The World’s Oldest Museum Found By Shaftesbury Historical Society President
Twenty-one-year-old Max Mallowan arrived at Ur in southern Iraq in October 1925, where he was to assist the renowned Leonard Woolley in supervising a major archaeological dig. Rising above the flood plain of the River Euphrates was the ancient Sumerian stepped pyramid or Ziggurat, whose name might be called “the Hill of Heaven” or “the Mountain of God”. The first two seasons in 1922/23 of what became a twelve year project were spent clearing by hand the rubbish before the ruins of the tower stood free .. running into thousands of tons. Work on the surrounding buildings was continued until 1929. (The point at which Woolley published Ur of the Chaldees). Among the surrounding buildings was the nunnery where King Nabonidus installed his daughter, the Princess Ennigaldi-Nanna, as high priestess of the Moon God cult. In her quarters, Woolley deduced, was a museum of local antiquities maintained by the princess (who in this took after her father, a keen archaeologist), and in the collection was this clay drum, the earliest museum label known, drawn up a hundred years before and kept, presumably with the original [inscribed] bricks, as a record of the first scientific excavations at Ur.
Ur, Mallowan recalled later, was a venerable, ancient city closely associated with the Old Testament. There was still a wide Bible-reading public. It was always Woolley’s hope to discover some reference to Abraham, although this name never appeared in the cuneiform record. There were spectacular finds, like the Ram caught in the Thicket (below. Courtesy of the Penn Museum) though nothing quite on a par with the Egyptian treasures of Tutankhamun’s tomb, discovered in 1922. Woolley absolutely knew the value of positive publicity, so evidence of an inundation, for example, could be claimed as proof of Noah’s Flood. He found two Ram statuettes in the Great Death Pit of the Royal Cemetery, crushed flat by 9 metres of soil. They are actually goats on their hind legs nibbling leaves from bushes but could be linked with the story in Genesis 22:13 of Abraham and son Isaac:
Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son.
In April 1927 Leonard Woolley married Katharine Keeling, a forceful vivacious widow and talented illustrator, whose presence as the only woman at Ur was troubling the American backers of the dig. It was a marriage of mutual convenience, never consummated. According to Max Mallowan, Katharine had the power of entrancing those associated with her when she was in the mood, or on the contrary of creating a charged poisonous atmosphere; to live with her was to walk on a tightrope.
In 1928, having seen the Woolleys’ reports in the Illustrated London News, the author Agatha Christie took the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul, followed by less luxurious transport to Damascus, Baghdad and finally Ur. She needed to escape the intrusive attentions of the Fleet Street paparazzi, who had not forgiven her for her unexplained disappearance in December 1926. Both the Woolleys were delighted to welcome their celebrity visitor. Katharine had been impressed by The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, (written in 1925, before Agatha’s emotional traumas, including her mother’s death and Archie Christie’s infidelity). Leonard gave Agatha a personal guided tour. Leonard Woolley, she wrote in her autobiography, saw with the eye of imagination: the place was as real to him as it had been in 1500 BC, or a few thousand years earlier. Wherever he happened to be, he could make it come alive. While he was speaking I felt in my mind no doubt whatever that the house on the corner had been Abraham’s. It was his reconstruction of the past and he believed in it, and anyone who listened to him believed in it also.
To be continued
