 | Royal Cemetery | PG | The excavation area abbreviation PG grew to refer to a large region, at least 60x80 meters, in the southeastern portion of the Neo-Babylonian temenos but below the level of that wall. The area is most often referred to as the Royal Cemetery. The abbreviation PG, however, was initially used to designate individual graves: PG1422, for example, refers to Private Grave number 1422. The first PG numbers were assigned in season 5 when a series of trial trenches (see TTD, TTE, TTF, and TTG) were excavated in the area. These trenches were expanded to uncover more and more graves over the next few seasons. The last number assigned in the PG sequence was around 1850 but numbers were often reassigned for publication and even in the field some numbers were combined as they were recognized to come from one large grave rather than two separate ones. Others were deemed too fragmentary to publish; furthermore, several hundred additional graves were found in Pit X, an expansion of the PG area dug in 1934. The total number of graves excavated in the Royal Cemetery is thus extremely difficult to determine.
Woolley reports that there may once have been as many as three times the total number of graves he recorded, as he found many plundered and almost completely destroyed. Despite being called the Royal Cemetery, there were only 16 graves that Woolley actually dubbed 'royal.' He believed that these formed the core of the burial ground and that many others wanted to be buried nearby.
The cemetery lay outside the original temenos, the core of the city, and was apparently a dumping ground through much of its history. Stratigraphic layers of sealings (see SIS) help to date the main period of the Royal Cemetery to the Early Dynastic III, though there are also graves of the Akkadian and perhaps some of the early Ur III period here. Well beneath the main PG area are also graves of the ED I and Uruk periods, but these were mainly uncovered in pits dug within or adjacent to area PG (see PJ, Pit W, Pit X, Pit Y and Pit Z).
Most burials in area PG were simple inhumations with few artifacts, but the ones Woolley called royal were much more elaborate. Apart from having rich artifacts, they also showed evidence of human sacrifice -- many bodies were found in 'death pits' outside the main 'royal' burial. The people found in these death pits may have been attendants who went into the afterlife with their king or queen, yet no other indication of this practice is found elsewhere in Mesopotamia. Nor do we know who these 'kings and queens' were. The dating of the graves makes it difficult to associate them with a known dynasty at Ur and there were very few names found with any of the bodies. Only the burial of Puabi, the Queen, can be directly identified by her cylinder seal and she does not appear on any king list. References to Mesannepada and his wife Ninbanda, a king and queen of the first dynasty of Ur, were found but not in specific graves. Instead, they were found in material above the main graves and would imply that the royal tombs pre-date the first dynasty.
Woolley spent a great deal of time and energy excavating the Royal Cemetery and the majority of his field notes concern it. Recording of contexts here, then, is better than anywhere else at Ur. Nonetheless, not all of the graves were mapped and photographs were often difficult to obtain. | (none) |
 | Pit G | Beginning in season 7, Woolley excavated a series of pits within the Royal Cemetery. He had already cut this area down about 10 meters from the surface, so it was an ideal location to go deeper to investigate the earliest occupation of the site. The only map of the location of these pits that Woolley published is found in Ur Excavations volume 4 in 1955, but it is demonstrably unreliable. Combining information from the field notes, the UE4 plan, and the UE4 stratigraphic profile helps to get closer to the actual sizes and locations, but most of these cannot be taken as exact.
Pit G was the largest of the pits dug in the Royal Cemetery in season 7 (larger were dug in seasons 11 and 12). It was located northwest of PG/777. The stratigraphic profile shows it as being 10 meters from NW-SE, but an early reference in the Antiquaries Journal for 1929 states that it was laid out as being 14x4 meters. It may have been conceived of as two pits, however, as the same reference mentions one pit on the outer line of a retaining wall [of the early temenos?] and a smaller on the inner line. Together they are later referred to as Pit G, or the smaller one may have been abandoned and only the 10 meter extent of Pit G reported.
The pit was on the northwestern outskirts of the Royal Cemetery and it uncovered some building remains. In fact, walls were not unusual in the Royal Cemetery as witnessed by this quote from UE4, p.70: "Over a large part of the Cemetery area there extended walls of plano-convex mud bricks, at two distinct levels... All were thin and flimsy, all much destroyed by the diggers of the Cemetery graves." Woolley felt that these were just store rooms of a temporary nature.
The pits dug in the Royal Cemetery in season 7 were intended to test the lower levels and little if anything was collected from them. Pit G, however, appears to have been a prelude to Pit F and may have initially been conceived of as Pit F in the sequence. Pottery was collected from it and analyzed by Henri Frankfort in Antiquaries Journal volume 9. Initial mentions of the pit indicate it was to go to the lowest levels, but it only reached 7.5 meters above sea level. It also began at a much higher point than other trenches, at 14.5 above sea level. Woolley must have realized he needed a much larger pit to achieve his goals and began that as PFT in the next season. The shift from this pit to the much larger is likely the origin of Legrain's listing of separate PF and PFT contexts, and the beginning of Woolley's realization that he must rename the entire sequence of pits at Ur. | (none) |