New posts at Museum Blog
My latest artifact of the month post is up at Penn Museum blog. This one centers on a single gold ring, then moves outward to the larger context of that find (with five other rings on one body, as well as much other jewelry and many other bodies with much more jewelry). The context is known as "the Great Death Pit" because there are so many bodies in it. We are still trying to understand exactly what happened here and why.
In another Ur related post, a volunteer working for me reports on archival material. This one is about a single letter in our archives. Written in 1921, it discusses establishing a dig in Mesopotamia but that this discussion must be delayed while Col. Lawrence (T.E. Lawrence, that is) and Winston Churchill (later prime minister of England) attend a conference in Cairo. That conference established that there would be a modern nation of Iraq and its king would be Faisal.
And yet another post is interesting as well, even though not directly related to the Ur project. It covers a photograph in archives that shows Agatha Christie visiting another of our digs at Nippur. She was at Ur often, but we seem not to have any photos of her at Ur. Thus, this is a rare photo of her on our archaeological digs.
Enjoy.