The oldest and most spectacular examples are to be found not in Egypt, but further to the east, in ancient Babylonia, where, on the site of the Biblical city of Ur of the Chaldees, the mass interments - the so-called Royal Tombs, especially the tomb of Queen Pu-abi - have yielded a fantastic profusion of gold jewellery dating from about 2500 bc, when Ur was the most powerful city-state in Mesopotamia.