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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge World History
  • Cited by 16
  • Volume 3: Early Cities in Comparative Perspective, 4000 BCE–1200 CE
  • Edited by Norman Yoffee, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2015
Print publication year:
2015
Online ISBN:
9781139035606
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781139035606
Subjects:
American History: General Interest, British History: General Interest, Regional and World History: General Interest, History, Regional History Before 1500, Global History
Collections:
Cambridge Histories - Global History, Cambridge Histories - Ancient History & Classics, Cambridge Histories - British & European History, Cambridge Histories - American History, Cambridge Histories - Asian History, Cambridge Histories - Middle East & African Studies
Series:
The Cambridge World History
Information

Book description

From the fourth millennium BCE to the early second millennium CE the world became a world of cities. This volume explores this critical transformation, from the appearance of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia and Egypt to the rise of cities in Asia and the Mediterranean world, Africa, and the Americas. Through case studies and comparative accounts of key cities across the world, leading scholars chart the ways in which these cities grew as nodal points of pilgrimages and ceremonies, exchange, storage and redistribution, and centres for defence and warfare. They show how in these cities, along with their associated and restructured countrysides, new rituals and ceremonies connected leaders with citizens and the gods, new identities as citizens were created, and new forms of power and sovereignty emerged. They also examine how this unprecedented concentration of people led to disease, violence, slavery and subjugations of unprecedented kinds and scales.

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 18 - The distribution of power: hierarchy and its discontents
    pp 381-394
  • View abstract

    Summary

    A long history of incipient urbanism in the southern Andes produced Tiwanaku, and yet, in turn, urban centrality transformed the southern Andes. This chapter focuses on two critical aspects of Tiwanaku's emergent centrality. Khonkho Wankane and Tiwanaku were sparsely inhabited centers of recurring periodic gathering and ritual activity. The chapter explores the origins of southern Andean urbanism. Tiwanaku emerged as a city between 500 and 600 CE in the Andean altiplano or high plateau. Tiwanaku thrived as an urban center during the Andean Middle Horizon. Next, the chapter discusses Tiwanaku's urban origins by explicating the recently investigated Late Formative site of Khonkho Wankane and emphasizing its distributed proto-urbanism as Tiwanaku's precursor and producer. Finally, it discusses the reason people came to these centers to begin with, focusing on the importance of cyclical social gatherings at built landscapes that facilitated proximity to ancestral monolithic personages.
  • 19 - Baghdad, an imperial foundation (762–836CE)
    pp 397-415
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Teotihuacan is often viewed as an impressive ancient city, but it must be understood as a regional phenomenon that included the city, its suburban periphery and surrounding countryside, as well as more distant rural settlements and populations as part of its sociospatial landscape. The urbanization of Teotihuacan was concurrently a process of ruralization of the surrounding region. This chapter explores Teotihuacan both internally and regionally, in an attempt to consider the social terrain of this early state from a holistic perspective. It discusses current conceptualizations, based on archaeological research, of Teotihuacan's political development and the organization of its rural and urban communities. Additional archaeological research at Teotihuacan period settlements across the Basin of Mexico is needed for fully comprehending the regional economic structure of this ancient state. Abundant research focused within the urban core continues to bring city life at Teotihuacan into focus, from its economic organization and socioeconomic disparities to the materialization of its governing institutions.
  • 20 - Jerusalem: capital city created in stone and in imagination
    pp 416-436
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The growth of cities fundamentally reorganizes economic, social, and political relationships, defines subjects, and reconfigures physical landscapes, although these effects vary in different cultural traditions and natural environments This chapter considers the social and physical environments of urban systems both within cities themselves, and in the rural hinterlands they create and modify. The reorganization of space and of human relationships in cities begins with their initial settlement and construction. Economies are transformed by the concentration of population in cities. Archaeological research points to a similar process in the emergence of Tiwanaku in the Andean high plateau, or altiplano. Spatially divided compounds and barrios provided residence for kin-based or otherwise intimately linked urban communities in Tiwanaku. Childe's notion of the Urban Revolution suggests that the construction of cities and the associated changes in political authority, economic organization, and identities was a rapid if not instantaneous change.
  • 22 - Imagined cities
    pp 455-466
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter reviews current knowledge of the first period of South Asian urbanism, situating the Indus cities in their larger regional landscapes. It addressees the end of the Indus tradition and the cities that followed more than a millennium later. In conceptualizing the larger Indus phenomenon, questions of scale rise to the fore. The geographic extent of sites containing Indus material culture assemblages is enormous. The chapter explores two very different urban trajectories and urban landscapes of ancient South Asia. The first one is characterized by a small number of massive widely spaced cities that existed as islands of urbanism in a vast sea of villages. The other one is characterized by closely packed urban places in a landscape of cities. The duration of many Early Historic Indian cities continued much longer, many remaining vibrant centers of population long after the Mauryan Empire's fall and through numerous successive states and empires, and leaving a legacy that endures to the present.
  • 23 - Neo-Assyrian capital cities: from imperial headquarters to cosmopolitan cities
    pp 469-490
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Some African cities developed in the context of interregional trade, others were politically dominant in their regions, and still others were clustered cities, showing little political or economic hierarchy. African urbanism encompasses many kinds of cities and many kinds of power. Over the marshes, winding streams, and rice fields of Mali's Middle Niger floodplain rises a tell that would not be out of place in Mesopotamia. Jenne-jeno's descendant town, Jenne, lies 3 kilometers away; there its present-day inhabitants walk about on 9 meters of ancient city deposits. Recent research reveals cities even earlier than Jenne-jeno and especially a 'pre-urban' landscape that was potentially several millennia in the making. The understanding of the evolution and nature of east African cities has similarly changed greatly in light of new archaeological field work. Early African cities and the distribution of power in them were neither cut to a normative pattern, nor did they develop from any single cause.
  • 24 - Mexico-Tenochtitlan: origin and transformations of the last Mesoamerican imperial city
    pp 491-512
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter address early urban formations that for various reasons have been viewed as lying outside of the normative structures of typical ancient cities. It focuses on case studies and other recent research to consider alternate ways of being urban and to advocate for models of urbanism that recognize the existence of a broad range of organizational structures and institutions through which power could be distributed in early cities. The chapter explores the urban features of many ancient cities, with the larger goal of understanding why and how different urban forms developed and were sustained. Even in the most hierarchical and dictatorial of political systems, rulers cannot control all aspects of life, ceding some degree of autonomy to various corporate groups and institutions. Urban life can offer many opportunities to city residents, and ancient cities were often magnets that drew dispersed rural populations and families and individuals to them in search of a better life.
  • 26 - Imperial cities
    pp 532-545
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Baghdad was the city that medieval Arabic geographers put in the center of the world. The history of Baghdad is divided into three phases, first, the prestigious capital of the Abbasid Caliphs from the time of its foundation in 762 by al-Mansûr up to its conquest by Mongol armies in 1258; then, for centuries, a simple provincial metropolis, and finally, since 1921, the capital of Iraq, whose dramatic present assails us with images of devastation. The Abbasid Caliphs took power in the aftermath of an important insurrection that overthrew the former Umayyad dynasty over the years 746-50. The palatial city founded by al-Mansûr has often been called the Round City because of its circular form. Ya‘qûbî affirms that it was the only round city known in the whole world. The city founded by al-Mansûr was transformed quickly as the result of the displacement and multiplication of the Caliph's places of residence.
  • 27 - Conclusion: the meanings of early cities
    pp 546-557
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Jerusalem, in stone and imagination, is unique as a holy city of the world's three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The most relevant primary texts describing the physical features of Jerusalem's cities include the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, Roman and Late Antique Jewish sources and Christian writings. Jerusalem dramatically changed during the eighth century BCE, coinciding with abundant archaeological and textual evidence testifying to its significance as a major cultic and urban center with a large residential population, perhaps for the first time in the city's history. More recently, salvage excavations have uncovered additional impressive remains dating to the late Second Temple period. Herod's monumental buildings have left their imprint on Jerusalem's landscape and topography; remnants are still visible today. First and foremost Byzantine Jerusalem was a city of pilgrimage, whose main function was devoted to the cult of holy places.

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