The Dark Secrets of the Royal Cemetery of Ur

Mention the ancient city of Ur and many wonderful things come to mind - the fabulous wealth generated from being one of the Bronze Age’s major trade hubs, its towering ziggurat, great works of Sumerian and Babylonian art, and for believers, the birthplace of the prophet Abraham. But in 1922, archaeologists led by Sir Leonard Woolley discovered findings in the oldest part of its great royal cemetery that shed light on a forgotten, dark chapter in the city's history, one that still puzzles us today. In this program we'll look at some of the dark secrets that were buried in the Royal Cemetery over 4500 years ago.
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Sources and Suggested Reading:
A History of the Ancient Near East: ca. 3000-323 BC, Third Edition - Marc Van De Mieroop
Excavations at Ur - Sir Leonard Woolley
"Human sacrifice and intentional corpse preservation in the Royal Cemetery of Ur" in Antiquity, Vol. 85 (2011), pp. 27-42 - Aubrey Baadsgaard, Janet Monge, Samantha Cox and Richard L. Zettler
Ur: City of the Moon God - Harriet Crawford
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[@HistorywithCy]

Sorry, one slip of the tongue on my part...at 2:32 I meant to say "remains of tens of other anonymous men and women" and not "tens of thousands" which would have been the population of Ur at the time, not the cemetery. Sorry for any confusion.

[@nillehessy]

thats ok believe me there is almost no confusion anymore about this

[@kendallbyrd9875]

Frustrating how 100 years ago archaeologist were not careful when digging. I wonder all the things we would know if the original Troy hadn’t been bombed.

[@acropolismauve8496]

Archeology via dynamite is one of the first things I’m fixing with a time machine before going back to see Troy in its prime.

[@phileon2323]

They'll probably say the same thing about modern archeologists in another 100 years

[@Mr0rris0]

​@@phileon2323they will be like.... "Why didn't those tossers just wait for Ezekiels wheel... We left clues in the Bible about peeking through time.."

[@M167A1]

I understand the point but I'm going to take you to task. Someone always has to come first, and that first person almost never does things. The way those who come later would desire. Certainly much was lost due to the initial carelessness and shall we say treasure hunting rather than information hunting. But without it we wouldn't know anything at all and would have no reason to preserve these ruins.

[@kkupsky6321]

Dug a hole and plug it full of dynamite… 🧨

[@codyclick190]

From deep dives to the single topics, your videos are always entertaining. Thanks Cy

[@HistorywithCy]

Thanks, glad you're enjoying these and more on the way, stay tuned and thanks for watching!

[@bettylaselli2048]

​@@HistorywithCy Excellent research work! Thank you for sharing an interesting video!

[@brianduffy4682]

Amazing how deep they dug down. The amount of earth excavated seeing those narrow staircases is astounding.

[@kartos.]

More to come? Yes, please!

[@HistorywithCy]

For sure!

[@Bruh-tw8uh]

More to come😕

[@jeffersonwright6249]

Also the Shang Dynasty in China 1700 to 1300 BCE practiced mass sacrifices at royal burials so taking them with you wasn’t isolated to Sumer

[@HistorywithCy]

Yeah also Early Dynastic Egypt had similar sacrifices. Thanks for watching!

[@jeffersonwright6249]

@@HistorywithCy Thank you for making these shows! Looking forward to the next one and the one next after that!!

[@freefall9832]

Narcissists everywhere

[@MrLee-cy1pw]

Ok, you're definitely one of the best sources of history on the internet. Thank you so much for the hard work that you do!

[@fluoroproilne]

Perhaps, they heard about Egyptian practices of body preservation and experimented to achieve something alike? 🤔

[@HistorywithCy]

It's possible... one thing I was thinking of mentioning but didn't is that there was also human sacrifice in early dynastic Egypt...servants believed to have been killed and buried within close proximity of the ruler or member of the royal family so that they could serve them in the afterlife. The difference in time though was a few centuries so I thought the evidence of one influencing the other was not that strong, but it is interesting. Thanks for watching!

[@josefrietveld219]

Wasn‘t this duty later on passed over to the uschebti-figurines - serving the death in the afterlife?

[@kaarlimakela3413]

Hi, Cy! You had me at Sumer!!!! ❤

[@WanaxTV]

Enjoyed the video. Great job Cy!

[@HistorywithCy]

Thanks bro, appreciate it! More on the way, stay tuned!

[@ThisHandleIsDefinatelyTaken]

"Great Death Pit", pretty metal

[@HistorywithCy]

Hell yeah, I'd consider it if I had a metal band. Another one could be "Serpents of Sumer". Ok, that's not as good as "Great Death Pit"... Thanks for watching, appreciate it and keep the world safe for rock 'n roll!

[@ChaosTheory1829]

Love your content man, extremely high quality and informative.

[@Sempermortis84]

I'm glad you covered this. Great job.

[@HistorywithCy]

Thank you, and thanks for watching!

[@muscledavis5434]

The archaeologists uncovered it so he can cover it

[@Abdulaziz_Saud91]

Honey, bring the kunafah because Cy just uploaded a new video!! Oh yeah!!

[@pinchevulpes]

Thank you Cy! My wish is that someday we will be able to read the scrolls that have been nearly fossilized and burned, and to find a buried library of some sort that has copies of lost works that can be redistributed

[@robbabcock_]

Fascinating stuff, Cy! 👏

[@HistorywithCy]

Thanks, glad you thought so... more on the way, stay tuned!

[@patrickcosgrove2623]

Great video, really interesting. Thanks for sharing 🙏

[@iLLeag7e]

thanks for the great content HIstorywithCy

[@geraldmeehan8942]

Thank you for video Cy. Got to love ancient Sumer

[@HistorywithCy]

Sumer is always fun to cover, thanks for watching, really appreciate it!

[@TheRedneckPreppy]

Fascinating stuff Cy, thank you for covering this!

[@HistorywithCy]

As always thank YOU for watching! More coming up, stay tuned!

[@noahlogue]

Awesome way to start my day.😊

[@HistorywithCy]

Thanks, hope you enjoy it!

[@dparthibhan1]

Hi cy... As always the best post on ancient UR. Please post detailed video on early aryans and kurgan hypothesis. Recent findings

[@HistorywithCy]

Thanks! I'll look into it, thanks for the suggestion!

[@martinulstein9087]

Super good video.

[@TERMICOBRA]

It makes you wonder if killing all of the household when the leader died wouldn't have negative consequences for the ability of the new leader to function as well as the old one. On the other hand we might not grasp the consequences of leaving any of the old faction alive when a competing faction came to power so maybe the death pit was the result of a pragmatic decision to kill all the members of a rival faction. Perhaps the dead king had multiple wives with multiple offspring so when the new king came to power he had to kill his half-siblings because there was simply too much of an incentive to commit regicide. The city-state would then develop a ritual that took care of this problem.

[@QalOrt]

Can't wait for the next Cy Video!

[@HistorywithCy]

Should be out in a couple weeks...will be a longer one. Thanks for watching!

[@mariemelansongundy-vx4ox]

Chemical analysis on the cauldron in the death pit. Guessing a slight hallucinogenic/ and slow deadly respiratory shutdown.

[@mattmatty4670]

Cool thanks mate

[@joeshmoe8345]

Thanks for sharing with us Big Dog!

[@HistorywithCy]

No problem, thanks for watching!

[@robertmastnak581]

Very interesting fakts. Thx

[@HistorywithCy]

Thanks for watching!

[@johnemery6944]

Very nice again cy

[@HistorywithCy]

Thanks, glad you liked and thanks for watching!

[@sirbillius]

I tried to go to your website to view the sources and suggested readings regarding another video. However, my wifi is warning me against doing so. I have no idea what the issue might be, but I figured I ought to let you know.

[@muhamedibrukic6901]

Could you do a video on forensic reconstruction of Mesopotamian dead? I’d love to be able to put faces to imagination when talking about these various peoples. Thank you!

[@Numba003]

Well, mass human sacrifice is an unsettling topic lol. Thank you for another fascinating video on ancient Ur though! God be with you out there everybody. ✝️ :)

[@koozkotopia]

Thanks!

[@HistorywithCy]

Thank you, appreciate it!

[@chrisdooley1184]

Cy where’d you find those excavation pictures?? I’ve looked long and hard for as many as I could see, which ended with me seeing a beautiful collection of photos at the nearby University of Penn Museum (luckily I have lived within a 30 minute drive for most of my life lol). I’d love to see where you found yours because the photos of excavations are just fantastic to see!! Great video as always

[@HistorywithCy]

Hi! You can find a lot of the excavation photos on on Wikimedia Commons. Just type in "Leonard Woolley" and scroll down and you should be able to find them. Good luck and let me know if you need anything else.

[@chrisdooley1184]

@@HistorywithCy thx Cy! Hopefully one day (if you haven’t already) you can visit Penn Museum. For a smaller type of museum it really is packed with some of the most amazing artifacts you could ever hope to see! Since I’m currently in the suburbs I could help you out and meet you downtown there if you’re ever here. Anyway thx again Cy

[@ColasTeam]

This is so interesting! When do the tombs with evidence of human sacrifice in Egypt date to? It's so crazy to think both of these ancient civilizations seem to have gone trough a short lived period of ritual human sacrifice at some point before abandoning it.

[@Bulgarian021]

I NEVER THOUGHT there might be some much knowledge hidden in a cemetery and that such an old one can be so well studied + it is amazing nobody stole most of the items from that amazing place throughout so many centuries Oo

[@angelahackman2522]

In the British museum there is the “Black Obelisk” it has the story of the flood etc. carved around it, it shows king Omri/Cymru bowing before the Gods.

[@galmachloof8669]

Do you have a video focused on the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah?

[@giselamarch1994]

I am glad you corrected yourself.I was just going to ask you how you arrived on this number.

[@HistorywithCy]

Actually you have to thank one of the viewers who found it...I missed it in my final edit. Thanks for watching/listening, appreciate it!

[@pikmin4743]

that's wild

[@simritnam612]

@5:00, "embalmed with Mercury?" Where did they get mercury?

[@HeroinMistress422]

That is insane. I'm always like, "ohhh the ancients, so mysterious, so cool" then sooner or later its "They sacrificed a pretty young girl every so often" or "They diddled little boys" or "They used slave labor to build such and such". sigh

[@HistorywithCy]

Yeah we only get to see the good stuff on the surface without sometimes realizing what went into creating these things. Thanks for watching, really appreciate it and more to come, stay tuned!

[@attila3231]

And if they voluntarily chose to serve the king, knowing that with the death of the king, they too will end. Self-sacrifice!

[@oriffel]

neat

[@opinyinatedhomeydonpladat3212]

@5:30 Pillars ofthe ærth

[@MrPink-qf1xi]

Was there a similar thing in Egypt? I remember reading something like that in Masks of God.

[@ColasTeam]

Veeeeeery early on Egyptian history, unfortunately too far back for any written records to survive. But the archeological evidence points there.

[@HistorywithCy]

Yes, during the Early Dynastic Period but I think the practice from around 3000 to maybe about 2800 BC. Thanks for watching!

[@PRH123]

What does "please stay safe" mean...? Safe from what....?

[@rafaels.3969]

Did ancient city-state peoples bury any namesakes with their dead to identify them to their ethnic, clan or families, besides the obvious family heirlooms.?

[@calin7017]

Is it possible that those bodies believed to be killed for the ritual, might have been prisoners of war and slaves killed together with the royalty who could have died in battle?

[@HistorywithCy]

In the article cited in the vid description I did read that one scholar thought that they might have been prisoners of war, but most dismiss this due to lack of evidence. Thanks for watching!

[@calin7017]

Thanks for clearing that up. I confess that I didn't catch some of the narration, but the question was honest. It is a pleasure to watch a channel well documented, well narrated and unbiased.

[@henkstersmacro-world]

👍👍👍

[@HistorywithCy]

Thank you!

[@markmcarthy596]

Some of the copper found was from Michigan

[@theunbutcheredcats]

Ur is the city of Emotions. The Goddess of Emotions is SIN; Metaphysically.

[@joshuakarr-BibleMan]

Man, it's no wonder Abram left that place.

[@attila3231]

Ábram's followers destroyed the inhabitants of many settlements, from infants to the elderly.

[@user-gd3xy2vl1s]

Human sacrifice of one's attendants is very wasteful. Unsurprisingly is did not continue for long. I certainly wouldn't have been keen on a job with the royal family :-)

[@HistorywithCy]

Me neither... I don't know what the motivation may have been as there doesn't seem to have been a precedent for such acts in ancient Sumer, at least not during the Early Dynastic Period. Anyway thanks for watching, really appreciate it!

[@laxman90210]

It could have been considered a privilege to join the rulers in the afterlife 😅

[@user-ez3zw1en3w]

When the king died he was buried with his court so the travel with him. The parade procession drank poison wine and danced like DAVID to the tomb where they were together like a JIM JONES procession 🤘🏼😵‍💫🤣

[@kaarlimakela3413]

Tens of thousands. 2500 bce. Gave me pause. This was about the same time as the building of the entire Great Pyramid complex in Egypt? Was it a competition thing? Most grand, expensive, and wasteful spectacle possible!? May have had the same wasting effect for both their local economies for more than a minute.

[@HistorywithCy]

Dang it, that was a slip of the tongue on my part. I meant to say "tens of other..." not tens of thousands. I'll make a pinned comment with the correction. I should have just said dozens! Thanks for catching that!

[@kaarlimakela3413]

@@HistorywithCy I don't know the difference lol. Interesting topic. Still seems competitive. Singular. 🙂

[@PatriceBoivin]

And here I thought Ashurbanipal was erudite; maybe the Babylonians had a reason for wiping them out.

[@mercedes523]

Abraham of the Bible started out in Ur.

[@Kariakas]

Interesting how the culture, beliefs and religion can lead to this type of thing. Successions are always a time prone to turmoil and killing so many important people when the ruler dies can only exacerbate the situation.

[@alessandrodelogu7931]

Isn't it possible that is just what happened? Maybe all those people were just political opponents of the dead king's successor, who had them killed to rid himself of them with the excuse of the funeral sacrifice.

[@M167A1]

​@@alessandrodelogu7931 absolutely, killing one's opponents on a pretext is common even today. Analyzing ancient cultures is always difficult, these are people just as human and just as smart as we are today. Yet enough removed from us to sometimes be almost alien. I'm just to make it more fun. The line between the two is ever shifting.

[@Kariakas]

@@alessandrodelogu7931 Can be, another hypothesis could be that the servants may have rebelled at some point not wanting to die.

[@AntiHolyChrist]

archaeology*

[@mohamadalakhras9750]

21st

[@NealOfTaylor44]

I wish we would just stop archaeology until LiDar is good enough to completely image underground without digging. Air exposure alone can destroy artifacts, let alone pickaxes

[@abandoninplace2751]

Lidar cannot image underground. This isn't a thing.

[@JABN97]

⁠@@abandoninplace2751ground radar is starting to be a thing though

[@NealOfTaylor44]

@@abandoninplace2751 exactly we should wait til it is good enough to do that

[@abandoninplace2751]

Let us know when visible light can penetrate the ground then reflect back off arbitrarily desired targets to a receiver, i guess?

[@KamielDV2]

Considering these artefacts are more than 4000 years old, I have to say I couldn't even to that with modern tools. I just love prehistory and like to think about how they lived. It's really unfortunately that scripts and specific historicism are rather recent compared to the advent of civilization/ tribal organization/ some form of society. However, like this we may wonder, I guess. Great video as always!

[@Raycheetah]

Kinda tough to get an accurate head hit with an axe when the target is struggling. My bet is that those sacrificial attendants were drugged, THEN killed. After all, a truly effective and fast-acting lethal poison was probably beyond the chemical technology of ancient Sumer, and having a bunch of people moaning in agony as they slowly died would probably have put a damper on the whole affair. ^[.]^=

[@freefall9832]

Nobody wanted the burden of all the kings servants. They had to go.

[@anasevi9456]

I've wondered about this for a long time. And not the just human sacrifice since that's a pretty typical thing when nobles start getting more money than their society has evolved to deal with. Awful as it is.

[@HistorywithCy]

Yeah it's pretty grisly... sometimes it seems like an act of desperation for the communities that carry it out, though in this case I don't know what the reason was since there doesn't seem to have been any real precedent for it in early Bronze Age Mesopotamia. Probably vanity on part of the rulers thinking that they could take their servants with them to the next world. Anyway thanks for watching!

[@dragonsguardianofcrystalhearts]

And people wonder why curses on tombs exist. They are buried with those things for a reason and when you disturb them.. You're disturbing the rest of the one who it was buried with. Smh at grave robbers bc that's all this is no matter how they spin it.

[@harshanid3636]

I don't believe the men were sacrificed for deceased Royal family members. The Sumerians were warriors. They needed every man they had to fight battles for land expansion and dominance over trade routes. The men buried were fallen soldiers. In ancient days up to the present, palaces had barracks built within the Royal compound for both high ranking military officers and footman. Cemeteries were no different. They would had been buried in honor- within the Royal tombs.

[@homuraakemi493]

Urrrrrrrr look at me im from urrrrr, urrrrrrr urrrrr urrrr

[@husambotros3958]

Mesopotamia is not known for human sacrifices so i believe these were killed in a coup and buried by the usurper as a sign of respect perhaps.

[@HistorywithCy]

Long time no see! Definitely agree with your first point... in all my studies of this region I haven't come across anything similar to Ur with regard to human sacrifice. Once I read somewhere that it may have also occurred in Kish but I never saw any evidence for it. As for a coup, I personally haven't seen any evidence of that. Thanks for watching, really appreciate it!

[@canstooges]

It would be pretty amazing if Iraqi government allow geneticists to extract DNA from the bones and make a haplogroup tests. With those numbers of skeletons, we can have really decent picture who were these people. We could know the Y hg for the men and also mt and autosomal DNA for the both sexes. But I guess it's just a nice dream that will never see the light of a day.

[@HistorywithCy]

Along with the Iraq Museum they have a few skeletons/remains from the Death Pit at the Penn Museum as well as the British Museum, so I think they can always do some analysis. I'd be interested to see stuff like that too, especially from different periods of time so that one can see how the population changed after the influx of Akkadians, Amorites, Chaldeans and other peoples. Would be really interesting. Thanks for watching!

[@canstooges]

@@HistorywithCy That is a good news that there are some of the remains in western museums. There might be a hope for future study! And yes, it's always great to see how population changed trough time. Historical writings are good, but not always a reliable source. Ancient DNA is the real deal.

[@madderhat5852]

Kids, don't try this at home.

[@wisemen8085]

You failed to mention that Old testament in the Bible has recorded Ur the city where Abraham had lived and later left due to God's command. (Genesis 15: 7) Ur appears in 4 Bible verses: Genesis 11:28, Genesis 11:31, Genesis 15:7 and Nehemiah 9:7.

[@ColasTeam]

It's not really relevant to the topic of the video tbh

[@NortonTheProphet]

WTF

[@h0rn3d_h1st0r1an]

Ur mom hah gottem

[@elfootman]

Giving way too much time to theories about what could have happened...

[@annakobuk3618]

With not many written sources of the era one has to speculate