Art Resource/Museum of Iraq, Baghdad

A maidservant to a queen of Sumer, buried with her mistress in a vast royal tomb at Ur sometime between 2600 and 2500 B.C., may have looked like this modern reconstruction. The girl’s spectacular adornments are genuine, found in the tomb in 1927 by Sir Leonard Woolley. Woolley describes his discovery of the girl’s skeleton: she was “wearing the gala head-dress of lapis and carnelian beads from which hung golden pendants in the form of beech leaves, great lunate ear-rings of gold, silver ‘combs’ like the palm of a hand with three fingers tipped with flowers whose petals are inlaid with lapis, gold, and shell, and necklaces of lapis and gold.”