Susan Pollock's Analysis

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Mesopotamia, a land that mystifies and enchants people from ancient times to present. The people of this ancient civilization left behind an extraordinary amount of records and artefacts for people to marvel over for centuries. Even with an abundance of written record, there are still many mysteries to be solved about this ancient culture. One of the biggest mysteries are located within the Royal Cemetery of Ur. Susan Pollock, wrote an essay for the Cambridge Archaeological Journal in 1991 regarding the evidence found and her interpretation of the Royal Cemetery and funerary practices of the Mesopotamians. Pollock believes that despite the name, the Royal Cemetery of Ur given by Sir Woolley (the original excavator), not all of the bodies buried within the cemetery are royal. It is believed that the royalty was set apart from the others by containing human sacrifices within their tombs. Pollock believes that human sacrifices were only a short term trend. These sacrifices were not necessarily dire for the afterlife, but rather a scare tactic to show their people the amount of power …show more content…

If the practice of human sacrifice had anything to do with religious context, I think we would have seen more of it throughout this culture’s history. If it were anything but a political scare tactic for the people, more leaders would have killed more and included more in their tombs throughout the ages. I also think that the elites along with the royals would have imprisoned slaves and taken them as human sacrifices upon death, if it were that much more helpful to them passing through the gates of the underworld. Susan Pollock did a terrific job with this essay by describing the ideas of death that the Mesopotamians had and supporting her theory with artefacts and past research done by other

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