纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 012乌尔军标(2)

Cities started around five thousand years ago, when some of the world's great river valleys saw a step change in human development. Fertile land, farmed successfully, became in just a few centuries very densely populated. On the Nile this hugely increased population led, as we saw in the last programme, to the creation of a unified Egyptian state. In Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates - now Iraq - the agricultural surplus, and the population that could support, led to settlements of up to 30,000 - 40,000 people, a size never seen before, and to the first cities. Co-ordinating groups of people on this scale obviously needed 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 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. It was Woolley who famously gave Agatha Christie both a husband - she married his assistant - and the inspiration for a novel: ?Murder in Mesopotamia'. There was a queen and the female attendants who died with her, dressed in gold ornaments; there were sumptuous headdresses; a lyre of gold and lapis lazuli; the world's earliest known board-game - and a mysterious object, which Woolley initially describes as a plaque: