Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects

from BBC Radio 4. At the

center of pretty well all great cities, in the middle of the abundance and the wealth,

the power and the busyness, you'll find a monument to death on a massive scale

It's the same in Paris and Washington Berlin and London at the moment I'm standing in Whitehall just a few yards from Downing Street to the Treasury

and the Ministry of Defence where the Senetaf 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

covered them. In this week's programs, I'm looking at the moment about 5,000 years ago

when people first started living in cities.

Today's object from one of the oldest and the richest of them all

seems to say quite clearly that the power of cities to get rich

is indissolubly linked to their power to wage and to win wars.

For the Iraqis, it's a symbol of their very deep long tradition being one of the center of civilization.

Since the invention of history, five or six thousand years ago, large part of history has been the

history of competing classes and class conflicts.

Marks was not so wrong.

A history of the world in a hundred objects. The standard of Ur, a wooden box inlaid with mosaic, discovered in southern Iraq,

approximately 4,500 and a half thousand years old.

Cities started around 5,000 years ago,

when some of the world's great river valleys saw a step change in human development.

Fertile land, farmed successfully, became in just a few centuries very densely populated.

...