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Entropic Cities: The Paradox of Urbanism in Ancient Mesopotamia
Abstract
The growth of cities in antiquity is paradoxical: before modern health and sanitation standards, early urban dwellers suffered high mortality as a result of epidemics and chronic diseases arising, respectively, from propinquity and poor sanitation. At the same time, lower-status individuals within those cities would have endured depressed birth rates because, typically, many toiled in partially or fully dependent occupations not conducive to early marriage or stable families. The interplay between these compounding forces implies that early cities would not have been viable over the long term and could not have grown without a continual flow of immigrants. The early cities of Mesopotamia were no exception. In an earlier publication, I argued that the growth of the first centers that emerged in the alluvial lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers during the fourth millennium BC was predicated on migratory inflows that took place, in part, in the context of self-amplifying cycles whereby the replacement of imported commodities with locally made, mass-produced substitutes catalyzed increases in specialization, employment, market size, and trade (Smithian growth). In this article, I expand on these ideas, explore their applicability to later periods of Mesopotamian history, and consider further iterations of substitution-fueled growth cycles in those periods.
... Households and the face-to-face interactions of their members with others create urban conditions and change. Parallel developments are also occurring in other regions that have seen recent fieldwork at early urban sites [80][81][82][83]. ...
The concept of urban order is important for research in urban sustainability science. I review the concepts and methods used by archaeologists to address the question of what holds early cities together. Archaeologists are starting to come around to the standard interpretation of urban order in the social sciences: urban order is created and maintained by the operation of two types of social forces: institutions (top-down forces) and generative processes (bottom-up forces). I review the changes in archaeological thinking that led from obsolete and inadequate models of social order (statism and agency) to the emerging current understanding. I discuss the concept of institutions and provide a new archaeologically-useful definition, and I describe five types of early urban institutions (political, economic, political economy, social, and religious). I then discuss three types of generative process: population/demography, self-governance, and self-coordination. These developments in the archaeology of urbanism have two benefits. They help archaeologists produce better models and interpretations of past cities; and, they help other urban scientists understand the deep history of cities and urban life. This approach allows new research findings on ancient cities to contribute to urban sustainability science today. What holds cities together? That is, how do city residents create and maintain a level of security, predictability, and cohesion that permits a city to flourish and persist through time? These are crucial questions for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 11, “Sustainable Cities and Communities,” and for the New Urban Agenda [1,2,3]. A recent United Nations report notes that progress on the Sustainable Development Goals needs to be based on solid scientific and social scientific data. Furthermore, progress requires input from countries in the developing world and data from cities in those countries [4]. I argue that this broader urban perspective will remain incomplete without input from the growing body of scientific findings on past cities and early urban development. In this paper I pursue this approach through a focus on urban order. If archaeologists and historians can determine the nature and sources of social order in early cities, this knowledge has the potential to illuminate a number of issues in urban sustainability science today.
... If the water-formed feature at the heart of Lagash did indeed result from Lugalzagesi's raid, our data reflect three significant facts: hydraulic engineering in ED Mesopotamian cities contributed to an entropic mode of urban existence, strongly supporting Algaze (2018), especially for downstream settlements. Second, Lagash's flat topography made it particularly vulnerable to flooding during a period of marked hydro-politics, potentially explaining sustained population losses at Lagash and Nigin following Lugalzagesi. ...
New research at Tell al-Hiba, ancient Lagash, has revealed evidence of significant flooding and widespread destruction in the Mesopotamian city during the Early Dynastic period. We identify and date a prominent water-formed feature that cut through its primary temple district. Geoarchaeological trenching and geophysical prospection indicate that an upstream river avulsion led to rapid fluvial sedimentation within the settlement. Further analysis of archaeological data, including newly reported radiocarbon dates, suggests that this environmental crisis occurred during or shortly after Lagash was attacked by Lugalzagesi, king of Uruk. This study therefore also contributes to an improved chronometry of 3rd-millennium BC Mesopotamia.
... Many large sites have been identified only through survey or remote sensing and, even where excavation has occurred, information on settlement size, internal layout or the presence of features such as lower towns, walls or public buildings (e.g. palaces, administrative buildings or temple complexes), which signify function, may not be available (Algaze 2018). ...
Historically, urban centres are seen as consumers that draw in labour and resources from their rural hinterlands. Zooarchaeological studies of key urban sites in Southwest Asia demonstrate the movement of livestock, but the region-wide application of these findings has not been tested and the logistics of urban provisioning remain poorly understood. Here, the authors analyse zooarchaeological data from 245 sites in the Levant and Mesopotamia to examine patterns of livestock production and consumption over a 5000-year period. They find that although preferences varied over time and space, urban sites consistently relied on rural satellites to overcome local limitations to support their large and diverse populations.
La cuestión del asentamiento y la movilidad de las poblaciones ha sido un foco de interés recurrente en el estudio del llamado Cercano Oriente antiguo. Las fuentes antiguas, desde una perspectiva urbana, presentaban una visión estereotipada, y por lo general negativa, de los pastores móviles, y los períodos de retraimiento y crisis del urbanismo han sido pensados como momentos de ascenso de los grupos móviles. Ahora bien, si, como se ha argumentado, los pastores podían vivir en las ciudades, o incluso las ciudades constituir asentamientos de pastores, la distinción entre entornos asentados y móviles parece diluirse. El presente volumen propone pensar las interrelaciones dinámicas entre los aspectos de movilidad y asentamiento. En este sentido, la movilidad no se restringía a determinados modos de subsistencia o habitación (como el pastoreo móvil), sino que la circulación de personas, animales, objetos e ideas cruzaba las relaciones de poder, las prácticas religiosas o el intercambio, y abarcaba espacialidades diversas. Las contribuciones aquí reunidas abordan distintos aspectos de estas interrelaciones y problemáticas en situaciones específicas.
Durante las últimas fases del Calcolítico Tardío surgieron múltiples asentamientos urbanos en los valles del Éufrates y del Alto Khabur. La fuerte presencia de cultura Uruk llevó a pensar que dichos centros eran resultado de la influencia de la Baja Mesopotamia, cuyos habitantes se habían trasladado al norte y/o impuesto su cultura. En los últimos años, sin embargo, se ha matizado el peso de unos sobre otros, proponiendo que las poblaciones locales habrían participado de manera voluntaria en dichas relaciones, así como también resaltando los indicios previos de urbanización local. Ahora bien, una vez finalizado el Calcolítico Tardío no sólo se verifica el repliegue de la cultura Uruk sino también del fenómeno urbano, indicando entonces que habría existido una estrecha relación entre ambos fenómenos. En este artículo, retomando un estudio dedicado a los sitios de Hacinebi Tepe, de Habuba Kabira Sur/Tel Qannas, y de Tell Brak, nos proponemos analizar estos cambios en los patrones de asentamiento y las formas de organización social durante y después de la expansión Uruk, para intentar comprender de qué manera urbanismo y movilidad se articularon en dichas dinámicas.
The Classical municipal model and its associated monumentality has, for a long time, determined our perception of the ancient city. However, it is clear from the literal and archaeological evidence that there was public munificence after Classical Antiquity, when ‘traditional’ forms of lay, civic investment existed in parallel to the increasingly important pious charity. This paper explores, through the sociological lens of Place Theory and belonging, why medieval urban dwellers invested resources in their cities. The theoretical premise is that, in order to preserve community cohesion, members of a group defined by their shared space will have to invest time, effort, and resources according to their means. In the post-Roman West we see this through elite investment in lay and religious works that meet the needs of the community, but also in active participation in events like festivals and processions that reassure and confirm belonging to the community—especially in opposition to other urban communities. These premises will be further explored with examples taken from the Visigothic kingdom in the sixth and seventh centuries.
The recognition of low-density urbanisation has been important in documenting how diverse human settlements generated enduring social and economic change. In tropical regions, the key challenges to studying low-density urbanisation have been the difficulty in acquiring past built environment data and integrating the frameworks that illuminate the social behaviours intrinsic to urbanisation. The introduction of lidar mapping and urban science methods has proven revolutionary in our understanding of low-density urbanisation as demonstrated by emerging research on settlements and states in Mesoamerica and Southeast Asia. These studies draw on urban theory to highlight patterns in the built environment associated with profound societal changes including the rise of social institutions, agglomeration effects, and ongoing settlement growth. Here, we present an approach that combines lidar survey and archaeological fieldwork with recent developments in urban science to understand the built environment of Tongatapu; the location of an archaic state whose influence spread across the southwest Pacific Ocean between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries a.d. Quantitative results show—for the first time—that settlements on a Pacific island were urbanised in a distinct low-density form and that the processes of urbanisation began prior to state development. This study highlights the potential contribution of Pacific landscapes to urban science and the low-density settlement phenomena given the presence of large populations, hierarchical societies, and vast distributions of archaeological built remains on many island groups.
This Element describes and synthesizes archaeological knowledge of humankind's first cities for the purpose of strengthening a comparative understanding of urbanism across space and time. Case studies are drawn from ancient Mesopotamia, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. They cover over 9000 years of city building. Cases exemplify the 'deep history' of urbanism in the classic heartlands of civilization, as well as lesser-known urban phenomena in other areas and time periods. The Element discusses the relevance of this knowledge to a number of contemporary urban challenges around food security, service provision, housing, ethnic co-existence, governance, and sustainability. This study seeks to enrich scholarly debates about the urban condition, and inspire new ideas for urban policy, planning, and placemaking in the twenty first century.
This chapter uses the concept of agglomeration to rethink and critique existing historical narratives of the urban. An agglomeration is any collection of buildings, hominins, and things. The history of agglomerations begins deep in the Palaeolithic and continues until today. Viewed from this perspective, V. Gordon Childe’s “urban revolution” appears rather less revolutionary than it appears, and it effectively closes the study of more ancient agglomerations from urban history. It ignores the many forms of “low-density urbanism” that are found in, for example, South America and Cambodia, and it also occludes analysis of other types of agglomeration, such as monasteries, camps, and industrial complexes. The chapter also situates Henri Lefebvre’s twentieth-century “urban revolution” within the history of agglomerations. The so-called end of the city is, instead, merely the end of one particular type of agglomeration: the discrete city in its basically Childean form. What Neil Brenner described as “planetary urbanization” is instead “planetary agglomeration,” not a totalizing phenomenon but merely one scale of the technosphere.
Cambridge Core - Economic Theory - An Economic History of Europe - by Karl Gunnar Persson