We're still going through the records and data from the 2022 season at the ancient city of Ur in southern Iraq, preparing for publication. In the process I'm making more videos from field footage and from recent footage using photos of some of the artifacts.
I can't say a lot in a short, so be sure to check out my longer videos on the channel!
/ @artifactuallyspeaking
Imagine doing a knife restoration video on that
Indeed. Iron just doesn't hold up in the ground very well. Bronze holds up better, but it can get into a pretty bad state as well. Funny that iron is superior in hardness but inferior in survivability over a very long time.
Cool information you’re bringing, it’s appreciated!
You're always informative and interesting. Great work.
Even a child could use a little knife for opening pistachios and pomegranates.
These shorts are great, I hope they can help spread the love for ancient Mesopotamia
Excavating Iraq must be amazing!!
By grave, do you mean the hole they were buried in or like the casket?
Most burials of this period didn't use caskets. In this case, it was a pit burial, but two thousand years of erosion had almost revealed the grave itself and had largely destroyed the bones. A jar and this knife were mostly what we found, though there were still traces of the bones, enough to show that the person was not yet fully grown.
Thank you for adding some worth to my doomscrolling.
"Abandoned not long after this" a length of time greater than the entire US history
Maybe it was just his favorite knife.
How do you figure out something like this is a knife? With the amount of weathering and corrosion, not to mention the degradation of the handle, I would never have guessed it was anything other than a handful of rocks!
The shape is apparent in general, but we also look closely at the corrosion patterns. Iron corrodes very badly, creating iron oxide in rough globules like this, but the core of the iron piece is still there and the slight curvature of the blade is still visible. Admittedly, though, there are some pieces of iron that are corroded so badly that we just don't know what they were originally.
So his family buried him with a knife for him to make his way and you dug him up desecrated his grave and took his knife good job
Yeah that is pretty messed up, his family should sue
Although I understand your point (and it is an important one to consider), we couldn't really avoid this grave. It was very near the surface and mostly destroyed by 2500 years of erosion. So, we carefully recorded what was left and are trying to understand how this person lived. Plus the material all remains in Iraq where it can be reburied.