A box with a misleading name
It is a hollow wooden box with sloping long sides, a little longer than your forearm. The wood has rotted away, but its skin survives: thousands of small pieces of white shell, blue lapis lazuli and red limestone pressed into black bitumen to form figures and borders. Two long panels carry the famous scenes, and the tapering ends are decorated too.
It comes from the Royal Cemetery of Ur in southern Iraq, centuries older than the great ziggurat of Ur. The British archaeologist Leonard Woolley found it in 1927 to 1928 in tomb PG 779, lying close to the shoulder of a man, and imagined it carried on a pole like a military standard. The name stuck; the idea did not. Other suggestions include the sound box of a musical instrument and a chest for funds, for war or for building, and none has been proved.
The war side
Each long side is divided into three registers, horizontal bands that you read from the bottom up. On the war side, the bottom band shows four-wheeled chariots, each pulled by four equids, probably onagers or donkeys, running down enemies who lie under the wheels. Read from left to right and the animals speed up from a walk to a gallop, a little like frames in a flip book.
In the middle band, infantry in long cloaks advance, and enemy soldiers are captured, stripped and led away. In the top band the ruler stands in the centre, taller than everyone else, his head breaking the frame. His chariot waits behind him, and bound, naked prisoners are brought before him. This is one of the oldest surviving pictures of an army at war. Around the same time the rulers of nearby Lagash carved their victories on stone, as on the Stele of the Vultures.
The peace side
The other side reads the same way. In the lowest band men carry heavy loads on their backs and lead donkeys or onagers. In the middle band others drive cattle, sheep and goats and carry fish. At the top the ruler sits on a stool, larger than his guests, raising a cup. Seated men drink with him, attendants serve, and on the right a musician plays a lyre with a bull’s head on its sound box, beside a figure who may be a singer.
The picture matches the ground. Lyres of exactly this kind, decorated with bulls’ heads in gold and lapis lazuli, came out of the same cemetery, which Woolley excavated grave by grave: about 1,850 burials, sixteen of them so rich that he called them royal tombs.
One story or two?
“War side” and “peace side” are modern labels. Many scholars read the two panels as one sequence: a campaign, then the celebration afterwards, with the goods and animals as booty or tribute from the defeated. Others see the peace side as the produce of the ruler’s own land. Who the people bringing goods are has been studied in detail, without a final answer. Either way, the ruler wins, receives and feasts, and everyone else has a place below him.
A box made of long-distance trade
The craftsmen cut shell, lapis and red limestone into thin shapes, set them into bitumen spread on the wood, and incised details such as hair, fleece skirts and harness. Almost nothing came from next door. The bitumen probably came from the natural tar springs at Hit, up the Euphrates. The shell came from the Gulf. The lapis lazuli came from Badakhshan in north-eastern Afghanistan, more than 2,000 km away. The name records the route: lapis is Latin for “stone”, and lazuli goes back to the Persian lāzhward, the same word that gave us “azure”.
A box covered in such materials showed wealth and reach as clearly as its scenes showed power. The taste for inlay and contrasting colours was already old at Ur: centuries earlier, at Uruk, the eyes of the Mask of Warka had probably been set with similar materials.
What you see is a reconstruction
The wood had decayed, and the two long panels were found crushed together. The British Museum reconstructed the box, then took it apart and rebuilt it in 1973, after earlier conservation had begun to cause damage. The pieces are ancient; their arrangement is a careful modern reading of how they were found.
Where to see it
The Standard of Ur is in Room 56 of the British Museum in London, with other finds from the Royal Cemetery. It is small, so get close: the incised details on the shell figures and the ruler’s head breaking the frame are easy to miss from a distance. Check the gallery’s opening before you go.
Sources
- British Museum, “The Standard of Ur”, 121201, collection record.
- C. L. Woolley, Ur Excavations II: The Royal Cemetery (1934).
- D. Ławecka, “Who Were the Tribute-Bearing People on the ‘Standard of Ur’?” (2017).
- J. Aruz (ed.), Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus, Metropolitan Museum of Art (2003).
- L. Horne, “Ur and Its Treasures”, Expedition 40.2 (1998).
- Oxford English Dictionary, “lapis lazuli” and “azure” (etymology).
