McCaffrey decided to revisit the tombs at Ur after women at the nearby Bronze Age site of Umm el Marra were unearthed with grave goods traditionally considered male, like weapons and men’s headgear. The find was a revelation, leading McCaffrey to reconsider the inconsistencies Woolley noted between the tombs of elite women and men interred in the royal cemetery. As she did so, three women stood out: Queen Puabi, an unknown queen buried in Royal Tomb 1054, and Queen A-su-sikil-am.
Queen—or King—Puabi
Puabi’s claim to power is the most visible. Though thousands of years of intrusive burials, grave robbing, and environmental wear have taken their toll on Ur’s royal cemetery, Puabi’s tomb is the most opulent one to have survived intact. Woolley described her burial chamber as arrayed with “an amazing wealth of offerings, vessels of gold, silver, copper, clay, and of such stones as white calcite, steatite, obsidian, and lapis lazuli; silver heads of lionesses from a piece of furniture, gold drinking-tubes, gold saws and chisels, an inlaid game board.”
In the burial chamber lay Puabi herself, a petite woman just under five feet tall who died around the age of 40. From the crown of her head down to her knees, Puabi was covered in gold and precious stones. Her headdress was composed of hundreds of carefully wrought pieces. Long, looping golden ribbons lay a foundation for multiple wreaths of delicate gold leaves and gemstone flowers; a diadem of overlapping gold rings shimmered just above her eyes; and an elaborate gold comb was adorned with seven gold rosettes that would have trembled with every movement. She also had an exceptional cape made entirely of beads: gold, silver, agate, carnelian, and lapis in long strings that would have sparkled and shimmered around her. Pins, earrings, bracelets, rings on each finger, a large gold and lapis lazuli belt, and even a garter of gold and precious stones tied at her knee further adorned her.
Gold daggers and multiple cylinder seals were found at her side. One of these seals carried her name and a royal title to accompany her into the underworld.
An elaborate dagger and sheath features intricate geometric patterns rendered in gold. It dates from around 2500 B.C. M. Seemuller, De Agostini/Getty Images
Like the other royals in the cemetery, Puabi was ushered into the afterlife by human sacrifices. Three human attendants rested in her burial chamber, and 21 more reposed in the adjoining death pit. The death pit presented an elaborate scene. Five men with copper daggers appeared to guard the entrance ramp. Two oxen pulling a chariot and accompanied by five humans occupied the center of the pit, while an additional man appeared to guard a wardrobe out of which spilled gold and silver bowls and cups, silver lion heads, and an inlaid shell cosmetic box. At the opposite end of the pit, the skeletons of 10 women sat in two neat rows, each wearing an elaborate headdress and some carrying musical instruments.
Impressed by the tomb’s splendor, Woolley noted that “the richness of the death-pit attached to the ‘King’s Grave’ was nothing compared to this.” Later scholars have grasped for explanations that might justify why this woman received such an extravagant burial. “Were the women in these graves invariably royal wives, or was there some other rank among the royal ladies that entitled them to burial with victims?” puzzled one scholar in the late 1970s.
While Woolley’s team was the first to note that Puabi’s cylinder seal identified her name and title but failed to mention a husband, they did not seem to assign any particular significance to this omission. Instead they hypothesized that Puabi’s husband was the lost king in a neighboring grave dubbed the King’s Grave. Since then, scholars have proposed numerous theories to explain it, arguing variously that Puabi was the wife of a king who wasn’t named on her seal (multiple candidates have been proposed for her husband), the high priestess married to the moon god, or, more recently, that she may have ruled independently.
Starting in 2008 McCaffrey took the debate in a new direction, arguing that Puabi could have been a primary ruler, an important a religious figure, and a wife without impairing her ability to fulfill any of those three roles. Further evidence pointing at potential rulership was found on Puabi’s seal, which bore the title nin, which was often translated as “queen” or “lady” but, crucially, could also designate an independent ruler, a ruler’s wife, or a title for male gods, suggesting that it denoted authority by itself rather than by relationship to a man. McCaffrey reads Puabi’s nin as a designator of rulership, not marriage. She further points out that “principals were not recovered from the largest royal burials and, while a male default has always been presumed for the grandest Ur tombs, the sumptuousness of Puabi’s chamber does not support that default.”
Most elite burials in Ur’s royal cemetery lack the clear remains of a primary occupant, leaving the gender of the deceased open to question. The so-called Great Death Pit, a mass burial in the royal cemetery that contained the largest number of human sacrifices (73 in total), was originally attributed to a king whose burial chamber was believed to be destroyed in antiquity. More recently, anthropologist Aubrey Baadsgaard argued convincingly that the primary burial was a woman distinguished from the sacrificial victims around her by the opulence of her jewelry and grave goods rather than an adjoining burial chamber. Further investigation of this theory by archaeologist Richard Zettler revealed a cylinder seal inscription that may link this woman to the powerful priestesshood, adding further evidence that women commanded the most lavish burials of the cemetery.
