Queen Puabi of Ur was buried in gold, and the attendants Woolley said drank poison were killed with blows to the head

From 1922 Leonard Woolley dug about 2,000 burials at Ur for the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum. In tomb PG 800 lay a woman of about 40. A cylinder seal pinned to her garment named her "Pu-abi, nin," Queen Puabi; the seal names no husband. She wore about 2 kilograms of gold in her headdress and a cape of 3,569 beads. Three other bodies lay in her stone chamber^†, and armed men and adorned women lay in the pit outside. The nearby Great Death Pit, PG 1237, held 74 bodies and no chamber. Woolley proposed that the attendants walked in and drank poison from the cups found beside them. Penn Museum later CT-scanned two heads Woolley had lifted: a young woman from the Great Death Pit and a soldier in a copper helmet from beside the King's Grave. Both had small round fractures from blows by a sharp instrument. Re-examination found the bodies had been heated and treated with mercury sulphide, likely to slow decay through long funeral rites, then dressed and laid in rows. Physical anthropologist Janet Monge said the servants probably had little choice. About 20,000 registered finds were divided: half to the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, a quarter each to London and Philadelphia. Pieces were looted from the Iraq Museum in 2003. Puabi's skeleton is in the Natural History Museum, London^†.