The Rise of Cities

Overview

In early farming societies, improved farming methods and a reliable food supply led to permanent settlements. Surplus food not only caused an increase in population. Freed from the all-consuming quest for food, laborers could begin to specialize in activities such as metal-working and weaving, and some jobs became more important than others. A social hierarchy took shape. Writing enabled administrative record keeping and, later, literature.

Background

Technological advance, including writing, beyond the folk society was a necessary condition for cities to take root. But it was not sufficient. Two additional considerations came into play. One was the ability to collect, store, and distribute the agricultural surplus, with all the social organization that implied. The second was a favorable environment in the form of fertile soil for growing crops and a water supply capable of supporting the needs of both agriculture and urban consumption. These are the conditions that describe the river valleys in which the world's earliest cities arose.

All early cities shared common organizational forms. They were theocracies (the government was divinely guided), and the elite and their entourages lived in the city center. This arrangement both facilitated interaction among the elite and offered protection from outside attack. The shops and dwellings of artisans such as carpenters and jewelers were located at a distance from the city center, and the poorest urbanites and the farmers lived at the periphery.

The very first cities arose in the Fertile Crescent, a crossroads that includes Mesopotamia, around 3500 b.c. The quality of the soil and the exposure over millennia to people of different cultures were an added stimulus to the evolution of cities in the area. These cities had similar technological bases and power structures, and by 2000 b.c. probably housed up to 10,000 people. By that time, urban communities had also been flourishing in the Nile delta for over a thousand years. Whether these communities arose as the result of Mesopotamian influence or whether they began independently is a matter of debate.

By the third and second millenniums b.c., cities were already widespread. By 2500 b.c., the Indus Valley civilization had produced the urban centers of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa in what is now Pakistan. In another thousand years, urban settlements would spring up along the Yellow River in China.

Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa are a special case. These centers, which flourished from c. 2500 b.c. to c. 1700 b.c., were a miracle of city planning. Well-fortified citadels, with integrated palaces, granaries, and baths, protected towns laid out in a rigorously rectangular pattern. Drainage systems ran from houses, which had bathrooms, to brick-lined sewers. The economy was based on agriculture and trade. Unlike the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Indus people left very little written information behind, only brief inscriptions on seals that have yet to be decoded. The strict uniformity of many features of so-called Harappa culture, from the planning of the streets to weights and measures, suggests a high level of organization and achievement. Yet the culture never adopted the technical advances of Mesopotamia, with which they traded. The civilization died out mysteriously.

In the fourth century b.c. the city of Pataliputra, in the east of India, controlled the entire basin of the Ganges River and was run by an administrative board of 30 members. It was there that Emperor Asoka had his palace, a brick and wood construction that reveals considerable technical expertise.

In Mesoamerica, the Maya, Zapotecs, Mixtecs, and Aztecs developed their own substantial cities, though how and why these cities arose remains unknown. Teotihuacán, in the region of modern Mexico City, boasted 100,000 inhabitants during the first millennium a.d. Here, as in the East, writing and literacy seem to have been essential in the formation of urban centers and the development of science. But urbanization in Mesomerica also contradicts assumptions about the origin of cities: cities managed to develop there without technologies such as animal husbandry and the wheel, and minus abundant water and fertile soil. In the Andean region, on the other hand, where writing was unknown, even sophisticated engineering and a complex social structure were not enough to catalyze the emergence of cities.

Between the sixth and third centuries b.c., Persia, India, and China all experienced waves of urban expansion that extended the previous reach of their empires. Toward the end of the second millennium b.c., the shipbuilding Phoenicians had begun a westward spread that gave them dominion over the Mediterranean. The Greeks followed a similar course several centuries later, and Greek city-states (cities plus their surrounding countryside) became established along the Mediterranean shore from Asia Minor to Spain and France.

In building cities to maintain military supremacy in the numerous regions it conquered, Rome did more than any other empire to diffuse city life into previously nonurban regions. At its largest, the city of Rome itself may have had 300,000 inhabitants. The first Italian city-states were Greek colonies. Later, native city-states formed, including Rome, which was founded by a foreign power in 753 b.c. In 500 b.c. the Romans overthrew their foreign rulers and declared a republic that governed for the next 400 years. Rome became an empire, and the exposure to new perspectives that goes with empire building proved a fortuitous stimulus to literature and the arts.

Overattention to conquest, however, caused trouble at home. Periods of civil strife alternated with periods of peace, during which a superb system of roads and a postal system were developed. A fire in a.d. 64 had the happy result of shifting the population to the right bank of the Tiber, where broad streets and impressive buildings were built. In the course of the next few centuries the empire fell into disarray, and in 395 Rome lost its political importance. Little was left of the original city, yet what did remain included baths, temples, theaters, and 19 aqueducts. The city had enjoyed the protection of police, sanitation, and a seven-brigade fire-fighting force. Central heating and running water existed in some quarters.

Paris was founded in the third century b.c. by a Celtic tribe called the Parisii, who set up huts on what is now known as the Ile de la Cité. When Julius Caesar (100-44 b.c.) conquered Paris in 52 b.c., it was a fishing village called Lutetia Parisiorum. During the reign of Augustus (63 b.c.-a.d. 14), the town spread to the left bank of the Seine River. The Roman occupation was an era of peaceful expansion, during which a Roman network of roads built originally for the military enabled new trade routes and the development of new cities. During the prosperous second century a.d., the city went into a fever of building. The catacombs under Montparnasse and the baths still remain from Roman times.

Impact

One practical consequence of the rise of cities was to separate people from the resources they needed to survive. Economic, administrative, and social systems arose to deal with those needs. For example, because city dwellers were no longer living close to sources of sustenance, food had to be grown outside the city and transported in. Water management became an issue, not just making drinking water available to residents but also getting rid of wastewater. The Indus Valley and Roman civilizations provide examples of drainage and irrigation systems, sewers, baths, and aqueducts. Public works that required large numbers of people became imaginable owing to available manpower. City planning evolved to enable cities to grow in an organized way.

The specialization of workers that occurred once surplus food could be produced contributed to an urban revolution of major proportions. Cities were located along major transportation routes, which enabled a continuous influx and outflow of ideas and inventions. Moreover, the mere concentration of so many experts encouraged innovation. Technical advances encouraged cities to expand further, which meant that inhabitants had access to human and material resources over a far wider region. The increased access fostered the growth of even more cities, and so on.

The entire ecology of groups changed. Scourges like smallpox and childhood diseases only persist in large populations, so city dwellers lived under the perpetual threat of infection from microbes and from poor sanitation and hygiene. Of course, infectious disease also became a kind of biological weapon. A conquering people used to living with disease could easily introduce it into naïve populations. People so stricken quickly succumbed, facilitating territorial expansion.

Nor was disease the only threat to inhabitants of cities. Breakdowns in transportation and crop failures could both spell famine in short order. Thus, cities began to depend on rural cultivators to produce surpluses of both food and workers to compensate for shortfalls. So dependent, in fact, were cities on this supply line, that civilizations could not have progressed without it. But the flow of people did not always go toward the city. Sometimes, particularly in prosperous times, it happened that surplus workers were forced back out to the countryside. Revolt, civil wars, and wars of conquest were a kind of self-correcting means of reducing surplus population from the countryside.

In all the early civilizations, cities were centers of innovation and development. The efflorescence of culture that went hand in hand with the rise of cities became a tool for remaking the world. With the fall of the Roman Empire, cities in western Europe went into eclipse, and their function as centers of learning and art passed to the monasteries. In the East, failed cities were the exception. With time, urban Europe came to life again, a result of the cycle of technology transfer and human migration that helps to keep cities going.

GISELLE WEISS