this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025
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Ennigaldi-Nanna lived in the mid 6th c. BCE, she was the daughter of Nabonidus, last king of the Neo-Babylonian empire just before Cyrus steamrolled through the whole place. She was the high priestess of Ur - and the first museum curator in History. Her dad, like many other kings between Sumer and Babylon, went around rebuilding temples that were up to 1500 years old in his time, but he picked up more stuff to bring back home.
Ennigaldi-Nanna built herself a special room with shelves where she lined up objects that were dated between 1400 and 2000 BCE, having them cleaned and restored, and she placed clay tablets next to them to explain what they were, where they came from, who made them. In three languages. In a room open to the public.
It's believed that she was present on sites when those objects were picked up. Some of those were from Ur, the city of her temple - her position as high priestess in that temple had been abandonned for a few hundred years before her temple was restored (because her dad was a big fan of the Moon god Nanna and this was his main temple for over a thousand years), so she may have just needed to look around and pick a shovel and a good brush. Nabonidus is also considered "the first serious archaeologist", antiquarian and antique restorer.
Some of the artifacts from Sumer and Babylon that are most famous today, oldest and best preserved, come from that museum. We found a 2500 year old museum, and we put it in a museum.
Is Ennigalda any relation to Inagadda-Davida?
No. That song name comes from one band member trying to say "In ~~a garden of life~~ the garden of Eden" while being ~~high~~ drunk as fuck. Then the name stuck.
EDIT: thanks for the correction. While checking, I also saw that he was drunk, not high.
*"In the garden of Eden"
Thanks, now I have a 17 minute song stuck in my head.
Just be glad you're not playing it on a church organ.
Did England put the museum-museum in a museum?
Thats amazing! Do you have any sources or papers on this temple? (I would love to share with my teacher friends!)
Wikipedia is a good start
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennigaldi-Nanna%27s_museum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennigaldi-Nanna
Then the history of Ur in general is relevant. For instance, an item listed as part of the museum is a statue of Shulgi, who was king of Ur around 2100 BCE and rebuilt the very same temple to Nanna. One of his statues (statuette) served as foundation nail for the rebuilding of the temple - Sumerians rebuilding temples involved digging down to the foundation to find the original foundation marker, and starting over leaving a new foundation marker by the new king, and we know Shulgi used a statuette of himself for several temples he rebuilt (they all look the same but we found several across different temples). I don't know what specific Shulgi statue Ennigaldi had, but she might have had, for example, a foundation nail recovered when Nabonidus rebuilt the same temple in the same way.
I don't know off the top of my head where to find a list longer than 3 entries for the items she had, unfortunately, I only find non-specific mentions of tablets, jewelry, carved statues, mace heads, kudurrus. Wikipedia only has a vague few items and says they're in a museum in Iraq, but Ur was one of the major cities and we have a lot of things from there in good condition. Including statues of Shulgi, and of course tablets and jewelry. Obviously the biggest problem is that a bunch of items landed in private collections for a while after Leonard Woolley dug up the museum, and the tablets that Ennigaldi wrote for them were separated from the items themselves, so we know from the display explanations what sort of items she had, but it's a lot harder to trace the exact items themselves - but we do have them between private collections and museums.
I don't know any paper that specifically talks about the museum, beyond Woolley's original notes. A few books talk about it, but that's usually less academic (Wikipedia has some links). This article looks like a good write-up.
It's from back when they didn't know how old Sumer really was (the first major Mesopotamian cities were found when people in the late 19th c. were trying to prove that the Bible was real and was the beginning of time, instead they found Sumer and doubled the length of known civilized History), so imagine finding a museum that existed in a period you thought was the beginning of history, and that museum held pieces that were nearly as ancient to them as the museum was to you... In 3000 years, people believing Trump was the beginning of civilization will dig up the Penn Museum and the Louvre and oh boy.
Another good link
Thank you!!