The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) Read Online Free
Author: Joel Kotkin
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 role 27 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
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 role 27 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
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