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Wooden box inlaid with mosaic, found at the royal cemetery of Ur, southern Iraq
2600–2400 BC
At the centre of pretty well all great cities, in the middle of the abundance and the wealth, the power and the busy-ness, you’ll usually find a monument to death on a massive scale. It is the same in Paris, Washington, Berlin and London. In Whitehall, for example, just a few yards from Downing Street, the Treasury and the Ministry of Defence, the Cenotaph marks the death of millions in the great wars of the last century. Why is death at the heart of our cities? Perhaps one explanation is that in order to retain the wealth and power that our cities represent, we have to be willing to defend them from those who covet them. This object, from one of the oldest and richest cities of them all, seems to say quite clearly that the power of cities to get rich is indissolubly linked to the power to wage and win wars.
Peace: the king and companions feast while people bring tribute of fish, animals and other produce
Cities started around 5,000 years ago, when some of the world’s great river valleys witnessed rapid changes in human development. In just a few centuries fertile land, farmed successfully, became densely populated. On the Nile this hugely increased population led, as we have seen, to the creation of a unified Egyptian state. In Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), in the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, the agricultural surplus, and the population that it could support, led to settlements of 30,000 to 40,000 people, a size never seen before, and to the first cities. Coordinating groups of people on this scale obviously required new systems of power and control, and the systems devised in Mesopotamia around 3000 BC have proved astonishingly resilient. They have pretty well set the urban model to this day. It’s no exaggeration to say that modern cities everywhere have Mesopotamia in their DNA.
Of all these earliest Mesopotamian cities, the most famous was the Sumerian city of Ur. So it’s not surprising that it was at Ur that the great archaeologist Leonard Woolley chose to carry out his excavations in the 1920s. At Ur, Woolley found royal tombs which themselves could have been the stuff of fiction. There was a queen and the female attendants who died with her, dressed in gold ornaments; accompanying them were sumptuous headdresses; a lyre of gold and lapis lazuli; the world’s earliest known board-game; and a mysterious object, which Woolley initially described as a plaque:
In the farther chamber was a most remarkable thing, a plaque, originally of wood, 23 inches long and 7½ inches wide, covered on both sides with a mosaic in shell, red stone, and lapis; the wood had decayed, so that we have as yet little idea of what the scene is, but there are rows of human and animal figures, and when the plaque is cleaned and restored it should prove one of the best objects found in the cemetery.
This was one of Woolley’s most intriguing finds. The ‘plaque’ was clearly a work of high art, but its greatest importance is not aesthetic: it lies in what it tells us about the exercise of power in these early Mesopotamian cities.
Woolley’s find is about the size of a small briefcase, but it tapers at the top – so that it looks almost like a giant bar of Toblerone – and it’s decorated all over with small mosaic scenes. Woolley called it the Standard of Ur, because he thought it might have been a battle standard that you carried high on a pole in a procession or into battle. It has kept that name, but it’s hard to see how it could have been a standard of that sort, because it’s obvious that the scenes are meant to be looked at from very close up. Some scholars have thought it might be a musical instrument or perhaps merely a box to keep precious things in, but we just don’t know. I asked Dr Lamia al-Gailani, a leading Iraqi archaeologist who now works in London, what she thinks:
Unfortunately, we don’t know what they used it for, but for me, it represents the whole of the Sumerians. It’s about war, it’s about peace, it’s colourful, it shows how far the Sumerians travelled – the lapis lazuli came from Afghanistan, the red marble came from India, and all the shells came from the Gulf.
This is significant. So far, each of the objects we’ve looked at has been made in a single material – stone or wood, bone or pottery – all of them substances that would have been found close to where its maker was living. Now, for the first time, we have an object that is made of several different, quite exotic materials traded over long distances. Only the bitumen which held together the different pieces could have been found locally; it’s a trace of what is now Mesopotamia’s greatest source of wealth – oil.
What kind of society was it which was able to gather these materials in this way? First, it needed to have agricultural surplus. It then also needed a structure of power and control that allowed its leaders to mobilize that surplus and exchange it for exotic materials along extended trade routes. That surplus would also have fed and supported people freed from the constraints of agricultural work – priests, soldiers, administrators and, critically, craftsmen able to specialize in making complex luxury objects like the Standard. These are the very people that you can see on the Standard itself.
The scenes are arranged like three comic strips on top of each other. One side shows what must be any ruler’s dream of how a tax system should operate. In the lower two registers, people calmly line up to offer their tribute of produce and fish, sheep, goats and oxen, and on the top register, the king and the elite, probably priests, feast on the proceeds while somebody plays the lyre. You could not have a clearer demonstration of how the structures of power work in Ur: the land workers shoulder their burdens and deliver offerings, while the elite drink with the king. To emphasize the king’s pre-eminence – just as in the image of King Den – the artist has made him much bigger than anybody else, in fact so big that his head breaks through the border of the picture. In the Standard of Ur we are looking at a new model of how a society is organized. I asked a former Director of the London School of Economics, Professor Anthony Giddens, to describe this shift in social organization:
From having a surplus, you get the emergence of classes, because some people can live off the labour of others, which they couldn’t do in traditional small agricultural communities where everybody worked. Then you get the emergence of a priestly warrior class, of organized warfare, of tribute and something like a state – which is really the creation of a new form of power. All those things hang together.
You can’t have a division between rich and poor when everyone produces the same goods, so it’s only when you get a surplus product which some people can live off and others have to produce, that you get a class system; and that soon emerges into a system of power and domination. You see the emergence of individuals who claim a divine right, and that integrates with the emergence of a cosmology. You have the origin of civilization there but it’s bound up with blood, with dynamics, and with personal aggrandizement.
While one side of the Standard shows the ruler running a flourishing economy, the other side shows him with the army he needed to protect it. That brings me back to the thought that I began with: that it seems to be a continuous historical truth that once you get rich you then have to fight to stay rich. The king of the civil society that we see on one side has also to be the commander-in-chief we see on the other. The two faces of the Standard of Ur are in fact a superb early illustration of the military–economic nexus, of the ugly violence that frequently underlies prosperity.
War: the king reviews captured prisoners while chariots trample the enemy
Let’s look at the war scenes in more detail. Once again, the king’s head breaches the frame of the picture; he alone is shown wearing a full-length robe and he holds a large spear, while his men lead prisoners off either to their doom or to slavery. Victims and victors look surprisingly alike, because this is almost certainly a battle between close neighbours – in Mesopotamia neighbouring cities fought continually with each other for dominance. The losers are shown stripped naked to emphasize the humiliation of their defeat, and there is something heart-rending in their abject demeanour. In the bottom row are some of the oldest-known representations of chariots of war – indeed, of wheeled vehicles of any sort – and one of the first examples of what was to become a classic graphic device: the artist shows the asses pulling the chariots moving from a walk to a trot to a full gallop, gathering speed as they go. It’s a technique that no artist would better until the arrival of film.
Woolley’s discoveries at Ur in the 1920s coincided with the early years of the modern state of Iraq, created after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. One of the key institutions of that new state was the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, which received the lion’s share of the Ur excavations. From the first moment of their discovery, there was a strong connection between the antiquities of Ur and Iraqi national identity. So the looting of antiquities from the Baghdad Museum during the recent war in Iraq was felt very profoundly by all parts of the population. Here’s Lamia al-Gailani again:
For the Iraqis, we think of it as part of the oldest civilization – which is in our country and we are descendants of it. We identify with quite a lot of the objects from the Sumerian period that have survived until now … so ancient history is really the unifying piece of Iraq today.
So Mesopotamia’s past is a key part of Iraq’s future. Archaeology and politics, like cities and warfare, seem set to remain closely connected.