Archaeology Tour Ur: Area 5 has the Nicest Toilet?

In October and November of 2022, the Penn Museum conducted the first post-pandemic excavation season at the ancient city of Ur in southern Iraq. Our main goal was to more completely understand habitation at the edges of the city and just beyond its technical limits. The edge of the mound is still marked by what had been the rampart or revetment on which stood the city wall in the Ur III period, about 4000 years ago
Houses on the interior edge of the city are not well understood. Woolley assumed that all were densely packed just as the more central ones were, but magnetometry is showing us that might not be the case. In 2017 and 2019, Archaeologists from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich began excavating a large house near the wall in the south of the city. It was more spacious than most that Woolley had dug, and there was more room between it and the next. In 2022, they completed the excavation of the house, and in this video we will follow the head of that team, Prof. Adelheid Otto, as she shows us some amazing features of this house, including a 'beautiful' toilet!
More importantly, we've learned a lot about the original owners of the house, around 1850 BCE, from the cuneiform tablets they left behind. Prof. Otto will be publishing the house in full soon, and this is just a peak at the many things this building can tell us.
00:00 intro
00:35 square 5 background
02:50 tour north side
04:24 tour inside
05:18 ancient owners
06:14 kitchen
07:25 overview of house
08:17 second phase shops
09:22 ancient toilet
10:38 later owners and outro

[@airplanes_aren.t_real]

One of the greatest advancements in human history, having somewhere to poop and pee that isn't just a hole in the ground

[@Divig]

The letters between the husband and wife really makes the history of the house more real. It belonged to real humans, it is not just old bricks and guesses as to what room was used for what purpose.

[@equesdeventusoccasus]

Having lived in that region of the world for a year or so, it is remarkable how similar that ancient toilet is to the ones they use today in the Middle East. Probably the one difference is what happens to the waste once you are done.
In a hotel that caters to Westerners, you will find toilets you are used to, but the areas primarily for the locals, they would all recognize this as a toilet.

[@safvanshaikh2024]

I absolutely love your videos, they are one of a kind. Feels like on hand learning, where you can actually see instead of just a story of how these events happened. Feels more real.

[@sobertillnoon]

I'm shocked the zoning board granted them the variance to run a business out of their home in that neighborhood.

[@HLBear]

Well done. 😆

[@nyarparablepsis872]

Great video, thank you so much for sharing these with us! It's wonderful to see excavations in southern Iraq back in full swing ❤
Question about the texts: with Charpin on the job does that mean they will be published with only French translation and commentary?
Edit: The 'shop area' reminds me of the recent Lagash finds - great stuff!

[@artifactuallyspeaking]

The texts will probably be translated both in French and English, and at least a summary of their information will appear in English in our final report.

[@nyarparablepsis872]

@@artifactuallyspeaking Thank you for the information!

[@VHPicasso]

Amazing information. Thanks for sharing!

[@JohnVance]

"No, because the Kassites..." I don't know why I found that so amusing.

[@sypialnia_studio]

Very fascinating glimpse in to a very ancient past

[@pattheplanter]

I don't suppose the garden will get dug? There may be little there but it might have something of interest to us gardeners.

[@artifactuallyspeaking]

There usually isn't much left in gardens. We still would excavate if we had time and questions about the use of that land. At the moment we don't have further permissions to dig on the main mound.
We do look for evidence of seeds and other ancient botanical remains by flotation of soil, but the ones we find were the ones that were burned (such as in cooking) since that keeps them from completely deteriorating in the soil.

[@EdrickBluebeard]

Teeth of Magni... just thinking about the hands that laid the bricks... how they felt, how they thought, their lives... so far removed and so similar at the same time...

[@vestafairie]

thank you for sharing with the wider world!

[@jfjoubertquebec]

Yay!!! New video!!

[@neva_nyx]

This is wonderful! Thank you so much! ❤

[@DemienC.]

So... just 8 meters tube hole which has walls covered with broken pottery? AND house had at least 2 owners?... Curious.

[@doggodoggo3000]

best channel on youtube

[@artifactuallyspeaking]

Thanks!

[@doggodoggo3000]

Thanks for teaching and showing us so much cool stuff!@@artifactuallyspeaking

[@axeldreyer8972]

wonder what they did when the toilet was full...?

[@ruskohm]

were the buildings made of stone or hand made bricks?

[@artifactuallyspeaking]

They're made of bricks--baked bricks in the bottom courses of the walls and sun-dried in the upper courses. Then they plastered the walls with mud to make them smooth.

[@artifactuallyspeaking]

Some floors were made of baked bricks, especially those in important buildings like palaces or temples. Many floors in houses were just packed mud.

[@ruskohm]

Thank you for taking time to answer my questions. I love archaeology, to think someone once walked these places at one time. I can't help but wonder what they were like. @@artifactuallyspeaking