What social structures emerged in the first cities?
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This is the third in a short series of posts about the origins of urban development.
Urbanism, like agriculture, was invented more than once. There was no singular, original city, from which all later cities are descended. Instead, they emerged in an incredibly diverse set of ecological environments, spread across multiple continents, at different points in history. Cities appeared in the broad alluvial plains of Mesopotamia, in the narrow strip of inhabitable land along the Nile, among the riverine valleys of the Indus, Yangtze, and Yellow rivers, in the highlands of the Andes, and among the floodplains and marshes of Mesoamerica. The Maya built cities in the dense forests of the Yucatán peninsula, while recent LIDAR scans of the Amazon basin has revealed what might be the remains of long-lost jungle cities hidden beneath the canopy. Of the inhabited continents, only Australia has so far shown no signs of early urban development.
For almost as long as humans have built cities, we’ve associated them with that intangible concept we call ‘civilisation’. The Greek geographer Eratosthenes (c. 276-195 BCE) proposed classifying those people that lived in cities as ‘civilised’ and those who did not as ‘barbarians’. Over time the Greeks came to believe themselves superior to the nomadic, non-urban Scythians who roamed the Pontic Steppe (despite trading with them for centuries). Thucydides (c. 460-400 BCE) saw further than most when he guessed that the Greeks’ ancestors must have once lived much like the ‘barbarians’ before settling down. The Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406 CE), meanwhile, devised a cyclical theory of history that pitted urban civilisations against nomadic tribes on the periphery. Each time a city fell to the barbarians, the new elites would take over and become accustomed to the luxuries and vices of sedentary life, becoming soft and vulnerable to attack from a new set of barbarians. The common thread in the writings of all of these thinkers was the assumption that civilisational progress was synonymous with urban centres. Indeed, historians today still define urbanisation as one of the key signifiers of civilisation.1
Clearly, we have long considered urbanisation a major turning point in human history, but what were the first urban societies actually like?
The world’s first cities appeared in Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BCE. This happened in two zones: the cooler, hillier Assyria in the north, where farmers could rely on regular rainfall; and the flatter, hotter Babylonia in the south, where the ground was often baked into mudflats. Farming in the south required the back-breaking work of digging irrigation canals from the slower moving rivers; rivers which had a nasty habit of changing direction.
The difference in geography seems to have influenced the emergence of two different forms of social organisation. The southern city of Uruk shows clear evidence of social stratification. This did not appear from nowhere; over the millennium or two before the city’s appearance, southern Mesopotamia was already showing signs of ranked societies, with rich burials alongside poorer ones, and larger houses alongside smaller ones, in the countless Neolithic villages that dotted the region. But the rise of monumental architecture in the form of monstrous ziggurats — the White Temple dedicated to the sky god, Anu, and the smaller ‘House of the Universe’ built for Iannna, the goddess of love and fertility — dwarf anything that came before Uruk. The construction of these temples required legions of full-time artisans, fed with provisions stored in increasingly standardised, plain pottery that suggest mass production.
The two ziggurats laid at the centre of the city geographically, forming two distinct precincts, but were also central economically too. Grain, animals, and perhaps beer were brought to their stepped-pyramids, where the emerging priestly caste managed and taxed the commerce. At first it seems the city was ruled by these priests, who were able to use their relationship with the divine powers to justify their increasing control over the rest of the populace. Eventually though, kings emerged: the city’s legendary founders (in accounts written a long time after the fact) were supposed to be a man named Enmerkar and his wife Enmerkar-zi, both credited with knowing ‘how to build towns, make bricks and brick pavements,’ as well as ploughs, yokes, cables, threshing sledges, and irrigation ditches. The more famous Gilgamesh is credited in the Sumerian King List and The Epic of Gilgamesh as building the city’s walls, the latter work establishing him in the Near East as the model ruler for millennia. We can suppose then that Uruk’s society was formed of a hierarchy of distinct classes: kings at the top, followed by priests, landowners, officials (who invented writing), merchants, farmers, and, at bottom, slaves. It has been posited that the need to organise labour to build the irrigation ditches required to feed the metropolis led to this social stratification — the so-called ‘hydraulic model’ of civilisation.
It was a different story in Tell Brak, though. Among the rain-fed hills of Assyria, the city here also shows signs of monumental building — in particular the ‘Eye Temple’—, but was instead ruled by a decentralised, kinship-based assembly, headed by elders. Like Uruk, Tell Brak relied on the surrounding countryside to feed its population, while it also saw the trade of key goods like obsidian and the emergence of a manufacturing industry: marble chalices, flint tools, tin-glazed pottery, and shell inlays were all made by the city’s artisans. Later, as the cities to its south — namely Uruk, Kish, and eventually Akkad — grew in influence, the city shifted its social organisation towards a monarchical system, before eventually falling under the direct control of the Akkadian Empire. There’s still a lot we don’t know about Tell Brak — its excavation has been on pause for the last decade due to ongoing conflicts in the region. It will be interesting to see how the story unfolds over the next few years when archaeologists are allowed back to the site.
The first societies that began cultivating crops along the Nile Valley lived in small egalitarian bands. However, during the Naqada II period (3500-3200 BCE) we begin to see the emergence of stratified chiefdoms at Hierakonpolis, Naqada, and Abydos. Cemeteries reveal wealthy graves with fine goods like jewellery appearing alongside common burials. Long distance trade began to be established, with pottery being exchanged as far south as Nubia. By Naqada III (c. 3300-3100 BCE), the urban centres began to be dominated by individual rulers, with polities growing to encompass more and more territory. The growing militarism of these Predynastic societies is shown by the introduction of victory and dominance motifs on their pottery, with ritual objects becoming more and more sophisticated. It seems likely the power of local rulers was bound up in their control of both trade and ritual.
With the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt — traditionally by King Narmer (c. 3150 BCE) — the idea of divine kingship only became more entrenched. The pharaohs were god-kings — seen as more than human; gods incarnate. They represented the gods on earth, controlling the rituals and temples, becoming in their duties divine themselves. The “Two Lands” (Upper and Lower Egypt) were governed by a centralised administration, which some have posited was made possible by demographic growth and increasing pressure on the limited land supply along the riverbanks. The steady intensification of agriculture in the region does seem to correlate directly with the emergence of a more unified state structure during this period of Egyptian history. Later pharaohs would build great ‘nilometers’ — underground chambers that provided advanced warning of the extent of the coming annual flood, and thus whether that year’s harvest would be bountiful or not. These measurements were closely guarded secrets, known only to the pharaoh and his highest ranking priests, who would plan the year’s taxes accordingly. They knew all too well their political authority rested on their ability to keep their people fed.