06: 1927-1928

Season 6

The sixth season at Ur led by Sir Leonard Woolley. 1927-1928

Objects: 06: 1927-1928 Export: JSON - XML - CSV

U Number	Museum Number (UPM Date Reg Number)	Museum Number (BM Registration Number)	Museum Number (UPM B-number)	Description (Catalog Card)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.614	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.638	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.670	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.522	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.516	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.870	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.604	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.577	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.620	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.603	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.579	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.581	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.578	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.619	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.588	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.582	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.583	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.584	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.521	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.601	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.860	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.580	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.866	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.673	(none)	(none)
(none)	(none)	1928,1010.505	(none)	(none)

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Locations: 06: 1927-1928 Export: JSON - XML - CSV

Context Title	Context Description	Description (Modern)
Dublalmah \| LL	First investigated by Taylor in 1853, the dublalmah was originally a gateway onto the eastern corner of the ziggurat terrace. It expanded into a larger building in the Isin-Larsa/Old Babylonian period. It had multiple functions, religious and administrative, through the centuries. An inscribed door socket of Amar-Sin found here refers to the building as the great storehouse of tablets and the place of judgment. It was thus essentially a law court, possibly with tablets recording judgments stored within. In Mesopotamia, an eastern gateway--in sight of the rising sun--was typically seen as a place of justice, and gateways were often places where witnesses or judges might hear claims. After the Ur III period the door onto the ziggurat terrace was sealed up and the dublalmah appears to have become a shrine, but it retained its name and probably its law court function. Kurigalzu made significant restorations to the building in the Kassite period and Woolley marveled at the well-constructed fully preserved arched doorway of this Late Bronze Age time. By the Neo-Babylonian period, the structure had essentially merged with the functions of the neighboring giparu.	(none)
Great Nanna Courtyard \| PD	The meaning of this two-letter designation is unclear. It may derive from Woolley's search for Shulgi's palace and may thus stand for Palace of Dungi. Woolley came to realize, however, that it was an enormous courtyard surrounded by rooms, and at times in the excavation it was simply referred to as the Ziggurat Courtyard. The path through the court led to the ziggurat terrace and eventually to the temple atop it. The court was likely a gathering place for special occasions of worship to the moon god (whose name Woolley read Nannar, but which we read today as Nanna). Therefore, Woolley eventually dubbed this space the Great Nannar Courtyard. Area PD is the large space to the east of the ziggurat terrace, substantially lower in elevation than the base of the ziggurat. It had many floors over many periods. It consisted of a large paved courtyard (some 50 x 75 meters) surrounded by rooms that may have been used for storage. Because of indentations in some of the wall faces, Woolley believed there was once an inset wooden colonnade along some of the walls.	(none)
Private Graves Area \| PGA	In season 6, Woolley expanded his trial trenches in area PG opening up a much larger space in the Royal Cemetery proper. The northeastern extents in TTG had been revealing fewer and fewer graves, so he expected many more to the southeast; indeed, he found an increasing density here. He no longer considered this to be trial exploration, but a true excavation area, and thus began to call the space the Private Graves Area, abbreviated PGA. He also began mapping individual graves, establishing at least 4 mapping points from which he took angular measures to pinpoint locations. Unfortunately he never showed where these stakes were placed on any map so we can no longer utilize the recorded angles. Cards from this season that bear the abbreviation PGA all concern textual material. Grave goods or other finds were recorded under their individual PG numbers rather than the general PGA abbreviation. It appears that the only material collected in the area but not associated with graves directly were inscribed objects and thus these were the only ones to garner the PGA designation.	(none)

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Media: 06: 1927-1928 Export: JSON - XML - CSV

Media	Media Title	Title	Label	Author	Omeka Label
	Season 6 Field Report	Season 6 Field Report	(none)	Woolley, Leonard	(none)

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People: 06: 1927-1928 Export: JSON - XML - CSV

People	Full Name	Biography
	Charles Leonard Woolley	Prominent British archaeologist whose excavation work includes digs at Roman Corbridge, Carchemish for the British Museum, Ur, and Al Mina and Tell Atchana in Syria. Knighted in 1935 for his contributions to the discipline of archaeology. , Trained as an archaeologist at Oxford University and excavated in Roman Britain (Corbridge) briefly, then in the Sudan under British-born American archaeologist David Randall-MacIver, who was a curator at the Penn Museum. Woolley then conducted excavations at Carchemish near the current Syrian/Turkish border from 1911-1914. In World War I, Woolley's knowledge of the Middle East was extremely valuable and he worked for British Intelligence. Even before the War he was essentially spying on the German railroad that was under construction near Carchemish (the Berlin-Baghdad Railway). Relatively early in the war, however, Woolley was captured and spent two years in a Turkish POW camp. Woolley was chosen to lead the expedition to Ur as early as 1920 when the two museums began to discuss the details of a joint excavation. He began work at the site late in 1922 and completed excavations in 1934, working long hours and accomplishing a great deal. He was knighted in 1935 for his work at Ur. He went on to run excavations at Al Mina and Alalakh in Syria. In his lifetime he gave many lectures and wrote many articles and books but never held an academic position. He died in 1960 and was lauded by generations of scholars around the world for his contributions to the field of archaeology., Leonard Woolley was the third of eleven children of a Church of England clergyman, George Herbert Woolley, and his wife Sarah. He attended St Johns, Leatherhead, and New College, Oxford where he studied Classics and theology. It was the warden of New College, W.A. Spooner, who advised him to take up archaeology after graduation. In 1905 Woolley was appointed assistant to Arthur Evans, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, in Oxford. Woolleys early career took him to Nubia in 190711, and after that he went as director of the Carchemish expedition sponsored by the British Museum. One of his assistants was T.E. Lawrence (better known as Lawrence of Arabia). Woolley and Lawrence collaborated in assisting the Palestine Exploration Fund in its programme of making a definitive map of the Holy Land. This work was published in 1915 as The Wilderness of Zin. After the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Woolley was posted to Cairo where he acted as an intelligence officer. He was promoted to the rank of major in 1916 before being captured by the Turks and imprisoned at Kastamonu. He tried to return to Carchemish after the War but the political situation was too unsettled. In 1921, he excavated at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt with T.E. Peet, sponsored by the Egypt Exploration Society. In 1922, Woolley was made director of a joint expedition at Ur funded by the British Museum and The University of Pennsylvania Museum. It is with this site that his name will always be associated. He spent twelve years there, until 1934. Within two years of his arrival, Gertrude Bell had established the Iraq Museum in Baghdad which had a statutory right to first choice of all objects excavated. So rich were the finds from the site, however, especially from the Royal Cemetery, that both the British Museum and Penn Museum also contain fabulous objects from Ur in their collections. Woolleys strengths were his painstaking approach to excavation; for example, excavation of the Royal Cemetery was delayed until he believed his local workforce was sufficiently well-trained to tackle the intricate disclosure of these opulent tombs. He also monitored and instructed his own staff, in particular Max Mallowan who early on acquired the habit of keeping careful field notes, making drawings, preparing monthly reports for sponsors, and most important, publishing in full each seasons work and finds as soon as possible after the seasons end. Woolley had a way with words and both his non-specialist books and lantern slide lectures were very popular with the public. His weakness was a familiarity with the Old Testament which led to unfounded connections between it and the work in hand, as for example, his belief that Ur was the birthplace of Abraham. Woolley also believed he had found evidence of The Flood. After Ur, Woolley moved to Tell Atchana in northern Syria, digging there before the War in 193739, and after it, from 1946¬49. He was knighted for his services to archaeology in 1935. During the Second World War, Woolley worked for the Military Intelligence Directorate to assess and protect art and museum collections throughout Europe. He reported to Winston Churchill personally. In this work he was most ably assisted by his wife Katharine. After Katharines death and the end of his active archaeological career at Atchana, Woolley retired to Ashford in Kent. After an unsuccessful relationship, he retired to Dorset where he was looked after by a devoted housekeeper and her husband, thus enabling him to write up his archaeological work.
	Eric R. Burrows	Rev. Burrows was the epigraphist at Ur from 1926-1930. He was a Jesuit priest who is said to have dressed on the dig very much as he did back in England, though photos of Woolley and others show that it was typical to wear jacket and tie even in the field. Contrary to his predecessor, Leon Legrain, Burrows is said to have had few social graces and Woolley commented that he was "a man of very little stamina." This was in reference to an illness Burrows suffered in his first year at Ur, eventually diagnosed as "dysentery and malaria." He had a high fever and had to be removed to hospital at Basra. He recovered and returned to Ur for every season up to 1930, so perhaps he had stamina after all. Burrows studied Assyriology at Felstead and Keble College in Oxford and specialized in cuneiform epigraphy. He assisted with the official publications of many of the cuneiform tablets from Ur, including the archaic texts. He died relatively young, in a car accident in 1938.
	Ibrahim ibn Hamoudi	Hamoudi's second son; he acted as junior foreman at the site but died young in 1932.
	Iraqi Workers	(none)
	Katharine Elizabeth (Menke) (Keeling) Woolley	Born to German parents in England, Katharine Menke studied history at Somerville College. She did not complete a degree due to health problems, and her health continued to give her trouble throughout her life. In fact, there are many indications that she suffered from a condition known as complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, though her life is somewhat mysterious as she had all of her papers burned on her death. She married Colonel Bertram Keeling in 1919, but he died later that same year. The widowed Mrs. Keeling joined Woolley's excavation at Ur as an artist in 1925. A young single woman on the dig stirred controversy; particularly among the Trustees at Penn. Woolley solved the problem by marrying her in 1927. Most descriptions of her say she was charming but also rather cold and manipulative. Nevertheless, she was a talented artist and very capable as an archaeologist. She came to be the primary assistant to Woolley's excavations in the final Ur excavation years, after Mallowan left in 1931. Agatha Christie is said to have styled the murder victim in her book Murder in Mesopotamia after Katharine Woolley., Katharine Menke was born in Birmingham to German parents. Her father, Carl Menke, was a well-to-do general merchant who later became the German and Swiss Consul in Birmingham. Katharine attended a grammar school in Birmingham and then went up to Somerville College, Oxford, to read Modern History, but ill health forced her to leave before she had taken her degree. Despite difficulties with her German parentage, she joined the Red Cross in 1915 and was shortly posted to Alexandria where she worked in one of the large field hospitals. At the end of the First World War, she went to Poland to a former concentration camp housing some 7000 Bolshevik troops being detained in terrible conditions. Menke returned to London in 1919 when she met her first husband, Bertram Francis Eardley Keeling OBE, MC, RE. They married in March 1919. In September 1919, shortly after their arrival in Cairo where Keeling was Director-General of the Survey of Egypt and President of the Cotton Research Board, her husband committed suicide. Katharine Keeling travelled to Baghdad in 1924 with a letter of introduction to Gertrude Bell. She was staying with Lt.Col. J.R. Tainsh, Director of the Iraq State Railways, and his wife. They had taken Katharine to see the excavations at Ur, where she impressed Leonard Woolley with her ability to draw accurately some of the objects emerging from the excavations. Mainly because of this, but also because Woolley had succumbed to her undoubted charm of manner and appearance, he invited her to make a long stay during 1925, and then offered her a post as volunteer at Ur. Her official period as artist to the expedition began in the spring of 1926 when Mallowan helped extend the expedition house at Ur to include a bathroom for her use. The first mention of a payment to K.K. for £51.172.3d appears on the accounts at the end of the 1925/1926 season. She continued until the excavations closed in 1934. Katharine married Woolley in April 1927, mainly because George Gordon, the Director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum at Philadelphia, insisted that a situation in which a single woman was living in the expedition house with single men was untenable. A letter from Woolley to a legal representative in 1928 makes it clear that the marriage remained unconsummated but its threat to seek an annulment was never implemented. The Woolleys remained married and there is no doubt that Katharines contributions to Woolleys excavations greatly enhanced his career. During the Second World War, Woolley worked closely with Winston Churchill and the Military Intelligence Directorate to monitor Nazi looting of European museums, art collections and royal archives. In this work, Katharine supplied invaluable assistance. Churchill had the Woolleys moved to the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane in October 1943, and it was there, in November 1945 that Katharine died. Her death certificate put multiple sclerosis (from which she had suffered for over a decade) as the cause of her death.
	Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan	Apprentice to Woolley during the Ur excavations, going on to excavate at Nineveh and direct excavations at Tell Arpachiyah, and the sites of Chagar Bazar and Tell Brak in Syria., Studied Classics at Oxford University and became general assistant to Leonard Woolley at Ur in 1925, having no prior field experience. He spent six seasons at Ur, gaining increasing knowledge of the field. In 1931 he left Ur to work with Reginald Campbell Thompson in northern Iraq and quickly moved on to head his own excavations in Syria at Tell Arpachiyah, Chagar Bazar, and then Tell Brak. Despite his many contributions to the field of archaeology, he is perhaps best known for having married the famous mystery writer, Agatha Christie, becoming her second husband in 1930. Mallowan was knighted in 1968 for his contributions to archaeology. He wrote many books and articles in his lifetime, including portions of the Ur Excavation series. He became professor of archaeology at London University in 1947 and died in 1978. , Max Mallowan was engaged as junior field archaeologist at Ur by Leonard Woolley between 1925 and 1931. He had just graduated from Oxford with a degree in Classical Greats but with no idea of a future career. A chance encounter led to his interview with Woolley at the British Museum, and his subsequent appointment. Ever careful not to squander funds, Woolley organised a free passage for his young assistant as a seaman on an oil tanker sailing from London to Port Said. At Beirut, Mallowan met Algy Whitburn and the two travelled together overland to Ur Junction where they met Woolley at the somewhat sparse expedition house. Woolley made it abundantly clear that they were there to work and he himself set a punishing schedule. The young men were expected to be on site half an hour after sunrise and to work until well after dinner writing up the days finds. Mallowan was lucky to have Woolley as his mentor. Not only did he instruct Mallowan in the rudiments of archaeology, but he also impressed upon him the importance of keeping precise daily field notes of all work going on, and also the necessity to publish that work, and especially any particularly interesting finds in order to inspire future sponsors. Woolley also insisted that Mallowan learn Arabic so that he could communicate with the workforce, which numbered between 200 and 250 men. That first season, Mallowan also kept the pay book, acted as untrained medical assistant, showed visitors round the site, and helped to build a new wing on to the expedition house. This extension was for the benefit of Katharine Keeling, an unpaid volunteer whom Woolley had engaged to do all the drawing of objects found on the site, and to whom Woolley was singularly attached. Mallowan resigned from his role at Ur after his marriage to Agatha Christie in 1930, because Katharine Woolley (she had married Woolley in 1927) insisted that there was room for only one woman at Ur. After Ur, Mallowan dug for one season at Nineveh with Reginald Campbell-Thompson, and thereafter conducted his own digs. In the years leading up to the Second World War, he excavated at Arpachiyah, Chagar Bazar and Tell Brak, as well as conducting a survey of the Khabur Valley. After the War, as Professor of Western Asiatic Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, he excavated at Nimrud (19491957) before handing over to David Oates. After Agatha Christies death in 1976 he remarried Barbara Parker, his epigraphist at Nimrud.
	Sheikh Hamoudi Ibn Ibrahim	Little is known about Hamoudis origins. Even his dates of birth and death are unknown. He is first known from the Carchemish excavations before the First World War, where he was in charge of organising and controlling the expedition workforce. Hamoudi also made himself indispensable in other ways, including administering medicine, and is credited with saving Lawrences life when he contracted typhoid fever. In June 1913, Lawrence and Woolley took Hamoudi to England, and they visited Oxford. The visit left a deep impression on Hamoudi. In 1914, Woolley and Lawrence shut down the site at Carchemish and both men were soon involved in military concerns. Woolley returned to Carchemish in 191920, but was unable to resume excavation because of the political situation. When Woolley was appointed Director of the joint British Museum/University of Pennsylvania Museum expedition to Ur in 1922, Hamoudi was appointed foreman. Described then as an elderly man, he brought with him two sons who worked under their father in organising the workforce. There are several photographs of Hamoudi at Ur, including some which show him in the same line as the Woolleys and the rest of the team. He was clearly a much-valued member of that team. At the start of every season, he would meet Woolley in Baghdad to discuss the ordering of stores of food and excavation essentials, then arrange for their transport to Ur. He also took instructions about work to be carried out to the expedition house before Woolley and his wife arrived. Mallowan frequently mentioned Hamoudi in a diary kept during 1925 and 1926. In October 1926 he reports buying presents (sundry decorative articles) in Paris on his way to Ur for Hamoudi and his (by then) three sons working at Ur: Yahia, Ibrahim and Isa. Undergoing an emotional crisis after the death of one of his closest friends, Mallowan went to talk things over with Hamoudi, that tower of philosophy. Hamoudi went on to be part of Mallowans digs in northern Syria at Chagar Bazar and Tell Brak. Agatha (Christie) related how he and two of his sons reported for duty at 5 a.m. while the Mallowans were still fast asleep in their hotel room. In 1949, when Mallowan was about to begin excavating at Nimrud, he found that Hamoudi had been awarded the Kings Medal for Service in the Cause of Freedom (KMS) for his services to British interests during the War. How long after this Hamoudi died is not recorded. Katharine Woolley made a bronze head of Hamoudi, which was once in the collection of the Horniman Museum, but the Museum does not have it now, and have no recollection of what happened to it. It was much admired at the time and considered to have been a good likeness.
	Yahia ibn Hamoudi	Hamoudi's eldest son; acted as junior foreman, clerk, and staff photographer