纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 012乌尔军标(6)

If one side of the Standard shows the ruler running a flourishing economy, the other side shows the army he needed to protect it - and 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 hang on to it. So, it's not surprising that the king of civil society that we see on one side also has to be the commander-in-chief we see on the other. The two sides of the Standard of Ur are in fact a superb and alarmingly early illustration of the military-economic nexus, of the ugly violence, that underlies prosperity. Let's turn to the war scenes.

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 very alike - because this is almost certainly a battle between close neighbours. The losers are shown stripped naked to emphasise the humiliation of their defeat. In the bottom row, we have some of the oldest-known representations of chariots of war, and one of the first discoveries of what was to become a classic graphic technique - the artist shows the asses that are 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 graphic artist would better until the arrival of film.

Woolley's discoveries at Ur 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 focal points of that new state was the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, which received the lion's share of the Ur excavations. From the moment of discovery, there was a strong connection between Iraqi national identity and the antiquities of Ur, so the looting of antiquities from the Baghdad Museum during the recent war in Iraq was felt very profoundly by the Iraqis: