The day the music stopped and the door was sealed on Puabi, Queen of Ur, was sometime around the year 2500 BC. By modern standards she was a petite woman, under five feet tall. But in that coastal city near the mouth of the Euphrates, she was king.1
Guarding her chamber were soldiers armed with daggers, their copper helmets gleaming in the dim light, and a chariot pulled by a pair of oxen. The animals pawed at the fine matting on the floor, ill at ease despite the murmured assurances of the grooms. Beside them stood a host of elegant ladies, their heads adorned in golden leaves, chanting an incantation to the gods.
The delicate notes of harp and lyre swelled down the ramp, past heaps of gold, copper and silver vessels and a chest full of exquisitely-woven textiles, to the dead queen lying on her wooden bier. Her black hair was perfectly puffed, wrapped in golden ribbons and topped with wreaths of gold leaves and a spray of flowers. She wore gold rings on each of her fingers. Her lips were tinted by the first-known lipstick: a mixture of powdered red stone and white lead.2 At her waist lay a heavy belt of gold rings, and blanketing her body were strings of thousands of colorful beads made from precious metals, carnelian, agate and lapis-lazuli imported from distant India and Afghanistan.3
At least one of her attendants was killed by a heavy blow to the head. Others may have been poisoned. Either way, one by one, the living crumpled to the ground: from her lavishly-dressed ladies maids, to the oxen and their drivers, to the guards bravely manning the entrance to her tomb. And as the women’s hands fell from the strings of the harp and the bull-headed lyre, silence fell.4
For centuries Queen Puabi lay undisturbed, until a joint British-American archaeological expedition found her tomb in 1927.5 British archaeologist Charles Leonard Woolley immediately sought to identify her the same way most ancient Sumerian women were identified, through textual evidence describing her as the wife of man. But all he found was a royal seal calling this influential person a queen, with no mention of her husband. Where was her king?
Woolley ultimately decided that Puabi’s husband must be a man named on another seal found in her tomb. But scholars have since rejected this theory and concluded that Puabi was a female ruler with all the might of a king. (She may have been ritually wed to the moon god Nanna, the patron of Ur, but this notion is partly based on the assumption that her exalted status must come from some association with a man.)6
Still, Woolley found things in her tomb that seemed out of place. For example, he was unable to explain the presence of certain tools such as a golden saw and chisels, a copper drill, small bronze axes, and copper rods.7 What would a powerful Sumerian woman be doing with such objects?
For decades scholars ignored or dismissed these tools as offerings. But recently some have theorized that the queen was actually a trained physician who needed her “surgical instruments” in death, just as she had in life.8 Powerful goddess healers were a fixture in the pantheon of ancient Mesopotamia and their temples were centers for medical training and care, though midwives were responsible for birthing babies.9 There was Ninhursanga, queen of the gods, whose dominion included birth, midwifery and motherhood; the healing goddess Ninisina, the “great physician of the black-headed ones” and “midwife of the mothers of the land;” and the warrior goddess Inanna, who embodied both fertility and a fierce, terrifying power.10
With role models like these, Puabi could easily have been both physician and queen. But precious little is known about Sumeria’s medical women. Their work was muffled, first by the lack of writing (which was only a few centuries old) and male disinterest in birthing, and later by the bias of archaeologists who assumed medicine was a male domain.11 Despite Woolley’s thirst for discovery, the most unexpected insights can be the most difficult to find.
So the glitz of Puabi’s famous head wreaths has captivated us for almost a century; yet no one has bothered to look at what they might mean to a physician. In fact, the golden leaves around her head are poplar and willow, two riverside species that evoke both fertility and medicine.12 The drug we know as aspirin was originally extracted from the bark of the willow tree (Salix alba), and our early hominid ancestors chewed the bark of the poplar, a related species, as a natural pain killer.13 Indeed, bark from the poplar species (Populus euphratica) featured on Puabi’s headdress has traditionally been used to treat fevers, kill worms, reduce inflammation and relieve menstrual cramps.14
Fertility control may also have been one of the ways Puabi helped patients and served the Sumerian gods. As a child she learned the story of Enlil, king of the gods, who created the world and quickly tired of the noisy, rapidly multiplying humans (their mating ruckus was particularly offensive). Fed up, he decided to drown them in a great flood; but his brother leaked the plot to a man who saved humanity by building a boat (sound familiar? This guy is a precursor to the Bible’s Noah). As a compromise Enlil promised not to destroy humanity on the condition that humans respect the natural world and use birth control.15
In Puabi’s time, as in our own, health care required the active participation of both men and women. But this revelation didn’t come easily to the Western archaeologists who discovered her, or to the largely white male scholars who have studied her since. Puabi’s unexpected power, and her probable proficiency in medicine, challenge our assumptions about women whose lives are outwardly controlled by men. Looking back at her from our own patriarchal society, today, her resilience and fortitude flash like gold. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised?
A few centuries after Puabi’s death, Ur was home to Enheduanna, a powerful princess, scholar and high priestess. Today she is recognized as the first known author to sign her own work. Enheduanna wrote the following words for a temple honoring the goddess of birthing, Ninhursanga, that highlights feminine authority.
Your lady is the lady who imposes silence.
The great good queen of heaven.
When she speaks, heaven shakes.
When she opens her mouth, storms roar.16
Thank you to my sister, Abby Donaldson, for helping me break through the paywall and get my eager little hands on some of the medical sources I needed for this piece.
Paul C. Zimmerman and Richard L. Zettler, “Two Tombs or Three? PG 789 and PG 800 Again!”, in From Sherds to Landscapes: Studies on the Ancient Near East in Honor of McGuire Gibson, eds. Mark Altaweel and Carrie Hritz (Brooklyn Park, MN: Enpointe, 2021), 283-296.
Sarah E. Schaffer, “Reading our lips: The history of lipstick regulation in Western seats of power,” Food and Drug Law Journal 62, no. 1 (2007): 165-225.
Willam B. Hafford, “A Spectacular Discovery: Burials Simple and Splendid,” Expedition Magazine 60, no. 1 (2018): 60-67.
Due to its position above Puabi’s burial chamber, some archaeologists argue that the “death pit” I describe (with 21 attendants, textile chest, oxen and chariot) was not actually part of Queen Puabi’s burial. But most descriptions of her tomb include the pit, and her lavish tomb certainly suggests the kind of royal influence that would merit this kind of pomp and sacrifice. See Woolley (1934), Hafford (2018), and Zimmerman and Zettler (2021), listed here.
Zimmerman and Zettler; Kathleen McCaffrey, “The Female Kings of Ur,” in Gender Through Time in the Ancient Near East, ed. Diane Bolger (New York: AltaMira Press, 2008), 173-215; and “Queen Puabi’s Headdress,” Penn Museum Online Collections, https://www.penn.museum/collections/highlights/neareast/puabi.php.
I.M. Diakonoff, “The City-States of Sumer,” in Early Antiquity, eds. I.M. Diakonoff and Philip L. Kohl (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991), 67-83.
Charles Leonard Woolley, Ur Excavations Volume II: The Royal Cemetery (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 303, 556; and P.R.S. Moorey, “What Do We Know about the People Buried in the Royal Cemetery?” Expedition Magazine 20, no. 1 (1977): 24-40.
David Isaacs and Spencer Beasley, “Women in Paediatric Surgery,” Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health 53 (2017): 1043-1045.
Alison J. White, Jason Herbeck, JoAnn Scurlock, and John Mayberry, “Ancient Surgeons: A Characterization of Mesopotamian Surgical Practices,” The American Journal of Surgery 224, no. 2 (2022): 790-793.
Ancient Sumerians referred to themselves as “the black-headed people.” See Diakonoff (1991); Kathryn Stevens, “Ninisinna (goddess)”, Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses, ORACC and the UK Higher Education Academy, 2019, https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/amgg/listofdeities/ninisinna/index.html; Zainab Bahrani, Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia (London: Routledge, 2001), 143, 154; and Therese Rodin, The World of the Sumerian Mother Goddess: An Interpretation of Her Myths (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2014), 194.
White et al. 2022.
Naomi F. Miller, “Symbols of Fertility and Abundance in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, Iraq,” American Journal of Archaeology 117, no. 1 (2013): 127-133; and Charles Leonard Woolley, Ur Excavations Volume II: The Royal Cemetery (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 241.
“Traditional Medicine,” World Health Organization, August 9, 2023, https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/traditional-medicine; Laura S. Weyrich, Sebastian Duchene, Julien Soubrier, et al., “Neanderthal behavior, diet, and disease inferred from ancient DNA in dental calculus,” Nature 544, no. 7650 (2017): 357-361.
“Populus euphratica – Olivier,” Plants for a Future, https://pfaf.org/user/Plant.aspx?LatinName=Populus+euphratica; and Li-Na Huang, Yun-Yun Liu, Hong-Bin Fang, Ya-Bin Jiao, and Yong-Xian Cheng, “Six new diterpenoids from the resins of Populus euphratica and their anti-inflammatory activities,” Fitoterapia 168 (2023): 1055485.
Editors of New World Encyclopedia, “Enlil,” New World Encyclopedia, https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Enlil.
Excerpt from Temple Hymn 7, “E-Kesh, The Temple of Ninhursanga in Kesh,” ed. Sophus Helle, The Complete Poems of Enheduana, the World’s First Author (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 63.