Episode 40

Ur Never Going to Believe This

Join Anna and Amber on a tour of third millennium BCE Mesopotamia, where they explore the Royal Tombs of Ur. It has everything: musical instruments, very extra jewelry looks, a Great Death Pit (!), a famous excavator with a flair for the dramatic, even a surprise find nearly a century later in a museum basement. Who was buried there? What makes these tombs so special? What did Sumerian music sound like? How great was that death pit?

To learn (and see!) more, check out:

Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East (via Worldcat)

Art of the Ancient Near East: Resources for Educators (via Worldcat)

The Royal cemetery : a report on the predynastic and Sargonid graves excavated between 1926 and 1931 (via Worldcat)

Assyrian King-Lists, the Royal Tombs of Ur, and Indus Origins (Journal of Near Eastern Studies)

Woolley's Excavations (Ur Online)

The Musical Instruments from Ur and Ancient Mesopotamian Music (Expedition)

Musician's Recreation of Ancient Sumerian Songs Will Haunt You (io9)

Queen Puabi jewellery (Nasvete)

Jewelry from the Royal Tombs of Ur (Sumerian Shakespeare)

Scanning the Deadheads (Penn Museum)

What Do We Know About the People Buried in the Royal Cemetery? (Expedition 20)

Human sacriﬁce and intentional corpse preservation in the Royal Cemetery of Ur (Antiquity, via Academia.edu)

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The Dirt Podcast

Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

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