Woolley considered the deaths of the retainers and their burial with kings and queens to be an integral element of the royal tombs and vividly described scenes of feasting and music making followed by ritual suicide as the kings and queens of Ur were laid to rest. The media and the public, of course, seized upon the appeal of this mass evidence of human sacrifice. However, scholars have failed to come to any consensus concerning the exact beliefs and practices behind the royal tombs at Ur. Later literary texts such as The Death of Gilgamesh and The Death of Ur-Namma indicate that kings could have underworld palaces and that the burial of a retinue may have been intended to enable royalty to continue living in the style to which they were accustomed, which could be used to explain the multiple burials in the earlier royal tombs at Ur. In addition, two administrative texts - probably lists of grave goods to be buried with high-ranking members of society and dating to within a century of the tombs themselves - include lists of items that are in many ways identical to what was found at Ur, including jewelry, chariots, donkeys, and, in one case, a slave girl. However, as Richard L. Zettler, one of the curators of the exhibition, writes in the exhibition catalog, "No particular explanation of the Royal Cemetery of Ur is completely convincing in our state of ignorance about early Mesopotamian society."

[oi.uchicago.edu]

So theres no evidence apart from that in woolleys imagination that people laid down and were ritually killed to join their brethren.
There never was.
You might want to bear in mind that he was digging in the royal CEMETARY when he found all this.

cemetery, name used by early Christians to designate a place for burying the dead. First applied in Christian burials in the Roman catacombs, the word cemetery came into general usage in the 15th cent. Group burials have been found in Paleolithic caves, and fields of prehistoric grave mounds, or Barrows, are located throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. In the ancient Middle East, graves were often grouped around temples and sanctuaries. In Greece the dead were buried outside the city walls along the roads leading into the city in a necropolis (city of the dead). Christian belief in resurrection made chapel crypts and churchyards desirable for burial, but overcrowding and the rise of urban centers made it necessary to establish cemetery plots outside the city limits. Graveyards of all periods tend to reflect the familial and class groupings of their living society. Among the many beautiful and historic cemeteries of Europe are the Père-Lachaise in Paris and the Campo Santo in Pisa.

Moderator's note -- the paragraph above is from [www.bartleby.com], The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001. -- It's important to reference quotes like this from the web (or from anywhere else). Thanks.

pay extra attention to where it says Graveyards of all periods tend to reflect the familial and class groupings of their living society
I'm not saying of course that human sacrifice wasn't practiced at all in mesopotamia because i know it was. But thats a different matter entirely. And it didn't happen en masse like woolley thought it did.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/02/2005 02:50PM by DougWeller.