The Rise of the Cities Part 1: What Is a City?
How do we know an ancient site is really a city?
In human history, there have been two major revolutions that have significantly affected our lives. The first was the Neolithic revolution when we abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and became farmers. Next was the urban revolution, which began with the urbanization of farming communities, laying the groundwork for future human progress.
The urban revolution was a watershed moment in human history. We had more time to focus our energy on innovations once we had food security. But have you ever thought about when we stopped living in small farming communities and decided that city life was better?
Or did specialization in skills force people to move to cities? There was a clear division of labor once humans realized we all have unique talents that are better used for the overall progress of the community.
In this four-part series, my focus will be on the urban revolution and the rise of cities. My interest in ancient cities comes from my search for the oldest and earliest known cities. What is the difference between the two? The oldest city still stands. In contrast, the earliest known city is simply the first city built by humans, irrespective of whether it is still inhabited.
There is a lot of confusion among history and archaeology enthusiasts about how to find the oldest and earliest cities. Every time archaeologists make a new discovery, people jump on the “see, I told you city X was the oldest” bandwagon. To avoid confusion, we need to define what a city is and how to distinguish it from a Neolithic settlement.
Is Jericho the oldest city? What about Göbekli Tepe? Could it be the oldest city that people know of? Are the Cucuteni-Trypillia mega settlements spread across Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine examples of early metropolises?
In this series, we will try to answer those questions.
The first part of this series will talk about what a city is. It is difficult to classify an ancient settlement as a city without specific parameters. This post will explain what makes a city a city. In the next part of this series, we’ll be looking at how humans transitioned from being hunter-gatherers to living in sophisticated ancient settlements. They’re known as “proto-cities.” Proto-cities do not meet all the criteria for a city, but they come close and are an important step in the urban revolution.
In the third part of this series, we’ll look at the earliest cities that we know of. Once we’ve established a clear definition of a city and the rise of pro-cities, the next step in our journey is to determine the earliest cities built by humans and their key features. We’ll wrap up this series with a look at some of the world’s oldest cities.
Before we begin the quest to find out about the earliest and oldest cities in human history, it is important for us to understand what is a city and how we distinguish it from a settlement.
Defining a city: A Childe’s play!
In the early days of social media, in the mid-2000s, I used to witness heated debates between people from various countries who would use an archaeological site with houses and signs of early human development as evidence of an ancient civilization. The discussions still take place but are not as prevalent.
Many were misled by pseudo-science and pseudo-archaeology about whether Catalhoyuk, Mehrgarh, and the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture can be called “cities” and if they qualify as civilizations.
We need to set some rules before we can call any old site a city. If we don’t, we’re just guessing. What distinguishes an ancient city from a Neolithic settlement?
In the 1950s, the Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe made a list of rules to define a city. Childe proposed the following distinguishing factors for an ancient settlement to be called a “city”:
“In point of size the first cities must have been more extensive and more densely populated than any previous settlements.”
A city should be bigger and have more people living in it than a village or other smaller settlement. This is a standard that we still use to distinguish between rural and urban centers.“In composition and function the urban population already differed from that of any village … full-time specialist craftsmen, transport workers, merchants, officials and priests.”
It is important for a city to have a distinct division of labor and the ability to specialize in different professions.“Each primary producer paid over the tiny surplus he could wring from the soil with his still very limited technical equipment as tithe or tax to an imaginary deity or a divine king who thus concentrated the surplus.”
A city should have a tax or produce a surplus which would be controlled by the city’s elite.“Truly monumental public buildings not only distinguish each known city from any village but also symbolise the concentration of the social surplus.”
A city, of course, is distinguished by enormous constructions and monumental structures such as temples, palaces,, and granaries.“But naturally priests, civil and military leaders and officials absorbed a major share of the concentrated surplus and thus formed a “ruling class”.”
A city ought to have an obvious and hierarchical framework for governing with a distinct ruling class.“Writing.”
A clear system of writing and record-keeping is necessary for a settlement to be called a city.“The elaboration of exact and predictive sciences – arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy.”
Science and technology are essential for a city to thrive. They distinguish a Neolithic settlement or a village from a city.“Conceptualized and sophisticated styles.”
Art and architecture are a crucial part of a city.“Regular “foreign” trade over quite long distances.”
A city must be the focus of long-distance foreign trade rather than limited businesses with neighboring communities.“A State organisation based now on residence rather than kinship.”
Government is an important part of any city. The ruling class is based in official buildings like palaces, and they rule the people more by their power than by their relationship
Childe’s rules for defining a city are quite robust. But are these criteria enough for a settlement to be termed a city? Is it fair to state that all the factors are equally important?
Take, for example, number 8 in the criteria of a city. The presence of conceptualized complex art genres is not limited to cities. In Neolithic settlements, there is evidence of high-quality art. Even Paleolithic art, as seen in Lascaux, France, or Bhimbetka, India, is advanced. Art predates the Neolithic Revolution and human urbanization.
Point 7, the existence of sciences, maths, and astronomy, is another problematic requirement. Arts and sciences developed before the urban revolution. Even though they did not live in cities, prehistoric humans left us with several hints concerning sky maps. One prominent example is the Nebra Sky disc (c 1600 BC) discovered in Nebra, Germany, which may be the oldest known map of the sky.
What about the monuments and public structures mentioned in point 4? Göbekli Tepe in modern Turkey has changed the perception that we only find big structures in cities. But, other than Göbekli Tepe (9500 BC to 8000 BC), early human settlements don’t have many significant monuments. We haven’t found large-scale proof that people in the late Paleolithic and early Neolithic built enormous monuments, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t.
Is a writing system required for a city, as Childe says in point 6? Cities have a long history of sophisticated record keeping. But there isn’t much evidence of a writing system in the cities of the Oxus civilization, also known as the BMAC( Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex), which were as culturally advanced as the cities of Mesopotamia or the Indus valley. One coin has been discovered, showing that the BMAC people may have known about writing, but there is no sign of comprehensive record-keeping similar to Egypt, Canaan, or Mesopotamia.
Even in Varanasi, India, full-fledged urbanization is visible prior to the establishment of a record-keeping system.
We should remember that many previous civilizations have oral traditions of recording. It’s also possible that many recordings that used flammable materials like grass or leaves didn’t survive the test of time. I can't imagine that sophisticated cultures such as the BMAC or Varanasi would not have a record-keeping system, since we have evidence of them being involved with long-distance trade.
Except for points 7 and 8, and, to a lesser extent, point 4, Childe’s definition of a city is valid. It will help us distinguish between an Early Neolithic settlement like those at Catalhoyuk, Mehrgarh, and the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture from more established cities such as Uruk, Nekhen, Mohenjodaro, and Byblos.
The urban revolution did not occur in a vacuum. Like other human discoveries of ancient times, signs of a city have been showing up since the Neolithic revolution. So, we can call the Neolithic sites “proto cities.”
Why don’t we treat the Neolithic settlements as cities?
Neolithic settlements show many of the characteristics of a city. Some were densely populated, such as the mega settlements of the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture (5500 to 2750 BC) which had a population of over 40,000 people during its peak. They had sophisticated art and in-depth knowledge of agriculture. But they lacked a social hierarchy, a clearly defined government run from a centralized building, and had no large monuments like the Egyptian city of Nekhen or the Mesopotamian city of Ur.
The absence of many of the features of Childe’s definition makes us question if such settlements could be termed cities. They were proto-cities, and the humans in those regions were a step closer to building a large city.
Sometimes necessity was also a reason some civilizations had larger urban centers. The region around the Carpathian mountains and the Dnieper River, the site of the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture, was not as arid as Egypt or Mesopotamia. Rivers were a lifeline for the people in Egypt and Mesopotamia. It is not a coincidence that the earliest cities were on the banks of rivers or close to the sea. Remember the long-distance trade criterion? It was important for ancient people.
In the next post, I will detail the rise of the proto-cities and how they played an important role in the rise of cities. A special focus will be on Gobkeli Tepe because it has changed how we view human civilization.
Stay tuned!
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References
Childe, Vere Gordon (1950). "The Urban Revolution". The Town Planning Review. Liverpool University Press.
Gates, Charles (2003). Ancient Cities: The Archaeology of Urban Life in the Ancient Near East and Egypt, Greece and Rome.
Ciuk, Krzysztof (2008). Mysteries of Ancient Ukraine: The remarkable Trypilian Culture, 5400–2700 BC. Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum.
History of Civilizations of Central Asia, Vol I, UNESCO Publishing.
A nice introduction to the consept of cities.