Before Virtual Reality: Visualising Ancient Sumerian Luxury in the Great Depression

This project's starting point is a collection of 67 watercolours (and associated correspondence) showing several 100 objectsfrom the famous 'Royal Cemetery' of ancient Ur, excavated by Sir Leonard Woolley (1880-1960) in southern Iraq in 1922-34. The archaeological illustrator Mary Louise Baker (1872-1972) painted them for his two-volume excavation report. They are now owned by Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG), part of Birmingham Museums Trust. It is difficult to recapture, nearly 90 years later, the worldwide impact of Woolley's discoveries of the 4500-year-old 'Royal Cemetery' at Ur, supposed birthplace of the biblical patriarch Abraham. In 1927-8, just as public interest was beginning to fade in Carter's opening of pharaoh Tutankhamun's tomb five years earlier, this ancient city in the newly created British Mandate of Iraq started to yield finds that were just as spectacular. Woolley's team uncovered a sequence of vaulted tombs whose elite occupants, accompanied by their retainers, had gone to their deaths adorned with jewellery and equipped for an energetic afterlife with an astonishing range of beautiful objects made with expensive imported materials. In advance of the development of reliable colour photography, he engaged Baker, then employed by dig co-sponsor University of Pennsylvania Museum, to document the richly coloured finds for publication, including his wife Katharine Woolley's famous but controversial reconstruction of the headdress of Queen Pu-abi. Baker's vivid, technically accurate watercolour images were widely reproduced in academic and popular publications alike. They chimed perfectly with the flapper aesthetic of the interwar period, and probably influenced it. Yet powerful and resonant as these images are, they have never been subject to academic study.
The CDA project will thus explore the production and reception of Baker's watercolours from several different angles. First, it will investigate how Baker's work built on, or responded to, the prior archaeological visualisation strategies of Leonard and Katharine Woolley, as well as Baker herself. Second, it will explore the ways in which Baker's watercolours were deployed in publications and museum displays in Britain, the United States, and further afield. This part of the project will seek to understand the relationship between objects in their archaeological context, text and image technologies such as photography, technical drawing and watercolour in a cross-section of books and exhibitions. Third, the project will situate Baker's aesthetic within the wider visual culture of the time. Images of ancient Sumerian luxury tapped very effectively into decadent flapper culture of the late 1920s. In 1929, the Wall Street Crash precipitated a plunge into worldwide economic depression. How did public responses to Baker and Woolley's work change in these new circumstances: was it ever more important to escape into a fantastical luxurious past, or were ancient symbols of wealth now repudiated?
At UCL's History Department, student Hélène Maloigne will benefit from Robson's expertise in ancient Iraq and the history of its archaeology, and can call on specialists in interwar America. Robson also holds a related CDA with the British Museum, Woolley's other co-sponsor. The two projects will be mutually supportive.
At BMAG, Maloigne will help to catalogue Baker's watercolours, and participate in a programme of public engagement that will inform their display and public presentation. Components will include an online presence, as well as community engagement and learning. Birmingham has the most diverse and the youngest population of any city in Europe, including migrants from Iraq. BMAG aims to provide a space in which diverse communities can explain themselves to and learn about each other. The study of ancient civilisations, and their contribution to the present through different strands of
heritage, is an important part of this strategy.