The Royal Graves and Death Pits of Ur

We begin at the dawn of the historical era with the only occurrence of mass human sacrifice in ancient Mesopotamian history.^[921] The location is the cemetery complex dating to the Early Dynastic period (2600-2450 bce) at the site of Ur, modern Tell al-Muqayyar in southern Iraq.

two accompanying bodies, while PG 1237 had as many as seventy-three.^[923] Since no literary or narrative texts have been recovered from Ur in this era, the exact relationship between the rulers in the main chamber and the accompanying buried bodies is not entirely understood. However, Woolley drew two conclusions that have been widely accepted: first, that the bodies accompanying the rulers were a part of the royal retinue; and second, that the retinue was sacrificed as part of the royal burial practice and was interred at the same time as the kings and queens.

For Woolley, the striking consistency in the arrangement of the dead in several tombs was important. The bodies appeared to have been neatly arranged in rows with no obvious signs of trauma, and even the women's fine headdresses were still in order. In Woolley's later and popular writings, he interpreted the sacrificed as people who willingly went to their death in order to serve their god-king in the afterlife.^[924] It was a theory quite in keeping with the evidence available to him. The lack of any clear struggle and the orderly arrangement of the bodies, together with the corpses of horses and oxen also present, was not insignificant to Woolley. So too the so-called ritual bowls that accompanied several victims, which Woolley thought must have contained poison consumed by the sacrificial victims. In all, Woolley drew the conclusion that a self-convinced retinue knowingly joined their rulers in death. However, recent analyses of some of the human remains from Ur offer more information about how the victims might have met their end.

In 2011 archaeologists at the University of Pennsylvania published the findings of their analysis of two skulls from Woolley's excavations kept in the Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Using CT scanning, Aubrey Baadsgaard and her colleagues discovered that there was clear evidence of heavy trauma to the skulls from a sharp instrument as well as evidence that the remains had been heated or smoked to hold off putrefac­tion, possibly to preserve the bodies for the royal funeral. Such findings indicate that the victims did not volunteer for sacrifice, but were violently killed and later placed in the tombs.^[925] They also support the picture drawn from earlier work conducted by Theya Molleson and Dawn Hodgson, who examined some of the skeletal remains Woolley had sent to London and

Ritual Killing and Human Sacrifice in the Ancient Near East found that the robust and muscular structures indicate that the victims had been engaged in hard labour most of their lives, a strong indication that the interred were from the lower strata of society.^[926] Beyond these inferences there is little information on how individuals were selected to serve as sacrifices for the royal funerary cult.

Since there are virtually no royal inscriptions or literary texts from the time, it is difficult to establish the reasons behind the practice of human sacrifice at Ur. The search for insights in later Sumerian religious literature has not been as fruitful as one would hope. Many decades ago it was suggested that some light might be shed on the matter by two Sumerian compositions from later periods, The Death of Bilgames (who became the Gilgamesh of later Babylonian epic tradition) and The Death of Ur-Namma^[927] These literary compositions detail the journey of the kings to the nether­world and their subsequent orientations in the realm of the dead. Both texts show that the great kings could expect a similar style of existence in the netherworld as they enjoyed during their lifetime. Thus, The Death of Bilgames states:

His beloved wife, his beloved child, his beloved senior wife and junior wife, his beloved minstrel, steward and..., his beloved barber, [his beloved]..., [his beloved] attendants and servants, his beloved goods..., were laid down in their places, as if [attending] a palace­review in the midst of Uruk.^[928]

According to Sumerian tradition, Bilgames was only a few generations before Meskalamdug, one of the kings positively identified from a cylinder seal in the royal tombs. Indeed, it was this connection between Bilgames, who was a demi-god, and Meskalamdug and the other rulers recognised from this era that gave strength to Woolley's theory that human sacrifice was a part of the

rulers of Ur's god-king status. The Death ofUr-Namma, a text about the famous king who founded the Ur III dynasty (c. 2047 bce), provides a similar picture of the support of a deceased king in the afterlife:

After the king had presented properly the offerings of the Netherworld, After Ur-Namma had presented properly the offerings of the Netherworld, The [...] of the Netherworld,

The [...],

Seated Ur-Namma on a great dais of the Netherworld (and)

Set up a dwelling place for him in the Netherworld.

At the command of Ereskigal,

All the soldiers who had been killed by weapons (and)

All the men who had been found guilty,

Were given into the king's (i.e. Ur-Namma's) hands.

Ur-Namma was [...],

So with Gilgames, his beloved brother,

He will issue the judgments of the Netherworld and render the decisions of the Netherworld.^[929]

Both literary texts state that the dead kings were to be served by a retinue in death, as they had been in life. These compositions, while Sumerian, come from a much later time, possibly as late as the Old Babylonian period (c. 2004-1595 bce), and therefore one must be careful in drawing dogmatic conclusions about the light they shed on the distant funerary practices of the early rulers of Ur, appealing as it may be. If they do provide accurate insights into the practice of mass human sacrifice in Early Dynastic Ur, it is unclear why it ceased so early in Mesopotamian history, particularly since the rulers of later dynasties of the Akkadian and Ur III periods, who were divinised during their reigns, did not sacrifice their retinue upon their deaths.

When one looks more broadly across the ancient Near East to Egypt, one finds comparable burials from an equivalent period of statehood in the Nile Valley. The excavations of the royal necropolis dating to the First Dynasty (c. 3200-2900 bce) at modern Umm el-Qa'ab by Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie revealed a large number of subsidiary burials adjoining the pharaohs' tombs filled with the victims of human sacrifice. Just as at Ur, scientific analysis of the First Dynasty subsidiary burials at Abydos has revealed that the interred were involuntarily killed (strangulation) and buried at the same time as the pharaohs.¹¹ Noteworthy too is the point that the Egyptian practice of human sacrifice as a part of the elite burial practice was also limited to a short period of history. However, with Egypt, the later practice of including shabti figurines designed to serve the deceased in the afterlife offers some understanding of how the funerary cult developed to fill the void left once human sacrifice ceased to be practised.

While we may never fully understand the ideas and motivations behind human sacrifice at Ur, recent archaeological and scientific investigations of the victims demonstrate that they were coerced and probably came from the lower classes. Such findings validate proposals in recent years that see human sacrifice as a frightening display of royal power that reinforced the inequality of the rulers' position. One can no longer accept Woolley's thesis of the kings' loyal retinue willingly giving up their lives to serve their deceased rulers in the afterlife. Rather, it seems they were arranged ‘like dolls in a sinister doll house or actors in a mortal tableau'.^{[930] [931]} In this way, the sacrifice of these people was as much a statement of the power and authority of the royal house of Ur as it was a funerary ritual.