In the autumn of 1922, the archaeologist Leonard Woolley dug a trial trench near the ziggurat at Ur. Within days his workmen were pulling out gold beads and jewelry. They called it the gold trench. Any digger would have kept going. Woolley stopped. He wanted to reconstruct the city's history from its prehistoric beginnings around 4000 BCE, and he did not yet trust his crew. Inexperienced diggers, he feared, could destroy delicate evidence or pocket small treasures. So he moved the team to the town buildings and left the gold in the ground for four seasons. When he returned to the cemetery in 1926, it proved to hold over 1,800 graves. This is the story of a queen in one of them, a pit of dozens more, and the question of how those people died.
The Discovery of Ur's Death Pit
Woolley's team found Queen Puabi's tomb in 1927, then a pit of 74 retainers whose deaths were finally reexamined with CT scans in 2007.
The Gold Trench
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Queen Puabi?
Puabi was a queen buried at Ur around 2600 to 2500 BCE. Leonard Woolley found her intact tomb in December 1927, and a lapis lazuli cylinder seal near her body identified her as Puabi the Queen. She was buried with a spectacular headdress of gold leaves and beads.
What did Woolley think happened to the 74 people in the Great Death Pit?
Woolley believed the retainers went willingly to their deaths. He thought they drank a soporific drug from small cups at a final banquet and lay down in a peaceful sleep. Archaeologists accepted this theory for nearly 80 years.
How do we know the retainers were not simply poisoned?
CT scans of skulls from the death pits, studied between 2009 and 2011, showed fractures consistent with a blow from a spiked weapon. Aubrey Baadsgaard of the Penn Museum was among the researchers. The evidence points to a violent killing, likely from behind, rather than poison.
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