A day in the life of Ur, 4,000 years ago

“I’m doing fine, don’t worry,” Sin-nada wrote to his wife Nuṭṭuptum in around 1840 BC. He was traveling on business, as was so often the case. And while he was on the move, the couple stayed in touch by writing letters – as attested by clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script that were found by the team working with LMU archaeologist Adelheid Otto.

Nuttuptum and Sin-nada lived in Ur, which, 4,000 years ago, was a vibrant port city and trading hub. Today, it seems, all that is left is sand and clay. Archaeologists nevertheless come to Ur in search of the remains of a lost civilization.

The team working with Professor Adelheid Otto and Dr. Berthold Einwag excavated the house of Sin-nada and Nuṭṭuptum and was able to benefit from the couple’s fate: They evidently had to leave their home in haste. The LMU archaeologists’ finds in the house are so numerous and varied that they are like a snapshot of everyday life four millennia ago.

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In the interview reproduced below, Adelheid Otto, Head of LMU’s Institute of Near Eastern Archaeology, looks back on her three excavations in 2017, 2019 and 2022. She analyzes her finds in collaboration with colleagues representing a variety of disciplines, including Assyriologists Professor Walther Sallaberger (LMU) and Professor Dominique Charpin (Collège de France, Paris), anthropologist Dr. Andrea Göhring (LMU), geophysicists working with Professor Jörg Fassbinder (LMU), zoologist Melina Seabrook (Harvard) and many more. The excavation work was part of a project initiated by Professor Elisabeth Stone at Stony Brook University and was funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

Together with colleagues at the Leibniz Supercomputer Center (LRZ), archeologist Dr. Berthold Einwag has reconstructed the excavated villa in 3D.

Ur is one of the world’s first cities

What was life like in Ur in the days of Nuttuptum and Sin-nada?

Adelheid Otto: Ur was one of the biggest and most important cities of the ancient Near East. It was very cosmopolitan. We know from surviving texts that many thousands of people lived in Ur and what life was like: that shops lined the streets, and that there was sometimes a loud din when the smiths were hard at work.

Four thousand years ago, Ur was enjoying a veritable golden age and its people were prosperous. We can now see an example of this in a house and its residents.

A model house from the Old Babylonian era

What is so special about the house you excavated?

For the first time, we now have a model house in Mesopotamia from the Old Babylonian era. It has got everything: food scraps and finds indicating the function of the different rooms, as well as textual evidence. For example, we excavated a pantry where sides of ham were still hanging up to be smoked. There was also a room where probably the lady of the house taught the children to read and write.

We also have a very exact knowledge of the couple that lived there. Sin-nada was the administrator of Ur’s second most important temple, a kind of priest and manager in one. So he was a very high-ranking person. We also found the letters they wrote to each other, which are fantastic and bursting with life. It is very unusual to find texts and other things that bring a given house and a given time together so precisely that it is like a snapshot, allowing us to accurately reconstruct a day in the life of these people.

4000 year old letters from a married couple

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What did the couple write?

The one letter from Sin-nada said: “Don’t worry, I’m fine.” And we thought: What a happy couple! The last text, which we found broken in pieces in front of the inner door, has this to say: “Nuttuptum, you are always telling me off, claiming that I neglect you and am away too often. But that is just not true!” Reading this text was like being there during a marital crisis that is currently raging: “It’s only because…” And suddenly the text breaks off.

It sounds as if Nuttuptum was very confident?

I am fascinated by this woman. We currently know more about men than about women at this time. But these women were obviously able to read and write. She appears to be complaining in writing to her husband that he is so rarely at home. We even found a letter addressed to her by her father.

The level of education was extremely high at the time. Since her husband traveled a lot, it is reasonable to assume that Nuttuptum taught the children to write – especially as two school texts were found in the pantry, an area where men rarely spent time back then. We know in theory that there were female teachers, but we have rarely been able to nail this down to a specific person. I find it tremendously exciting that this woman played an active role in the economy and also provided tuition.

Being a woman in Ur

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How do you know that she was active in the economy?

Some of the texts we have found make it clear that Nuttuptum received draff from a female beer brewer, which she probably used to feed the sheep or pigs. Since there were extraordinarily large ovens in her kitchen, we also assume that she and her husband held positions of responsibility in the temple administration, and that they prepared meals for the temple here. That is why I always insist on saying: “It was the house of Sin-nada and Nuttuptum,” precisely because women are often overlooked in research about this period.

Why is that?

There is less documentary evidence surrounding them. Most texts come from public administrations – a palace or a temple. Yes, we repeatedly find exceptions as well as women’s archives, but the assumption is that most administrative documents were written by men.

In Sin-nada and Nuṭṭuptum’s day, women who were legally competent and economically active appear to have held roles that were in no way inferior to those of men – especially where women were involved in temple administration. In Ur, there were probably more women than men in the temples, because the cloisters where they lived in this city were filled primarily with women. Many lower-ranking positions were held by men. The high priestesses and mid-level priestesses were, obviously, women. Some 200 years before Nuṭṭuptum, Encheduana was the high priestess in Ur. She is believed to have been the first female poet in world history. From this time on, the period from roughly from 2,300 BC to 1,700 BC appears to have been a golden age for women in Ur.

Hasty escape, abandoned home

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Why did Sin-nada and Nuṭṭuptum abandon their life in Ur?

The house owner and his wife evidently had to flee the house very abruptly and left everything behind. The king, whose servant Sin-nada was, had been overthrown, probably killed. It is possible that Sin-nada too was killed; at the very least, he had to leave Ur. We simply hear nothing more from him. And the fact that he left everything behind in the house suggests that his departure was not voluntary. That was in 1835 BC.

Was it not a stroke of luck to dig precisely here, where you found a villa and all its contents?

It was an incredible stroke of luck! There are thousands of houses from this time. We really found a needle in a haystack: this one home where even the couple’s private archives were still intact. I cannot tell you how rare such an event is. As an archaeologist, you might hit this kind of unbelievable jackpot once in a lifetime.

Unique excavation for students

How did your students who were there during the excavations react?

It was very exciting for them, I think. But at that moment they didn’t understand how exceptional this situation was. Now, bit by bit, they are starting to say it was like a fairy tale! You are ‘ruined’ for archaeological purposes after something like that, because you will never again discover such amazing finds. It really was the way you would always imagine archaeology: You dig a trench and suddenly find clay tablets and cylinder seals, food and terracotta figurines lying around in a house. Normally, you might find two, maybe three comparable items in an entire campaign, and you are happy if you discover a fraction of these finds.

What happened to the items that were excavated?

The best finds went to the museum in Baghdad. We covered the house itself and filled it in to preserve it, so it is likely that no one will ever see it again. You can indeed only visit it by taking a virtual 3D tour.

International Workshop:

From 25 to 26 July 2024, the Institute of Near Eastern Archaeology is organizing an international workshop at which the results of the excavations will be presented.

More research about Ur:

Institute of Near Eastern Archaeology at LMU: Overview of excavations in Ur

Excavations in Ur: Ancient Babylonian ceramics

3D model: How the wealthy lived 4,000 years ago (report by the Leibniz Supercomputer Center [LRZ])

Publications:

Adelheid Otto: Excavations at Ur. In: Münchener Abhandlungen zum Alten Orient 7, 2022, S. 350-357)

Adelheid Otto: A New Archaeological Response to an Old Question: When and how Did Ur Recover in the Old Babylonian Period? In: Proceedings of the 12th International Congresson the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East. Volume 2, Bologna 2021 (pdf ab S. 15)