Queen Puabi of Ur

In working on my own self-education a bit, I decided to participate in Sketch Tuesday with Monkey. Sketch Tuesday this week is themed around jewelry, and I was thinking about doing one of my necklaces, but then I came across this lovely headdress when learning about Sumer:



Here's the original that I was working from when I made my drawing: it's a little simpler than the one in the following clip, and simple was nice for doing the drawing.



An archaeologist named Woolley discovered about 1800 graves in a dig in Iraq. Of those graves, 16 of them were "royal" tombs, and the finds he made were reported all over the world from 1922 to 1934. Artifacts from this work were split between the Universtity of Pennsylvania, the British Museum, and the Iraqi Museum.

Queen Puabi, buried in one of the 16 royal tombs, is interesting because she appears to have ruled in her own right in a time when the other nobles buried near by are all identified by their husbands - yet the archeologists think that her tomb is sitting right on top of her husbands because she didn't want to be separated from him in death. You can explore a bit about her tomb at the British Museum's website. It's got clickable sketches of the tomb and photos of some of the artifacts and reconstructed artifacts they have.

There's more cool pictures here:
University of Chicago: Treasures From the Royal Tombs of Ur

Another interesting thing about Ur is that Ur's ziggurat is thought to be a possible Tower of Babel site. This site has a discussion of the possible Tower of Babel site near the bottom of the page. The British Museum also has a site for the Ziggurat of Ur, with clickable pictures. Apparently this is one of the sites that Woolley excavated.