Cities before globalization

IA 310 - Mapping World Cities

Overview

  • Urban areas very small for the vast majority of human history
  • Earliest cities start emerging around 4000-3500 BCE
  • Cities could be sites for political power and shaped by political control
  • Cities generally emerge in groups engaged in exchange
  • Controlling exchange networks another source of political power
  • Despite a general idea that early cities were compact, permanent settlements, this may be a Western bias

Visualizing historical population growth

At least 7 different places where cities (mostly) independently developed

Location Approximate Starting Dates
Mesopotamia 4000-3500 BCE
Nile Valley 3500-3000 BCE
Indus Valley 3300 - 3000 BCE
Central Plain of China 2000 BCE
Basin of Mexico 0 - 500 CE
Northern Peruvian coast 600 - 800 CE
Cahokia, near Saint Louis 1100-1200 CE

Common features of non-industrial cities

  • Very small, both absolutely and as share of population
  • Heavily reliant on hinterlands for food and other resources
  • Generally relatively compact and densely populated due to reliance on foot traffic
  • Often part of a network of cities exchanging goods, etc.
  • Often divided into neighborhoods, sometimes with evidence of neighborhood formation due to migration1

Fragility

“One possiblity is that early urban systems and early states were simply quite fragile. Individual cities were major projects, costly not only to build but also to sustain. They depended on balancing acts that were at once ecological, political, economic, and even theological. So they broke quite easily.”1

City sizes

  • Uruk in 3100 BCE about 350 football (soccer) pitches (fields); about 400 around 2000 BCE1
  • Erlitou, possibly the capital of China’s Xia dynasty, covered about 700 football pitches around 1500 BCE2
  • Nineveh, created in 700 BCE as the capital of the Assyrian Empire, was about 2,800 football pitches3
  • Chang’an, the capital of the Han dynasty, was about 4,900 football pitches around 150 BCE4
  • Easton’s city limits are over 1,750 football pitches

Political power

  • Cities were essential bases of operation for major empires
  • Roman empire established colonial cities to gather resources and host soldiers
  • Chinese dynasties after 221 BCE tended to establish county governments in walled cities, with somewhere between 800 and 900 of them across the empire in the late-200s BCE1
  • Islamic empires established several new cities (Baghdad was founded as a capital in 762 CE)2
  • Cities could also develop some autonomy from state government

Example: Legacy of Roman colonization

Map of sites with a population of at least 1,000 as of 700 CE (Buringh, Research Data for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2021)

Urban stratification

  • Cities could often be designed to reinforce elites’ claims to power
  • Socioeconomic elites often enjoyed access to privileged urban areas
  • Because urban populations could be dangerous to the elites, many cities featured internal walled areas

Tang Dynasty Chang’an (~ 800 CE)

Lincoln, An urban history of China, 2021, p. 60

Seville, Al-Andalus (contemporary Spain), ~ 1250 CE

Map of Seville around 1250 CE, showing the Alhambra Palace Complex (Lantschner, Al-Masaq, 2024).

City clusters

Example: Mesopotamian urban network

Mesopotamian cities with marshes and gulf circa 4000 BCE (Hammer & Di Michele, American Journal of Archaeology, 2023).

Example: Phoenician and Greek trading ports, circa 1000(ish) BCE

Mediterrean ports (Woolf, The life and death of ancient cities, 2020, p. 157).

Example: Han Dyanasty-era transport and communication routes (~ 2 CE)

Map from Lincoln, And urban history of China, 2021

Example: Swahili coastal network

Swahili coastal cities circa 1000 CE (Pawlowicz, et al., Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology, 2021)

Commercial networks and power

  • First sailing ships invented for travelling the Nile and there are trading missions in the eastern Mediterranean by around 2500 BCE linking Egypt and Syria1
  • In Bronze Age (3500 - 1000 BCE-ish) Mesopotamia and Mediterranean, rulers usually enjoyed monopolies on certain goods and controlled long-distance trade2
  • Elite control of lucrative luxury good exchange networks may have contributed to relatively high inequality in Classical Mayan cities3
  • Within states with sufficient political capacity, infrastructure could be used to reinforce governmental power by privileging particular cities

Example: Byblos, an early port city

Location of Byblos (Wikimedia Commons).

Suspected ancient Byblos port area (Francis-Allouche & Grimal, Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies, 2016).

Example: Byblos, an early port city

Plan of Byblos, circa 3100-2800 BCE (Nigro, La Revue Phenicienne, 2020).

Ruins at Byblos (Nigro, La Revue Phenicienne, 2020).

Example: The Roman road and shipping network

Standford Geospatial Nework Model of the Roman World (https://orbis.stanford.edu/)

Example: Tang Dynasty road and canal system

Lincoln, An urban history of China, 2021, p. 53.

Is this story too Eurocentric?

  • Many Mayan cities and the settlement at Angkor in present-day Cambodia were expansive
  • Different model of urbanism in which the local landscape, flora, and fauna were more directly incorporated into the city
  • Even ancient cities like Ur likely had some form of “suburbs” outside the city walls, but there has not been much archaeological attention and they are hard to detect1
  • African polities were often structured in ways that reduced incentives for monumental architecture, and in many areas towns and cities shifted frequently2

Something different about tropical cities?

“Tropical cities and their dispersed population aggregates were partially a function of the fecund environments that were colonized. Although plant and animal diversity was pronounced, there exists the biological tenet that no one species’ numbers or richness was sizable enough to harvest the necessary abundance for lasting societal support (Scarborough and Burnside, 2010). To accommodate sedentism and growing populations, two adaptations were required: (1) the spreading of populations across the landscape to cultivate and collect diverse resources within a relatively wide radius of one’s home and (2) the maintenance of flexible but persistent social relations with neighbors and kin. Although domesticates introduced from outside the tropics were frequently accepted, the difficulties associated with immediately elevated pest numbers and diseases made monocropping problematic in a wet, humid environment. By separating from one another, humans, plants, and animals were able to mimic, to some extent, the natural rhythms of the wet–dry forests and neighboring tropical settings in a manner beneficial to both resource harvesting and biodiversity maintenance.”1

Mayan cities

  • More extensive urban settlements due to agricultural trade-offs, but gathered at regional centers at specific times of year1
  • Similar levels of inequality as other pre-modern cities, but spatially stratified by wealth2

Isometric reconstruction of Tikal, in contemporary Guatemala (Scarborough & Isendahl, The Anthropocene Review, 2020)

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Mayan cities

Mayan urban areas surveyed in Smith, et al., Latin American Antiquity, 2021.

Mayan cities

Area-population relationship in Mayan cities.

Greater Angkor

Map of Greater Angkor excavation site (Scarborough & Isendahl, The Anthropocene Review, 2020)

Tenochtitlan

  • Capital of Aztec Empire - Approximately the size of Easton in 1500 CE, with about 250,000 inhabitants1
  • Lake essentially part of the city itself

Major population areas in the pre-colonial Basin of Mexico (Moctezuma, Scientific American, 1984).

Tenochtitlan

  • chinampas: Floating artificial islands upon which crops are grown
  • Permits agricultural production on Lake Texicoco itself

Surviving chinampa in Xochimilko (Wikimedia Commons, 2023)

Tenochtitlan’s water infrastructure

Causeways and dikes around Tenochtitlan (Filsinger, in Biar, Ancient Mesoamerica, 2023)

Tenochtitlan’s canals

Canals and ports in Tenochtitlan (Filsinger, in Biar, Ancient Mesoamerica, 2023).

Tswana towns1

  • Semi-permanent towns in southern Africa, built in 18th and early 19th centuries
  • Some had populations of around 20,000 in early 19th century; similar to size of Cape Town at the time

Photograph of Tswana town, pre-1907, Ameircan Museum of Natural History Archives.

Tswana towns

View of the large Tswana town of Kaditshwene (Campbell, 1820)

Tswana towns (Mangoro, 2018)

Characteristic signature of a Tswana town.

Review

  • Urban areas very small for the vast majority of human history
  • Earliest cities start emerging around 4000-3500 BCE
  • Cities could be sites for political power and shaped by political control
  • Cities generally emerge in groups engaged in exchange
  • Controlling exchange networks another source of political power
  • Despite a general idea that early cities were compact, permanent settlements, this may be a Western bias