Museum Stumbles Onto Lost Treasures

The Telegraph ^ | 7-12-2002 | Nigel Reynold

[blam]

Museum stumbles on lost treasures

By Nigel Reynold, Arts Correspondent
(Filed: 10/07/2002)

Two 4,500-year-old gold head-dresses from ancient Sumer have been found in a store room at the British Museum where they had lain unexamined and wrongly labelled for 73 years.

One of the 4,500-year-old gold and lapis lazuli head-dresses [top] and the x-ray which revealed the lost treasure Recovered by British archaeologists from a giant burial site at Ur, now in southern Iraq, in the 1920s, they were wrongly described as "crushed skulls" when registered at the museum in 1929.

It was only when experts from the Natural History Museum recently asked their British Museum counterparts to X-ray the skulls to establish the age of the victims that the head-dresses, with flowers and leaves made of gold and lapis lazuli beads mounted on silver combs, were revealed.

"They are stunning, very colourful and delicate, and it is wonderful to imagine how beautiful they must have looked while they were being worn," said Alexandra Irving, a curator in the British Museum's department of Ancient Near East.

The ceremonial headgear was part of an enormous find of human and decorative artefacts by the British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley at Ur.

The site became known as the Great Death Pit. Sir Leonard found evidence of rich funerals. In exercises in mass human sacrifice, individuals were buried along with their attendants or servants.

The two head-dresses were found in a tomb containing the remains of no fewer than 74 attendants, 68 of them women.

Many of the skeletons went to the Natural History Museum while decorative objects went to the British Museum.

Because so much material had been recovered, no one thought to look at the mislabelled head-dresses, which were covered in wax to prevent damage.

The British Museum intends to keep the finds inside their wax cocoons. "The X-rays have told us everything," said Dr Irving

[Molly Pitcher]

Wonder what else they have that they don't know about??

[BradyLS]

Who knows? Has the Smithsonian ever displayed that Arc of The Covenant that was put into storage?

[Bob J]

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[BradyLS]

On a more serious note, the blood-stained uniform of the Arch-Duke Ferdinand, whose assassination started Europe down the path to the first World War, is mildewing away in the basement of some impoverished museum in (Zagreb?) Yugoslavia.

[glorgau]

73 years out of 4,500 isn't even a speed bump. As long as it wasn't damaged.