The story that emerged from the excavation of ancient Mesopotamian burial pits caused an international sensation: a bevy of sacrificial maidens drinking poison to join their ruler in the afterlife.

A lurid tale, but now, according to new evidence by University of Pennsylvania researchers, a false one. An analysis of CT scans indicates the ladies-in-waiting and other funereal attendants were simply cracked on the head with a pickax.

This oldest of cold cases represents just some of the fresh research that Penn's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology is highlighting in an exhibit of royal treasures from the city of Ur, opening tomorrow.

The items were unearthed by the British Museum and Penn in the 1920s and '30s with the permission of the then-fledgling nation of Iraq. They have been displayed at various times since their discovery, including on a national tour in the 1990s. But previous exhibits were geared more toward an art-museum audience, with a focus on the beauty of the objects.

The new exhibit, "Iraq's Ancient Past," strives to put the pieces in their historical context, with new scholarship supplemented by the sciences. Chemistry, botany, and forensic pathology all were brought to bear in fleshing out the story of these treasures of long ago.

The display has a bittersweet element, as many other objects from the same excavations remain locked away from public view, in the Iraq National Museum.

Thousands of items from that sister collection were stolen in the early days of the Iraq war; many have since been recovered.

Still, scholars there have neither the time nor the resources for the kind of scholarship that went into the Philadelphia exhibit, said Donny George Youkhanna, the former Iraq museum director who is now at Stony Brook University. He came to Penn on Monday for a sneak preview.

"This proves for me that we are not done with what we can learn," the Iraqi scholar said of the new research. "The more advanced technology we have, we can find more and more information."

Most impressive, he said, was the forensic analysis of two skulls found in the death pits - one from a maiden decked in gold jewelry, the other from a helmeted soldier.

When discovered decades ago, the heads had been flattened into a mass of fragments, apparently the result of a tomb collapse, so analysis was tricky at best. Leonard Woolley, leader of the original excavation, found cups near some of the dozens of victims and guessed they had willingly drunk poison.

In the exhibit is a 1934 Inquirer article describing Woolley's theory: "Grim Tragedy of Wicked Queen Shubad's 100 Poisoned Slaves."

But CT scans conducted at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania revealed two kinds of bone fractures in the skulls, said Janet Monge, acting curator of skeletal collections at the Penn Museum.

The majority came after the bone was already dry and brittle, suggesting the tomb collapse that flattened the heads occurred long after death.

"It's almost like breaking a pane of glass," said Penn undergraduate Samantha Cox, who assisted in the research.

But there were also distinct radiating fractures of the kind that result from a violent blow to the head, Monge said.

Those breaks clearly came around the time of death, when the bone still contained collagen and had some give to it, she said.

The bones also display evidence of heating and treatment with mercury, which are thought to be part of a mummification process before an elaborate funerary rite, said Richard Zettler, cocurator of the exhibit.

Another object subjected to reinterpretation was the so-called diadem of the queen, whom scholars now believe was called Puabi and not Shubad.

The diadem includes more than 3,000 tiny beads of lapis lazuli and dozens of larger gold ornaments. Woolley had them all tied to a strip of chamois, as if to be worn about the head.