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Wall Street Journal C. Leonard Woolley's first excavations at Ur, in southern Iraq, coincided with Howard Carter's 1922 discovery, in Egypt, of King Tutankhamen's tomb. This grand-scale archaeology captured the popular imagination: Its practitioners were hailed as heroes, their theories were trumpeted in the mass media, and their finds influenced fashion. 
The British-born Woolley's expedition involved 12 seasons of digging with hundreds of workers, until the Depression closed the funding tap in 1934. Its focus was the Royal Cemetery, whose tombs were filled with exquisitely crafted artifacts from Mesopotamia's Early Dynastic period, about 4,500 years ago. The venture would inspire Agatha Christie's 1936 mystery "Murder in Mesopotamia," in which expedition members, thinly disguised, pop up as characters. Six years earlier, Christie had married Woolley's field assistant, M.E.L. Mallowan, who said of his boss: "Woolley's observations missed nothing, and his imagination grasped everything." The comment is highlighted in a new long-term exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, "Iraq's Ancient Past: Rediscovering Ur's Royal Cemetery." But it has assumed an ironic cast. While Woolley was careful and conscientious, the show says, he was not quite the paragon Mallowan describes, and many of his conclusions were wrong. "He told good stories," says Richard L. Zettler, the exhibition's co-curator and associate curator-in-charge of the museum's Near East section. "And when he made stories up, he stuck with them. And that occasionally blinded him to evidence that could be contradictory." "Iraq's Ancient Past" celebrates the return of the Ur artifacts to the Penn Museum after a national tour. But it also aims to place these mostly familiar works- the massive lyre with its gold and lapis lazuli-bearded bull's head, the "Ram Caught in the Thicket" statuette, the astonishing beaded jewelry and gold headdress of Queen Puabi- in an updated archaeological context. "What we attempted to show is that these . . . are not just dusty artifacts sitting in a curio-cabinet museum," Mr. Zettler says. "These are artifacts that still have plenty to say to us. If we pose the right questions, we have the right methodologies, the right technologies, we can make these objects speak again." Crammed into a single large gallery, the Penn Museum show- filled with delicate cylinder seals and alabaster pots, and glittering strings of gold, carnelian and lapis lazuli beads- is at once frustratingly old-fashioned and deliberately retro in its design. Musical selections from the expedition's record collection play in the background. The texts are well-written but long and somewhat dense. They are supplemented by archival and contemporary images of the site and computer terminals displaying the exhibition's Web site and other Web resources and offering visitors a chance to "live blog" about the show. The exhibition's most startling contention is that the attendants buried in the so-called Great Death Pit and other royal tombs did not voluntarily imbibe poison to join their sovereign in the underworld, as Woolley had hypothesized. Recent CT scans of two skulls, belonging to a gold-helmeted soldier and a female attendant, indicate that the cause of death was blunt-force trauma and the murder instrument was likely a pick, Mr. Zettler says. Not addressed in the show is whether such practices were kept secret, who the murderers were, and how so many- there were 74 skeletons in the Great Death Pit- could have been lured to their deaths. "They may have drugged them all, and then killed them," says Mr. Zettler. "It's a puzzle." The suicide theory was not Woolley's only misstep. Ever the romantic, he suggested that Queen Puabi chose the location of her tomb to be near the (dead) king she loved. Penn researchers have since found evidence that the king's tomb was constructed after hers- and that Queen Puabi probably reigned alone. This show offers other revisions to the archaeological record as well. The queen's diadem, for instance, has been reconstructed as a series of separate strands rather than as one elaborate choker. And the curators have traced the trade routes- from ancient Anatolia (part of present-day Turkey) to India- that brought gold, silver, lapis lazuli, carnelian and other precious materials to Ur. The exhibition stops short of challenging two of Woolley's biblical archaeology theories. He believed his site was "Ur of the Chaldees," the birthplace of the Old Testament patriarch Abraham. And he cited a layer of silt he found as evidence of the Great Flood, an event that turns up in the Sumerian epic "Gilgamesh" as well as the Bible. "Iraq's Ancient Past" situates the Ur finds in the context of modern Iraqi history, provides a history of the expedition itself, and shows how the two were intertwined. The formidable Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), Iraq's honorary director of antiquities, founded what is now the Iraq Museum in Baghdad and filled it with Ur treasures. The 1924 Iraq Antiquities Law, which she wrote, mandated that half of Woolley's finds remain in Iraq. The rest were divided between the Penn Museum and its excavation partner, the British Museum. Like many contemporary archaeological exhibitions, the Penn show includes a polemic against looting. It notes one salutary aspect of Saddam Hussein's rule: He subjected looters to capital punishment, an effective deterrent. With Saddam's ouster in 2003, the practice resumed on a massive scale, but the Ur site was protected by its proximity to a U.S. military base. Not so the Iraq Museum, whose pillaging has been extensively, if often inaccurately, chronicled. Donny George, then the museum's director and now a visiting professor at Stony Brook University, said in an interview that the Ur artifacts and other treasures, secreted in bank vaults and elsewhere, were untouched. (About 6,000 of 15,000 looted artifacts, most stolen from museum storerooms, have been returned, thanks to an amnesty and rewards program partially funded by the U.S. military, Mr. George says.) More inventive and varied displays- immersive environments, a replication of the dig site, more audiovisuals- would have made the already interesting story told in "Iraq's Ancient Past" more compelling, particularly to families. As it is, the stars of the show remain the artifacts themselves- ancient missives whose meanings we continue to decipher.
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