c. 2500 BCE · Ur, ancient Sumer (modern Tell el-Muqayyar, Iraq)
The Standard of Ur: war and peace
Found in the royal cemetery of Ur, a wooden box inlaid with shell, lapis lazuli, and red limestone preserves the earliest surviving narrative of the Sumerian warrior and landowner's daily world.
Discovered in 1927–28 by Leonard Woolley beside a skull in one of Ur's royal tombs, the box measures roughly 21 × 50 cm. Its two long panels each carry a different scene, which is why the object is traditionally read as a 'War' side and a 'Peace' side.
The War side reads in three registers from bottom to top: four-wheeled war carts charging over enemies, infantry forcing prisoners into line, and naked captives presented to the king. The Peace side, again in three registers, shows porters bearing booty, fish, sheep, and cattle on the lower bands, and a banquet with cups of beer on top. Read together they make the cycle of palace economy explicit: from victory to tribute, from tribute to feast.
Now in the British Museum, the Standard of Ur is neither a 'standard' (banner) nor really one object — it came out of the ground in fragments as panels of a box, and its present rectangular form is reconstruction. Even so it remains the most fully preserved record we have of Sumerian inlay work and pictorial narrative.
Location
Ur, ancient Sumer (modern Tell el-Muqayyar, Iraq) · © OpenStreetMap
Sources
- The Standard of Ur — The British Museum — The British Museum
- Standard of Ur — Smarthistory — Smarthistory