"Anyone know what all this is?"
"Just a bunch of old stuff. Gotta keep it somewhere."
Posted on 12/30/2014 11:06:31 AM PST by mbarker12474
Bible History Daily Website (Biblical Archaeology Society) Robin Ngo • 08/12/2014
A 6,500-year-old skeleton from the site of Ur in present-day Iraq was recently rediscovered in the basement of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The skeleton had originally been uncovered in 1929–30 during the joint British Museum/Penn Museum excavation at Ur led by Sir Leonard Woolley. For 85 years, the skeleton has been lying in a wooden box in the Penn Museum’s labyrinthine basement; any associated documentation that may have once been attached to the skeleton or storage box has long been missing.
The remarkable rediscovery of this skeleton is due to the new British Museum/Penn Museum project Ur of the Chaldees: A Virtual Vision of Woolley’s Excavations, which seeks to digitize the records and artifacts from Woolley’s excavations in the 1920s and ’30s. While poring over the excavation records and researching the Penn Museum’s collections, Ur Digitization Project Manager William Hafford saw that one skeleton that had been excavated in 1929–30 was noted in the museum’s object record database as “Not Accounted For” as of 1990.
Inquiries with Janet Monge, curator-in-charge of the physical anthropology section of the Penn Museum, led Hafford to an unidentified skeleton in a box in the museum’s basement storage. Monge had been aware of the skeleton for a long time, but with no identifying records associated with the box, the skeleton remained a puzzling curiosity. Comparing the skeleton with Woolley’s field notes, the researchers determined that they had found the mystery skeleton discovered in the 1929–30 excavation season at Ur and subsequently delivered to the Penn Museum.
The Penn Museum skeleton had been unearthed from an Ubaid-period (5500–4000 B.C.E.) grave located about 50 feet below the famed Royal Cemetery at Ur. The man whose skeleton was rediscovered at the Penn Museum was alive during a time after a great flood had deluged the region—what Woolley had identified as the Biblical flood. The Penn Museum researchers have therefore nicknamed the skeleton “Noah.”
“Utnapishtim might be more appropriate,” Hafford said in a Penn Museum press release, “for he was named in the Gilgamesh epic as the man who survived the great flood.”
Read the Penn Museum press release. http://penn.museum/press-releases/1093-ur-skeleton-rediscovered.html
ping
Now our own museums have become archeological digs.
Ur...I guess they found it.
I wrote a children’s musical about 20 years ago, where at one point Abra(ha)m arrives in Canaan. The people ask him where he’s from, and he says “Ur...”, happens three times and the third time the people all look at each other and say, “He must be crazy, he doesn’t even know where he came from!” At least the kids thought it was funny...
Dem bones, dem bones walkin’ around?
Lets send it back home ASAP as we did with Egyptian relics right before the fun began!
“Darmok and Jalad... at Tanagra.”
Did he vote in November?.................
This seems to happen often enough that museums and other repositories really ought to have someone tasked to sort through their dead-storage (heh) areas now and then to see what might have been mislaid or “lost”.
In the 60s my dad loaned a Confederate and a Union rifle plus a battle flag to the local college museum. When we moved in the 70s, they were unable to locate them to give back to him.
If you see posts of interest to Pennsylvanians, please ping me.
Thanks!
Always thought Gilgamesh would make a great movie.
The small museum where I was once a board member has a policy of not taking anything on loan. I guess that is the reason.
Like in a locked box, under the stairs?
Yeah right. How can a skeleton be 500 years older than the Earth?
His nickname on the Creepshow set was Fluffy.
Apparently some old crates do have their uses.
“For 85 years, the skeleton has been lying in a wooden box in the Penn Museum’s labyrinthine basement; any associated documentation that may have once been attached to the skeleton or storage box has long been missing.”
Hmmm. . .no documentation. . .hmmmm. . .Jimmy Hoffa’s body discovered, perhaps?
Just another undocumented alien.
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