But the story of our small Jomon pot doesn’t end here, because I haven’t yet described what is perhaps the most extraordinary thing of all about it – that the inside is carefully lined with lacquered gold leaf. One of the fascinating aspects of telling a history through objects is that they go on to have lives and destinies never dreamt of by those who made them – and that’s certainly true of this pot. The gold leaf was applied somewhere between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, when ancient pots were being discovered, collected and displayed by Japanese scholars. It was probably a wealthy collector who had the inside of the pot lacquered with a thin layer of gold. After 7,000 years of existence our Jomon pot then began a new life – as a mizusashi, or water jar, for that quintessentially Japanese ritual, the Tea Ceremony.
I don’t think its maker would have minded.
PART THREE
The First Cities and States
4000–2000 BC
The world’s first cities and states emerged in the river valleys of North Africa and Asia about 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. In what are today Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan and India, people came together to live for the first time in settlements larger than villages, and there is evidence of kings, rulers and great inequalities of wealth and power; at this time, too, writing first developed as a means of controlling growing populations. There are important differences between these early cities and states in the three regions: in Egypt and Iraq they were very warlike, in the Indus Valley apparently peaceable. In most of the world, people continued to live in small farming communities which were, however, often part of much larger networks of trade stretching across wide regions.
11
King Den’s Sandal Label
Hippopotamus ivory label, found at Abydos (near Luxor), Egypt
AROUND 2985 BC
There’s a compelling, beguiling showbiz mythology of the modern big city – the energy and the abundance, the proximity to culture and power, the streets that just might be paved with gold. We’ve seen it and we’ve loved it, on stage and on screen. But we all know that in reality big cities are hard. They’re noisy, potentially violent and alarmingly anonymous. We sometimes just can’t cope with the sheer mass of people. And this, it seems, is not entirely surprising. Apparently, if you look at how many numbers we’re likely to store in our mobile phone, or how many names we’re likely to list on a social networking site, it’s rare even for city dwellers to exceed a couple of hundred. Social anthropologists delightedly point out that this is the size of the social group we would have had to handle in a large Stone Age village. According to them, we’re all trying to cope with modern big-city life equipped only with a Stone Age social brain. We all struggle with anonymity.
So how do you lead and control a city or a state where most people don’t know each other, and you can interact personally with only a very small percentage of the inhabitants? It’s been a problem for politicians for more than 5,000 years, ever since the groups we live in exceeded the size of a tribe or village. The world’s first crowded cities and states grew up in fertile river valleys: the Euphrates, the Tigris and the Indus. This chapter’s object is associated with the most famous river of them all, the Nile. It comes from the Egypt of the pharaohs, where the answer to the question of how to exert leadership and state control over a large population was quite simple: force.
If you want to investigate the Egypt of the pharaohs, the British Museum gives you a spectacular range of choices – monumental sculptures, painted mummy cases, and much more – but I’ve chosen an object that came quite literally from the mud of the Nile. It’s made from a tusk of a hippo, and it belonged to one of Egypt’s first pharaohs – King Den. Perversely for an object that’s going to let us explore power on a massive scale, it is tiny.
It is about 5 centimetres (2 inches) square, it’s very thin, and it looks and feels a bit like a modern-day business card. In fact, it’s a label that was once attached to a pair of shoes. We know this because on one side is a picture of those shoes. This little ivory plaque is a name tag for an Egyptian pharaoh, made to accompany him as he set off to the afterlife, a label which would identify him to those he met. Through it, we’re immediately close to these first kings of Egypt – rulers, around 3000 BC, of a new kind of civilization that would produce some of the greatest monumental art and architecture ever made.
The nearest modern equivalent I can think of to this label is the ID card that people working in an office now have to wear round their necks to get past the security check – though it’s not immediately clear who was meant to read these Egyptian labels, whether they’re aimed at the gods of the afterlife or perhaps ghostly servants who might not know their way around. The images themselves are made by scratching into the ivory and then rubbing a black resin into the incisions, making a wonderful contrast between the black of the design and the cream of the ivory.
Before the first pharaohs, Egypt was a divided country, split between the east–west coastal strip of the Nile Delta, facing the Mediterranean, and the north–south string of settlements along the river itself. With the Nile flooding every year, harvests were plentiful, so there was enough food for a rapidly growing population and, frequently, surplus to trade with. But there was absolutely no extra fertile land beyond the flooding area, and as a result the ever more numerous people fought bitterly over the limited amount of land. Conflict followed conflict, with the people from the Delta eventually being conquered by the people from the south just before 3000 BC. This united Egypt was one of the earliest societies that we can think of as a state in the modern sense, and, as one of its earliest leaders, King Den had to address all the problems of control and coordination that a modern state has to confront today.
Engraved on the back of the label is a pair of sandals
You might not expect to discover how he did this from the label on his shoes, but Den’s sandals were no ordinary shoes. They were high-status items, and the Keeper of the Sandals was one of the high court officials. It’s not so surprising, then, that on the back of the label we have a clear statement of how this pharaoh exercised power; nor, perhaps, that the model which evolved in Den’s Egypt 5,000 years ago resonates uncannily around the world to this day.
On the other side of the label is an image of the owner of the sandals, dressed in a royal headdress with a mace in one hand and a whip in the other. King Den stands in combat, authoritatively smiting an enemy who cowers at his feet. Of course, the first thing we look for is his sandals but, disappointingly, he’s barefoot.
This little label is the first image of a ruler in this history of humanity. It’s striking, perhaps a bit disheartening, that, right at the beginning, the ruler wants to be shown as commander-in-chief, conquering his foe. This is how, from earliest times, power has been projected through images, and there’s something disturbingly familiar about it. In its simplified forms and its calculated manipulation of scale it is eerily reminiscent of a contemporary political cartoon.
The label-maker’s job was, however, deadly serious: to keep his leader looking invincible and semi-divine, and to show that Den was the only man who could guarantee what Egyptians, like everybody else, wanted from their rulers – law and order. Within the pharaoh’s realm, everybody was expected to conform and to take on a clear Egyptian identity. The message of our sandal label is that the price of opposition was high and painful.
This message is carried not only in the image but also in the writing. There are some early hieroglyphs scratched into the ivory which give us the name of King Den and, between him and the enemy, the chilling words ‘they shall not exist’. This ‘other’ is going to be obliterated. All the tricks of savage political propaganda are already here – the ruler calm and victorious, set against the alien, defeated, misshapen enemy. Who he is we don’t know, but on the right of the label is an inscription which reads: ‘The first occasion of smiting the east’. As the sandy ground beneath the figures rises to the right-hand side, it has been suggested that the enemy come
s from Sinai in the east.
The area that King Den’s unified Egyptian state was able to coerce and control is staggering. At its height, it included virtually all the Nile Valley from the Delta to what is modern Sudan, as well as a huge area to the east up to the borders of Sinai. I asked the archaeologist Toby Wilkinson what building a state on this scale required:
This is an early period in Egypt’s history, when the nation is still being consolidated, not so much territorially as ideologically and psychologically. The king and his advisers are looking for ways to reinforce Egypt’s sense of its own nationhood, and support for their regime. I think they realized, as world leaders have realized throughout history, that nothing binds a nation and a people together quite so effectively as a foreign war against a common enemy, whether that enemy is real or manufactured. And so warfare plays really a key role in the consolidation of the Egyptians’ sense of their own nationhood.
It’s a discouragingly familiar strategy. You win hearts and minds at home by focusing on the threats from abroad, but the weapons that you need to crush the enemy also come in handy when you’re dealing with domestic opponents. The political rhetoric of foreign aggression is backed up by very brisk policing at home.
So the apparatus of the modern state had already been forged at the time of King Den, with enduring consequences which were artistic as well as political. Only power of this order could organize the enormous building projects that these early pharaohs embarked on. Den’s elaborate tomb, with granite shipped from hundreds of miles away, and the later, even grander pyramids were possible only because of the extraordinary control which Egyptian pharaohs could exercise over the minds and the bodies of their subjects. Den’s sandal label is a miniature masterclass in the enduring politics of power.
12
Standard of Ur
Wooden box inlaid with mosaic, found at the royal cemetery of Ur, southern Iraq
2600–2400 BC
At the centre of pretty well all great cities, in the middle of the abundance and the wealth, the power and the busy-ness, you’ll usually find a monument to death on a massive scale. It is the same in Paris, Washington, Berlin and London. In Whitehall, for example, just a few yards from Downing Street, the Treasury and the Ministry of Defence, the Cenotaph marks the death of millions in the great wars of the last century. Why is death at the heart of our cities? Perhaps one explanation is that in order to retain the wealth and power that our cities represent, we have to be willing to defend them from those who covet them. This object, from one of the oldest and richest cities of them all, seems to say quite clearly that the power of cities to get rich is indissolubly linked to the power to wage and win wars.
Peace: the king and companions feast while people bring tribute of fish, animals and other produce
Cities started around 5,000 years ago, when some of the world’s great river valleys witnessed rapid changes in human development. In just a few centuries fertile land, farmed successfully, became densely populated. On the Nile this hugely increased population led, as we have seen, to the creation of a unified Egyptian state. In Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), in the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, the agricultural surplus, and the population that it could support, led to settlements of 30,000 to 40,000 people, a size never seen before, and to the first cities. Coordinating groups of people on this scale obviously required 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 the Sumerian city of 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. There was a queen and the female attendants who died with her, dressed in gold ornaments; accompanying them were sumptuous headdresses; a lyre of gold and lapis lazuli; the world’s earliest known board-game; and a mysterious object, which Woolley initially described as a plaque:
In the farther chamber was a most remarkable thing, a plaque, originally of wood, 23 inches long and 7½ inches wide, covered on both sides with a mosaic in shell, red stone, and lapis; the wood had decayed, so that we have as yet little idea of what the scene is, but there are rows of human and animal figures, and when the plaque is cleaned and restored it should prove one of the best objects found in the cemetery.
This was one of Woolley’s most intriguing finds. The ‘plaque’ was clearly a work of high art, but its greatest importance is not aesthetic: it lies in what it tells us about the exercise of power in these early Mesopotamian cities.
Woolley’s find is about the size of a small briefcase, but it tapers at the top – so that it looks almost like a giant bar of Toblerone – and it’s decorated all over with small mosaic scenes. Woolley called it the Standard of Ur, because he thought it might have been a battle standard that you carried high on a pole in a procession or into battle. It has kept that name, but it’s hard to see how it could have been a standard of that sort, because it’s obvious that the scenes are meant to be looked at from very close up. Some scholars have thought it might be a musical instrument or perhaps merely a box to keep precious things in, but we just don’t know. I asked Dr Lamia al-Gailani, a leading Iraqi archaeologist who now works in London, what she thinks:
Unfortunately, we don’t know what they used it for, but for me, it represents the whole of the Sumerians. It’s about war, it’s about peace, it’s colourful, it shows how far the Sumerians travelled – the lapis lazuli came from Afghanistan, the red marble came from India, and all the shells came from the Gulf.
This is significant. So far, each of the objects we’ve looked at has been made in a single material – stone or wood, bone or pottery – all of them substances that would have been found close to where its maker was living. Now, for the first time, we have an object that is made of several different, quite exotic materials traded over long distances. Only the bitumen which held together the different pieces could have been found locally; it’s a trace of what is now Mesopotamia’s greatest source of wealth – oil.
What kind of society was it which was able to gather these materials in this way? First, it needed to have agricultural surplus. It then also needed a structure of power and control that allowed its leaders to mobilize that surplus and exchange it for exotic materials along extended trade routes. That surplus would also have fed and supported people freed from the constraints of agricultural work – priests, soldiers, administrators and, critically, craftsmen able to specialize in making complex luxury objects like the Standard. These are the very people that you can see on the Standard itself.
The scenes are arranged like three comic strips 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, feast on the proceeds while somebody plays the lyre. You could not 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. To emphasize the king’s pre-eminence – just as in the image of King Den – the artist has made him much bigger than anybody else, in fact so big that his head breaks through the border of the picture. In the Standard of Ur we are looking at a new model of how a society is organized. I asked a former Director of the London School of Economics, Professor Anthony Giddens, to describe this shift in social organization:
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 where everybody worked. Then you get the emergence of a priestly warrior class, of organized
warfare, of tribute and something like a state – which is really the creation of a new form of power. All those things hang together.
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. You see the emergence of individuals who claim a divine right, and that integrates with the emergence of a cosmology. You have the origin of civilization there but it’s bound up with blood, with dynamics, and with personal aggrandizement.
While one side of the Standard shows the ruler running a flourishing economy, the other side shows him with the army he needed to protect it. 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 stay rich. The king of the civil society that we see on one side has also to be the commander-in-chief we see on the other. The two faces of the Standard of Ur are in fact a superb early illustration of the military–economic nexus, of the ugly violence that frequently underlies prosperity.
War: the king reviews captured prisoners while chariots trample the enemy
Let’s look at the war scenes in more detail. 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 surprisingly alike, because this is almost certainly a battle between close neighbours – in Mesopotamia neighbouring cities fought continually with each other for dominance. The losers are shown stripped naked to emphasize the humiliation of their defeat, and there is something heart-rending in their abject demeanour. In the bottom row are some of the oldest-known representations of chariots of war – indeed, of wheeled vehicles of any sort – and one of the first examples of what was to become a classic graphic device: the artist shows the asses 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 artist would better until the arrival of film.
A History of the World in 100 Objects Page 8