The Music of Ur

Reading Elif Batuman's piece in the current New Yorker about Ur and the civilizations that preceded this Biblical home of Abraham put me in mind of a harp my grandfather made. A link to it is here . It's the lapis, gold, and tiger maple one. That's tuned accurately to the scale used in Sumerian harps. The museum calls it a "bull-headed lyre," which when you say it aloud, sounds like what my grandfather would have called my father. Really. My mother's father made this is in his "workroom" which was the basement of a little ranch house. He was kind of a genius. He tried to get me to eat borscht. I wouldn't. But you should see the jewelry he made. This harp is at UC Berkeley, in the museum.