{"id":875,"date":"2013-01-01T19:33:18","date_gmt":"2013-01-01T19:33:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ajaonline.org\/2013\/01\/01\/1497\/"},"modified":"2024-08-13T03:46:20","modified_gmt":"2024-08-13T03:46:20","slug":"1497","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ajaonline.org\/note\/1497\/","title":{"rendered":"Symbols of Fertility and Abundance in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, Iraq"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Fertility and abundance are important themes of ancient Mesopotamian texts and images. The goddess Inanna and her consort Dumuzi personify these ideas in texts of the second millennium B.C.E. Excavated by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s, the Royal Cemetery at Ur dates to the mid third millennium B.C.E. Among the tombs, that of Queen Puabi yielded many ornaments of gold, carnelian, and lapis. Some of the pendants realistically depict identifiable animals. Others are more stylized depictions of clusters of apples, dates, and date inflorescences. Apples and dates are both associated with the goddess Inanna, who is associated with love and fertility. Twisted wire pendants in the same group of objects are not so readily identified. I propose here that the twisted wire pendants in the Puabi assemblage may literally represent rope, symbolically reference sheep, and narratively evoke the flocks of the shepherd Dumuzi. Pairing symbols of Inanna and Dumuzi evokes life in a place of death. This article considers and rejects the following identifications for the wire pendants: stylized palmette,&nbsp;pinnate leaf, grape (and implicitly any other fruit cluster),&nbsp;water, road, canal, and snake.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fertility and abundance are important themes of ancient Mesopotamian texts and images. The goddess Inanna and her consort Dumuzi personify these ideas in texts of the second millennium B.C.E. Excavated by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s, the Royal Cemetery at Ur dates to the mid third millennium B.C.E. Among the tombs, that of Queen Puabi [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":874,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[920],"tags":[5,22,27,36,43],"issues":[136],"region":[807],"class_list":["post-875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-note","tag-iconography","tag-smallfinds","tag-prehistory","tag-metallurgymetalworking","tag-mesopotamian","issues-136","region-neareast"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Symbols of Fertility and Abundance in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, Iraq | January 2013 (117.1) | American Journal of Archaeology<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/ajaonline.org\/note\/1497\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Symbols of Fertility and Abundance in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, Iraq | January 2013 (117.1) | American Journal of Archaeology\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Fertility and abundance are important themes of ancient Mesopotamian texts and images. The goddess Inanna and her consort Dumuzi personify these ideas in texts of the second millennium B.C.E. Excavated by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s, the Royal Cemetery at Ur dates to the mid third millennium B.C.E. Among the tombs, that of Queen Puabi [&hellip;]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/ajaonline.org\/note\/1497\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"American Journal of Archaeology\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/aja.journal\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2013-01-01T19:33:18+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2024-08-13T03:46:20+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/ajaonline.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/1171Miller.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"672\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"306\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"aja\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"aja\" \/>\n\t<meta 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