Archaeologist Leonard Woolley made amazing discoveries during his life, he directed with T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) the excavations of Carchemish, he found the statue-biography of King Idrimi, and the geological evidence of the flood told in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Woolley is most renowned for his excavations in the ancient Sumerian city of Ur between 1922 and 1934. The findings there are among the most significant archaeological events of the 20th century: royal tombs (2700 B.C.), the royal standard of Ur, or the Copper Bull, among others.
Interestingly, Agatha Christie visited the excavations twice in 1929 and 1930, where she met her second husband, Max Mallowan, Woolley’s assistant archaeologist.
Six years later, she published her novel “Murder in Mesopotamia”, revolving around the murder of the excavation director’s wife (Katharine, who sadly inspired the character, passed away nine years later from multiple sclerosis after 20 years of collaboration with her husband).
Before that, Woolley, Mallowan and Katharine made another sensational discovery. While excavating the palace complex and the temple of Ur, objects and artifacts began to appear in certain rooms, dozens of them, which immediately caught their attention.
For a very specific reason, they all belonged to different periods, some with differences of several centuries.
The most recent object was seven centuries older than the pavement of the building, and the oldest two millennia earlier, as Woolley himself wrote.
Each object had a small clay cylinder with inscriptions in four columns: the first in ancient Sumerian and the others in three different languages, with explanations for each object, similar to modern museums.
Woolley later wrote that the evidence strongly suggested that these items were not there by accident, stating in his famous work “Ur of the Chaldees” that the room was an antiquities museum maintained by Princess Bel-Shalti-Nannar (also known as Ennigaldi-Nanna).
Her father, Nabonidus, not only was the last king of the Babylonian Empire (reigning between 556 and 539 B.C.) but is considered the first archaeologist. He led the first excavations in search of the temples of Šamaš, the sun god, the warrior goddess Anunitu (both located in Sippar), and the sanctuary Naram-Sin built for the moon god in Harran, restoring them after discovery.
He was also the first to attempt dating an archaeological object, though lacking technology led him astray by about 1,500 years.
All the artifacts Nabonidus found in his investigations came from sites in southern Mesopotamia, dated between 2050 and 1400 B.C. (some possibly collected earlier by Nebuchadnezzar II). Around 550–530 B.C., his daughter gathered the entire collection in a room attached to her palace (the building called E-Gig-Par), creating what many historians consider the first museum in history.
The museum was part of the priestess school Ennigaldi led, where she used the pieces to teach history while instructing in writing and a dialect called Emesal, exclusively used by women in literary texts.
The school had existed for eight centuries when Ennigaldi became the priestess of Nannar (god of the Moon) in 547 B.C. and took charge.
The remains of the building housing the museum are just 150 meters southeast of the Ziggurat of Ur, about 24 kilometers southwest of Nasiriya in Iraq. As for the objects found by Woolley, they are distributed among the British Museum, the University of Pennsylvania Museum, and the National Museum of Baghdad.
This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on December 19, 2018. Puedes leer la versión en español en El primer museo de la historia, creado en el año 530 a.C. en la ciudad de Ur por la princesa Ennigaldi
Sources
Leonard Woolley, Ur of the Chaldees: a record of seven years of excavation | Leonard Woolley, Ur Excavations | The Excavations at Ur of the Chaldees | Wikipedia
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