664 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1959 
The most primitive textiles, the ancient reed mats and baskets, also 
survived, made by the inhabitants of Mesopotamia in unchanging pat- 
terns as long as there were Sumerians and even long after they 
departed. Reed mats were used for wrapping the bodies of the poor 
for simple burials. Woolley (1950) writes: 
It is an astonishing thing that in soil wherein so much that seems enduring 
decays entirely, a fragile thing like a piece of matting, though it lose all its 
substance and can be blown away with a breath, yet retains its appearance 
and its texture and can with care be exposed in such condition that a photo- 
graph of it looks like one of the real matting which perished 4,500 years ago. 
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS 
Music, like dancing, had ritual aspects in the early days of Sumer. 
The harp...and the clang of cymbals accompanied the chanting of 
prayers in Sumerian temples. The small harp was sufficient for the private 
chapel of the queen. The magnificent harps of gold and silver discovered of 
late in the royal tombs must have been used in official ceremonies. ... The 
cymbals of Shubad’s time [ca. 2500 B.C.] were flat metal pieces, straight or 
horn-shaped, which the dancers struck in cadence. They are seen in the hands 
of the kid dancing behind the scorpion man; in the hands of a cymbal player, 
on a gold cylinder seal of the high priestess buried in the domed vault dis- 
covered last winter; in the hands of a woman musician of the Kish inlaid 
plaques. Curiously enough, the museum has two such plates of copper brought 
from Fara 30 years ago... most likely Sumerian cymbals of Queen Shubad’s 
age. They are curved, 35 centimeters long and 4 in width at the larger end. 
(Legrain, 1929b.) 
The large drum, which is often depicted by Sumerian lapidaries, 
also must have been an instrument of ritual music; later texts speak 
of driving away the evil spirits with the sound of the drum. 
Ficure 40.—Masquerade; animals as musicians. Inlay picture on a large harp from Ur. 
