Early Civilization

The mind alive encyclopedia

The Mind Alive Encyclopedia

The history of modern times will be documented in minute detail in print, on film, on tapes and in computer records. Early history is different: our distant past, like a richly coloured mosaic, must be pieced together by archaeologists and scholars from surviving written records and the products of years of painstaking excavation. Many of the fragments of the picture are missing. New facts constantly come to light.

Monday, December 30, 2019

Life and death in Ur

December 30, 2019 0 Comments

Life and death in Ur

Summer was one of the first countries in which men began to settle in groups and build towns. What conditioned their society and made them develop their particular pattern of living?

Masses in a formal pattern, with apears and big
shield, the heavy infantry of King Eannutum
of Lagash - one of the city-states of Sumer - marches
to war, led by the king himslef. This
limestone stele of 2400 BC is now in the Louvre.

QUEEN PU – ABI died about 5000 years ago. Her attendants dressed her splendidly, covering her cloak with precious jewellery down to the waist and trying her wig with a golden band. When they had finished, bearers took the queen down a sloping pit shaft into her burial chamber and reverently laid her face upward on a plain wooden bier. Her two women attendants carefully arranged her most treasured possessions around her, then one crouched by her head and another by her feet. Down the slope leading to the queen’s burial chamber came soldiers, courtiers, officials and servants. Musicians appeared and more women attendants, their gay robes and sparking hair lavishly decorated with jewellery of gold, silver and lapis lazuli. Hard on the heels of this strange procession came oxen and donkeys pulling decorated carts, their drivers and grooms struggling to guide them into position for the macabre ceremony about to be performed.
As the shuffling ceased, each of those present took a cup filled from the large copper pot standing in the centre of the chamber. Then all took up their proper places either inside the chamber or by the doorway at the bottom of the pit. The musicians played on their instruments, and calmly and deliberately the whole party drank. Then all fell unconscious, for the drink was drugged. Someone came down to slay the animals, and finally the royal grave – diggers entombed the whole party in the earth.  

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