The Ancient Mesopotamian Urban Community of Ur

The Ancient Mesopotamian Urban Community of Ur The Mesopotamian city of Ur, known as Tell al-Muqayyar and the biblical Ur of the Chaldees), was an important Sumerian city-state between about 2025-1738 BC. Located near the modern town of Nasiriyah in far southern Iraq, on a now-abandoned channel of the Euphrates river, Ur covered about 25 hectares (60 acres), surrounded by a city wall. When British archaeologist Charles Leonard Woolley excavated in the 1920s and 1930s, the city was a tell- a great artificial hill over seven meters (23 feet) high composed of centuries of building and rebuilding mud-brick structures, one stacked on top of another. Chronology of Southern Mesopotamia The following chronology of Southern Mesopotamia is simplified somewhat from that suggested by the School of American Research Advanced Seminar in 2001, based primarily on pottery and other artifact styles and reported in Ur 2010. Old Babylonian (Late Bronze Age, 1800-1600 BC)Isin-Larsa Dynasties (Middle Bronze Age, 2000-1800 BC)Ur III (2100-2000 BC)Akkadian (Early Bronze Age, 2300-2100 BC)Early Dynastic I-III (Sumerian, 3000-2300 BC)Late Uruk (Late Chalcolithic, 3300-3000 BC)Middle Uruk (3800-3300 BC)Early Uruk  (4100-3800 BC)Late Ubaid (4400-4100 BC)Ubaid Period (5900-4400 BC) The earliest known occupations at Ur city date to the Ubaid period of the late 6th millennium BC. By about 3000 BC, Ur covered a total area of 15 ha (37 ac) including early temple sites. Ur reached its maximum size of 22 ha (54 ac) during the Early Dynastic Period of the early 3rd millennium BC  when Ur was one of the most important capitals of the Sumerian civilization. Ur continued as a minor capital for Sumer and succeeding civilizations, but during the 4th century BC, the Euphrates changed course, and the city was abandoned. Living in Sumerian Ur During Urs heyday in the Early Dynastic period, four main residential areas of the city included homes made of baked mud brick foundations arranged along long, narrow, winding streets and alleyways. Typical houses included an open central courtyard with two or more main living rooms in which the families resided. Each house had a domestic chapel where cult structures and the family burial vault was kept. Kitchens, stairways, workrooms, lavatories were all part of the household structures. The houses were packed in very tightly together, with exterior walls of one household immediately abutting the next one. Although the cities appear very closed off, the interior courtyards and wide streets provided light, and the close-set houses protected the exposure of the exterior walls to heating especially during the hot summers. Royal Cemetery Between 1926 and 1931, Woolleys investigations at Ur focused on the Royal Cemetery, where he eventually excavated approximately 2,100 graves, within an area of 70x55 m (230x180 ft): Woolley estimated there were up to three times as many burials originally. Of those, 660 were determined to be dated to the Early Dynastic IIIA (2600-2450 BC)period, and Woolley designated 16 of those as royal tombs. These tombs had a stone-built chamber with multiple rooms, where the principal royal burial was placed. Retainerspeople who presumably served the royal personage and were buried with him or herwere found in a pit outside of the chamber or adjacent to it. The largest of these pits, called death pits by Woolley, held the remains of 74 people. Woolley came to the conclusion that the attendants had willingly drunk some drug and then lay down in rows to go with their master or mistress. The most spectacular royal graves in Urs Royal Cemetery were those of Private Grave 800, belonging to a richly adorned queen identified as Puabi or Pu-abum, approximately 40 years old; and PG 1054 with an unidentified female. The largest death pits were PG 789, called the Kings Grave, and PG 1237, the Great Death Pit. the tomb chamber of 789 had been robbed in antiquity, but its death pit contained the bodies of 63 retainers. PG 1237 held 74 retainers, most of which were four rows of elaborately dressed women arranged around a set of musical instruments. Recent analysis (Baadsgaard and colleagues) of a sample of skulls from several pits at Ur suggests that, rather than being poisoned, the retainers were killed by blunt force trauma, as ritual sacrifices. After they were killed, an attempt was made to preserve the bodies, using a combination of heat treatment and the application of mercury; and then the bodies were dressed in their finery and laid in rows in the pits. Archaeology at the City of Ur Archaeologists associated with Ur included J.E. Taylor, H.C. Rawlinson, Reginald Campbell Thompson, and, most importantly, C. Leonard Woolley. Woolleys investigations of Ur lasted 12 years from 1922 and 1934, including five years focusing on the Royal Cemetery of Ur, including the graves of Queen Puabi and King Meskalamdug. One of his primary assistants was Max Mallowan, then married to mystery writer Agatha Christie, who visited Ur and based her Hercule Poirot novel   Murder in Mesopotamia on the excavations there. Important discoveries at Ur included the Royal Cemetery, where rich Early Dynastic burials were found by Woolley in the 1920s; and thousands of clay tablets impressed with cuneiform writing which describe in detail the lives and thoughts of Urs inhabitants. Sources Baadsgaard A, Monge J, Cox S, and Zettler RL. 2011.  Human sacrifice and intentional corpse preservation in the Royal Cemetery of Ur.  Antiquity 85(327):27-42.Dickson DB. 2006. Public Transcripts Expressed in Theatres of Cruelty: the Royal Graves at Ur in Mesopotamia.  Cambridge Archaeological Journal  16(2):123–144. Jansen M, Aulbach S, Hauptmann A, Hà ¶fer HE, Klein S, Krà ¼ger M, and Zettler RL. 2016. Platinum group placer minerals in ancient gold artifacts – Geochemistry and osmium isotopes of inclusions in Early Bronze Age gold from Ur/Mesopotamia. Journal of Archaeological Science 68:12-23.Kenoyer JM, Price TD, and Burton JH. 2013. A new approach to tracking connections between the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia: initial results of strontium isotope analyses from Harappa and Ur. Journal of Archaeological Science 40(5):2286-2297.Miller NF. 2013. Symbols of Fertility and Abundance in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, Iraq. American Journal of Archaeology 117(1):127- 133. Oates J, McMahon A, Karsgaard P, Al Quntar S, and Ur J. 2007. Early Mesopotamian urbanism: a new view from the north.  Antiquity  81:585-600. Rawcliffe C, Aston M, Lowings A, Sharp MC, and Watkins KG. 2005. Laser Engraving Gulf Pearl ShellAiding the Reconstruction of the Lyre of Ur.  Lacona VI.Shepperson M. 2009.  Planning for the sun: urban forms as a Mesopotamian response to the sun.  World Archaeology  41(3):363–378.Tengberg M, Potts DT, and Francfort H-P. 2008.  The golden leaves of Ur.  Antiquity  82:925-936.Ur J. 2014. Households and the emergence of cities in ancient Mesopotamia. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 24(2):249-268.Ur J, Karsgaard P, and Oates J. 2011. The Spatial Dimensions of Early Mesopotamian Urbanism: The Tell Brak Suburban Survey, 2003-2006. Iraq 73:1-19.

How To Update All Social Networks At Once With CoSchedule

How To Update All Social Networks At Once With Does this sound like your experience with social media management so far? Youve been logging in and out of multiple social media accounts. Youve been posting the same message on all of them (and trying to do it all at the same time). And youve been getting mediocre engagement despite tons of effort. But you know there  has to be a better way. Right? After all, that process ^ isnt very sustainable or efficient. Youre looking for: An efficient + effective way to manage all of your social networks in one place because getting organized makes you feel (and look) like a marketing rock star. And that way needs to help  you not only update all social networks at once, but help you post well beyond now to build engagement consistently with an easy process (and without the constant hassle youre working through now). So lets explore the best way to find your app that can manage and update all your social networks in one place, shall we? How To Update All Social Networks At Once (+ Organize *Every* Account)1. Pick Your Social Networks + Accounts You may already post to several social networks. Thats great! This step is about building  a social media accounts list to help you understand what youre doing well now, while also understanding the social media engagement opportunities youre not currently taking advantage of. Depending on your company, you likely have both business accounts and personal accounts. Heres an overview of the accounts you could manage with an  all-in-one-social media app: Consider this a checklist for you to explore: Could any of these options present an opportunity for you to better reach your audience? Business Social Media Accounts: [ ] Instagram account [ ] Facebook page [ ] Facebook groups [ ] LinkedIn company profile [ ] Twitter handles [ ] Pinterest profile [ ] Google+ page Personal Social Media Accounts: [ ] Instagram account [ ] Facebook profile [ ] Facebook group [ ] LinkedIn profile [ ] Twitter handles [ ] Tumblr blog [ ] Pinterest profile The point of looking into your social media accounts list is to strategically choose  the networks and accounts you can easily manage in an all-in-one social media app. It turns out, is an app that posts to all social media. As a social media marketing calendar, helps you not only update all social media in one place, it enables you to update all social networks at once (and long after posting just  right now). As you use that checklist to decide what networks and accounts youd like to manage, just keep in mind that you can easily organize your posting process for all of them with . :) Easily organize your posting process for every social network with .2. Manage Social Networks In One Place Now that you know what accounts youd like to manage, its time to choose your app  to manage multiple social networks in one place. For the sake of example, lets say youve chosen as your social media calendar. You made a good choice! ;) Its time to integrate  your social media accounts into the one tool. Dont worry, its a simple process: Log in to the social network + account youd like to manage with . Cruise over to your Settings in and select Social Profiles. Connect your  social account as a Public Social Profile (so your team can manage the messages for the account) or Personal Social Profile (so only you see the messages for your account). ^ Its seriously that easy. 3. Write Messages For Each Social Media Account When you update all social networks at once, youre posting to  multiple accounts at the same time. This practice can be particularly useful  when you share brand new content like blog posts, webinar landing pages, or have a strategic announcement from your brand. In these instances, its a best practice to change up your message for each account. This helps you optimize your messaging for the different networks while keeping the folks who follow you on multiple social networks happy + engaged. This way, you dont come off as blasting one message across all of your social networks (which comes off as a lazy social media engagement play). So whats the best way to do this? Start by writing one message for each specific account, optimizing your message for the specific network: Then, create + optimize a visual (image, graphic, GIF, or video) for each of your messages for the specific networks: You can use the Social Templates  + Helpers features to easily organize the message creation and scheduling process in . First,  start a new Social Template. A Social Template helps you create a posting schedule for all of your accounts that you can easily reuse  over and over again to easily schedule dozens of social media messages in a matter of minutes. From here, you will create Social Helpers, then add those Social Helpers into a posting schedule template. There are Social Helpers for text, images, and videos. Start by naming your Social Helpers after the specific social media accounts they will match up with. Remember, youre building a reusable template at this point, so you can think of this like building form fields you will later fill in with the actual message creative for a specific campaign. Once youve added a text helper and image/video helper for each of your accounts, you can then build those as a posting schedule template. Save that  Social Template, and then apply it in a piece of content, blog post, or social campaign on your social media calendar. Now you can fill in the creative for each social media message for your specific accounts once, apply your Social Template, and know your messages will send when you publish your content. You can see in this example that  youll update all of your social media accounts at once, complete with unique messages optimized to increase engagement on  every network. 4. Schedule All Social Networks In One Place When you update all social networks at once, its still possible that your followers who werent online at that specific time wont see your messages. Thats why its common for marketers to schedule messages and  post to all social media long after the initial campaign. When youve written multiple messages to post to all social media, its efficient to reuse your hard work as part of a social media schedule to share your message a week, two weeks, a month, and sometimes even longer well after you post your first messages. ^ There are two great ways to reuse your messages efficiently with . Did you know you can reuse social messages efficiently with @?Way #1: Automate  Your Evergreen Social Media Messages After you post your social media messages, will show you the messages that get the most engagement. These are great opportunities to add to ReQueue, the most intelligent way to  fill in the gaps in your social media posting schedule. Simply toggle the messages that have already gotten lots of engagement. Choose your ReQueue group. And forget about it. ReQueue will smartly share that social media message again at the best time for engagement. Way #2: Add More Messages Into Your Social Template You already created a Social Template that updates all of your social accounts  at once, complete with messages optimized perfectly for engagement on each specific network. You can easily add more messages into your Social Template to continue to spread the word long after your initial update. How Will You Organize Your Social Media Updates? helps you manage multiple social media accounts and organize posting schedules as campaigns. It helps you collaborate efficiently as a team while boosting your effectiveness from your social media strategy. Check it out! Get started today with your 14-day free trial of the #1 best-selling social media marketing calendar in the world.