The Urban Revolution PDF

The Urban Revolution Author(s): V. Gordon Childe Source: The Town Planning Review , Apr., 1950, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Apr., 1950), pp. 3-17 Published by: Liverpool University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40102108 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and s...

The Urban Revolution Author(s): V. Gordon Childe Source: The Town Planning Review , Apr., 1950, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Apr., 1950), pp. 3-17 Published by: Liverpool University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40102108 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Liverpool University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Town Planning Review This content downloaded from 103.211.18.1 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:05:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  THE URBAN REVOLUTION by V. GORDON CHILDE Director of the Institute of Archaeology, the University of Lon concept of * city ' is notoriously hard to define. The aim essay is to present the city historically - or rather pr the resultant and symbol of a * revolution ' that initiated stage in the evolution of society. The word * revolution ' mu be taken as denoting a sudden violent catastrophe; it is culmination of a progressive change in the economic str organisation of communities that caused, or was accompan increase in the population affected - an increase that would ap bend in the population graph were vital statistics available. J observable at the time of the Industrial Revolution in En demonstrable statistically, comparable changes of direction m at two earlier points in the demographic history of Britain Though perhaps less sharp and less durable, these too shou revolutionary changes in economy. They may then be re marking transitions between stages in economic and social de Sociologists and ethnographers last century classified exist societies in a hierarchy of three evolutionary stages, denomi * savagery,' * barbarism ' and ' civilisation/ If they be d selected criteria, the logical hierarchy of stages can be tr temporal sequence of ages, proved archaeologically to foll the same order wherever they occur. Savagery and barbarism recognized and appropriately defined by the methods adop food. Savages live exclusively on wild food obtained by co or fishing. Barbarians on the contrary at least supplement thes by cultivating edible plants and - in the Old World north of by breeding animals for food. Throughout the Pleistocene Period - the Palaeolithic Age o - all known human societies were savage in the foregoing sens tribes have survived in out of the way parts to the present da logical record barbarism began less than ten thousand y Neolithic Age of archaeologists. It thus represents a later, as stage, than savagery. Civilization cannot be defined in quite Etymologically the word is connected with * city/ and sure e begins with this stage. But ' city ' is itself ambiguous so arch use * writing J as a criterion of civilization; it should be This content downloaded from 103.211.18.1 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:05:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 4 THE URBAN REVOLUTION april and proves to be a reliable index to more p that, because a people is said to be civilized all its members can read and write, nor th is no recorded instance of a community of urban life or inventing a script. Wherev preliterate farmers existed previously (sav people have colonized uninhabited tra whenever it arose, succeeded barbarism. We have seen that a revolution as here denned should be reflected in the population statistics. In the case of the Urban Revolution the increase was mainly accounted for by the multiplication of the numbers of persons living together, i.e., in a single built-up area. The first cities represented settlement units of hitherto unprecedented size. Of course it was not just their size that constituted their distinctive character. We shall find that by modern standards they appeared ridiculously small and we might meet agglomerations of popula- tion today to which the name city would have to be refused. Yet a certain size of settlement and density of population, is an essential feature of civilization. Now the density of population is determined by the food supply which in turn is limited by natural resources, the techniques for their exploitation and the means of transport and food-preservation available. The last factors have proved to be variables in the course of human history, and the technique of obtaining food has already been used to distinguish the consecutive stages termed savagery and barbarism. Under the gathering economy of savagery population was always exceedingly sparse. In aboriginal America the carrying capacity of normal unimproved land seems to have been from ,o$ to.10 per square mile. Only under exceptionally favourable conditions did the fishing tribes of the Northwest Pacific coast attain densities of over one human to the square mile. As far as we can guess from the extant remains, population densities in palaeolithic and pre-neolithic Europe were less than the normal American. Moreover such hunters and collectors usually live in small roving bands. At best several bands may come together for quite brief periods on ceremonial occasions such as the Australian corroborrees. Only in exceptionally favoured regions can fishing tribes establish anything like villages. Some settlements on the Pacific coasts comprised thirty or so substantial and durable houses, accommodating groups of several hundred persons. But even these villages were only occupied during the winter ; for the rest of the year their inhabitants dispersed in smaller groups. Nothing comparable has been found in pre-neolithic times in the Old World. The Neolithic Revolution certainly allowed an expansion of population and enormously increased the carrying capacity of suitable land. On the Pacific Islands neolithic societies today attain a density of 30 or more persons to the square mile. In pre-Columbian North America, however, where the land is not obviously restricted by surrounding seas, the maximum density recorded is just under 2 to the square mile. This content downloaded from 103.211.18.1 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:05:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms i9£o V. GORDON CHILD li $ Neolithic farmers could of cou permanent villages, though, owing practised, unless the crops were w shifted at least every twenty year was not reflected so much in the multiplication of settlements. In et a few hundred inhabitants (a coup Fig. I - Plan of the neolithic village of A Fig. 2 - Hypothetic Reconstruction o After ft. ft. Schmidt This content downloaded from 103.211.18.1 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:05:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 6 THE URBAN REVOLUTION april a thousand, but perhaps they cann Europe the largest neolithic village $2 small, one-roomed dwellings, bu so the average local group in n members. These low figures are of course the absence of wheeled vehicles and had to live within easy walking dis the normal rural economy of the and-burnt or j humming, condemn fallow so that large areas were requ ment rose above the numbers tha land, the excess had to hive off and The Neolithic Revolution had ot population, and their exploitation surplus increase. The new econom to produce every year more food t alive. In other words it made possibl Owing to the low efficiency of neo insignificant at first, but it could b of society. Now in any Stone Age society, palaeolithic or neolithic, savage or barbarian, everybody can at least in theory make at home the few indispensible tools, the modest cloths and the simple ornaments everyone requires. But every member of the local community, not disqualified by age, must contribute actively to the communal food supply by personally collecting, hunting, fishing, gardening or herding. As long as this holds good, there can be no full-time specialists, no persons nor class of persons who depend for their livelihood on food produced by others and secured in exchange for material or immaterial goods or services. We find indeed to day among Stone Age barbarians and even savages expert craftsmen (for instance flint-knappers among the Ona of Tierra del Fuego), men who claim to be experts in magic, and even chiefs. In palaeolithic Europe too there is some evidence for magicians and indications of chieftainship in pre-neolithic times. But on closer observation we discover that today these experts are not full-time specialists. The Ona flintworker must spend most of his time hunting ; he only adds to his diet and his prestige by making arrow- heads for clients who reward him with presents. Similarly a pre-Columbian chief, though entitled to customary gifts and services from his followers, must still personally lead hunting and fishing expeditions and indeed could only maintain his authority by his industry and prowess in these pursuits. The same holds good of barbarian societies that are still in the neolithic stage, like the Polynesians where industry in gardening takes the place of prowess in hunting. The reason is that there simply will not be enough food to go round unless This content downloaded from 103.211.18.1 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:05:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Plate I Fig. 3 - Section of the Ramparts round the Citadel of Harappa This content downloaded from 103.211.18.1 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:05:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Plate 2 Fig. 4 - The Step Pyramid of Zoser J. P. Laver, La Pyramide a Degris: I' Architecture, Vol. II, pl. II: i (L'lnstitut Francais d'Archaeologie, Cairo) Fig. 5 - Clay Account Tablets from Erech showing the oldest Mesopotamian Writing Fig. 6 - Seals current in the Harappa Civilization showing the Indus writing and style of art The Institute of Archaeology, The University of London This content downloaded from 103.211.18.1 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:05:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Plate 3 Fig. 7 - The Temple of Warriors with the Castle in the distance, Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico Ewing Galloway and Aerofilms, London This content downloaded from 103.211.18.1 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:05:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Plate 4 Fig. 8 - Frieze of Horses from the Cave of Lascaux (Dordogne) showing Naturalist Art of Palaeolithic Hunters A. H. Broderick, Lascaux A Commentary, pl. 24, p. 120. Lindsay Drummond Ltd., London Fig. 9 - Painted Vase from Sialk in Iron illustrating Conventional Art of Early Peasantries (After R. Chirshman, Fouilles de Sialk pris de Kashan. Paris 1938) This content downloaded from 103.211.18.1 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:05:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  i9£o V. GORDON CHILDE 7 every member of the group contr not big enough to feed idle mouths. Social division of labour, save th is thus impossible. On the contrary absorbtion in obtaining food. by sim to the group. For co-operation is ess defence against foes, human and sub and pursuits is echoed and magnified rigid conformity is enforced as effe food. But conformity and industrio to maintain them. The local group us who believe themselves descended from a common ancestor or who have earned a mystical claim to such descent by ceremonial adoption) or a group of clans related by habitual intermarriage. And the sentiment of kinship is reinforced or supplemented by common rites focussed on some ancestral shrine or sacred place. Archaeology can provide no evidence for kinship organization, but shrines occupied the central place in preliterate villages in Mesopotamia, and the long barrow, a collective tomb that overlooks the presumed site of most neolithic villages in Britain, may well have been also the ancestral shrine on which converged the emotions and ceremonial activities of the villagers below. However, the solidarity thus idealized and concretely symbolized, is really based on the same principles as that of a pack of wolves or a herd of sheep; Durkheim has called it * mechanical/ Now among some advanced barbarians (for instance tattooers or wood- carvers among the Maori) still technologically neolithic we find expert craftsmen tending towards the status of full-time professionals, but only at the cost of breaking away from the local community. If no single village can produce a surplus large enough to feed a full-time specialist all the year round, each should produce enough to keep him a week or so. By going round from village to village an expert might thus live entirely from his craft. Such itinerants will lose their membership of the sedentary kinship group. They may in the end form an analogous organization of their own - a craft clan, which, if it remain hereditary, may become a caste, or, if it recruit its members mainly by adoption (apprenticeship throughout Antiquity and the Middle Age was just temporary adoption), may turn into a guild. But such specialists, by emancipation from kinship ties, have also forfeited the protection of the kinship organization which alone under barbarism, guaranteed to its members security of person and property. Society must be reorganized to accommodate and protect them. In pre-history specialization of labour presumably began with similar itinerant experts. Archaeological proof is hardly to be expected, but in ethnography metal-workers are nearly always full time specialists. And in Europe at the beginning of the Bronze Age metal seems to have been worked and purveyed by perambulating smiths who seem to have functioned like tinkers and other itinerants of much more recent times. Though there is no such This content downloaded from 103.211.18.1 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:05:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  8 THE URBAN REVOLUTION april positive evidence, the same proba metallurgy. There must of course ha whom, as the Polynesian example w because they worked in perishable m will be to rescue such specialists fro in a new social organization. About £,000 years ago irrigatio breeding and fishing) in the valleys Indus had begun to yield a social s of resident specialists who were t Water-transport, supplemented in M vehicles and even in Egypt by pack at a few centres. At the same time d Fig. 10 - First Centres of Urban Civil of the crops restricted the cultivab waters and protecting habitatio aggregation of population. Thus a ten times as great as any known neo the old world are offshoots of those So the latter need not be taken into account if a minimum definition of civil- ization is to be inferred from a comparison of its independent manifestations. This content downloaded from 103.211.18.1 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:05:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  i9£o V. GORDON CHILDE 9 But some three millennia later impossible to prove that the Ma civilizations of the Old World. Their achievements must therefore be taken Fig. II - First Centres of Urban Civilization in Central America into account in our comparison, and their inclusion seriously complicates the task of defining the essential preconditions for the Urban Revolution. In the Old World the rural economy which yielded the surplus was based on the cultivation of cereals combined with stock-breeding. But this economy had been made more efficient as a result of the adoption of irrigation (allowing cultivation without prolonged fallow periods) and of important inventions and discoveries - metallurgy, the plough, the sailing boat and the wheel. None of these devices was known to the Mayas ; they bred no animals for milk or meat ; though they cultivated the cereal maize, they used the same sort of slash-and-burn method as neolithic farmers in prehistoric Europe or in the Pacific Islands today. Hence the minimum definition of a city, the greatest factor common to the Old World and the New will be substantially reduced and impoverished by the inclusion of the Maya. Nevertheless ten rather abstract criteria, all deducible from archaeological data, serve to distinguish even the earliest cities from any older or contemporary village. (1) In point of size the first cities must have been more extensive and more densely populated than any previous settlements, although considerably smaller than many villages today. It is indeed only in Mesopotamia and India that the first urban populations can be estimated with any confidence or precision. There excavation has been sufficiently extensive and intensive to reveal both the total area and the density of building in sample quarters and in both respects This content downloaded from 103.211.18.1 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:05:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms io THE URBAN REVOLUTION april Fig. 12- Plan of the City of Erech (Uruk) show canal (The White Temple stood at the inte This content downloaded from 103.211.18.1 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:05:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms i9£o V. GORDON CHILDE n has disclosed significant agreement today. The population of Sumeria 7,000 and 20,000; Harappa and Mo approximated to the higher figure. cities were of comparable magnitude executed by urban populations. (2) In composition and function from that of any village. Very likely harvesting the lands and waters ad accommodated in addition classes wh by agriculture, stock-breeding, f craftsmen, transport workers, mer of course supported by the surplus and in dependent villages, but they changing their products or services f (3) Each primary producer paid ov the soil with his still very limited imaginary deity or a divine king wh Fig. 13 - Craftsmen engaged in Rope Makin of Rekh-me-Re, fifteenth century N. de Garis Davis, The Tomb of Rekh-me-Re, vol. II, This content downloaded from 103.211.18.1 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:05:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 12 THE URBAN REVOLUTION april this concentration, owing to the lo effective capital would have been ava (4) Truly monumental public build city from any village but also symbol Every Sumerian city was from the first centrally situated on a brick platform and usually connected with an artifici Fig. 14 - Reconstruction of the White Templ But attached to the temples, were wo appurtenance of each principal tem Indus basin, was dominated by an art of kiln-baked bricks, containing pr looking an enormous granary and t nor palaces have been excavated in dominated by the gigantic tombs of are attested from the literary record exclusively from the temples and p they grew up. Hence in Sumer the social surplus the hands of a god and stored in his America while in Egypt the pharao the imaginary deities were served by elaborate and often sanguinary rites masters' earthly estates. In Sumer in the revolution, shared his wealth a 4 City-King,' who acted as civil ru was naturally assisted by a whole hier (s) All those not engaged in food in the first instance by the surplus a and were thus dependent on temple military leaders and officials absorbed This content downloaded from 103.211.18.1 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:05:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms i9^o V. GORDON CHILDE 13 Fig. 15 - Plan of part of the City of After Wheeler in Ancient India I and thus formed a * ruling class.' Unlike a palaeolithic magician or a neolithic chief, they were, as an Egyptian scribe actually put it, ' exempt from all manu tasks.' On the other hand, the lower classes were not only guaranteed peac and security, but were relieved from intellectual tasks which many find mor irksome than any physical labour. Besides reassuring the masses that the sun w going to rise next day and the river would flood again next year (people who have not five thousand years of recorded experience of natural uniformiti behind them are really worried about such matters!), the ruling classes did conf substantial benefits upon their subjects in the way of planning and organization This content downloaded from 103.211.18.1 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:05:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 14 THE URBAN REVOLUTION april (6) They were in fact compelled to invent sy but practically useful, sciences. The mere admi of a Sumerian temple or a pharaoh by a perpetual corp priests or officials obliged i to devise conventional methods of recording that should be intelligible to all their colleagues and successors, that is, to invent systems of writing and numeral notation. Writing is thus a significant, as well as a convenient, mark of civilization. But while writing is a trait common to Egypt, Meso- potamia, the Indus valley and Central America, the characters themselves were different in each region and so were the normal writing materials - papyrus in Egypt, clay in Mesopotamia. The engraved seals or stelae that provide the sole extant evidence for early Indus and Maya writing, no more represent the normal vehicles for the scripts than do the comparable documents from Egypt and Sumer. (7) The invention of writing - or shall we say the inventions of scripts - enabled the leisured clerks to proceed to the elaboration of exact and predictive sciences - arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. Obviously beneficial and explicitly attested by the Egyptian and Maya documents was the correct determination of the tropic year and the creation of a calendar. For it enabled the rulers to regulate success- fully the cycle of agricultural operations. But once more the Egyptian, Maya and Babylonian calendars were as different as any systems based on a single natural unit could be. Calendrical and mathe- matical sciences are common features Fig. 16- Maya Glyph giving Date Formula and of the earliest civilizations and they Numerals too are corollaries of the archaeol- After G. S. Morley, The Ancient Maya pl. 15 Oxford University Press, 1949 ogists' criterion, writing. This content downloaded from 103.211.18.1 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:05:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  i9*o V. GORDON CHILDE ig (8) Other specialists, supported b a new direction to artistic express tried, sometimes with astonishing s they saw them - concretely and na that; they hardly ever tried to re symbolize them by abstract geometr by a few traits a fantastical man o Indus and Maya artist-craftsmen - fu - began once more to carve, model but no longer with the naive nat conceptualized and sophisticated styl centres. Pig. 17 - Bas Reliefs on a Stone Vase from Erech indicating the stylised naturalism of literate Sumeria (9) A further part of the concentrated social surplus was used to pay for the importation of raw materials, needed for industry or cult and not available locally. Regular * foreign ' trade over quite long distances was a feature of all early civilizations and, though common enough among barbarians later, is not certainly attested in the Old World before 3,000 B.C. nor in the New before the Maya ' empire.' Thereafter regular trade extended from Egypt at least as far B This content downloaded from 103.211.18.1 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:05:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  16 THE URBAN REVOLUTION april as Byblos on the Syrian coast while M with the Indus valley. While the obje mainly * luxuries/ they already includ notably metal the place of which in t To this extent the first cities were depe trade as no neolithic village ever was. (10) So in the city, specialist crafts materials needed for the employment o in a State organization based now on re was no longer obligatory. The city w could belong politically as well as econo Yet in return for security they becam were relegated to the lower classes. The advantages ; in Egypt for instance met tools for agricultural work. Yet, howev communities must have been held toget any neolithic village. Peasants, craftsme not only by reason of identity of language mutually complementary functions, under civilization) of the whole. In f approximation to an organic solidarity b and interdependence between all its constituent cells of an organism. Of approximation. However necessary th were with the existing forces of produ on economic interests between the ti of the social surplus, and the vast major and effectively excluded from the spiri had still to be maintained by the i mechanical solidarity of barbarism as temple or the sepulchral shrine, and now State organization. There could be no oldest cities. These ten traits exhaust the factors common to the oldest cities that archaeology, at best helped out with fragmentary and often ambiguous written sources, can detect. No specific elements oF town planning for example can be proved characteristic of all such cities ; for on the one hand the Egyptian and Maya cities have not yet been excavated; on the other neolithic villages were often walled, an elaborate system of sewers drained the Orcadian hamlet of Skara Brae; two-storeyed houses were built in pre-Columbian pueblos, and so on. The common factors are quite abstract. Concretely Egyptian, Sumerian, Indus and Maya civilizations were as different as the plans of their temples, the signs of their scripts and their artistic conventions. In view of this divergence and because there is so far no evidence for a temporal priority of one Old World This content downloaded from 103.211.18.1 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:05:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms i9£o V. GORDON CHILDE 17 centre (for instance, Egypt) over the America and any other urban centre, be regarded as mutually independen in the Old World may in a sense be re Egypt, Mesopotamia or the Indus. But this was not a case of like prod of Bronze Age Crete or classical Greece differ more from their reputed ance But the urban revolutions that gave They could and probably did draw u allegedly primary centres. That is mo Even today we use the Egyptians' cale day and the hour. Our European ancest these divisions of time nor repeat the they took over - and very slightly ago! But the same is in a sense true of the Sumerians and the Indus people food. At the same time they had to im like metals and building timber as we these natural resources could in exc They could use it as capital to supp rulers - until the latters' achieveme enriched barbarian economies that th in their turn. 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