How it began
The Lyres of Ur were made in the Sumerian city of Ur, in present-day Iraq, during the Early Dynastic III period, between about 2550 and 2450 BCE. They were found in the Royal Cemetery at Ur by a joint expedition of the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum led by Leonard Woolley, who excavated the site from 1922 and uncovered the instruments in 1929. Strictly speaking three lyres and one harp were unearthed.
How it works
The instruments are box lyres, played upright with the strings plucked with both hands. Each lyre had 11 strings. The bodies were wood, decorated with gold, silver, lapis lazuli, shell and bitumen, and each sound box ended in a bull's head. The Silver Lyre stands about 110 centimeters high and is covered in sheet silver fixed with small silver nails. The front panel of the Bull-Headed Lyre is shell inlay set in bitumen.
What changed first
Woolley found the lyres among the skeletons of ten women, one of whom was said to lie against a lyre with her hand where the strings would have been. The wood had decayed, so he poured in liquid plaster to recover the form of the frames. The gold and silver coverings survived. The decoration is regarded as a fine example of Mesopotamian court art of the period.
Where it stands today
The restored instruments are divided between the museums that took part in the excavation. The Golden Lyre is in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, the Queen's Lyre and the Silver Lyre are in the British Museum, and the Bull-Headed Lyre is in the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. The reconstructed wooden body of the Golden Lyre was damaged by flooding during the Iraq War. In 2005 engineers at the University of Liverpool helped build a playable reproduction.
