The Standard of Ur
About 2500 BC
A small wooden box the size of a briefcase is covered on both long sides with mosaics of white shell, red limestone and deep blue lapis lazuli. One side, called War, shows chariots pulled by donkeys trampling enemies, soldiers in cloaks and helmets leading naked prisoners, and a king, larger than everyone else, receiving them at the top. The other side, called Peace, shows a banquet: seated men raise cups while a musician plays a lyre, and below them servants bring fish, sheep and goats, and porters carry sacks of grain.
The figures are cut from shell, the background is lapis lazuli that came from Afghanistan, and each piece is set into bitumen, a natural tar. Read the scenes from the bottom up, as the Sumerians did, and notice how the donkeys on the war side change from walking to galloping as your eye moves along the register: it is one of the earliest attempts to show motion in sequence. The king on both sides wears the same fleece skirt and holds the same pose, so that war and feast become two faces of one rule.
Leonard Woolley found the object in the nineteen twenties in one of the Royal Tombs of Ur, in southern Iraq, lying crushed beside the shoulder of a man, and he guessed that it had been carried on a pole as a standard; the name has stuck although nobody knows its purpose. It might have been a sound box for a musical instrument. The wood had rotted, so the mosaics were lifted from the soil in fragments and reassembled in the museum with the original bitumen. In the Mesopotamia gallery it sits with the ram in a thicket and the queen's lyre from the same cemetery, the richest burials of the early Bronze Age.
Did You Know? The blue stone in the mosaic travelled more than two thousand kilometres from the mountains of Afghanistan to reach the workshops of Ur.
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