纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 012乌尔军标(5)

On the Standard, the scenes are arranged like three comic strips, one 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, are feasting on the proceeds while somebody plays the lyre. And you couldn't 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 - and to emphasise the king's pre-eminence, the artist has made him much bigger than anybody else - in fact so big that his head breaks through the border of the picture. What we are looking at in the Standard of Ur is a totally new model of how a society is organised. We asked the former Director of the London School of Economics, Professor Anthony Giddens, to consider this shift in social organisation:

"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 - everybody worked. Then you get the emergence of usually a priestly warrior class, you get the emergence of organised warfare, you get the emergence of tribute and something like a state - which is really the creation of a new form of power I think. So all those things hang together, and that was the way it happened really, the conjunction of all those things.

"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. And you see the emergence of individuals who claim a divine right, that integrates with the emergence of a cosmology, you have the origin of civilisation there but it's bound up with blood, it's bound up with dynamics, it's bound up with personal aggrandisement - you can't really have those things in the same way in a small village community."