Death of a Queen

Title: Queen Puabi's Golden Headdress
Material: Gold, Lapis Lazuli, Carnelian
Creator: Likely Palace Goldsmith
Year: 2550 BCE

Queen Puabi's headdress is part of the Penn Museum's collection of objects from ancient Iraq. It is on display as part of the Iraq's Ancient Past exhibition.  It is part of an exhibit element titled "Rediscovering Ur's Royal Cemetery."  It is on display with other pieces from the 1920 and 1930's expeditions to the Middle East including a lyre found in the tomb. The walls around the objects are decorated with enlarged  newspaper prints from the period detailing the archeologist exploits and advertisements for the traveling exhibitions of the artifacts.

The headdress was acquired when the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology co-sponsored a excavation in ancient Ur, now part of modern Iraq in 1922. The expedition was led by C. Leonard Woolley. During the first phase of the dig, one hundred local workers, under Woolley's direction, unearthed a massive burial tomb. Woolley mistaken identified the woman in the burial as Puabi although her name is probably pronounced "Pu-Abum."  He believed she was a queen because of her elaborate gold headdress. She may have been the wife of the king of Ur at the time, but there is no mention of her husband names, so she may have been one of the few female rulers of ancient Mesopotamia. Buried along side Puabi in her tomb were her servants, whom Woolley believed had drunk poison and peacefully died beside their queen in homage.  Woolley's last excavation in Ur took place in 1934, and the artifacts in the Penn museum are so important because no other excavation have taken place since.

The Penn Museum has a program for school groups called "Cemetery Sleuths" in which students identify burial objects from the mock coffin. They use deduction to figure out if the grave belonged to a man or woman and whether the person was rich or poor. Students also identify the objects, the materials they are made from, and the possibly use of each object.  Information on the excavation of Queen Puabi's tomb in included in the Power Point presentation to supplement the hands-on activity.  A program in which students design, fabricate and wear their own headdress is another possible activity the Penn Museum could design around this artifact.