by Joel Kotkin
But there were also many differences between these two early civilizations. In Egypt, control lay in the hands of the pharaoh, who claimed to be a god himself. The civil servants, rather than administering the irrigation and surplus economy for the benefit of the gods or a king, did so for an individual personifying both at the same time.19 The intimate relationship between the civic identity and the priesthood, so critical in the evolution of Mesopotamian cities, was not nearly as pronounced.
For this, among other reasons, early Egypt does not serve us well as a primary focus on the origins of urbanism. Mesopotamian society revolved around city life and a permanent set of religious structures. Egyptian life centered around the royal court.20 Administrators, priests, artisans, workmen, and their slaves identified themselves not with an urban place, but with the personage of the pharaoh. If the dynasty moved, as it sometimes did, so did the priesthood and the government.21
Of course, a civilization as great and as long-lasting as Egypt’s still produced some significant cities. Thebes, for example, was praised in a hymn in the fifteenth century B.C.: “She is called city; all others are under her shadow, to magnify themselves through her.”22 In the world before the rise of cities such as Babylon, Egyptian cities had populations as large as, or even larger than, their Mesopotamian counterparts. 23
Yet despite this, even great cities like Memphis or Thebes never assumed the independent identity, economic dynamism, and divine status associated with the various Sumerian urban centers. For one thing, Egypt’s prolonged periods of universal order—in sharp contrast with unruly, fragmented Mesopotamia—did not promote the development of self-enclosed walled cities. Lack of competitive trade also slowed the development of a marketplace economy. Egypt would remain a civilization whose greatest achievement, the Pyramids, was constructed to house the dead, not provide an environment for the living. “Everything else in Egypt seemed to have found durable form,” observed the urban historian Lewis Mumford, “except the city.”24
INDIA AND CHINA
What Egypt did share with urban Mesopotamia was the religious focus of its civilization. Similarly, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, constructed around 2500 B.C. in the present Pakistani provinces of Sind and Punjab, also placed monumental religious architecture at their core. As in Sumer, with which they maintained a trading relationship,25 theocrats played a dominating role in the running of the city. Much of the worship seems to have been focused on the Mother Goddess, an important feature as well to the fertility cults of the Middle East.26
This religious orientation also applied to cities that had little or no direct connection with the Fertile Crescent. In China, around 1700 B.C., the Shang dynasty rulers placed temples at the center of their urban spaces. Priests or shamans played a critical role not only in divine matters, but in administration as well.
From the Shang as well we see the pattern of worship of ancestors that would play an important role27 in the evolution of China’s enduring and continuous model of urban civilization.28 Religious devotion and practice was critical to the raising of mass conscriptions of peasant labor needed to build walls and city foundations. As an ancient Chinese poem has it:
They set their plumb-lines vertical
They lashed the boards to hold [the earth]
And raised the Temple [of the Ancestors] on the cosmic pattern.29
Great cities throughout most of classical Chinese history would be dominated by adherence to the “cosmic pattern.” Temples of the gods and ancestors, along with the palaces of the rulers, stood at the center of the city. Through propitiating these deities, the rulers hoped to regulate both the natural universe and the human one.30
THE AMERICAS
The primacy of the religious role was, if anything, even more striking in the earliest cities of the faraway Americas—places unlikely to have contact with either the Mesopotamian or the Chinese urban center. Like their counterparts in Mesopotamia and China, the first cities built in Mexico, Peru, and other early civilizations of the Americas also placed religious structures at the heart of their metropolitan centers.31 Over a millennium before the rise of Tenochtitlán, Teotihuacán, a short drive from contemporary Mexico City, was home to over a hundred temples along its main avenue, the Street of the Dead.
To the south as well, among the Maya and in Peru, early cities center around temples, religious ceremonies, and regulations. On the northern highlands of Peru, the Chavin builders of the early first millennium B.C. constructed massive religious structures that represented both a major cultural advance and a foundation for future urban civilization on the west coast of South America.32 Roughly two thousand years later, the Incas also built temples in the middle of their cities. Incan society rested on the notion that their rulers were gods and their capital, Cuzco, constituted “the navel of the world.”33
Historians, amateur or otherwise, have tried to explain the similarities among the religious origins of ancient cities by insisting on some vague transmission of culture across vast distances. Perhaps a more fruitful approach would be to assume, as the American historian T. R. Fehrenbach notes, the existence of a “psychic unity” among early city builders in all parts of the world.34
CHAPTER TWO
PROJECTIONS OF POWER— THE RISE OF THE IMPERIAL CITY
Without the notion of sacred space, it is doubtful cities could ever have developed anywhere in the world. Yet to grow beyond the city walls, urbanites needed to be able to settle, travel, and trade in territories beyond those controlled by a local lord, the gods, or their servants.
In Mesopotamia, a region that had long been dominated by a series of petty city-states, military conquest by one leader—and the shift of all power to one city—set the stage for the next critical phase of urban evolution. The earliest of these capital cities was established by Sargon, who around 2400 B.C. conquered the various city-states of Mesopotamia.
SARGON: THE CREATOR OF THE IMPERIAL CITY
Sargon and other architects of the earliest imperial city were careful to build their legitimacy on the foundations and traditions of the earlier sacred places. Although the new rulers were Semites and not Sumerians, they maintained the old language for religious purposes, poetry, and mythological storytelling. In Mesopotamia, the tradition of respect for the old order by new conquerors persisted all the way through the Persian, Alexandrian, and Roman empires.1
As he bowed to the sacred past, Sargon initiated changes that would forever reshape the urban order. Wresting control of the economy from the priesthood, he allowed land now to pass into private ownership as opposed to merely the servants of the local god. The king was “chief entrepreneur” in charge of all the important irrigation canals, building construction, and commerce.2
Critically, Sargon broke with tradition by refusing to adopt one of the existing Sumerian cities as his capital. Instead he built a new imperial center at Agade, near the site that was to become Babylon. Unlike the original, physically constrained city-states, Sargon’s new capital could draw on raw materials, finished goods, and masses of slaves from an empire that sprawled, at least briefly, to the shores of the Mediterranean.3
This first imperial capital, however, did not last long. Within four generations, the Sargonid Empire fell victim to nomadic invasions from the north. Eventually, venerable Ur was restored by a new dynasty as the principal city in the region. The new rulers did not return to the old temple-centered system, however, but instead retained many of the patterns of landownership and centralized control developed under Sargon and his successors.
BABYLON: THE FIRST URBAN COLOSSUS
By 1900 B.C., the focus of Mesopotamian power had shifted to a new capital at Babylon.4 For the next 1,500 years, it would rank among the world’s greatest cities, the incubator of an urban culture on a scale not before seen anywhere.5
Under the Babylonians, the stranglehold of religion over commerce was further weakened and trade encouraged over a wide array of cities. 6 This created a need for a system of laws that wou
ld be universally applicable to a wide variety of peoples from separate clans and different races.
The most famous laws, enacted by the Babylonian king Hammurabi, covered a wide range of criminal and civil situations. According to the prologue of his laws, Hammurabi had been ordered by the god Marduk to “make justice appear in the land, to destroy the evil and the wicked so that strong may not oppress the weak, to rise like the Sun-god over the black-headed one [humans] to give light to the land. . . .”7
By Herodotus’s time, Babylon had lost its place as the seat of empire but retained its status as a sacred place and center of learning; yet with a population estimated at 250,000, it remained a colossus, the world’s largest urban area. Even under foreign rule, the city’s great legacy inspired both respect and awe. With its vast population and stunning architecture, the Greek historian reported, the city still surpassed “in splendor any in the world.”8
SECURITY AND URBAN COLLAPSE
The creation of empire, beginning with Sargon, allowed for the development of ever larger cities. The promise of security over a large expanse, even under such harsh rulers as the Assyrians, sparked an expansion of urban life and commerce. This occurred not only in the capital of Nineveh, the world’s largest city in 650 B.C.,9 but in many smaller urban settlements across the Assyrian Empire.10
This pattern repeated itself elsewhere in the ancient world. The Harappa urban civilization in India rested on the ability of cities to maintain order against invaders. Once nomadic raiders could penetrate the city walls, this early urban civilization collapsed. It would be many hundreds of years before large metropolitan centers would once again rise in the subcontinent. 11
Similarly, the first great cities of the Americas—from the Olmecs and Maya in Central America to the pre-Incan civilizations in the Andes— flourished as centers of empires that provided the security critical to large-scale urban growth.12 Under such a protective regime, Teotihuacán, in central Mexico, grew to a population of between fifty and eightyfive thousand from the fourth to the sixth centuries A.D. Yet an invasion by less civilized people from the north in 750 A.D. had left it largely deserted.13
CHINA: THE ENDURING URBAN ORDER
China arguably supplies the most enduring example of the imperial role in city building. A unique, indigenous urbanism in China had begun in the second millennium B.C., but for the most part, the early cities stood as relatively small ritual centers, with surrounding workshops for artisans servicing the court. The creation of the united empire under the Zhou around 1110 B.C. sparked the first development of large walled towns; indeed, the character for wall and city was identical.14
The Zhou dynasty and its successors the Han and the Tang devised a pattern of centralized control unparalleled in its duration and thoroughness.15 For over a millennium, the capital cities of Loyang, Chang’an, and Kaifeng consistently ranked among the world’s largest. Shifts in relative importance depended largely on the location of the ruling dynasts.16 “It is the sovereign alone who establishes the capital,” states the Confucian classic Zhou Li. Other cities, whether large administrative centers or the local government unit, or hsien, derived their importance largely from their role as administrative centers for a portion of the empire.17
In ensuing centuries, other neighboring Asian countries adopted the Chinese model of urbanism. Japan’s first major centers—Naniwa, Fujiwara, and Nara—consciously borrowed from the Chinese city-empire of Chang’an.18 In A.D. 794, the Japanese constructed a new, and more permanent, capital city at Heian, or Kyoto, which grew to be home to over one hundred thousand residents and served for over a millennium as essentially a ceremonial capital centered around the household of the emperor.19
Similarly, Seoul, established as the capital of the Yi dynasty in A.D. 1394, served, in the words of two Korean historians, as a “pastoral mandarin capital” for roughly five hundred years. Following the classical Chinese model, the city was laid out as an administrative center, surrounded by walls and dominated by the royal bureaucracy.
CHAPTER THREE
THE FIRST COMMERCIAL CAPITALS
The development of imperial cities with control over large areas allowed for the rapid growth of trade in all areas of early urban growth, from China to Egypt, Mesopotamia, and eventually the Americas. Despite this, the overall role of merchants and artisans in urban society remained sharply circumscribed.
Today, the entrepreneurial class is often assumed to be the critical, if not the dominant, shaper of a vital urban area. Yet in the ancient world, even when merchants and artisans accumulated considerable wealth, power remained concentrated in the hands of priests, soldiers, and bureaucrats. Often merchants served simply as middlemen, implementing the trade initiatives of the state or the priesthood. In Egypt, one historian notes, the pharaoh stood as “the only wholesale merchant.”1
In China, urban merchants used their wealth to scale the rigid barriers of class, seeking ways for themselves or their children to enter the government class or the aristocracy. Even the layout of the Chinese city reflected the priorities of the society: The ruler’s palace lay in the middle of the metropolis, while the markets were placed in far less auspicious and peripheral locations. 2
THE RISE OF PHOENICIA
The search for the origins of the commercial metropolis—so important to the later development of urbanism—leads us away from the great city-empires and instead to a narrow strip of land between the coastal mountains and the Mediterranean.
The climate in the area that would later become known as Phoenicia was particularly amenable to human settlement. As an Arab poet would write, it “carried winter on its head, spring on its shoulders whilst summer slumbers at its feet.”3 Early port cities, such as Ugarit north along the Syrian coast, developed as trade centers for empires of the Hittites and Egyptians as early as the middle centuries of the second millennium B.C.4
At a time when almost all other city dwellers feared the open sea, Phoenician traders scoured a vast extent of the known world. Their black ships explored everywhere from the far western coast of Africa to Sardinia, Cyprus, Spain, and even Great Britain.5 Although the main Phoenician cities such as Tyre or Sidon never grew much larger than forty thousand people—a fraction of the size of Babylon6—they arguably spread their influence over a wider array of places than any civilization up to that time.
Unlike the great empires, the Phoenicians never expanded deeply into the interior. Clinging to the coastline, they instead developed an urban life based predominantly on trading goods, and sometimes services, to their more powerful neighbors.7 The Phoenicians’ genius lay in making themselves indispensable, preferably at a healthy profit.
“WHOSE MERCHANTS ARE PRINCES”
By the ninth and eighth centuries B.C., Phoenician cities such as Bylbos (a key port for the Lebanese cedar trade), Tyre, and Sidon had become wealthy and powerful in their own right. Here, for the first time, we see the emergence of an influential, even dominant, merchant class. Tyre, wrote Isaiah, was “the crowning city, whose merchants are princes and whose traffickers are the honorable of the earth.”8
Phoenician contributions extended well beyond their role as traders in goods. In a way later seen in such cities as Venice, Amsterdam, and Osaka, they also developed skills as artisans and craftsmen. Phoenicians fashioned glass, jewelry, garments, and other adornments worn from the wilds of Spain to the already ancient cities of Sumeria. Homer, in The Iliad, speaks of Paris clothing Helen in “the bright robes woven by the women of Sidon.”9 One particularly important industry grew from their mastery of the complex formula for extracting purple dye from the glands of a sea snail found on their beaches. It was from this dye, phonikes (“red” or “purple” in Greek) that the region derived its name.10
Phoenician cities also exported their expertise. They were the designers of beautiful urban places, palaces, and temples around the ancient world, including Solomon’s Temple at Jerusalem.11
The Phoenicians’ greatest cultural contr
ibution—the alphabet—also derived from the demands of commerce. Phoenician merchants and artisans learned from the Mesopotamians and Egyptians the value of writing as a way to keep accounts and lay down laws. Starting around 1100 B.C., these practical urbanites devised a system that was both simpler and more accessible than the old hieroglyphs. This system of writing became the basis for the Greek and then the Latin alphabets.12
As befitted talented entrepreneurs, the Phoenicians appreciated their own value. They were quick to remind their customers that they would do their bidding for profit, not out of compulsion. When the pharaoh sent a mission to procure wood for a sacred vessel for the god Amon, the king of Bylbos rudely reminded the Egyptian representative: “Nor am I the servant of him that sent thee.”13
THE ROOTS OF PHOENICIAN DECLINE
Like the Greek city-states that would inherit their commercial empire, or the Italian cities of the Renaissance two millennia later, each Phoenician city was covetous of its own independence. Cities were run, for the most part, by mercantile interests whose primary concern was expanding trade.
The civic parochialism of the mercantile elite served to limit the Phoenicians as empire builders. When their traders founded permanent outposts far from their native land, their tendency was to build a new, independent city.