Ram in a Thicket

Leonard Woolley excavated the Royal Cemetery at Ur between 1922 and 1934, and in 1928 he uncovered two similar figures in a deposit he associated with a woman he called Queen Puabi. The name "Ram in a Thicket" came from Woolley himself, who connected the figures to the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. The connection is not supported by any Sumerian text, and the term is now understood as a romantic flourish rather than an identification. The figures are more accurately described as goats, not rams, and they are not caught in anything — they are standing upright, forelegs resting on the branches of a stylised plant.

What Woolley found was not a sculpture. It was a scatter of materials: fragments of gold foil, pieces of lapis lazuli, shell, and red limestone, all lying in the soil where a wooden core had decayed. The organic structure had collapsed, and the inlays had fallen with it. Woolley's task was not simply to clean and record the object. It was to infer what it had been, and then to rebuild it.

He stabilised the metal with molten wax, which he poured over the fragments to hold them in place during lifting. Once the pieces were out of the ground, he constructed a new wooden armature and reassembled the inlays onto it, guided by their positions in the soil and by the shapes of the surviving pieces. The result is a hybrid: ancient surface, modern support. The gold, lapis, shell and limestone are Sumerian. The wood, the wax, and the arrangement are twentieth-century interpretations.

This is not unusual. Most composite objects from waterlogged, crushed, or burned contexts require similar interventions. Metal corrodes, wood rots, textiles disintegrate, and adhesives fail. What survives is often a kit of parts, not a coherent whole. The archaeologist's role is to recover the parts and propose a reconstruction. The proposal is based on evidence — the position of fragments, traces of organic materials, comparisons with better-preserved examples — but it remains a proposal. Another archaeologist, working with the same fragments, might make different decisions.

Woolley was working in an era when reconstruction was standard practice, and when the priority was to present objects in a form that museum visitors could understand. He did not publish a detailed account of his restoration process, and the extent of his interventions was not always made explicit in labels or catalogues. That has changed. Contemporary practice requires documentation of every stage of conservation, and museums now distinguish clearly between original material and restoration. But the objects themselves remain hybrids, and the Ram in a Thicket is a particularly clear example. You are looking at Sumerian craftsmanship, but you are also looking at Woolley's interpretation of it.