[Noelnada]

How did the first cities appeared, why did they appeared, what was the material and ideological conditions for their existence ?

Actually, my question is rather, what would be the best questions to ask about the Urban revolution ?


I have only 3 days left to produce a paper on the subject. So i'm not asking you to make my homework for me, but i ask you if you have any interesting scientific point of view on the subject. Or if you know any really good scientific paper which treat the subject ?

[Oxymoron]

My take:

Cities appeared when men started farming and domesticating animals. Farmers would settle in a area with water, then would proceed to a central area to sell or trade their goods. Other groups of people figured out instead of farming they could just raid these quasi villages. The farmers figured out it would be cheaper just to pay these people of and the first Racket, I mean society was born. After some time the leaders of these warrior bands, had control of multiple villages, and became defacto Leader of the area, first nation states form. With the growing income brought by local farming and foriegn raids nation states can afford specialzing citizens (scientists,artists blabla). Religion is introduced combining many different urban mythologies and beliefs into a state controlled institution.

[Noelnada]

According to what i read so far, yes agriculture appeared before cities, and it is obvious that without surplus to feed large populations, there is no possibility to maintain a city.
It also seems that "international trade" also appeared before cities.
It is also clear that villages and towns appeared before cities.

So the appearance of cities must be the consequences of these economic factors coupled with political factors, these political factors being the need for local town chiefs to increase their power relatively to other towns, the need for individuals to find protection and thus joining better protected, larger towns.

first nation states form

I think City-State is more appropriated than Nation-State. (well for me nation-state imply modernity, standardization of language, and so on).

Well, thank you Oxy

I'm gonna investigate the matter more thoroughly in about one hour or two.

And i'll post scientific articles here

[Oxymoron]

think City-State is more appropriated than Nation-State. (well for me nation-state imply modernity, standardization of language, and so on).

Actually no City states developed much later then Nation states. Sumer the first civilazation had more then one majour city.Nation states appeared with religion,laws, military, and other modern ideas of society, long before city states like Athens,Sparta, etc appeared.

[Thunderhawk]

I understand what you mean Oxy, but I believe the term nation-state is also wrong. They were not states as such, just villages/areas more or less controlled/extorted by a strong band of people.

Do you really believe semi-nomadic people who get tribute from villages (rather then just plunder them) count as a state?

I suppose once those semi-nomads started defending their territory and actively battling/killing other nomads who would raid "their" villages, it would be a good start to state hood. But even that strikes me as a foundation for, rather then an actual, state .

[Oxymoron]

Do you really believe semi-nomadic people who get tribute from villages (rather then just plunder them) count as a state?

Not at all it was a progression(My opinion):

Communties form--- semi nomadic people pillage communities--- communities pay one semi nomadic clan tribute in exchange for protection----A collection of communties under on powerful warrior clan thus the clan ceases to become nomadic and sustains itself from a the communties it protects--The Leader of such a clan becomes defacto leader of the communities(villages now as they grow with the sence of security)----A way of transfering power starts, easing conflicts after warrior king dies---As the collection of villages grows richer and more powerful people start gaining specialties, a unified code of behavior is established, customs and religion are formed to make the different towns more unified. In time written language is developed, literature follows, Code of Law, Art etc. Based on archeological evidence this might have been the way Sumer was established, and this all happend in a very short period of time basically overnight in historical terms.

[Suska]

cities were for a long time places where surplus farmer kids would go, cities died now and then because of infectious disease, until modernity they never did get very big. so there are really at least 3 major stages
a) farm-town : for brokering tools and food
b) city : for being hip and dieing of the plague
c) modern : for being hip and dieing of drug overdoses
k?

[Thunderhawk]

until modernity they never did get very big

Didnt China and India have huge cities historically?
And then there was Rome at its hight with its ~million(?) inhabitants.

[Suska]

10s of thousands was impressive, 100s of thousands cities probably couldn't have happened, millions way over the estimates of total human population. Europe got big before the black death era, china and rome yeah, but i'm still thinking 10 or 20,000 was considered a normal big city. I bet Persia had some large one's too, and Egypt but when you think of them as wilderness estates its easier to understand, populations spiked shortly after the black death 1500 to 1700 as steamships domesticated infectious disease. yeah see for yourself.

[Noelnada]

Babylon is the first city that existed in recorded human history. Reaching up to 300000 inhabitants in 1700 B.C.

But we probably should agree on a definition of what is a city before we can agree that Babylon was the first city.

[Oxymoron]

Babylon is the first city that existed in recorded human history

the Sumerian cities : UR Uruk etc

[Nattering Nabob]

How did the first cities appeared, why did they appeared, what was the material and ideological conditions for their existence ?

I have heard it said that the emergence of a priestly class first made building and urbanization possible.

The theory goes, all the priests (history's first liesure class ) are sitting around with nothing better to do than figure out ways of making their temples bigger and better so they develop construction techniques as well as rudimentary math calculations and other sciences.

One soucre

[Noelnada]

I have heard it said that the emergence of a priestly class first made building and urbanization possible.

Great, i'm gonna mention this possibility in my paper, just to annoy my marxist teacher

Models for the rise of cities

Religious

Paul Wheatley suggests religion was the motivating factor behind urbanization

Knowledge of meteorological and climatic conditions was considered to be within the domain of religion

Religious leaders decided when and how to plan crops

Successful harvests led to more support for this priestly class

Priestly class exercised political and social control that held the city togheter

In this scenario, cities are religious spaces functioning as ceremonial centers

First urban clusters and fortification seens as defenses against sprititual demons or souls of the dead.

Now i need to find the article where Paul Wheatley suggests this.

How comes there is no bibliographical reference on the powerpoint ?

[Suska]

Matt Rosenberg estimated city populations using a variety of vectors, pretty interesting - and I stand corrected having misread a chart. However this doesn't change my estimate that cities were commonly 10s of thousands.

Babylon according to that source became the largest city known in 615bc and seems to have been the first to top 200k. Estimates put the world population at that time a around 100 million. Rome between 25BC and 100AD seems to have had 450,000, the world at around 200 million.

the idea of a priestly class seems a little misleading. "religion was the motivating factor behind urbanization" is kind of a nonsensical statement. You're talking about early royalty really and it is only religious in as much as everything in those days was interwoven with ritual and presumably superstition. They weren't really a leisure class either, there were a couple phases and it happened differently around the world. In the West you're talking about a matriarchy, privileged enough, but only because they ran things well. Later the Kings co-opted these and made them militant. In other words they had important duties.

[Noelnada]

Wheatley's thesis is simply stated. "When-ever, in any of the seven regions of primary urban gen-eration"-Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, the North China Plain, Mesoamerica, the central Andes, and the Yoruba territories of southwestern Nigeria- "we trace back the characteristic urban form to its be-ginnings we arrive not at a settlement that is dominated by commercial relations, a primordial market, or at one that is focused on a citadel, and archetypal fortress, but rather at a ceremonial complex"


In support of this thesis, Wheatley proceeds to examine "the centripetalizing function of the ceremonial center" in each of these areas, demonstrating the intimate re-lationship that existed between religious authority and political, social, and economic power (pp. 257-267). The control exercised by the cult center "presupposes the development of new social institutions," and it is the process of social differentiation which "in formal terms, must be regarded as the dependent variable when we seek to elucidate the complex series of interrelated chan-ges that eventuated in the emergence of the ceremonial city" (p. 267). Wheatley focuses in particular on trade and marketing, irrigation (with a highly effective critique of Wittfogel's theory of Oriental Despotism on pp. 289- 298), warfare, and religion, as factors which have been thought to induce social differentiation, and he concludes that though there is "no single autonomous cause... one activity does seem in a sense to command a sort of priority. Whatever structural changes in social organiza-tion were induced by commerce, warfare, or technology, they needed to be validated by some instrument of authority if they were to achieve institutionalized permanence. This does not imply that religion . . .was a primary causative factor, but rather that it permeated all activities, all institutional change, and afforded a consensual focus for social life" (pp. 318-319).



Source :
Review: Religion and the Rise of Urbanism
Author(s): David N. Keightley
Reviewed work(s):
The Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of
the Ancient Chinese City by Paul Wheatley
Source: Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 93, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1973), pp. 527-
538

Sounds like this powerpoint has highly simplified Wheatley thesis.