A Secret Room Was Found Beneath the Ziggurat of Ur — And the Body Inside Shocked Researchers

A body lies on a stone platform twenty feet beneath the Ziggurat of Ur. Six feet tall in a culture where men averaged five foot two, hands folded across the chest, and according to the man who opened the chamber in 1923, the platform was still warm to the touch after four thousand years. The bedrock walls around it are polished smooth, there is no dust on the floor, and the robes on the body are woven from a fabric with a metallic sheen that no Bronze Age loom could produce. A stone tablet propped against the wall reads: he who was sent from the sky now sleeps beneath the house of Nanna. The translator refused to sign his name to the official record. Three of the men who entered that chamber were dead within five years.