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City

City
I. Ancient Near East
The ancient Near East is recognized as a world of early urban cultures, where archaeological and textual evidence confirm that cities existed from the second half of the 4th millennium BCE onwards in the land between the Tigris and the Euphrathes. Southern Mesopotamia of the 3rd and 2nd millennia BCE was famously referred to as the heartland of cities by Adams, whose archaeological survey work investigated the beginnings of urbanization in Mesopotamia and documented the populous, complex urban centers of the southern alluvium. The definition of the city here follows contemporary literature in urban studies, recognizing it as a socio-spatial, political, and cultural phenomenon. I refer to cities as sizeable settlements where social hierarchies, public institutions, and a political sphere can be attested. Cities host a complexity of production, consumption, and exchange practices that maintain a continuous flow of materials, objects, animals, and people. They are spatial realms where there is a reasonable balance between public spaces and monumental architecture vis-a-vis residential neighborhoods. In cities, the citizen body represents a heterogeneity of cultural and linguistic groups, while there is usually solid evidence for a division of labor and differentiation of occupations including craftsmen, merchants, entrepreneurs, ritual specialists, temple administrators, bureaucrats, and the like in addition to agriculturalists. The urban environment is shaped by both planning decisions as well as other everyday spatial practices. Throughout the history of the ancient Near East, one sees both the gradual development of smaller settlements into urban centers, but also many examples of the foundation of cities as imperial or regional capitals, frontier towns, ports of trade, or trade colonies. Residential neighborhoods were characterized as a densely packed fabric of mudbrick houses with or without courtyards, accessed through narrow, winding streets. Neighborhoods often included occasional small scale shrines, shops, or bakeries (like those excavated in Diyala valley cities and second millennium levels of Ur and Nippur). Cities of the Near East have their beginnings in the late 4th millennium BCE in the Southern alluvium (particularly within the regions of Uruk and Nippur), and this process is complemented by a process of urbanization across Northern Mesopotamia during the mid-3rd millennium BCE. The city appeared as a protected social environment constructed around a ceremonial center. The city of Uruk grew to a size of 250 ha (2.5 sq km) at the end of the 4th millennium and to 400 ha by 2700 BCE, acquiring a monumental city wall by the beginning of Early Dynastic period (ca. 2900 BCE). The double

Kullaba and Eanna sanctuary complexes were set on artificial platforms with highly elaborate cult buildings and monumental terraces, located roughly at the center of Uruks urban topography, and witnessed several cult-building projects that are represented in the stratigraphic complexity of Uruk levels VIIII. Furthermore, a myriad of innovative building techniques were employed throughout the Late Uruk period, including the abundant use of cut stone masonry, multi-colored stone, and terracotta cone mosaic. Although monumental architecture is an important feature of Near Eastern cities, their existence alone is not sufficient to identify particular settlements as cities. For instance, the impressive megalithic architecture recently excavated at the Neolithic mountaintop sanctuary of Gbeklitepe in Southeast Turkey does not feature a settled, urban lifestyle. Likewise the size of the settlement alone tells little about the urban character of places. Neolithic atal Hyk in the Konya plain in Turkey is often cited (erroneously) as the first city because it housed several thousand residents, yet no public spaces or monumental structure have been identified at the site and the division of labor and social hierarchies are minimal. Ancient Near Eastern cities can be understood as open cities (like their classical counterparts) where the urban environment is closely linked to its immediate hinterland, since the urban residents remain intimately engaged with agricultural production and pastoralism, often on a day-to-day basis. Such socio-economic integrity is also manifest in bodies of archaeological evidence, including hollow ways and canals that link the Early Bronze Age cities to the surrounding fields and orchards, or the frequent linking of the urban center to the countryside through extra-urban sanctuaries and the cult processions that connect them. While the 19th and early 20th century excavations in major Near Eastern urban sites exposed large horizontal stretches of urban landscapes (such as Nippur, Khafajah, and Ashur), more recent archaeological projects have dedicated considerable energy for a holistic understanding of urban layouts, using nondestructive methodologies such as remote sensing, aerial photography, geophysical surveys of sub-surface features, detailed GPS-run topographic mapping, surface surveys of architectural and archaeological materials, and surface scraping and test excavations (Tell Abu Dhuwari, Kerkenes Dag, See Stone, et al. 2004). Van de Mieroop developed a historical model of the Mesopotamian city, based principally on textual sources, in order to establish a structured understanding of the social and economic organization of Mesopotamian cities and to address issues of urban government, management of agricultural produce, craft production, and exchange. Noting the debate on the social organization of Mesopotamian urban

Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception 4 ( Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/Boston 2011)

City

economies, he dicussed the so-called Schneider-Diemel model of the Sumerian temple-city which was based on a limited corpus of texts. Since then, it has been convincingly argued by a variety of scholars that the early Mesopotamian urban economies consisted of three types of land tenure economies that existed side by side: palace and temple household institutions as well as private ownership. Postgate referred to the palace and the temple, the two important urban institutions, as wealthy neighbors which had a significant impact in the shaping of the monumental urban landscape as well. While temple complexes are more evidently visible in the centuries of early urbanization at Uruk and Nippur, one sees the appearance of the palace as a distinct monumental unit toward the second half of the 3rd millennium BCE. In late 3rd and early 2nd millennia BCE, certain temple complexes became massive pan-Mesopotamian, supraregional sanctuaries such as the Sanctuary of the Moon God Nanna at Ur and the Sanctuary of Enlil at Nippur, where rulers of various Mesopotamian states were able sponsor construction projects. The cultural and socio-political identity of each city was intimately linked its autochthonous deity - many cities often derived their names from their patron cults. The two well-known urban types for the ancient Near East are frequently discussed in the literature: South (Lower) Mesopotamian and North (Upper) Mesopotamian cities. Differentiated mostly due to ecological factors (e.g., alluvial flood plain/ irrigation agriculture vs. rain-fed/dry-farming; cf. Postgate 1992: 18), the Upper and Lower Mesopotamian cities have distinct morphological characters represented in their urban topographic components. In the ecological context of irrigation agriculture along the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, the Lower Mesopotamian city developed as a massive urban agglomeration with a densely built fabric of residential quarters enclosed within and outside of a substantial fortification wall. Cities of the southern alluvium were built on flat landscapes with little or no topographic differentiation between the public and private sectors at least for the earlier periods of the settlements urban history while the streets and canals were arteries of circulation within the city. The monumental temple complex dominated the urban landscape in the early 3rd millennium BCE, while the palace, as a politico-economic urban household-institution independent from the temple, appeared as a monumental architectural complex towards the end of the Early Dynastic period (Postgate). Excellent examples of these Early Bronze Age cities were excavated at Khafajah, Tell Asmar, and Nippur. The North Mesopotamian city crystallized during the now extensively studied phenomenon of the mid-3rd millennium BCE urbanization in dry-

farming in the environment of Upper Mesopotamia. The urban centers of the North featured two distinct morphological zones with significant topographic differentiation: a high mound and a lower town, both of which were walled. The upper city made use of either former settlement mounds or artificially created terraces to elevate itself above the rest of the settlement, and housed the monumental structures of cultic and sometimes administrative buildings. The spacious lower city contained monumental structures as well as perhaps orchards and plantations within the wall; but in contrast to the South, massive trans-urban canals are less frequently attested. Extra-mural suburban lobes of residential quarters are also known from several (especially Early Bronze) sites. Important examples of such urban settlements are Tell Leilan, Tell Brak, and Tell Mozan, among others. The early 2nd millennium BCE marks a new period of urbanization in the ancient Near East, with the foundation and development of new urban landscapes such as Mari, Ebla, and MashkanShapir, where the discursive planning strategies of the state increasingly demonstrate themselves in the urban configuration, especially with the construction of large palatial complexes. The Old Babylonian cities of the south continued the long-term legacy of 3rd-millennium BCE cities with their densely built residential neighborhoods spilling outside the city walls and identifiable craft quarters, where monumentality is reserved for planned, well-structured sanctuaries (e.g., Ur, Nippur, Sippar). As illustrated in the ancient map of Nippur from the Late Bronze Age preserved on a tablet, canals seem to have constituted arteries of communication in the urban landscape while delineating neighborhoods and connecting harbors. Northern Syro-Mesopotamia and Anatolia, on the other hand, developed distinctive urban landscapes increasingly accommodating large populations, especially in the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE up to the widespread economic and urban collapse in the Eastern Mediterranean world around 1200 BCE. In Hattusa, for instance, a city notorious for its lack of archaeological evidence for residential quarters, Hittites built an imperial capital on an impressively dynamic rocky topography over the course of 15th through 12th centuries BCE, when the city was largely configured as a ceremonial space accommodating several cult complexes of deities from around the empire. Similarly, the Middle Assyrian capital city Asshur was built on a high promontory overlooking the Tigris and accommodated several temple complexes and early examples of Assyrian palaces. The newly founded Kar-Tukulti Ninurta across the water from Asshur in late 13th century BCE by Tukulti-Ninurta illustrates Assyrian ambitions for orthogonal urban planning, which are pursued even more rigorously in 1st-millennium

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City

BCE urban construction projects such as Calah (Nimrud), Dur-Sharrukin (Khorsabad), and Nineveh. It is notable that in the Late Bronze Age, the Eastern Mediterranean cities became wealthy and populous centers of interregional trade and craft production at the expense of increasingly depopulated agricultural countrysides. Following the collapse of large cities in the Near East, one sees a distinctive process of new urbanization and large scale building projects in the Iron Age. This occurred especially from 1000 BCE onwards in notable Syro-Hittite, Assyrian, and Urartian centers, typically in the construction of new imperial cities, regional centers, and frontier fortresses (Harmansah). In addition to the astonishing regional diversity among these cultural realms, the scale and character of these Iron Age cities distinguish themselves from their Bronze Age predecessors with their clearly configured citadels or upper cities, relatively smaller but often orthogonally planned layouts, and new architectural technologies with increased emphasis on stone carving. Monumental inscriptions in Hieroglyphic Luwian, Cuneiform Akkadian and Urartian, Alphabetic Phoenician, and Aramaic inscriptions set up in public spaces often talk about the foundation of cities. In cities such as Calah (Nimrud), Nineveh, Rusahinili Eiduru-kai (Ayanis), Carchemish (Kargams), Azatiwataya (Karatepe), and Gordion (Yasshyk), a new sense of urban space developed with regard to spectacles commemorating political life and civic rituals, each performed in the context of urban festivals, that lead to the design of urban space to accommodate such social action. Notable in this sense is the akitu festival that was prominently celebrated at Babylon and many southern as well as Assyrian cities. This civic festival accommodated ritual ceremonies, reciting of epic compositions, and public processions that connected the city to its countryside through the visiting of bit akitu, or the akitu house located outside the city.
Bibliography: Adams, R. McC., Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land Use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates (Chicago, Ill. 1981). Algaze, G., Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization: The Evolution of an Urban Landscape (Chicago, Ill. 2008). Barbanes, E., Heartland and Province: Urban and Rural Settlement in the Neo-Assyrian Empire (PhD diss.; University of California, Berkeley 1999). Harmansah, ., Spatial Narratives, Commemora tive Practices and the Building Project: New Urban Foundations in Upper Syro-Mesopotamia During the Early Iron Age (PhD diss.; University of Pennsylvania, 2005). Novk, M., Herrschaftsform und Stadtbaukunst: Programmatik im mesopotamischen Residenzstadtbau von Agade bis Surra man raa (Schriften zur Vorderasiatischen Archologie 7; Saarbrcken 1999). Postgate, J. N., Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History (London/New York 1992). Stone, E. C. et al., The Anatomy of a Mesopotamian City: Survey and Soundings at Mashkan-shapir (Winona Lake, Ind. 2004). Stone, E. C., Mesopotamian Cities and Countryside, in A Companion to the Ancient Near East (ed. D. C. Snell; Malden,

Mass 2005) 14154. Van de Mieroop, M., The Ancient Mesopotamian City (Oxford 1997).

mr Harmansah

Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception 4 ( Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/Boston 2011)