Inscription from different stamp with slight variants on Type 1. Found in pavements and round E-NUN-MAH [subscript \"v\" under H]. Two examples.Type 3. Brick resembling a voussoir, but probably not used as such. Same inscription as Type 2. Two examples.NABONIDUS.Type 1. Known inscription = B.M. 90, 148-54. Found in pavement W. of ziggurat E-NUN-MAH [subscript \"v\" under H], on glacis of ziggurat, and surface generally. SEVERAL examples.Type 2. New(?) inscription recording restoration of ziggurat. Found in pavement W. of E-NUN-MAH [subscript \"v\" under H] and surface. Several examples.Type 3. New inscription concerning the erection of the E-GIG-KISAL. Found in E-NUN-MAH [subscript \"v\" under H], Room 27. One example.:
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12/13/33-3-(2) \"A grant in aid of such publication made to either of the two Museums could be used by it for their join purpose without putting any obligation on the other Museum\". (Extract from the Carngie Grant memorandum)I need hardly point out to you that Sir George Hill's cable regarding your view as to the way in which any deficit in the Fund should be met was based on the view that the Fund was an independent entity and the concern of the Joint Expedition. His view is of course to be traced to my own belief.December 15.Since the above was written I have received from the Oxford University Press an approximate statment of final charges based on the actual work done and including the printing of 3000 copies of the prospectus and colour-plates for the same; I am glad to say that it comes to only (pound symbol)5697.16.0., which is about (pound symbol)800 less than the original estimate; I had, as I said above, taken a maximum figure, but had not expected so radical a reduction.By the way, you speak in your letter of enclosing for confirmation copies of telegrams exchanged; these were accidentially omitted.Now about the book. I am to have advance copies before I leave England, and 600 copies will be ready very soon after, the rest following quickly. I have not yet had word from you as to the numbers of copies required or whether they are to be bound or in sheets, and I hope to hear before I go; but if I do not I shall leave provisional instructions, which can be modified by any instructions sent by you, to the effect that of the first 600 copies 200 shall go to you at once, and of the next batch 40% . As to the circulars I must await your instructons, but I have reserved for your use a batch of 2000 of the specimen coloured plates (I am sending out many of the circulars without such). I am afraid that it is too late for the holiday market.This I think is all and it is indeed enough;!Yours sincerely,S/ C. Leonard Woolley:
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12/3/25Dear Kenyon:In the sheets that have been sent me containing the list of objects found at Ur, presumably a copy of the original register, I find that the numbers run from 1 to 1054 only. A memorandum which I have from Dr. Legrain shows that the numbers in last season's campagin, 1924-25, ran from 2501 to 3356. It would appear therefore that we have received a copy of the register for the first campaign only and that the second and third are lacking. This leaves me in a rather awkward situation. Could you manage to have copies of the remaining lists made and sent to me? There is just a chance that they might still reach me in time to be of use to me in arranging the exhibition. In any case I will need them. Very sincerely yoursDirectorSIR FREDERIC KENYONDirectorThe British MuseumLondon, England:
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1370(?) not [not written in blue pencil]:
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13th July, 1935 Dear Dr. Jayne, (1) As I wrote to you on 15th March 1935, Father Burrow's volume on the Archaic Texts from Ur is now ready. It will contain 50 plates of copies of the cuneiform texts, 37 plates, an autograph list of signs, and 65 pages of introductory and explanatory text and indices, together with about 6 collotypes of selected types of tablet, for epigraphical study. It is estimated by Messrs. Harrison, who printed the similar volume previously, that 350 copies can be produced for [pound symbol] 362. 10s.; but this does not include the cost of the collotypes last mentioned. Allowing for this, we reckon that the total cost would be about [pound symbol] 400. My Trustees have accepted this estimate. In your letter of 23rd October 1934 you were good enough to say that you hoped that the Pennsylvania Museum would be able to bear half the cost. Payment will not, of course, be required until the appearance of the book, i.e. probably not until late in the autumn. (2) You will doubtless have been informed that, as a result of conversations between Mr. Jessup and myself, Dr. Keppel and Mr. Jessup are recommending that the Carnegie Corporation pay off the debt to the Oxford Press standing at [pound symbol] 920, and in addition make up the sum of [pound sign] 381. 0. 5., to be earmarked for the next volume, so that all the proceeds from sales of the \"Royal Cemetery\" may be devoted to financing the next volume, and that we may proceed with the publication on the line originally proposed, according to our interpretation of the conditions, the proceeds from each volume being used to pay for the production of succeeding ones. When we approach the end of the series of volumes, it may be necessary to ask for an advance from the funds of the Museums, to be repaid from future sales; otherwise, when the series is complete there will be an accumulation of money for which there would be no use according:
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150mm[crossed out due to error]
Found at same place.
Papsukal-Mud Fig. Traces of white plaster remain. Human bodies with dogs heads, left hand held across chest. rt. arm bent at elbow and held upright.
EAgle headed-genies-4 wings carries cove in the rt. hand &bucket in the left hanging
CF-Jastrow Builders Type 60
CF Nippur CBS. 4552-Four wing_d demon amulet-left down-Rt. raised-suspension ring over head. Human body scorpion tail. :
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15th July 1924.My dear Gordon,I have delayed answering your letter of June 23rd, because Mr.Joyce, the author of the Maya Guide-book, was away, and it was necessary that I should hear what he had to say about the passage of which you complain. On looking up the footnote to which you refer, I was relieved to find that the note as a whole did not convey the same impression of censure as the passage which you quote, when read by itself. To me, reading it without any knowledge of the events referred to, the whole of the note appeared to be governed by the fact mentioned in the first sentence, viz. the occurrence of a landslide. No blame is suggested for the non-recognition at first that a landslide had occurred, and presumably it could not be recognised until the excavation had proceeded some way. Therefore I read the non-recognition as a misfortune and not a fault. The most careful excavation may involve the destruction of some evidence, without any blame attaching to the excavator, especially when the true conditions are unknown in advance. That is how I understood it.Therefore I can truly say, first that, reading the passage without any idea that it referred to work with which you were concerned, it did not occur to me that anyone was being censured (in/which case I ought to have inquired into the circumstances referred to), and secondly that, on reading it again after receiving your letter, I do not think it/contains:
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16a = 1RExchange is slightly lower than 13.3R = 1£JOINT EXPEDITION OF THE BRITISH MUSEUMAND OF THE MUSEUM OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIATO MESOPOTAMIA.STATEMENT OF ACCOUNTS FOR NOVEMBER 1927.A. TRAVELLING. £ s d Rev. E. Burrows 70. 0. 0 B. WAGES. Paid out to workmen, Nov. 5. Rs.791. 8 Nov.12. 677. 13 Nov.19. 988. 11 Nov.26. ----- 727. 12 Dec. 3. 770. 15 3954. 9 = 296. 13. 9. Wages of guards for 5 weeks 28. 10. 2. Wages of foremen for one month 21. 0. 0. ----- ----- ----- ----- C. PURCHASES FOR WORK. Printing 4. 4. 9. Customs dues Rs.258. 6. Expenses on car 250. 9. Basra agents' account 82. 11. Post and telegrams, Ur, 55. 8. Small antikas 35. 5. Drugs 49. 0. Stationery 15. 5. Varia purchased for work 54. 11. 801. 10. = 60. 5. 4 801. 10 > corrected to 801. 7D. COMBINED HOUSE AND WORK EXPENSES Water contract for month 15. 0. 0. E. LIVING EXPENSES. Food stuffs from Nasiriyah 191. 2 from Baghad 110. 15 from Basra 15. 12 from Ur 7. 12 325. 9. = 24. 8. 3. House servants' wages 15. 15. 0 Building new servant's room 55. 12 Purchases for house 56. 3 111. 15 = 8. 7. 3 Papers 1. 5. 11F. SALARIES. C. L. Woolley 66. 13. 4 M. E. L. Mallowan 16. 13. 4 TOTAL £623. 17. 1. [OK]:
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1923-24The Ziggurat of Ur.During the whole of our digging season the greater number of the workmen have been engaged upon the clearing of the Ziggurat, and before the work closed down this, the most imposing of the monuments of Ur, was fully exposed as it had not been since its destruction in the fifth century B.C.In each of the chief cities of Mesopotamia there stood of old one of these ziggurats or staged towers wose ruins today dominate the lower mounds that were temples or palaces. They were great solid structures rising up tier above tier, each stage smaller than the one below, so that the whole had the effect of a stepped platform; stairways or sloping ramps led from the ground level to the summit,and thereon was set a little shrine dedicated to the city's patron god. The amount of labour that went to the building of such a tower was immense, and one wonders why it should have been incurred so regularly in every great town. The explanation seems to be that the Sumerians were originally a hill folk, accustomed, as all hill folk are, to putting up their temples and their altars on the \"high places\" and on \"every high hill\"; when they moved down into the plain of Mesopotamia, where the flat alluvium stretches unrelieved to the horizon, they felt the need of the \"high place\" where god could be properly worshipped and so set to and built artificial mountains whereby man might approach nearer to heaven. The tower of Babel was meant to storm the throne of god with prayer at close quarters rather than by force of arms. The ruins of Khorsabad have given us the remains of one ziggurat fairly well preserved and Herodotus has left us a description of that of Babylon; the Greek's account is none too clear, but he evidently is describing a building very different to that represented by the ruins, and we can only gather that whereas the idea of all the ziggurats was the same, in plan and in ornament they varied much one from another. Therefore the clearing of that at Ur, the best preserved of all the ziggurats in Mesopotamia,was bound to be a work of great interest. Much of the history of the monument was already known, for in the middle of last century Mr. Taylor, excavating on behalf of the British Museum, had found the inscribed clay cylinders whereon Nabonidus, last king of Babylon, recorded how he had repaired and completed the tower begun but left unfinished by Ur-Engur and his son Dungi, kings of Ur about 2300 B.C. We knew therefore that we should have to deal with buildings of that early date and of the sixth century B.C. Actually of Dungi we have found no trace, and we can only conclude that his work was limited to the upper structure which was swept away to make room for the new buildings of Nabonidus; it is safer to assume this than to suppose that Nabonidus was in error, for the king was a keen archaeologist,[???] fond of digging up the foundation-records of his predecessors and basing his statements upon their written evidence; that he did so here is sure, for at the corner of the second stage of Ur-Engur's work, below an unbroken pavement laid down by Nabonidus, we found a hole driven right into the heart of the brickwork, a hole that could only have been made by the later king's workmen searching for the old foundation-deposits. Even without the later foundation-cylinders (further examples of which were found by us this year) it would have been possible to assign to each king his own part in the building, for the royal stamps of the bricks left no doubt on the subject, except indeed where the later builders re-used some of the material taken from the earlier walls. The whole of the lowest stage is due to Ur-Engur, and everything visible above it to Nabonidus. There is nothing to tell us what the upper part of the original ziggurat was like; that of the sixth century B.C. can be reconstructed in all its essential lines. The lowest stage is a rectangle measuring about 220 195 x 150 feet, the short ends straight, the longer sides slightly convex, as if to give an appearance of greater strength to the centre, where the building was highest. It is solid throughout, of crude brick inside with a thick facing of baked bricks laid in pitch for mortar; to secure a bond, reed mats dipped in pitch were laid between the brick courses at regular intervals. The quality of the bricks and that of the bricklaying is astonishingly good, and much of the wall face is as clean and new-looking as when it was first built. The surface is relieved by shallow buttresses; a further variety is afforded by the numerous \"weeper-holes\" running right through the thickness of the burnt-brick wall for drainage of the filling which with-:
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1924 DEC 23 PM 8 03NYA1058 9 SUBJECT TO CORRECTION CABLEBASRAH 23 410PGORDON (FOR GORDON CARE THE UNIVERSITY MUSEUM U.OF P. 135533RD AND SPRUCE STREETS)ANTIQUE PHILADELPHIAACANONEIS TAPOTEUR ABJUGABAM REEGEITEN RANCISSE WOOLLEY.Present address unknown I do not think he willaccept responsibility. I cannot recommend him.Woolley:
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1924-25 A Great Temple of Babylonia.By C. Leonard Woolley, Director of the Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania to Mesopotamia.More and more clearly as the work of excavation goes on at Ur of the Chaldees do we see the real nature of the Moon God's temple. To understand it one must rid one's mind of all ideas derived from the self-contained and isolated unity of the temples of Greece, of Rome or of Egypt; here there is a different conception of the deity and corresponding to that a diferent conception of how he should be housed. The Babylonian god was a king, the Lord of his city; he controlled its destinies much as did the temporal ruler and therefore he must have his ministers and his court; he was agreat landowner, and therefore he needed stewards to manage his estate: there are preserved lists of the functionaries attached to a temple which have a curiously mundane sound; of course there is a High Priest and a body of priestly satellites, but we find too the sacristan, the choir-master, the treasurer, ministers of War and of Justice, of agriculture and of housing, a Controller of the Household, a Master of the Harem, and directors of live-stock, dairy-work, fishing and mule donkey-transport. All these carried on their duties in the Temple precincts, and so the Temple is not a single building but a huge complex which is at once temple and palace, government offices and stores and factories.At Ur this complex, called E-gish-shir-gal, covered an area some four h hundred yards long by two hundred yards wide, surrounded by a heavy wall. In the west corner of the enclosure was a raised platform also defended by walls, whereon rose the ziggurat tower, and below the ziggurat stood the particular private house of the God. If in some respects we might compare the whole temple to a rambling mediaeval moastery, in others we might find the best parallel in a mediaeval castle, with the ziggurat and its platform representing the keep, the walled temple enclosure the inner baily, and the walled city beyond the outer baily; for the god of the Babylonian city was a War Lord, and his house was a house of defence, the final stronghold of his people. Just as in a cathedral there are chapels dedicated to many saints, so in E-gish-shir-gal there were many shrines where subordinate gods received their worship, but these buildings are relatively unimportant: even E-Nannar, the Moon God's own house on the terrace, was not very large and in mere area was completely outdone by the more secular buildings which crowded the sacred Temenos. Upon the character of these a vivid light is thrown by the inscribed tablets found in the ruins, and fortunately, just as our plans of the site grow more complete and more complicated, tablets have turned up in far greater numbers: apart from isolated finds, which are common enough, we have this season hit upon one small hoard of documents dating from the time of the Larsa kings (about 2000 B.C.) and a very large hoard, which indeed we have only started to unearth, dating from the last years of the Third Dynasty of2:
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1924-25During January the Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania has carried on work on the site of the Convent built by king Nabonidue for his daughter, a large part of which has been unearthed in December, and has excavated a temple of Nin-Gal, the wife of the Moon god, lying immediately under the Ziggurat tower in the corner of the walled enclosure which in late Babylonian times when the levels of the site had changed replaced the terrace originally laid out round the ziggurat: and another small shrine in front of the steps of the tower has also been cleared.The ground-plan of the Princess' convent has been recovered almost in its entirety, a fine large building well designed, with dwelling-houses at the back, then offices, schoolrooms etc. surrounding on three sides the great paved court, and on the other side of this the ancient sanctuary of Dublal-makh enlarged and converted to the orthodox scheme of a Babylonian temple but still [undecipherable] retaining as its core the two-chambered shrine built by king Bur-Sin seventeen hundred years before and restored by the piety of many subsequent rulers of Ur.Most of the convent buildings were found in a deplorably ruined state, and today virtually nothing of them is left, for all has had to be removed in order that we might reach the lower levels. Six or eight feet below the foundations of the Nabonidus house lies another big range of buildings con-nected with E-dublal-makh in its earlier form: again there is a great court-yard paved with brick, and about it offices and stores, but now the old shrine stands isolated on a plinth of fluted brickwork and the walls, presered to a [undecipherable] man's height and more, bear on their bricks the royal stamps of Kuri-galzu, of Sin-idinnam, of Ishme-dagan and of Bur-Sin, and date back to more than 2000 years before Christ. Numerous objects were found in the process of removing the upper strata, little copper watch-dogs that were buried beneath the floors to protect the house, fragments of sculpture and of inscriptions, vases of bronze and of clay and terra-cotta figurines; but the most interesting discovery was of a hoard of clay tablets which preserve the records of the business affairs of the temple over a space of two or three years about 2200 B.C. There are inventories of the lands attached to the Nannar temple, lists of the rent and tithes paid by the farmers on those lands, little clay receipts for every pound of butter or pint of oil or head of sheep that was brought in to the great store-house, and monthly and yearly summaries of all these receipts; lists of the payments by the town merchants in hides or woolen thread, gold and silver and copper; issue vou-chers duly dated and signed and sealed for everything that the temple stew-ard gave out to the priests and functionaries of the temple, to the guards and sweepers, and to the men, women and children employed in the temple work shops; and then there are the pay-books and registers of these workshops, recording how much raw wool was handed out per month to each employee and how much finished cloth each one produced, and all the details of how much grain, oil, etc., was supplied to each as rations and pay, the amount vary-ing according to the age and utility of the worker. It all gives a wonderful vivid picture of how life went on in the great building through the ruins of which one walks today, repeopling it with a very real past.:
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1926-7<ins>DEBIT ACCOUNT. £. s. d.Payments to Eastern Bank by Philadelphia 2500. 0. 0. by grant 1250. 0. 0. *subscriptions 703. 10. 6. per C. L. W. 135. 0. 0. ditto (Iraq) per C. L. W. 152. 10. 0. â subscriptions after May 1. 397. 10. 0. [total] 2638. 0. 0.[note: the total shown above is hand-corrected to read 2638.10.6] (this includes £250 <ins>230-13 due for the year 1925-6).â (this includes A. L. Reckitt £250 not yet paidBy interest 2. 3. 5.By sales of reports and stock 38. 9. 0. [subtotal] 5178. 12. 5.By interest 1. 12. 5. [total] 5180. 4. 8.:
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1927-8The sixth season's work at Ur undertaken by the Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania has already proved to be the most successful of all. Digging began on October 17th, so that little more than a month has passed, and yet we can report the discovery of the most remarkable objects that the soil of ancient Sumer has yet yielded to archaeology. The first part of our programme was the continuation of work on the early cemetery which last year gave us the golden dagger. From the very outset the dig prospered and every day brought in some new treasure of ancient craftsmanship - engravings on shell, gold beads or pendants, a finger-ring decorated with a minute cable pattern or with cloisonne work set with lapis lazuli, cylinder seals finely engraved in lapis, crystal or shell and sometimes set in gold; moreover the excavation of a new quarter of the cemetery confirmed and added much to the knowledge that had been acquired last year, for though there had been a great deal of plundering in antiquity the levels here are less confused and we could gain a better idea of each period. Even the changes of fashion can be traced. At one time the women wear a sort of hair-net made of gold ribbons between which runs a double string of coloured beads, lapis and carnelian, hung with gold mulberry leaves, and the ear-rings are grotesquely large pendants in the form of a crescent moon; later the same gold ribbon is used in a different way. It is twisted in a spiral round two long tresses that hange from above and these braided locks are then brought one above the other across the front of the head so as just to overlap an oblong plate of gold tied over the forehead, and now the ear-rings are quite small spirals of gold and silver interlaced. Had we but gone on as we began we should have had an excellent season and brought back a rich collection of objects; actually we have enjoyed astonishing good fortune.One disappointment we had had, the discovery of a royal tomb, a solid:
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1927During December the work of the Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania has been unusually varied. There were left over from our previous seasons a number of loose ends that had to be tied up, buildings not wholly excavated, theories not satisfactorily proved and requiring more digging for their proof, and I decided to devote, if necessary, a whole month to work which might seem desultory and prove unremunerative but was essential to a proper understanding of the site. Now most of our difficulties have been cleared up, but in the process we have not only obtained good scientific results but have secured a finer collection of small objects than in any former year.The discovery of a new gateway where we had conjectured a straight wall completes our ground-plan of Nebuchadnezzar's sacred Temenos and throws new fresh light upon the nature of the buildings inside it; the gateway lies directly in front of the façade of the Ziggurat, and as it is the most imposing of all the gates there can be little doubt that the great courtyard (only partly excavated as yet) which lies between it and the Ziggurat stairs is the main temple of Nannar the Moon God. We have completed the excavation of the buildings which lined the Ziggurat terrace along its south-west side and can follow their vicissitudes back from the time of Nabonidus (550 B.C.) to a period when the Ziggurat as we know it was not yet built; walls of plano-convex mud brick shew that at least as early as 2800 B.C. there stood here a tower which was to be buried beneath the massive pile of Ur-Engur. In the temple of E-Nun-Makh we have dug down below the brick pavements of Nebuchadnezzar and have found the memorials of an earlier king of Babylon, one Marduk-nacin-ahi (1117-1100 B.C.), who now figures for the first time in the history of Ur, and here too we found what is probably unique in Mesopotamia, an inscription on ivory in the Phoenician language, and with this a set of Phoenician toilet articles in ivory including a beautifully engraved comb. A small excavation on an outlying site rather over a mile from the:
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1927Rec'd Jan 1928During December the Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania had the good fortune to discover at Ur two more royal tombs dating back to the fourth millennium before Christ.The first of these was of the elaborate sort which seems to have been peculiar to royal persons and was accompanied by human sacrifice on a lavish scale. A large rectangular pit had been dug, approached by a sloped ramp, in one corner of which was built the tomb proper, a a stone chamber roofed with arches of burned brick and entered by an arched doorway. It was astonishing to find that the builders of that early time were already familiar with the arch and the vault, architectural features which were to remain unknown to the western world for another three thousand years. The vaulted tomb was to receive the body of the king and all his personal belongings required in the next world; the remaining area of the pit was for offerings of a more general nature and for the bodies of those who should accompany their dead lord. When we excavated it it looked like a shambles. The tomb had been plundered in antiquity and in it we found only the leavings of the robbers, but even so we had reason to be content; a frontlet of gold chains and gold and lapis beads had been overlooked; there was a very fine gaming-board set in silver with all its squares made of shell plaques engraved with animal scenes and coloured in red and black; and against the wall, buried in the fallen stones but yet miraculously preserved, [indecipherable] a silver model, two feet long, of a rowing-boat, high sterned and high prowed, complete with oars and awning. Like the Egyptians, the ancient Sumerians believed that the dead must cross the water separating this world from the next, and the ferry-boat was commonly placed in the grave for the man's use, but only here have we found anything so delicate and so costly. But the thieves who broke into the tomb had not disturbed the rest of the grave area, and in that there was plenty for us to find. Against the wall of the shaft, which had been hung with mats, stood two statues of bulls; the bodies, originally of wood, had decayed away, but the heads were preserved; one was of copper with eyes inlaid with:
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1928From: The University of Pennsylvania For releaseBureau of Publicity, Philadelphia ----- Thursday, Jan. 12Philadelphia, Jan. 11 - Rich in treasures, and strewn with bodies of musicians, servants and gold-decked women of the harem who accompanied their master in death, the most remarkable royal grave found thus far in Ur of the Chaldees has been discovered by the joint archaeological expedition of the University of Pennsylvania and the British Museums, a report received today reveals.The grave is totally unlike the hundreds of others exacavated [sic] in the cemetery in Ur in which the expedition is working, and provides definite information entirely new to science as well as affording material for far-reaching theories concerning the history of civilization, according to C. Leonard Woolley, director of the expedition.The body of the king was not found, but presence of the bodies of more than a score of men and women who constituted the king's household offers dramatically the first proof that in the fourth millenium B.C., there were practiced in Mesopotamia burial rites and ceremonies about which later tradition is silent and archaeologists hitherto knew nothing, Woolley states.A magnificently decorated chariot and harp, gold and silver vessels, an exquisite toilet set, and various other treasures yielded by the grave serve to illustrate the extraordinary degree of material civilization which Mesopotamia enjoyed more than five thousand years ago and how far it was in advance of contemporary Egypt, according to the director.Excavation of the grave, which closely followed that of the grave of Mes-kalam-dug, a royal prince, was accomplished only after:
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1929LIST OF OBJECTS SHIPPED BY THE BRITISH MUSEUM TO PHILADELPHIA FOR THE GREAT EXHIBITION OF UR MATERIALS HELD IN THE UNIVERSITY MUSEUM IN MAY, 1929:
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1st Bab. Kassite
TC. pair of scat_d fem. in high relief.
rt. h. of one, lt h. of other resting against the breast. Both have wig down to sh. and long sheepskin (?) coat to feet
Forearms exposed. Full faces.
Feet on a Foot-rest(?)
Bands against a breast may support a pot(?):
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2 beard_d Gods facing e.o.
& carry_g the litmus Type I.b.A.
From waist up-Poor:
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2 birds fac_g e.o. on a panel
w. some v shap_d object between their necks.:
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2 bull. leg_d demons Fac_g e.o.
hold_g upright staffs like palm-
logs-
Heads miss_g:
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2 clay tables. Circular flat top. 3 legs
small hole in centre due to depression underneath. In each case there is a drop of glaze which has fallen on this side & runs towards the central hole. The objects therefore seem to have been used as tripod supports, with the table top downwards as base, which was to be treated with glaze. :
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2 fig- lost below waist.
Man on right. beard_d, full face, high headd. holds stick (?) in rt. h. Rt sh. bare, l. covered.
Woman full face, high headd, rests one hands on his sh. Neckl.
Rt. sh. bare.
Hole 4mm between the 2 fig.:
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2 Fig. both Fem. Taller holds 2 cup in 1. h. & stick(?) in rt. :
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2 head ornaments, with three each inlay-flowers.1 head ornament with lapis knobs.4 pins with lapis heads.Inlay work:-Square of 12 engraved shell plaques, in form of a gaming board.Toilet box, semi-circular, with lid of lapis and shell inlay, a lion overcoming a bull.Cylinder-seals:-Lapis cylinder of A. BAR. OI.Shell cylinder of Lugal-shagDadda.Several fine archaic seals of lapis, and a number of later examples.Stone Vases:-Alabaster lamp, with head of bull, of Sargonid period.Small lipped cup of lapis lazuli.Oval bowl with knob handles, translucent green calcite.Alabaster spouted pot.Amulets:-Lapis, bearded bull.Copper objects of special interest :-Breast ornament (?) 2 repousse lions and circular plaque.Crushed helmet on human skull.Drinking pipe, with tubular lapis beads.Large lamp of 'shell' form.Necklaces, beads, etc :-The queen's cloak of beads, lapis, cornelian, and gold, some of the latter with filigree work.A number of necklaces, with beads and pendants in gold, lapis and cornelian.:
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2 hum. Fig. Hand. model_d Crude:
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2 hum. fig. Hand/ model_d crude:
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2 seat_d fem fig., clothed of very unequal size. :
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2<L. LEGRAINUR EXPEDITIONIRAQ>year, and W. expect to work till 6th of March. We will leave about the middle of March. I will go straight across the desert to Jerusalem and from there to Tunis and Algier before returning to Marseille Paris and London. You have my Paris address - 3 rue de Chartres, Neuilly sur Seine. We have not yet received the much expected Victrola and the thirty records, but the thought of it has cheered up extremely. It was a kind thought and a good heart who devised the scheme-We had our Xmas dinner in good English style with one turkey, one goose, four ducks, two plum puddings, six bottle of Champagne, one of golden sherry, two of Vermuth and no end of Whisky. Don't print that in the Museum Journal please. I like to leave them under the impression of our hardships-.Another good improvement was the wire netting at the door and windows which keep the flies effectively out. The white ants still pierce the walls hunting for books and paper their favorite food, but we drown them in kerosine.II Have you ever received my paper written on the boat crossing the ocean and mailed from Rome:
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2<Thackeray Hotel>or not. In the case of the gold wig - Baghdad's property - since the Br. Mu. ordered an electrotype, they could indoubtedlty make two in order to send the original at [?] back to Baghdad where it is wanted. The copy would serve as well in Philadelphia and so avoid further complications.W. admitted at once the opportunity and fair deal of exhibiting the best objects in Phil. as here.4°) I have cancelled my sailing on Saturday Sept 29 and reserved a cabin on \"Paris\" Oct 3rd - incidentally that notably increases the expenses- But I see no possibility of winding up before end of Sept. - The Paris is a faster boat and I won't loose much time5°) We keep making equal lots and drawing for luck and avoiding choosing:
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2. £ s dF. COMBINED EXPENSES. Petrol, oil etc. 21. 12. 0. Water contract for March 12. 3. 0. Water contract up to June 30. 11. 8. 0.G. TRAVELLING EXPENSES. Combined party to Baghdad 23. 5. 6. C. L. Woolley, to Bath 72. 2. 0. L. Legrain, on account, 80. 0. 0. M. E. Mallowan 87. 9. 8. A. S. Whitburn 86. 7. 2. Foremen to Jerablus 25. 1. 8. H. SALARIES. C. L. Woolley, four months, 266. 13. 4. A. S. Whitburn, March and 11 days of April, 42. 0. 0. TOTAL. 1268. 1. 10.Included in Jul-Oct 1926 StatementN. B.Two items of actual expenditure as follows, (1) Purchase of two new trucks for light railway £16. 6. 0. (2) Expenses of going to Hillah 18. 18. 6. Total, £35. 4. 6.are not included in the above: the trucks were bought after the close of the season, with a view to next year's work, and the expenses of the trip to Hillah should be reckoned as the cost price of goods taken over from the stores there for the Expedition, some being objects which would have had to be bought before next season. These two items should therefore be carried over until next year, and for the purpose of this season's account their cost is reckoned as cash in hand.:
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2. £ s d 508 Brought forward 458. 13. 2 F. Salaries C. L. Woolley 66. 13. 4 M: E. L. Mallowan 16. 13. 4 ------------------ Total £. 531.. 19. 10 591 ------------------ £591-19-10 is correct GMB:
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2. (?hand written symbol? on paper)it may have contained clothes, but no traces of such remained. Along the sides of it lay more copper vessels and many vases of stone, mostly of white calcite or alabaster and of green-grey steatite, but amongst them were two rareities, an oval bowl of obsidian and a spouted cup carved from a lump of blue lapis lazuli: there were more than forty stone vessels in all. With them were found two large(word struck through indecipherable) lions' heads of silver with lapis eyes, probably ornaments from a stool or chair, a number of copper tools, chisels, axes and adzes, and quantities of beads of lapis lazuli and gold and a small semicircular silver box the lid of which was a mosaic in lapis and shell, the finest example of this technique that we have yet unearthed, representing a lion a lion crouching over his prey; the figure of the beast, (strike through) white picked out in red stands out boldly against the blue background and is far more realistic than the normal lion of Sumerian art. Close to this lay a set of chisels in gold and a gold saw, with two axes of copper bound with gold; presumably these were ceremonial tools not intended for practical use, as must also have been four throwing spears with long gold heads and shafts bound with gold and silver; even our workmen protested against the likelihood of anyone throwing away weapons so precious! Next to the golden saw was a gaming board of inlay work, made more interesting by the fact that with it had been placed the two sets of \"men\"- one set finely engraved shell plaques bearing scenes of animals- and the dice with which the game was played, one set of shell inlaid with lapis, the other of plapis inlaid with gold; we have now three such gaming-boards, and it should be possible to recover the rules of the game.But the most remakable objects in the grave lay apart from these already des-cribed and, unlike them, had no parallel in any grave discovered heretofore; they were a twelve-stringed harp and a chariot. Both had been made of wood and the wood had de-cayed away entirely, but in each case the woodwork had been outlined with borders of inlay which still kept its place in the soil, and by following this up we were able:
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2. [15 in pencil and circled in upper right corner]the silhouette completely, the other. standing upright in the soil, was bent and broken, the hind legs being detached, but the thickness of the body and the spacing of the flowering plants was kept, so that here too restoration is made simple and safe: in neither case was there anything missing. Since the women's head-dresses are so numerous I am bringing back fine examples waxed in the earth so as to preserve the remains of the skull and all the visible ornaments in their position as found; for exhibition purposes these should be of great value.The work now in progress will I hope before long bring us to the tomb connected with the \"death-pit\". In another part we are getting down to where there may be the tomb connected with the \"death-pit\" containing forty bodies described in my last report. In another place we have found one corner of a great stone tomb which ran under the high undug soil and are now working down from the top and shall in a few days be in a position to examine it properly. Elsewhere on the low level we have found what appears to be the corner of another \"death-pit\", but I doubt whether we shall be able to clear it this season. On the whole therefore our prospects are excellent and I hope to be able to report fresh successes in the near future.Trusting that you will be satisfied with this report I have thehonour to remain, Sir,Your very obedient Servant,C. Leonard Woolley [signature][NB Part of the last paragraph has been marked as 22 and a pencil line drawn around it. The sentence starting with 'Elsewhere on the.....' and ending with 'in the near future. ']:
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2. -out this precaution would have swelled with the infiltration of the winter rains and burst the ceiling. On three sides the ziggurat walls rise straight and unbroken from the ground to a height of 60 feet, but on the NE side, which is carried up some 8 feet higher, are the stairs leading to the summit. There were three flights of a hundred steps each; a central flight, and from either corner of the ziggurat a flight running up against the wall face, the three converging at the top in a broad gateway through the parapet of the second stage; the two angles between the central and the side stairways are filled by solid platform-towers whose flat tops were probably decorated with statues. The whole conception is very dignified, and the threefold approach must have lent itself well to such ritual processions as we may imagine to have formed part of the Moon-god's worship. That there was a second stage to Ur-Engur's tower is certain, and we have found remains of it in situ, but from Nabonidus' account we may perhaps infer that there were no more than two; but through its design may not have satisfied the Babylonian king the building such as it was planned must have been completed in the time of the Third Dynasty of Ur; during the next eighteen hundred years royal builders who did much work in the city carried out minor repairs to the ziggurat and if the top had been left unfinished would certainly have worked there too, but neither we nor Nabonidus found any evidence for their having done so. We must conclude that Ur-Engur's building whose lower part survives today was completed at least during his son's reign, and that when Abraham lived at Ur he looked up daily to a ziggurat which if not so lofty as some was at any rate a finished monument. In the sixth century B.C. Nabonidus respected most of what was left of the ancient building. He put down new brick treads for the staircases, but he did not alter their design, and it was only on the top of the structure that he swept away the older ruins altogether to make room for something more suited to his tastes. Three stages set on the old base gave greater height to the platform on which the shrine was to be built; these were not of the same proportions as the lowest stage, but left at either end a platform much wider than along the sides, and on the NE side there was no lowest stage at all, the entrance from the triple stairway giving directly on to the second platform. Entering here one turned to the left and went down a short flight of steps to the lowest platform at the SE end of the ziggurat (like all such, the ziggurat of Ur is orientated with its corners, not its sides, to the cardinal points of the compass), and passing to the centre of this up a broad staircase to the top platform of all, while smaller flights led to the third platform by which one could walk right round the building . Theoretical reconstructions of ziggurats in the past have always aimed at a perfect symmetry such as the groundplan would seem to dictate; the ruins at Ur present to us a structure curiously irregular and almost lopsided. But this irregularity is calculated. The top of the ziggurat is treated as a thing in itself, without reference to the surroundings, which indeed were too far below to matter; everything is subordinated to the effect to be obtained from the lowest platform at the SE end, where the spectator has before him the stepped terraces and the main and side stairways, all the lines centering on the shrine above. From below, the only view that really mattered was that of the NE face, for all the other sides were more or less encumbered and concealed by other buildings; here therefore the lowest stage was carried up higher and the passage from the stairway to the lowest platform was hidden by a parapet which masked the real lack of balance on the two sides; only two upper terraces were visible with the shrine crowning the whole. In a previous report I described a large courtyard that lay below the ziggurat on the NE side. The floor of this lay at a lower level than the ziggurat, which really stood high on an artificial terrace held up by the boundary wall of the court, and it was from the court that the best view of the ziggurat was obtained. To some extent we can recover at least the main features of this view. The courtyard, with its paving of brick and asphalte, stretched this way and that for a hundred yards and was some sixty yards wide; the bounding wall was decorated with attached half [undecipherable]:
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2. all the walls he encountered; from the scattered remains of mud brickwork found in the patches of undisturbed soil it was difficult to reconstruct any kind of plan without an undue exercise of the imagination. However on Nov. 9th and the following days we found no less than four boxes of burnt brick in the remains of a mud-brick wall containing foundation-deposits of King Dungi, in each case a copper statuette of the king and a stone tablet with the dedication of a shrine to his patron goddess, and on Nov. 14th a broken diorite statuette of Dungi with a good inscription on its back was found, confirming in some measure the theory with which we had started the dig. But the site was so confused that I decided that it was inadvisable to continue work on it with the whole of my large gang; it was better to go slowly and elucidate a few essential points before attempting excavation on a big scale; therefore the greater part of the men were moved further north to a different site while a small gang was kept on both on the top of the mound and also on its eastern slope where as yet no work had been done. My idea was that a heavy buttressed wall discovered in 1925 behind the temple excavated by Dr. Hall was in reality the SE wall of the original Temenos, that this would cross the site through the middle of the E-Harsag mound holding up on its north side the terrace on which Dr. Hall's temple was built, and that on its southern side there would be found a terrace projection jutting out from the confines of the Temenos proper and surmounted by the Dungi palace. At first our work seemed to have no result: no true walls showed up, but a complexity of drain pipes and mud brick congolmerate out of which it was hard to make sense; but all objects found were of high antiquity, pottery resembling that of Tell el Obeid rather than anything to which we are accustomed at Ur and inscribed clay tablets which Dr. Legrain on epigraphical grounds dates as older than the First Dynasty of Ur: this harmoised with the fact that immediately below the Dungi walls on the top of the mound there were scanty remains of plano-convex mud brick walls of the type of the Second Dynasty of Ur which were themselves so high up that one could argue to the existence at a lower level of many generations of still earlier work. The difficulties of the are, I believe, now in a fair way to be solved; terraces and retaining walls are beginning to appear built in the most primitive style hitherto remarked in our excavations. I hope to clear up the plan of the terrace outlines and shall then dig down from the top of the terrace through the Larsa and Third Dynasty remains in with the idea of finding traces of the First Dynasty and of the prehistoric settlement. Meanwhile the bulk of my men have been at work on the area between the Palace mound and the large temple the excavation of which was begun at the end of last season, and a considerable part of this has already been cleared at least as regards its upper levels. On the top were found remains of the Nebuchadnezzar Temenos wall, and we were able to locate the gateway whose existence we had suspected in 1923 but had conjecturally restored it in the wrong position: incidentally I was gratified at finding in the hinge-boxes of the gate stamped bricks of Nebuchadnezzar, for although I had attributed the building of the Temenos wall to him we had not before found any written evidence confirming the attribution. The buildings discovered here are fairly well preserved but not of great intrinsic evidence or of an earlier date than Kuri-galzu (1400 B. C.), and most of them are Neo-Babylonian: their importance can only be estimated fairly when more work has been done and their relation to the site as a whole established: but in objects the work has amply repaid us. On the floor of one of the rooms were recovered a number of well-preserved tablets, hymns and school exercises, dating from the reign of Nergal-ushezib of Babylon (693 B. C.), and from the filling of another room came a good white limestone head of a small statue of the period of the Third Dynasty of Ur. From under the foundations of a late wall we obtained, associated with early pottery types, a collection of nearly a thousand bead in carnelian, lapiz lazuli, silver and gold, with pendants of silver filigree inlaid:
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2. mer was completely buried and had to be excavated, 100 men working at this for four days. On October 31st my wife and I reached Ur and found everything in order: on the following day 170 workmen were enrolled and excavation started on the site on November 2nd.The first task is to remove an old dump which overlies the part of the cemetery chosen for the first part of the season's work; this will take four or five days. Digging will go on simultaneously on a section of the mound above the cemetery where we hope to lay bare part of the pre-Flood town: later on I intend to work on the city wall of which a short length was examined at the close of last season. This will make a full programme. The weather is still hot but may be expected to break shortly. Trusting that you will be satisfied with this programme and with its subsequent results I have the honour to be, Sir, Your very obedient Servent, C.Leonard Woolley [signature]:
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2. the older civilisation represented by the great rubbish-heaps in which the graves are set. In a stratum of this rubbish which is late in comparison with much that lies beneath it but very much earlier than the oldest graves we were fortunate enough to find in a ruined(for at one time the primitive settlement overflowed its normal limits and houses were constructed on the slope of the town's refuse-dump) some two hundred tablets written in a very archaic script, one of the oldest forms of writing known in Mesopotamia. Other remains go back even further than these, and certain grotesque seal-impressions on clay and types of decorated pottery extinct long before the age of the royal tombs supply material for a relative chronology which will carry us back almost to the beginnings of things in the lower Euphrates Valley. Thoroughly to work out this prehistoric site was a task far too big to be tackled at the close of a season: content for the moment with the very important preliminary results which we had obtained we turned our attention during the last ten days to the city wall, again with the idea not of complete excavation but of securing information which would enable us to draw up programmes for future digging. The results were immediate and surprising. The original wall was found to stand some twenty-six feet high and to have a width of no less than twenty-four yards! the width had actually been increased by later builders. This wall was of mud bricks and dated from about 2300 B.C; along the top of it ran a superstructure in burn brick younger by some three hundred years, and overlying these early remains were walls of a different years plan of which the last brought us down perhaps almost to the close:
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2. This tracing out of the temenos wall, which has yet to be completed, has given a completely new aspect to the site as a whole, and other discoveries related to it have further corrected our views.My first trial trench, dug when work here began, came up against the mud-brick wall shown in Dr. Hall's plan (fig. 4.) as running behind and parallel to his large building \"B\". This was found to have a strongly battered and butressed face of burnt brick standing three metres high; it was immediately obvious that this was not the wall of another building, lying south of \"B\" but the wall of the terrace on which \"B\" stood. In front of it was a big drain of burnt brick built by Dungi, which apparently leads to a brick rain-water well just inside the temenos wall, and gives the line of a street. The wall is now being followed to its return. During this month I have cleared a paved entry-court running along the SE front of E-nun-mah [subscript \"v\" under h] and find that the wall bounding it on the south is a buttressed exterior wall; [word struck through and indecipherable] In the wall of \"B\" Mr. Smith has found stamped bricks proving that the building is not the palace E-Harsag [subscript \"v\" under H] but the great Nannar temple. Dr. Hall's building is really the sanctuary of that temple, which, on the analogy of the smaller temple E-nun-mah [subscript \"v\" under h] cleared by us must have had outbuildings of very considerable extent. I have no doubt that Dr. Hall's \"mud brick\" wall represents the SE boundary of the temple proper, and that it reached to the buttressed wall fronting on the E-nun-mah courtyard on the NW.; along the NE. its wall must have been roughly parallel to that of the temenos, a point which I hope to settle in the near future. Instead of the temenos being a wide open space with isolated buildings scattered about it, we must expect a complex of buildings linked up with each other which would have presented a solid and defensible front to an enemy who might have forced the temenos wall.In spite of the diversion to the temenos wall, a considerable amount of work has been done on the E-Nun-Mah site, and the area cleared has been largely increased. The plan though still incomplete, has now taken on a fairly definite form; the west corner and the NW. front remain to be cleared, but this I hope to do immediately; the photograph sent herewith shows the plan of the building as reconstructed by Kudur-mabug, which in virtually all its details followed the original plan of the mud-brick walls (shewn in outline); that of the later (Nebuchadrezzar) temple has been satisfactorily recovered, but the plan is not yet in a sufficiently advanced stage for me to submit copies. I am gradually removing the upper strata of the ruins, leaving in situ only enough to show levels, and now the top remains left are those of Nebuchadrezzar's date; it is interesting to find that the Persians when repairing the sanctuary reproduced with scrupulous exactness all the details of Nebuchadrezzar's arrangements, and the more interesting because the Peraian building here (and therefore its predecessor also) illustrate faithfully Herodotus' description of the (Persian period) temple of Bel at Babylon.While removing a Persian brick pavement which overlay one put down by Nebuchadrezzar we discovered a very important cache of treasure, - gold rings, bracelets, beads, earrings, lockets and pendants, a female statuette in gold, silver vases, bracelets and rings, bronze vases, engraved seal-stones and great quantities of beads in lapis lazuli, carnelian, agate, amethyst, malachite etc. Some of these are illustrated by the accompanying photographs. I send for comparison with those 6th - 5th century objects photographs of the earlier (8th - 7th cent.) jewellery found in November and reported by me already.As to our pottery finds, some fifty types are already on record, and evidence is beginning to accrue for the relative dating of some of these. This work, on which Mr. Lawrence is now engaged, is of great importance in view of the little that is known of the pottery of Mesopotamia.:
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2.?shell? and lapis lazuli, the other was of gold. The beast had great curved horns o tipped with lapis, the hair between the horns, the eyes and the ceremonial beard t below its chin were of lapis also: down its chest ran a band of engraved shell plaq colored with red and black: it was a very wonderful object.Against the foot of the grave were eleven bodies of women wearing rich head-dres of gold, lapis and carnelian; strewn over the rest of the floor were more bodes of men and women less richly adorned; in front of the ramp stood two heavy wooden wagon four-wheeled, drawn each by three oxen whose bones lay stretched in front of the poles; they had silver rings in their muzzles, silver collars decorated with eye ornaments, reins of silver and lapis, and on the poles rein-rings surmounted by little figures of bulls. On the slope of the ramp lay in two ranks the soldiers of the guard keeping the entrance, their copper helmets on their skulls, their spears by their sides.The second tomb lay behind the first, built, like it, of stone and brick. Luckily it had not been plundered. The body inside was that of a queen named Shub-ad, and the tomb was the richest we have yet found. There were two crowns, one a composite thing of gold ribbons, beads, heavy gold rings which hung across the forehead, mulberry leaves and willow (?) leaves of gold and gold rosettes with inlaid petals of shell and lapis; above the top of the head rose a tall ornament of gold with seven points ending in gold flowers. The other crown was of gold and lapis beads decorated with little figures in the round of stags, bulls, rams and antelopes, with ears of corn, flowers and bunches of pomegranates, all of gold She wore ten gold finger-rings, necklaces, amulets of lapis and gold in the form of fish, a calf and two antelopes, and a cloak entirely covered with beads and fastened by big gold pins to which were attached lapis cylinder seals. With the body were placed three bowls and a strainer of gold, a pair of gold cockle-shells and a silver pair, these containing xxxxxxx toilet paints, gold ear-rings, quantities of silver vessels including a set of eighteen fluted tumblers, some thirty ?stone? vases and copper vessels innumerable. A silver bull's head with long horns came:
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2.a date. The wall (which is Kuri-Galzu's ) was standing to a considerable height, with heavy burnt brick foundations; these rested on the remains of an earlier wall decorated with hald-columns in mud brick,- at the corner of a buttress the column was actually in the three-quarter round; thus the column motive is carried back well beyond the 16th century. That the Courtyard building was itself a temple was more or less proved by the partial clearing of w what I believed to be the cella; where the statue should have stood there were traces of a wooden base and below this the usual pit for foundation-deposits; unfortunately it had been entirely plundered. /A small gang set to elucidate a doubtful point in E-Nun-Mah hit upon a deposit of tablets, records of tithe etc. paid to the temple during the reign of Gungunu king of Larsa (c.2100 B. C. ) which give much valuable detail about the economy of the shrine in that period and supply one or two new facts in its history. As is usual here, the tablets were unbaked and in a very fragile state, but after baking they form a small but good collection of Isin and Larsa documents illustrating a little-known period.As second site for the season I ultimately chose that immediate adjoining E-Nun-Mah on the SW., where on our general plan we suggest the site of E-Muriana. This is where Taylor dug and found what he describes as a small house of uncertain date, cruciform in shape, with panelled walls and arched doorways. This \"house\" we have cleared down to the Nabonidus floor level; if my provisional theories are correct its walls go much deeper down and its character is very different from that assigned to it by Taylor. At present we have a small building of burnt brick with panelled walls standing from six to ten feet high; there are only two rooms, of about equal size, with very wide doors between them and opening on the SE., and two very narrow doors in the outer chamber giving egress on either side; these two doorways were arched and in one case the arch is still complete. The burnt brick wall is strengthened all round by a heavy wall ( a \"kisu\") of mud brick, and from this run out other mud-brick walls forming small rooms whose tiled floors be bear the stamp of Nabonidus. The burnt bricks bear the name of Ishme-dagan and of Kuri-Galzu, the former sometimes above the latter, i.e., in the reverse of the natural order. The surprising feature of the place is the enormous thickness of the walls and the peculiar patchwork which they present.Unless I am much mistaken we have here the main gateway of the original Temenos of Ur, standing on the Processional Way. The earliest building, which has yet to be found, should date from the Third Dynasty, probably from the reign of Bur-Sin; it was restored by [struck out 5 letter word/name] Ishme-dagan (c.2100 B.C.) and again by Kuri-Galzu (c. 1600 B.C.); by the seventh century it was in ruins and was restored by Sinbalatsu-ikbi (who apparently used some of the Ishme-dagan bricks fallen from the old building, and it was further patched by Nabonidus. Kuri-Galzu speaks of the place as Dub-lal-mah, the seat of judgement; Sinbalatsu-ikbi describes it rather as a gate; By the time of Nabonidus when the Neo-Babylonian temenos wall had been set up outside the limits of:
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2.A number of small antiquities have been brought in to us from an outlying part of the site, vases, cylinder-seals, and good terra-cottas which continue the series obtained last season from the same spot. As it is impossible to protect the area in question, which lies within the zone of occasional cultivation, as it is desirable to learn as much as possible of the conditions in which these figurines are found, - and to secure more of them, - I propose to put in one or two days' work with our whole Ur gang on this site; the interruption to our main work will be small, and the results in the form of objects should be excellent.At Tell el Obeid the excavation of the Nin-Khursag temple is complete except for the investigation of one or two underground features; most of the men were taken off on December 22. Two days were then spent on the investigation of the neighbouring mounds which I had confidently hoped would prove to be important graves of the early period; I regret to state that my expectations were quite unfounded, and the mounds were what others had assumed them to be, namely piles of bricks. The kilns, for such they really are, apparently date from the close of the neo-Babylonian period, and have no connection whatever with the temple and cemeteries in their neighbourhood, or with anything nearer than the city of Ur itself. After this failure I resumed work on the early graves in the hope of finding more painted pottery etc. Close to Tell el Obeid there is a site which seems to be a grave-yard of the Third Dynasty, and it may be possible to do sufficient work there too to establish dates and to get characteristic examples. The objects discovered at Tell el Obeid during the month have far surpassed in number and importance what I was able to report to you at its beginning. As is natural when architectural decoration is concerned, there has been a good deal of repetition, but even where this was the case it was gratifying to find that the further we went into the mound the better preserved were the objects it contained. The artificial flowers are now very numerous. The copper reliefs of bulls, of which I reported five, now number twelve more or less complete specimens and two spare heads; all these will be fine Museum exhibits. There were found four statues of bulls in the round, made of thin copper plates on a wooden core which had gone to powder; three were headless, the fourth has a head but no horns; these were made separately, in a different material, and there can be little doubt that they were in gold, like the horn found by Dr. Hall. One of the bulls was in a hopeless condition; a second, better preserved, collapsed on removal, but may be capable of restoration; the other two I hope to be able to remove, though their removal is the hardest task that Tell el Obeid has yet set us.Two mosaic columns were found, each 2.30m. long. The greater part of one of these, removed with the tesserae in position, has been applied to a modern core and represents the column in its condition as found, i.e., with a certain amount of distortion, with some tesserae missing, and others shifted from their place; the remainder of this and the whole of the second column have been similarly removed, but their reconstruction as columns has been deferred for the present, & the drums are being kept in the flat. The successful lifting of these columns was also a difficult task, but we have at least an unexpected illustration of temple decoration at the period and, as the accompanying photograph shows, a very find Museum piece.In my last report I spoke of two bulls carved in relief in white limestone for inlay. At the beginning of the month we found examples like these but much more delicately carved in shell. Then a complete panel was discovered. It was lying on its face in the hard soil; the board which had been its original back-:
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2.and more important: its plan could be distinguished into two main parts, a north-west section which was a temple, probably dedicated then, as earlier, to the goddess Nin-E-Gal, the south-east comprising an official residence and offices; the NW. half incorporates a good deal of earlier work, the SE. is much more original; throughout the building is well preserved and very few details of its plan are missing.The building set up by the kings of Larsa, which I at first supposed to be the immediate predecessor of the Kassite structure now proves to have undergone serious modifications and changes, at least at its NW. end, at the hands of builders possibly of the late Larsa time but more probably under the First Dynasty of Babylon: these transformed the NW end, the old Nin-E-Gal temple, into something more closely resembling the Kassite plan; the SE. end they either disregarded or re-used at a higher level. We have now removed as much of the Kassite work as prevented the excavation of the lower walls, and when the First Babylonian additions are eliminated we have a very fine and complete ground-plan of the Larsa building, most of the walls standing to a considerable height, very solidly constructed in burnt brick with mud and bitumen mortar, and forming a most imposing monument. The final work of cleaning has not been done and I am therefore not sending photographs of the building, which will be held over until my next report: here I will only say that the complex, occupying the whole of a raised terrace supported by massive retaining walls, is divided into two parts by a long and narrow corridor, on one side of which is the temple of the goddess Nin-E-Gal, on the other that of the more familiar goddess Nin-Gal; the former is laid out on more or less conventional lines with a double sanctuary facing on a large court flanked by service chambers, the latter is a more original structure with a central court and a series of great gate ways leading to the shrine. The details of the latter temple of Nin-Gal are remark-:
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2.antiquities.The houses were built up against an already existing hill side, terraced by their walls. Immediately below them we came upon terrace walls of a more solid character which, as we worked back into the mound, proved to be remarkably well preserved. In the course of the last few days we cleared two courts with one or two of their adjacent rooms; it is too early to state the nature of the buildings which may be large private houses or official, but they are constructed of burnt bricks, date from the Isin-Larsa period, about 2100 B.C., and their walls are standing fifteen and twenty feet above pavement level, - a height unequalled elsewhere on the site. We found here a small head of a priest carved in the round in pinkish sandstone, rather rough work but interesting in that it seems to be not a conventional po piece but a portrait done from the life, and a broken steatite vase with a design of scorpions on the outside, the latter dating from about 2500 B.C., the former from some five centuries later. On the very last morning we unearthed a hoard of some sixty large clay tablets, for the most part in very good condition, all religious texts and hymns dated to the period of Rim-Sin; these are the most important tablets yet discovered by your Expedition, and the finding of them was a fitting end to a successful season. The discoveries make it clear that the mound is well worth excavating next year.On March 13 the division of the objects with the Baghdad Museum took place. Miss Bell took the complete Bau statue, the broken Dungi statue, the alabaster plaque representing a primitive boat, and a selection of the remaining objects: the Expedition took the early limestone plaque, the alabaster moon's disc with the representation of the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, the broken Nin-Gal statue, the marble head with blue eyes, a black diorite head and a limestone head, the two copper coffins, one of the two early rams (the other went to Baghdad), the fragment of a plaque in the style of the Ur-Nina reliefs and half of the remaining objects: considering that:
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2.as possible in this sphere. For myself I could ask no more valuable fellow-worker or agreable[sic] companion. On this subject also would you please write to Kenyon. I believe that Legrain sails from England about the ninth of May; probably you will wish to consult him before coming to a decesion[sic] on the matter of his re-joining the expedition in the autumn; but of course one would like to know reasonably soon how the staff will be made up.Speaking of the staff, I must certainly try to secure an architect for next season; the lack of one seriously interfered with the proper conduct of the dig this time. I am going to try to get one without much cost to the fund, and may succeed, but will let you know very soon how things shape. The man I was after last year is very good, but his fees are rather high. As regards salaries, Linnell was working without pay last season, and did well: I want to employ him a good deal during the summer and for this he ought to receive some payment. Kenyon thinks he should be given a small lump sum for the work already done; I am not greatly in favour[sic] of this, but do wish to pay him for the summer work, and I consider that he should have a small salary next year. He works hard and is getting on well enough to deserve a fee; I have not gone into the question of how much this should be, but perhaps --163;100 for the season would meet the case. In his third year he should, if he continues to work well, be better paid. Then I am afraid that I must put up something about myself. As you know, I am at present drawing --163;600 a year. The work, both during the digging season and at home, is more arduous than I had expected, and my expenses during the summer when I have to be working in town are also more than I had foreseen. I think that I could take on this year a more or less permanent digging job at --163;1000, but do not wish to give up Ur, which interests me more than does the other place, but I am not in a position to sacrifice my material advantages unduly. So I am going to ask that my salary be raised to --163;800, at which figure I should be prepared to carry on with Ur: I might retire altogether for health or other reasons, but should not require any higher salary so long as I did stop with the Expedition. I have not yet discussed this point with Kenyon, but shall raise it when next I see him, early next week, and shall ask him to ascertain your views. I hate asking for more money, especially when the expedition funds are short, but I hope that that state of the things may improve this year thanks to the encouragement of a successful season.As soon as possible I shall send you a complete set of the photographs and plans.Yours sincerely,C Leonard Woolley:
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2.at this period. A notable impression shews an ass-chariot with con-siderable detail. One or two harps are represented of a kind differentfrom that found in the graves. We have 7 impressions from a large sealshewing a cattle-byre and milking-scene like that represented at al'Ubaid.SIS. 4 is characterised by 4 kinds of jar-sealings that do not occur here at higher levels nor anywhere, so far as I know, at other sites: -1) There are a very large number of linear patterns, geometrical, arabesques etc. , often extremely complicated and ingenious. xxxxxProbably quite 100 are in hand. If there is a foreign influenceor connection this will be important. Frequent patterns of con-ventionalised vegetation (palm-branch?) are in the same spirit.2) Sometimes signs from the script occur as an element in the devor-ative geometrical patterns. There are besides a number of im-pressions which are quite definitely inscriptions. The signs areoften very archaic and even quite unknown. Those that can be i-dentified generally seem to be the ideograms for cities; Larsa,(several times), Kesh, Adab and perhaps Ur. The writing of thejar-seals differs so much from that of the contemporary tabletsin the same stratum that one wonders if the jars did not comefrom another place.Two or three of these inscriptions have pure pictures (bird,bullock, ox's head) mingled with the writing-signs. This seemsto be a unique phenomenon.It is noteworthy that in SIS. 4 no sealings have a propername added to the design (as on the cylinders found in the graveslast year and as in SIS. 1 and SIS. 2); we have in SIS. 4 either:
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2.built above them. The tomb in Dungi's building is far the most impressive From a doorway, bricked up when the funeral was over, steps lead down to a platform deep in the great walled pit which lies at the back of the god-king's house; from this more stairs run down on either side under corbelled vaults twenty-six feet high, and at the bottom of these flights are the doors of the tomb chambers, one of them a room some fifty-five feet long. These are the roofs which have caused us so much trouble, for the crowns of the corbelled arches had given way, robbers had broken up the vaulting from above, and great masses of brickwork were suspended almost without support against the wall faces from which they had split away; unless we were to destroy one of the finest monuments of antiquity left in this country very elaborate measures had to be taken before the soil could be removed. At present we have entered the two largest tombs but have not finally cleared them; all the rest have been cleared and have produced no more than one inscription of king Ur-Engur; but even if the last two yield no more than that we can be satisfied with having found the burial-places of the greatest of the kings of Ur and found them worthy of their greatness.Meanwhile a large number of our men have been employed elsewhere on a site in the residential quarter of the town. Seven houses, forming almost a complete insula, have been unearthed; they are remarkably well preserved, the walls often standing as much as ten feet high. Quantities of inscribed tablets have been found in the ruins; the earliest of them date back to the Third Dynasty of Ur, the latest and most numerous are of the Larsa period. especially of the reign of Rim-Sin (1970-1910 B.C.), and various signs of restoration and rebuilding, the raising of floor:
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2.cellent introduction to the general series. A second volume might reasonably deal with the Temenos Wall, the Ziggurat, and perhaps the E-Nun-Makh temple, and even the temple now being excavated should that be p rimarily a building of the Third Dynasty of Ur. Of course both these volumes require a great deal of work before they would be ready for press; and it would greatly assist me in planning out work for the summer months if I could have your decisions on the advisability of preparing the material forthwith.As regards the inscriptions, we shall certainly by the end of this season have enough material for a volume, not reckoning the tablets found last year whose importance does not warrant their receiving immediate attention or the expense of publication now. May I assume, as it seems to me reasonable to do, that throughout the course of the Expedition the inscriptional material found in any one season will be published by the cuneiformist who for that season is on the field staff of the Expedition? Obviously any historical information based on the inscriptions which may be utilised in the excavation volumes will have been drawn from his work; and should it be suggested that the inscriptions be published by the staff of the Museum to which they are eventually allotted the anomaly will arise that, there being no cuneiformist at Baghdad, the inscriptions there could only be published by the cuneiformist in the field, he alone having access to them. The inscriptional, like the other material, forms part of the results of the Joint Expedition before it forms part of the property of either Museum, and it appears natural that it should be treated in the same way. To do otherwise would mean a very wasteful duplication of labour, and might seriously hamper the publication of the excavation volumes. It is this consideration that has induced me to put forward my own views when I should perhaps have only asked for your instructions.:
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2.century B.C., apparently an official residence or institution attached to a temple in the rooms of which we found a number of tablets, school exercises and hymns, of Neo-Babylonian date. This building was in part built over and in part incorporated in itself an older structure of the Kassite period, apparently of much the same character, with a large central courtyard and rooms all about it, solidly built in mud brick over burnt brick foundations, which we attribute provisionally to king Kuri-Galzu, 1400 B C.; it is upon the excavation of this that we are at present engaged. But below this, in the few spots where we have probed to a deeper level or where the foundations of the Kuri-Gazu walls lie lower down and are set over earlier remains, we have come upon walls of a very different type, massive construction in burnt brick, great piers and gateways still standing six and eight feet high, and though so little work has yet been done we are already able to establish from the written records something of the history of what will undoubtedly prove one of the most imposing ruins of Ur. The building was founded in the Third Dynasty, begun apparently by Ur-Engur (2300 B.C.) and finished by his grandson Bur-Sin, and their records speak of it as the E-Gig-Par of the goddess Nin-Gal. Then, after its destruction in the times of the Elamite invasion which brought the Third Dynasty to a close, it was rebuilt by the Larsa Isin kings who inherited the overlordship of Mesopotamia, and nearly all these rulers are represented on the site by inscribed bricks or other written testimony, Their work does not seem to have lasted long, for all its solidity of construction, for by 2072 B. C. Warad-Sin king of Larsa had to undertake its reconstruction: we found one of his foundation-cones in situ, and thereon he claims to have rebuilt the ancient walls of Bur-Sin and strengthened them from their foundation upwards, but in sober fact what he did was to plaster a thick layer of clay against the face of the Isin walls, and he must stand convicted of exaggeration. None the less this building, the E-Nun-Azag, or Great House of Splendour, as it was nor called, contained a great wealth of objects, judging by what we have found in the very small part of it which we have as yet examined. Inscribed and sculptured stelae and statues of diorite and of alabaster adorned it, and in front of the door of one of the inner shrines we found, flung out and broken, beautiful stone vases inscribed with the dedications of various kings from 2700 B. C. down to the days of Warad-Sin: the complete excavation of the temple ought to reward us with a collection of museum pieces of the greatest importance. I trust that my next month's article will shew that our optimism is justified.C. Leonard Woolley.:
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2.cones of Warad-Sin and of Sinbalatsu-ikbi ) and it would be difficult to prevent the publication of these by scholars into whose hands they may pass; 6) generally speaking it seems more truly scientific to present our results to scholars with as little delay as possible; and to such it makes very little difference whether the texts appear in historical order in one volume or in two or three.I am urging the publication of historical texts only, i. e., of royal and other inscriptions on stone cones and bricks and of new dates from tablets. Though only new texts should be published, I think it desirable that references should be included to texts already published which have turned up in the course of the excavations; in this way we should present, what has never yet been done for any one site, a collection of all the inscriptional matter found at Ur.I think that it has already been agreed that the texts should be published in historical order under the names of the kings, with copy, transliteration and translation; to this should be added a short reference to the conditions and place of finding, and such notes as the authors may think good: and each of the three authors will be responsible only for his own work and his share in the whole will be clearly indicated.Might I request that the matter be taken up and so far arranged that Dr. Legrain may utilise his visit to England for the necessary work of collaboration with Messrs. Smith and Gadd? He ought to be in London about the middle of April.I am, Sir,Your very obedient Servant,[signature] C. Leonard Woolley:
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2.dealing with the business side of the Temple administration ans shewing that this building was one of te industrial centres of the Nannar shrine where the women and children attached to the god's services were employed on such tasks as weaving the wool which the tenant farmers of the Temple domains brought in as rent and tithes. In a former letter I gave some account of the contents of the many tablets af all sizes which have been labouriously extracted from the ground and baked and brushed and mended by Dr. Legrain; their complete translation is necessarily a question of some time, but already he has been able to extract from them enough to give a new and very human interest to the ruined chambers whose mere ground-plan might have told us so little. As it is, a copper-smelter's furnace takes on a new importance when it illustrates a text recording the amounts of metal paid to the temple by the copper-smiths of the city, and even the long store-rooms become less common-place when one has the tally of their contents.An unexpected discovery has been made in the south angle of the walled enclosure which Nebuchadnezzar built around the Ziggurat tower. Here I looked to find a fort such as stood in the west corner, but the walls which gradually came to light from under the heaps of ashes covering the whole area soon took a different shape, and one could recognise a temple which inscriptions on bricks and stones proved to be that of Nin-Gal, the Great Lady, wife of the Moon god of Ur. The building on which we are now engaged - for its excavation is not yet complete - occupies the whole of the south corner of E-temen-ni-il, the terrace enclosure of the Ziggurat. Most of the walls are of crude mud brick of miserably bad quality, often ruined right away and where still standing to any height extraordinarily difficult to follow; my most experience pick men have found their skills taxed to the utmost to distinguish between fallen mud rubble and brickwork so soft that one can rub it to powder with one's finger; but the floors are of brick well laid and thickly spread with bitumen, looking like modern asphalte, and with their help all the outlines of the chambers could be traced even where the walls enclosing them had altogether perished. The temple was built, in its present form, by Sinbalatsu-ikbi, the Assyrian governor of the city, (c.650 B.C.) who always seems to have been short of cash for his building schemes and so to have employed the poorest materials; fifty years later Nebuchadnezzar added, or repaired, some of its outbuldings, and later again his grandson Nabonidud repaved the temple floors. The plan is the best thing about it - it is remarkably regular in its layout and really dignified in conception:from a forecourt flanked by small chambers a pylon gate gave access to the entrance chamber of pronaos: doors on either side of this led to subsidiary pronaos, facing the entrance, a flight of shallow steps ran up to the naos or shrine chamber wherein on a raised base surrounded by a screen wall of burnt brick, was set the statue of the goddess. Somebody has been before us here, for the solid pavement of the shrine has been broken through, and a gold bead and fragments of gold leaf lying in the disturbed soil shew that the foundation deposit has been removed; but we have no need to give up all[handwritten number 10]:
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2.DEBITReceived by cheque to Mssrs Brown Shipley & Co., October 22, 1932 500. 0. 0. January 1933 1493. 13. 3.By interest 1. 3. 10. -------------------- [pound sign] 1995 3 10 -----------------------:
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2.deep into a subsoil which, with the river and the canals close to thecity, was then much damper than now, and when they came to use thetomb chambers they found them awash with infiltered water and wereobliged to raise the floor by setting over it loose bricks on edge xand then a solid mass of mud bricks. Another point which became apparent is that these two Dungi vaults were plundered immediately beforethe approach to them was filled in with earth and the chamber floorlaid over this; both the doors had been broken in and the loose brickwere found at the bottom of the filling; when therefore the Elamitestore up the pavements of the superstructure and cut their way downinto the chambers they must have been disappointed.A few small details have yet to be investigated, but the real ex-cavation of the Royal tombs was completed early in the month; muchyet remains to be done in a the way of restorations etc. A large-scaleand fully detailed plan of the building and its substructures hasbeen made, together with numerous sectional drawings; over a hundredphotographs have been taken, and our record of the building is asthorough as its great importance demands; the timber shoring of thevaults should ensure for many years the preservation of the moststriking building at Ur.The workmen taken off the Royal tombs were set, as soon as possible on what has been a main item in our programme, the digging of a deep pit close to the Ziggurat; the actual site chosen was that ofthe Neo-Babylonian sanctuary of the temple of Nannar. The work isnow so nearly finished that I can report on it.Below the pavement of this late sanctuary (below which we found:
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2.Dr. Hall to the SE end of the E-Gig-Par. On the other site it was found that the Kassite building rested directly on the mud-brick platform of the Ziggurat, the E-temen-ni-il of Ur-Engur, only the boundary wall being of earlier date: it would seem that whereas the original Nin-Gal temple, comprising two separate sh shrines, was built by Bur-Sin outside the limits of E-temen-ni-il, it had been so ruined in the course of time that when Kuri-Galzu undertook its restoration much of the plan was lost and he rebuilt only the NW section in someting like its original form, suppressing altogether the old SE shrine, and it its stead built the new Nin-Gal shrine inside the wall of the Ziggurat enclosure. A second result of this work was that we now had evidence for a chambered wall of the Larsa period along its NW side, and for the history of the site it became necessary to investigate the south-west front also; but [indecipherable] since the objective was limited only a small force was employed here and the remainder of the workmen were transferred to new ground, namely the building whose excavation, started by Dr. Hall in 1918, remained unfinished.The work on the SE side of the Ziggurat has been most interesting. Below and in front of the Temenos wall built by Nebuchadnezzar were found rooms of Sin-balatsu-ikbi, below these a chambered boundary-wall of Kuri-Galzu (apparently a restoration of the Larsa work), then the original enclosure wall of Ur-Engur, contemporary with the Ziggurat itself, and under this walls and pavements of plano-convex bricks dating from the Second or First Dynasty of Ur and belonging to a pre-Third Dynasty ziggurat which must lie buried beneath the great tower of Ur-Engur: it is the first time that we have obtained proof of the existence of such a ziggurat.The other site proved somewhat disappointing; the part excavated by Dr. Hall was only a small part of the whole building, but it was the best preserved, and:
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2.Elamite ruler (Warad-Bin, c. 1990 B.C.) pulled down the original building and rebuilt on a larger scale and with richer architectural decoration. In 1400 B.C. there was another wholesale rebuilding, and works of less importance were undertaken in 1080 and in 650 B.C., but the general character of the temple underwent no change. . Only Nebuchadnezzar proved, as usual, more radical in his restorations and modified the structural plan of the ancient building, and though the denudation of the surface has destroyed much of his work we can see none the less what he did, while the fact that he raised the level of the courtyard by some eight feet has preserved for us a great deal of the older construction, whose walls still stand to an imposing height. For the history of the city that of its principal temple is essential, and we now have that history in minute detail from the rise of the Third Dynasty until the downfall of Ur.The graves have yielded many treasures, of which the best is a realistic head of a calf in copper together with a mosaic plaque in lapis lazuli and shell, both belonging to a harp found in a \"death-pit\" in the lowest stratum of the cemetery. A stone-built royal tomb was found plundered and empty, but the loss of its contents was atoned for by the importance of the structure whose roof, consisting of both vaults and domes, was unusually well preserved; and a find of archaic tablets came to illustrate a period much older than that of the tombs, a period not otherwise represented by our discoveries.:
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2.first class.Of more immediate interest are the houses in which the tablets were found. These date from just about the time when Abraham was living at Ur - they were first put up about 2100 B.C., and were inhabited, with various minor rebuildings and repairs, for some two hundred years, - and what strikes one at once is the high degree of comfort and even luxury to which the ruins bear witness. Two-storied buildings, solidly constructed in burnt brick (some of the walls today stand fifteen and twenty feet high) they were almost exactly like the best houses of modern Baghdad. There was a central court with a wooden gallery running around it onto which the upper rooms opened: the family lived above; on the ground floor were the reception-room and the domestic offices, kitchens and servants' quarters: the rooms were lofty - in one case the brick staircase is preserved up to ten feet and was originally carried up higher in wood, so that the ground-floor rooms must have been twelve or fifteen feet high - and although all traces of decoration have gone and we have only the bare walls with occasionally a little mud plaster and whitewash, yet we can scarcely be wrong in supposing that the furnishing matched the excellence of the construction. It is the first time that private houses of the period have been discovered, and the discovery changes altogether our ideas of how men lived then; now we have a number of separate dwellings, forming blocks divided by rather narrow streets, the large houses of wealthy citizens cheek by jowl with the four- or five-roomed homes of their poorer neighbours, and it is easy to repeople the ruined courts and chambers and to understand the surroundings of the men who once inhabited them and pored over the tables of cube roots! Only one room, - a long narrow chamber in No. 7 Quiet Street,- puzzled us altogether. It was a common custom to bury the dead under the houses in which they had lived, and often beneath the pavement we find clay coffins or vaulted brick tombs containing together with the body clay vessels of offerings, food for the journey to the next world, and perhaps the signet seal of the house-owner.:
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2.foundation was sanctified by sacrifice, and this was a banquet spread for the god, the shoulder \"waved before the Lord\" and the cups which once perhaps contained wine and meal.From such mud structures whose date can only be guessed we have moved to a building temple massively constructed in baked brick whose history is already growing c clear thanks to the numerous inscribed objects it is yielding even in these early days of the work. Built in honour of Nin-Gal, the wife of the Moon God of Ur, it was founded about 2220 B. C. by king Bur-Sin and was restored and rebuilt by a whole succession of kings down to the 19th century before Christ, when the kings of the first Dynasty of Babylon took and sacked the city and its shrines suffered a long period of neglect ad decay. By 1400 B. C. the temple was a complete ruin and its site was taken over for a large official building laid out on quite different lines; some seven hundred years later this in its turn was replaced by another and poorer construction in mud and brick, and last of all in the Persian days, between 500 and 400 B. C., a fresh building on a higher level obliterated all trace of what still stood elbow. But the lowest building, which is the most interesting, is yet wonderfully well preserved, and already, though in but few places have we reached its floor level, it is yielding all sorts of treasures which testify to its the splendour in of its prime. It was adorned with statues and bas-reliefs in black diorite and alsbaster, kings set up here records of their piety inscribed on great stelae of polished stone, and dedicated in its shrine statuettes and vases of breccia, alabaster, oolite and granite whereon their names are perpetuated. Enemies have plundered the temple of its precious metals and broken up with axes and hammers the carved work of it, but from the fragments which they flung down we are recovering a collection of objects which from an artistic as well as from a historical point of view are of the greatest value. Luckily what the enemy broke they did not carry away and day by day as all the scattered bits are brought together our finds:
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2.gives access to a double-chambered tomb running the whole width of the building. It is probable that at the time of the burial the great passage vaults were divided into two [xxxxxx] storeys by a wooden floor the beams for whose support were set in holes in the brickwork of the walls on the level of the central platform, so that the funeral procession passed down the stairs through a gap in the floor of what was otherwise a sigle room open in the middle and vaulted at either end. After the funeral, the doorway at the top of the stairs was bricked up and the whole pit was filled in solid with dirt - but not, it would seem, before some daring thief had pulled away the upper bricks of the blocking of the tomb door and had plundered its contents. Above ground level the staircase doow was masked so cleverly as to defy detection, the temporary structures were removed and the permanent building was erected: its court and chambers were at a lower level, and through two doorways steps led up to the high pavement which now overlay the vaults and the stairways in the buried pit.The ground-plan of the superstructure was, as I have said, that of a private house, but it was the house not of a living man but of the deified king who having once been human required for his occupation a house rather than a temple; just as the private person was buried below his house floor, so the king in his tomb lay beneath a building in which he might be supposed to still live. But the rooms were turned to uses unknown in the ordinary dwelling; in many of them, and always where_ the lay over tomb chambers, there were altars for sacrifice and libation - one of these, built of bricks and bitumen, was found almost intact; on the top of it narrow channels ran parallel with the edge and then turned outwards to empty into six small fireplaces set against the:
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2.gress, and wet walls and mud-covered pavements do not lend themselves to photography. Incidentally I may say that the rains have also made living conditions very uncomfortable as our house proved far from water-proof; a certain amount of damage was done by the leakage of salt water, and the roof has had to be re-covered in anticipation of the winter. At the present moment conditions seem to be improving and I hope to send before long the views of the buildings which ought to have accompanied this report.[Note, opening of penciled bracketing labelled \"3\" in the margin] The area excavated measures roughly sixty metres by forty. Within this werefound a number of houses, large and small, in large blocks separated by narrow lanes running more or less at right angles. While the individual houses differ considerably in size and in their internal arrangements, they still conform to some extent to a uniform plan, and this plan is of a quite unexpected character. The front door leads through a small entrance-chamber to a central court off which open the kitchen,the reception-room and various domestic offices, while a brick staircase led up to the main living quarters; these upper rooms seem to have opened onto a wooden gallery, sometimes protected by a pent-house roof, which ran round the central court and was entered directly from the stair-head. Instead of the low and flimsily-built mud huts, consisting of two or three rooms giving off a yard, which characterized sixth-century Babylon, we have at Ur in the 20th century B. C. an almost exact exactcounterpart of the wealthier houses of modern Baghdad. [Note, close of penciled bracketing labelled \"3\" in the margin] I have planned the site, but the drawing out of elevations and restorations is being left for Mr. Whitburn, whom I expect about the 8th of next month; but really photographs of existing houses in Baghdad would serve almost as well as any restoration.[Note, opening of penciled bracketing labelled \"4\" in the margin] From the point of view of objects the houses were not remunerative. There weregraves below the floors of the higher Kassite buildings as well as below those of the Isin town blocks, and these yielded a great quantity of pottery, some good cylinder seals, a few bronzes, but little else. The principal things were a fine bottle of3:
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2.had between them made complete havoc of the buildings; walls of burnt brick or of mud brick were everywhere, but they were merely disconnected fragments out of which it seemed impossible to deduce a plan. Moreover the levels bothered us. The great Temenos wall of Nebuchadnezzar was found well preserved, but its foundations, laid in about 600 B. C., lay six or eight feet below those of walls only a few yards off which according to our dating were nearly fourteen hundred years older, and I began to wonder whether all my arguments were not at fault. Then luck favoured us. In one of the most tattered remnants of mud-brick wall we found first one and then, in a row, three more foundation deposits, boxes of burnt brick each containing, undisturbed, a stone tablet inscribed with the name of Dungi and the dedication of the building, and a copper statuette of the king represented as carrying on his head a basket of mortar for the laying of the first brick: it was a fine haul of museum objects, and a welcome proof that we were really on the tracks of what we had set out to find. Another object, rarer than the copper figures, turned up in the loose rubble filling between the walls, a broken diotite statue of the king with a long inscription on his back, a small statue of a goddess (probably Nin-Gal, the Moon-god's wife) dating from the same period, the Third Dynasty of Ur. This small head, carved in white marble, shows Sumerian art in a more attractive guise than does any other object known to me; the modelling of the features is soft and life-like and an extraordinary expression of vitality is given by the eyes, which are inlaid with shell and lapis lazuli: the hair, originally painted black, is very elaborately rendered, an infinity of fine lines reproducing the combed waves of a formal coiffure round which is tied a heavy plain fillet like the modern agal; it is a real masterpiece of ancient sculpture.But the unravelling of the tangle of broken walls on the site was too intricate a task to allow of the employment there of so many men, and accordingly the greater part of the gang were was shifted to an adjoining mound and only a few re-:
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2.have had a side chapel in the temple; a broken statue of Nin-Gal herself bears an inscription shewing that it was dedicated by Enanatum, the founder of the building; there is a box of black polished stone exactly like a modern cigarette-box, a stone ram's head once mounted on a staff and set up before the altar as a symbol of divinity, there are alabaster vases given by Larsa kings, a granite bowl presented by the daughter of king Dungi (2250 B.C.) but for centuries an heirloom, for it originally belonged to Naram-Sin who was king about 2600 B.C., a beautiful bowl of polished oolite dedicated by Ur-Engur, the builder of the great Ziggurat, an alabaster disk presented by the daughter of Sargon the great of Akkad (2700 B.C.) carved with a scene of sacrifice in which the princess figures in person, and, perhaps five hundred years older even than this, a limestone plaque in perfect condition bearing similar scenes of sacrifice to the Moon God.Nor has the floor-level of the temple alone repaid us. Above the ruins of the Kassite shrine which replaced it we found buried in ashes vessels of [indecipherable] stone, silver and bronze which must be the loot from this later shrine building. The Kassite shrine fell into disuse, and hewn into its walls we found two brick tombs which contained remarkable coffins of copper. Higher up still, under a brick floor dating from about 600 B.C. we discovered rows of small brick boxes in each of which was a statuette of unbaked clay, little gods, friendly demons, dogs and snakes, which with due sacrificial rites were set like sentries in their boxes to protect the house against malign spirits and the evil eye. At every level we have made discoveries, and in the historical information we have gathered, in the buildings whose plans we have traced and in the objects such as a museum may treasure our month's work has had a wonderful reward.:
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2.have never bothered about the market prices of such, and should not be a good person for executing comissions of that sort: and to attempt a business which one does not thoroughly understand is small satisfaction to one. Personally too I am anxious to avoid more delay than is necessary in getting home this year, as I wish not to miss my brother who is in England on leave after five years' absence and goes back to Borneo in the middle of May; the antiquities from here will not reach England before the middle of May at the earliest, and I was calculating on taking that season for my holiday, as after their arrival I shall be b usy enough. On the other hand it may be necessary for me to go to Egypt in order to obtain a passage, as boats from Syria are few and at this time of the year very full; and in that case I'll certainly run up to Cairo and see what I can do for you. But I should prefer to report simply, and not to enter upon any definite engagements to purchase. So please leave the question open for the time being, and let circumstances decide for me. I do not at all want to be disobliging, but it is not a job which I like to undertake or for which I want to lose time, if I can manage it ithout loss of time and without commi comitting myself I shall be glad to help. All are well here. Legrain joins me in regards, and adds that you may envy him the short drinks in the evening and the excellent whiskey!Yours sincerely,[signature] Leonard Wooley:
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2.have the finest Sumerian collection.I am glad to say that we have now arranged that my wife shall come over with me to the States next March; she will not travel to all the places I expect to visit but will go to some and will give a few lectures herself; it will be a great pleasure to shew her Philadelphia, and she is looking forward immensely to the trip, as I am myself.With best wishes from us both,Yours very sincerely,C. Leonard Woolley [signature]PS. I enclose a photograph as required!:
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2.He had been obliged to engage a gang of men to dig out the building before it could be entered at all, but he had made such good progress that we were able to settle in at once on our arrival and the next morning I enrolled the workmen. Most of those taken on were old hands, and their experience would ensure good work. I started excavations on Friday Oct. 30th with 215 men.This year I have dispensed with Khalil ibn Jadur, my second foreman from Car-chemish: Hamoudi takes sole command of the gang, but receives assistance from his son Yahia, who again acts as photographer, and he has also with him a younger son Ibrahim, who ranks as an ordinary pick-man but is to be trained up with a view to his eventually taking on the job of foreman. This change means a certain economy for the fund and will, I hope, prove satisfactory. I have also ceased to employ my local agent, whose wages have been a considerable item, and have made fresh arrange-ments for obtaining food supplies. A more substantial saving has been effected by the cutting down of wages: labour conditions have enabled me to reduce the men's wages from six to five rupees a week; the reduction has been accepted cheerfully and has not in any way impaired the efficiency or good will of the men, whereas it repres-ents an economy of about £125 in the course of the season.I enclose a summary of accounts for the period July 1st to October 31st. I regret that the expenses of traveling have been rather in excess of my estimate; this is due in part to my stopping in Paris for purposes of work, and in part to Mr. Whit-burn's being obliged to take any passage which was offered to him. Stores also have come to a little more than I foresaw; after three years the outfit originally pur-chased for the house )much of it second-hand) had to be liberally replenished; nore-over I had decided that enlargements to the house were necessary, and for the new rooms furniture had to be bought; my idea was to build a new study, separate from the living-room which is also dining- and general work-room, a second bath-room and another bedroom: allowance for the building is made in my estimates.:
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2.hold good.One grave which I would assign to the latter part of the early period contained an object of very great value for comparative dating, a complete painted clay vase of the later Jemdet Nasr type. This is the only example of this ware ever yet encountered by us: it must be an importation at a time when Sumerian pottery was exclusively monochrome, & it appears to support the view I have already put forward that the Jemdet Nasr ware is northern and Akkadian, not Sumerian, and that in the north its manufacture continued until the native Akkadian culture had been swamped by the Sumerian, i.e., until the rise of the First Dynasty of Erech if not until that of the First Dynasty of Ur: at any rate it must mean that the Jemdet Nasr culture, though earlier, is not much earlier than that of our first series of graves.Of the private graves one of the best was that of a very young child perhaps three or four years old. Besides a set of stone vases the little shaft contained a group of miniature vessels in silver and on the body were miniature gold pins, while on the head was a miniature wreath of gold beech-leaves, another of gold rings, and one with pendants of gold, lapis and carnelian. Another child's grave contained a fine head ornament (of which I send a photograph) - a chain of triple beads in gold, lapis and carnelian with a large gold roundel of cloisonne work and two others of wire filigree. A woman's grave produced, together with many other objects, the remains of a harp similar in type to that of Queen Shub-ad though simpler in character in that it had no animal's head and was decorated with silver instead of gold; a very important feature was that the woman wore on her head, as well as the normal beech-leaf and ring wreaths, a diadem decorated as was the second diadem of Queen Shubad, with pomegranates and figures of anim-:
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2.hundred years ago.While the excavation of the temple was still in progress the div- ision of the antiquities found during the season between the Iraq Gov- ernment and the expedition was effected and those allotted to the lat- ter were packed for transport to London; they filled fifty-three cases and amongst them are many of the oldest objects that the Mesopotamian valley has yet produced. The preparation of these for exhibition is the next task of the Expedition.:
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2.I have engaged 175 men, this being the greatest number advisable this season when both of my as istants are new to the work of supervision and much of my own time must be given up to the architectural side of the work. For the first week or so all hands will be employed on the area NW of the ziggurat, between that building and the temenos wall; I propose to clear the whole of that this year, and wish to get out the main lines of the site as quickly as possible; then I can work out the details better with a smaller force, while the rest of the men can be employed on an outlying site more likely to yield museum objects. I trust that the necessary economies of this year will not seriously curtail my programme; I may say that the preliminary expenses which I now report are well within the amount provided in my estimate.Hoping that these accounts will meet with your satisfaction.I have the honour to, Sir,Your very obedient Servant,C. Leonard Woolley [signature]DirectorJoint Expedition of the British Museum and the Museum of the Ubiversity of Pennsylvania to Mesopotamia:
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2.in itself, with its courts and sanctuary and its rows of service chambers; an intermediate block is formed by a series of minor shrines, including that if the deified founder, king Bur-Sin, and by a complex of small rooms under the floors of which we found vaulted tombs, perhaps those of the chief priests of the temple. The finds made in January had given us some idea of the ancient riches of this great temple; the last stages of our work on it brought to light one more relic of its decoration, a very charming head carved in black diorite of a goddess with the full soft features characteristic of the Sumerian women and with her hair dressed in the sadly unbecoming chignon affected by deities: it is certainly one of the best examples of sculpture yet found here.As the work on the temple drew to a finish the bulk of the men were drafted off to a site within the Scared Area whose excavation had been begun by Dr. Hall in 1918 and never completed; now all that remains of it has been cleared. The building, originally started by Ur-Engur, was apparently unfinished at the time of his death and whereas the wall bricks are stamped with his name those of the pavement bear the name of his son and successor Dungi; the bricks, very large and of admirable quality, are set in bitumen mortar, and there is no building at Ur with the sole exception of the Ziggurat, also Ur-Engur's work, so well and solidly constructed. One part of it,apparently the living-quarters of the priest in charge, is well preserved, but the temple proper has suffered severely and not all its plan could be recovered, but under one corner from which all the brickwork had disappeared we found lit upon the foundation box containing the conventional copper figure of the king carrying his basket of mortar and the stone model brick - unfortunately not inscribed.Meanwhile a smaller gang has been digging close to the foot of the Ziggurat on its south-west face where we had previously traced the enclosure wall built round the Temenos by Nebuchadnezzar but now hoped to find an earlier version of the same dating from the time of the Larsa kings, about 2100 B.C. Actually the results were bet-:
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2.in situ or re-used in the buildings of the next period shew that this was E-Nanner, the House of the Moon god in the Third Dynasty. One of these door-sockets was remarkable in that resting upon it was found the bronze shoe of the hinge-pole, also inscribed with the king's name and titles. Some deep cuts in the terrace produced no remains of buildings, but many fragments of the \"prehistoric\" painted pottery; from one we obtained a very fine little shell plaque engraved with two human or divine figures in Sumerian dress and wearing crowns; it certainly dates from the fourth millenium B.C. and is an admirable example of the art of that time. The buildings which replaced those of Ur-Engur were due to the Isin and Larsa kings, and most of the latter dynasty are represented by actual remains. We have nricks of En-an-atum, son of Ishme-dagan, a cone of Sumu-ilu, another of Nur-Adad, bricks of Sin-[6 letter word]idinnam and Silli-Adad, and less than eleven large cones of Warad-Sin which were found in position embedded in the mud brickwork of his buildings. These kings refaced with burnt brick the original mud-brick terrace wall of Ur-Engur, rebuilt his chambers more or less on their old lines, and finally Warad-Sin added a new fort which projected from the line of the terrace to the NW. The next builder was Kuri-Galzu, who added a new facing or \"kisu\" to the terrace and rebuilt most of the ruined work of his predecessors. Over his walls stretch pavements made of old bricks re-used (some of these date back to the Second dynasty of Ur, others are from a building of Dungi) laid down by some nameless ruler, probably Sin-balatsu-ikbi in the 7th century B.C., which obliterate the ground-plan of the old E-Nannar, and [5 letter word] run out over what had been the low ground at the foot of the terrace but was now levelled up by the debris from the buildings on it. A clean sweep was made by the Neo-Babylonians when they built their Temenos Wall. The plan as it now works out shews that in Nabonidus' day the Ziggurat stood in the centre of a strongly walled rectangular enclosure having a fortress at each corner; the[?E.?} Fort was new, the North Fort was the old fort of Warad-Sin and Kuri-Galzu remodelled, the W. Fort was the old E-dublal-makh, and the S. Fort on which we are now at work has yet to be identified. The area inside this enceinte wall was kept free of buildings, except that in the angle between the central and the borthern flights of stairs of the Ziggurat there was a complex of rooms which must be a new version of E-Nannar, and in the corresponding angle to the south remains now coming to light may be a sister shrine of Nin-Gal. In our final publication we shall be able to give five plans of this important area, shewing the surroundings of the Ziggurat at each main stage in the history of Ur.Up to the present this could not be done of any ziggurat at any period.E-DUBLAL-MAKH and its surroundings.On the building itself itself work is being done by slow degrees, as it is important not to destroy what may later prove indispensible. Inside the first chamber we have gone down deep, finding the original wall of Bur-Sin (v. my last report) and remains of a still earlier work of the Second Dynasty of Ur. Now we have cleared away the floor levels of nabonidus and of Kuri-Galzu:
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2.in their main line all may be said to conform to one type. From the street door one passed through a little entrance-chamber into a central court which was partly open to the sly and acted as a light-well for the surrounding rooms. One side of the court was taken up by the reception-room, a long shallow chamber with a door wider than the rest set in the middle of the length; on another side was the kitchen, and other domestic offices occupied the remaining space. Close to the entrance was the door of the staircase;the treads, high and narrow like those of modern Arab stairs, were built of solid brick below and were carried up in wood on their return over the cupboard-like chamber alongside. The living-rooms of the family were all on the upper floor. The arrangement of the rooms above corresponded to that of the ground floor, but whereas those had opened onto the paved court, the top rooms were entered from a wooden gallery which ran from the stairhead round the four sides of the court and seems to have been protected by a pent-house roof: the whole plan of the building anticipates almost exactly that of the richer houses of modern Baghdad, and we have only to look at one of these to get a very fair picture of the setting in which a Terah might have passed his life at Ur four thousand years ago.The houses, continuously inhabited throughout a long period (all sorts of minor rebuilding and alterations shewed the whims of successive owners), had been swept bare of nearly all their contents, and even the graves, -for it was the custom to bury the dead below the house wherein they had lived,- had generally been plundered and yielded little except clay pots and sometimes the signet seal of the householder; but in one respect, and that perhaps the most important of all, the ruins were productive. Very large numbers of inscribed tablets were found, some singly, others in hoards, lying along the foot of the brick shelf in the repository where they had been kept, or flung out together as rubbish in:
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2.It is impossible nowadays to speak of 'rich tombs' without evoking a memory of the marvelous treasures of Tutankhamen. In the nature of things Mesopotamia can never produce such furniture as filled the rock-hewn hermetically sealed chambers of Thebes; here whatever offerings accompanied the dead man to his grave were but laid between two spread mats with earth heaped above: the mats decayed and the objects, crushed beneath eighteen feet of soil, have for thousands of years sufferred from the chemical action set up by damp and salt; wood perishes leaving little or no trace of itself, silver and copper may corrode to dust, even stone does not always escape corruption, and only gold triumphantly resists. Obviously the comparison with Egypt is unfair; and yet we can say that from the wreckage of these graves come objects which although 2000 years older than Tutankhamen, rival even his treasures in artistic merit and in skill of craftsmanship.One of our best things is a fragment of inlay work consisting of eight shell plaques four of which are decorated with linear patterns, four most delicately engraved with animal figures; the engraved lines are filled in with colour, black for the animals and red for the conventional background, and the plaques are framed with narrow borders of pink limestone and lapis lazuli. More elaborate than this but less artistic is what one is inclined to call a royal gaming-board; it again consists of shell plaques, twenty in all, adorned with linear designs and inlay of red paste and lapis and framed with lapis, ivory and mother-of-pearl; it comes from one of the earliest graves of all. But the richest grave - if indeed it is all one grave - was found at the very end of the season, so late that to finish it we were compelled to keep ten men on at work after the rest of the gang had been dismissed. At a depth of eighteen feet we came on a hard of copper tools and weapons lying between two of the filmy streaks of white which indicate matting; there were complete sets of chisels and a spear-head of bright gold. We followed up the matting over an area vastly greater than that of any tomb yet found by us and came upon increasing quantities of copper weapons, more spears, arrows by the quiverful, lance-points, a mace, axe-heads, parts of bows and other things which we could not identify. Then there lay scattered in the soil beads and pendants of polished carnelian, lapis and gold, some of them exquisitely worked; then the gold binding of a bow; then an adze of solid gold, its handle of wood covered with gesso pointed red and bound with thin gold; and lastly, lying apart, a silver baldric to which was attached a golden 'vanity-case' enriched with filigree work and containing intact its tiny tweezers, spoon and stiletto, all of gold hung on a silver ring, and a dagger which was the season's crowning reward. The hilt is of one piece of deep-coloured lapis lazuli studded with gold, the blade is of burnished gold; the sheath isof/36:
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2.It is obviously necessary to finish out the cemetery which last year proved so re-munerative, and to this I propose to devote the first part of the season. The num-ber of men desirable for this work would be comparatively small, about 120, but a-gainst the the economy in wages should be set the probability of heavy \"baksheesh\" forimportant finds: it is my opinion that the richest part of the cemetery has yet to be dug. The second part of the programme, which might to some extent run concur-rently, is the excavation of the great courtyard building lying NE of the Ziggurat.This is heavy work on which a gang of anything up to 300 man could be employed, and so for the latter half of the season the pay-bill is likely to be large. I may saythat the work, at any rate in its earlier stages, is not likely to produce much inthe way of objects - the lower levels might perhaps be more productive - but it isessential to the thorough excavation of the sacred Temenos. Indeed with it the ex-cavation of the Temenos might be considered complete, and we should at least be ina position to undertake the publication of the Expedition's work as a reasonablyfinished whole. With a view to this end I have made a fairly generous allowance for wages. Living Expenses are calculated on the normal basis. I may point out that they include the living expenses of the three imported foreman as well as of the Staff, house servants and chauffeur.Varia for Work. My old car was sold as unserviceable at the end of last seasonand must be replaced, which should be possible at the sum of £25. The item of thepresent to the tribal sheikh plus wages of guards has always been a heavy charge onthe Expedition. The past expense will be largely justified if, as I hope, the sitehas, without extra cost, been preserved undisturbed through the summer in spite of the inducement to plunder caused by our plentiful discoveries of gold last year; itcould only have been safeguarded at very heavy expense if the position had not beensecured by former regular payments.:
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2.it would even seem that they had been forestalled, for at an early date, before the great stair-pit was filled in with earth to support the floor of the superstructure, someone had broken through the brick blocking of the tomb doors; the Elamites perhaps found no more than we shall find. But elsewhere they had loot in plenty. In the doorways of the building above-ground there lay fragments of the leaf gold and mosaic in gold and lapis lazuli which adorned the doors and walls; and always the altars in these upper rooms had been torn up, as if in them too precious things had been hidden. The upper building was intended for the worship of the dead king and was planned on the lines of a private house, only distinguished by its magnificence and by the altars and religious other fittings of a religious nature which occupied its chambers. That magnificence has gone, but the grandeur of the structure remains, a worthy monument of Ur's greatest kings.In the private houses the most important discovery has been that of a little goddess chapel dedicated to a goddess whose function appears to have been the protection of travellers along the desert tracks. It dates to about 2000 B.C. and was quite a humble shrine to a minor deity, but it was most interesting because it was practically undisturbed. The statue of the goddess stood in its niche in the tiny sanctuary, a second statue lay fallen on the floor of the main chamber, where too lay a curiously-carved limestone pillar with a cup-like hollow at the top; outside the door was one of the clay reliefs which had decorated the facade, a figure two feet high of a bull-legged demon; small votive objects, a model chariot, model beds and stone mace-heads were in a corner room, clay pots and a number of inscribed tablets littered the:
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2.itect himself, a total increase of [Pound symbol]400. The hard winter of last year shewed certain faults in the Expedition house, and repairs will have to be undertaken and some extra accommodation provided, - a second bath-room, a stable and another bedroom are really needed, and all existing windows and doors require renewal. My estimate in consequenc reaches a total of [Pound symbol]5000 if my request for an increase of salary to myself be granted or of [Pound symbol]4800 if that be refused. It will be remarked that I assume that Dr. Legrain will again accompany the Expedition, and his salary is therefore included in the es-timate.Trusting that you will approve of my statement of accounts and accept in principle my estimate for future expenditure,I have the honour to be, Sir,Your obedient Servant,[signature of C. Leonard Woolley]:
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2.lions, and we have the inlay stela which will I believe prove to be a finer thing even than Mes-Kalam-dug's wig. The chariot includes the rein-ring with the electrum ass, again one of the best things found; the rein ring with the bull went to Baghdad. From the subsidiary burials in Shub-ad's grave and in that of her husband we have a number of gold head-dresses, and there are many other gold objects. The silver vessels are numerous and many in excellent condition; the small silver toilet-box with lid inlaid in shell and lapis came to us, and with the animal heads come a number of fine shell plaques.We were much helped by the fact that the Iraq Museum has no one capable of dealing with objects that need restoration or technical treatment and is therefore chary of selecting such; even so I had a hard fight to secure the inlay stela and had to surrender a good deal to get it, but had the Museum been better equipped we should not have obtained the chariot, the harp and the golden bull's head as well as all the Shub-ad treasure. On the whole we have done well by the division, and though I grudge the inscribed vessels of Mes-kalam-dug I feel sure that you will be satisfied by with the share allotted to the Expedition.The more valuable objects and those needing most treatment leave Ur tomorrow for immediate shipment; the rest will follow at the end of the season.I have the honour to be, Sir,Your very obedient ServantC. Leonard Woolley [signature]:
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2.low the foundations of the Larsa buildings (c. 2000 B.C.); these walls must be ofa very remote antiquity, but traces of coppers shewed that the stone age properlyspeaking lay yet further back. In connection with the lowest buildings we foundfoundation-deposits in the form of large clay pots inverted over mats on which wereplaced clay cups containing animal and other remains, undoubtedly a meal spread forthe god: the practice is of course known in Egypt at much later times, but has notI believe hitherto been established for this country. Various circumstances pointedto the fact that the pottery drains which, as I stated in my last report, were as-tonishingly numerous in the mound and belonged to all periods of its occupation, possessed a quite unexpected characted. They had originalky no connection with thegraves, they were too many to serve the sanitary needs of the small sacred buildings(not private houses) erected on the site, and there were found inside them verylarge numbers of clay pots xxxxx of types which we know from other evidence to havebeen used for offerings to the gods. I am convinced that these \"drains\", thoughsimilar in construction to others in other parts of the city which really were )xxidrains, here acted as channels by which libations could be xxxx poured and offerings madeto the god of the underworld. Certainly a peculiar sanctity attached to the spot, for the buildings on it, though quite small, were constantly rebuilt by kings; Ur-Engur, Dungi, Bursin, of the IIIrd Dynasty, Libit-Ishtar of Isin, the Larsa kings,have all left their mark on the site, and even Nebuchadnezzar was at pains to pre-served its character: for some two hundred years it served as a cemetery, and thebuildings as mortuary chapels, and during that time it may be that the cult of thedead was combined with that of the god of the lower world, but I have no doubt that the latter was the primary idea: it might even be possible to regard these drainsas a modest version of the \"apsu\", the deep and dark place, which royal buildersdedicated to Ea. Very few objects of intrinsic importance were discovered in these low levels;the most important was a little shell carving of a bull found under a mud floor of:
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2.mah there is a range of courts and chambers, divided up into separate units, which seems to have been called E-Kar-zida, and was partly residential and in part one of the industrial centres of the E-gish-shir-gal temples.Above the floor of one of the rooms we came upon a small collection of tablets of the Larsa period, and below another floor a large hoard of several hundred tablets, some uncommonly large (more than a foot square), all dated within two or three years of each other in the reign of Ibi-Sin the last king of the Third dynasty of Ur (2208-2183 B.C.) and containing temple accounts. These accounts are full of interest for the light they throw on the activities of a great shrine; there are the records of the weaving shops attached to the temple, receipts of tithes, lists of servants, details of sacrifices and offerings, issue vouchers of temple stores etc; their connection with the building in which they were found gives them a special importance. The work of baking, cleaning and mending is in the hands of Dr. Legrain; the full analysis of their contents must necessarily be a matter of time and cannot be finished in the field. A few Neo-Babylonian tablets containing omens etc., are of greater intrinsic interest.The excavation of E-kar-zida, down to the Larsa level is still in progress, and will hardly be complete before the close of the season.The temple of Nin-GalWork in the south corner of E-temen-ni-il at first seemed disappointing: everywhere we encountered piles of ashes five and six feet deep, and walls ere conspicuous by their absence, excepting for a few shoddy constructions of the Persian period. It was only after several days of apparently fruitless labour that we came upon a heavy wall of mud brick decorated with vertical grooves which proved to be the Neo-Babylonian enceinte wall of E-temen-ni-il, running between the main wall of the Temenos and the inner angle of E-dublal-mah. With this discovery we have complete the delimitation of the Ziggurat enclosure and which I assumed to be the fort for which I had all the time been looking. This assumption was soon disproved. The building, which took on ever larger proportions as digging progressed, proved to be the temple of Nin-Gal, the wife of Nannar the Moon God. Unfortunately the greater part of the temple underlay the spoil-heap made by Dr. Hall when in 1919 he cleared part of the SE. face of the Ziggurat, and some ten to twelve feet of modern dump had to be removed over a wide area before the walls could be traced; this has naturally made the work both slow and costly, and indeed it is not yet finished; but what we have got already of the temple is worth the trouble of shifting so much rubbish. The building was for the most part of mud brick of particularly bad quality; the majority of the walls are ruined down to floor level, and where this is not the case they are only with great difficulty to be distinguished from the soil in which they are buried; but the pavements are:
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2.moon goddess exquisitely carved in white marble, its eyes inlaid with lapis lazuli and shell; it is a most lifelike piece of work, the contours of the face full and soft, the hair a faithful rendering of an elab orately waved coiffure, a piece which proves that the artists of the Third Dynasty had achieved a skill worthy of the great empire ruled by their kings.The graves which made so difficult our search for the buildings were in them-selves interesting enough. They dated from a rather later period, between 1900 and 1700 B. C., some being brick-built tombs and others clay coffins shaped like baths inverted over the body of the dead man, and they contained large quantities of pot-tery and other objects. Against the side of one we found the gravediggers' tools, dropped accidentally into the shaft, hoes or adzes like those used by the modern Egyptian peasant, but of bronze instead of iron, and inside another, the grave of assessor in the lawcourts, was a little set of tablets recording his last business transactions; amongst other things he had just added a single room to his town house and had bought the necessary little plot of land for the modest equivalent of [undecipherable] shillings and [undecipherable] pence. four dollars twenty cents.The neighbouring mound proved no less fertile. We traced out the inner face of the great wall built by king Nebuchadnezzar round the old buildings of the Sacred Area of Ur and found its south-west gate, and then, going deeper inside the wall, laid bare some houses which seem to have been last inhabited about 693 B. C., when someone dropped on the floor a lot of inscribed clay tablets some of which contained schoolboys' exercises and grammars and some [undecipherable] religious hymns or prayers. But it was beneath the floor of this house that our best discoveries were made, for here, as it appears, there had been thrown out some of the contents of a very ancient shrine, the debris of ruined buildings had covered them, and the floor had been laid over the top of all. First we found pots of archaic forms, then a collection of beads in gold and silver, lapis lazuli and carnelian; close to these was a pair of rams:
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2.Museum is supposed to pay in one half of its contribution at the beginning of the Expedition's financial year (which starts on July 1st) and one half on December 31st; one have therefore of the total sum given in my estimate and approved by the Museums ought to be at my disposal as from July 1st. Actuallysome[sic] funds are needed before that date, as I have to arrange for the payment for guards on the site and for water, so that an advance has to be made from the balance over from the previous season if any and where there was no such balance I have borrowed from the British Museum; of course there is no demand on anything like the total sum, which is calculated to last me half-way through the [word xed out here] winter, but what with salaries and traveling expenses, which come early in the autumn, considerable drafts have to be made on this first credit. Normally I have obtained the first instalment[sic] from the British Museum as soon as it was due, or at least a large advance on it, and [word xed out here] have been content to wait till the autumn for your contribution, that money being really required only when the Expedition takes the field.This year I started with a balance the larger part of which represented the British Museum's contribution and drew from them a further remittance of £400 to complete their half share; I was not aware when I came out here that none had been forthcoming from you and that my instructions to the Eastern Bank were therefore premature. The Bank appealed to the British Museum and they sent in a remittance anticipating their second contribution intended to cover the deficite[sic], but at the end of the year the London account was overdrawn again in spite of the fact that, having been informed of the situation, I had delayed to pay cer-:
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2.new buildings at on a level some six or seven feet above the old. In front of the old gate-tower he laid out a court some thirty yards square, and round this built a double wall enclosing a series of rooms of different s1 sizes. His buildings were of crude mud brick, and except on either side of the tower, where they were protected by its massive walls, they were are ruined down almost to the level of the floors, and since wind and rain had denuded the whole area and left only a foot or so of earth over the brick pavements it looked as unpromising a site for excavation as well might be. In order to make complete the plan of the late Babylonian Temenos we had to dig it none the less; and we have every reason to be glad of the necessity.The first half-hour's work in shallow soil brought to light a large votive mace-head of granite and a tall boundary-stone inscribed with the title-deeds of property, the owners' and the witnesses' names, and hearty curses by all the gods whose symbols were carved in relief above on whosoever xx should remove his neighbour's landmark. Then came tablets and inscribed foundation cones, a fragment from a diorite statue with an inscription of king Dungi, carefully trimmed so as to preserve the lettering intact, an early cylinder seal, and various small objects. The strange thing was the disparity of dates. The statue was of about 2250 B.C., the cones of two hundred years later, the boundary-stone of the Kassite period, about 1600-1500 B.C., and yet all lay together above a paved floor of the sixth century. Then was found a very curious object - a small drum-shaped clay pedestal whereon were three short inscriptions in rather faulty Sumerian and then thereafter the explanation; \"Copy of bricks ... of Bur-Sin king of Ur which Sin-balatsu-ikbi,vice-regent of Ur, was found when searching for the ground-plan of E-gish-shir-gal. These Nabu-shum-iddina, son of I-din-an-nium the priest of Ur, has copied for the singled out and copied for the admiration of people\". We knew that we were not the first in the field at Ur, for Dr. Hall worked here in [?] 1919, and Taylor excavated part of the site seventy years ago: but it is delightful to learn that we have an earlier forerunner and that in the seventh century B.C. someone was drawing up the plans of the [???] ruins and, like Dr. Legrain today but with less skill, copying the inscriptions found; and he would even seem to have started a local Museum of antiquities! When some of the late tablets proved to be writing-exercises and one a syllabary endorsed as \"the property of the boys' school\", and when we found with these loose bricks with scratched pattern which were either gaming-boards or abaci for teaching arithmetic, it was hard to resist the jest that we had stumbled on the ruins of the University Museum! But the inscriptions on the bricks of the pavement threw a different light on the question, for they described the place as the house built by Nabonidus for the Priestess of Nannar, and this can only mean that the whole complex of chambers between the double walls of the court is the cloister wherein lived Bel-Shaltu-Nannar, the King's own daughter, whom he solemnly installed as High Priestess of the god at Ur. Doubtless there were schools in this ancient E-gig-par, as in a modern convent, and if the Princess had a museum of antiquities in her cloister she was but inheriting a taste for archaeology from her father, who has left on record his pleasure in the discovery of ancient monuments.:
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2.of a class far more important than anything we had found previously; I hope to get many more of these literary texts, and as the building is remarkably well preserved ought to obtain objects of other kinds as well. Work on this site will have to go rather slowly, if tablets are to be extricated in numbers and in good condition, so I propose to start wih a rather smaller gang than usual, increasing the numbers if advisable later on. I do not anticipate sensational results early in the season, but I do feel confident that the site is a good one and will well repay excavation. My party will reach Baghdad probably on the 23rd, and I shall get on to Ur as quickly as possible and start excavations on November 1st as usual. I understand that Mr. Cooke has taken Miss Bell's place as Director of the Iraq Museum, and I shall presumably have to deal with him as well as with the Advisor to the Ministry of Education.Before I left England the first proofs of the whole of the al Ubaid book had been corrected; in order to save time further proofs will not be sent out to me in Iraq, but Dr. Hall will undertake all the remaining work of editing up the volume. It ought to be out this year, and will be a handsome publication.I think that that is everything until I can report actual progress in the field - and I hope that when I can do so the report will be a good one!Yours sincerely,[signed] C. Leonard Woolley:
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2.of Nannar the Moon god and his wife Nin-gal; in the west corner of it rose a second terrace with sloped walls of mud brick inset with clay cones bearing the king's dedication-texts, and in the middle of this upper terrace stood the Ziggurat, flanked by shrines of the great gods. It is obvious that the terrace, solidly constructed and dominating the city, was as well adapted to military as to religious purposes; it would naturally be the last line of defense against an invading enemy. It is not then surprising to find that after the Elamite conquest which brought to an end the dynasty founded by Ur-Engur the great outer wall was breached and in part overthrown: only in one place have we found th[sic] burnt brickwork of its face preserved; elsewhere only the mud-brick core remains, cut back to a slope by the despoilers and by the weather. Warad-Sin king of Larsa in about 1960 B.C. undertook its reconstruction. At either end of t he[sic] line he contented himself with restoring the old work, but in the centre[sic] of the NW face he built a strong fort with buttressed walls of burnt brick which rose directly from the terrace edge and occupied its entire width. This addition to the defence was probably in view of the war which Warad-Sin had started against Babylon and the Babylonian victory sixty years later [word x-ed out, may typed above] have led to its destruction, or t hat[sic] may have resulted from the rebellion of Ur against Hammurabi's successor early in the nineteenth century. Ur was neglected after that time, and local resources could do no more than patch with shoddy brickwork the breaches in the Larsa walls; but in the fourteenth century B.C. Kuri-Galzu of Babylon embarked on a general work of restoration; he rebuilt the fort, set up a range of magazines along the terrace to the south-west of it, and on the north-east added a series:
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2.of Sinbalatsu-ikbi giving no less than nine variants of a new text, dedic-ations of shrines and statues to different gods worshipped in the same temple. Work was pushed forward to the SE of the Nin-Gal temple, and it was foun that the entrance of this gave from the courtyard onto a paved street which ran from the E-dublal-makh courtyard to the Temenos wall; immediately oppos-ite to the Nin-Gal gateway was the similar gateway of another large temple o palace complex of which we were able to trace only the NW and the SW sides: it dates from the Larsa period but has been rebuilt by Kuri-galzu; the N. corner seems to be an open court, along the SW are small rooms and shrines recognisable by the statue bases still in situ: a good door-socket found under the floor of one of these must belong to an earlier structure; it give the name of Gimil-Sin but does not identify the building whith which we are at present dealing. Only a few days could be spent upon this site, but the results were satisfactory in two ways, for the excavated area now extends xx well towards the great \"E-kharsag\" mound which should be the objective of our next season and so makes easier the linking up of that with the Ziggurat and further its SW limits are found to be conterminous with the Neo-Babylon-ian temenos, and so help to define the area necessarily to be excavated in the future. On the E-dublal-makh site the whole of the great courtyard has been cleaed and another range of buildings along the NE of it excavated; the site has thus been linked up with E-nun-makh on the one hand and with the Nin-Gal temple on the other, while in the west corner of the court is a well-preserv flight of brick steps giving access to the Ziggurat terrace or E-temen-ni-il A door-socket of Bur-Sin found in one of the chambers gave further inform-ation about the foundation of the temple on the site of a primitive unroofed enclosure used for sacrifice - probably the structure whose walls, dating fr the Second Dynasty of Ur, we found under the Bur-Sin floor level inside the shrine. A brick-lined well in the courtyard produced water at a depth of som forty-five feet below pavement level, i.e., sixty feet below the surface of the mound: the water is unfortunately brackish.In one of the chambers of the range of buildings round the court we con-tinued to find great numbers of tablets, all business archives of the temple the baking of these, which was a considerable tax or our time and also rather expensive, has now been taken over by the Iraq Railways, and better results are now obtained with the greater heat which their oil furnaces supply. Other small objects include a fine bronze axe-head, an arrow-head of bronze plated with gold, probably a votive object, a gold locket with stone inlay, a bronze bowl and vase from a late tomb, and some curious painted mud statuettes, un-fortunately in bad condition, of priests (?) wearing the fish mantle, found in a brick box under a late floor level. But our main discovery was made in the courtyard of E-dublal-makh and i[?n] the gate-chamber leading to it. Here there were scattered over the pavement quantities of limestone fragments, large and small, which proved to be parts of one, or possibly two, huge stelae measuring five feet across and perhaps:
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2.of the Jemdet Nasr period which has hitherto been but scantily represented at Ur. The period is named after the site near Kish, excavated by Professor Langdon, where its characteristic three-coloured pottery was first found; it is one of the outstanding puzzles in Mesopotamian archaeology, for [word crossed out, then its culture typed above] is very distinct from both what comes before and what follows after it, shews certain fairly obvious connections with Elam in the East, and in spite of its association with tablets of a proto-Sumerian type has often been taken to be foreign and intrusive; unfortunately at Jemdet Nasr itself only one fragmentary skull was secured to throw light on the [word x-ed out] anthropological side of the question, and at Kish and Warka no graves had been discovered.In the small area excavated - and since the graves lie as much as fifty feet below the surface the area must needs be small - we recorded over a hundred and thirty graves set close together and one above the other. The upper graves were of a post-Jemdet Nasr date and contained pottery decorated with the \"reserved slip\" technique which elsewhere we have found both in buildings and in rubbish-strata well above those in which the polychrome pottery occurs. The intermediate graves yielded tumblers of a curiously tall and slender type which in the atrata[sic] of Kish, Warka and Ur are found commonly and exclusively immediately above the Jemdet Nasr levels: the lowest graves were of the Jemdet Nasr age and produced both the polychrome vases characteristic of it and also vessels [inserted above: of plain burnished plum-red colour and others] with freely-drawn designs in red paint on the buff body-clay, a technique which seems to belong to the latter part of t he[sic] period. The sequence is much more interesting than an unmixed Jemdet Nasr cemetery would have been.At this depth in the soil everything was much crushed, especially in:
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2.out and with the Tel el Obeid dig in prospect, and with, too, the possibility of employment of a larger gang which Lawrence's supervision might justify, or make economically desirable, I do not see my way to making a long, even a reasonably long season of it. Of course I am going to try to do all the work planned on the sum of £3000 fixed by you and Kenyon at my own suggestion; but I should strongly recommend that if it be possible for you to do so, as indeed you hinted at our last interview, you should put at my disposal a further sum only to be drawn upon in case of real need. I am very anxious to hear your decision on this point, and should be glad if, as distances are so great, you would cable me what you decide.The site is an excellent one and will repay a great deal of work and outlay. I am now engaged on the excavation of a very important building, one of the most ancient of the historic temples of Mesopotamia; it is remarkably well preserved, and though only a part of it has as yet been cleared we have already obtained most important new historical information, and in the way of museum objects have found, though we have not yet started looking into the deeper levels and foundation-deposits, unique specimens dating as far back as the Agade dynasty; some of these objects are of considerable artistic as well as historical value.I hope to send a full report on the work in ten days' time. All three of us are well and flourishing. The weather has been most kind, and there has as yet been no rain to speak of, - none to stop work for a moment; only the wind and dust (it's a dreadfully dusty place) have at all interfered with progress.The house is finished and is really most comfortable an well suited to the needs of the expedition now and in the future; I send you a plan and a photo of it. It is a boon to be in proper rooms where one can work decently instead of a tent with all its crowding and disorder. On furniture etc., I have spent more than I should have done if the dig were going to last one season only; this is I think justified by the permanent nature of the preparations I was told to make and by the fact that through the kindness of friends here I have been able to secure things far more cheaply than normally I could do in this by no means cheap country. To buy now in this way seems to me a true economy for future years, - and it has the advantage that we in the present year are personally comfortable and properly equipped for our respective jobs. I hope I shall get a wire from you on the money question. I hate seeming to go back on my own estimate, but I think it only wise to be prepared, and a slight excess over the estimate might make all the difference between a moderately and a very successful year.Yours very sincerely,[signature] C. Leonard Woolley:
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2.pottery on the top of which the body was placed together with the grave offerings. Occasionally small beads of shell or black stone are worn on the arms and a stone axe or mace-head may be found by the shoulder, but for the most part the offerings are of clay. The characteristic pottery is of a type familiar from fragments which occur freely in the earlier levels at Ur, at Eridu, at Warka and at other Sumerian sites, but it is called \"al 'Ubaid ware\" because at al 'Ubaid we first found three or four more orr less complete examples of it; made of a buff [x] clay often turned green in the firing and decorated with designs in chocolate-brown or black paint, it is entirely different from anything made produced in the historic or later pre-historic periods, and even before we found fragments of it underlying the clay deposit left by the Flood I had ventured to call it antediluvian. Now we have complete vases in great numbers and in a variety of forms; thin-walled and inclined to be brittle, they have been crushed by the enormous weight f the earth under which they have lain for so many thousands of years, but the colours have not suffered and the pots, once pieced together, will form a wonderful collection noteworthy not only for the antiquity but for the artistic excellence of the objects. The decoration simple in its elements, is well composed and admirably adapted to the shape of the vessel; the shapes, so far from being primitive, shew that the Mesopotamian potter had already explored to the full the natural possibilities of his material; it is a humble art perhaps but highly developed.Another aspect of art is shewn by the figurines which occur in a number of graves. They are of terra-cotta and always represent a nude female resting her hands on her sides, sometimes hold-:
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2.preliminaries for the final publication of the Cemetery. A tabular analysis has been drawn out of all the graves and their contents (there are more than 1800 graves_ and we have completed up to date the type- sheets of all the pottery yet found, of which we have some 550 forms; already certain chronological results are evident, and I believe that in time it will prove possible to arrange all the graves in a proper time sequence. The work has of course now been postponed until next summer.I hope that very shortly I shall have something really good to report; things look to me extremely promising.With best wishes,Yours sincerely,[singed] C. Leonard Woolley:
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2.primarily tombs. In Bur-Sin's courtyard a small shaft leads under a wall and through a corbelled doorway into a long vaulted chamber, still standing almost intact, which can only have been the king's grave. It had been plundered by the Elamites who swept down from the Persian hills and brought the Third Dynasty of Ur to a disastrous end, and we could collect from the infilterredd dust no more than the scattered bones: of one who was presumably no less than the king of Ur, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters of the earth a smaller tomb under the pavement of the courtyard, probably that of a prince of the royal house, had been as thoroughly as cleaned out, and a few tiny bits of gold strewn about the court shewed how the robbers had divided the spoil. It is too much to hope that the royal graves should have escaped the notice of the enemies to whom Ur so often fell prey, yet though until the last tomb has been opened hope persists; but even if not a single object should be found we are amply rewarded. The actual tomb of Bur-Sin is one of the finest monuments we haveat Ur, but it is almost insignificant compared with what we have, even at this stage, in Dungi's building. At the back of this two flights of stairs lead up to what was a high paved room; beneath its floor there lies a huge brick-lined pit more than twenty feet deep which had been filed in with clean packed soil. In a recess on one side of it is a bricked-up door through which steps led down to a square brick platform at the pit's bottom; from this broad stairs run down to left and right and passing beyond the limits of the pit enter long vaulted rooms or passages. The corbelled roofs of the passages are in a dangerous state and must be shored up before we can enter them, - at present they are supported by the earth filling which we dare not:
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2.ramp's foot; they had silver rings in their muzzles, silver collars round their necks; the reins, made of huge beads of silver and lapis lazuli, passed through a pole ring surmounted by a silver mascot in the form of a bull: the grooms lay dead by the heads of the oxen, the drivers across the seats of the waggons.The rest of the grave area was literally a shambles. In the narrow space were strewn fifty bodies of those sacrificed to the spirit of their dead master. Along one side were men, their daggers on their hips in a neatly ordered row; against the foot of the tomb lay the chief ladies of the harem, eleven of them wearing what must have been full court regalia, an elaborate head-dress of gold ribbon, wreaths of gold mulberry leaves hung from strings of lapis and carnelian beads, silver pins with lapis heads, great gold ear-rings, and above the hair a silver palm with long points ending in inlaid rosettes of gold, shell and lapis; they had with them their cockleshells containing face paint and their little alabaster unguent-vases, but none of the ordinary offerings made to the dead, because they were themselves such offerings. [handwritten note (Here insert paragraph on separate page)]The tomb itself had been looted, but the robbers had overlooked or despised a few things which to us were precious enough. Chief of these was a two-feet silver model of a rowing-boat. The little craft is very delicately shaped, with high stern and prow, just such a boat as may be seen on the Euphrates marshes today; there are six benches for the rowers, each with its pair of leaf-bladed oars laid across the gunwale, and amidships is the arched support for the awning that protected the owner from the Mesopotamian sun: though it was deeply embedded in the fallen stones of the wall the model is perfect and only the awning-support is crushed.But the main interest here centred in the tomb itself. In the stone wall there was a doorway, bricked up when the body had been laid inside, which was crowned by a true arch of baked bricks; the tomb chamber was vaulted with arches of which a few rings,were yet standing, and the end, brought round to apsidal form, was reefed with a half:
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2.Sacred Area of Ur brought to light a building of quite remarkable interest, for it proved that as early as 2100 B.C. a royal hall could be roofed with arches and vaults. It is not too much to say that the history of architecture in the Near East -that is, the early history of architecture as a whole - has to be re-written in view of what Ur has taught us in the last three years, but this discovery, carrying back to so remote a date the most advanced features of building, is more revolutionary than any other.None of these sites were productive of much in the way of objects, though the south-west side of the Ziggurat gave us a very fine diorite weight in the form of a duck with an inscription of king Dungi (2500 B.C.) attesting its correctness to standard. Particularly welcome therefore was the chance find of a shell plaque, dating to about 3000 B.C., with an engraving of a priest offering sacrifice, - a fine illustration of the early Sumerian style and perhaps the best piece of Sumerian shell carving yet known. But important as this was it was to be eclipsed by discoveries in an area where buildings were conspicuously absent. There was a wide blank in our general plan at the south-east end of the late Temenos, inside Nebuchadnezzar's wall, and a trench cut here to ascertain whether or no the site was occupied by buildings has brought to light no walls but a whole cemetery of very early date (the tombs come shortly before or shortly after 3000 B.C.) and of surprising richness. As usual pottery vessels are most common, but there is a most unusual wealth of vases in stone, alabaster, limestone, and diorite and stearite or soapstone, many of them of very fine design. Copper occurs in nearly every grave, bowls and vases, cooking-pots, axes, adzes, spears, razors, knives and daggers in great numbers and of many types, and such smaller things as reticules containing manicure sets and pins with ornamental heads, often of lapis lazuli set with silver or gold. Of beads there is a profusion, generally of lapis or carnelian, gold or silver, and with these come:
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2.same builder, who indeed rebuilt the gate from the ground up, using his predecessor's walls as a foundation. But interesting as it was to recover the history of the Justice Hall, the buildings which Nabonidus put up at a higher level, incorporating in the Kuri-Galzu's tower as a central shrine, was were more interesting still.From an inscription preserved in the Museum at Yale we know that the last King of Babylon, following ancient precedent, consecrated his daughter Bel-Shalti-Nannar as High Priestess of the Moon God at Ur and built an E-gig-par or cloister for her dwelling; and incidentally he lays down the most admirable moral precepts for her guidance! Now, in front of the E-dublal-makh in this its latest phase, we find a wide courtyard surrounded by a double wall enclosing a long range of chambers the bricks of whose pavements bear together with the name of Nabonidus the description of the building as \"the House of the Priestess\": the ground-plan of the place answers perfectly to the word \"cloister\" used in the Yale inscription, and there can be no doubt that we have here the actual convent of the Princess. And the contents of the building were also not less important than its character. School materials, writing exercises etc., seemed to shew that the religious houses then as now had their educational side, and the daughter of Nabonidus, himself a well-known antiquary, appears to have kept a museum in her convent, for there were found in the ruins a large number of objects of such different dates that it was hard on any other theory to account for their presence all together in rooms of the latest period. Amongst these were a fine boundary stone carved with the symbols of the gods, an inscription of King Dungi (c.2250 B.C.), a votive mace-head of early date, inscribed stones of the Larsa kings, bronze figurines etc., and, most curious of all, a record on clay of excavations carried out at Ur in the seventh century B.C. with copies of early inscriptions found in the course of the work! These copies were made \"for the admiration of people\", and I can now feel that not only in digging here but also in making public the results of the dig I am following a local precedent set two thousand five hundred years ago.:
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2.section of the graveyard in which we have been digging was not used after the beginning of the Third Dynasty. Forty-five graves were recorded in the first week; they yielded masses of plain pottery - some 200 complete or nearly complete specimens - and a few painted pieces, flint and obsidian implements, stone vases, copper tools and bowls, clay imitations of stone and copper tools, a few beads and some small objects. One vase is peculiarly interesting as bearing an early Sumerian inscription incised in the clay. The bones had for the most part decayed away entirely, but we have secured some half-dozen skulls and one complete skeleton, material which in view of its date ought to prove of the greatest importance for the solution of the Sumerian race question. The amount of material afforded by the tombs was so embarassing that in the second week I moved the men on to the small building whose excavation was begun by Dr. Hall, intending to resume operations on the graves when the catalogue of objects had been brought up to date. Events have quite stultified my intentions, for the building has proved no less productive than the cemetery.We started work at the angle where Dr. Hall found the copper lions and the Imgig relief; this was cleared (see photograph) and then the gangs were set along the face of a supposed projection from the SE front of the building as shown in Dr. Hall's plan; it is in this section that our discoveries have been made.There are three buildings on the site. The first in date was the small building of Dr. Hall's plan, a rectangle with a projecting platform containing a staircase on its XX SW side, and another projection approached by a massive stone staircase on its XX SE; it consisted of a platform with a containing wall of baked plano-convex bricks, above which rose a building of plano-convex mud bricks; the projections were in mud brick. the building was a temple of the goddess Ninkhursag, erected by the (hitherto unknown) king A-an-ni-pad-da, son of King Mes-an-ni-pad-da of the First Dynasty of Ur, the third dynasty, according to Babylonian tradition, after the Flood. The marble foundation-tablet, from which we derive our information, is the oldest dated document ever yet found; it proves the historic existence of a dynasty hitherto commonly regarded as mythical, & it gives a date, if not an authorship, for the remarkable series of art objects discovered by Dr. Hall and by ourselves.The temple was decorated with a series of copper reliefs, 20 centimeters high, of reclining bulls; of these we have found up to date five more or less complete examples and two heads. I enclose specimen photographs, but it will be realised that these cannot do justice to these very remarkable works of early art; it is difficult enough to remove such delicate things from the mud brick in which they are embedded and to take the necessary measures for thir preservation; to prepare them for exhibition is beyond our means and the limits of our time. The photographs shew in the rough what can be made very much finer objects. Another form of decoration was by inlay in white limestone and other materials; the more complete examples of this that we have as yet shew bulls and birds, which were:
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2.side the body. Another grave, that of a woman, contained a head-dressof the normal type but distinguished by several new elements in theshape of gold filigree pendants, long leaves etc. It is quite clearthat we have reached the outskirts of the cemetery in this direction, and although there are still outlying graves they would not in my o-pinion repay excavation; those we have found this year, though far frombeing poor, have added comparatively little to the riches of formerseasons. The vertical zone occupied by the bulk of the graves is clearlydefined by the coloured rubbish-strata which run unbroken above andbelow it and my original idea was to expose the lower stratum over thewhole area in order to be satisfied what the graves were exhausted.In one corner however this stratum failed is and led to work at deeperlevels; here, at a depth of some twelve metres, we have found a dewgraves, one of them lying actually under the stratum in question, whichare shewn by new forms of clay and stone vases to belong to an earlierperiod than the rest of the cemetery; their position in the time sequencewhich I am now trying to establish is given by the tablets and seal im-pressions occurring freely in the stratum.Of these tablets and seal-impressions great numbers have been foundand I enclose a special note on them by Father Burrows. They occur inwell-marked strata which we have numbered from 1 to 8 and both on ex-ternal and on internal evidence form a chronological series. In orderto collect as much of this material as possible we have carried the workdown in several points below the level at which graves are encounteredand are searching the rubbish-mounds underlying the cemetery; in one:
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2.slaughter of beasts and of grooms had been a later act in the burial tragedy.It was probable that the waggon stood immediately in front of the entrance to the shaft, so digging was continued behind it and the sloping earth side was traced back for some distance; but to our surprise this proved to be the side not of a narrow passage ramp but of a pit some twenty-five feet square, a \"death-pit\" larger than any we have yet encountered, and the whole of this is covered with the bodies of human victims laid out in ordered rows. For more than a week we have been at work clearing the last nine inches or a foot that covered the floor of the shaft and a third of the space still remains to be examined, but already we have listed forty-five bodies of which thirty-nine are women and six are doubtful. And the riches of them are astonishing. In the King's grave last year we found nine court ladies wearing head-dresses of gold and semi-precious stones; here there are already thirty-four such, and for the most part far more splendid - the best only less remarkable than the head-dress of Queen Shub-ad herself, gold hair-ribbons, wreaths of ^gold leaves and flowers, inlaid pendants, great lunate ear-rings, silver \"combs\" with flowers of coloured inlay, pins of silver or gold, necklaces of gold and lapis row upon row, a wonderful regalia. Nor are these all the contents of the pit. In one corner there lay folded up on the top of the bodies a sort of canopy whose ridge-pole was decorated with bands of gold and coloured mosaic over silver and the uprights were of silver with ^copper heads in the form of spear-points hafted with gold while shell rings held up the hangings. In another corner were harps. Of one the sounding-box was decorated with broad bands of mosaic, the upright beams:
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2.stands the bitumen-lined brick tank for the water. Against the other walls there are two cooking-ranges, one with an open trough-fireplace for burning wood, [?]p- a cup-fire for charcoal and a furnace whereon probably the great cauldron stood, the other an elaborate covered stove with two fireplaces, circular flues and top vents for the cooking-pots and a flight of steps so that one might mount on the top of the stove to lift or shift them: on the floor we found the quern and grinder-stone and the clay vessels left lying when the last meal had been cooked.Another curious feature of the temple is a small chamber lying in the centre of a maze of corridors symmetrical in plan; it had two doors at the south-east end of its longer sides and at the other stelae of dark gypsum lying side by side at its foot, embedded in the bitumen which here covered its brick floor; each stone was inscribed with the name of Bur-Sin and his dedication of the temple, and one can only suppose that this chamber was the shrine in which was celebrated the cult of the buildingâs deified founder. Certainly it is unique in Mesopotamian discoveries.In the sanctuary and in the rooms about it, and in the courtyard, numerous discoveries were made. The temple had been sacked and burned, probably as a result of a rebellion in the twelfth year of Samsu-iluna king of Babylon against the suzerainty of that city which had recently been established by the great Hammurabi, and its treasures had been looted by the troops; but some of the objects which for them had small value they had been content to smash, and we found on the brick floors fragments which combined to make up vases and other things of alabaster or diorite dedicated by kings and pious worshippers in the shrine of the Moon goddess. The most important of these was also the only one which was intact, a diorite statue of the goddess Bau, patroness of the poultry-yard, a squat and solid figure in an elaborately flounced dress seated on a throne supported by geese: it is the first [?statue?] which we have found complete (only the nose is missing) and the first:
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2.suggest that it might account for the wide extent of the covered by the ruins of Sumerian cities; considering that the houses were so closely set this area would imply a population incredibly numerous, but it may be that whole quarters might become uninhabitable owing to the presence of the graves and that the householders would shift for a time at least to cleaner ground leaving the old site vacant for time to purify it.These graves, like the houses, were those of poor folk, but the produced tomb furniture in the shape of clay pots, beads, seals and metal objects which were of great value as filling up a gap in our chronological series of types. Below them lay the ruins of older buildings and as we followed these up the hill-side we came upon something very different from the cottages of the top level. It is too early as yet to say exactly what these buildings are. Dating from the period of the Larsa kings, about 2000 B.C., they are large, solidly constructed in burnt brick, and at present chiefly remarkable for their preservation, - the walls are standing fifteen feet high and their height increases the further we dig back into the mound. Our work was confined to two courts and two or three chambers opening on to them, and even these were not fully excavated , but two objects turned up as omens of good luck for the future, a little head of a priest carved in pinkish sandstone, rough work but of interest in that it was evidently a portrait realistically done from life, and a small stone bowl decorated with a design of scorpions carved in relief round the outer face, this dating probably from about 2600 B.C., some three or four centuries older than the head. Then on the very last morning of the season we found against the wall of a room a collection of nearly sixty clay tablets which had obviously been stored in a jar whose fragments lay with them: they were fairly large and unusually well preserved and bear religious texts and hymns in honour of the Moon God written out in the time of Rim-Sin king of Larsa twenty one centuries before Christ. These are the most important tablets which our excavations have yet brought to light and their discovery was a fitting finale to a successful season.C. Leonard Woolley.:
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2.SUMMARY OF ACCOUNTS FOR THE YEAR 1925 -1926.DEBIT.A. Balance from year 1924 - 1925, as shewn andapproved, £1005. 19. 7., less £250 re- £ s. d.maining in the hands of the British Museum, 755. 19. 7B. Remittances to the Eastern Bank by the BritishMuseum as shewn by pass-book, these includ-ing £250 due to last year's balance, 1659. 0. 11.C. Remittances to the Eastern Bank by the Univer-sity Museum as shewn by pass-book, 1869. 0. 0.D. Moneys handed to Dr. Legrain by the UniversityMuseum, 484. 11. 7.E. Direct payments by the two Museums, as shewn,other than the above, 17. 8. Total of payments by the two Museums 4769. 9. 9.F. Interest on deposit at Eastern Bank, 2. 4. 0.G. By sale of reports in Iraq, 36. 6. 0. Total funds available to date 4807. 19. 9. Balance due 363. 18. 8. TOTAL £5171. 18. 5.£125 of this was remitted by U.M. to Brit. Mus. April 13, 1926:
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2.that the temple was a complex one containing at least two principal shrines; the two gods therefore shared the temple building between them.At the close of last season we had found, on the edge of the north harbour, a temple of Nebuchadnezzar so well preserved that the neighbouring areas called for excavation, since here too we were likely to find discover buildings standing to a considerable height. A few men were employed here on trial work and at once encountered mud brick walls of great thickness whose foundations went down for twelve feet and more into the sand; as the building extended more men were the number of the diggers were was increased and serious excavation began. We have now unearthed the largest building yet [xxxx] dug at Ur, a building about one hundred yards square opening on to a walled court eighty yards long. Inside a defensive wall pierced by a monumental gateway lies a massively-constructed complex of courts and chambers which, at first sight a mere maze, gradually resolves itself into an orderly system built of units differing in size but similar in character, units which are clearly residential, with open courts surrounded by series of chambers, but of which one stands out from the rest by the spaciousness of its plan and the solidity of its walls. At Ur we have no buildings resembling this, but a fairly close analogy to it is given by the huge Palace of Nebuchadnezzar at Babylon, and in certain details of construction the resemblance is surprisingly close. Brick-stamps on the burnt bricks of the pavements ident ify identify the building as the \"cloister\" of Nabonidus, the last of the Babylonian kings (550 B.C.) Precisely the same inscription was found inside the Sacred Area where:
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2.The excavation of the temple of Nin-Gal is not yet complete, and here too we are for the time being contenting ourselves with the clearing of the upper levels, where, in a sadly ruined state, there is a large building of conventional late Babylonian type put up by an Assyrian governor in 650 B.C. and added to or restored by Nebuchadnezzar fifty years later and by his grandson Nabonidus. Af A few deeper cuts have shown that below this lies another temple of very much earlier date, and from them chance has already brought to light a number of very important an inscriptions from which can be gathered much of the history of a building which we have not yet seen. We have stone door-sockets, inscribed cones and foundation-tablets in stone and copper which, when the walls are laid bare, will enable i us to trace the work of each successive builder; and their discovery gives ground for the hope that the excavation of these lower levels will produce a rich harvest of museum objects. Owing to lack of funds I had expected to close down the work at the end of January, but generous friends of the British Museum have contributed sums which, met by a similar amount from Philadelphia, permit of another month's digging; and I can only trust that the lower strata of the Nin-Gal shrine may fully recompense the gift.:
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2.The former site did not detain us long; it was proved that there had been here a large building of the Larsa period, but it was so completely denuded that even the limits of its ground-plan cul could not be determined and of the interior virtually nothing remained: the interest was therefor wholly topographical. The trench shewed that the greater part of the area between E-Harsag and the SE was of Nebuchadnezzar's Temenos had never been occupied by buildings, - most of it was an open mud-floored space, - this strengthening the theory I had previously formed that the older Temenos d d not include this area but stopped short at the retaining-wall of the E-Harsag terrace: but towards its NW end the trench produced groups of pottery and tombs resembling those found in the neighbouring trench dug in the first weeks of our first season here. Further to test the ground I started a second trench roughly at right angles to the first and extending to the corner of the south-east gate of the late Temenos, and almost at once hit upon more graves of so interesting a character that the excavation of the whole area was obviously necessary; but at this moment we ran short of the note-sheets etc. without which tomb-digging could not be attempted, and pending the arrival of the already long overdue supplies ordered in London I was obliged to shift the gang to a spot where less note-taking would be required. Two sites were accordingly attacked.In the north corner of the Temenos there was a wide space of unexplored ground between the Great Courtyard and the line of the NE temenos wall - the line which in 1922-3 we had failed to trace and had therefore only dotted conjecturally on the plan. Now work here has brought to light a deep and wide recess in the late Temenos wall containing a new gateway, the biggest in the wall's whole circuit: it lines up directly with the entrance of the Great Courtyard and gives a new significance to that building which I feel sure was in Nebuchadnezzar's time the courtyard of the main temple of Nannar. This discovery completes the plan of the late Temenos enclosure and was eminently worth while.In the mean time a report from a dismissed workman of the finding at Diqdiqqeh:
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2.The greater part of the month has been devoted to the excavation of the building mentioned in my last report as lying below the ziggurat and to that of the ziggurat itself. As regards the former building, my first suggestion, that it was a temple of the deified Gimil-Sin, is almost certainly incorrect, as the inscribed door-socket on which this suggestio was based was undoubtedly re-used and did not originally belong to the construction in connection with which it was found. The real name and use of the building have yet to be discovered.What we have found up to the present is a great courtyard surrounded by chambers, the whole lying in the north corner of a platform raised above the ground-level to the NE and NW and contained by a massive wall of burnt and mud brick strengthened by heavy buttresses. If we are to judge by the chambers along the NW side, which alone have been cleared, and are peculiarly long and narrow in proportion to their walls, it might be more correct to say that the courtyard is surrounded by a terrace wall some ten metres thick containing intramural chambers. The courtyard is about 75 metres long and fifty metres wide and is paved throughout with brick; at each end there are three doors giving access to five rooms, on the NE side five doors, and on the NW three. Three sides of the court are decorated with buttresses symmetrically arranged, but the fourth side, that to the SW, lying in front of the ziggurat, is more remarkably ornate; the whole wall-face is composed of attached half-columns each relieved by a double or T-shaped recess running down its centre, these being built of specially shaped crude bricks mud-plastered and whitewashed; parallel to the wall and at a distance of about four metres from it runs a low sleeper wall in the brickwork of which can be seen the circular sockets for free columns of whose shafts, almost certainly of wood, have disappeared. On this side then the court was bounded by a colonade presumably supporting a roof which ran back to the columned wall behind. It is no exaggeration to say that this discovery revolutionises our ideas of Babylonian architecture. At the conclusion of many years' work at Babylon the German excavators felt justified in saying that the column was unknown in Babylonia before the Persian period, and however improbable the theory may sound a priori it is at least supported by the negative results of their excavations; yet here we have such a columned portico as might have graced a Greek agora or a Roman forum.The building in its present form was erected by Kuri-Galzu in the 16th century B.C.; below it are earlier remains wherein occur stamped bricks of Bur-Sin, of the Third Dynasty, and in one place were found, perhaps in situ, two large inscribed cones of Arad-Sin of the dynasty of Larsa. Extensive repairs to Kuri-Galzu's building were carried out by Sinbalatsu-ikbi, Assyrian governor of Ur under Ashur-bani-pal, following the lines of the original ground-plan but at a higher level; one of his foundation-cones was found in position in a doorway. Later still Nebuchadrezzar repaved the whole area at a much higher level and dug a wall in the north corner; practically the whole of his work has disappeared with the denudation of the site, but judging from the fact that the original doorways continue in use, he too would seem to have retained more or less the old plan.The name and purpose of the building have not been ascertained. The inscriptions of Arad-Sin and Sinbalatsu-ikbi give only the names E-Temen-ni-gur, those of Kuri-Galzu only E-Gis-Sir-Gal, i.e., the names applied to the sacred temenos of Ur as a whole. There is some reason to think that the name of the whole temenos could also be used for any one of the buildings within it; but it may prove that here we have to deal with a corner of an older temenos with its original containing wall, which at a later date was included within the enlarged temenos area the containing wall of which was traced by us last season. It is very probable that the courtyard was connected:
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2.The main task of the month has been the tracing of the line of the city wall, which is now complete. Owing partly to its height, to its exposed position and to the nature of its structure, the wall is a complete ruin; not a vestige of the burnt-brick wall proper has been discovered and in few places does more survive than the weathered stump of the huge mud-brick rampart along which the wall originally ran. The buildings found on the top of or along the back of the rampart belong to the Third Dynasty of Ur and was repaired or built over at various periods down to the Neo-Babylonian. The rampart served as a retaining-wall for the terrace on which the town was built, but for much of its length it was also the embankment of a canal. The surprising fact proved by our excavations is that Ur was almost entirely surrounded by water; a broad stream, probably the Euphrates, ran past it on the SW, a wide canal divided the main part of the town from a big suburb on the NE, and small channels seem to have joined these main water-ways a little above the city: to the north of the great courtyard of the Nannar temple lay a large harbour enclosed by moles and walls, and from this a canal ran right through the town to join the stream outside the SW walls: on he SW side a smaller rectangular harbour cut back into the town area behind the main line of its fortifications. This discovery gives us quite a new idea of the topography of Ur at the turn of the third millenium.The complete excavation of the town wall and of the canals would have involved years of work and enormous expense: I have contented myself with following the weather-worn edge of the front face of the wall in stretches where this was easy and in other places by making cuts across its width at frequent intervals; the canals have been fol-:
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2.The next inconsistency you point out is in the balance carried over from the season 1924-1925; in my statement for that year I put the balance at £855. 19. 7.; in this year's accounts I put it at £755. 19. 7. or, more fully, £1005. 19. 7 less £250 remaining in the hands of the British Museum.Let me here remark that my own difficulties with my accounts are mainly on the debit side. At the start of a season I receive authorization to incur expenses up to a certain fixed sum; I have no official cognizance as to the sources from which that sum is forthcoming nor as to when or in what form contributions towards that sum are paid in to the Joint Fund. Of course in one way this does not matter at all: except in so far as I am warned beforehand that the total expenditure approved includes certain sums which will not be remitted to me in cash, e. g., Dr. Legrain's salary last year, my financial responsibility begins and ends with my Bank book; I have to account for the moneys shewn by my pass-book to have been debited to me, and the entries in my pass-book constitute the only information I am given as to my liabilities. It is therefore most necessary that at the close of the year I should get my accounts checked by someone better informed, and it is not surprising if this checking sometimes leads to alterations on the debit side.This was the case with my balance from the season 1924-1925. My original figures were altered by the Accountant of the British Museum to £755. 19. 7 plus a sum of £250 about which, as it had never been passed through my bank account, I could not possibly know anything. In my accounts for 1925-1926 I start with this emended figure, which I describe as \"shewn and approved\": thereby I relied on the correspondence between the Museum Directors, Sir Frederic Kenyon's letter of Feb. 5. 1926 and Dr. Gordon's reply of April 14 in which he agreed to the British Museum's figures.Kenyon's letter of 2/5/26 gives the balance of £855-19-6As regards the money paid out to Dr. Legrain for his salary and travelling expenses there is obviously a mistake. I was never informed by the University Museum what:
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2.the northern gate on the NE. side, the hinge-stone of BUR-SIN, probably itself an original feature of the gateway, was found in a hinge-box built by CYRUS and in-corporating bricks of NABONIDUS. The southern gate in the same side contains ahinge-box of CYRUS the Great; the hinge-stone of the Ziggurat gate bears an in-scription of NABONIDUS; in the south gate the recessed wall leaves the line of the earlier straight-faced masonry and runs over larnax graves of the New Bab-ylonian period. In the BUR-SIN gate the difference between the two periods of the recessed wall is clearly shewn by the brickwork, one course running quite on an-other line to that of the older work and omitting one of the returns in the angleof the entry. The long history of the Wall is therefore illustrated by its remains.The Ziggurat gate, which is a reconstruction due wholly or in part to NABON-IDUS, was cleared, as it presented certain unusual features. The brick-paved gate-chamber, buried deeply beneath the talus of debris from the Ziggurat, had been de-stroyed by fire, and on its floor were the remains of the burnt roofing timbers much of the matting- and mud roof itself, also numerous pottery fragments whichwere useful corroborating evidence for the pottery of the Persian period.Against the inner door there lay in this burnt stratum the fine diorite statue shewn onPl. 2,3. The figure, which stands 0.75m. high, represents ENANNATUM, king ofLagash (c. 2900 B.C.). The head was broken off in antiquity and the neck smootheddown; round the right upper arm and across the back runs a long inscription fort-unately well preserved; one hand, which has flaked away, was found separately;the figure is otherwise intact. The presence of this king's statue in the sanct-uary of UR is difficult to explain, nor does the inscription seem to throw anylight upon the point, as he does not claim to have ruled the city; it may possib-have been a trophy of war. Certainly it stood at some height, either upon orin close relation to the Ziggurat, and is not likely to have been alone; I shouldquite expect to find in the immediate neighbourhood, against the inner face of theTemenos wall, two or three further examples of statuary, but unluckily my lack offunds has prevented my carrying on the search.In the talus covering the gate was found a number of blue-glazed bricks,one of which bears the stamp of NABONIDUS, thus confirming Dr. Hall's conjecturethat this king was responsible for the glazed facing of the Ziggurat.During the progress of work on the wall, a number of graves were found bothagainst the wall face itself and on the mounds lying to the north and west of theTemenos. These have produced much pottery of the New Babylonian and Persian per-iods, a quantity of glazed vessels, bronze armlets, beads and other small objects.The installation of the light railway made possible the resumption of workon E-NUN-MAH. The west corner of this building was cleared and its original bound-ary along the SW satisfactorily fixed; unfortunately the NW limit remains unknownand is likely to remain so; by laying down a deep drain and, probably also, by ex-tending the courtyard area, NEBUCHADREZZAR destroyed most of the older work, andthe subsequent denudation of the ground level has completed the destruction. On the NW therefore our plan has to be left incomplete. It is clear that originallyan open court ran along the SW side of the building between it and another temple;KURI-GALZU separated this by a doorway from the courtyard along the SE front (hisgatestone was found in situ, and NEBUCHADREZZAR filled the whole in and built ona new terrace level above it. An inscribed door-hinge stone of GIMIL-SIN found ina late doorway by the SW wall mentions a shrine called MU-RI-A-NA, which is prob-ably the building that bordered E-NUN-MAH on the SW; the outer buttressed wall ofthis was found, and loose bricks of ISHME-DAGAN lying beside it may give the au-thorship of the construction.:
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2.the outset by having to allow for this sum out of my new season's grant. I am proposing to put the figure for next season at the same as that for last, i.e., at a total of £5000, which experience shews to be as near the mark as may be. I shall of course not have to pay the extra travelling costs from America to England and back which are involved by Legrain's presence on the staff, but on the other hand I shall have to make some payment to Mallowan who in his first season received no salary but ought to begin to draw one from now on. I shall let you have details of that later, but give you the total now for your information and general approval.For the rest, I hope that the accounts will meet with your satisfaction.Yours sincerely,[signed] C. Leonard Woolley:
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2.The second big discovery was of a chariot. Here too the wood had all perished, leaving only hollows in the soil, or, at most, a black film thinner than a coat of whitewash and obliterated by a touch, but the decoration again enabled us to recover the original design. And the decoration was marvelously rich. All the woodwork had been outlined with narrow banks of inlay in blue and white or red and white against a black background. A rail ran round the top, decorated in this fashion with blue and white, supported by small uprights whose intersections were marked by blue and white circles; attached to the rail and facing outwards were little heads of lions and bulls in the round, all of gold, six on either side of the chariot. From each side of the body of the car projected three larger lions' heads, also of gold, the eyes inlaid with lapis lazuli and the manes, waved across the chests, represented in lapis and shell. Two large panthers' heads of silver stood out from the front uprights, and in front of these a rail ran for the width of the body decorated with smaller silver heads and with inlay. In front of the chariot lay the bodies of the two asses which had drawn it, their copper collars ornamented with an eye design, and on the pole between them was the rein-ring of silver surmounted by a \"mascot\" of electrum in the form of a donkey which for realistic modelling must rank as one of the master-pieces of ancient art. We had never hoped to recover from the salt-laden soil of Iraq the design of things as perishable as these; now for the first time we can realize the extraordinary richness of the furniture which a Sumerian king might possess in the middle of the fourth millennium before Christ.Behind the chariot lay a gaming-board, not so richly decorated as that found last season but made more interesting by the fact that beneath it were placed in neat piles the two sets of playing-pieces and the dice; one set of \"men\" is composed of simple black squares inlaid with five dots each, the other is of shell squares engraved with animal scenes; one set of dice is of shell with lapis dots, the other of lapis with gold dots.A large chest, originally perhaps a clothes-chest, of wood bearing a long panel of:
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2.the stem of a marble base bearing a long dedication by Ur-Engur; but the buildings fully compensate for the lack of smaller finds. I enclose photographs of the general plan of the superstructure and sections of the two annexes built by Bur-Sin; the sections through the huge tomb-structures built by Dungi are not yet ready, as the tombs are nor yet fully excavated; but there will suffice to shew the remarkable character of the buildings. Two points should be singled out. The first is that the tombs were built before the superstructures and are really independent of them - in this differing from the \"family vaults\" under the private houses of the Third Dynasty and Larsa periods, which were built after the houses and re-opened for secondary use by digging through the room floor. Here the superstructure is subsidiary to the tomb. The second point is that the superstructure, though undoubtedly a temple for the worship of the deified king, is modelled not on the conventional temple but on the private house; I take it that this implies the continued occupation of the building by a deity who was primarily human; - it is essentially a \"house of the dead\". Certain structural features seem to shew that after the tomb was occupied and before the \"house\" was erected above it there was an intermediate phase in which a temporary building was used for ceremonies connected with the funeral. While the authorship of the buildings is proved by innumerable brick inscriptions, nothing shews definitively for whom each tomb was intended; the principal tombs must be royal, those either of Ur-Engur an and Dungi or of Dungi and Bur-Sin; possibly one of the annexes built by Bur-Sin was for his father and the other for himself, and Dungi's great building was for Ur-Engur; but for this there is no real evidence.:
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2.The trial trenches have been started, both of which are giving valuable results. Judging from the digging already done, from the lie of the ground and from the inscribed bricks found at various points, it seems clear that the ziggurat is situated in a corner of a very large walled temenos, the whole of which is probably identified with E-GIS-SIR-GAL [superscripts \"v\" about each S]. Within this temenos there were several temples, one of which was dedicated to the goddess NIN-GAL, The building, restored by Nabonidus, was originally dedicated to SIN himself, and inscriptions show that it already needed repair in the time of the Third Dynasty kings UR-ENGUR and DUNGI; other kings, BUR-SIN I, KUDU-MABUG and NEBUCHADREZZAR II are also represented in the bricks found within the temenos. Our second trench is bringing to light a large and well-preserved building with walls and paved floors of baked bricks; as this is the only part of the site on which stamps of KUDU-MABUG have as yet been found, the building in question my well be of his founding.Our other trench, dug south of the wall Lying south of Dr. Hall's building B.,has produced heavy walls both of baked and of unbaked brick going down to a depth of more than four metres below the present surface; to clear this site, which is undoubtedly of great antiquity and interest, is beyond our immediate means and must await the arrival of a light railway. The building of which indications only have been found was obviously a temple, and though ruined at a very early period and apparently never restored, it seems to have preserved something of its sanctity, for its site was used as a cemetery at a much later date. Close to the modern surface we have found brick tombs, supposedly of the Parthian perod, and burials in clay bath-tubs; the latter have as a rule been assumed to be of late, probably Saseanian, period; on the analogy of Carchemish I was already disposed to put them back to the time of Sargon, and the discovery of an untouched grave has confirmed this guess. The grave contained a necklace of gold, carnelian and lapis beads, two engraved lapis cylinder seals, a gold ring, a gold mouth-stopper, sliver bracelets, bronze cups, axe and spear. This forms an unuaually good group. Another part of the trench has produced,scattered loose in the soil, a remarkable set of beads in carnelian, lapis and gold, of the same date as the grave. The gold beads and pendants,which to date number 73, include leaf-shaped pendants, a seated ram, a floriate open-work disc, a lapis fly set in gold etc. Another group, probably a votive deposite, includes two alabaster bowls, a bronze axe-head, and a shell ladle. Amongst other small objects are a large and interesting but fragmentary cone of the Ist Dynasty which should give useful information regarding the buildings and lands dedicated to the gods, and a small cone brought in from a tell some miles away which contains an account of the making of a canal by UR-ENGUR of the Third Dynasty. A great deal of pottery has been found, including many complete examples.Trusting that you will be satisfied with the progress made as yet,I have the honour to be, Sir,Your very obedient servant[signature] C. Leonard WoolleyDirector of the Expedition:
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2.This temple has also been cleared in the course of the last month down to the Kuri-galzu level and has yielded interesting plans of its several periods and not a few fine objects, of which the best was a small head in black diorite, the portrait of some priest of about 2200 B.C. Inscriptions found here prove that the foundation of the temple dates back to a time far earlier than that of Kuri-galzu, but the excavation of these lower ruins has been reserved to another season.At the end of three years' work we have covered between a third and a half of the area of the walled enclosure which was the Temenos or Sacred Place of Ur, and our plans, at least for the various periods between the sixteenth century B.C. and the sixth, when Nebuchadnezzar put up his new Temenos wall round the ancient sanctuaries and his grandson Nabonidus restored them for the last time, are fairly complete, so that we see the buildings not as isolated units but as parts of a connected whole which was the Moon god's temple; and though the older buildings have suffered more from time and restoration and their excavation, necessarily a longer and a costlier task, is not yet so far advanced, we can already form a tolerably coherent and truthful picture of this northern end of the Temenos at a much earlier date, when Ur-Engur's Ziggurat was new or when later Abraham walked along the brick-paved streets of Ur.Leonard Woolley:
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2.to have been a composite building with two or more main shrines. The next level gave us a temple put up by Kuri-Galzu to Nin-Ezen; this is lamentably incomplete and it was difficult to associate the fragments of walls that survive and to base a plan on them: the dedication, which is given by a stamped brick built into the shrine gateway, it is interesting because in a building occupying the same site as the older temple and described as a restoration and not a new foundation the patron deity is changed; the explanation would seem to be that the temple, if our restoration is correct, and in this respect, it most certainly is, was a double one, and may have sheltered both cults, a theory which is [xx] strongly supported by the discovery of a fragment of a stone stela bearing an inscription to Nin-Ezen by Naram-Sin of Akkad, shewing that the worship of Nin-Ezen on this site goes back to a high antiquity and may have been associated with that of Nin-gishzida throughout. The fourth level produced a large temple, better preserved but nameless, the work of some later Kassite ruler such as Adad-aplu-idinnam: above this came the Nebuchadnezzar temple excavated last year, and scanty house remains and graves taking us down to the Persian period. The historical record is therefore unusually continuous.The site by the Harbour Temple proved a complete surprise. We came at once on heavy walls of mud brick which were standing to a height of about four metres; as the area over which they extended was very great the task of excavation would have been serious, but further investigation shewed that the rooms had been filled in virtually to that height with earth and the brick pavements laid over it (the raising being perhaps due to the fact that the site is comparatively low-lying and may have been:
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2.To this remote antiquity belong the remarkable series of objects of art which adorned its walls and have fortunately survived to the present day, embedded in the debris of the fallen temple and hermetically sealed up below five or six feet of the hardest mud brick [?] I have ever encountered. Chief amongst them are a number of copper reliefs of cattle; the animals are represented as lying down but almost in the act to rise; they [?] are eleven inches high and twenty-two inches in length, the bodies beaten [up] out of thin copper plates, the heads cast and attached to the necks; the bodies are in low relief, but the heads, turned to the front, stand out boldly in the round; both technically and artistically the reliefs shew a degree of excellence which would do credit to any age and is quite amazing when one considers their actual date. Though the metal is completely oxydised and cracked into hundreds of pieces, it has been possibletto remove the figures for the most part in good condition, and though they will be greatly improved by proper cleaning methods such as are [?po?] feasible only in a laboratory at home, yet even now they excite the admiration of everyone who sees them.These reliefs formed a frieze in the facade of the temple. Another frieze, on a rather smaller scale, was composed of figures of men and oxen carved in fine white stone and silhouetted against a background of [?bal?] black paste, the whole framed in copper; yet another shewed birds, similarly treated in black and white. One part of the building was decorated with copper statues of bulls in the round, a little over two feet high. One naturally supposed that copper, imported as it had to be from a great distance, was a rarity in days when flints were still the common use; but the wealth of the metal lavished on this little temple is astonishing. A large part of the wall was faced with copper plates or with wooden panelling studded with copper nails; there were columns of palm-logs sheathed in copper, and even the roof-beams were metal-cased. Other columns were of mud covered with bitumen on which was an elaborate inlay in bright colours, the materials being red sandstone, white limestone, a black bitumen composition, mother-of -pearl and lapis lazuli. A more excentric ornament consisted of artificial flowers with clay stalks and calyces and petals inlaid in red and black and white.Work is still going on on this veritable treasure-house of ancient monuments, and further finds are to be expected, while a great deal should be learned about the style of architecture and the distribution of ornament employed under the First Dynasty of Ur; but alreddy in a short space we have recovered more than the most optimistic would have hoped to secure in a season.C. Leonard Woolley.:
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2.Trusting that you will be satisfied with the enclosed statement,I have the honour to be, Sir,Your very obedient Servant,[signature] C. Leonard Wooley:
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2.Trusting that you will be satisfied with these accounts and with my explana-tion of the form in which they are presented,I have the honour to be, Sir,Your very obedient Servant,[signature] C.Leonard Woolley:
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2.under this again walls of pudding-shaped mud bricks which must go back to the fourth millennium before Christ; there could be no doubt that these too were the enclosing walls of a ziggurat platform, and we can conclude from this that underneath the millions of brick piled up by Ur-Engur's workmen there lie buried the remains of another ziggurat older by many centuries.The third piece of work was to complete the excavation of a building of which part had been dug by Dr. Hall in 1916. This is a very solidly built structure of baked brick and bitumen mortar, the work of Ur-Engur and his son Dungi, but later houses had been set up over its ruins and their deep-cut foundations had wrought havoc with much of the original work, and part of it had wholly disappeared. However, we were able to recover nearly all of a very interesting plan, a temple with two official residences attached to it, and under one ruined corner had the good luck to find undisturbed the foundation -box of burnt brick containing the copper statuette of the king bearing on his head the basket of mud mortar for the laying of the first brick of the building. We can further be satisfied in that we have now gone far towards completing the excavation of the Sacred Area and with very little more work shall be able to draw out the plans of all its buildings through their successive phases of reconstruction and alteration from the closing days of Nabonidus in 550 B.C. to the time, nearly two thousand years earlier, when Ur-Engur laid out his design for an imperial Ur.:
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2.What strikes one most is the degree of wealth and comfort evinced by the graves. The pottery indeed is coarse, but that is precisely because, with better materials to hand, pottery was cheap and little regarded: for other than the most utilitarian purposes vessels were made of fine stone, alabaster or coloured soapstone, of copper of of silver, and the shapes of these show an astonishing variety and an admirable understanding of form. For ornamental purposes silver and gold are very common; the latter is sometimes used in the form of thin leaf laid over copper, but sometimes is solid and heavy; a \"manicure set\" of tweezers and prick in solid gold has a curiously modern look, and so have the heavy gold chains found in several graves; gold beads of various shapes are most numerous, and we have such refinements of jewellery as a necklace of two rows of xx lapis lazuli beads with gold flower-rosettes set at intervals and gold mulberry-lead pendants, fold pendants of filigree or of cloisenne work inlaid with lapis and carnelian, or triangles formed of xxxxxxxxx a number of small gold beads soldered together which alternate with triangles of lapis and carnelian beads; beads of stone and gold two and three inches long made a sort of fob hanging from the belt to which was attached a little whetstone- a very necessary article, one may imagine, when tools and knives were but of copper and would require constant sharpening. Rich people wore diadems of gold tied round the head with twisted gold wire; rings of fold and silver are found on the finders and sometimes copper rings on the toes; in one grave there were several yards of narrow ribbon cut out of thin gold plate, but it did not lie on the body and so one could not tell how it was worn: a belt may be adorned with large square beads of gold and coloured stone, and big round buckles of silver filigree not unlike those of present-day xx Armenia may secure a cloak. Naturally the bulk of the objects from the graves are of this personal sort, articles of use or adornment, but other things also occur, a panther's head carved in white shell with eyes and tongue inlaid in colour, little plaques of shell with:
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2.With the same staff as last year and with about the same number of workmen employed the costs ought to be about the same also, and without going into details I should estimate the normal requirements of the year at 5,000 pounds.One point however I must raise in modification of this estimate. I see no reason why the discoveries of the approaching season should not be as rich as those of the last. Last year came as a surprise; it has been the general rule for the excavators to pay as \"baksheesh\" to their workmen the bullion value of gold objects found; this rule could not have applied to last season owing to the quantities of gold ans was indeed unnecessary owing to the supervision exercised, but in fact I was paying about one fiftieth of the value of the gold and was conscious of the great strain I was putting on the loyalty of the Arab diggers. To strain that loyalty too far would mean the loss of a certain number of objects and a real risk to the personal safety of the members of your Expedition, and while I have no intention of squandering funds in exaggerated rewards I do ask for the right to give such rewards as seem to me essential even if in so doing I exceed the total expenditure for the year which I have estimated above.Your staff should arrive in Baghdad on October 20th and start work as soon as possible after that date. Trusting that this programme may meet with your approvalI have the honour to remain, Sir,Your very obedient Servant,C. Leonard Woolley [signature]:
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2.[25, circled in pencil in the upper right hand corner.]and roofed with a corbelled vault of the same material; I estimated that over 400 cubic feet of stone were used in the building, all imported stone probably from the [?Gebel Sinam?], south of Zebeir, a distance of 110 miles as the crow flies. The central chamber was divided into two parts, the inner of which had probably contained the king's body; in this and in each of the side chambers there was a a [sic] shallow rectangular depression in the cement floor the size of a coffin, and at each corner of it a round hole as if for the supports of a canopy. The walls and roof had been plastered with a smooth coating of lime cement, and the floors were of the same. The roofs, of which in each case the apsidal NE end was well preserved, stood two metres high. It is the finest of the built tombs yet found by us.Unfortunately it had been plundered, and that probably not long after the burial, for the robbers had thought it worth their while to remove objects of every class, whereas had any very long period elapsed the copper and silver vessels would have been so far decayed as not to merit removal. We only found what the thieves had dropped or overlooked. A small gold cup of thin metal a good deal distorted by the fall of the roof was found in the third chamber; in the central chamber were two curious objects, - imitation ostrich-shells, one in silver and one in gold, the former crushed and in bad condition, the latter scarcely dented; both had been encrusted with shell, lapis and red stone set in bitumen, and the decoration, which fallen away, I have been able in the case of the gold shell to replace in its original form. There were several real ostrich-shells similarly incrusted, but these were very badly broken up. The third chamber produced part of a gaming-board made of shell plaques framed in lapis and set in silver; it is only a fragment, but the engraving on the plaques is very good; these have been re-set for the most part in their original order. With them were found some of the \"men\" also engraved. In a corner of the same chamber, against a human skull entirely:
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2.[?first?] season I did underestimate, not knowing anything of local conditions, and had to close down the work unduly early; for the second season I estimated at £4000 on the understanding that the programme was to be the excavation of Tell el Obeid and the clearing of the Ziggurat at Ur, and I did not make any demand for an increase of the grant. It is true that without an increase it would have been impossible to finish clearing all the faces of the ziggurat, but that was due to the unexpected discovery of the courtyard building; to clear at least at least part of this was necessary first because of the lie of the land, secondly because it was found to be an essential element of the Ziggurat scheme (although not structurally part of the ziggurat) and that any account of the ziggurat which did not include the courtyard would have been incomplete and even misleading; it was more important for our purposes than the clearing of the two ends of the building itself. I wrote to to this effect on Feb. 1., and on Feb. 3. wrote to Gordon that \"funds are running sensibly low. I shall not be able to clear the two ends of the ziggurat, as I had originally proposed to do, but this will not interfere with the plan and restorations being completed this year\". When more money was forthcoming, [two letters struck out] without any request from me, I was naturally glad to carry on the work and fulfil my original programme as regards the ziggurat; but the difference between my estimate and the actual expenditure is accounted for by the discovery and excavation of the courtyard building, not by any serious miscalculation on my part as to the cost of the original programme.I make this statement partly to meet the strictures implied by Gordon's letter, partly to justify my estimates for the coming season. These were for £4250, and as I pointed out in my covering letter the overhead charges cannot be greatly reduced, and any economy effected will be at the expense of the wages to workmen. Naturally I must cut my coat to suit my cloth [in original doc, cloth & coat were transposed, but Mr. Woolley indicated the correction], as you say, and if the total grant is for £3000 I must act accordingly. But I am dismayed to see in Gordon's letter that Legrain's salary, amounting to £2397. 10. 0 will be chargeable to the expedition, for this would seem to:
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2.[Encircled number 9 handwritten in the top right corner]bodies then at intervals votive offerings would be laid in with the earth and at a certain stage the filling-in of the shaft would be stopped and a chamber or chambers would be constructed in it to receive the last offerings; then more earth would be poured in and perhaps a superstructure in the form of a funerary chapel would complete the whole. So much for the theory; in fact we have dug down some twenty feet below the layer of pots, finding every now and then a fresh group of offerings or a subsidiary burial, and at the bottom we have found, not indeed the tomb-chamber of the king, which must lie under the mass of soil not yet excavated, but the \"death-pit\" inseparable from it; in this open part of the shaft measuring less than twenty feet by ten, there are crowded, more or less in ordered rows, the bodies of thirty-nine women and one man.PG1054 Another shaft opened more sensationally with a wooden box in which were two daggers with gold blades and gold-studded handles and a cylinder seal inscribed \"Mes-kalam-dug the King\", a relative, one must suppose, of that prince Mes-kalam-dug whose gold helmet was the glory of our last season. Immediately below this came a coffin burial with stone and copper vessels and a mass of clay vessels extending over the whole brick building which was now found to occupy the pit then more layers of votive pots and more subsidiary burials, all separated by floors of beaten clay or by strata of clean earth. There followed a long blank which made us fear that we might lost the clue, but the shaft continued; in opposite corners of it there appeared heaps of wood ash and, lower down, clay cooking-pots and animal bones, the relics of a funeral feast or sacrifice made in the pit itself: the reason for the fires being precisely at the level at which they were soon became obvious, for half-way between them were found lumps of limestone set in clay mortar which spread outwards and downwards until from a border of carefully smoothed clay there rose intact the stone roof:
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2.[END OF SENTENCE FROM PREVIOUS PAGE OBSCURED DURING SCAN].Though the tomb had been robbed there remained notwithstanding plenty for us to glean. A very beautiful set of shell plaques engraved with scenes of animals and framed in lapis lazuli came from a a broken gaming board; there were many beads, two or three inlaid shell handles of staffs, and a small gold cup. In the king's chamber there lay on the floor two peculiar objects, imitations of ostrich-shells, one of silver new crushed and broken, and one of gold in perfect condition decorated at the base and round the cut rim with incrustations in shell, lapis and red stone, a queerly barbaric piece of work. In the further chamber was a most remarkable thing, a plaque originally of wood, twenty-three inches long and seven and a half wide, covered on both sides with a mosaic in shell, red stone and lapis: the wood had decayed and in order to keep the pieces of the inlay in position it had to be waxed and strengthened with cloth bit by bit as it was uncovered, so that we have as yet little idea of what the scene is, but there are rows of human and animal figures and when the plaque is cleaned and restored it should prove one of the best objects found in the cemetery.Work on the great courtyard has been simply a matter of shifting earth. The central court is a hundred yards long and fifty-eight wide, and it was buried up to a depth of ten feet, so that the labour of clearing it away has been very great. Little was to be expected here in the way of objects, and the purpose of the work was to discover as much as possible of the nature of the building, which is the largest within the Sacred Area of Ur. At present we have dealt almost entirely with the later levels and much remains to be done next season, but already the results are very important for the history of the city. The courtyard is an essential part of the great temple of Nannar the Moon God and it is intimately connected with the Ziggurat tower before which it lies: in fact it forms a lower terrace to the Ziggurat and is part of the same complex, the boundary walls being continuous and some of the buildings:
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2.[Hand-drawn bracket round all text to two thirds of page with number '2' written in margin]life was to continue in surroundings as like as might be to those of this world. Of the servants and court attendants there remained in this case little but scattered bones, for ages ago robbers had broken through the roof of the tomb and made a clean sweep of its contents. Some of the necklaces torn from the bodies had broken, and the floors wee littered with lapis lazuli and gold beads, two silver lamps lay overlooked in a corner, there was a broken sceptre of mosaic work with gold bands decorated with figures in relief; but the great treasures which the tomb must have contained had vanished. It was a disappointment of course, but we had the satisfaction of having found the tomb itself, a first-class monument of this early age How much the robbers had actually taken one can only guess, for not all the royal graves were as rich as Queen Shub-ad's; we have just laid bare one \"death-pit\" in which the ranked bodies were all quite poorly attired, with a few silver ornaments in the place of gold; but the pit rewarded us well, for against its edge stood a harp with a particularly fine calf's head modelled in copper and on the front of the sounding-box a panel of mosaic work with human figures in shell set against a background of lapis lazuli, the technique of the wonderful \"standard\" discovered last season. [Bracket closes here and new one opens with handwritten: Deeper level and oldest - 3] Here too another discovery was made. The graves are all dug down into a vast rubbish-heap which sloped down from the walls of the earliest Sumerian settlement to the marsh or river out of which it rose, and the bottom of this particular \"death-pit\" just touched a stratum of rubbish, necessarily very much older than itself, wherein lay multitudinous nodules of dark-coloured clay: many were shapeless, but amongst them were:
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2.[letterhead: National Scheme for Disabled Men] BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDONÂ : W.C.1.</br>into this when I send the MS. back to you.I much fear you will lose patience at the time I am taking over this business, and I most sincerely apologize. But I have been miserably overcrowded with work of different kinds, and now hav Tell el-Obeid publication a good deal on my hands as well, besides the more normal Museum business. But I hope, at least, to get it sent off to you before the end of the year, and then it should not take very much longer.I haven't seen the Sept. Mus. Journal yet, but I am sorry it won't contain the Amorites, whom I expected to have rather a solvent effect on certain Germans!Yours very sincerely, C. J. Gadd.:
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2.[letterhead: National Scheme for Disabled Men] BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDONÂ : W.C.1.would like to add or to substitute - please do what seems best to you, and I shall be very well content. For those at present in the British Museum I am about to start a photographing campaign, and am writing to Baghdad for a few to be made there. I will not trouble you with the provisional list of these, because of course the whole will be submitted to your criticism and you can then suggest any additions or omissions.Thanks for your suggestions about sending my remarks on the Bauerian Amurru to the League of Nations. But I understood that was an organization to promote peace!Your sincerely, C. J. Gadd.:
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2.[note: a circled numeral \"2\" appears at the top right corner of the page][note: the penciled bracket labeled \"4\" from the previous page opens here] obvious continuity of culture there is XX equally clear evidence for a long lapse of time between the first and the second periods of the cemetery.[note: a penciled bracket labeled \"5\" opens here] The graves have proved very rich; gold objects have been found every day since work started, [note: penciled bracket closes here] and though for the most part these do not give us much more information than we possessed before, yet they illustrate better the civilization of the period.[note: a penciled bracket labeled \"6\" opens here] The most curious of the gold things is an amulet in the form of a phallus, a very rare thing in this country where phallic rites were to say the least of it uncommon; also curious are coils of narrow gold ribbon probably twisted round braids or hair and worn across the forehead. The bulk of the gold comes from the grave in which the gold dagger was found last year; its excavation had been left unfinished and we are still at work on it. The best object is a composite bead, probably from a tasseled cord, formed of four double coneid beads soldered together and decorated with applied filigree work exactly like that of the dagger: with this were found hundreds of gold beads and pendants, many of them finely worked, and great quantities of beads in lapis and carnelian; a finger-ring of gold cloisonne work set with lapis was found this morning and is a remarkable specimen of technique.Quite exceptional are the cylinder seals, of which very many have been found. No previous season has produced anything so fine, and I enclose illustrations of a few of then which will give an idea of the quality of the seals of the period. In several cases the gold or copper caps have been preserved and add greatly to the appearance of the stones. [note: the penciled bracket labeled \"6\" closes here]However rash it may be to prophecy, I can safely say, even at this early stage, that the season is likely to be most successful: the work done hitherto is hardly more than preparatory, yet it has yielded a rich return in good objects, and I think that there is every probability of discoveries which will eclipse those already made. In case of very important finds I propose to cable to you and follow up the cable by a report irrespective of the date in the month.:
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2.[Note: a penciled bracket continues from the previous page labeled \"23\" in the margin.] grees with the views I had formed previously, can now be considered certain instead of hypothetical; a proper analysis of the contents of the graves will in time produce more detailed information, but we can already get a very good perspective of the history of the site.In two graves found close to the surface of the ground in the IIIrd Dynasty (a level which had been denuded from the part of the cemetery area dug earlier in the season we obtained cylinder seals of members of the household of that daughter of Sargon of Akkad who dedicated the circular calcite stela found last year: the furniture going with these cylinders seems to differ considerably from that of other graves. From a plundered grave also on the top level came the lapis lazuli cylinder seal of the wife of Mesannipadda, first king of the First Dynasty of Ur. In the top stratum therefore we have the remains of two periods, or of a period ranging from 3200 to 2500 B.C.: comparison with the al Ubaid graves makes it fairly clear that the former alternative is the correct one, and that site was used for graves before and up to the First Dynasty, and then after a lapse re-used in the Sargonid period. The next stratum contains graves of a uniform character from which we have obtained two cylinder seals giving the names of three prehistoric kings of Ur. Then, after a barren stratum, we reach at about five metres' depth from the present surface, a new series of graves distinguished by cylinder seals of the most primitive types, by semi-pictographic tablets, and by an astonishing wealth of gold. These graves cannot be much later than 3500 B.C. [Note: close of the penciled bracket labeled \"23\"]I am glad to say that in the division I have secured all the historical cylinder seals mentioned above except one of the Sargonid pieces.[Note: penciled bracket labeled \"24\" in the margin opens. Also note that in this first paragraph the phrase \"this has gone to Baghdad\" is excluded from the bracket] One of the finest objects found consists of a set of four shell plaques engraved with animal subjects and four with linear patterns framed in pink limestone and lapis lazuli; this has gone to Baghdad. In some ways more remark-30:
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2.[obscured by author: \"been in the employment of the Expedition for five years was ill in [illegible] and unable to [illegible].\"]At Aleppo I had seen Hamoudi and his sons and had sent them to Baghdad with orders to go on directly to Ur and dig out the Expedition house. At Beyrouth we met Father Burrows and together crossed the desert to Baghdad, arriving there on October 20th. On the morning of the 23rd Father Burrows and I took the train to Ur, arriving there at midnight, and on the following morning engaged with the working gang, the number taken on, 120 men,being the maximum which I felt our reduced staff could cope. My wife, who had stopped behind in Baghdad and engaged a new cook, joined us on the 27th [manuscript alteration from typed 26th]. Digging had started on the 25th.To carry on the excavation of the cemetery it was first necessary to remove a dump-heap thrown up last year, a mass of earth some sixty feet wide, fifteen to twenty-five feet high and about 110 feet long; I had reckoned that this would take five days but with our small gang six days have not quite seen it finished. Meanwhile work had to be done on the house; certain repairs were necessary, and the experience of last season had shewn that we were insufficiently provided with room for antiquities; so a new room had to be built on. Since the pick-men were not required for the moving of loose soil they were turned on to the constructional work and only a single bricklayer had to be employed from outside. The house work is now far advanced. The new room, built on a pigeon-hole system with kerosine tins, not only affords good storage space but makes possible a far more efficient classification of objects, while the internal repairs have added much to the healthiness of the house.The area now cleared for excavation lies immediately inside the Neo-Babylonian Temenos wall, stretching from the east corner along the:
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212.of silver; standing thus erect they are about twenty inches high. From scattered fragments of inlay one had guessed that such workso of art were made by the early Sumerians, but here for the first time we have actual and complete examples of sculpture in precious metal and inlay. and there is no doubt that they are amongst the two of the most remarkable objects of antiquity that this country has yet produced.:
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22URIraq.3rd Report January I. I929.Sir,I have the honour to submit to you my report on the work done by your Expedition during the month of December, supplementing the interim report sent to you on the 25th of the month. The excavation of the \"death-pit\" there described is now complete and the total number of bodies found in it is seventy-four, of which the great majority were accompanied by gold objects. It has been an extraordinarily rich find, and the amount of precious metal has been such that I have had to pay out in \"baksheesh\" no less than Rs.500, a sum unprecedented in our work here but representing a very small fraction of the actual value. We have not yet found the tomb, but are almost at the right level for the associated shaft in which is the waggon described in my last report, and I hope that this may lead us to the tomb. With the clearing of the \"death-pit\" we finished up the area selected for the first stage of our seasonS dig and strated on the adjoining area: over half of this we are now down almost to the level at wich the main tombs may be expected ; on the other half work has been rather held up by the necessity of shifting a number of men to the site of the a new stone tomb previously reported by me. I had expected to open this this week, but it was larger than had been supposed and ran on under high dirt - it is at least eight metres square and almost if not quite as large as, the plundered three-chamber stone tomb found last year, which it adjoins. It will be ten days or more before we can enter it.:
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23 Wall Street New York April 3, 1935Dear Tom:I enclose a copy of a letter which the Carnegie Corporation, of which I am a trustee, has recieved from the British Museum, dated March 15, 1935. Offhand it looks as though the University Museum has speculated in exchange, and lost, and ought to make good the resulting deficit. Won't you look into it yourself and see what you think, and then perhaps we can have a talk about it? I am writing you in this informal way and asking you to take a personal look at it because it would be too bad to have this effort in international scholarly cooperation turn into an international debate. Very truly yours,s/ Russell:
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232.in the ipper levels of the new section the ordinary graves were less numerous than usual owing to the disturbance of the soil at a later period. In spite of this the number of graves dug this season already exceeds three hundred and fifty, and the small objects from them have been excellent; of recent finds one of the best is a second alabaster lamp with a figure of a bull in relief. Work on the courtyard of the Nannar Temple continues satisfactorily under Dr. Mallowan's supervision. It is too early to have obtained very much in the way of results, but so far as I can see at present we are getting confirmation of the views as to the history of the building based on the clearing of the central court in previous seasons. A building due in part to Ur-Engur and in part to Dungi seems to have undergone radical alterations either at the close of the Third Dynasty or in the Larsa period; after various minor repairs which we hope to date and define more accurately it was rebuily by Kuri-Dalzu , repaired by other Kassite rulers and, more thoroughly, by Sinbalatsu-ikbi in the seventh century, and again rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar. The work is heavy - walls go down to five metres' depth - and the evidence is not easy to interpret at least where a relatively small area is concerned, but the results are encouraging and emphasise the need to complete the excavation of the site. The rooms cleared so far have not produced any tablets; two inscribed door-sockets have been found, but the best object is one which has no real connection with the present building, a limestone mace-head with figures of man-headed bulls in relief and an inscription, unfortunately much defaced, which may refer to a king of Wari and certainly belongs to about that period.:
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23c, Via Lombardia,Roma (6). Italia.3rd December, 1933.Dear Dr. Legrain,It was exceedingly kind of you to intervene so effectual on behalf of the 'Iraq Museum, and when the books begin to arrive there the Museum Staff will be filled with joy and gratitude. You have obtained far more than I dared to hope, a fact which certainly shows what a skilful[sic] ambassador you must be!During the short time that I worked in that Museum it seemed to me absolutely essential that they should have works like your catalogues of seals and of clay figurines, because when new material is pouring in all the time such books are invaluable for comparison, for showing a range of types, and for aids in dating the material. It is really most generous of the Museum Authorities to promise such a fine gift, and of you to have laid the case before them in such a persuasive manner.How is the catalogue of the Ur cylinder seals progressing, and is there a good hope of its appearance before very long? The book will be eagerly awaited, for there are such fascinating problems among the subjects represented, and it will be most exciting to learn your opinion and explanation of them. It must, however, be quite an arduous task, for some of the 1st Dynasty seals are very complicated in design, and require most careful study before all the details are revealed.In the 'Iraq Museum there is one seal, U.12114, which shows a contest of beasts in the presence of a man. What is curious is that the body of one animal, bull or second lion, which should cross the body of the first lion, does not show the head and shoulders but totally disappears, and instead there is the figure of a smaller being in a tasselled skirt who seizes the mane of the first lion. Is it not quite rare for the body of an animal to evaporate in that way? Usually, however complicated the scheme with patience one can trace:
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23c,Via Lombardia,Roma (6). Italia.15th January, 1934Dear Dr. Legrain,Your letter of the 5th of January reached me yesterday, and I hasten to answer it, in order to say how much it interested me, and to thank you cordially for taking so much trouble to reply to my observations about the cylinder seals from Ur.It is very nice to have the two photographs; U.12,114[U.12114] (Ur Cemetery [words underscored] No. 203) is certainly an astonishing subject, and I know of no precise parallel to the hybrid being. The other, U.12,680[U.12680] ([looks like an equal sign?]No.138) is quite vigorous and has an attractive interplay of line.Probably U.6807[U.6807] would not have concerned you, because, from its appearance, it is very unlikely that it came from the Royal Cemetery at Ur, for it is evidently quite late in comparison to the objects from that site. I enclose a bad sketch, thinking that It may amuse you. I cannot make out what the object in the centre can be. It looks almost like a human being lying on his back with legs and arms raised. Then it has certain resemblances to the conventional early form of a boat, and cf.[word underscored] U.2223A[A is superscripted and underscored]. The \"demon\" walking upright and carrying a mace is grotesque.I do most heartily congratulate you upon having accomplished such an important piece of work as your section on the cylinder seals in the volumes on the Royal Cemetery. The seals from there are of the utmost importance, not only on account of the intensely interesting subjects which they depict, but also because they are approximately dated (in spite of the carping criticisms of Professor Christian!).I am longing to see the work and be able to study the exciting material at leisure. It would also be very helpful to me for a very practical reason. I found, when in Baghdad, that I was woefully ignorant as to the materials of which the seals were made, and could not tell whether it was marble, or steatite, or diorite or even porcelain! Lapis lazuli was recognizable, or as a rule shell also. I appealed to Selim Effendi, and thought his answers were most helpful until I discovered that he always replied \"that is steatite\"! You see, I needed your authoritative advice to guide me.:
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23c,Via Lombardia,Roma (6). Italia.16th April, 1934.Dear Dr. Legrain,Thank you very much for the No. of the Gazette des Beaux Arts[entire title underscored] containing your article, \"Au pays de la Reine de Saba\", which has just reached me.The statuettes are most extraordinary, certainly more curious than beautiful, and you are to be congratulated upon having made such an important acquisition for the Museum. They are a curious mixture of faint recollections of the art of various peoples, and some of the heads are quite like portraits. The head of a woman in alabaster, Fig. 16, recalls third and fourth century portraits of Roman emperors, Constatine[sic] and his successors, especially the later ones. It seems as if you must surely be correct in stating on p.74 that in some cases the top of the head was covered with a wig of bitumen. At present the poor things have a sadly bald appearance!The seated figure, Figs. 19, 21, is peculiar, and the square shoulders, the hands resting on the widely spread knees, and the heavy, stunted pose remind one of the Branchidae statues. Perhaps the rudimentary cubic seat adds to the impression.As the article has only just arrived there has not yet been time to read it, so I do not know if all the figures and other objects were from the same place, a sanctuary or a deposit. The mask, Fig. 17, is exceedingly morose; if the inscription were eliminated one might think it was a work of modern art!I have been reading with the greatest interest your description of the cylinder seals in Ur Excavations II: The Royal Cemetery[title underlined]. They are quite astonishing, and it is most valuable to have that full descriptions of the seals themselves, and of exactly where they were found. The whole work is a triumph, and must have entailed an enormous amount of labour. It was splendid to be able to illustrate the account so fully with those admirable plates, and then to be able to bring it out at such a moderate price. It must be rather a relief to your mind to know that such a complicated piece:
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243.An interesting discovery was made on Christmas day when your whole staff went by car some forty miles out into the western desert and found at a distance of rather less than thirty miles from Ur good beds of limestone similar in quality to that used for the royal graves and for the foundations of the walls of the al 'Ubaid temple and for the enceinte walls of Eridu. This solves one of the difficulties involved by the belief that Gebel Simran near Shaiba, 110 miles away, was the nearest source of supply for such stone: on the other hand it makes it hard to explain why stone fell into complete disuse for building purposes at a later date.The weather throughout December has been most favourable and no working time at all has been lost. I enclose my statement of accounts for the month, which call for no special comment by me. Trusting that you will be satisfied with this report I have the honour to remain, Sir, Your very obedient Servant, C Leonard Woolley [signature]:
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274.For the heavy work of clearing the Courtyard I have engaged sixty extra workmen: work is proceeding there satisfactorily.Trusting that you will be satisfied with the last stage of this season's work on the gravesI have the honour to be, Sir,Your very obedient Servant,C Leonard Woolley:
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2an impressive one. Do you think there is any possibility of other fragments turning up later in the excavations? I do not know whether I can find the fragment that you refer to as Dr. Legrain is the only one who has handled our share of the first and second years' finds.With best regards, I remainVery sincerely yoursDirectorC. LEONARD WOOLLEY, DirectorJoint Expedition of the BritishMuseum and the University Museum, Phila.The British MuseumLondon, England:
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2any important pieces that may come upon the market, either in Egypt or in Europe. My thought is that you might go to Cairo and ascertain whether anything may be obtained there at the present time, either through the Museum or from dealers. We own an important head which I bought by cable a few weeks ago from Youssef Bey Chiha, rue El Manakh 13, but the Museum authorities refuse to permit him to export it. They would have no right to prevent you from exporting it if you should pay the regular tax on antiquities.At various times upon inquiries from me, the authorities at the Cairo Museum have suggested the possibility of our receiving through them one of the large stone sarcophagi from Saqqara. I do not know whether they are now in a position to let us have one. The present time would certainly be an appropriate one for us to receive one of these sarcophagi which we have long wanted. Of course, we would be prepared to pay the price required within reason. we would be prepared to commission you to negotiate with them for a good example of these sarcophagi. In short, my thought would be that without going too far out of your way, you might at least report on the condition of things in Egypt and perhaps be the means of getting some additions to our collections. Any expense which your journey to Egypt would entail would, of course, be paid by this Museum. I am writing to Kenyon to ask his consent to your performing this mission for us on your way home. In case you should prefer to take your holiday for this purpose, we could arrange to pay you something extra for that time.I am glad that all are enjoying good health. People here are having a very bad time with bronchitis and pneumonia and severe colds - a bad winter.With best regards to yourself and Dr. LegrainVery sincerely yoursDirectorC. LEONARD WOOLLEY, Esq.Directorc/o Eastern Bank, Ltd.Basra, Irak:
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2at his own expense means a very great saving for the expedition and for the two Museums and will probably be the best solution in other ways. If the British Museum has confidence in Paul Geuthner as a publisher and is willing to entrust him with the volumes I think that I would be satisfied. Your proposals for next year's expedition in so far as they include Legrain, an architect and Linnell are agreeable to me. I am in favour of Legrain going out and shall consult him as soon as he returns. I agree with you with regard to an architect and the payment of a salary to Linnell next year, subject to your having a similar understanding with Kenyon. With regard to a payment to Linnell for work already done, you and Kenyon can decide the matter between you. With regard to your request affecting your own salary, I am sure that it is not unreasonable, provided the funds of the Expedition can stand it. I shall write to Kenyon with regard to this. I wish you success in arranging the exhibition. I have not heard from Legrain but I presume that he is with you in London by this time and that he will be arriving here soon. With my best regardsVery sincerely yoursDirectorC. LEONARD WOOLLEY, Esq.Director of the Joint Expeditionof the British Museum and the UniversityMuseum of PhiladelphiaThe British MuseumLondon, England:
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2been welcome. They simply wish that the beautiful and successful exhibition which attract visitors [shou?] keep on as long as possible. I assured him that his letter of July 17 had been received before my departure on Aug. 1st, and that anyhow the immediate division seemed desirable, the american public been anxious to see the famous and well advertized collection. He [?ageed?] to the point. G. and S. are strongly in favor of the yearly division. It is already a difficult task after two year and it would worst next year. The objects are exposed or kept in various places, upstairs and down stairs or packed away. It takes time, room, and real fatigue to find, unpack and compare them before dividingSo far Smith has been helping in the:
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2element in the town's population.Where we are working now the stratification of the rubbish-heaps into which the graves were dug is unusually well-marked; in some cases it is possible to see, by the interruption of strats, from what ground-level particular graves have been dug and in others to prove that fresh rubbish-deposits formed higher strata after the making of a grave. In the uppermost stratum of the old rubbish (as distinguished from the artificial filling which was employed at a later date for levelling the area) there were found a few tablets and numerous clay jar-sealings, distributed down the slope, amongst which were several bearing the impressions of the seals of Mes-anni-padda and his wife Nin-tu-nin; the stratum can therefore be confidently assigned to the early part of the First Dynasty of Ur. A stratum two removed from this has produced tablets and seal impressions of an earlier type, in style half-way between the First Dynasty and the tablets found deep in the rubbish-mounds last season; now, in a stratum only slightly lower at the top but corresponding (by the line of the fall) to that which produced tablets last year, we are getting similar documents identical in character with last year's. We have thus three strata relatively dated and can prove that comparatively small vertical rise of the mound's surface represents a period as long as divides the archaic script of last year's tablets from that of the First Dynasty; within this period, as epigraphical and stratigraphical evidence proves, come nearly all the graves of the early cemetery. Measured drawings supplemented by photographs are being made of the section of strata exposed by our excavation and will afford documentary proof of the age of the graves, and though the duration of the cemetery period must remain conjectural the fact that the First Dynasty:
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2favourable rate of $ 3.25 to the pound sterling this sum exceeded by several thousand dollars the amount allocated by the Carnegie Cor- poration for the Ur publications....... and you had believed that there would certainly be left something overhead expenses until the next volume could be xxxxxxxxx issued.Here I think you mis-judge me. When I contracted for the volume you had advanced me [£ ?] 500 and we were pledged to Miss Baker for a sum which you told me would not exceed $1,000: at the rate you quote the balance of the $25, 000 would yield £6646: actually the exchange here went down to $3.14. and when I wrote was, I think, $3.17, giving me a larger credit; even at the rate prevailing when you sent me $5000 on account in January 1933 I could reckon on £6450, in spite of the xx rise in the value of the pound. I considered it my duty in view of the wording of the memorandum on the strength of which the Carnegie grat was made to expend the whole sum on the first volume; the es= timate was for between £6450 and £6550 (I quoted the larger figure) and this I hoped would be if anything in excess of the total, for I allowed for 500 pages of text (which as events proved was 100 pages too little) but also for 40 colour blocks and 200 collotypes, which is more that were actually used, and the plates are of course the main item of costs. Consequently I was keeping pretty close to the limits of my assumed credit, and as we were to reckon on a certain amount of loss on each volume (the loss on the total series of volumes being the total of the $25,000 grant) a small excess due to incident- al expenses was venial.:
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2from Iraq and Palestine make it an important part of their recollections though most of them know it only from hearsay.Perhaps the presence of a lone woman with four men in camp makes a more interesting figure for some of them than the outline of Ziggurat. In any case I should be a little apprehensive that a woman in that situation might incur the risk of becoming the subject of inconsiderate remarks which though they might be treated as negligible by their subject could not be regarded as matters of indifference by you or anyone in a responsible position. Perhaps you will wish to give the matter your best consideration with a view to removing that risk. I do not know how important you may consider Mrs Keeling's worth as our assistant; but without detracting from her in any way and quite apart from the circumstances that I have mentioned:
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2gan the construction, but it was left to Dungi to finish it, and certain minor details were added by Bur-Sin in the second generation.When Kuri-galzu pavement was removed we found that a large part of the courtwas taken up by brick bases of different sizes and different orientation; all lay (so far as their present brickwork is concerned, but they may of course have risen originally much above their present level) under or flush with the brick pavements of the Third Dynasty; their solidity is surprising, and one base, put down by Sin-iddinam of Larsa, goes down fifteen feet below pavement level; it is of solid brickwork throughout and no explanation is forthcoming for this massive construction: possibly further work in the future may throw light on its purpose. The SE end of the court presents very peculiar features for which again we have as yet no explanation. The brick pavement is five courses thick; a large holeirregular in outline has been dug through this and covered with a roughly laid pavement of broken brick not at the same level but lower and sloped down to the centre like the bottom of a pool; going through this we have found no less than five superimposed brick pavements of different qualities and below these again mud brick construction. Further investigation of this is being reserved for next year. For the next week, which will finish our digging season, work will consist merely in shifting surface earth with a view to complete excavation later.As my wife's health has made an early return to England imperative I havetaken advantage of this phase of the work to leave Ur forthwith, putting Mr. Mallowan in charge of the closing down. He will pack and send off the remaining antiquities and generally wind up the season. I am very glad that Mr. Mallowan, whose work with me has been invaluable, should have this opportunity for independent work.:
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2had promised me their help. Anyhow, there it is, the funds are not forthcoming, and I have to close down just when we are in the middle of a piece of work which is pro-ducing the best small objects which we have yet secured at Ur. You will understandthat I feel rather bitter about it.Kenyon tells me that he is writing to you to ask whether you would, in thecircumstances, agree to contribute the £500 which you have already paind in to the Joint account even if it is not met, as it should be, by an equivalent amount fromthe British Museum. If you do, it will of course enable me to prolong the season,though even so it will be a short one. The proportion of contibutions by the twoMuseums is of course not my affair, - all I want is money for the joint work: butthat £500 would be extremely useful, so I want to get hold of it! but as you mayfeel a natural objection to what looks like going back on an agreement, I propose to put before you certain facts which hitherto there has been no need to worryabout.I must begin historically. When Kenyon first told me, three years ago, thatour programme might have to be curtailed owing to the British Museum's inability tofind the half share of the costs due from it under the revised agreement, I protestedthat this was not really fair because the \"good will\" of the British Museum, which had been taken into account in the original agreement, was still a very materialfactor on the financial side. Kenyon however said that he had agreed to the newscheme and that there was no point in going into my objections; any advantage Imight get by using the name of the British Museum would of course go to the generaladvantage of the Joint Fund, and the more the better. Accordingly a number of items in the accounts I render conceal what are in intention subscriptions to the BritishMuseum side of the Fund, but do not figure as such.I must explain how real this \"good will\" is. In 1922-3, when my total budgetwas £3000, of which one third only came from London, I reckoned that the gifts, re-:
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2has explained to you that he went to Baghdad as Annual Professor at the American School of Archaeology founded by the Archaeological Society of America.I do not know who is making the photographs this year, but I have noticed that those you have sent are very poor. Also I received no acknowledgement of the letter I wrote you on behalf of the newspaper press requesting that a few photographs should be made containing life groups. This, I realize, is a subject for a photographer with an artistic eye and accustomed to making picturesque or striking compositions and I am not at all disposed to urge this newspaper demand although I think everyone would be grateful for whatever you might be able to do in that direction.I have received a furious letter from Mr. Hall of the British Museum complaining about Legrain's statement in the September JOURNAL giving credit for the discovery of the temple at Nin-har-sag at Tell el Obeid to the HJoint Expedition instead of to him. I had already noticed the error and had it corrected in the December JOURNAL and wrote him to that effect. I then received another letter from him almost as fierce as the first.I have since received a copy of the publication called MAN containing an article by Hall on the work at Tell el Obeid in which he stated that the work in the last two years was conducted by the British Museum and omits all mention of the University Museum. I have consequently written a polite note to Mr. Hall calling his attention to this omission.I want to make it clear to Mr. Hall that the reference in the JOURNAL was a simple inadvertence for which I was quite as responsible as Legrain and that there was no intentional discourtesy to him. A complete correction on the first page of the December JOURNAL ought, I think, to be satisfactory and I am particularly anxious to avoid any kind of misunderstanding. I think that your:
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2I notice that at the bottom of the envelopeafter writing Ur in the ordinary way, he tookthe trouble to write it again in capitals.On the other hand I have great admiration for theq Irag Postal Authorities, for whom such excessiveprecautions were unnecessary.In the meantime I trust that neither younor the interest of the Expedition has sufferedfrom the delay which has been occasioned by theseseveral efficiencies in the public service of Irak.C. LEONARD WOOLLEY, Esq., DirectorJoint Expedition of the British Museumand the University Museum, Philadelphiac/o The Eastern Bank, Ltd.Basra, Irak:
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2Legrain's disposal for travelling expenses and his salary amounting to £397.10 which we will pay direct to him. I would suggest that you send Woolley a cable notifying him of the amount now available so that he can make his plans accordingly.With best regardsVery sincerely yourDirectorP. S. Upon second thought I have decided to send Woolley a cable myself to save time. Accordingly I have cabled him as follows.Appropriation increased by £350.I suppose that with this information he will be able to keep on a good deal longer than he though of doing when he wrote on December 5th.SIR FREDERIC KENYON, DirectorThe British MuseumLondon, England:
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2ly of burnt brick.In the NW end of the courtyard there were altars or bases of burnt brick, the meaning of which is not clear, erected by both the builders of the temple and also by their successor Bur-Sin. Early in the Isin period a king, perhaps Ishme-Dagan, divided the great court of the temple into two by putting up against the SW wall an enormous mass of solid brickwork which now lies level with the pavement but may once have stood to a considerable height; it occupied half the court. The fact that in the Kassite period a wide trench was driven across it, destroying even its foundations, suggests that there was something of value beneath it, but we have found no explanation of the platform or of its destruction. Equally mysterious is is a \"base\", smaller but more solid, built in the court by Sin-idinnam who in the process destroyed part of the Isin wall; we have cut away the heart of this and have dug down beneath it to water level without finding any explanation of it.A complete re-building of the temple was undertaken by Warad-Sin. He razed the walls of Dungi and enlarged the terrace in three directions while preserving the main lines of the original ground-plan, so that the outer walls of the Third Dynasty lie below the floors of the chambers surrounding the Larse court; the feature of his work was the use of half -columns and recesses to relieve the wall face both of the outer facade and of the Sanctuary wall facing the entry, but most of his building was in mud brick only. This temple was pulled down and rebuilt, in mud brick on burnt brick foundations, by Kuri-Galzu II (1400 B. C.) who followed exactly the lines of the last building but gave to his temple a plain facade instead of the decorated one of his predecessor: Incidentally he placed in the:
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2nd Press Report Dec-25-1928 (20)The Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania is already this year rivalling the success of its work at Ur last season. We are now engaged in clearing what seems to be the antechamber of a great royal tomb: the tomb itself has not yet been found but we have come upon a square pit measuring more than twenty-five feet across whose floor is crowded with the bodies of human victims, most if not all of them women. Nearly all these bodies are adorned with head-dresses of gold, silver, lapis lazuli and carnelian far richer than those of the nine court ladies found in the \"King's tomb last year; for eight days we have been busy removing these elaborate decorations and the work is not over yet. But the most surprising contents of the pit are of a different nature. In one place there were lying, one on top of another, three harps and what may be the ornament of a fourth: the finest harp has a wooden sounding box decorated with mosaic, the front bearing engraved shell plaques above which projects a magnificent bull's head in gold, while the uprights are covered with bands of gold alternating with encrustation in shell, lapis lazuli and red stone and the cross-beam is plated with silver. The second is of silver throughout and attached to the sounding-box is a cow's head in the same metal: the third is also of silver but of a different shape and has for the support of the upright a silver statue of a stag; a similar copper statue of a stag may have belonged to a wooden harp.Elsewhere there were two statues, a pair, each representing a ram caught in a thicket: the heads and legs of the animals are of gold, the fleece of white shell and the hair on the shoulders of lapis lazuli, while the plants amidst which they stand are of gold, The rams are shewn rearing up on their hind fore-legs and are shackled to the plants by bands:
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2of all these and the complete body of one have been preserved. The grooms and driv-ers were found in their places; one of the former had a dagger with gold-decoratedhilt.Against the side of the shaft were two statues of bulls; the bodies, made ofwood, had entirely decayed; the head of one was of copper with inlaid eyes, a veryfine piece of work in excellent condition, that of the other was of gold and lapis, the head itself being of thin gold over wood, the hair, beard, eyes and tips of thehorns of lapis. The head is badly crushed and distorted, but can easily be restored.Down the chest of each animal ran a series of shell plaques engraved with mytholog-ical scenes.The whole of the rest of the shaft area was littered with bodies. Against thefoot of the tomb lay 11 skulls, presumably those of the principal women of the har-in, each wearing an identical elaborate head-dress consisting of gold ribbon makinga sort of net over the hair, a wreath of beads with mulberry-leaf pendants, verylarge gold ear-rings, and a silver head ornament shaped rather like a hand with atthe tip of every point a rosette having inlaid petals of gold, lapis and shell. Theother bodies were less richly adorned, but gave a great number and variety of beads,pins etc.Obviously the main riches of the grave had been with the body in the plund-ered tomb; from the wreckage of this we recovered a few small gold objects, includ-ing a frontlet made of two lengths of gold chain and three large beads, a very finegaming board encased in silver, all the shell squares of the face engraved with an-imal subjects, and a most remarkable model sixty centimetres long of a boat, in sil-ver, complete with oars and awning-support. Much as one must regret the looting ofthe chamber, this loss is perhaps compensated by the survival of the chamber itself, for it is an extraordinarily interesting architectural monument. The walls are ofrough stone built up between caissons with mud mortar; at one point the wall line:
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2other things all right - & I agreed with you that the ring was not cheap - but one can't get a bargain every time, & things generally balance each other. But I do want a decision because I can't afford to keep on out of pocket: I didn't say anything on my way back this season for that reason, i.e. that I couldn't afford to, the stuff now in your keeping represents what is for me a large sum. You seemed to think that what you didn't want might be taken by some other American museum: if you could:
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2recovered and form a most important collection.[note: a penciled bracket labeled \"3\" opens here] Meanwhile work on the other side of the excavated area proved the NW limits of the cemetery also. Our work here produced no graves but either stratified rubbish or superimposed house remains according as the limits of the early town fluctuated in times of greater or less expansion. Near the surface we came on a pavement of plano-convex bricks which could be dated as not later than 3000 B.C. and we dug down through successive floor levels to a depth of eight metres below this, by which time we were finding very early seal impressions on clay and pottery, painted or otherwise decorated, of types elsewhere occurring only below the ten-foot bed of clay which I have regarded as a relic of the Flood. For the full working out of the earliest history of Ur excavations on a large scale ought to be undertaken either at this spot or a little to the NW of it: [note: the penciled bracket labeled \"3\" closes here] as it was too late in the season to start anything of the kind I stopped work here on Feb. 13th. [note: a penciled bracket labeled \"4\" opens here] With regard to the ancient cemetery lying on the slope below the walls of the settlement, we now know its width and further excavation of its length in either direction (probably little remains to be done to the NE) can be carried on economically and with proper knowledge. [note: the penciled bracket labeled \"4\" closes here]Since the division was fixed for Feb. 16 - 23 and would absorb much of my time I thought that the men would be best employed in the mean time in making soundings on the line of the city wall so as to get information of which we could base a programme for its fuller excavation. [note: a penciled bracket labeled \"6\" opens here] The spot chosen was on the NE side, just behind the Expedition house: [note: the penciled bracket labeled \"6\" closes here] here the mound looked most promising, but on the other hand Dr. Hall had in 1919 dug here a twelve-foot deep trench across the mound in search of the same city wall and had:
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2shrine and Court of Justice described by me in a former report. Had this work not been done in the present season it might well never have been done at all, for it is never very tempting to polish off the odd corners left over from a previous year, especially when there is no reason to suppose that anything of value will be found; even as it was I hesitated to spend money on continuing what had been hiterhto the unremunerative task of digging down through seven feet of hard soil to a brick pavement, and it was more obstinacy than anything else that made me go on. Almost the first day produced in one room a door-socket of king Sur-Sin (2200 B.C.) with an inscription in 52 lines giving the history of the temple's beginnings, a very welcome record; but it was in the western wing of the great court that the discovery was made which put the others in the shadows to make overshadowed all others. Here the pavement was littered with blocks and lumps and chips of limestone, ranging in size from four feet to an inch or less, some rough, others carved, some pitted and flaked with the action of salt, some as smooth and sharp as when the sculptor finished his work; and all, or nearly all, belonged to the most important monument yet found at Ur, one monument, the most important yet found at Ur.This monument was a stela or slab five feet in width and perhaps fifteen feet high, carved on both sides with a series of historical or symbolic scenes arranged in horizontal bands of unequal heights. It bore a long incscription, now fragmentary and with the king's name missing; but here luck favoured us, for on a mere flake of stone, the drapery of a figure otherwise lost, there is inscribed the name of Ur-Engur, and we can therefore identify the author of the stela with the founder of the Third Dynasty and the builder of the Ziggurat. The fragments found by us represent only a fraction of the whole carved surface: none of the registers is complete, some have disappeared altogether, of most we have only bits, often disconnected, from which to reconstruct the design; but even so the monument ranks with the famous (and equally fragmentary) Stela of the Vultures in the Louvre as one of the two most important relics of Sumerian art known.The reliefs illustrate king Ur-Engur's care for his people as shown by the digging of canals for the irrigation of the land, and his piety in building for the Moon god the great Ziggurat of Ur. What remains of the inscription is a list of the canals made by him, and this is illustrated by a most curious scene in the top register of the stone: the king stands in an attitude of adoration before the seated figure of the god, and above his head is an angel flying down from heaven and holding in her outstretched arms a vase from which streams of water pour out upon the [handwritten: underlined previous few words and question mark drawn] ground: the scene, which appears on both sides [margin note: 8] of the stela, seems to have been repeated several times in the register, perhaps with an angel symbolising each of the principal canals. The whole conception is new to us, and the graceful figure of the angel is unique in Mesopotamian art.Other scenes are those of sacrifice to the gods. In one, two men have thrown a bull down on its back, one grasps its forelegs and sets his foot upon the beast's muzzle while the other stoops forward and seems to be cutting it open to examain examine the liver for omens; a third man has cut off the head of a he-goat and, holding the body in his arms, pours out the blood from the neck before a smaller figure, perhaps the statue of a god, which stands upon a low pedestal; others pour libations of water upon a simple pillar-like altar. In another scene two men are lustily beating a great drum; in another there seems to be a row of prisoners, a record probably of the king's conquests. But most interesting of all are the pictures of the building of the Ziggurat, shown upon three registers the main fragment:
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2sympathy in the difficult task of gathering, arranging, guarding the works of ancient art and presenting them at their best for their human interest and beauty. Never forgetting his beginning as an Americanist, he supported and encouraged several Expeditions in Central, North and South America and Alaska. But his keen interest extended to many other fields also. Particularly as regards the South Seas and Western African regions it was chiefly bu his efforts that important collections were built up which especially in the matter of the decorative and representative arts are of the very first class. The Chinese section in the Charles Curtiss Harrison Hall, was his care and pride, and best expresses his personality. The large frescoes of the Tang Dynasty are the first of their kind exhibited in this country. Day after day the students from art schools find in this room models and inspiration. In the classical fields of [?Crete?], Egypt, Palestine, Mesopotamia, and the Mediterranean sections, the Museum had long traditions, which were kept alive by Dr. Gordon and received fresh impulse [?from him?]. The Joint Expedition at Ur of the Chaldees, and the Museum Expedition at Beisan, with their important historical results, are well known to the readers of the American Journal of Archaeology. The first Expedition in which the University Museum joined hands with the British Museum, has already achieved its fifth campaign. Both were strongly advocated by Dr. Gordon. The publication of material from former expeditions in Mesopotamia were not neglected. Over twenty two volumes in the Babylonian section have been published [or are printing] under his Directorship, presenting to the public the choice material from the Nippur collections. There is a growing demand at home and abroad for the:
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2TELEGRAMS, \"AQUILÃ, LONDON\"TELEPHONE Nos REGENT 4024 & 4025ROYAL SOCIETIES CLUB,ST. JAMES'S STREET,S.W.the morning of the 20th inst. he visited the U.S. Consulate-General and demanded an advance in cash; when the consul demurred he threatened violence and also stated that in view of his treatment by the U.S. authorities he wished to change his nationality. He refused the loan of 2/6d for breakfast (he had said that he was starving) and drove to the British Museum where he saw Dr. Hall of the Egyptian Department and Mr. Sidney Smith, a member of the Joint Expedition: the latter gave him lunch and lent him £1 (which must have been expended in the fare of a cab which he had retained throughout the whole morning) but he made no effort to obtain funds, as he easily might have done. The management of the St. James' Hotel, finding that he had not obtained money as he had promised to do, raised objections and in view of his behaviour took him to be intoxicated and asked him to leave - eventually they did offer him his room for another night bur he refused it and went elsewhere. Mr. Hunter told me that he was perfectly sober but still suffering from the effects of his sea voyage, as he:
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2The only archaeological discovery made at Ur on the site since my last report was that of a foundation-deposit of Ur-Engur (in Dr. Hall's building \"B\") containing a fine but uninscribed bronze statuette of the kanephoros type. The Iraq government has in it its share of the objects taken the diorite statue of Enannatum, but allows this to be carried to England for further study. Apart from this serious loss, the Expedition comes out well on the division; we retain all but two of the inscribed and all but one of the decorated vases and vase-fragments in alabaster and other stones; we also have the gold statuette and the gold figurine of a ram, far the best examples of goldsmith's work found. All the best of the inscribed door-sockets, except one of the duplicate pair of Gimil-Ilishu, were allotted to us. I have kept the bulk of our large series of terracottas, including all the interesting types. All inscribed objects are being brought home for study, including the share of the Iraq Government.Trusting that you will be satisfied with this report,I have the honour to be, Sir,Your very obedient servant,[signature] C. Leonard WoolleyDirector of the Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the University Museum, Philadelphia, to Mesopotamia.:
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2the solidity of its construction is astonishing, and some of its details are absolutely new and strange to us.The approach to the temple and through it to the Ziggurat seems to have been from the south-east, beyond the limits yet reached by our excavation Here there is an open court across which runs diagonally a causeway built of kiln-fired bricks -- the curious round-topped bricks characteristic of the period -- with bitumen for mortar; steps led up from this through a door in the mud-brick wall and through a long chamber and down more steps to the open terrace on which stood the ziggurat. The passage-chamber is one of six lying side by side and opening on to the terrace; their walls, more than seven feet thick, are of unbaked brick, their floors, raised high above the terrace level, are of burnt bricks set in bitumen and covered with a [word xed out, and heavy written above] coat of the same material; the surprising thing is that these floors are fifteen courses of brick thick. What was the reason for this extravagance? An ordinary pavement consists of a single layer of bricks; so solid a block of masonry as this, wholly unnecessary as a floor, can only be due to some religious purpose. Nor is this the only curious feature. In the courtyard, the floor of which, on either side of the causeway, was of clay whitewashed, there rise two low circular constructions of burnt bricks set in bitumen and covered with bitumen, the sides neatly rounded off in a curve to the floor, which [word xed out] one would normally regard as column-bases -- in fact on one of them there remain a few bricks radially set which might be the beginning of the shafts: but the circles are thirteen feet in diameter, and it is difficult to imagine such huge columns in a temple of 3000 B.C. Close to them is a small basin sunk in the floor, also built of bitumen and brick, and since this must:
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2To make my meaning more clear to you and to illustrate my own opinions, the following observations may suffice.A. Volunteer assistants in the sense of unpaid associates may sometimes be allowed to join an Expedition under suitable circumstances. It is best, however, that such assistants should be paid a small stipend for their services.B. Women, as such, whether married or single, are not disqualified for membership on an expedition. They may be, when properly qualified, attached to an expedition on the same terms as men.You will understand that these are my personal views and represent our practice in the Museum.Thanking you for the pains which you have taken to write me without reserve, I remainVery sincerely yoursMR. C. LEONARD WOOLLEYc/o The British MuseumLondon, England:
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2Under heading D £. s. d.The figure entered for moneys handed byUniversity Museum to Legrain is ............ 484. 11. 7.The actual amount handed D. Legrain was Travelling expenses .... £143.14.11 Salary ................. 359. 6.11 ... 503. 1. 10.The total funds available for Season 1925-26according to Director's reportare entered as ............................. 4807. 19. 9.The total funds available for Season1925-26 according to records of the University Museum are ...................... 5051. 10. 0.Director's report shows deficit forSeason 1925-26 amounting to ................ 363. 18. 8.Deficit shown on statement made upfrom Museum records amounts to ............. 91. 13. 7.:
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2Ur, about 2200 B.C., both series being business records of the Temple.As well as tithes, the God as landowner received either rent or a part share in the produce of the soil, and since money was unknown these were all paid in kind; and since the temple was also a fortrees enormous quantities of food stuffs were stored within it, ready to serve meet the normal requirements of the temple staff but also to act as a reserve in case of war. For everything that was brought in a receipt was given, a little clay square carefully dated recording that so-and-so has paid in six pounds of butter of the best quality, so many bushels of barley, so much oil, sheep, cattle or what not; and every month a full balance-sheet of all returns was drawn up with parallel columns showing ever farmer's contribution under separate headings. Just below the Ziggurat terrace there is a very large building exactly like the modern khan of the Near East, with a great courtyard surrounded by store-rooms and with living quarters above its main gate; there is already some evidence for supposing that this was the Ga-nun-makh, the Great Storehouse, and it is easy to picture the countrymen driving in their donkeys laden with sacks of corn and piled baskets of cheese and butter and round-bottomed oil-jars, crowding the courtyard, weighing and counting and disputing the tally, and and going off at last with the clay receipt of which a duplicate had been duly filed by the chief clerk in his office over the gate. The Baghdad Customs House today must bear a very fair resemblance to the Great Storehouse of Ur four thousand years ago. While the farmers and cowmen paid in country produce, the townsfolk used another currency; there are receipts for all sorts of hides, for gold and silver from the jewellers, for copper from the smiths; and in one of the store chambers we find a furnace for melting copper, big jars full of copper scrap, and ingots of the metal presumably of some standard weight. But if the revenues of the temple are carefully recorded, the outgoings are not less scrupulously checked, and these are just as illuminating for the life of the time. Naturally the temple officials drew their rations from the stores, and the issue vouchers were all preserved in the registry; every man had his regular allowance of foodstuffs, flour and oil, etc., for which he or his servants had to sign, and special issues were made in cases of sickness. But the most interesting records are those of the industrial side of the establishment. Numbers of women devotees were attached to the temple, and these were employed in regular factories; there were slaves similarly employed, and piece-work was given out to others who had small workshops outside the temple precincts, and all these had to be supplied with the raw materials and with the food which was their wage. The main industry was weaving. In the building E-kar-zida alone 165 women and girls were kept at work, and we have the monthly and yearly accounts of the quantitiy of woollen thread supplied to each, and of the amount of cloth produced, each sort distinguished by quality and weight with due allowance for the wastage of thread in weaving. The rations are in proportion to the output, the older women receiving less than the young ones who would have larger appetites and could do better work, no more, in fact, than3 1/N:
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2useful if it gave information that would help to define future pro-grammes. We chose a spot on the north-east side of the enclosure xxxxwhere conditions seemed favourable to quick results and set all ourmen to work: in the ten days that remained of the season an astonish-ing amount was brought to light.[note: a penciled bracket labeled \"10\" opens here and includes the rest of the text on the page] The fortifications of the city were, naturally enough, repaired orre-organised a number of times; the earliest work that we have founddates to the Third Dynasty of Ur (2300 B.C.) and is probably due to the founder of the dynasty, Ur-Engur, who explicitly claims its construction; wehave reconstructions and additions by kings of Larse (circ. 2000 B.C.)by Kuri-Galsu of Babylon (1400 B.C.) and by a later king whom we havenot yet identified. Ur-Engur's wall seems to have consisted of twoparts, a lower wall of crude mys brick and an upper wall of burntbrick of which, in the section cleared by us, nothing at all remains.But the mud-brick wall is an amazing structure. It stood some twentysix feet high, its back vertical, its outer face sloped back at anangle of forty-five degrees, and at its base it measure no less than seventy-five feet in thickness! Really it served the purpose of anearth rampart along the top of which ran the well proper, but it wasitself built entirely of bricks carefully laid. Behind it the floorlevel was raised about twelve feet above that of the plain outside,though whether this was continuous over the city area or was in thenature of a platform back against the wall we cannot yet say; judg-ing from surface indications the former would seem to be the case. The sloped mud face of the wall must have suffered badly from weather and it was twice re-inforced with revetments which added anothereighteen feet to the wall's thickness; the authorship of these isstill uncertain, but the first addition may well have been due to the:
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2Your request that Dr. Legrain's salary be not charged to the Expedition is new, for you are wrong in supposing that the salaries of Mr. Sidney Smith and Mr. Gladd were not charged against the Expedition. Last year the original fund of the Expedition stood as follows. Your general estimate, omitting Mr. Gadd's salary £4,000. Mr. Gadd's salary 215. ------ £4,215.To meet your proposal this year, the funds appropriated to the Expedition would have to be as follows. Your general estimate, omitting Dr. Legrain's salary £4,250. Dr. Legrain's salary 397.10 --------- £4,647.10As I understand your letter you propose that this sum be regarded as the proper sum to be placed to the credit of the Expedition for the year 1924-25, if possible. If it should prove to be impossible to increase the grant above the present figure of £3,000. you will endeavor to adjust the year's operation to that scale of expenditure.There is a disagreement between your statement concerning the division made by Mr. Gadd and Dr. Legrain and Dr. Legrain's report to me on the same subject. It appears to be your understanding that the division was finished. Dr. Legrain, on the other hand, has reported that the certain copper bulls were not included in the division, neither those some of these are in relief nor those and some are in the round. I feel that it is important that you should examine into this and report to the two Museums before you leave London.Dr. Legrain will sail from New York on the 17th of this month on the S. S. FRANCE to Marseilles. He will sail from that port on October 1st on the S. S. LOTUS and will meet you in Baghdad on the 25th of October. I believe that he expects to be a week in Egypt before travelling across to Baghdad. Dr. Legrain will carry funds to pay his travelling expenses as far as Baghdad where he will hand you his accounts. You will find Dr. Legrain a scholar whose services will be of value to the expedition and a gentleman who will be agreeable as an associate;:
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3 Numbers of the Museum Journal, the Quarterly Magazine which he originated in 1910. The two first pages of the first number of the Journal where he expressed his ideas about: \" A new departure, the growth of the Museum, Reorganization.\" are worth reading. They contain a far sighted program to which the big changes brought about in the world by the war have given a strange consecration. When we realize how leading foreign institutions like the British Museum and the Louvre organize more and more an intelligent and popular service and guidance of the public through their collections, we can only admire how the same program was ripe in the mind of Dr. Gordon as early as 1910. His ambition was a service not only interesting to the specialist but profitable to the public. He kept faithful to it. [<stike> His ambition was a service not only interesting to the specialist but profitable to the public. The last important act of his Directorship was </strike.] The opening in May 1926 of the Eckley Brinton Coxe Junior wing of the Museum, with some of the finest and unique collections from Egypt, Assyria, Ur of the Chaldees, and Beisan, was the last important art of his Directorship.L. LegainFeb 18 1927:
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3 rue de chartres Neccily s/ Seine Paris June 29th 24Dear Doctor Gordon. I recieved early last week your letter of June 12th. I certainly enjoy myself and had a pleasant trip. You ought to try it. I saw Mr. Maurice Nachman Friday 27th at the Grand Hotle. His collection is part in Egypt part in Paris. In Egypt he has still a fine line stone group of the IVth Dyn. With inscription-Pyramid style(Kheops)-from Memphis about .50 high-My sketch is precisely from memory-Price about 450.000 Francs-at \"Kelekian 2 rue castiglione private collection-Price $25 or 20.000I called on both, Sheid and Thureau Dangin and mentioned your name and compliments-There is now in the Louvre a department of plasters cast where you can acquire for the Univ Mus. any copy of Sumerian, Babylonian or Assyrian monument you desire. I could not find room in the Safford or Hyde. P. Hotel, but mo2 word of welcome, and cause he will provide for one. I will fly over Tuesday 1st July and spend a few days in London. and write to you as soon as I see the collection and work to be doneYours most sincerelyL. Legrain:
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3<Thackeray Hotel>and pushing it over to the next man, and asking Dr H.R.H. [between ?] time to decide as if afraid of taking risks or losing the good piece - You would believe a boxing contest.S. after working for two days announced that he was going next week on his vacation. Dr H. marked a point by inviting us all at dinner on Sept. 25th.Alltogether the business is satisfactory and just what I expected and we are fairly treated, but it will take some time and patience.Tentatively we made two groups of the main objects of this year collection.A) The mosaic stela & The harp with the [bull head: deleted] calf's head in gold with blue beardB) The bull's head in gold (with blue beard:
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3. C( hand written)to make photographs and measured drawings which render possible the exact reprod-uction of these astonishing objects. The upright of the harp is capped and boundwith gold and the twelve keys are of copper with gilt heads; the sounding-box isadorned with mosaics and has in front a series of shell plaques engraved with my-thological scenes, and (word struck through illegible) is finished off with a large head of a calf ingold with hair and great formal beard of lapis lazuli. The chariot is still moreornate. Not only are its outlines all emphasised by bands of mosaic, but the upper rail is decorated with twelve heads of lions and bulls in gold, the body has oneither side three gold lions' heads with waving manes of lapis and shell, from thefront uprights project panthers; heads of silver, and two more silver(word struck through illegible)heads,this time of lions, adorn the from bar; it is indeed a regal chariot. It was drawnby two asses(the horse was not know in Mesopotamia until fifteen hundred years later) whose bodies lay in front of it on either side of the pole; they wore collars of copper decorated with an eye pattern. On the pole was a rein-ring, of silver,surmounted by an electrum figure of a donkey which as a piece of realistic art isunsurpassed by any sculpture yet found in this country.The grave belongs to the oldest series, thought it need not come very early in that series, i. e., it need not be earlier than 3,500 B. C. and might be a centurylater: the character of the objects so closely resembles that of those (word struck through illegible) be-longing to Mes-kalam-dug that one might well assume the two graves to be strictlycontemporary were it not also true that conventions persisted so long as to makethe purely stylistic argument dangerous. In any case we can say that this periodwhich until last year was completley unknow to archaeology is no illustrated byexamples of art unrivalled by those of any later period in Mesopotamian history.:
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3. fronted by a colonnade; the whole was whitewashed. Above this rose the terrace on which stood the ziggurat isolated and huge. The lower part was all painted black; the three staircases ran up to the centre of the main stage a great doorway at the top of the main stage which here, in its centre, was higher than at the two ends, so that all the lines, the actual side walls of the ziggurat with their slight batter, the parapet with its sharper break, and the steep-pitched converging stairs, all led the eye upwards and inwards; over the black parapet showed the upper terrace of bright red brick, and on the top of all the shrine built of glazed bricks of brilliant sky blue. The scheme both of colour and line has been carefully thought out; the vertical lines of the white columns below, the converging lines against the black mass of the first stages of the tower, the plain red step leading up to the blue shining cube of the shrine, all contribute to the effect, and make of the ziggurat of Ur an architectural monument worthy of our admiration. and of Nabonidus' pride.The new buildings whereon the king of Babylon relied for the perpetuation of his name did not last long, and today they are a sorry ruin; luckily enough remains for to establish their original character (though few but Mr. F. G. Newton, who fortunately was the architect of the Expedition, could have solved all the riddles of the scanty walls and broken floors), and, though the upper part has suffered much, though the shrine has wholly disappeared and of the stepped terraces but little has survived, yet the massive base with the triple staircase of that Ur-Engur built more than four thousand years ago is the most imposing of the ancient monuments of Iraq.:
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3. The main cemetery may safely be placed between 3500 B.C. (or rather earlier) and 3200 B.C.; making all allowances for local conditions the rise in levels demands at least two hundred years, and, with a margin for error at either end, the period suggested by the round figures given must be approximately correct. The written records found by us are few; the tablets contain little information, but we have recovered the names of three kings of Ur who reigned in the era assigned by the King Lists to the fabulously long-lived rulers of Erech: one of the cylinder seals giving this information was found loose in the soil, the other was in a grave which was not rich enough to have the appearance of a royal grave, though it did contain a toilet-set, tweezers and stiletto, of solid gold. A royal monument may well be represented by the fine fragment of a stela (pierced for fixing to a wall) of which I send a photograph; it seems to be a scene from the funeral procession of a king whose empty chariot, drawn by lions, is being led to the cemetery, - though of course it might also be interpreted as a religious procession and a chariot as the car of a god. The piece was found high up in the soil, close to the remains of the pre-First Dynasty building. Fragmentary as it is, it ranks with the Kish inlays as one of the best monuments of the prehistoric art of the country.The graves continue to produce quantities of gold objects. The finest pieces are a pin 0.21m long of solid gold with lapis lazuli head, a cloisonne pendant set with lapis and carnelian, worn on a belt between large square lapis and gold beads, a diadem formed of two lengths of imitation chain in gold with large lapis and gold beads over the forehead, a gold medical spoon, the gold toilet-set mentioned above, a very find lapis cylinder seal set in gold, a necklace of lapis beads with gold flowers and leaves, gold chains, a delicate gold filigree pendant, a pair of large but coarse lunar ear-rings, a necklace of triangular gold spacers strung up with six rows of very small lapis and carnelian beads, two large and ornate silver filigree buckles, and any quantity of beads of various types.:
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3. [3 in pencil and circled in right hand corner]als in gold over a bitumen core; the workmanship is much inferior, butthe parallel is very striking.I must report one most successful piece of excavation work A very interesting discovery was that of another harp. Twoholes in the soil were noticed by a workmen and after examination werefilled by me with plaster; the earth was then cut away and more plasterwork was done whre [sic] the decay of woodwork had left hollows: the result was a complete cast of a wooden harp decorated with a copper head of a bull; on further clearing (for purposes or photography we were able to) exposed the remains of the actual gut strings, mere hair-lines of fibrous white dust but, even in the photograph, perfevtly [sic] clear as the ten stringsof the instrument. It was the more interesting as this is a harp not of the type of that found in Shub-ad's grave but resembling those figured onthe shell plaque from the gold bull's head found last year and on the\"standard\", which the strings attached by tieing (not by metal keys) to a horizontal beam.The grave with the ruined harp of the type of Shuyb-ad's also produced a silver bowl, unfortunately in very bad condition, decorated with a design of wild goats in repousse work walking over mountains represented in the conventional way by engraved lines; this is the first example that we have found of this technique in silver. Another technical novelty was given by the imprint on mud of a piece of wooden furniture, itself completely decayed, decorated with engraved designs (the engraved lines filled with colour as in the case of shell plaques) and with carving in low relief; the possibility of ever finding the actual wooden objects preserved is so small that evidence of their character is the more interesting.[NB the whole page has been marked with a pencil line along the left hand side and the number 13 written next to it]:
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3.26 [encircled]covered with minute lapis beads lay an object which is perhaps the most important that we have yet found. It is best described as a stela, made of wood, fifty centimetres long and twenty centimetres high and about four centimetres thick; both sides and the ends are covered with mosaic. On each side there are three registers divided and bordered by a minute diamond pattern in white, red and blue; each register has a row of human or animal figures silhouettes in white shell against a lapis lazuli backbground, the internal details of the figures being rendered by engraved lines filled in with black or by red inlay. The subject on one side is the Sumerian army on the march, footsoldiers and chariots; on the other side there is a banquet scene, the king and his family seated in the top register, in the others servants bringing the materials for the feast, driving up cattle, carrying fish and so on. I regret that I cannot send photographs of this remarkable piece. As it lay in the ground the upper face (the army scene) was almost intact and only at one end of the middle register had the mosaic been seriously displaced by a stone which had been forced through it ( the wood had of course decayed away and there was nothing to keep the tesserae in position). This face had to be waxed and bandaged bit by bit as it was exposed. The lower face had suffered more severely, and part of it came away with the front panel; this can of course easily be replaced and the whole can be restored, but the work is such as [undecipherable] should not be attempted under field conditions. But I see no reason why the stela should not be turned out in perfect condition, and in general interest it will I think, rank above any Sumerian antiquity known. I hope that at the division it may fall to the lot of the Joint Expedition.I would suggest that the discovery of the object should not be made public until adequate photographs can be made of it, but that is naturally a matter which I leave to your discretion.:
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3.a design without inscription or a long and apparently impersonal in-scription filling the whole seal.3) Many of the jar-sealings are stamped with circular impressions, some-times plain, sometimes having a decorative element, most often a rosetteof the kind represented in the graves. It is certain that in many casesat least these stamps were made with the end of the cylinder (sometimespierced, sometimes apparently unpierced).4)/ A large number of jar-sealings in SIS.4 instead of being sealed wereincised or scratched with various markings. For the most part there arenot known signs and can hardly have been intended as signs, but a cer-tain number are evidently significant.A small number of seal-impressions from a stratum apparently lowerthan SIS. 4 make SIS. 5: the material is not sufficient to characterisethe stratum.The pit now being sunk deep in the western corner of the excavationhas cut a number of lower strata; the objects from these have been grouped as SIS.6, SIS.7, and SIS. 8.The seal-impressions, at least in the two latter, seem to shew asregards the representation of living beings a change in the directionof greater freedom and naivete. \"Geometrical\" patterns and like werehowever already as common as they were later. Fortunately the lowest of these strata is the richest; here we areearlier by five \"seal-impression-strata\" than the prehistoric cemeteryand everything is of interest. One piece for instance shews a bold re-presentation of a house or gate with 8 posts and pointed roof.We have in all about 550 seal-impressions.The under part of the seal-impressions shews that the clay was af-:
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3.a much damaged but still fine head of a small steatite statue of abearded god dating to about the eighth century B.C.) all relics ofbuildings of the earlier historic periods had been destroyed and thesite dug out and re-filled with rubbish; between the foot of the Zig-gurat and the back of the wall of the Neo-Babylonian court of theNannar temple there was not a vestige of standing wall, but on thecontrary brick rubbish with mixed material of the dates of the ThirdDynasty of Ur, of the Larsa age and of Kuri-Galzu went down for twoand a half metres and only came to an end on a very solid floor orpacking of plano-convex mud bricks at that depth. This floor, abouttwo metres thick, was bounded on the NW by a wall running out fromthe line of the NW face of the Ziggurat and on the NE by a very heavywall parallel with its front facade; outside this a parallel withit was a yet more massive wall (three and a half metres thick) prob-ably of the s me date, for the bricks were similar and the foundationsof the two lay at the same level, 5.20m. below the foundations of Ur-Engur's Ziggurat. These walls are presumably of the First Dynasty ofUr and are the terrace walls of the Ziggurat of that date. From 5.20m.to 8.00m. we encountered stratified sand with very little pottery; ateight metres' depth there came the foundations of mud brick walls a-gainst either face of which lay quantities of slender clay cones withpainted ends and disks of black stone having copper wire attachmentsbehind; these are for wall decoration such as that found by Loftus atWarka and subsequently by the German expedition there; the spatial in-terval separating them from the foundations of the plano-convex brickwalls above is most important for their relative dating. We have now:
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3.ably well preserved, in the courts the water-tank and stela-bases and altars, in the sanctuary the stepped altar, in the fore chambers the seats, bases and minor altars set against the walls. The most surprising feature of all is perhaps the temple kitchen; here we have the well, by it the bronze holdfast let into the pavement for securing the bucket-rope, and by it the bitumen-lined water-tank; the brick table, the querns, and two complete cooking-ranges with circular flues and heating-holes, and with steps up onto the top of the range so that the servants might get up to move the cauldrons. Another striking feature was an [indecipherable] isolated block surrounded by corridors and consisting of three narrow chambers with doorways affording a somewhat tortuous access to the central chamber. In this there was set up a large limestone stela simply inscribed with the titles of king Bur-Sin and the dedication of the temple; at the foot of this there were two large gypsum stelae, round-topped and bearing a similar inscription, laid face downwards and embedded in the bitumen pavement: I can only suggest that this was a shrine in which was conducted the cult of the deified founder of the Third Dynasty temple.Of Bur-Sin's temple we have at least the greater part of the ground-plan, for it was faithfully followed by the Larsa kings and their burnt-brick walls rest almost invariably on the well-preserved mud-brick walls of the Third Dynasty.If the results of the month's work have been satisfactory from the point of view of the history of the temple and the architecture of the Temenos, and I venture to think that they have been eminently so, from the point of view of objects we have been no less fortunate. In my last report I spoke of the numerous objects found in fragments on the temple floor: further discoveries, and the fitting together of pieces already unearthed, have given us a fine collection of which I illustrate some of the best specimens. To the throne dedicated by Enanatum there have been added fragments of the finely carved figure of the goddess Nin-Gal, al-:
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3.altar front; one was reminded of a ritual text in which the worshipper enumerates the \"seven sweet-scented oils which I have put upon seven fires\", for it was clear that over the channels there were set vases of oil whose contents would trickle down into the separate fires beneath. [W/T?]hen the Elamites conquered Ur and brought the Third Dynasty to an inglorious end they did not spare the tombs of the kings; every vault has been dug in from above and every altar more or less pulled up; in each of the doorways opening on the central court we found fragments of thin gold plate which had once adorned the doors, and in one a twisted bit of [chest/sheet?] gold set with shield-shaped tesserae of lapis lazuli, part of the rich veneer which [xxxx] encased the walls. Today we have only a shell of bricks and bitumen, robbed of all its old splendour; but though the treasures have gone and the tombs have been rifled, what survives is a magnificent monument, as powerful a witness to the greatness of the Third Dynasty as is the Ziggurat itself.One of the two annexes built by king Bur-Sin one is a smaller edition of his father's work, with the same arrangement of staircases descending to vaults below the chambers, and the same domestic ground-plan of court and encircling rooms; the second, less regularly built, conceals a single great tomb approached from a pit under the courtyard. Had either of them stood alone, we should have hailed it as one of the finest illustrations extant of the builder's craft under the Third Dynasty; as it is, though dwarfed by Dungi's huge work with its nine-foot walls and yawning shaft they are yet one of the most impressive buildings we haveyet unearthed.:
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3.and exposed the pavement of Ishme-Dagan (c.2100 B.C.). On the outside, on the the NE., we have removed the \"kisus\" and other works of Nabonidus and Sinbalatsu-ikbi and have laid bare the pavement of Ishme-Dagan and have thus obtained the original connection of the two buildings E-dublal-makh and E-nun-makh; at the same time it has been possible to trace exactly what was done by Kuri-Galzu when he levelled the older walls, strengthened their foundations, and built on them the walls which now stand to a height of ten or twelve feet. On the SE front we are in process of clearing the big court which underlies that of Nabonidus down to the Kuri-Galzu level. Here we have a paved court in front of the building, which at a height of about six feet is set back on a \"kisu\" or re-inforcing block of masonry decorated like the building itself with vertical double grooves. The door of the building thus stood high above the court, and access to it was obtained by a flight of shallow steps on one side which led up to the top of the \"kisu\" which formed a platform with a parapet wall along the whole front of E-dublal-makh. The floor of the inner room, where probably stood a great statue of Nannar, was at a considerably higher level, and therefore commanded the courtyard: altogether it forms a most impressive monument, and the various inscriptions found enable us to recover its history in remarkable detail.Various circumstances encouraged me to extend operations, at least so far as the upper levels were concerned, over the whole area of the buildings surrounding the Neo-Babylonian courtyard. The work has proved most interesting and remunerative.Mud-brick buildings of the time of Nabonidus were found standing to a considerable height on either side of E-dublal-makh (v. last report); to the E. and SE. these were completely destroyed, but along the remainder of the NW. and the SW. sides of the courtyard the walls were standing at least a few inches high and the paved floors were well preserved. In the first room excavated on the SW., under less than a foot of rubbish, we found a very large stone mace-head and a \"kudurru\" or boundary stela of the Kassite period (see plates)and two foundation-cones of Kudur-Mabug, one with a new text. Then there came to light a curious drum-shaped clay object inscribed by a scribe of the time of Sinbalatsu-ikbi with a record of excavations carried out at Ur and a copy of three of the inscriptions on Third Dynasty bricks (referring to statues set up by Bur-Sin - we apparently have the original of one of these) discovered in the course of the work. Other objects were found, all of widely separatel periods, and it seemed hardly an exaggeration to regard the building as a small museum of antiquities. Thenthere were tablets, those of late date being school exercises, a part of a syllabary endorsed as \"the property of the boys' school\", and two examples of what appear to be abaci for teaching arithmetic, but may be gaming boards. Clearly the ruined building had served more purposes than one. Later bricks of Nabonidus were found in situ identifying the place as the cloister built for the priestess of Nannar, i.e., for Bel-Shalti- Nannar the King's daughter whose consecration to office is known to us from a cone of Nabonidus at Yale.:
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3.bates etc. allowed to the Expedition because it was regarded as representing theBritish Museum, had a cash value of £1200: in 1923-4 the same totalled about £980.In later seasons I did not trouble to make out the account; the contributions dim-inished, I know, but they were still considerable. I mean that if the Expedition hadbeen purely American, the first season would have cost £1200 more than it did, andeven so there are many forme of help given to us now which we should not getotherwise; help the absence of which would mean more expense though one cannot reckon it in cash.I tell you this by way of explanation - I am not suggesting going back at all onthe past; but in a less degree the facts hold good for the present. Should consider-ation of them make it more easy for you to agree to the relinquishing of the £500 already paid in the Joint Fund, excellent, for all that I am after is the cash re-quired for our work. But should you feel that the agreement ought to hold strictlygood and that Philadelphia ought not to appear as contributing more than does London, then I suggest that at least I might enter on the Joint account as part of the Brit-ish Museum's contribution those economies which are actually due to it: in this waythe joint fund would receive from Philadelphia a corresponding sum, and though I donot know precisely how much that would be, yet it certainly would be enough to eke out our season to some extent.Let me see, off-hand, what I could fairly put down.Rebate from the Messageries Maritimes for Government service, £15. 10. 0. Rebate from Nairn's, as contribution to B. M. £12. 18. 0.Strick's, free carriage of antiquities from Basra to London, £65. (minimum)Basra Port, free embarkation etc. of same, £7. 0. 0.Iraq Railways, rebate on freight and special rates £24. 0. 0.Royal Air Force, free boxes for packing, £55. 0. 0.:
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3.blue and black glass, \"Phoenician\" work of about 1400 B. C., found in a Kassite grave (it was broken in antiquity and incomplete, but has been restored: incidentally the discovery of glass rods with pincer-marks at one end has proved that this technique was practiced also at Ur itself), a pilgrim-flask of light blue glaze, also Kassite, a copper adze of the Isin period and a few small gold and silver trinkets. [Note, penciled \"|\"] But the outstanding discovery was that of the tablets. A few more of these turned up in the same room as produced last season's hoard: high up inone of the streets was another collection, perhaps the contents of a large store-jar: No. 7 Quiet Street gave us the best results of all. Here, on a mud floor of the Larsa period and underneath a wall of a Kassite house, in a heavily burnt stratum, there were unearthed between thirty and forty large tablets, which, having been baked by the fire which destroyed the building, were in remarkably good condition; in the next room were a number more (not baked), and below the mud floor in and near the door of a small chamber with a shelf along two of its sides which had probably been their original storage-place were many more tablets of a slightly earlier date. [Note, close of penciled bracketing labelled \"4\" in the margin] Individual tablets occurred fairly frequently in the houses.Of the majority of these no examination has yet been possible as they havefirst to be fired and cleaned and the weather conditions have held up the firing; [Note, opening of penciled bracketing labelled \"5\" in the margin] only of the set of accidentally baked tablets can anything be even provisionally said. They include hymns, one addressed to Rim-Sin, records of pious foundations by various Larsa kings, the text sometimes in part reproducing known texts on the building-cones of the kings, lists of words and phrases, tables of square and cube roots and lists of solid or liquid measurements; on one archaic tablet, not yet sufficiently cleaned to be wholly legible, there is mention of an otherwise unknown kingof Ur, possibly one of the rulers of the Second Dynasty of the city. Amongst the tablets which have yet to be fired there are a number which appear to be of a literary character, and it is likely that the collection is by far the most important4:
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3.BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON, W.C.1carefully upon this question, and try to form a scheme by which the Catalogue would be useful and imformative, while being (as I think it must, in view of bulk and expense) very drastically curtailed.Yours Sincerely,C. J. Gadd:
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