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.

In 1925, the Woolleys knew they were excavating a Sumerian site that existed in 500 BCE but Ennigaldi’s museum of much older artifacts filled in major historical gaps about an era that had no previous record.

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

[–] Capybara_mdp@reddthat.com 2 points 1 week ago

Thank you!!