 Here on my map, I'm showing you the location of the ancient city of Orr. We're going to start out by talking about a particular personage who was a Sumerian. The Sumerians were one of the first civilizations to arise in Mesopotamia in the Fertile Crescent. And they were the builders of some of the first cities. Their primary cities were Uruk and Ur, and many very important finds have been discovered there. We're looking at Ur and at works belonging to a first dynasty woman named Puabi. This is the reason that we know Puabi's name. What we're looking at is a cylinder seal. It is a cylindrical object about the size of a spool of thread. And it's made out of lapis lazuli. We'll talk about that in a moment. But first, I want you to notice the impression made by this cylinder seal when rolled over a piece of damp clay. Or in this case, I think it's probably more like an advanced dental casting type clay. But you can see that there are a series of cuneiform letters or symbols. And those read Puabi Nin, which translates to Queen or Lady Puabi. Puabi, if you continue looking at the impression from the cylinder seal, is most likely the seated figure that we see just to the right of my box. You might notice that she has the most elaborate chair of all of the seated figures. She's holding a drinking vessel and she also has the most elaborate garments and hairstyle. So this is very likely meant to depict her as the most important person on this. And often, important people would be depicted feasting and hosting events on cylinder seals. A cylinder seal was used as sort of an official signature. Very much like, say, a chop mark could be used to sign a document in China or in Japan. Something bearing a glyph. And cylinder seals were used to sign important documents, to seal envelopes, basically to establish the legitimacy of something associated with a particular person. If you take a look at this cylinder seal, it has a hole drilled through it and it could have been worn on a thong around Puabi's neck. So it would always be with her and always associated with her. The reason that I brought this in, first of all, is that lapis lazuli, because of its hardness, its bright blue color, and the fact that in Mesopotamia, which was a flat floodplain, it was not a native stone. It had to be acquired from quite a distance away in Afghanistan. It was considered a very precious material. And it was associated with a number of things like protection with the heavens. And that's discussed in some of your readings in more detail. It was also quite difficult to work. And so for someone to own a cylinder seal made out of this, first it was an expensive material and then because of the difficulty in working it, the cylinder seal would have the additional expense because the laborer, the artist working on this, has to put more effort into it than they would for an easier material to work. Let's say, for example, hematite or soapstone, for example. As a high status and also visually appealing stone, we also see lapis lazuli being used frequently in Sumerian jewelry. And when Puabi was buried, she was buried with some really impressive grave goods, including an entire jeweled cape, a gold headdress, and multiple reeds of gold and beads and flowers fashioned from mother of pearl and lapis lazuli and gold and silver, as you can see. This is a reconstruction of her headdress. It also includes the reddish-orange stone carnelian. And you can see this at the University of Pennsylvania Archaeological Museum. The University of Pennsylvania and the British Museum cooperated on the excavations in ore. And half of what was found in the royal graves at ore is now in this country at the Penn Museum. So again, this is a high status material, one that was highly desirable, and it would have been a sign of status, of wealth, of taste. And then, of course, it also had the symbolic values that you've seen in your readings. Now we're moving to ancient Babylon to the time of the Neo-Babylonian dynasty, that is the dynasty that took over after Babylon had risen and fallen with great figures like Hammurabi. You might be familiar with the law code of Hammurabi. This is a bit later when the Neo-Babylonian dynasty rises first with Nabapolasser, beginning rebuilding on the city, and then his son, and heir Nebuchadnezzar, really finishing ancient Babylon and creating what was considered to be one of the really glorious and incredible urban centers in the ancient world. And what's interesting is the way that this relates to lapis lazuli, because Nebuchadnezzar built a great entry gate to the city of Babylon and made most of that gate blue and claimed to have made it out of precious blue stone, and sometimes in his inscriptions actually mentions lapis lazuli, but as we'll see, it's not meant made of lapis at all. Babylon and many other cities in the ancient Near East was constructed primarily out of molded mud brick, and this is a display of mud bricks. You might know of them in the United States, particularly in the West as Adobe. You take mud and straw and sometimes dung, and you mix it all up and mold it. You see the mold in the foreground here, and then let it dry in the sun. And this is an inexpensive means of building material that's been used for centuries. In Babylon, however, Nebuchadnezzar chose to have baked brick used in many areas for greater permanence because, of course, once the brick is baked, it doesn't break down with succeeding rains. And in his city of Babylon on the Ishtar gate, the great gate to the city that I was discussing, he actually had the bricks made of molded and glazed brick. So they were forced into a mold to get these relief designs. That's the projecting image of the lion head and mane that you see here. And then they were glazed using glass-based ceramic type glazes. And you might notice that the bright blue, particularly if you look in the row of bricks at the bottom, looks very much like lapis lazuli. Let's back up for a moment and look at the gate, both in a satellite view and in a reconstruction. The Ishtar gate was one of two major gates going into the city on the north and south ends. And it was dedicated to Ishtar, the goddess of love and beauty and war. And lions were sacred to the goddess Ishtar. And so we'll see lions very much associated with this gateway. As you can see, it was a great double gateway. And there was a long processional way that went through the gate. So a number of important festivals would enter the gate, but this was also the gate by which visitors would enter the city. And so it was meant to be both defensive, and you can see the crenellations and the places for archers up on top of this gate. But it was also meant to really impress the visitor with the wealth and the power of Babylon. This is a statement showing that Nebuchadnezzar was so wealthy and so successful a ruler that he could afford to take something like a main city gate and make it beautiful in addition to making it utilitarian for defense. The Ishtar gate today is reconstructed inside the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. It's actually, they're more than one museum actually in that same building. So this is technically part of the Forder Asiatisches Museum, but most people think of it as the Pergamon Museum. And so it's actually reconstructed slightly smaller than the real gate would have been in Babylon, although as you can see from the size of these people, it's pretty impressive in its size as it is. They just had to be practical and there were limits to what they could fit inside the museum building. As you can see, it is covered in that vibrant ultramarine blue brick, which is meant to resemble lapis lazuli. And in a lengthy inscription which we'll look at in a moment, Nebuchadnezzar himself refers to constructing this gate of brick and bluestone. And the bluestone he doesn't elaborate, but in other areas and other inscriptions talking about his accomplishments as king, he consistently tells us that he rebuilt temples using bricks of lapis lazuli. So here I've brought in details of the two creatures that adorn the gateway itself. You see bulls representing Adod the storm god and a dragon-like creature called a Mushushu, which represents Marduk and that's the patron god of Babylon. Now we're looking at the inscription itself and that is just to the side of the entryway on the gates. And as you can see, it's quite a lengthy inscription in Kanaeiform text and it tells us all about the rebuilding of this gate which was called the beautiful gate to the city. And in it, Nebuchadnezzar gives us a laundry list of expensive materials that he had imported to make this a beautiful and expensive gate. And so he talks about bronze. He talks about cedar wood for the doors. And then of course he mentions the glazed brick and blue stone for the gate itself. And this is meant to be a reference to lapis lazuli. And lapis was associated with the goddess Ishtar with the goddess of love and beauty. It shows up in descriptions of her adorning herself with jewelry. So it's meant to be something pleasing to the goddess. But this is also an expression of the wealth and power commanded by someone like Nebuchadnezzar who can afford or at least afford to pretend that he's building an entire gate out of lapis lazuli. So I've told you what this isn't. It's not lapis lazuli, but what is it? Well, first of all in this detail, I hope that you notice that the really pristine bricks of both blue and yellow and black and white are not original. These are reconstructions made by the museum based on the originals in order to reconstruct the gate and part of the processional way around it. The original bricks are the ones that clearly look like they've been through a lot and you can see those here. What this blue substance is, is it is a glass glaze based on one man's earliest synthetic pigment and that is a pigment called Egyptian blue. The Egyptians and the Chinese actually made the discovery of this pigment at about the same time and the Assyrians adapted Egyptian blue for their own purposes and had a slightly different formula. So this is, most people tend to talk about this as Egyptian blue, but it might be better classified as Assyrian blue. Assyrian blue and Egyptian blue are a blue glass frit that is based on cobalt and it actually fluoresces under UV light, but it creates this really brilliant, wonderful blue pigment that is much less expensive and much less difficult to refine than lapis lazuli is for making ultramarine blue pigment. And so this was actually the pigment of choice in much of the ancient world because of the difficulties with lapis lazuli both with obtaining it and then purifying it properly.