Emerging cities

The Emergence of Cities

• This chapter explores the origins of cities, their location, and the timing of their emergence, further examining the impact of cities on their inhabitants.

Discoveries in Africa (75,000 Years Ago)

• Archaeological discoveries in Africa dating back 75,000 years showcase symbolic thinking in early humans.
• In Tanzania's Serengeti National Park, 70,000-year-old ostrich eggshell beads were discovered in 2004.
• In South Africa, 30 perforated seashells were found, suggesting their use as jewelry nearly 75,000 years ago.
• These artifacts offer concrete evidence of symbolic thought in ancient humans, predating previous estimates by 30,000 years.
• These findings contribute to the debate on whether modern behavior evolved gradually or from a "creative emergence" around 45,000 years ago.

Archaeological Belief

• Current archaeological belief suggests that anatomically modern humans initially appeared in Africa roughly 120,000 years.
• Archaeological evidence from a wide geographic area indicates that early forms of modern behavior emerged around 45,000 years ago, coinciding with human migration from Africa.
• European evidence from 40,000 years ago includes cave paintings, jewelry, specialized tools, and burial rituals.

Cultural Lag POV

• "Modern" humans came into being, and two perspectives address their development.
• Some propose a culture-lag view, suggesting that despite the emergence of anatomically modern humans 120,000 years ago, technological and cultural changes came about with a genetic shift, potentially triggered by population density.
• Cultural change in Europe may have occurred due to competition between humans migrating from Africa and Neanderthals around 45,000 years ago.

Gradual Evolution POV

• Some argue for a gradual evolution of "behavioral modernity" in Africa.
• While the capacity for creative thinking existed, it may not have been expressed due to limited archaeological research in Africa, unlike extensively studied European sites.
• Recent discoveries of shell "jewelry" in Africa dating back 70,000-75,000 years, along with bone tools and ocher pieces found in a South African cave, support this view.
• The ocher pieces, dating back about 70,000 years, featured abstract lines suggestive of artistic expression.

Symbolism and Tools

• Jewelry is universally regarded as a form of art indicative of symbolic thought.
• Making beads is considered evidence of symbolic thinking with little connection to survival.
• "Modern" traits include planning, technological innovation, establishing social and trade networks, creating art, and adapting to changing conditions.
• Beads may have symbolized identity, group status, relationships, or language, implying a means of communicating meaning.
• Beads offer tangible proof of a concept of self, as personal decoration suggests a sense of self-awareness.

The Origin of Cities

• Speculation surrounds the origin and development of cities due to limited written records and fragmentary archaeological evidence.
• Cities include settlements with large, dense populations.

Early cities

• Archaeologists generally agree that cities independently arose in Mesopotamia (modern-day southern Iraq), Egypt, the Indus River Valley (modern-day Pakistan), the Yellow River basin in China, the valley of Mexico, and the coastlands of Peru.
• These civilizations emerged in various epochs.
• Mesopotamia, Egypt, and India are considered "dead" cultures from which Western civilizations evolved.
• The Meso-American cultures of the Mexican (Aztec), Central American (Mayan), and Peruvian (Inca) civilizations were destroyed during the Spanish conquest of 1519-1533.
• China is the only "living" original civilization, originating in the Shang Dynasty (Yellow River Basin) in the late third millennium B.C.

Urban Settlement Requirements

• Urban settlements had two requirements: a sufficient food surplus to support those not involved in food production and a social structure to distribute the surplus beyond family and kinship ties.

Hunting and Gathering

• Humans spent most (98%) of their 500,000-year existence as nomadic wanderers, subsisting on berries, fruits, roots, nuts, and meat.
• The Paleolithic or Old Stone Age (500,000-10,000 B.C.) coincided with the Pleistocene or Ice Age, known for glacial ice sheet coverage.
• Small nomadic clan groups containing families made up the predominant social unit needed to move constantly to fresh food sources.

Climatic Conditions

• Climatic changes around 9000 B.C. enabled people to reside in established communities.
• Crop cultivation and animal domestication began in favorable conditions, such as the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, and Indus valleys.
• Technological advancements in transportation, architecture, pottery, textiles, and metallurgy enabled the growth of concentrated populations.
• Innovations included stone tools, the ox-drawn plow, the wheeled cart, pottery, and later, weaving.
• Concentrated populations could transport needed goods, clear fields effectively, and store surplus commodities.

Productivity

• The agricultural economy helped bring the concentration in one place of people who do not grow their own food.
• The Neolithic (New Stone Age) Revolution or the Agricultural Revolution characterized that time.
• Factors include a social organization in which strata could appropriate the cultivators' produce, which is a necessary component.
• Religious and governing officials, traders, and artisans could live in towns because their power over goods did not depend on their presence on the land.

Urban Revolution

• V. Gordon Childe (1950) termed the "urban revolution" the development of new institutions to secure, store, and distribute food surpluses.
• The following traits distinguish early cities: large, dense settlements; nonagricultural specialists; a taxation and capital accumulation system; monumental public buildings; social classes etc.

Factors that Led to The Urban Revolution

• There are four broad categories
• Population refers to the increase resulting from the agricultural surplus.
• Organization is the social structure that enables the population to function.
• Environment contains the ecological landscape, such as geography.
• Technology refers to materials, tools, and techniques that increased food production, storage, and distribution.
• Archaeological evidence found in the Sumerian civilization, based in the Tigris-Euphrates region, today's Iraq, was largely attributed to Childe's theory.

Sumerian Cities

• Tower of Babel was located in the land of Shinar, which is called Sumer; its people are called Sumerians.
• The Sumerian civilization existed from roughly 3500 B.C. to 1800 B.C. .
• Uruk was one of the most influential of a number of city-states.
• Sumerian cities ranged in size from about 5,000 to 25,000 residents.
• Temples and pyramid towers were a vital feature of cities.
• Temples and pyramidical towers were called ziggurats.
• Cities were theocracies ruled by the priestly class.

Temple Complex

• Administrative offices, and support facilities including granaries, stables, and sheds.
• Artisans, scribes, domestic servants, and retainers of the ruling class lived outside.
• Streets were narrow and wandering.
• Two or three stories housed dense and congested, built around an inner court, which was in response to street dangers.
• The river harbor was the Sumerian marketplace, intercity and interregional trade.
• The agricultural surplus and cultural advances aided the development of trade, and was carried over considerable distances following caravan routes and rivers.
• Warfare and conquest with trade further advanced culture, with new ideas and information introduced, with the creation of great works of art a result. One significant example is the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Epic of Gilgamesh

• 1,500 years older than Homer's The Illiad and The Odyssey.
• Written on Clay tablets that were found in the mid-19th century in Mesopotamia.
• Likely, it contains an account of The Flood that predates the biblical story of Noah by over 750 years.
• Epic -heroic account of the life of Gilgamesh, a king of Uruk, who lived in 2700 B.C.

The Origin of Cities Trade Theory

• Mid-20th century archaeological excavations have also led archaeologists to question Childe's view that trade followed cities as cities followed agriculture.
• Evidence found in Ancient Jericho and in Catal Huyuk questioned the thesis that civilization and cities first emerged in Mesopotamia.
• Jericho and Catal Huyuk's ruins contained traces of foreign goods that indicates it was a trade center.
• The ruins contained evidence that a considerable amount of trade must have existed between Jericho, which had access to valuable minerals, and its distant neighbors.

Key Facts about Catal Huyuk

• Estimated to be at least 8,500 years old.
• Contained 32 acres that had the potential to house at least 6,000 people.
• Excavations began in the early 1960s.
• Houses and shrines were clustered around the courtyard and constructed without doorways.
• The objects included women's jewelry and intricately carved weapons.
• Walls were decorated with representational and abstract wall paintings, which depicted scenes of bulls, people, and cattle, among which was the mural of diving vulture assailing a headless man.
• Ruins include foreign materials and skeletal remains found in the excavations: seashells from the Mediterranean Sea, fine flint from Syria to the east, and foreign nuts and seeds.

Neolithic Communities

• Cities may be the key to trade rather than production or agriculture.
• "New Obsidian" is the imaginary city, which is built off Catal Huyuk, and served as the basis.
• Mining obsidian and trading goods developed trade skilled crafting that was made into desirable objects.
• Rural development accounts for agricultural primacy.

Flaws in Neolithic Theory

• Doubts persist regarding the plausibility of these theories.
• There are three questions from Architect and town planner A. E. J. Morris, that raise questions regarding Jacobs's conclusions.

Factors to decline of cities

• Limited by the social and cultural.

Religion in Early Cities

Early sociological views

• Religion serves as a cohesive element that gives people a collective sense of community.
• There is potential evidence that massive religious building projects could have predated agricultural, which would elaborate that religious observance may predate the agricultural revolution.
• In 1864, Fustel de Coulanges wrote of religion's importance in ancient Grecian and Roman cities.

Mumford Theory

• The city of the dead may have antedated the city of the living.
• Paleolithic humans came together to pay homage to the dead and to reaffirm their bonds, which led to people seeking a fix meeting place that led to continuous settlement.
• A crucial element of cultural importance is the agricultural advancements with changes and social structures.
• Early city dwellers had primary loyalty to the city, not to their kinship groups or clans.
• Cities like Mesopotamia had social organization.
• Cities had a distinct social organization compared to prior neolithic villages.
• "True cities" include the cities in Mesopotamia and Egypt that rose in 3000 B.C., followed by cities in India a millennium later. The largest of them was Memphis (Cairo) at 100,000 people.
• By 1000 в.с., the cities in the Middle East region then went into decline and eclipse.

Downfall of cities

• Concentrated power and wealth in cities led to arrested growth.
• A ruling class can discourage rational science which could lead to stagnation in in agriculture and technology.
• primitive sanitation facilities combined with the lack of scientific medicine kept low urban mortality rates high and minimized growth.
• Political and military limitations.
• The constant warfare, raids from neighboring settlements, and outside attacks made the early cities especially vulnerable and small.

Hamoukar

• Is an anicent site excavation - Architectural find that demonstrates warfare had an important element in the ancient cities.
• An increase can result in diffusing culture

Factors that hindered city functions

• The lack of scientific medicine and urban hygiene.
• The tie of the peasant to the land and the need for a large population be involved in cultivation
• The absence of manufacturing
• Their vulnerability to raids, conquests, and natural disasters