A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [34]
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