One of the most widely known ancient musical interments is a 46.5 inch tall harp. The Greay Lyre of Ur was found in the 1920s on Sir Leonard Woolley’s excavations in Ur when he was looking for information on the ancient city of a Mesopotamian biblical city. Sir Leonardo also found sixteen royal burial sites and many spectacular objects.
The Lyre rested over the body of a woman who is suspected to be the one who played it at the funeral ceremony of the royal figure buried nearby, and she was most likely sacrificed to ensure the wonderful afterlife of the royal person who had died. When it was found, the wooden sound box had deteriorated; however, the gold and lapis lazuli bull’s head and the front panel made of carved shell had survived. The head of the bull is 14 inches tall, the front panel is 13. The harp is 55.5 inches in length, and 46.5 inches tall. This is large object, and the owner of it must have been wealthy to have been able to afford such a large, very well crafted piece of work. This piece tells us a lot about the owner, actually. The materials used to make the head and front panel are rare and valuable, even in today’s terms.
The front panel, or the Cuneiform, on the harp shows four different registers to help tell the narrative from the 3,000 line poem, Epic of Gilgamesh. The top square shows a heroic battle of a man interlocked with two bulls and is remarkably over powering them, and the bottom shows Gilgamesh encountering the scorpion man and another mythical creature. The second story told below in the next three registers show three common activities being acted out by animals, including showing a donkey playing a bull-shaped lyre, much like the one it is posted on. The Cuneiform also shows animals upright, attending and bringing food to a feast.
However, since the cuneiform was carved about 700 years before the poem was wrote, it is suspected that instead of telling the story that has been passed down for years, it may tell the story of the man it belonged to; showing an inflated, heroic image of the deceased at the top, a funeral banquet in the middle, and the guardians of the afterlife at the bottom.
The front head of the bull is suspected to be the head of Sargon of Akkad, who was King at the time of the conquest of Sumerian city-states in the 23rd and 22nd centuries, BCE. This led him to be called the, “Great King,” and adored by all. He had distinct facial features when he was depicted in art, all of which the bull on the harp has. An enormous curling beard and braided hair twisted around toward the back of its head, indicating both royalty and ideal male appearance; both made out of the lapis lazuli.
These important image cues are here, it says that the owner may not have been Sargon, but he saw himself as equally powerful. When the piece was found, half of his face was destroyed, with the eyes and ears missing. Symbolically, this means that the people who were under the thumb of this ruler was not pleased with his ruling technique. They crushed the face of the bull to keep the man’s power limited, if not destroyed. The removal of the eyes and the ears makes it so that the dead man could not see or hear in the afterlife. This could have also been done, however, by tomb raiders who dug around the barial site and did not want the dead owner to see them stealing from him.
The significance of the materials used is a big one. Lapis lazuli is a valuable blue colored mineral. It is only found near the Fertile Crescent. This shows us the people who made it were active in trading, thus active in traveling and communication with other tribes both near and far.
Zoomorphic figures are important to the artists of the Mesopotamian era, it not only relates back to the altered definition of “human” used in the early Neolithic period, but also relates the viewer to the gods of that time. The use of an animal head with human-like details (hair, eyes, body shape etc.) allows the viewer to see themselves and the royalty around them in the same way and makes them have a closer connection to the god protecting their country.
