Bull-Headed Lyre of Ur

The object on view in Philadelphia is not, strictly, a lyre that has come down from the third millennium BC intact. It is a gold, silver, lapis lazuli and shell bull's head and beard, a shell-and-bitumen plaque that sat beneath it, and a wooden soundbox built by Penn Museum conservators in the 1970s to the excavator's own measurements. The wooden body of the original instrument had decayed completely in the ground more than four thousand years before anyone dug it up. What the excavators actually recovered was a void in the soil in the shape of the vanished wood, still wrapped in its surviving skin of precious metal, stone and shell.

This is true of every Early Dynastic lyre or harp recovered from the Royal Cemetery at Ur, and it is the single fact a reader needs before anything else on this page makes sense. The gold head is ancient. The beard's lapis tesserae are ancient. The shell plaque is ancient. The wood underneath all of it, the thing that actually made the object a lyre rather than a sculpture, is a reconstruction, and it has been rebuilt more than once, at more than one size.

The bull's head, its beard, and the plaque were excavated by Leonard Woolley's joint expedition of the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum in the 1926-27 season, in a grave the excavation numbered PG 789 and which the expedition called the King's Grave. It lies adjacent to the grave of Queen Puabi, PG 800, one of the small number of burials in the cemetery that Woolley identified as royal on the basis of their construction and contents. PG 789 held the bodies of more than sixty soldiers and attendants in addition to the primary burial, sacrificed retainers of the kind that give the Royal Cemetery its name and its reputation.

The cemetery as a whole was excavated over more than a decade, from 1922 to 1934, under a permit from the Iraq Antiquities Service. The royal tombs, including PG 789, belong to a level that has since been dated by radiocarbon to approximately 2600-2500 BC. This bull-headed lyre is one of at least nine lyres and harps recovered from the cemetery's royal graves, evidence that stringed instruments of this quality were not a singular treasure but an expected furnishing of an elite Sumerian burial.

The excavation technique used to recover the lyre is the reason any of it survives in recognisable form, and it is one of the notable field methods of early twentieth-century Mesopotamian archaeology. By the time Woolley's team reached the instrument, the wood had rotted away entirely, leaving only a cavity in the compacted soil where the soundbox had been, lined on the inside by the sheets of gold, silver and shell that had once covered its surface and had not decayed.

Rather than lift the fragile metal skin alone and lose the object's original shape, Woolley poured liquid plaster of Paris into the void left by the vanished wood. The plaster set inside the cavity, capturing the soundbox's form and holding the surviving metal and shell decoration in place against it, so that the whole assembly, gold sheet, silver, lapis and all, could be lifted from the ground as a single rigid block rather than as loose fragments. The bull's head itself, crushed and distorted where the roof of the grave had collapsed onto it, was separately reinforced in the field: molten paraffin wax was poured over the pieces and the whole was wrapped in muslin bandaging before removal, then reshaped and filled with plaster once in the workroom.

The plaster casts taken from the soundbox voids are why the later corrected reconstruction of this lyre, and the reconstructions of its sibling instruments from the same cemetery, could be built to the actual excavated dimensions at all. Woolley's excavation report of 1934 records the soundbox's original measurements from these casts. It is a measurement his own museum would fail to use correctly for nearly fifty years.

Technical examination carried out when the head was disassembled in 1976 established, for the first time, how the object was actually built, none of which had been recorded at the time of the first restoration. The front and sides of the head are a single piece of gold sheet, raised and hammered around a solid wood core, most likely palm or poplar, both available locally. The ears and horns were formed the same way, each from a single seamed sheet of gold wrapped around its own wood core, the ears secured to the head with small gold tacks and wooden pegs, the horns fitted with lapis lazuli tips attached by a tenon and, probably, an organic pin.

The beard is a separate, more complex assembly: fifty-eight individual lapis lazuli tesserae, carved to represent long central locks and shorter curls at the sides, each tile drilled with a small biconical hole on its reverse through which a copper alloy wire was threaded, evidence, unrecorded before the 1976 disassembly, that the tiles were pre-assembled on a thin backing of fabric or leather before being mounted. The assembled beard was built in three separate sections, each with its own wood support, then backed with hammered silver sheet held by small silver tacks, and the three sections were joined with long copper alloy pins driven through the wood supports. The finished beard was then nailed onto the head core through a deliberate gap left in the gold sheet. The eyes were built the same way, as a three-part assembly of lapis lazuli iris and lid over a white shell ground, evidently made and pre-assembled by a stone specialist before being set into the head with bitumen adhesive.

None of this was recorded by Woolley's own excavation report, which gives only a brief account of the first restoration and does not say when it was carried out, where, or by whom. Everything above comes from what conservators found when they physically took the object apart half a century later.

Below where the head was mounted, the soundbox carried a rectangular plaque of shell figures set into a bed of bitumen, 31.5 by 11 centimetres, arranged in four horizontal registers. Reading from the top: a bearded, naked hero grasps a pair of human-headed bulls, one in each arm; below that, animals take on human roles in a banquet scene, most prominently a hyena carrying a laden table and armed with a knife, and a lion carrying a jug and cup; a further register shows animals in procession and at music, including, notably, a smaller animal figure playing a bull-headed lyre of its own; and the lowest register is occupied by a scorpion-man, a hybrid figure known elsewhere in Mesopotamian tradition as a guardian or boundary figure.

What this sequence of scenes actually meant to the people who commissioned it is not settled, and this record does not adopt any one reading as fact. The imagery belongs to a wider Early Dynastic repertoire of animals acting in human roles that appears on other objects from the same cemetery, including the Standard of Ur, and scholars agree the genre draws on a body of Sumerian animal fable and proverb literature that existed in oral and later written form. Beyond that broad placement, published readings diverge: some treat the register as a coherent narrative tied to the funerary banquet ritual actually practiced at burials like PG 789, others as a looser assembly of stock motifs without a single fixed story. Popular writing on the object has in places proposed that the scene is a piece of social satire, mocking specific human vices through its animal cast; that reading has not been advanced by an identifiable specialist in a citable academic publication in the sources consulted for this record, rests on resemblance rather than textual or archaeological evidence, and is not adopted here.

The Penn Museum's own published position, repeated in its collections catalog, is that the bull's head represents the sun god Utu, known in the Akkadian-speaking world as Shamash. The connection rests on a documented association in Mesopotamian tradition between Utu and the bull, particularly in the god's role at sunrise, and on Utu/Shamash's separate, well-attested role as judge of the dead. Read this way, the bull's head presiding physically above the plaque's scenes of feasting, procession and the scorpion-man guardian casts the whole object as an image of divine judgment set over a funerary rite, appropriate to an instrument buried with a royal grave's sacrificed retinue. This is the museum's stated interpretation, not an independently established fact beyond dispute, and it should be read as an argued position rather than as the maker's confirmed intention; no contract, inscription or textual source ties this specific object to Utu's cult by name.

What is documented, rather than argued, is the function the lyre served in its own burial. It was placed in a grave built for mass sacrificial interment, one of at least nine lyres and harps recovered across the cemetery's royal graves, several of them found still close to the skeletal remains of the individuals who had apparently been playing them when the pit was filled. Music was not incidental furniture in these burials; it was part of the rite being performed at the moment of interment. Whatever the frontal plaque's animal scenes meant in detail, the object as a whole belonged to a documented funerary practice, not to household or secular use.

The excavation operated under Iraq's 1924 Antiquities Law, negotiated in large part by Gertrude Bell in her capacity as the country's Director of Antiquities, and the 1924-1928 permit for Ur was formally accepted by Woolley on behalf of both the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Under that law, finds were divided between the Iraqi state and the excavating institutions, broadly on a formula that left half the material in Iraq and split the remaining half between the two foreign museums, so that roughly a quarter of what came out of the ground at Ur in a given season went to Philadelphia and a quarter to London. The final say over which specific objects went where rested with the Iraqi Director of Antiquities; Bell herself accepted that the foreign museums needed to retain genuine treasures as an incentive to keep funding and staffing the dig, and by some accounts individual allocation decisions in the field were settled as informally as the toss of a coin.

This is the mechanism, not a vague word like acquired, by which a royal grave excavated in southern Iraq produced an object now owned outright by a museum in Philadelphia, another share of the same cemetery's finds owned by the British Museum in London, and the remainder retained by what is now the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. It was a legal, treaty-based division of excavated material under the law in force at the time, carried out with the involvement of the Iraqi antiquities authority, not a private removal. The bull-headed lyre's gold head, beard and plaque were assigned to the University of Pennsylvania Museum's share.

Once in Philadelphia, the surviving head, beard and plaque needed a soundbox to be displayed as a lyre at all, since the original wood had not survived even as the plaster-filled void; that void itself did not travel to Philadelphia as a usable structural element. Museum conservators built an entirely new wooden soundbox around the ancient elements, and the watercolorist and museum artist M. Louise Baker, a long-serving member of the Penn Museum's scientific illustration staff, applied the finishing decorative work and painted its surface, including inlay patterned after the genuine decoration of a different lyre from the same cemetery, since the plaque available for this particular lyre did not cover the whole soundbox. A photograph in the museum's own archive, captioned to around 1930, shows Baker at work adding the final touches to this reconstruction.

This was the version of the lyre that went on exhibition and that the public, and Woolley himself, knew for the next several decades. It gave the object a plausible, complete appearance. It also, as it turned out, gave it the wrong proportions.

Woolley's own 1934 excavation report on the Royal Cemetery recorded the dimensions of the soundbox as measured from the plaster cast taken in the ground in 1926-27. When conservators finally compared the 1929-30 reconstructed soundbox against those published figures, decades after it had been built and put on display, the two did not match. According to the excavator's own numbers, the reconstruction the museum had built and exhibited for a generation was wrong.

How this happened is one of the genuine gaps in the object's record. The Penn Museum's own conservation literature on the head states plainly that it is not even certain when the first restoration was carried out, where, or by whom; Woolley's excavation report gives only the briefest account of the restoration procedure and no dimensions for the reconstructed soundbox itself, only for the original as measured from the cast. Whoever built the 1929-30 soundbox appears not to have worked from, or not to have correctly applied, the measurements the excavation had already produced.

When it finally became possible to build a corrected soundbox, the head was removed from its 1929-30 mount and brought to the Penn Museum Conservation Laboratory. The initial intention, according to the conservator who carried out and later published the work, Virginia Greene, was minor: clean the surface, make small repairs, and remount the head on the new box. X-radiography at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania instead revealed a large iron armature buried inside the old plaster fill, and once conservators began removing the plaster neck to get at it, the beard broke away at a weak point between two sets of modern wooden dowels, forcing a full disassembly that had not been planned.

What followed, across 1976 into 1980, was the most detailed physical examination the object has ever received. Conservators removed three separate batches of old plaster fill, exposed for the first time the original silver beard backing (much of it not visible in the first restoration and some of it, discovered afterward, misfiled under a different catalog number in storage), documented the biconical wire-holes in the lapis beard tiles that had never before been recorded, and established the actual original construction sequence described above. The head, ears and horns were refilled not with plaster but with a reversible wax core of polyethylene glycol 6000 thickened with silica and loaded with styrene pellets, chosen because it could later be dissolved out with water without disturbing the ancient gold. A Plexiglas armature, designed with the assistance of W. Thomas Chase of the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art, was built in two bolted sections to carry the actual physical weight of the lapis beard independently of the fragile gold sheet, an engineering problem the original 1929-30 restoration had not had to solve in the same way because its plaster fill did the structural work instead. Mervin Martin then designed the mounting system, allowing the head and plaque to be lifted cleanly off the new soundbox for future study, and the reassembled lyre, on its new, correctly sized wooden body, went back on exhibition in the museum's Mesopotamian Gallery in 1980.

The new soundbox, built this time to Woolley's own excavated measurements rather than around them, came out roughly a third larger than the one it replaced. A visitor standing in front of the lyre today is looking at an instrument closer in scale to what the excavation record actually says stood in PG 789 in 2550 BC, not the somewhat smaller, freely estimated object the public saw between 1930 and the late 1970s.

Sixteen years after the 1980 reinstallation, the head was examined again in preparation for a traveling exhibition, Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur. Conservator Lynn A. Grant found no deterioration in either the reversible wax core or the beard's Plexiglas support, despite the head and plaque having been removed and remounted several times for study and travel and despite the gallery lacking climate control. Greene's own 2003 published account of the 1976-80 treatment is candid that several of the specific materials chosen at the time, a toluene-based acrylic resin solution, a polyvinyl acetate consolidant later swapped for an acrylic emulsion, styrene pellets originally sourced from a bean-bag chair supplier, would not be the first choice of a conservator working today, even as the overall structural design of the repair held up completely on reexamination.

Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is on record singling out this lyre, alongside four other Ur objects in the Penn Museum's collection, Queen Puabi's jewelry, an electrum drinking tumbler, a gold ostrich egg, and the Ram Caught in a Thicket, as among what he called the finest, most resplendent and magical works of art in all of America. Whatever one makes of the ranking, the bull's head has become one of the most widely reproduced single images to survive from third-millennium Mesopotamia, appearing routinely in textbooks and museum branding as shorthand for Sumerian civilization generally.

That reach has extended to functioning replicas built specifically to test how the instrument actually sounded, since the original strings did not survive and cannot be reconstructed from the archaeological record alone. A playable reconstruction built by the luthier Eli Richman, inspired directly by seeing the Penn Museum's 1970s-rebuilt lyre on display, is now held by the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum at the University of California, Berkeley, one of several modern attempts to give the object a voice rather than only a shape.

Ur itself, the archaeological site rather than this particular object, came under the control of a nearby military installation during the Iraq War and was, according to the Penn Museum's own account of its 2009 exhibition on the excavation, largely preserved as a result before being returned to the custody of Iraq's State Board of Antiquities and Heritage in May 2009. That is a statement about the physical site's custody, not about ownership of objects already divided out under the 1920s partage system and held abroad, including this lyre; the sources consulted for this record report no restitution claim, dispute or legal action concerning the Penn Museum's holding of B17694 specifically. Separately, and importantly for anyone researching this object online, a different bull-headed lyre from the same excavation, now in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad and commonly called the Golden Lyre, was affected by the 2003 looting of that museum; that is a documented event concerning a different object in a different collection, and this record does not extend it to the Penn Museum's lyre.