Piercings in Mesopotamia: The Gold Earrings of Ur
In 1928, a British archaeologist opened an intact tomb in southern Iraq and found a woman who had been buried around 4,500 years earlier, still wearing her jewelry. Among it: a pair of large crescent-shaped gold earrings.
The Royal Cemetery of Ur is one of the richest sources we have on early ear ornaments — not because it's the oldest site, but because it's the most complete.
What Woolley Found
C. Leonard Woolley began excavating the Royal Cemetery at Ur in 1922, in a joint expedition between the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Early digging near the ziggurat turned up so many burials and so much gold that the workmen started calling the spot the "gold trench."
Over the next decade Woolley uncovered somewhere between 1,800 and 2,000 burials. Most were simple pits with little in the way of offerings. He classified 16 as royal, based on their built structure, the wealth inside them, and the presence of attendants buried alongside the main occupant.
The tombs date to the Early Dynastic IIIA period, roughly 2600–2500 BCE — a high point of Sumerian culture, in a city about 140 miles southeast of Babylon.
The timing is worth noticing. Howard Carter had opened Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, and Woolley's finds arrived while that discovery was still dominating the newspapers. Ur was constantly compared to Egypt, which shaped both how the story was told and, arguably, how the excavation itself was carried out.
Puabi's Earrings
Tomb PG 800 was the exceptional one: undisturbed, never looted, with its occupant still wearing her jewelry.
She was identified by a cylinder seal carved in cuneiform with her name and title. The signs were first read as "Shub-ad" and are now read in Akkadian as Pu-abi. Her title, eresh, means queen — and notably, the seal names no husband. That is unusual for a woman's seal of the period and suggests she held status in her own right.
She lay on a wooden bier. Here's what she was wearing:
- A pair of large lunate — crescent-shaped — gold earrings. Substantial pieces, not delicate ones.
- An elaborate headdress: 20 gold leaves, gold ribbons, two strands of lapis lazuli and carnelian beads, and a tall gold comb.
- Chokers and necklaces of gold, silver, lapis, carnelian and agate.
- A beaded cape covering her upper body from shoulders to belt.
- Ten rings on her fingers.
Near her head, on what appears to have been a table, lay a diadem made of thousands of small lapis beads with gold pendants shaped as plants and animals.
The crescent earring is the piece that matters most here. It's large, it's gold, it was clearly designed to hang from a pierced lobe, and it remains one of the best-preserved examples of early ear ornamentation anywhere.
Not the Oldest — But the Clearest
It's worth being precise, because Ur is often called the earliest gold jewelry and it isn't.
The Varna Necropolis in Bulgaria dates to roughly 4600–4200 BCE — around two thousand years before Ur — and holds the oldest worked gold yet found, including pieces catalogued as earrings. Neolithic jade jue from China are older still. We cover both in our history of body jewelry materials and piercings in ancient China.
What makes Ur exceptional isn't age. It's completeness. An undisturbed burial with the jewelry still in place on the body tells you how things were worn, in what combination, and by whom — something fragments recovered from settlement debris can never quite show.
The Trade Network Behind the Jewelry
The materials say as much as the objects themselves.
Lapis lazuli came from Afghanistan — specifically the Badakhshan mines, thousands of miles from Ur across mountains and desert. Carnelian came from the Indus Valley region. The gold and silver came from somewhere else again.
None of it is local. Every piece of Puabi's jewelry represents a supply chain running across a large part of the ancient world, in the third millennium BCE, simply to make ornaments for a single burial.
The craftsmanship matches the distance. Modern analysis of the Ur goldwork, using X-ray fluorescence and microscopy, has been used to reconstruct Sumerian alloying and soldering techniques. The metalwork is sophisticated enough to be studied as engineering in its own right.
Who Wore Ear Ornaments?
This is the part that quietly changes the picture, and it comes from the attendants rather than the royals.
The royal tombs contained additional burials — people interred alongside the principal occupant. Woolley documented 25 in Puabi's tomb, and 74 in the burial known as the Great Death Pit. The evidence points to these being deliberate ritual deaths, a grim aspect of the site that dominated the press coverage at the time.
What matters for our purposes is what they were wearing. The attendants had headdresses and gold ear ornaments too. At least twenty women in the Great Death Pit wore comparable headdresses — Woolley recorded finding so many that he eventually grew tired of them.
So ear ornaments at Ur weren't limited to a queen. They extended through a court, worn by people who were not themselves royal. That's a meaningfully different picture from the idea that "ear piercing was a royal privilege," which is how ancient jewelry is often described.
A Recurring Motif
One decorative element turns up throughout the site: the eight-pointed rosette, appearing on headdresses, plaques and other objects across Sumerian material culture.
What it meant isn't settled. It recurs consistently enough to be clearly significant, but the specific symbolism hasn't been established — one of many cases where the objects survive and the meaning doesn't.
Where the Objects Are Now
The finds were divided between the sponsoring institutions. Most are in the British Museum in London and the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, with a smaller number in the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad.
That division reflects the excavation agreements of the 1920s and sits inside an ongoing conversation about where archaeological material from that era belongs — a live question, and one we mention rather than try to settle.
What Ur Adds to the Picture
Three things stand out.
Ear ornaments were already substantial and deliberate by 2600 BCE. Not experimental — large crescent gold earrings made by skilled specialists, part of a carefully coordinated ensemble.
They weren't exclusively royal. Court attendants wore them too.
They were worth long-distance trade. Lapis from Afghanistan and carnelian from the Indus reached southern Iraq because someone wanted to wear them.
How the practice looked elsewhere in the ancient world is covered in our guides to ancient Egypt, ancient Greece and ancient Rome, with the broader arc in our history of body piercing.
Gold, Then and Now
The Sumerians chose gold for reasons that still hold: it doesn't corrode, it doesn't tarnish, and it sits well against skin. They had no modern framework for biocompatibility — that arrived only in the twentieth century — but they had clearly noticed what worked.
For a healing piercing today the accepted materials are implant-grade titanium, solid 14K or 18K gold, or niobium. Browse our 14K gold and implant-grade titanium ranges.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Queen Puabi?
A high-ranking Sumerian woman buried at Ur around 2600–2500 BCE, identified by a cylinder seal giving her name and the title eresh, meaning queen. The seal names no husband, which is unusual and suggests she held independent status. Her tomb, PG 800, was found intact by Leonard Woolley.
What earrings was Puabi wearing?
A pair of large lunate — crescent-shaped — gold earrings, alongside a headdress of gold leaves, lapis and carnelian bead strands, a gold comb, chokers, necklaces and ten finger rings.
Are the Ur earrings the oldest ever found?
No. The Varna Necropolis in Bulgaria, at roughly 4600–4200 BCE, holds older worked gold including pieces catalogued as earrings, and Neolithic jade ear ornaments from China are older still. Ur is exceptional for being an undisturbed burial with the jewelry still in position, not for its age.
Where did the materials come from?
Lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and carnelian from the Indus Valley region, brought thousands of miles to southern Iraq. The materials in a single burial represent a trade network spanning much of the ancient world.
Did ordinary people in Ur wear earrings?
The evidence shows ear ornaments beyond the royal occupants — the attendants buried in the royal tombs wore headdresses and gold ear ornaments too, at least twenty of them in the Great Death Pit alone. So the practice extended through a court rather than being confined to a queen.
Who excavated the Royal Cemetery of Ur?
C. Leonard Woolley, beginning in 1922, in a joint British Museum and University of Pennsylvania Museum expedition. He uncovered roughly 1,800 to 2,000 burials and classified 16 as royal.
Where can you see the Ur jewelry?
Mostly at the British Museum in London and the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, with a smaller number of pieces in the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad.
This article is for general information only and is not medical advice. Archaeological interpretations are revised as new evidence emerges; where questions remain open, we have said so.