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29 results

Page 1 of 2

  • 7 - Writing and the city in early China
    • from Part II - Early cities and information technologies
  • Edited by Norman Yoffee, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book: The Cambridge World History
  • Published online: 05 March 2015
  • Print publication: 12 March 2015, pp 131-157
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This introduction presents a brief history of the study of early cities, archaeological research on the nature of ancient cities. It also provides an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapter of this book. The book delineates some distinctive features of ancient cities and then compares these features. It first concerns early cities as arenas of performance, which includes studies of Egyptian, Maya, and Southeast Asian cities. Next, the book analyzes early cities and information technologies. Then, early urban landscapes are explained. The book also considers cities in the Harappan tradition and their successors in South Asia, and explains the rise and fall of Cahokia. Finally, the book focuses on Rome in the early centuries CE, the capital cities of imperial Assyria in the early to middle centuries BCE, and Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, in the fourteenth to early sixteenth centuries CE.
  • 10 - Writing and record-keeping in early cities
    • from Part II - Early cities and information technologies
  • Edited by Norman Yoffee, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book: The Cambridge World History
  • Published online: 05 March 2015
  • Print publication: 12 March 2015, pp 207-226
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Classic Maya cities were dynamic places constructed throughout the Yucatan Peninsula and adjacent zones during much of the first millennium CE. This chapter examines how Maya cities were understood, used, and altered. Other named features of urban landscapes include pyramids and altars, neither, unfortunately, with fully accepted readings of their glyphic references. Other buildings in the Maya texts correspond to stairways, known as ehb, and ballcourts recorded by glyphs that are not yet deciphered. A notable attribute of later Maya ideas about appropriate or correct behavior is that it conforms to movement and handed-ness. Right and straight correspond closely to concepts of truth, virtue, cleansing, even prophecy. A final, remaining theme is that Maya cities accord with general concepts of landscape features yet also remain a malleable work-in-progress. The view of any such city today would contain a certain arrangement of buildings and spaces in urban armatures.

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