CityReads│A History of Early Cities in 5 Objects

238

A History of Early Cities in 5 Objects

5 objects tell history about early cities, its politics and administration, religion and rites, class and hierarchy, writing and arts, war and peace, civilization and decline.

Neil MacGregor, 2012. A History of the World in 100 Objects, Penguin.

Sources:https://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/a_history_of_the_world.aspx

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5KB52gmS1Hpsbv7DXn45QQN/a-history-of-the-world-in-100-objects-by-theme

https://hk.heritage.museum/zh_CN/web/hm/exhibitions/data/exid257.html

https://www.shanghaimuseum.net/museum/olexhibition/frontend/index.action

Last Saturday, I went to see a featured exhibition at Hong Kong Heritage Museum, A History of the World in 100 Objects from the British Museum. This exhibition originated from a popular radio program of the BBC with the British Museum in 2010, telling the story of human civilization using 100 objects selected from the encyclopedic collections of the British Museum. It is comprised of a 100-part radio series written and presented by British Museum director Neil MacGregor. A book to accompany the series, A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor, was also published.

In 2016, a touring exhibition of several items depicted on the radio program, also titled A History of the World in 100 Objects, travelled to various destinations, including Abu Dhabi, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, and China. Shanghai was the ninth city to host this exhibition in 2017. I missed that touring exhibition. But luckily, I was able to see the Hong Kong exhibition.

It is a worthy trip. Several objects stand out, such as standard of Ur, and the early writing tablet, which provide vivid and concrete evidences to the ten traits ofthe early cities proposed by Gordon Childe (To learn more about Childe’s works about the early cities, please read CityReads | Who first coined the term“Urban Revolution” ?).  On my train back home, I read the companion book, A History of the World in 100 Objects, which further enhance my understanding. Here are what the 5 objects can tell us about the early cities.

1 The Standard of Ur: war and peace in the early city

Wooden box inlaid with mosaic, found at the royal cemetery of Ur, southern Iraq 

2600–2400BC

Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qb5xv

In Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), in the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates,the agricultural surplus, and the population that it could support, led to settlements of 30,000 to 40,000 people, a size never seen before, and to the first cities. Coordinating groups of people on this scale obviously required new systems of power and control, and the systems devised in Mesopotamia around 3000 BC have proved astonishingly resilient. They have pretty well set the urban model to this day. It’s no exaggeration to say that modern cities everywhere have Mesopotamia in their DNA.

Of all these earliest Mesopotamian cities, the most famous was the Sumerian city of Ur. The great archaeologist Leonard Woolley carried out his excavations in Ur in the 1920s. one of Woolley’s extraordinary discoveries is a plaque. The‘plaque’was clearly a work of high art, but its greatest importance is not aesthetic: it lies in what it tells us about the exercise of power in the seearly Mesopotamian cities.

Woolley’s find is about the size of a small briefcase, but it tapers at the top – so that it looks almost like a giant bar of Toblerone – and it’s decorated all overwith small mosaic scenes. Woolley called it the Standard of Ur, because he thought it might have been a battle standard that you carried high on a pole in a procession or into battle. It has kept that name, but it’s hard to see how itcould have been a standard of that sort, because it’s obvious that the scenes are meant to be looked at from very close up. Some scholars have thought it might be a musical instrument or perhaps merely a box to keep precious things in, but we just don’t know.

Dr Lamia al-Gailani, a leading Iraqi archaeologist who now works in London, shared her opinion about it:

“Unfortunately, we don’t know what they used it for, but forme, it represents the whole of the Sumerians. It’s about war, it’s about peace, it’s colourful, it shows how far the Sumerians travelled –the lapis lazuli came from Afghanistan, the red marble came from India, and all the shells came from the Gulf.”

What kind of society was it which was able to gather these materials in this way? First, it needed to have agricultural surplus. It then also needed a structure of power and control that allowed its leaders to mobilize that surplusand exchange it for exotic materials along extended trade routes. That surplus would also have fed and supported people freed from the constraints of agricultural work – priests, soldiers, administrators and, critically, craftsmen able to specialize in making complex luxury objects like the Standard. These are the very people that you can see on the Standard itself.

While one side of the Standard shows the ruler running a flourishing economy, the other side shows him with the army he needed to protect it. The two faces ofthe Standard of Ur are in fact a superb early illustration of the military–economic nexus, of the ugly violence that frequently underlies prosperity.

The scenes are arranged like three comic strips on top of each other. One side shows what must be any ruler's dream of how a tax system should operate. In the lower two registers, people calmly line up to offer their tribute of produce and fish, sheep, goats and oxen, and on the top register, the king and the elite, probably priests, feast on the proceeds while somebody plays the lyre. You could not have a clearer demonstration of how the structures of power workin Ur: the land workers shoulder their burdens and deliver offerings, while theelite drink with the king. To emphasize the king’s pre-eminence – just as in the image of King Den – the artist has made him much bigger than anybody else, in fact so big that his head breaks through the border of the picture. In the Standard of Ur we are looking at a new model of how a society is organized.

Peace: the king and companions feast while people bring tribute of fish, animals and other produce

War: the king reviews captured prisoners while chariots trample the enemy

The king’s head breaches the frame of the picture; he alone is shown wearing a full-length robe and he holds a large spear, while his men lead prisoners off either to their doom or to slavery. Victims and victors look surprisingly alike, because this is almost certainly a battle between close neighbors – in Mesopotamia neighboring cities fought continually with each other for dominance. The losers are shown stripped naked to emphasize the humiliation of their defeat, and there is something heart-rending in their abject demeanor. In the bottom row are some of the oldest-known representations of chariots of war – indeed, of wheeled vehicles of any sort – and one of the first examples of what was to become a classic graphic device: the artist shows the asses pulling the chariots moving from a walk to a trot to a full gallop, gathering speed as theygo. It’s a technique that no artist would better until the arrival of

film.

Professorof sociology Anthony Giddens described this shift in social organization:

“From having a surplus, you get the emergence of classes, because some people can live off the labour of others, which they couldn’t do intraditional small agricultural communities where everybody worked. Then you get the emergence of a priestly warrior class, of organized warfare, of tribute and something like a state – which is really the creation of a new form of power. All those things hang together.

You can’t have a division between rich and poor when everyone produces the same goods, so it’s only when you get a surplus product which some people can live off and others have to produce, that you get a class system; and that soon emerges into a system of power and domination. You see the emergence of individuals who claim a divine right, and that integrates with the emergence of a cosmology. You have the origin of civilization there but it’s bound up with blood, with dynamics, and with personal aggrandizement.”

2 Indus Seal: the fragile city

Stone stamp, from Harappa, the Indus Valley (Punjab) Pakistan 

2500–2000BC

Source:https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qb5xx

The seal itself was discovered in the 1850s, near the town of Harappa, in what was then British India, about 150 miles south of Lahore in modern Pakistan. Over the next fifty years three more seals like it arrived in the British Museum, but no one had any idea what they were, or when and where they’d been made. But in 1906 they caught the attention of the Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, John Marshall. He ordered the excavation of the ruins at Harappa, where the first seal had been found. What was discovered there led to the rewriting of world history.

Marshall’s team found at Harappa the remains of an enormous city and went on to find many others nearby, all dating to between 3000 and 2000 BC. This took Indian civilization much further back in time than anyone had previously thought. It became clear that this was a land of sophisticated urban centers, trade and industry, and even writing. It must have ranked as a contemporary and an equal with ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia – and it had been totally forgotten.

The largest of the Indus Valley cities, such as Harappa and Mohenjodaro, had populations of 30,000 to 40,000 people. They were built on rigorous grid layouts, with carefully articulated housing plans and advanced sanitation systems that even incorporated home plumbing; they’re a modern town planner’s dream.

But just who ran these highly ordered Indus Valley cities remains unclear. There is no evidence of kings or pharaohs – or indeed of any leader at all. This is largely because, both literally and metaphorically, we don’t know where the bodies are buried. There are none of the rich burials which in Egypt or Mesopotamia tell us so much about the powerful and about the society they controlled. We have to conclude that the Indus Valley people probably cremated their dead, and, while there may be many benefits in cremation, for archaeologists it is, if I may use the phrase, a dead loss.

What’s left of these great Indus cities gives us no indication of a society engaged with, or threatened by, war. Not many weapons have been found, and the cities show no signs of being fortified. There are great communal buildings, but nothing that looks like a royal palace, and there seems to be little difference between the homes of the rich and the poor. It seems to be a quite different model of how to create an urban civilization, without celebration of violenceor extreme concentration of individual power. Is it possible that these societies were based not on coercion but on consensus?

Between 3000 and 2000 BC the Indus civilization was a vast network of complex, organized cities with flourishing trade links to the world beyond, all apparently thriving. And then, around 1900 BC, it came to an end. The cities turned to mounds of earth, and even the memory of this, one of the great early urban cultures of the world, vanished. We can only hazard guesses as to why.The need for timber to fire the brick kilns of the huge building industry mayhave led to extensive deforestation and an environmental catastrophe. Moreimportantly, climate change seems to have caused tributaries of the Indus toalter their course or to dry up completely.

3 Early Writing Tablet: writing emerged out of the need of record-keeping

When and where did writing begin – and how? A piece of clay, made just over 5,000 years ago in a Mesopotamian city, is one of the earliest examples of writing that we know; the people who gave us the Standard of Ur have also left us one of the earliest examples of writing.

It is emphatically not great literature; it is about beer and the birth of bureaucracy. It comes from what is now southern Iraq, and it’s on a little clay tablet, about 9 centimetres by 7 (4 inches by 3) – almost exactly the same shapeand size as the mouse that controls your computer.

Our little beer-rationing tablet is divided into three rows of four boxes each, and in each box the signs –typically for this date – are read from top to bottom, moving right to left, before you move on to the next box. The signs are pictographs, drawings of items which stand just for that item or something closely related to it. So the symbol for beer is an upright jar witha pointed base – a picture of the vessel that was actually used to store the beer rations. The word for ‘ration’ itself is conveyed graphically by a human head, juxtaposed with a bowl, from which it appears to be drinking; the signsin each of the boxes are accompanied by circular and semicircular marks which represent the number of rations recorded.

When the earliest cities and states grew up in the world’s fertile river valleys around 5,000 years ago, one of the challenges for leaders was how to govern these new societies. How do you impose your will not just on a couple of hundred villagers, but on tens of thousands of city dwellers? Nearly all these new rulers discovered that, as well as using military force and official ideology, if you want to control populations on this scale you need to write things down.

By 3000 BC the people who had to run the various city-states of Mesopotamia were discovering how to use written records for all kinds of day-to-day administration, keeping large temples running or tracking the movement and storage of goods. Most of the early clay tablets in the British Museum collection, like this one, come from the city of Uruk, roughly half way between modern Baghdadand Basra. Uruk was just one of the large, rich city-states of Mesopotamia that had grown too big and too complex for anyone to be able to run them just by word of mouth.

We tend to think of writing as being about poetry or fiction or history, what wemight call literature. But early literature was in fact oral – learnt by heart and then recited or sung. People wrote down what they could not learn by heart, what they couldn’t turn into verse. So pretty well everywhere early writing seems to have been about record-keeping, bean-counting or, as in the case ofthis little tablet, beer-counting. Beer was the staple drink in Mesopotamia and was issued as rations to workers. Money, laws, trade, employment: this is the stuff of early writing, and it’s writing like that on this tablet that ultimately changes the nature of state control and state power. Only later does writing move from rations to emotions; the accountants got there long before the poets. It’s all thoroughly bureaucratic stuff.

John Searle, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, describes what happens to the human mind when writing becomes part of culture:

“Writing is essential for the creation of what we think of as human civilization. It has a creative capacity that may not even have been intended. I think you don’t understand the full import of the revolution brought by writing if you think of it just as preserving information into the future. There are two areas where it makes an absolutely decisive difference to the whole history of the human species. One is complex thought. There’s a limit to what you can do with the spoken word. You cannot really do higher mathematicsor even more complex forms of philosophical argument unless you have some wayof writing it down and scanning it. …But there’s asecond thing about writing which is just as important: when you write down you don’t just record what already exists, you create new entities – money, corporations, governments, complex forms of society. Writing is essential forall of them.“

Writing seems to have emerged independently in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Central America – all of them expanding population centers – but there’s fierce debate and much rivalry about who wrote first. At the moment, the Mesopotamians seem to be in the lead, but that may simply be because their evidence – being in clay– has survived.

4 Chinese Zhou Ritual Vessel: city as a center of rites

Bronzegui, found in western China

1100–1000BC

This spectacular bronze vessel, made about 3,000 years ago, is called a gui. Gui often carry inscriptions which are now a key source for Chinese history, and this bronze is just such a document. The inscription tells us of a significant battlein the Zhou’s ultimate triumph over the Shang:

“The King, having subdued the Shang country, charged the Marquis K’ang to convert it into a border territory to be the Wei state. Since Mei Situ Yi had been associated in effecting this change, he made in honor of his late father this sacral vessel.”

So the man who commissioned the gui, Mei Situ Yi, did so in order to honour his dead father and at the same time, as a loyal Zhou, commemorated the quashing of a Shang rebellion in about 1050 BC by the Zhou king’s brother, the Marquis K’ang.

Bronze vessels like this were among the most iconic objects of ancient China, and making them was an extraordinarily complicated business. First the ores that contain copper and tin had to be smelted to make the bronze itself, then the molten bronze had to be cast – a technology in which China led the world. This gui was not made as a single object but as separate pieces cast in different moulds which were then joined together to make one complex and intricate work of art. The result is a

vessel which at that date could have been made nowhere else in the world. The sheerskill, the effort and expense involved in making bronze vessels like these made them immediately objects of the highest value and status, fit therefore for themost solemn rituals.

In domestic ceremonies, families offered food and drink to their watchful dead; but on a grander scale governments offered them to the mighty gods. If the guiaddressed the ancestors and the world of the past, it also emphatically asserted authority in the present.

The Shang Dynasty, which came to power in about 1500 BC, had seen the growth of China’s first large cities. Their last capital, at Anyang on the Yellow Riverin north China, covered an area of 30 square kilometers (10 squaremiles) and had a population of 120,000 – at the time it must have been one of the largest cities in the world. Life in Shang cities was highly regulated, with twelve-month calendars, decimal measurement, conscription and centralized taxes. As centers of wealth, the cities were also places of outstanding artistic production, in ceramics, jade and, above all, bronze.

5 Olmec Stone Mask : the mother culture of Maya and Aztec civilizations

Stonemask, found in south-east Mexico

900–400BC

The people who made this mask were the Olmec, who ruled in what is now Mexico for around a thousand years, from 1400 to 400 BC. They’ve been called the mother culture – the cultura madre – of Central America. The Olmecs were a highly sophisticated people, who built the first cities in Central America, mapped the heavens, developed the first writing and probably evolved the first calendar there. They even invented one of the world’s earliest ball games – which the Spanish would encounter about 3,000 years later. It was played using rubber balls – rubber being readily available from the local tropical gum trees – and although we don’t know what the Olmecs called themselves, it’s documented that the Aztecs called them the people of Olmen, meaning ‘the rubber country’.

The similarities between the cultures of the old and the new worlds are so strong –both produced pyramids and mummification, temples and priestly rituals, social structures and buildings that function in similar ways – that scholars for along time found it hard to believe that these American cultures could have evolved in isolation. But they did.

Majorcities such as La Venta, near the Gulf of Mexico, had impressive steppyramids with temple monuments for the worship of the gods and the burials of the kings. These would have formed the center of the city. The pyramid itself was often topped by a temple, just as the Greeks, at roughly the same time, were building the Parthenon overlooking Athens. But whereas the Parthenon stood on the naturally formed rock of the Acropolis, the Olmecs built artificial mountains – platforms is far too mild a word – on which to put their temples to overlook the city. The layout of the city, and its placing in an ordered landscape, typified not just Olmec but most later Central American urban centers – such as those of the Mayas and the Aztecs. All were variations on the Olmec model of a temple overlooking an open square, flanked by smaller temples and palaces.

The remains of La Venta, one of the centres of Olmec civilization

By 400 BC La Venta, along with all the other Olmec centers, was deserted. It’s a pattern that occurs with disconcerting frequency in Central America – great population centers are suddenly, mysteriously, abandoned. In the case of the Olmecs, it could have been the overpopulation of this fragile tropical river valley, or a shift in the Earth’s tectonic plates making rivers change their course, the eruption of one of the local volcanoes, or a temporary climate change caused by the shifting patterns of the El Niño ocean current.

Related CityReads

03.CityReads│Agriculture and City, Which Comes First?05.CityReads│Why did Shanghai become the key to modern China?09. CityReads│Sapiens: How We Got to Now10. CityReads│Who first coined the term “Urban Revolution”?41.CityReads│Seeing China From the Air

（Click the title or enter our WeChat menu and reply number ）

CityReads ∣Notes On Cities

"CityReads", a subscription account on WeChat, 

posts our notes on city reads weekly. 

Please follow us by searching "CityReads"