What Was Life Like in Ancient Mesopotamia?

[Music] howdy friends my name is Milo and today I am here with none other than Dr Brad Hafford at the Penn Museum Dr Haverford why don't you uh introduce yourself well I'm Brad Hafford and I'm an archaeologist here at the Penn Museum I study the ancient near East so Mesopotamia what's now Iraq Syria and areas like that and well we've talked about that in a way before Oh we have yeah so how exactly uh why are we here how did we get to know each other all because of the Baghdad battery against um there are these theories about this particular jar and you had looked into it and then I looked well with some of the resources here we had paper dive in a way yes and so we did a series of videos back and forth it was really interesting and educational so we contacted each other and now and here we are so today we're going to be doing a little bit of a walk through of the museum Dr Hafford has graciously offered to give me a tour to be able to share with all you guys so we're going to do a little bit of a walk through some of the near East exhibits and then also get our hands on some artifacts from Storage to have a little look at which should be very exciting so Dr Alfred thank you so much for having me here today and uh let's head inside all right [Music] we are here at our first stop through the museum walkthrough so uh Dr Hafford what are we what are we looking at here well this is the ancient city of Nepal and Nepal was a really important place in early Mesopotamia not because it was the seed of the king but rather the seat of the primary God in Lille there's good evidence that most kings were crowned at this site but they this wasn't their actual City where they ruled from but instead it was important to all of Mesopotamia which is why they all had to come here and it's important for many other reasons because Penn Museum dug it starting in 1889 and that was kind of the foundation of the museum itself so the city was the city of the God explain that to me well every city in ancient Mesopotamia had a primary deity and in this case the primary deity was in though who was also the primary deity of all of the Mesopotamian Gods so that's why it was so important but or for instance had Nana those Moon God was the Prime principal deity there and there may be temples to the other gods but there was one that was primary for a city and in this case it was in though I see and so this up here is the excavation at nipple yeah so we have a lot of photos from back then they had some really good photographers even though this was late 19th century you know they were wow they were playing around with making sure they could document all of these things really well so we've got some great photos we also have a lot of good drawings of what was still there so they left this thing intact it's a drawing of what we call the Bell Tower and you can see that it looks like a bell tower but this is really different levels through time and that's a doorway in the parthian time period so it would have been a building at that point and then there's all these other so this is a construction that would have just taken place on subsequent levels of building and they just worked up yeah but it's not one construction this is just part of a building and these are just parts of dirt left there to the examples to show the progression of time so you know it's 40 feet tall you know this is a very big column of dirt do we find that the subsequent buildings will incorporate parts of the previous structure into it they can but normally you're going to kind of knock everything down and level off so you'll see these very straight lines this is pavement of a different period and another straight pavement here stratigraphy which you know is really important in archeology is rarely this straight but in this case we're in an area where there were very important buildings we're very near the ziggurat at nipport so they had a lot of sacred buildings here and they had very good flat Pavements and those make these straight lines which are great for stratigraphy I see so I guess tell us a little bit about stratigraphy because this carries on so these two things are related to one another so what is it exactly that we're looking at here we're looking at different layers of time really the the dirt will build up through the centuries or what have you so the earliest in stratigraphy is at the bottom yes unless for some reason it's been dug up of course this all comes from geology too you know you might get up thrust which will bring the earlier stones or whatever to the surface in the case with archeology normally the disturbance is people digging pits down but in this case it's all been pretty level and this stuff is so clean because it was intentionally leveled they brought a lot of dirt in and that's why they've drawn these lines they're showing how straight it is in order to make the floor for the parthian levels these others are more packed down just various dirt and artifacts of course you find them in there I see there's some pots down here and there's something going on there bricks Airway or something like that and so these are related to the stratigraphy of this site is that correct yes I've chosen a pot that's kind of represented of different time periods here so the very top we've got the latest and it's glazed it's got this dark green glaze because it's a fairly late development when they learned how to put this on there and fire it high enough to make a glaze on their pots so when you find that you've got pretty late stuff this is into that parthian zone or just before what time period would this be around we're in the late time before the Common Era so you know we're somewhere 500 up to maybe 200. the parthian levels really are roughly 200 BCE to 200 CE so we're looking into more well for me that's pretty modern I know it's still 2 000 years ago um but then you know you've got the Acadian period into the Bronze Age you know and all the way down um well actually acadians down here cast site and you've got uh so for the Layman these I mean the biggest you know difference that I'm noticing here is this one is obviously glazed but these ones on the bottom look I mean visually more or less the same what sorts of differences would you look at between these to be able to tell a passage of time well of course there's a lot of different style or types of pottery at any one particular point you can think of it today Styles will change you know we might like a certain kind of certainly with clothing we see it very quickly things can change from the 1970s with very you know big flares and big yeah and you can usually tell the difference well that's true of some pottery too maybe the painting style is different in this case very utilitarian and then it gets green here interesting but there are a lot of differences that you can track through time which help us and pottery is the most common stuff we find find in any excavation so when we look at a stratigraphic layer like this or I guess this one in particular what what amount of time passage are we looking at represented here like what's the difference between this bottom and up here well the Acadian period we're roughly down here well actually we're in here uh 2300 BCE approximately and then we're going up to the Common Era here so we're looking 2000 2500 years just in that deposit but like I say the whole thing is running 12 meters from here to up there wow so it's a lot of dirt and you can see from the photo too just how small the people are compared to a lot of the dirt around and I had said yeah what's going on in here and this nipple excavation was fundamental to the museum so we have notebooks from the very first day of excavation in February in 1889 it took a long time to get out there of course and so the expedition that discovered where they thought they wanted to work was in 1885 and then they send people out after they'd raised money in 1888 they finally started work in 1889. it was a rough season though they had bad weather and they got attacked by Bandits and all their gold was stolen they were paying with gold and they they got it all stolen that person now they went back in 1890 and then again in 1893 John Henry Haynes stayed there for three years he built a house on top of the cigarette he just lived out there but anyway um so these are the notes from the original vid here yeah wow some of the objects that were found in that first thing these are quite late you can see there's a glaze on that pot and that's because it's parthy the reason that these were found early is because they would have been at the highest level of stratigraphy right I see that bracelet or jewelry piece is really beautiful what is that that's all kinds of gemstones or something yeah um it's fairly common we've got a lot of beads from Chelsea and the often which is a number of crystalline structures and Jasper and things like this that look very impressive a lot of the artifacts did come back to Philadelphia of course because this was early the Ottomans controlled the area and we were splitting things a lot remained in Constantinople which is today Istanbul and some came back here but Penn had agreed to house them as long as they could build a fireproof building in the in the records under one condition and that was the origin of building the museum and it opened up in 1899 so this building itself has been here for a really long time so it was this dig essentially that inspired the creation the museum that we're in now but then of course we expanded we've got collections from all around the world wow that's amazing so this case not only represents the beginning of this excavation but almost the I guess foundation of the museum in a way that's very interesting and now I I see something over here that I I recognize so as much as I want to ask you about the fish I I have to ask about these Bulls because this is something we've actually discussed before I guess so what are we looking at here well we call them incantation bowls some people call them magic bowls it's to do with belief and this is so hard to get to because even today right now I can't really get into your head and know what you believe but how can they get into someone's mind who's been dead for thousands of years yeah and so we have to try to infer that sometimes when they're writing and sometimes the objects themselves so there is writing inside these balls and those are usually spells and they tell us what they're trying to do trap evil spirits ah well there's great things because these are different languages and sometimes it's what we call pseudo writing it's not even real words so some people couldn't read and they just would write this in the top that counts you know right or maybe the salesman comes around this will protect you and they can't read it's like oh yeah it's a magical um but you can see that they would often draw the demon itself inside the bowl and then you would lay it upside down so in the photo up here we can see some found in situ and upside down I guess the demon would be curious and it would get trapped by the Spells inside so wow so you found them all like that and now I notice they're all like this so there's definitely some demons running around well here it sounds like so these are actual depictions of or we think these are depictions of the spirits themselves as they perceived of them yeah yeah that guy he's got some some Shackles on his legs there that looks like because that's what it's going to do is trap him yeah he's got the shackles wow that that's very interesting all right so what are we looking at here well these were cases that uh I was calling meet the people because I'm really interested in more common folk you know a lot of times archeology is about the glitzy the famous and things you know and we want to know how did people really live so I needed a few cases that show some I guess you could call them mundane objects you know some people might call them boring but they're not because they tell us about real life and of course we'd said before that Pottery is the most common thing we find it everywhere usually broken though and so can you really display that you know we've got a lot in storage but we only put a few on display and you can see some here they're fairly common ones we here's a goblet from an earlier period the old Babylonian and a dish that some painted old Babylonian which isn't come and a kind of water jar maybe with this ring stand so they could actually put it into a stand so it would it would stay up you know I always wondered how those things were supposed to stand up right then we have models and probably toys and rattles for children and things that really tell us about how they live and we even had in the case behind you an impression of a baby's foot you know which shows that they wanted to have a Keepsake yeah which I think is amazing yeah and that's still something we do today you know what what's uh what are these down here these are crafting tools so you know you would have a scraper probably to make leather and punches and things like this so we find molds for making things and crafting was a common thing to be done you know you had to make the things that people were using so they're not as common as everything else but we still find quite a few of them and I'm usually most interested in the economic aspects and sometimes we find things that show that people were dealing with trading and business and so I wanted to look at the merchant in this next case of course let's have a look so there were Merchant houses especially in this area with that really called ah so this is a map of the different houses and I've highlighted ones that we found objects in so the blue one we found things in merchants in several we did but that blue one is the house of ayanatsu and he has made the memes in a way because we found tablets that say he was cheating is he the one with the uh the copper he was selling the low-grade amazing there you go there it is that's amazing yeah I keep saying that maybe he wasn't a terrible Merchant but he did have some complaint letters that's for sure so maybe I'd like to see kept them you know it's like a chip on his shoulder yeah but your archives that's another reason that I wonder if he was really that bad why keep them was it proof in other cases or something but that would be proof against him you would think I'm not sure they could be the ones that left over that he didn't want anymore they left and when he left his house I don't know and the most common thing for Mercantile work were weights and I study weights pretty carefully and we find them in a lot of houses and I keep wondering were more people involved in trade than than we thought yeah but we have a bunch of them here in sequence you can see how big they get in fact that's not the biggest that's a half a talent which is pretty big but made of that bottom one is that same Limestone but it has been burned earned it was in a burned building that then cracked away so wow looks like it does and then we have some you know smaller and smaller these are the ones that are in shapes of ducks those tiny little things are weights really yeah and what would you use what sort of thing would you be weighing you're probably wearing silver and that's why I've got a bunch of scrap silver there on that shelf and we often find it in kind of coiled ring form so wire that's been coiled up into rings and you can wear that you can tie it to your belt you can tighten your car and that's display of wealth but it's also stuff that you could potentially break off a bit throw it into scales and use it to pay so it's like a little purse as well you get to carry it with you and you don't need a whole lot because one shekel about 8.3 grams 8.4 a lot of these spiral Rings weigh about that so you can see that it's not much that was a month's pay for a standard workers wow yeah it's it's worth a lot so when we talk about currency from this area in this time period um I know I normally you know your mind jumps to coins and things like that but it would be this the silver itself was the currency rather than they you know stamped up yes I don't know if everyone carried silver and coins aren't really in use until about 650 620 BCE much much later than this this stuff's 1800 or you know so more than a thousand years before coins become a thing but weighing was certainly important and there was an exchange rate between silver and Grain and most people got their rations ingrained so that was a form of payment and I do say that that is a form of money some people say money didn't exist yeah I think it did but it's a it's a concept of it's not coinage or bills the way that we think of money today and what is this large Central statue here well a protective figure probably this one is the priest's house that we've uh covered On The Other Side Merchants here orange one right okay and this was found just outside one of those and it's probably a protective figure just before you go in and she's got the flowing vas and this usually means abundance and it's uh you can see her headdress as well these are horned headdress it shows that that's a deity and then we often find other things given as offerings so sometimes the things we think might be toys we find them in a domestic context we find them in a religious context we think they're offerings to the gods to maybe say uh let my sheep you know grow and multiply or whatever and so I'll leave a little model sheep there certainly again it's that belief thing how do we get into the minds but it's probably that because we know these are ritual contexts and here we've got a basin where they may have washed things and it's got snakes on it why snakes were sometimes The Messengers to the underworld those uh you know motifs there are particularly interesting to me I think that's almost similar to what you were talking about with currency where when I you know when we hear offerings normally I would think you know be like food or some sort of you know thing like that but it's interesting that they would create these items and leave those as offerings it's quite common but food offering is probably common too we will find vessels but of course the food itself may have been completely disintegrated over time but we do think that that was part of it sometimes you would pour offerings to the ground or you would leave a little grain bowl out or something like that text tell us a little bit about that too they would in the bigger Temple certainly they fed the statue you know and they closed the statue because they were taking care of the god and it represented the god did they burn some of it so it would go up or did the priests eat that food later and really they were part of the again that's the part we don't necessarily know but we know they conceptualize it as taking care of the god of the representation of the God has the excavation gotten larger from this we have redug a little bit of his stuff and one or two small trenches outside but we don't dig this big anymore we just can't cover the sea we use 300 workers to do that wow is this the excavation that we saw in the uh depicted in the other room they're similar that was a little bit earlier in the 1890s so this is 1920s and to 30s when they did this very cool well what do we got next um probably we looked at the common folks let's look at the rich folks I like the sound let's do it [Music] foreign [Music] Bowl friend well this was on the front of a liar or a harp a musical instrument so the wood had all disintegrated and we've kind of etched it in glass to try to give you the impression of where it was but there are texts that tell us that they thought these big Harps sounded like a bull braying and very low okay it would reverberate because there was a wooden sandbox kind of back there and if they were often decorated with Bulls heads because it was the braying bull so this one is very special because it's gold and Lapis and then a shell plaque underneath it where the harp went down I see so this would be inlaid onto the front of right the Tilted front as this came out and then the Liars out behind it wow well so I guess if there was no wood you know found with this how do we know that this was part of a liar well woolly was very clever and sometimes when wood disintegrates it leaves an impression and in some cases he even poured plaster into the impression and found the shape of the liar and even little bits of where the strings went and he found the tuning fork kind of thing up on top so we can tell a little bit about how many strings were there and maybe how it might have sounded and this was found in a grave in the Royal Cemetery because well it's a work of art and it's a very expensive thing that went to the grave and probably a ceremony where they were playing music at the death of this great king or queen probably do we know exactly who this item was associated with how does the Royal Cemetery work is it you know the modern conception of it is a grave and every person has their own spot or was it more of sort of a jumble well this one's rather jumbled some were individual Graves cut down into other Graves though so you're in a big burial ground but the largest ones were there were 16 of them that we call Royal and that's because they had such Fantastic Finds in them and they usually had many people in the one grave but most of those were servants and they were probably sacrificed wow it's very rare and Sewer to have that it was only a small period of time and only represented it or really we don't get sacrificing anything else so why a display of power for a brief period and then they realized if we keep killing our people how can we stay you know I mean you've got to try to run out of them eventually and where cultures have that they usually do turn into representations of people rather than real people fairly quickly the Terracotta Warriors in China for instance they start to represent an army rather than being actual people that were killed and do we see that similar thing happening at Earth so after we're at this period where we're no longer burying real people alongside you know a great person we find there's some sort of representation we still get a lot of things but not necessarily ones that we could say that's a person in Egypt you kind of find the schwabi figure right and it will have some of the scripts from The Book of the Dead to say that this figurine will become a servant to the person in the afterlife we don't see it so much in Mesopotamia so they seem to have given up on that in a way of course we don't have that many Royal burials after this we have common burials under the houses house floors and things like that interesting so the common people will be buried under the floors of their own home yeah you lived with your ancestors wow just dead yeah wow go figure so I see this is not the only gold we have here we have something else in this direction [Music] so who is this well traditionally we call it the RAM and the thicket that's what woolly called it it was a Biblical reference but really it's a goat in a tree so I don't know that name doesn't sound quite as catchy but this was found in another one of the royal tombs a very big one that really called the Great Death Pit there were 74 people that were in that one grave and this is that depiction on the wall of yeah correct there's uh one there and there were two of these that were very near what we think is the primary the most important person in there maybe the burial and since she was both near these and she had more jewelry than any of the other women most of the people in there were women there were six men near the entrance and they seemed to have been guards of some sort and then the women were probably reenacting the Feast of the festival for the burial and then appear to have been killed afterwards so they would continue this praise into the Afterlife and how do we know that they were um creating a feast or a festival well we can't know absolutely but the fact that there are many musical instruments is one of it and then they've all got cups and they seem to have been toasted maybe to the person who was gone woolly thought they were all drinking poison out of that that's a logical conclusion yeah but he said because they were all kind of peacefully laying down they must have just gone but most poisons you don't just peacefully die your stomach tries to get rid of it in your account that's not a good way and we have some evidence that some of them may have been hit in the back of the head or something so either they weren't succumbing to the poison or all of them were killed in a different way but so there was two um sculptures that looked like this one yeah interesting and I take it that this is reconstructed so this probably was what it was flattened but it's been reconstructed pretty Faithfully by you know pushing out it was all in one group and you could kind of push it that's amazing they've managed to fully blow back up the other one's in the British Museum and it's really constructed as well and do we know what this represents other than a sheep in a tree well there is a lot of theories some say it's dumuzi he was this kind of fertility God and often represented by nature and you know by a sheep or goat the flowers themselves have ate it's like the rosettes the symbol of inanna there's the whole story of Anana and dumuzi as being you know together to make the whole life Recreation the cycle of life and death to movies underground because it's like Persephone in the greekness and then he comes back up for spring and things like this so it could be that whole idea but it could just be representation of what they saw every day you know there were goats and sheep and they were eating in the trees so you know that's interesting the only other time that I'm familiar with the rosette is its use on the royal game of UR which also would have been found in the same area and that was the immunity square right you're on that one and you can't get you know kicked off so there that's that's pretty interesting so was this found in conjunction with the liar that we were looking at where these near each other uh there were liars and harps in this grave but that's not the same one that was from 789 which people call the king's grave but I'm sure oh this interesting that's very cool [Music] so this is a pretty impressive piece of get up who who wore this well this is a conglomeration of things that was not worn by one person but is examples of things that were worn by most of the attendance in that big Death Pit that we were talking about so most of the women were wearing you know gold wreaths and a bunch of necklaces that had lapis on them much of the Carnelian was on that main body 61. but this is an example because normally we would have everything that puabi wore and she was a queen and the only grave that really was unlooted so there we had more evidence but right now puabi is visiting New York she's at the Morgan Library so people can see yeah exactly so we wanted to still show the kinds of things that she was wearing here and in pawabi's case because she was completely there we were able to get her cylinder seals she had three seals that were kind of worn on her shoulder and one of those had her name on it and it had her title the problem is that her name doesn't appear in any King lists or anything else so we don't know what dynasty she's from and all of these Royal graves are very confusing because we don't know exactly where they fit we kind of know the time period 2450 BCE maybe you know 2500 and that might be around the first dynasty but evidence of the first dynasty actually caps these so they might be earlier than that but then who are they and why weren't they mentioned in more text so it's a big question they certainly had wealth I mean you can see yeah really this stuff is being imported from as far away as Afghanistan a really long Trade Network that brought in the lapis and the Carnelian from India Pakistan and gold she's incredibly in that red mineral that's beautiful so with I mean if everyone in that large you know Death Pit was wearing some form of gold how was it deduced which one of them was you know the most important one how do you know basically I guess not only did uh body 61 have more gold that she had more Carnelian and everything that she was wearing was very similar to what buabi wore so she had four wreaths and one of those was different from the others but it was very similar to wabi's and the it's often the more the rosettes on that hair comb oh yeah the Lobby's had seven and that one has three so and that it kind of tells us that they had a ranking or at least we think they did so that the more you could afford I mean huabi's gosh weighed about five pounds just of the stuff that she was wearing and wow that's a lot of materials yeah really so was any of this actually uh poabi's jewelry or is this more exemplary of what she everything here is exemplary of that maybe one or two of her rings are there I'm not sure I think most of it went to the Morgan though too so that is amazing and the the cylinder seal I have to ask what is the you know the purpose of carrying one of those around was that like a signature use it for transactions and whatnot it's a kind of identification and so you can roll it onto clay and sign a document basically is that something why you would have three a lot of people did um especially people of importance but as we go through the years more and more people get them maybe imitation or I'm important too and you get ones that aren't as well made one of hers was lapis you know and that's more expensive so it's harder to get we get a lot of them know that are hematite very hard to carve so yeah it looks like more and more people wanted them because this was Identity or the ability to lock something seal it say this is mine you know Market with my my seal that's very interesting well I suppose uh that sort of does it for these exhibits so should we move on to a bit more of a intimate tour of some special items sure let's make it happen all right all right clean room environment we'll get the best example first to see your reactions okay I'm excited What's it gonna be we might be starting conspiracy because it looks kind of like a vertebrae ah I know this one alien is can I roll it uh we shouldn't I cannot get over the fact that it's almost transparent oh that's amazing you can see a fingerprint in that 4500 BC wow there were a lot of marshes around her especially in the early periods and they brought all knowledge to Sumer um foreign [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Miniminuteman

Views: 268,027

Keywords: archaeology, anthropology, documentary, history, lesson, education, educational, interesting, science, stem, learn, ancient cultures, world history, travel, explore, truth, deep dive, video essay, theory, near east, teacher, teaching, archaeologist, treasure, mystery, artifact

Id: AlKKvJKBd3s

Length: 29min 4sec (1744 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 30 2023