 Now we've returned to ancient war and we're looking at an excavation plan of the city and also a satellite view with my little thumbtack that I put in Google Earth. The areas that are particularly recognizable are the ziggurat, which we're not going to talk about and the area of the Royal Graves, which I'm pointing out here with my second green arrow. On the left, what I'm showing you is a plan that depicts most of the major tombs in the Royal Graves at war and here on that plan is what we're seeing in the detail on the right, the so-called Great Death Pit and what I want you to notice also is that the grave of Lady or Queen Puabi, whose cylinder seal we looked at earlier, is located just right by the Great Death Pit. This Great Pit was filled with a number of servants, including musicians, who apparently were meant to accompany a very important personage into the afterlife. There were 73 people discovered here in all, five men and 68 women, all of them richly dressed and ornamented with jewelry and there were also two harps or liars and as well as what appears to be a highly decorated table and we'll talk about that more in a moment. Here's that Great Death Pit diagram again and I want to zoom in on this area right here. You can see that there are two liars or harps drawn and then what appear to be sort of two goat-like bodies and those belong to some sort of a support for the ornamental table. One of those goats is now in the British Museum in London and the other one is in Philadelphia and likewise, these two liars were divided between the two museums and we're going to be looking at the one that is in the University of Pennsylvania Museum. So these are both of our liars here, just in case you couldn't make them out before. Before we move to the piece that is in the University of Pennsylvania Museum, I want to show you the other liar because it's actually in a better state of repair and you can see that it still includes a number of its original tuning pins. So what I'm showing you on the right is the original excavation photograph that was taken back in the 20s when these royal graves were excavated and then in the detail on the left, you can see a close-up of the bull head decorating the the sound box and then some of the inlay worked down below and this is the the liar that's in the British Museum. Now we're looking at the the liar that is in the University of Pennsylvania Archaeological Museum in Philadelphia and as you can see, we don't have quite as good of a survival as we did with the silver liar that is now in London. We know we don't have the entire body of the liar, but rather a reconstruction of the sound box and then some inlay from the front of the sound box and this wonderful bull's head that decorated the liar originally and of course that has been restored as well. The the wood core for the bull's head is I believe modern wood at this point, but everything else is original. The this bull is truly extraordinary and I want you to notice just the incredible workmanship on the beard which is made of lapis lazuli. Bulls are very important in the Sumerian tradition. The the moon god sin or nana depending on which version you're reading, he has one name or the other, had the symbol of a bull and that was because the the horns of a bull resemble a crescent moon. There were also other gods that were associated with bulls like Marduk in Babylon, had some association with bulls and of course Adod, the storm god, had association with bulls as well and bulls were also traditionally associated with power in the ancient world. Egyptian rulers would wear symbolic bull's tail around their waist in order to show the power that they had and similarly in the ancient Near East rulers would often have bull horns decorating their headdresses and their crowns as a sign of their earthly power. Beards too were also an important symbol of power and so here we have the power symbol of this bull and this this symbol that also is associated with royalty in this incredibly expensive difficult to work lapis lazuli stone and if you look at the detail on the right, I want you to notice just how beautifully this is done with these wonderful incised parallel wavy lines that come down into three-dimensional spirals that curl upwards. This is a tremendous amount of work put into this amazing wire. Here's an even closer view and you can see first of all if we look at the eye the inlay of the eye is really skillfully done with the shell and the lapis meeting up just perfectly. And then if you look at where the the silver framework is to hold that beard, it looks like bitumen, which is basically like a petroleum tar was used to sort of stick all of this together and to mount those pieces of the beard inside of this metal framework so that it would hold down. We'll finish now with just a few final views of this bull. I wanted you to look at the hair, the shaggy hair in between the horns and you can see that just like the hair on the beard, we have this wonderful intricate work with three-dimensional spiraling curls emerging from these wavy parallel lines incised on the lapis. And just the tremendous lifelike quality of these ears and eyes and kind of wonderful facial expression on this bull. It truly is a magnificent work and the lapis here should be seen as a material that was considered to be worthy of the importance of the God being portrayed on this liar. And of course, this would also have been made for a very important personage, whoever it was whose grave near the Great Death Pit meant that 75 retainers, including musicians, had to accompany them into the afterlife. There's also close to this same death pit another corridor that includes an entire chariot with horses and drivers and a bunch of other goods and these are all very close to Puabi's tomb so it's possible that this was all done when she passed away.