Reflections: The Emergence of Cities

WHAP/Napp

Excerpts from Article: “Settled Societies: The Emergence of Cities” by Candice Goucher, Charles LeGuin, and Linda Walton

Cues: / Notes:
  1. Gathering and Hunting Societies
  1. Units usually consisted of persons related by bloodlines and organized into groups that we might today term family structures
  2. Groups formed clans or tribes, as well as larger social and family units, based on shared cultures and blood relationships
  3. Even as cities emerged, majority of people remained in rural communities, linked through trade and contact with urban centers
  1. Causes of Urbanization
  1. Agriculture was only one reason that people settled down and populations began to be concentrated in urban clusters
  2. As gatherers and hunters began to cultivate crops and domesticate animalsless mobile/began to settle in more fixed communities
  1. In time, most of these communities grew in size
  1. Other reasons that people settled together in large communities
  1. Advantages gained from increased trading opportunities
  2. The desire to be near religious shrines or other sacred sites
  3. The safety and defense afforded by large numbers
  1. But surplus food produced as a result of technological innovations allowed people to settle in communities that grew in size and density
  1. West Asia
  1. By around 6500 B.C.E. in West Asia, settlements such as Tepe Guran in the western Zagros Mountains of Iran or Jericho in Palestine were large enough to be considered small cities
  1. Jericho was an older, year-round settlement, dating back to as early as 9000 B.C.E., when the site was established as a sanctuary beside a spring for hunter-gatherers
a)But it drew its wealth primarily through trade from Red Sea
  1. Çatal Hüyük in central Turkey, is an example of a complex urban society that eventually came to be based on agriculture but which also relied on game hunting and the gathering of undomesticated plants

Summaries:
Cues: / Notes:
1.By 5800 B.C.E., the city had a population of some 5000 people settled in about a thousand houses surrounded by a well-watered plain
2.Çatal Hüyük’s economy centered on large herds of domestic cattle, though grain farming dependent on irrigation was also practiced
3.In fact, the presence of ritual or ceremonial functions at Çatal Hüyük may have been as significant for the center’s existence as any economic or military reasons
4.Specialists were important to cities, because they relied on unique skills and knowledge unavailable to the ordinary field laborer
  1. No “first city” emerged in West Asia during this earliest period, only towns, each in its own way seeking to sustain a more complex society
  2. But following 3500 B.C.E., in Sumer, as the area at the head of the Persian Gulf came to be known, the extent of arable land was greatly enlarged due to an ample supply of water from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers
  1. Changes Wrought by Urbanization
  1. Priests first appeared at some time prior to 3000 B.C.E., when they are depicted on seals and stone carvings
  1. They were perhaps the first social group to be released from direct subsistence labor, since their role in religious ritual and as spokesmen for gods was related to the exercise of power by kings
  1. It is likely that the complexity of business transactions and administrative and legal needs presented by the challenge of organizing larger urban communities stimulated the writing system developed by the Sumerians around 3000 B.C.E.
  1. The centralization of the economy through the integration of urban center and hinterland required the systematic collection and allocation of goods, aided by a means of recording such transactions
  1. Variations
  1. Like a number of other West African urban centers, Jenne-Jeno was located on trade routes
  2. The evidence from Jenne-Jeno suggests indigenous trade and independent urban development effectively related to the city’s relationship with its own hinterland can lead to the development of an integrated regional system
  1. Changes
  1. Urban society was more complex
  2. Intensification of inequality and rigid divisions along lines of class, status, and gender
  3. Resulted not only in the benefits enjoyed by complex societies and cultures; homelessness, exploitation, and injustice have also been characteristic of the urban experience throughout world history

Summaries:

Essential Question:

  • While permanent settlements and urbanization are often presented as consequences of the development of agriculture, agriculture was not the only force that led to these processes. Discuss the other forces that led to these processes?

  1. Early urban dwellerswere
  1. Dominated by peoples in agricultural settlements.
  2. Left the pursuit of religious practices to agricultural peoples.
  3. Saw the need for a government.
  4. Were exempt from taxation.
  5. Were offered few opportunities to carry out specialized tasks.
  1. The Neolithic Age
  1. Saw the beginnings of urbanization.
  2. Saw the process of agriculture carried out without the use of metal tools.
  3. Produced societies without class distinctions.
  4. Saw a decline in global populations.
  5. Witnessed the end of nomadic societies.
  1. Which of the following occurred as a result of the development of agriculture in societies that previously relied on hunting and gathering?
  1. Conditions for women improved.
  2. The incidence of disease declined.
  3. Population density increased.
  4. Polytheism disappeared.
  5. Degradation of the environment lessened.
/
  1. Where is the Fertile Crescent?
  1. Africa
  2. Asia
  3. Along the Nile
  4. Canaan, Egypt, and Mesopotamia
  1. Which of the following is the most ancient cities known?
  1. Athens
  2. Canaan
  3. Jerusalem
  4. Jericho
  1. Why did people start gathering together in villages and cities?
  1. The king ordered them.
  2. To work together.
  3. For agriculture.
  4. To build big buildings.
  1. When did the Sumerians invent cuneiform?
  1. 3200 B.C.E.
  2. 2300 B.C.E.
  3. 1800 B.C.E.
  4. 3000 B.C.E.
  1. Egypt is inwhich direction from Sumeria?
  1. West
  2. East
  3. North
  4. South

Excerpt from National Geographic: The Birth of Religion, June 2011

… Just 20 years ago most researchers believed they knew the time, place, and rough sequence of the Neolithic Revolution—the critical transition that resulted in the birth of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages and from there to technologically sophisticated societies with great temples and towers and kings and priests who directed the labor of their subjects and recorded their feats in written form. But in recent years multiple new discoveries, Göbekli Tepe preeminent among them, have begun forcing archaeologists to reconsider.

At first the Neolithic Revolution was viewed as a single event—a sudden flash of genius—that occurred in a single location, Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now southern Iraq, then spread to India, Europe, and beyond. Most archaeologists believed this sudden blossoming of civilization was driven largely by environmental changes: a gradual warming as the Ice Age ended that allowed some people to begin cultivating plants and herding animals in abundance. The new research suggests that the "revolution" was actually carried out by many hands across a huge area and over thousands of years. And it may have been driven not by the environment but by something else entirely…

Hovering over Göbekli Tepe [in Turkey] is the ghost of V. Gordon Childe. An Australian transplant to Britain, Childe was…one of the most influential archaeologists of the past century. A great synthesist, Childe wove together his colleagues' disconnected facts into overarching intellectual schemes. The most famous of these arose in the 1920s, when he invented the concept of the Neolithic Revolution.

In today's terms, Childe's views could be summed up like this: Homo sapiens burst onto the scene about 200,000 years ago. For most of the millennia that followed, the species changed remarkably little, with humans living as small bands of wandering foragers. Thencame the Neolithic Revolution—"a radical change," Childe said, "fraught with revolutionary consequences for the whole species." In a lightning bolt of inspiration, one part of humankind turned its back on foraging and embraced agriculture. The adoption of farming, Childe argued, brought with it further transformations. To tend their fields, people had to stop wandering and move into permanent villages, where they developed new tools and created pottery. The Neolithic Revolution, in his view, was an explosively important event—"the greatest in human history after the mastery of fire."…

The discovery of the Natufians was the first rock through the window of Childe's Neolithic Revolution. Childe had thought agriculture the necessary spark that led to villages and ignited civilization. Yet although the Natufians lived in permanent settlements of up to several hundred people, they were foragers, not farmers, hunting gazelles and gathering wild rye, barley, and wheat…

Göbekli Tepe, to Schmidt's way of thinking, suggests a reversal of that scenario: The construction of a massive temple by a group of foragers is evidence that organized religion could have come before the rise of agriculture and other aspects of civilization. It suggests that the human impulse to gather for sacred rituals arose as humans shifted from seeing themselves as part of the natural world to seeking mastery over it. When foragers began settling down in villages, they unavoidably created a divide between the human realm—a fixed huddle of homes with hundreds of inhabitants—and the dangerous land beyond the campfire, populated by lethal beasts.