Why It Sucks to Be a Queen's Attendant (in Ancient Ur)

You're born about 4,600 years ago in Ur, a city of mud brick on the Euphrates, in what's now southern Iraq. Your father cuts shell inlay for the palace, your mother sings in the temple of Nanna, the moon god, and you can't hold a note. But you never lose the beat. This is the life of a lyre player in Queen Puabi's household in ancient Ur, told in second person: a teacher who raps your knuckles with a reed, a king's funeral where the music goes on underground and nobody comes back up the ramp, a queen who can't sleep without your slow song, a groom who talks to his oxen, a lyre with a gold bull's head, a winter when everybody is suddenly kind to you, a list of names read out the morning after the queen dies, and what Leonard Woolley found in her pit in 1927-8. SOURCES: C. Leonard Woolley, Ur of the Chaldees (1929); A. Baadsgaard et al., Antiquity 85 (2011); W. B. Hafford, Expedition 60.1 (2018); Penn Museum records. NOTES ON PRECISION: The heroine and all dialogue invented. Puabi real. Details follow Woolley's excavation account and subsequent scholarship. The death is never shown. Everyone in this video is a stick figure and the main character is invented. No likeness of any real person is depicted or implied.