“Take a brick,” Ezekiel is told (Ezekiel 4:1), “and lay it before you, and portray upon it a city, even Jerusalem.” This is like inscribing Clean Slate proclamations on bricks embedded in temple foundations.
Pre-urban ritual sites were largely public in character. As such, they were made autonomous by general agreement rather than belonging to any particular family, tribe, or territorial entity. There was a studied equality within them, especially for their amphictyonic functions.
They were initially far from being centers of government, of lawmaking and “the state” as modern political theorists understand the term. Instead of being centers of law, early group sites and their temples often were asylums from the laws of local communities. Lawbreakers could seek refuge in their precincts, much as in today’s world foreign embassies still provide diplomatic immunity. (This practice is found in Native American societies as well as the Bronze Age Near East.) In this respect, temple centers had the character of anti-states. Self-government and oral common law remained with the communal kinship-based landholding groupings throughout most of the Bronze Age, along with military decision-making. Hammurapi’slaws applied mainly to the public institutions in their relationship with their communities. Oral common law seems to have governed punishment for manslaughter, injury, and other offenses among citizens themselves. Written law also applied to specifically urban problems, such as the goring ox.[1]
The earliest public institutions were set aside as corporately distinct entities serving “higher” communal functions. Urban property was not periodically (re)distributed among the community’s individual kinship groupings, but was permanent and autonomous.
The Seasonal Ritual Character of Proto-Urban Sites
Let us set aside our modern ideas of cities in terms of their physical size, population density, and semblance of permanence, and focus on what they were before they evolved into full-fledged towns. They were places for diverse people to come together, at first on a merely seasonal basis, to exchange goods at festive occasions, to forge marriage alliances, and to help sustain populations through cold winters or other hard times.
Inasmuch as Ice Age populations wandered year-round across the land, their meeting spots were only temporarily attended by most families. Until quite recently most of the world’s peoples lived on the land most of the time, and came into cities only occasionally. Ten thousand years ago such gathering sites would have been attended on a seasonal basis—in summer when the land was able to support populations coming together, or in times of need such as midwinter for the northern latitudes. Springtime also would have been an appropriate occasion, when the melting snows swelled the rivers and the earth became reanimated.
If the earliest fixed sites were used for “higher” social functions, as in the Ice Age caves of the Magdalenian epoch c. 12,000 BC, this was probably because they were ritually imbued with a higher and even sacred character to ensure their peaceful openness as meeting spots or sanctuaries. From this status they developed into exchange entrepôts and, by the neolithic period, into handicraft production centers. Sacred protection and safe passage typically was stipulated for visitors to these sites.
The most important rites of social consolidation probably were held on the new or full moon, in conjunction with some annual event such as an animal migration or the ripening of particular crops. The fact that most of these rituals were seasonal, and thus related to calendrical order, probably helped provide a cosmological dimension to pre-urban gathering areas. In any event, calendrical associations remained an important dimension of urban identity throughout antiquity. And if Ice Age cave art was indeed ritual art (Leroi-Gourhan[2] 1967), then proto-urban ritual spots had an identity extending beyond the family scale from the outset, if only to sponsor communal functions such as marriages among clans. These areas would have become, in effect, common ritual zones, neutral areas for families and communities to participate in such exchanges.
Established as permanent sites from the neolithic onward, cities were centered around temples which sponsored contacts with outsiders through ongoing exchanges, and also sacred gateways to the netherworld of the ancestral past. In fact, one finds from the earliest remains a reciprocal influence between sacred and commercial functions. Mesopotamian towns apparently were sanctified precisely because of their commercial functions, for the fragility of early exchange called for the most careful formalities. Trade needed a framework of rules imbued with sanctity to make it be accepted, to establish mutually equitable obligations and benefits, and to provide recourse in disputes. The alternative would have been a hit-and-run type of dealing that soon would have broken down from mutual enmity.
It is important to recognize that the cosmological structuring of public areas and proto-cities with reference to a central temple and its cult was independent of their physical size, density, or even year-round permanence. In view of the fact that nomadic hunter-gatherers ranged over the land for most of the year, the festival sites would not yet have been permanent, except to the extent that each year the same site was used. What is critical is how the social organization of cities differed from that of the surrounding land, and how their institutions performed services which differed from those provided by the traditional family structures.
Among the first higher orders transcending the family were priesthoods, shaman healers, and their associated professional guilds. The elaboration of such orders is evident in the Bronze Age metalsmiths and other public servants or specialized workers, which the archaic Greeks called “demiourgoi” (“servants of the demos”). They were separate from family groupings as such. Either they cut across family lines or their members renounced their family ties. But such guilds and similar groupings were like family units in holding communal property and having an administrative quasi-paternal head. They had the character of both cults and autonomous corporations, with their own property and buildings, initiation rites, common meals, and other such rituals—and also myths of common origins just as the clans had.
Many cities had a dual character, sacred and civil, such as the great Sumerian city of Uruk with its Eanna district. Nippur apparently was a “normal” city alongside its sacred precinct housing the Ekur (“mountain house,” i.e., the ziggurat-pyramid) that lent its influence to the city as a whole. Benefiting from its sacred status, Nippur never asserted itself as the seat of an imperial dynasty, but drew resources and gave prestige to whatever cities held the leadership of southern Mesopotamia, e.g., Lagash, Umma, Uruk, or Ur. Much like the amphictyonic-type capitals, such centers would not have had to be fortified as long as they remained strictly sacred and public in function, performing generally desired functions.
But in one way or another, most cities during the neolithic and early Bronze Age became what Lewis Mumford has called containers.Citation NeededCitation needed. If you have a source for this, we’ll add it as a footnote and to our Bibliography.OpenSee All Queries Their protective walls sheltered populations from external marauders, and at sun-down cattle often were driven back through their gates (hence the long stream of laws about problems caused by goring oxen. See Finkelstein[3] 1981.). Within these enclosures, storage facilities for food and grain tided the population through the year, and also provided tools and housed handicraft workshops.
By performing these specialized storage and related economic functions, communal temples played a major role in civilization’s formative epoch. However, rather than standing over communities as a ruling body or “state,” the temples were parallel institutions, not under the control of any specific group or territory. It may be helpful to think of these temple areas as being in the character of anti-states. Instead of being centers of government, they were just the opposite—a neutral ground acting as an umbrella for diverse groups to come together.
Public but Nonstate Character of Early Urban Precincts
As meeting sites or entrepôt enclaves, early civic areas developed rituals of social cohesion that had neolithic and even Ice Age roots. For even in these early times, gathering spots for a diversity of people coming together had to be set aside from the territories claimed by individual hunting and gathering bands. Rules for polite behavior were needed to ensure peace. It was in developing such rules for coming together that early assembly sites became proto-towns. Some served as what Karl Polanyi[4] (1957) called ports of trade. Others were amphictyonic centers for confederations of towns. The achievement of this kind of “higher” political order can be traced from Nippur in Bronze Age Mesopotamia through Jerusalem and its earlier tribal centers in Canaan, and Delphi and other temple centers in Greece.
A spatial urban cosmology expressed the ideas of centeredness and permanence that helped gain widespread adherence to public authority. The cosmological grounding of early sites was attested in foundation ceremonies which can be traced back to temple-founding rituals in third-millennium BC Sumer, and no doubt have roots going back to the neolithic and even the Ice Age. It seems that the earliest cities consisted basically of their temples, for all 10 characteristics of cities as enumerated by V. Gordon Childe[5] (1950) applied originally to temples (Table 9.1).
The best way to make a site politically and militarily neutral was to establish it as a temple center, allotting equal shares in the temple administration to each participating group. The idea of equality under the public laws of such institutions was not a utopian ideal but a pragmatic means to obtain agreement and voluntary participation. Modern political observers have found that for such agreement, the path of least resistance is the most neutral outcome, that is, one that does not favor (or offend) any one party over the other. The basic early need therefore was a forum for arm’s-length transactions that would not favor any of the diverse parties operating under sacred aegis. In cases where it came down to an either/or decision to favor one party or another—when the baby could not simply be cut down the middle—then it was settled by lot as a device giving each party an equal chance. The taking of lots accordingly came to be sanctified.
Even in classical times, despite increasing economic stratification, the Athenian democracy gave each citizen an equal vote and equal opportunity to serve on juries. Colonization likewise was neutral in dividing new territories into equal lots and distributing them “by lot,” that is, by luck of the draw. This gave the term “lot” the dual meaning of chance and property area. The practice was associated with the notion of sacred equity as an extension of the archaic idea of uniform regularity.
What is remarkable is the extent to which a common cosmological imagery was retained during the transformation of cities from Bronze Age neutral zones (what I call anti-states) to the seats of government found in classical antiquity. What began as temple-founding New Year ceremonies were generalized into city-wide foundation and renewal rituals re-creating civic order.
Table 9.1: Pre-Urban and Urban Traditions of Social Intercourse
Pre-Urban and Urban Traditions of Social Intercourse
Public Temples in Third-Millennium BC Mesopotamia and Earlier
1
Concentrated people in a compact site.
Ritual ceremonies sanctified public space and incorporated its diverse occupants into an ordered community.
2
Specialization of labor.
The first formal professions were public workers organized into temple guilds and specialized cult-families.
3
Social stratification.
The word “hierarchy” has sacred connotations.
4
Centralized economic surplus.
Temples were civilization’s first public storehouses and “containers,” sanctifying their food, seed, tools, and precious metals from outside seizure or domestic misappropriation.
5
Foreign trade.
Temples housed civilization’s first handicraft workshops largely developed for an export market. In Mesopotamia, temples had the largest herds of sheep to provide wool for their dependent textile-making labor.
6
Territorial organization took precedence over family lineages.
Sacred space set aside from ownership or control by any specific families. (Rulers did not speak of their parentage but described themselves as being nurtured or chosen by the gods, or “reborn” as members of sacred cults.)
7
Monumental public architecture.
The first stone architecture was public and ceremonial.
8
Writing and account-keeping.
These originally were public-sector functions.
9
Development of the exact predictive sciences.
Prediction began with calendar-making and omen-taking and prognostication.
10
Naturalistic art, especially portraiture.
Subordination of realism to standardized traditions, often of a cosmological character. Cities as sacred commercial gateways.
It may help to distinguish between two concepts of “center” with regard to archaic cities. Archaeologists of the materialist school have emphasized towns as physical, demographic, and political centers. According to this view, towns grow up in the geographic center of their communities to become nodes of state control. Their compact population density led to an urban division of labor and related characteristics as described by Childe[7] (1950).
This section approaches the idea of “center” as a gateway or boundary. As boundary areas, archaic towns tended to be neutral or stateless sites in the sense that they did not favor any one group exclusively but served as bridges for all to meet. Such towns were neutral zones outside the law of any particular communities, but subject to their own sanctified laws as administered by a cosmopolitan “committee”—the sacred hierarchy.
The laws they promulgated were not the oral common law of the land such as governed family relations, manslaughter, and personal injury. Rather, temples and palaces developed their own specialized public law. This was the type of law that was the first to be written down, inscribed on public stelae or other monuments. But these laws were not true “codes” governing the entire society. Only in classical antiquity did comprehensive law codes develop, as cities became centers of truly society-wide political control. As long as early Near Eastern neolithic and Bronze Age towns were enclaves in a predominantly rural landscape, kinship groupings retained their own laws and self-governing institutions. What the earliest sanctified urban sites provided was a neutral meeting ground for these diverse landed groupings.
There were two kinds of gateway centers. One was an entrepôt—an outpost, harbor, or “port.” (The Assyrian word for harbor was karum, used also for inland trade colonies planted in Asia Minor such as Karum Kanesh.) The other kind of gateway was one which seems at first glance not to have much to do with commercial entrepôts at all. I refer to gateways to the timeless underworld of the past, to the afterlife and the kosmos of the community’s ancestors. Such bridges across time are found in archaic burial sites and ritual centers.
These two types of gateways often coexisted at one and the same site throughout the Bronze Age Near East, being simultaneously sacred centers and commercial entrepôts. In any case, all early cities were centered around their temples, and this public space was the essential urban space. Temples played a preeminent role in commerce and handicraft, and in channeling contacts with the afterlife and with the heavens in their calendrical aspects.
Trade centers tended to be situated on geographic peripheries serving as gateways for trade and other contacts among contiguous neighbors. The third-millennium BC city of Ashur, for instance, was built on the Tigris at the east/west crossing of the trade route—leading from Afghanistan to Asia Minor. The commercial contacts sponsored by such sites were conducted according to strict rituals whose objective was to make such arm’s-length exchanges regular, equitable, and, in a word, urbane.
The important feature to bear in mind is that archaic urban sites were sacred as well as commercial boundaries. Like temples and tombs they were foursquare yet also integrating circular forms. Both the templum cross-in-circle 𛲜 and the “squared circle” ⧇ pattern were associated with early city planning. They connoted gathering points for contacts with the dead (that is, with the past) and also with the future via rituals to ensure worldly life—a good hunt, a good harvest, and good balance and health within the community.
As an introduction to this analysis it may be helpful to look at a particular kind of ancient city—capital centers and their cosmological imagery.
A Paradigmatic Capital: Ecbatana and Its Cosmological Symbolism
A paradigmatic example of ancient capitals is Ecbatana in Asia Minor, on the mountainous Iranian plateau northeast of Babylon, halfway to the Caspian Sea. Described by Herodotus[8] (I:98–100) and Polybius[9] (X.27), it was the first major palace built by the Medes, a people closely related to the Persians, whom they dominated in the early centuries. (Its Median name, Hangmatana, meant “meeting place,” presumably for clan representatives to convene in a central council.) When Cyrus II conquered Media in 550 BC, he made Ecbatana one of Persia’s three capitals, along with Babylon and Susa.
As Herodotus tells the story, around 700 BC the Medes were near a state of chaos following their revolt against Assyria. To create an orderly regime they chose a village leader, Deioces, to be their king.[10] Striving to legitimize his authority, he built an impressive royal residence at Ecbatana. Appropriate for a capital dedicated to bringing social and economic order, the citadel’s architecture was a monument of great size, fortified by concentric walls. Herodotus seems never to have gone there, and may have confused the description he heard with that of a ziggurat—a multileveled temple. What he described as walls may have been the stages of the pyramid. He described each successive circle as being higher than the one below it by the height of the battlements. Herodotus seems to have jumped to the conclusion that it was built on a hill to bring about this effect, but archaeologists have found no hill there.
What is important is the symbolism of the citadel, which gave its form to the capital city. The circles were seven in number, and the innermost contained the royal palace and treasury. … The battlements of the five outer rings were painted in different colors, the first white, the second black, the third crimson, the fourth blue, the fifth orange; the battlements of the two inner rings were plated with silver and gold, respectively. These fortifications were to protect the king and his palace; the people had to build their houses outside the circuit of the walls.
Herodotus clearly exaggerated. He apparently had not seen the site, and probably got his account secondhand from Persians or Medians resident at Babylon. There is no trace of a conical hill with walls (Rawlinson[11] 1881: Vol. II, pp. 268f.), and only the central administrative buildings were fortified.
Still, there is an informative pattern to his confusion: Mistaking the citadel for the entire city reflects the fact that classical Greek and Italian towns were agglomerations of families around a public space. Their administrators, functionaries, and juries were chosen from the citizenry at large rather than being corporately distinct. But to the Persians and earlier Near Easterners, the essence of cities was their ceremonial public area. Palace or temple structures formed an imago mundi associating their laws and rulings with the stability and regularity of the kosmos. The gold and silver at the center represented the sun and moon, associating the king and his treasury with the sun-god of justice, and hence his laws with the principles of regularity and order that characterized the heavenly bodies moving in their orbits—“the law-giving sky.”
In this respect the “city” described by Herodotus was only the central part of the overall urban area. If its walls really had measured nearly 20 miles in circumference, it would have been the size of Athens—an implausible inference. Writing in the second century BC, Polybius described Ecbatana as being without walls, and added a pointed jibe at Herodotus: “To those authors whose aim is to produce astonishment, and who are accustomed to deal in exaggeration and picturesque writing, this city offers the best possible subject.” No doubt most of Ecbatana was situated on the plain below. Its palace, treasury, and walls symbolized the entire town.
Inasmuch as Mesopotamian influence had been dominant in Asia Minor since the third millennium BC, it is hardly surprising that the citadel should have drawn its architectural symbolism from Assyrian and Babylonian cosmology. Ecbatana’s walls were painted in the same symbolic colors as were the walls of Mesopotamian ziggurats, the first shapes to rise out of the primeval watery chaos that preceded creation. However, although the colors reported by Herodotus for these walls corresponded to the Babylonian symbolism, their sequence is not the usual one.
Illustration 9.1: “The Tower of Babel or Birs Nimrud Restored,” by William Simpson, c. 1885, watercolor over graphite. Public Domain via the Metropolitan Museum of Art. From the Met Museum’s description of the work: “The bright colors and stair structures in the drawing are less plausible, although the shrine built on top of the ziggurat may well have been covered in blue glazed bricks. Simpson’s primary source for the latter would again have been Herodotus.”
In the seven-staged Birs Nimrud ziggurat at Borsippa (Illustration 9.1), south of Babylon, for instance, each wall represented one of the concentric spheres in which the moon, sun, and planets move beneath the outermost firmament of fixed stars. It was normal for all Mesopotamian temples to have their corners exactly facing the four cardinal directions, thus aligning themselves to the path of the sun, moon, and planets (George Rawlinson[12] 1881: Vol. I, pp. 76f., citing William Kennett Loftus, Chaldaea and Susiana: p. 128). The ziggurat’s excavator, Henry Rawlinson[13] (1861: pp. 17ff.) did not suspect an astronomical symbolism until he discovered a cuneiform cylinder dedicating the temple to “the planets of the seven spheres.” Further analysis showed the ziggurat to be a squared representation of the solar system. Its lowest stage was coated with black bitumen, “the sable hue which was always attributed to the sphere of Saturn,”[14] the outermost and hence darkest planet known in antiquity. The next stage had bricks burnt to the orangish sandalwood color traditionally associated with Jupiter. The third stage was red, signifying Mars.
The tablet found by Henry Rawlinson described the fourth stage as golden. It was common at the time to cover such stages with gold sheet (see, e.g., Snodgrass[15] 1990: p. 268). The Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar used the phrase “clothed with gold”[16] to describe Babylon’s gilded palaces and temples. But according to Polybius (X.47), Borsippa’s gold facing was stripped away by Alexander and the generals who succeeded him.
The ziggurat’s fifth stage was pale yellow to signify Venus, while the sixth was dark blue, traditionally used to represent Mercury. Upon digging out the top stage, Rawlinson concluded that it probably had been covered with silver sheet, as were many walls and pillars of ancient public structures. As his brother George Rawlinson[17] (1881: Vol. III, p. 384f.) described the effect, “the building rose up in stripes of varied colour, arranged almost as nature’s cunning arranges the hues in the rainbow, tones of red coming first, succeeded by a broad stripe of yellow, the yellow being followed by blue. Above this the glowing silvery summit melted into the bright sheen of the sky.”
This symbolism seems to have been carefully thought out. The planet with the longest and outermost orbit, Saturn, was assigned the ziggurat’s bottom level, while that with the shortest orbit, the moon, was placed at the top.Fact CheckCan you help us fact-check this and make suggestions if necessary?OpenSee All Queries Rawlinson pointed out that this principle also was followed at Ecbatana as well as by the fifth-century BC seven-walled ancient Armenian city Takht-i-Suleïman in the satrapy of Media Atropatene, known as “the second Ecbatana.”[18] Likewise, the seven stages of Asian pagodas typically had different colors for each planet represented. The idea survived into the Renaissance, e.g., in Campanella’s utopian city of the sun, “divided into seven great rings named from the seven planets, with four main streets and gateways looking to the points of the compass; the temple in the centre was also circular, and domed” (Lethaby[19] 1974: p. 44).
Such symbolism is foreshadowed by that of the temples that originally formed the focus of Mesopotamian cities. Herodotus[20] (I.181–183) described the ziggurat of Bel in fifth-century BC Babylon as being square, with the usual seven “planetary” stages topped by “a great temple with a fine large couch in it, richly covered, and a golden table beside it.” Here, at the New Year ceremony, a girl was chosen to spend the night with the ruler who acted as the Bel’s stand-in for the hierogamy ritual.
This sevenfold cosmological symbolism was also adopted for the Persian tomb of Cyrus at Pasargadae (Rawlinson[21] 1861: p. 24; see Illustration 9._,Illustration QueryThe illustration number was missing; can you help us figure out what it should be? Also, what is the illustration that this refers to?OpenSee All Queries from George Rawlinson[22] 1881: Vol. III, p. 318), reflecting the seven concentric transparent mountains that formed the Persian kosmos. Lethaby[23] (1974: pp. 151, 23) interpreted Crete’s labyrinth with its seven concentric circles or squares as being a two-dimensional image of the ziggurat’s seven stages (and ultimately, the orbits of the corresponding planetary bodies). In sum, Ecbatana and similar ritual cities, public buildings, and tombs shared an astral cosmology originally developed for temples.[24]
It is easy to see why civic regimes would draw on cosmological symbolism. Representing their authority as being part of the kosmos put it beyond question. Building round public hearths and imposing civic centers helped sanctify the administrative hierarchies of Athens and other classical towns. Rulers embodied a similar cosmological geometry in their public calendars and festivals, their myths and rituals, the architecture of their temples and palaces, and even the division of their communities into tribal fractions.
A social cosmology likewise is found in the rituals ascribed to Ecbatana’s ruler. Herodotus wrote that Deioces, having built his city, established strict royal ceremonies. “Admission to the king’s presence was forbidden, and all communication had to be through messengers.” The idea was that “if nobody saw him the legend would grow that he was a being of a different order from mere men.”Verify CitationCan you help us identify where in Herodotus’s Histories this is so we can add a citation? And check the quotation.OpenSee All Queries
Lethaby[25] (1974: pp. 156ff.) compared this pageantry of office to that of Minos, credited with having instituted law at Crete’s capital city of Knossos.[26] Minos “has three characteristics in classic lore; he is, above all, the great administrator or law; he is the judge of the under world of the dead; he is the lord of the labyrinth.” Much the same aura was attached to Osiris passing through a series of gates to the hall of justice in the underworld. The Egyptian Book of the Dead described the house of Osiris as a kind of underworld or “nocturnal abode” having seven halls signifying the seven planetary orbits, through which the sun passes each night on its way back to rise in the east.
The symbolism of Theseus descending into the labyrinth recalled the Sumerian myth of Inanna’sdescent into the underworld. As François Lenormant described it (as cited in Lethaby[27] 1974: p. 161): “The country whence none return is divided into seven zones, like those of Dante’s Inferno, upon the model of the seven planetary spheres. … Seven gates gave admission, each guarded by a porter. … In the centre of this grave-land was the palace of the ruler and a temple of justice.” This sanctified the law and its administrators. (More examples can be found in L’Orange’s 1953 study[28] of the cosmology of ancient rulership.) An almost universal symbolism of justice, eternity, the underworld, and the kosmos seems to be at work, a synthetic idea common to seven of the world’s ancient early urban centers in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, Egypt, China, Central America, the Andes, and the Yoruba coast of Nigeria.[29]
Near Eastern city-founding ceremonies survived in the classical Mediterranean lands in perhaps their most mundane manifestation as the Roman military triumph.
‘Persepolis as a Ritual City’
In 550 BC, a century after the death of Deioces, the Persian leader Cyrus II (born near Ecbatana, the grandson of the Median king Astyages, whose daughter married into the Achaemenid clan) threw off Median rule and conquered Babylon and Elam to the south, and much of Asia Minor to the west. Henceforth the Medians were ruled by Persian kings, the Achaemenids, who administered their empire from the capitals of Ecbatana, Babylon, and Susa in Elam (Xenophon[30]AnabasisIII.5.l5 and Cyropaedia[31]VIII.6.22).
Cyrus died in 529 BC while fighting in eastern Iran. After eight years of palace intrigues one of his sons-in-law, Darius, killed his major rival, suppressed a revolt, and created enough stability to rule for 35 years, 521–486 BC. A natural administrator, Darius brought order into Persia’s fiscal, military, and public affairs.
Just as Deioces built Ecbatana at the beginning of his reign, so in 515 BC Darius began building Persepolis as a ceremonial center to help legitimize his rule. Situated high on the Iranian mountain plateau, near Pasargadae where the Achaemenid kings were crowned and buried, Persepolis was built up for nearly two centuries, until Alexander the Great looted it (along with Ecbatana) in 330 BC.
Like Ecbatana, Persepolis was the seat of a royal treasury. In these early times treasuries were much like museums, containing dedications of ceremonial artworks (Schmidt[32] 1957: pp. 3, 56f., 66ff., 81ff.). It also contained thousands of tablets, written in Elamite. But as Cameron[33] (1948: p. 9) pointed out: “Contrary to expectations, the documents… are not of a political nature. There are no treaties, chronicles, annals, letters to or from satraps, or edicts to distant outposts…” Indeed, the city “was too isolated to serve as a capital for the administration of a vast imperial domain” (Pope[34] 1957: p. 124). For the latter purposes the Persian Empire used Babylon, Susa, and Ecbatana, the capitals of its three richest provinces.
Some modern observers (e.g., Bausani[35] 1962: p. 13) have misinterpreted Persepolis and Ecbatana as military camps, but Pope[36] (1957: pp. 125, 129) pointed out that the crenelated parapets crowning the walls and stairway railings of Persepolis, representing the mountain symbolism of the ziggurat, “are clearly symbolic and have no possible military value” (Illustrations 9.A and 9.B).Missing IllustrationsHelp us track down two images to insert.OpenSee All Queries “Although fortified, and required to be kept inviolate, Persepolis was not a fort nor was it controlled by military considerations. … The main function of Persepolis was to provide a splendid setting to reflect on earth the heaven above.” Pope[37] (1957: p. 123) added that “throughout the ancient Near East religious motivation was primary, and symbolism was the natural and universal form of thinking. The inscriptions proclaim in solemn language that the buildings were erected by the grace of God, that they attain a beauty, perfection and magnificence never before realized, and that, by the specific inspiration and protection of [the sun-god] Ahura Mazda, the Persian kings were designated his agents on earth and mediators between the divine and the human world.”
As in the case of Ecbatana, much of the new capital’s cosmological symbolism derived from Mesopotamia. Situated in the sacred mountain area and decorated with the “sacred mountain” design stemming originally from the ziggurats, Persepolis had great gates “guarded by colossal mythical figures, majestic, divine, mysterious, living powers of formidable authority” (Pope[38] 1957: p. 124), typical Babylonian practice.
Near Eastern symbolism also shaped the solar imagery of Ahura Mazda, whose winged disc was borrowed from the Neo-Assyrian Assur. “Likewise Mesopotamian was the seven-pointed star symbol atop Ahura Mazda’s polos crown,” and the investiture ceremony in which the sun-god handed the ruler the ring/measuring rope (Root[39] 1979: pp. 172f., 211ff., 166). “It is probable that the Achaemenids borrowed from Assyria not only the literary formulae, but also the actual court protocol for ceremonial enactments of the vassal/king relationship such as kissing the feet of the king.”Verify CitationCan you help us check these quotations and this citation?OpenSee All Queries
In sum, Persia’s sacred iconography and that of civil rulership, its urban architecture, and even the function of its capital and ritual cities adopted Mesopotamian traditions. This is especially significant inasmuch as Persia never really was urbanized and commercialized outside of these centers. It is thus to Bronze Age traditions that we must look to understand the pedigree of archaic urbanization.
Neolithic and Bronze Age Towns and Their Temples
A central theme of The Creation of Order is how the archaic idea of economic order sanctified customs of equitability. The archaic idea of equity was to formalize a uniform and standardized regime.
For thousands of years, probably going back to Ice Age times before 10,000 BC, personal egoistic feelings were channeled into mutual gift exchange, perhaps tinged with one-upmanship to outdo one another in presenting gifts, feasts, and public sacrifices. But in the late neolithic, larger-scale trade began to replace this “anthropological” exchange. It was primarily to develop and systematize long-distance trade on a bulk scale that early Near Eastern towns grew up, evolving from seasonal cult and redistribution centers to full-blown commercial enclaves and handicraft workshops.
The 32-acre settlement of Çatalhöyük in Asia Minor (modern Türkiye) dates roughly from 7500 BC to 5600 BC. Situated on the Konya-Karaman Plain in the center of Anatolia’s richest grain-growing and hunting region, it supported a nonagricultural population working up obsidian and trading for at least a 100-mile radius.
The key to Çatalhöyük and other exchange centers was that their bulk trade was impersonal—in a word, economic. It also was multiethnic, and indeed, the town’s pathbreaking innovations have been attributed in part to its intermixing of populations. Analysis of its burials has shown that its approximately 5,000 inhabitants were ethnically mixed (Mellaart[40] 1975: p. 99). It seems that to live and interact together, these various groups had to develop arm’s-length formalities as part of a regime that must have stood “above” the self-governing institutions of the various self-governing ethnic communities.
Çatalhöyük’s abundance of ritualistic art suggested that religious practices helped shape its social relations, so that its status as a sacred meeting ground contributed to its economic innovations as well as to its physical safety. Thus, sacred ritual practices and social cohesion went hand in hand with economic organization and indeed, bureaucracy. One might suspect that such sites would have been prone to attack by neighboring tribes, i.e., burnings and abandonments such as occurred at early Jericho. Yet Çatalhöyük was peaceful throughout its existence. No attempt was made to fortify it, and its occasional fires seem to have been accidental. The inference is that the ligaments of economic and social organization were strongest where exchange and other interfaces with aliens occurred.
The etymology of terms associated with urbanization gives some hints as to its characteristics. Our words “polite” and “political” stem from the Greek “polis,” while “civility” and “civilization” derive from Latin “civitas.” The Latin word for city in its physical aspect, “urbs,” underlies the English word “urbane.” These three usages—polite, civil, and urbane—reflect the idea of city activities being formalized in ways that rural life was not. It was at such formal public sites that polite formalities and an urbanity of manners developed, in order to regularize relations among diverse and heterogeneous individuals and groups.
Such formalities were necessary for people to live in close quarters with one another and to deal with families or clans other than their own. The crowding of urban space posed a danger of clashing egos leading to outbreaks of violence. The larger the city, the more such qualities of civility and urbanity were needed.
To return to our archaic examples, by the fourth millennium BC a new mixture of populations developed in southern Mesopotamia. They are known as the Sumerians, composed of Semites and at least one non-Semitic-speaking population, as well as newer arrivals speaking yet another language or two. In addition to coping with the resulting multilingualism, the Sumerians had a pressing economic problem: They had to obtain essential metals and ores, stone, and even hardwood by trading in bulk over long distances.
To let this trade be conducted by individual families would have led to economic polarization between wealthy patrons and poor retainers. As an alternative, the Sumerians built up the economic role of their temples so as to organize the labor-intensive production that formed the basis for this commerce. And at least in principle the temple hierarchies were made autonomous from the community’s landed families (with greater or lesser success from one town to the next).
In retrospect we can see how their public ritual activities made these temples the path of least resistance to become the major vehicles for Mesopotamian production, commerce, and credit. Most families still lived on a near-subsistence basis on the land. Immigrants seem to have been given their own lands rather than becoming dependents of local chieftains and big-men. Individual households lacked the resources to build workshops, not to mention solving the problem of mobilizing labor to produce textiles and other handicrafts to exchange for imported raw materials. In this epoch of generalized self-dependency, wage labor had not yet come into being. War slaves were not yet available on a large scale, and debt-servitude began to proliferate only in the second millennium BC. Other forms of dependency likewise were only just beginning to develop.
One of the major factors qualifying the Sumerian temples to undertake a commercial industrial role was their function as centers for dependent welfare-type personnel—war widows and orphans, the injured, and the infirm unable to function well as part of the subsistence-based agricultural community. The temples mobilized their labor to serve the community’s broad economic objectives, most notably the production of export goods. In the Early Bronze Age such exchange was considered to be a public function, and as such was conducted via the temple/urban area.
Myths tell the story. In “Enki and Ninmah: The Creation of Humankind” (translated in Kramer[41] 1989: pp. 31ff.) the individuals being created consisted of misfits, made virtually out of sport by the goddess Ninmah. Enki, acting as the divine friend of humanity, countered her by making a virtue out of necessity. When Ninmah created a man with arthritic hands, Enki made him a royal servant. When Ninmah decreed the fate of the next man to be blind, Enki “gave him the art of song, named him chief (musician) of the lyre before the king.” He placed a barren woman in the harem, and so forth. In this way these dependents were given public means to earn their barley and bread rations.
To grow the requisite crops to support this workforce, Sumerian communities endowed their temples with their own land. Some of this was rented to local collectors or “big-men” for subleasing to sharecroppers. Much of the output produced in the temple workshops likewise seems to have been turned over to merchants on consignment, and even temple silver was lent at interest for use on commercial missions. And in commercial centers temples became centers of knowledge and strategy. This is why they took the lead in planting trade colonies in peripheral regions, much as would the Delphi temple in the first millennium BC. Such trade outposts and colonies were organized as local cults, e.g., that of Karum Kanesh in Asia Minor c. 2000 BC. Probably Ashur itself was organized as such a colony half a millennium or so earlier.
In any event, it was under temple aegis that economic life in Mesopotamia’s cities became highly formalized, dominated as it was by the large temple and palace institutions. Measures, Rules, and Prices has described how the Sumerian temples designed weights and measures as a byproduct of their early storage, distribution, and employment functions. Out of the resulting economic regime evolved a general regulation of prices, interest rates, and rents on temple and subsequently palace lands, as well as cuneiform writing to aid in record-keeping.
As Diakonoff[42] (1982) and Gelb (197_)Missing DigitWhat year is missing in the Gelb citation, and what work was cited?OpenSee All Queries have shown, these public institutions by no means constituted the entire economy. Rather, the Sumerians had what today would be called a mixed economy, a symbiosis between public and private sectors, and also between towns and their quay areas and surrounding countryside. Cities regulated commerce within their urban walls, but let it transpire more or less freely outside the city gates in the harbor and quay areas along the canals, and above all in island entrepôts made sacred for this purpose, such as Dilmun.
In the third millennium BC Nippur developed as a major sacred center, but never became the seat of a military dynasty. Like Çatalhöyük it enjoyed a strife-free existence, immune to the dynastic rivalries that set neighboring towns at war during 2800–1600 BC. While the rulers of Uruk, Lagash, Ur, and a few other city-states vied with each other for the kingship of Sumer, they sent regular contributions to Nippur’sEkur temple (lit. “mountain house”). Ambitious rulers sought to appoint their relatives to its administrative priesthood, just as they sought suzerainty over other regional temple centers, at least as early as Sargon named his daughter Enheduanna priestess of Ur’s temple of the moon-god Nanna c. 2300 BC. But Nippur never was a player in these imperial games. It resembled an amphictyonic capital in serving as a neutral meeting ground and cult center.
Foundation Ceremonies to Orient Temples and, in Time, Cities
It is not surprising that urban cosmology was inextricably associated with that of the temples in view of the social and economic motivation for building civilization’s earliest cities around their sacred precincts. After all, neolithic and Bronze Age towns were urban first and foremost in having their own temples and patron deities. It therefore was appropriate for classical city-foundation rituals to evolve out of ceremonies for establishing the city-temple. After all, this generally was the community’s most conspicuous urban building as well as its cosmological center. Although in classical times the temple no longer was the commercial center of cities, their sanctified public buildings housed the community’s economic records, kept official weights and measures, regulated the calendar, and provided other basic infrastructure functions, as well as providing the interface with foreign embassies via the public hearth or Greek prytaneion. All these functions may be traced back to Bronze Age Near Eastern temples.
The iconoclastic British anthropologist Lord Raglan[43] (1964: p. 142) wrote that “All temples and palaces are cosmic buildings, and a cosmic building is a microcosm of the universe constructed for the purpose of performing cosmic rites, rites designed to ensure that the activities of the cosmic powers will produce favorable results.”Verify CitationCan someone with access to the text check the quotation and citation for us?OpenSee All Queries In time the entire classical city, its temples and palaces, civic structures, and even the private houses of the well-to-do would reflect a similar cosmology. While Raglan’s views were controversial, it is beyond dispute that much of the civil cosmology of ancient cities derived from their temple-foundation ceremonies.
Through the third millennium BC it was primarily the large public structures that were astronomically oriented as centers of cosmological and social order. The most noteworthy examples were Egypt’s pyramids and Mesopotamia’s temples.[44] But whatever their function, temple public areas were set permanently apart or “cut out” from the surrounding land, as expressed by the Greek word “temenos.” Local streets and town houses were not as formally oriented, except to the extent that they happened to front on avenues whose lines extended the orientation of major public edifices.
No doubt partly to promote popular acceptance of their commercial functions, city-temples were inaugurated with solemn and neolithic-origin rituals establishing them as part of the natural kosmos. Richard Ellis[45] described the relevant archaeological record in his 1968 Foundation Deposits in Ancient Mesopotamia. Construction began with the ruler placing auspicious objects in the temple’s foundation—“good things,” food offerings, and peg figurines stuck into the ground depicting the ruler carrying a basket of mortar to help in the construction.
Often the ruler laid down a ritually prepared special brick with magical incantations. For symbolic reasons not completely understood today, inscribed bowls were buried upside down to trap demons and other malevolent beings and protect the inhabitants of a house, among other general magical functions. (This practice was found from Mesopotamia to Crete and Mycenaean Greece spanning more than a millennium. See Burkert[46] 1984.) Also buried in temple foundations were Sumer’s earliest historical texts, as well as the longest Assyrian royal inscriptions, usually “couched as communications from the king to his deity, reporting on warlike deeds and building activities” (Oppenheim[47] 1977: pp. 26, 147).
A growing repertory of ritual symbolism provided the basis for augury ceremonies to align public buildings and the directions of the avenues on which they fronted, as well as to demarcate the town walls and gates. These ceremonies were repeated when cities extended their limits or rebuilt their temples. By classical times annual or other periodic festivals re-enacted the city’s foundation. This afforded an occasion for incorporating memorials to its most illustrious past and present citizens. When new rulers were crowned, these ceremonies renewed the overall social kosmos, replete with a census and fresh laws or related proclamations.
The idea of aligning public buildings and ultimately entire cities to the four cardinal directions was suggested by Egypt’s hieroglyphic city-symbol𓊖 (Illustration 9.5),Missing IllustrationCan you help us find this illustration?OpenSee All Queries and also by the Mesopotamian uru sign for town or city: 𒌷 (Wheatley[48] 1974: p. 333). This image referred to more than just a temple or city as such. It was the entire world-kosmos, which individual temples and their cities reflected in microcosm. As Raglan[49] pointed out in The Temple and the House (1964: pp. 159–162), Sargon of Akkad c. 2340 BC and his grandsonFact CheckPlease check this fact, especially if you have access to Lord Raglan’s text. Originally written here was that “NarumSin” (rather than Naram-Sin) was Sargon of Akkad’s son, rather than grandson; can you verify spelling, hyphen, and point of fact for us?OpenSee All QueriesNaram-Sin called themselves Ruler of the Four Quarters, as did the Ur III ruler Shulgi three centuries later. The term was applied to the Sumerian sky-gods Enlil and Anu, and to Babylonian Shamash.Verify CitationCan someone with access to Lord Raglan’s text verify this point is made in these pages?OpenSee All Queries An Egyptian analogy occurred at the royal sed festival, when “the Pharaoh shot four arrows to the four cardinal points and was enthroned four times facing the four cardinal directions.”Citation NeededWhat is the source of this quotation? Let us know so we can add a citation. Is it Lord Raglan?OpenSee All Queries And there are many biblical references to the Four Quarters (Isaiah 11:12, Ezekiel 7:2, 37:9). Jeremiah 49:36 refers to “the four winds of the world.”
The idea of the cross-in-circle was to integrate heaven and earth, and perhaps (as Raglan believed) the lunar and solar cycles—a cosmological centering, if not yet political centralization as such. Rulers of the four quarters sat at the center, the point of intersection of the four cardinal axes. Nearly every ancient society or important city thought of itself as the hub of the earth—and at their center usually stood the city-temple (Lethaby[50] 1974: pp. 71ff.).
The center was bounded, often by a circle, as the earth was surrounded by the spherical heavens. A Neo-Babylonian tablet c. 600 BC showed the earth (or at least Babylonia) ringed by water (the World Ocean) as if rising out of it, much as city-temples were depicted rising out of watery chaos to become the first earthly forms (Illustration 9.6).Missing IllustrationCan you help us identify this image?OpenSee All Queries In Greek mythology the River Styx separated the world of the living from that of the dead, and the Sumerians had a similar river barrier. (Holland[51] 1961: pp. 10–13Verify CitationThe page numbers might be from a different edition; can you help us verify the range? We inserted the en dash in the page range.OpenSee All Queries discussed this idea with regard to Rome.) Analogously, an all-encompassing “river of death” surrounded the world of the living.
So pronounced was the tendency of this tradition that Herodotus[52] (IV.36) wrote that “I cannot help laughing at the absurdity of all the mapmakers—there are plenty of them—who show Ocean running like a river round a perfectly circular earth, with Asia and Europe of the same size.” Evidently cosmological ideas overshadowed reality in shaping these archaic geographic perceptions. When the Milesians made classical antiquity’s first maps of the inhabited world, they adopted the cartographic iconography of their Near Eastern predecessors. The circular river Okeanos often looked as if it had been drawn with a compass, while the inhabited world was depicted within a regular grid system—like the Mesopotamian and Egyptian city-symbols.
Mesopotamian cities typically had four gates, each leading to a distinct quarter (babtum, deriving from the word “babu,” “gate”) where a particular type of activity was conducted or where a distinct ethnic, clan, or professional group lived (Stone[53] 1987). The four quarters represented the basic directions used to orient cities in line with the rising and setting of the sun (from east to west), and the sun’s annual movement from north to south between the winter and summer solstices.
Barag sign: Assyrian cuneiform U12048.
This idea, which resonated throughout antiquity to culminate in Roma quadrata, appears on Sumerian cylinder seals whose subject matter is the construction of temples and ziggurats. Illustration 9.7Missing IllustrationCan you help us identify what illustration was intended here?OpenSee All Queries shows seals from Ischali (34/36),Verify CitationWhat do these numbers correspond to? Years identified? Sites?OpenSee All QueriesKish (K1420 and K2038),Verify CitationWhat do these numbers correspond to? Sites?OpenSee All Queries and a private American collection (Brett No. 13).Verify CitationWhat does this correspond to? A person, their collection?OpenSee All Queries The Ischali seal (Amiet[54] 1951: ___)Missing Page NumberCan you help us identify the missing page number(s) referred to in Amiet 1951 here?OpenSee All Queries depicts the goddess of writing, Nisaba, holding a barag sign over a ziggurat. An elaboration of this sign appears on Kish 2038.Omitted TextCan you help us figure out what this symbol was supposed to look like, and help us find an illustration of each to insert or link to/cite? There were underscores indicating unknowns that we removed from the original text.OpenSee All Queries These quadrature symbols have been interpreted as signifying a divine throne or dais, or an abstraction of a four-pointed star (Amiet[55] 1951: p. 87 and van Buren[56] 1952a: pp. 68–70). They were engraved on the bricks which rulers ceremonially laid to mark temple foundations. Perhaps the idea was to depict a brick imprinted with a star-sign and cross resembling the optical illusion created by stars “giving off rays.” Whatever its inspiration, all interpreters agree that the symbol is a celestial one.
Van Buren[57] (1952a: p. 72) suspected that the barag image was the sign which Gudea of Lagash c. 2130 BC saw in his famous dream in which he received from the god Ningirsu the omen to build the temple. “Not only did the position of the star indicate the pre-ordained site, but its four points served to orientate the ground-plan.” The narrative of this dream, inscribed on Gudea’s Cylinders A and B, related how he made an auspicious brick-paste out of various aromatic oils, plants, and wood, and greased the ritual brick-mold with fat and honey. In the hot brick-making month of Simanu (June), to the sound of drums in a public ceremony, Gudea drew the barag symbol, poured the clay into the mold, and then removed the “brick of destiny” and left it to dry in the sun.
In Gudea’s dream Nanshe explained that his images of Nisaba meant that he was to build a great ziggurat and temple. Measures, Rules, and Prices and Music, Temperament, and Social Concord have cited Nisaba’s association with the origins of writing and its links to astronomical notation. One of her epithets was “She who knew the meaning of numbers,” presumably to write down and calculate planetary and stellar movements. As the patron goddess of scribes and writing (and hence of the reeds that were the Sumerian writing tool) she often was depicted holding a stylus in one hand and in the other “the tablet of a good or favorable star” or favorably aspected planet. In Sumerian seals she typically (according to van Buren[58] 1952a: pp. 72ff.) “holds the tablet of the good star… now inscribed with the ground plan of the temple which priests display above the topmost storey as described by Gudea, who adds that it was then ‘deposited and installed’ (immured) in the temple, because it was documentary evidence for the choice of the site and for the plan and erection of the temple. The goddess, her scientific task accomplished, resumed her fertility aspect.” The greenery in her hand symbolized “the fertility which rites performed in the new temple will solicit and procure. Her last official act was to sanctify the feast celebrated upon the completion of the work,” by ritually drinking through a long tube. “Meanwhile an animal was brought, and sacrificed amidst general rejoicings.”
It is easy to jump to the conclusion that when the ancients drew a grid-like sign for cities or on boundary stones they simply were being practical. Herodotus[59] (II.109) speculated that purely worldly considerations underlay the gridiron city plan. He believed that its geometry was invented when the pharaoh Sesostrisparceled out Egypt’s land for tax purposes. But behind the pragmatic quadrature convention lay a cosmology based on ideas of equity and regularity, ultimately embodied by “the law-giving sky” which underlay early civic values and urban orientations. Contra Herodotus, Egypt’s division of the land into regularized squares and rectangles reflected the cosmological orientation to the four quarters. (The pyramids also were oriented to the cardinal directions or their midpoints, that is, their diagonals.) The pharaoh was depicted iconographically with a net—not to catch fish but to symbolize the orthogonal layout of his land and city areas. Herodotus’s rationale about facilitating tax assessments reflected a fortuitous byproduct of the gridiron layout rather than its original inspiration.
The urban historian Joseph Rykwert[60] (1976: pp. 25, 86, 88) pointed out that orthogonal city plans were “the product of tight [cosmological] discipline and its adoption by a people like the Etruscans was not in the least likely to have occurred as a simple matter of convenience.” Although “The rectilineal patterns… and even the country lanes of old imperial lands, from Scotland to Sudan, are often thought to be the byproduct of a utilitarian surveying technique…[, t]his is not how the Romans themselves saw it: The city was organized according to divine laws.” An astronomical alignment to this rectilinear surveying “gave landed property divine, and in particular celestial sanction.” (The term “orthogonal” has the meaning of “straight,” deriving from the same root as “order.”) He concluded that the idea of Roma quadrata underlay the legendary king Servius’s division of the city of Rome into four districts, and also its fourfold constitutional arrangements. These were all involved with the idea of order by being made to correspond to the four seasons, elements, and other fourfold cosmological phenomena.
Villages, towns, and even army camps throughout the world historically have divided themselves into four quarters. Social Divisions Into Calendrical Tribes and Ranks has shown how this fourfold organization typically dovetailed into tribal divisions and meshed with the calendar dividing the year into four seasons demarcated by the equinoxes and solstices. These four key solar dates were associated with the cardinal directions in the manner illustrated in The Shift From Lunar to Solar Calendars and Counting: The sun rises in the east, sets in the west, and moves from south to north as it rises over the horizon from the summer to the winter solstice.
Arthur Hocart’s book on Caste[61] (1950: pp. 27f.) described how India’s and Sri Lanka’s three worthy and sacrificial castes (royal, priestly, and farming), plus serfs, “are placed at different points of the compass within the square or circular city: royal to the east, mercantile to the south, servile to the west, priestly to the north. Heretics and outcasts live outside the city near the cremation ground, the place of corruption. That castes were segregated into quarters is proved by the names of the streets such as ‘brahman street,’ ‘merchant street.’”
Hocart[62] (1950: pp. 28ff.) added that a fourfold color scheme typically was integrated into this kosmos: “the ancient authorities told us that colours were symbolic and connected with the four cardinal points.” While the particular alignments of colors and directions varied from one region or even town to the next, each direction was associated with some color throughout most of the world, from China to the Americas. Each of India’s four social orders had “a standard, or turban, or robe of its own colour.” Red and yellow were royal colors over much of the world, especially in the Far East. It typically represented the east, probably the sunrise, and hence the priesthood or solar rulership ritually associated with it. Yellow also may have connoted the spring, for the beginning of the day is logically linked to the beginning of the year. Conversely, the west tends to be associated with night and autumn. In Vedic India the deity Vishnu, guarding the west, is blue, a color widely interchangeable with black, representing the night that follows the sunset.
Rather than rigidly oriented to the rising sun, the cardinal cross often was aligned with prominent local configurations. What remained invariant was the integration of city-orientation ceremonies with astrological forecasting and various related auspicious practices to situate the city in the kosmos by integrating as many dimensions of nature and society as possible. This orientation was done temporally as well as spatially, by founding the city at a propitious time.
Cosmological City-Founding Ceremonies, Sacred Trenches, and Urban Alignments
To inaugurate a city meant literally to read the auguries that appeared at its founding ceremonies. The Romans did this by observing the flight of birds which, being part of the sky world, may have seemed nearly on a par with the moving planets. As they moved much faster, they probably seemed to tell the future more immediately, and required less of an astronomical knowledge. Etruscan augurs sacrificed a sheep and read the markings on its liver. This practice, like so many other Etruscan ones, seems to have diffused from Mesopotamia, whose sheep often suffered from a liver-disfiguring disease. Burkert[63] (1984: pp. 48–54) pointed out that the various parts of Babylonian and Etruscan livers were called by identical terms!
What the Romans called a “mundus” was a trench into which seeds, fruits, and other auspicious objects were thrown at city foundation ceremonies. It was found already in Sumer, but in the third millennium BC it seems to have been used only for the temple foundation. The purpose of sacrificial offerings evidently was not only for good fortune by association, but also to set the site permanently apart from other land, e.g., as a public gathering place, temple, or tomb.
A similar idea is found in the Old Testament (Joshua, Chapter 4). When the Israelites prepared to cross the Jordan River to attack Jericho, Joshua announced that the Lord had instructed him to “choose 12 men from the tribes of Israel, one from each tribe” to follow the priests and pick up “12 stones that had been in the middle of the Jordan at the spot where the priests who carried the ark of the covenant had stood.” The 12 tribal representatives carried these stones to the eastern border of Jericho, where 40,000 Israelites had encamped for the coming battle. Joshua set up the 12 stones as a monument to the new society, and instructed the Israelites to tell their descendants that just as the Lord had parted the Red Sea to enable his people to flee Egypt, so he stopped the waters of the Jordan. The stones symbolized that the Israelites had crossed the river on dry ground, just as the Lord had helped them do in their exodus from Egypt. (However, the ceremony was not exactly a mundus, for there was no burial of these or other auspicious artifacts.)
In Rome, after the augur laid out the city in the templum procedure and pronounced the proper incantations, the auspicated site was grounded by making a mundus, in this case a round hole dug in virgin soil, into which were cast “good things.” But instead of consisting of the statues and valuable Streugaben (“strewn things”) found in Mesopotamian temple and palace foundations (Ellis[64] 1968: pp. 131ff.), Rome’s agrarian economy found rural products more suitable—seeds or first-fruits to imbue the land with fertility, or in the case of newly founded colonies, sod from the settlers’ homeland. Rykwert[65] (1976: p. 59 citing Ovid, Fasti IV: 821)Verify CitationAre these to be labeled as lines or as pages? And do we think it is 821, or a range such as 8–21? We couldn’t find a public domain English source to figure it out.OpenSee All Queries described how, “After whatever was to be deposited was put in, it was covered by a stone, and an altar was set upon or beside it, and a fire lit on the altar, perhaps by rubbing firesticks.”
The mundus thus corresponded in many ways to the Greek city hearth. The French structuralist Joseph Gernet[66] (1981: p. 322f.) described how the hearth-goddess Hestia was imbued with chthonian earth or underworld powers. By anticipating “the Latin mundus, which was both the epitome of the cosmos and the reservoir of souls,” she united the ideas of womb and fertility with those of the tomb and rebirth. The mundus thus was the town’s cosmological matrix, the source of its fertility and very existence as well as a passage to the underworld ancestral spirits. Like the French cognate “monde” (which retains some parallel connotations to the Greek “kosmos”), the mundus had the connotation of “mouth,” in this case to the underworld. Like the templum it was an axis linking the present world to its ancestral past and indeed, to eternity. It was a shrine to “the manes, the propitiated souls of the dead[,]… opened three times a year, and the days on which it was opened were dangerous and all sorts of public business, including the joining of battle, were forbidden. On those days the spirits of the dead came among the living” (Rykwert[67] 1976: pp. 59, 126).
Traditionally under the patronage of the grain goddess Ceres, the mundus combined the ideas of womb and tomb found in Greek Hestia and her analogs. Its vaulted chamber apparently represented the vault of the heavens, and may be traced back to the Sumerian myth of Inanna and Ereshkigal traveling annually into the underworld. This myth appears in numerous Mediterranean variants down through Demeter and Persephone (Demeter being the Greek prototype for Roman Ceres).
All these underworld deities were identified with planting, storing, and digging. With regard to their prominent role in foundation ceremonies, Rykwert[68] noted: “the cult of the dead, the infernal powers and the deities of vegetation are closely connected.” (However, the notion of “hellhole,” as the idea sometimes is expressed, is anachronistically lurid. Rather than being threatening spooks, the ancestral spirits provided a beneficent continuity with the city founders.)
Greek city founders were buried in the public agora space at the city’s center, along with “athletes, particularly winners in one of the national games, or great poets, or just very good looking” (Rykwert[69] 1976: pp. 34, 59). In Rome were interred the Vestal Virgins, sacrificed in national emergencies down through the Punic Wars. The result was not unlike London’s Westminster Abbey. But all other burials were forbidden within Greek cities, and except for the exceptions just noted, Rome’s Laws of the 12 Tables banned the urban interment of corpses.
With regard to private houses, van Buren[70] observed in her monograph on Mesopotamian Foundation Figurines and Offerings (1931: p. 74): “In archaic times a human dwelling was a more or less temporary construction; hence, if there was a foundation ceremony at all, the offerings were likely to be of an evanescent character. The sanctuary for a god, on the contrary, was erected upon a spot already marked out in some special way as hallowed and therefore inviolable, and the building was intended to last for countless ages.”Verify CitationCan someone with access to this source text verify the quotation and page number?OpenSee All Queries
Great feasts replete with music and ritual dramas were held at temple and city-founding ceremonies to sanctify such spots, replete with dramatic (re-)enactments of building the kosmos on earth. To make the ground pristine for its intended purpose, a layer of pure sand was spread over some Sumerian sites, or at least reed matting was spread under the offering. Many cultures erected one temple on top of another, culminating in the Christian churches built on traditional ritual sites.
The Secularization of City-Founding Ceremonies From Mesopotamia to Classical Antiquity
Already in the Bronze Age Mesopotamian core, temple and city-founding practices gave way to local variations as central authority diffused after Sargon’s Akkadian epoch (c. 2334–2279 BC). While the official in charge of building a temple or founding a town might believe his own methods to be the correct ones, “his colleague a few miles away or a few years later may have followed quite different customs” (Ellis[71] 1968: p. 162).
The nearly three thousand years spanning the Early Bronze Age and classical antiquity witnessed radical breaks in tradition. A number of common denominators underwent a secularization and militarization. By classical antiquity the most basic elements of city-founding ceremonies had become decontextualized from their Bronze Age origins. But what remained invariant was the underlying worldview which led to setting aside areas as sanctified territories for particular public purposes. It was to sanctify public areas that they were oriented astronomically and their thresholds, walls, and gates were ritually protected by prophylactic figurines of gods or demons buried under floors or in the foundations. Protective spirits were invoked by formula pronouncements and blessings, often confirmed by an array of rather idiosyncratic auguries such as liver divination, astrological readings, or other taking of omens by trained specialists.
Less economically centralized societies outside of Mesopotamia transposed these ceremonies into less temple-oriented contexts. Through an often convoluted process of diffusion extending down to imperial Rome, city-foundation festivals, their annual re-enactments, and even military triumphs shared a common format with New Year and coronation ceremonies.
Throughout the ancient world the high point of coronation ceremonies occurred when the ruler circumambulated the city following their crowning. Mesopotamian rulers seem to have traveled around their realm repeating the ceremony in each city. (Hocart,[72] in Kingship, 1927: pp. 71, 85f., described the general format for these coronations.) At Egypt’s sed festival the pharaoh led a procession around the walls of their city to commemorate the triumphal procession of King Menes around the walls of Memphis in celebration of his conquest of Lower Egypt.
In Rome, investiture of the auspicated city began by digging an initial furrow, the sulcus primigenius. The foundation ritual attributed to the legendary Romulus consisted of drawing a bronze plow around the city’s archaic boundaries. As noted above, this seems to be an extension to the entire city of an agrarianized ritual that once may have been limited to just the temple area or public temenos in the Near East. And there is a hint of what may have begun as a fertility ceremony when Plutarch described Romulus as yoking a bull and cow to a bronze plow and driving “himself a deep line or furrow round the bounds; while the business of all those that followed after was to see that whatever was thrown up should be turned all inwards towards the city, and not to let any clod lie outside. With this line they described the wall…” (Rykwert[73] 1976: pp. 27–29, 65, 126, 132, 136, citing Plutarch, Roman Questions #27, and Life of Romulus11.2–11.3).[74]
The Roman scholar Varro explained that the furrowed earth was called a moat, perhaps alluding to an ancient habit of taking watercourses as boundaries. The ridge thrown up by the plow was called a wall, suggesting that the wall over which Remus jumped was the ritual furrow rather than an actual defense wall. It was for this symbolic breaching of the boundary that he was killed, but even this may have been part of a mock ceremony. In the Babylonian New Year festivals, rulers acted the part of Marduk vanquishing the chaos-dragon Tiamat in a ritual combat. If the fratricide between Romulus and Remus represented a similar such ritual, it may have been to establish the primacy of one tribal moiety over the other.
In what was a long and widespread tradition, city gates were set ceremonially apart from the walls. Plutarch emphasized that where the Romans “designed to make a gate, there they took out the share, carried the plough over, and left a space; for which reason they consider the whole wall as holy, except where the gates are.”[75] The Romans also considered gates to be feminine, like the mundus and the sulcus furrow.
In Sumer, gateways seem to have been the most cosmologically charged feature of buildings, for it was via the threshold that danger might enter. “Early representations of primitive dwellings invariably show the doorposts rising even higher than the roof” (van Buren[76] 1931: p. 74).Verify CitationCan someone with access to this text verify the page number and quotation?OpenSee All Queries One of the early symbols for Inanna was a bound-reed mat or perhaps doorpost (Jacobsen[77] 1976: ___),Missing Page NumberCan you help us identify what page number(s) is/are missing?OpenSee All Queries representing the entrance to her third-millennium BC temples. And speaking of classical Persia, Root[78] (1979: p. 307) stated: “In the placement of the motif on doorjambs, a principle is consistently followed whereby anyone entering a building or entering a private chamber from the main hall is confronted by the hero figure”Verify CitationCan you help us check this citation and quotation? The version of Root we found and added here doesn’t go up to page 307 or contain this quotation.OpenSee All Queries as a protective deity.
Public gates served much the same function for cities. The first purposely designed gatehouses were found at a religious site, the chalcolithic sanctuary of Ein Gedi. By the Middle Bronze Age the “three-portal” town gate was found in Canaan, from which it may be traced back to northern Syria (e.g., at Ebla) in the third millennium BC. “The gate was the public building par excellence of ancient Israel (and neighboring countries of the Middle East). In fact, together with the temple (which it could very much resemble in overall aspect), it constituted the only well-developed type of locale for virtually all public assemblies—political, juridical, commercial—and also religious (since the basis of public life was religious). In short, the heart of the ancient city was in its mouth” (Wright[79] 1988Verify CitationCan someone with access to Wright 1988 check this quotation for us?OpenSee All Queries; see also Herzog[80] 1986).
“In the course of time,” according to van Buren,[81] “the model doorpost was transformed into the anthropomorphic image of the spirit and guardian of the house and therefore the servant of the owner. … [H]ence there soon arose an order of minor gods whose duty it was to act as ‘Guardians of the Gate,’ the best known of whom are the six sons of the god Ea.”Verify CitationCan someone with access to the text verify the quotation and add a page number/page numbers?OpenSee All Queries By Babylonian times the gateways of temples, palaces, and cities were defended by images of armed gods. Rykwert[82] (1976: p. 142) pointed out that throughout antiquity “Monsters and fabulous creatures frequently guarded gates: like those of the underworld, so those of earthly cities, towns and forts were protected by carved or sculptured creatures: lions or griffins, bulls, scorpion-men, bull-men and lion-men[, and]… lion-women,” often winged like the Egyptian and Theban sphinxes. I think it significant that at least three of these animals may represent the four fixed signs of the modern zodiac: the bull (Taurus), lion (Leo), and scorpion or eagle (Scorpio), originally signifying entire seasons of the year and hence the “four quarters.” In place of Aquarius we found griffinlike figures. It seems that these quadrature-oriented animals imbued city gates with a numinous celestial spirit.
The book of Joshua indicates separate ritual procedures for establishing a city’s walls and demarcating its gates. After destroying Jericho, Joshua pronounced a ritual curse on whoever might rebuild the city: “At the cost of his firstborn son will he lay its foundations; at the cost of his youngest will he set up its gates.”[83]
From these rather brief hints it follows that in contrast to modern “open” cities, those of antiquity were “closed,” as was their kosmos. But gateways were maintained for contact with outsiders, and also with their own past. Doing away with such boundary points has opened up modern cities, and also epitomizes their secularization.
It was normal throughout antiquity for foundation ceremonies to be re-enacted annually at the city center, the complex of public buildings that in classical Greece were situated around the agora. At these kosmos-renewing festivals, local annals typically were read aloud in a kind of archaic Fourth of July or Bastille Day festival when citizens renewed contact with their town’s enlivening ancestral spirits.
The Ancient City as Templum, an Earthly Microcosm
One of the most complete city-founding rituals that has survived is that of Rome. In The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World (1976), Joseph Rykwert[84] reviewed the foundation ceremonies of Rome and other Italian cities. These rituals usually began with an inauguratio in which an augur watched for auspicious signs. Facing east toward the rising sun (literally orienting himself), he sat with his head veiled so as to block off all distracting phenomena outside his primary focus. After reciting a formula and announcing what matter he was to decide, he looked for signs and portents.
Central to the city-founding ceremony was the conrectio procedure dividing Romaquadrata into four quarters. The templum diagram—the cardinal cross enclosed in a circle—represented the city boundaries and their typically four gates.
The word “cardinal” (from Latin “cardo,” meaning hinge or axis) refers to the polar north/south axis around which the earth revolves. Crossing this vertical axis was the east/west decumanus, which Hyginus Gromaticus (following Festus) traced to the term “duodecimanus,” the 12-hour “line which runs from the rising to the setting of the sun.” Setting up the city boundaries with reference to these axes made the conrectio orientation procedure “heavenly, and its practice invariable. … Boundaries are never drawn without reference to the order of the universe, for the decumani are set in line with the course of the sun, while the cardines follow the axis of the sky” (Rykwert[85] 1976: pp. 91, 98ff. citing De Constitutione [Limitum]).
Drawing the templum diagram with his curved wand (the lituus, which may originally have derived from the folded Sumerian measuring rope), the augur pronounced an incantation that “drew a magical net round the landmarks the augur named. It is this naming, and not any drawing on the ground with a staff, which actually fixed the boundaries of the templum.”[86] The city probably received its formal name at this ceremony.[87]
On philological grounds Émile Benveniste[88] (1973: pp. 311f.) found the city-planning ritual to be one of the earliest functions of the rex (ruler) whose functions he derived from Greek “orégō,” “to stretch out,” as discussed in Measures, Rules, and Prices:
“In the language of augury regio indicates ‘the point reached by a straight line traced out on the ground or in the sky,’ and ‘the space enclosed between such straight lines drawn in different directions.’
“The adjective rectus can be interpreted in a similar way: ‘straight as this line which one draws.’ This is a concept at once concrete and moral: the ‘straight line’ represents the norm, while the regula is ‘the instrument used to trace the straight line,’ which fixes the ‘rule’ (règle). Opposed to the ‘straight’ (droit) in the moral order is what is twisted, bent. Hence ‘straight’ (droit) is equivalent to ‘just,’ ‘honest,’ while its antonyms ‘twisted, bent’ (tordu, courbé)… [are] identified with ‘perfidious,’ ‘mendacious,’ etc. This set of ideas is already Indo-European. To… [Latin] rectus corresponds the Gothic adjective raihts, which translates euthús ‘straight’; further the Old Persian rāsta, which qualifies the noun ‘the way’ in this injunction: ‘Do not desert the straight way.’”[89]
Benveniste[90] concluded that the expression “regere fines” referred to “a religious act which was preliminary to building. Regere fines means literally ‘trace out the limits by straight lines.’ This is the operation carried out by the high priest before a temple or a town is built, and it consists in the delimitation of a given terrain of a sacred plot of ground. The magical character of this operation is evident: what is involved is the delimitation of the interior and the exterior, the realm of the sacred and the realm of the profane, the national territory and foreign territory. The tracing of these limits is carried out by the person invested with the highest powers, the rex.”
According to this reading it follows that “The Indo-European rex was more a religious than a political figure. His mission was not to command, to exercise power but to draw up rules, to determine what was in the proper sense ‘right’ (‘straight,’ droit).”[91]
The templum’s basic idea of cardinality was reflected in the cruciform shape of the city’s central cross-streets. To be sure, archaic kosmoi were practical in taking into account local features when the earth’s cardinal directions did not happen to align with the immediate landscape. (Likewise in the case of modern cities, New York’s east and west sides are not true east and west, but follow the lines of the East and Hudson rivers.) What was invariant was a cosmological model underlying the city plan—an orthogonal model imbuing the city with straight order. The idea was for the city’s physical plan to reflect the regular and equitable rule of law and justice.
From the templum diagram came the term “contemplatio”—contemplation of its meaning. The idea is semantically akin to consider, meaning literally “with the stars” (Latin “sider” means “star”). As Rykwert[92] (1976: p. 91) summarized the templum/contemplatio procedure: “By the simple act of drawing his cross within the circle, the augur, standing on his hilltop scrying the southern horizon for significant birds, had put himself at the hub of the sacred universe… it is from these two lines that the two main streets of the town had to be drawn.” Most street addresses today are numbered on the descendants of these rectangular coordinates as they extend outward from the city center.
The parallelism between urban street grids and social organization was drawn by Plato and Aristotle, but the city planner most closely associated with the gridiron layout was Hippodamus of Miletus, who lived in the fifth century BC. Aristotle[93] (PoliticsII, 1,267b) described him as being a meteorlogos—a student of celestial phenomena—as well as applying political philosophy to urban planning. As a means of standardizing space and property lots in Athens, other Greek cities, and above all in new colonies, the gridiron plan had long served as a spatial analogy to democratic equality under the law—“isonomos.” Hippodamus created separate gridiron plans for the sacred, public, and private parts of Piraeus, Rhodes, and one or two other Greek cities. This stratified urban space while standardizing it within each district (McCreadie[94] 1971; see also Vernant[95] 1983: p. 225). It thus made members of each mikrokosmos equal within their own ranks, satisfying the aristocratic ideal of harmony (“to each his own proportion”) while maintaining a symmetrical regularity within each rank.
Squares, Circles, and Boundaries in the Hermetic Social Cosmology of Classical Greece
The geometry of public architecture and urban layouts reflected a social cosmology mirroring Greek cultural history from the Mycenaean through the classical period, culminating in Hellenistic Rome. Ideas of quadrature and circles, the geometric constructs found in the templum’s imagery, are abstract in themselves, but had symbolic relations to the social kosmos that went far beyond esoteric geometry as such.
The objective was to make urban areas and their governing powers part of the objective kosmos. This was why temples and other major public edifices were oriented to the cardinal directions. Lethaby[96] (1974: p. 64) remarked: “This four squareness was a talismanic assurance of permanence and stability. The thought that, as the heavens were stable upon the earth, so any building four square with them would be immovable, seems… a natural analogy.” More to the point, it was the social policies emanating from these buildings that were conceived as immutable and beyond dispute.
In the most abstract sense, the idea of the square was sanctified because it was so regular, that is, precisely measured on each side. The idea of the double-square (a rectangular shape twice as long as it is wide) also was sanctified, as were the “Platonic” regular solids and of course the circle. But the key really is to be found not in these shapes in themselves. Triangles or pyramids would have done as well, and as everyone knows, the Egyptians built great pyramid tombs for their pharaohs. What was important was that precise measurement went into constructing these shapes. Their regularity and symmetry gave off a general aura that all policies associated with public urban institutions, be they temples, palaces, or the civic centers of the classical polis, were likewise “well measured,” correct and right, straight and just. These regularity metaphors for social justice shared in common the idea of precise measurement, regularity, symmetry, and cardinal orientation.
Two French structuralists cited earlier, Joseph Gernet and Jean-Pierre Vernant, have interpreted the hearth’s devolution from the centralized Late Bronze Age Mycenaean palaces to the aristocratic oikos households that emerged after the collapse of the Bronze Age. Following the rule of Cleisthenes in the sixth century BC, the round public hearth extended the fellowship of the family household to the civic plane as belonging to the citizenry in general. In this public manifestation the hearth came to be tended by men, complementing the household hearth ruled by Hestia. The woman of the house thus remained in a fixed place to deal with storage and other “home economics functions,” while the men were in social motion.
The Latin word for hearth was “focus,” whose central meaning is clear enough. (This was before the TV set achieved this status in modern households.) Other noteworthy circular monuments include the omphalos “navel,” usually “a bulge in the earth or a conical rock that is more or less a cult object” (Gernet[97] 1981: p. 323), or simply an ovoid stone associated with the earth and sometimes styled ge, the Greek word for earth. It was identified with the roundness of pregnant women, and hence with birth. In a similar way the circular hearth symbolized a navel tying the house to the earth, “the symbol and pledge of fixity, immutability, and permanence.” In classical Athens the communal hearth, hestia koine, located in the prytaneion or town hall, was called “the omphalos of the city.” Hestia’s seat was said to have been the omphalos rock at Delphi, home of the python goddess and her oracle (Vernant[98] 1983: pp. 128 and 146ff.).
Gernet[99] (1981: pp. 322f.) observed that the hearth, whether in the home or at the civic center, symbolized the idea of centeredness. This was true above all in the prytaneion situated in the classical agora. Here the public hearth was “used for proclamations of public authority, inaugural oaths of high magistrates, publication of legal acts such as adoptions, ancient forms of punishment such as exposure of the condemned at the pillory, and so on.”
In all cases, from Bronze Age Mycenaean palaces to the classical prytaneion and private estates, the hearth had “a connection with chthonian powers; here it evokes the image of a tomb (and it had a reputation of being a tomb)…”[100] The hearth and omphalos seem to have consciously picked up the round motif of the tholos tomb signifying the realm of the dead, the eternity of the afterlife into which the departed spirits of this earth have passed.
Vernant[101] (1983: p. 147) summarized the hearth’s symbolism in similar terms: “In Greece, the circle was characteristic of powers both chthonic and feminine associated with the image of the earth-mother containing within her bosom the dead, the successive generations of mankind and plant life. During the city period and the establishment of the communal hearth in the prytaneum [Latin for the Greek ‘prytaneion’], Hestia was associated with a building in the shape of a rotunda, the tholos, the sole example of the circular form in Greek religious architecture.” He suspected that at Olympia and Sicyon the prytaneion housing hestia koine may have been circular, as was Rome’s Temple of Vesta, its goddess corresponding to Greek Hestia.Verify CitationCan someone with access to Vernant (1983) check the quotations and page number?OpenSee All Queries Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris described this temple as having been built by the legendary Numa in “an orbicular form, for the preservation of the sacred fire,” to show “the whole universe, in the centre of which the Pythagoreans placed fire, which they called Vesta and Unity” (Lethaby[102] 1974: p. 43, citing Ovid, Fasti).
Raglan[103] (1964: pp. 75–84) derived the iconography of the civil house from that of the temple, and speculated that the four-cornered building was “primarily sacred because it is the setting for the sacred marriage.”Verify CitationCan someone with access to the Lord Raglan source text check the quotation and page numbers?OpenSee All Queries The hearth-fire was an important adjunct, connoting the idea of center. The basic connotation was with fire, with reference being made to the sun as its preeminent celestial symbol.
To the extent that the hearth’s symbolism integrated the ideas of tomb and (re)birth, its patron goddess Hestia was a partial analog to Sumerian Inanna and other goddesses with links to the underworld. Hestia shared with these goddesses an association with food and its storage as patron deity of the central hearth, a place of private or communal sacrifices to the gods and/or ancestors. (Greek priestesses characteristically were depicted holding ceremonial keys, apparently to the temple as thesaurus for the community’s public food supplies.)
Hermes and Hestia often are paired together in classical mythology. Whereas Hestia represents love of the home, Hermes signifies the friendship that binds commercial trading partners. For in addition to the cosmological boundaries between worldly life and the kosmos of celestial order, he was patron deity of the commercial gateway—the area where trade occurred, the boundary between the ordered urban kosmos and the realm of external exchange. Hermes also was a god of the magical boundary with the underworld of the dead.
While the home was the woman’s domain, the open air and commerce were masculine occupations. To Hestia “belongs the world of the interior, the enclosed, the stable, the retreat of the human group within itself; to Hermes the outside world, opportunity, movement, interchange with others. … Hestia is apparently capable of ‘centering’ space while Hermes can ‘mobilize’ it. … in the oikos, the man represents the centrifugal element. It is for him… to establish contacts with the outside, to enter into negotiations with strangers… in work, war, trade, social contacts or public life” (Vernant[104] 1983: pp. 127ff.). In the house the place of Hermes “is at the door, protecting the threshold, repelling thieves… he also stands at the gateways of towns, on state boundaries, at crossroads, as a landmark along paths and tracks, and on tombs—those gateways to the underworld. … He is the witness to agreements, truces, and oaths between opponents; he is the herald, messenger, and ambassador abroad.”Verify CitationCan someone with access to Vernant (1983) check the quotations and page numbers?OpenSee All Queries
With regard to the circle-and-square imagery, Hestia’s round hearth was situated in the center of the large square dining hall. (Illustration 9.8 depicts the Tirynsmegaron.)Missing IllustrationCan you help us find this illustration?OpenSee All Queries For Hermes the inscribed circle-in-the-square ⧇ became the emblem of the Athenian herm, an innovation of its democratic leaders Solon and the Pisistratids (especially Hipparchus), elaborated by Cleisthenes and his successors. Standing a few feet high, herms had square bases with round, often phallic tops. Named after Hermes in his manifestation as the deity of commerce, herms were placed as distance markers along highways to guide merchants and other travelers.
With regard to this symbolic shape, it may be significant that Hermes is associated with the tortoise, out of whose shell he is said to have made the first lyre.[105] The tortoise shell resembles the herm in having a square bottom and round top. It played an important role in Chinese divination. The text of the I Ching described heaven as being round and the earth square, and “a later edition of the Li-Chi described the Ming T’ang (palace) as being round above and square below… to signify the roundness of Heaven and the Squareness of Earth” (Raglan[106] 1964: p. 155.Verify CitationCan someone with access to the Lord Raglan text check the quotation and page number?OpenSee All Queries For other examples see Sickman and Soper[107] 1956: p. 214.). Lethaby[108] (1974: p. 51) added that in China “even the coinage, circular with a square hole, is well-understood as symbolizing heaven and earth.” (See Illustration 9.9.)Missing IllustrationCan you help us find this illustration?OpenSee All Queries
An associated herm-like image is the stupa or “tope” found throughout India and the Buddhist east, often containing auspicious relics (Illustration 9.10).Missing IllustrationCan you help us find this illustration?OpenSee All Queries Lethaby[109] (1974: pp. 49f., 56f.) described it as “a high solid structure based on a square foundation or platform, from which rises into the air a semicircular dome, which is crowned by a square railing, or sometimes a solid cube with eyes on every side. The square platform represents the earth, the semicircular dome figures out the air, the railed structure on the top denotes the heaven, where watch the four gods (indicated by eyes).” Gateways to such stupas are oriented to the four cardinal directions, with the main entrance facing east. According to legend the Buddhist ruler Asoka had 84,000 such stupas built.
A related image is the Chinese pagoda, which typically has seven stages, is aligned to the four cardinal directions, and has “bells and tinkling copper leaves to denote the celestial ‘music of the spheres’” (Lethaby[110] 1974: pp. 50, 133f.). The association of such imagery with cities and indeed, with their commerce as well as religion, helped create a public cosmology applying to most inhabited sites, even temporary military camps as described below.
The pairing of circular heaven and foursquare earth is found in Tibetan mandalas, stupas, and cosmological symbols such as the turtle, as well as the various symbols of Near Eastern and Mediterranean urban cosmology. Raglan[111] (1964: pp. 152–155) may have had the right intuition when he wrote that the key to the circle and square is that they complement each other as geometric opposites, a harmonization of heaven and earth. He suggested that round forms reflect lunar calendar-keeping, whereas the square indicates the solar solstices and equinoxes and four cardinal directions. The two geometric shapes went together in a yin/yang type of complementarity. It is natural to find circles in the sky—the great disks of the sun and moon circling the earth—while the rising and setting points of the sun trace out the cardinal directions, east and west, north and south.
Integration of the circle and square imagery represents an interface of celestial and mundane functions, in boundary stones and city gates, tombs and megaron hearths, temples, and public prytaneion civic centers. The boundary signified was between the earthly and cosmic dimensions, the profane and sacred, the worldly and otherworldly. It is this cosmological interface that made the first gathering sites urban. Their temples and other civic monuments linked life and death (through the tomb) and also the seasonal rhythms of the countryside with the cosmological permanence of urban regimes.
The iconography of the Enki-Hermes figure evolved to reflect the shifting role of trade in ancient society as it was decentralized from the large Bronze Age public institutions to private households. Whereas Mesopotamian trade occurred at or just outside the city gates or in the quay area along the canals—that is, at the external boundary of the Bronze Age urban kosmos—by classical antiquity commerce moved into the very center of Greek and Roman cities. Hermes henceforth was found in the agora where commerce and public discourse were conducted, as it was in Rome’s Forum where we find Janus, the Roman god of boundaries.
Through this shift to the city’s physical and economic center the Hermes figure retained his attributes as god of boundaries, apparently recalling the archaic place of trade. Brown[112] (1947: pp. 37f.) observed that “In Greece the tradition of holding intercommunity gatherings on the boundary survived the establishment of the city-state and the city agora. … A Greek law cites the ‘agora on the boundary,’ along with the amphictyonies, as a customary site for gathering of neighboring communities ‘in ancient times.’” The 𛲜 or ⧇ symbolism is associated both with the boundary between the worldly and the eternal kosmos, and with the commerce that occurs at the boundary with the foreign world.
A Note on the Demographic Dimensions of Urban Cosmologies
Cities were not supposed to grow more dense willy-nilly, but ideally were to stabilize at a correct size, often cosmologically determined. The relatively small size of early towns meant that citizens knew their neighbors as families with hereditary ties to the land. When disputes arose, injured parties had recourse to the perpetrator’s family as bearing responsibility for his actions. (This was before a distinct civilian police force developed.)
Urban congestion sprawl likewise was avoided by various civil practices designed to make cities livable. But as Oppenheim[113] (1977: pp. 140f.) observed, “Greek political thinkers realized… that their type of democratic rule could not work in cities over a certain well-defined size, and in the Old Testament there is everywhere a latent disapproval of city life, especially with respect to large agglomerations.”
Both within the town area and on its surrounding lands the size of cities was regulated so as to avoid too high a population density. (The usual way to relieve population pressure was to establish colonies. Being preplanned and built from scratch, most had uniform gridiron layouts and standardized kleros plots.) Plato and other Greek philosophers might have disagreed on exactly how large cities should be, but each had his own idea as to what an ideal size was. Hippodamus recommended 10,000 inhabitants (Aristotle, Politics[114]: II.1,267) while Plato advocated 5,040 allotments (Laws[115]: 745). The latter number is a cosmologically significant factorial 7! (that is, 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1). It also represents 24 x 32 x 5 x 7 (or 144 x 35). The cosmological number 360 also comes into play inasmuch as 5,040 = 360 x 14.
Another way in which the ancient city was ideally built as a microcosm of the calendrical kosmos was in its circumference. Lethaby[116] (1974: pp. 235–252) cited Rawlinson’s list of the accounts by ancient historians on the circumference of Babylon’s walls: Ctesias put it at 360 stades, Clitarchus at 365.[117]Strabo cited the number 385, but “critics agree in this being a mistake for 365,” wrote Lethaby citing Henry George Bohn’s footnote in The Geography of Strabo.
Mesopotamian town-dwellers attained citizenship by being part of the landed community (Diakonoff[118] 1982). Most free urban families obtained their food from their own plots in the countryside. (Temple administrators had prebend sharecropping lands assigned to them.) This close linkage between city-dwellers and the land continued into classical times. Cleisthenes mixed rural and urban plots together in his Athenian restructuring, thereby linking the landed families with the city and its public focus. In this way the social kosmos of law, commerce, and order was extended beyond the city walls through the land generally. Likewise in Plato’s ideal city each agricultural family had a town house. (Illustration 9.11Missing IllustrationCan you help us find this illustration?OpenSee All Queries reproduces this round city as described by Brumbaugh[119] 1954, who pointed out its musical proportions. It resembles the round horoscope divided into 12 houses, i.e., the year divided into 12 months and the ancient day divided into 12 hours, as well as the musical octave divided into 12 equal semitones.)
Army camps in particular were planned according to strict rules. The urban historian A.E.J. Morris[120] (1979: p. 39; see Illustration 9.12)Missing IllustrationCan someone with access to the 2nd edition of this A.E.J. Morris text help us find this illustration?OpenSee All Queries described the typical Roman camp (many of which subsequently developed into permanent towns) as being laid out according to a standardized gridiron plan regardless of size: “The perimeter was square or rectangular; within this two main cross streets form the basis of the strict structure—the decumanus, through the center of town, and the cardo, usually bisecting the decumanus at right angles, towards one end.”Verify CitationCan someone with access to the 2nd edition of this A.E.J. Morris text help us verify the quotation and find a page number?OpenSee All Queries The forum area usually was placed at the intersection of the decumanus and cardo, as described by the Greek historian Polybius in the second century BC. Morris cited Richard Mansfield Haywood’s study of Ancient Rome[121] (1967: pp. 116f.) paraphrasing Polybius:
“Every camp was constructed according to the same master plan; although natural features were sometimes made a part of it, ordinarily it was pitched on reasonably flat land and constituted a fort without rivers or cliffs to aid in its defense. It was square; each side was 2,150 feet long and had a gate. Inside each wall there was an empty space in which the soldiers could form and which could keep the tents of the soldiers from being reached by any missiles sent over the wall from outside. The commander’s quarters were always in the same place, as were a little forum and the headquarters of the quaestor who served as paymaster. The troops always had a specified location, so that a given maniple would know that when the camp had been constructed it would find its quarters, as it were, on the corner of 4th Street and Second Avenue.”
In being built from scratch, such towns embodied urban cosmology more than any other type of city, save for the imperial capitals likewise designed from the ground up—Ecbatana, Alexandria, and earlier Akkad and Babylon.
From the Cosmology of Urban Space to That of Private Property
Above, I have described how cosmological considerations determined the siting and proportions of temples, ziggurats, pyramids, and other public buildings, as well as city gates and the major cross-streets leading to and from them. Reviewing the gateway principle—from the temporal to the external world—we have seen that urban gateways were associated not only with trade but also with time, with calendrical symbolism, and with the contrast between transitory and permanent. At the end of this process would develop the idea of private property, first in the cities and later on the land.
The classical integration of civil, religious, and economic life was reflected in bringing the common hearth and the agora—trade, commerce, and political government—into the urban center as a civil space open to all. The Athenian agora, for instance, became the center not only for public meetings and commerce, but also for the town hearth, situated in the prytaneion building. This communal hearth, hestia koine, represented a sharp break from Bronze Age Mesopotamian practice. Every Athenian citizen qualified for a role in government and its public juries, to be either elected or chosen by lot. Public officials were direct representatives of the citizenry, not set corporately apart within autonomous palace or civil bureaucracies. Temples likewise no longer were set apart as a distinct sector from the rest of society.
In Mycenaean Greece a large megaron hearth signified the house of the chieftain who dominated religious activities as well as trade and warfare. As everyday life became “privatized” and secularized, the realm of Hestia and Hermes, household and commerce, passed into the hands of the community’s families at large. The result was a civic religion, a distinguishing feature of Athenian democracy as sponsored by the Pisistratids, Cleisthenes, and their successors. The results stand in sharp contrast both to the aristocratic oikos trade of the Greek archaic period and to the centralized Bronze Age regimes whose trade occurred outside the city or at its gates.
Mesopotamian cities typically were divided into three parts (Oppenheim[122] 1977: pp. 115f.). At the center was the walled city with its temple and palace precincts. Next came a suburban area and fields. A third part, usually just outside the city gates, consisted of the karum embankments and trading area along the canals. It “had administrative independence and also a separate legal status,” with unloading depots for the barges plying the waterways of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Valley river systems (Orlin 1970: pp. 25f.).Specify CitationCan someone help us identify the full citation for the text called “Orlin 1970” and help us verify the quotation?OpenSee All Queries It was here, where the city’s vital foreign commerce was conducted, that the temple and palace interfaced with the quasi-private sector. Economically and politically, the karum area often dominated the city, which typically “was administered from the ‘gate,’ or ‘gates’ in larger settlements… To each gate was assigned a precinct within the city,” a tradition still found in the portus of the early Middle Ages.Verify CitationCan someone help us identify the full citation for the text called “Orlin 1970” and help us verify the quotation?OpenSee All Queries
The Babylonian New Year festival was highlighted by a procession leading outside the city gates to the ritual akitu house. “Outside the walls of some cities, but belonging to it, was often situated… a sanctuary of a special type, called the New Year’s Chapel (bīt akītu),” described Oppenheim[123] (1977: p. 115). “Once a year, the image of the principal deity of the settlement was carried in a procession to the sanctuary, accompanied by throngs of worshippers. In certain instances, a sacred road through a special gate linked the outlying sanctuary to the temple.” The path to the akitu house was almost like an umbilical cord extending to a newborn baby—perhaps the spirit of the New Year in the chapel. Just as the Babylonian New Year was celebrated in a special period of extra days outside the 360-day administrative year, so the akitu procession led outside the urban kosmos. This was more than merely a symbolic reminder that archaic cities were part of a broad social kosmos that included the land as well. It was cosmological imagery of certain functions being appropriately performed outside the city proper.
For instance, also outside the city gates were probably the market areas, for archaeologists have not found any markets in Bronze Age urban excavations.Fact CheckIs this still up to date?OpenSee All Queries Except for the stores situated in the temple precincts, markets must have been located in the quay areas along the canals where goods were transported by barge. It was from the docking area—“kar” in Sumerian, “karum” in Babylonian—that the words for merchant derived: “damgar” in Sumerian, “tamkarum” in Babylonian, and “lugar” or “man of the quay” in Eblaic,Spelling of TermShould “Eblaic” be “Eblaite” instead?OpenSee All Queries the Semitic language spoken in northern Syria in the mid-third millennium BC.
Orlin (1970: p. 25)Specify CitationCan someone help us identify the full citation for the text called “Orlin 1970” and help us verify the quotation?OpenSee All Queries added: “Through extensions of usage the term [‘karum’] also came to be employed to designate the administrative and judicial boards which supervised the business activities with which the traders were concerned.”Missing Quotation MarkThe close-quotation mark was originally missing here. Can you help us identify what the “Orlin (1970)” text is and help us find where the quotation ends?OpenSee All Queries By the Old Babylonian period it “was a corporate body which consisted of the merchants of the city to which it was attached”Missing Quotation MarkThe close-quotation mark was originally missing here. Can you help us identify where the Larsen quotation ends?OpenSee All Queries (Larsen[124] 1976: pp. 231f.). It imposed dues on members to cover expenses, including that of holding its courts.
This was not only a Mesopotamian phenomenon. In Egypt, “The same development of meanings as in karum, originally ‘commercial settlement,’ later ‘judicial power,’ can be observed in the words ‘pharaoh’ (great house) or ‘Porte,’ originally a place where justice was executed, later ‘justice’ or the ruler himself. Cf. also the English germ ‘court,’ originally only the place where justice is dealt out” (Orlin, loc. cit.,Specify CitationCan someone help us identify the full citation for the text called “Orlin 1970” and help us verify the quotation?OpenSee All Queries citing Gelb).Specify CitationCan you help us identify the year and text referred to by “Gelb”?OpenSee All QueriesMissing Quotation MarkThere was no close-quotation mark originally (we added it). Also, can someone help us identify the full citation for the text called “Orlin 1970”; and lastly, we don’t have the full citation for Gelb.OpenSee All Queries
Karum areas thus functioned as commercial zones where merchants from various cities governed themselves as autonomous communities. It is significant that foreign traders possessed autonomy in these districts. They were allowed to purchase property here, which they often held collectively, but they often could not own land within Mesopotamia’s walled cities proper (as they were able to do in more peripheral Levantine cities such as Damascus and south along the coast to Egypt). They enjoyed diplomatic immunity from local laws, and in this respect their status was in contrast to modern private-sector trade and investment, which is subject to host-country laws.
These commercial embassies were more in the character of quasi-official cults, organized as temple guilds with their own feast-days and sacred officials. The autonomy of these areas, often with their own temples, housed merchants. Local merchant “mission chiefs” redeemed colleagues who had contracted local debts, and were charged with the duty of purchasing from local owners any fellow hometown citizens who had been captured in wars or otherwise enslaved. (In the laws of Hammurapi, paragraph 32 stipulated that reimbursement was to be made by the temple in their home cities, or later by the palace in case the temples lacked the funds.)
Debts tended to be owed by the agricultural economy to the cities, either to the temples or palaces directly, or to their designated merchants and collectors. (And even today, of course, rural farming areas still tend to be indebted to urban commercial centers and their banks.) And on another plane, these Bronze Age debts were owed by individual families to the public sector, which was synonymous with the urban center.
Only a portion of archaic production was sold on the market. Most grain, wool, and other basic local production was for self-use, either by the families living on the land or by the temples and palaces for their own labor force. Royal proclamations listed official prices for products used to pay fees to the temples, the palace, or their collectors. Outside the city gates, prices apparently were free to rise when shortages occurred in droughts or years of military devastation. The result was a bifurcation of pricing not only between the cities and outside their gates, but also between public (institutional) and private-communal sectors.
Bronze Age urban property-ownership patterns differed from those of the countryside. It was the land above all that retained a constant order; land and its crop rights could only be forfeited to creditors on a temporary basis, until the ruler proclaimed the next Clean Slate. This is what ensured general self-support on the land for most of the community’s families. Rural properties forfeited for debt or sold under economic duress periodically were turned back to their former holders when new rulers took the throne and celebrated with what today is called a honeymoon period, or when natural disaster or military disruption required the ruler to proclaim such debt annulments during the course of his reign. This maintained a free and tenured peasantry, and hence a peasant army with its own land to defend from outside attack.
Town houses typically were owned by merchants or other professionals whose their status in urban society tended to be public or quasi-public in interfacing with the temple and palace institutions. Precisely because they were owned by the well-to-do, once sold, they were not subject to the customary rights or options of subsequent repurchase by the seller, such as existed for rural property. Urban town houses could be sold, forfeited permanently, and bequeathed freely—often by the room like modern condominium apartments.
Inasmuch as town houses were not part of this agrarian subsistence economy, they could be treated differently. Like commercial balances and investments owed among merchants (“silver debts,” in contrast to personal “barley debts”), they were excluded from the Clean Slates that accompanied periodic economic renewal (described in Periodicities of Property and Debt).
Debt relations transformed the urban and rural landscape over time. Ultimately, debts owed to individuals became as sacrosanct as those owed to temples and other public entities. By classical antiquity private property in land became as permanent, irreversible, and even sanctified as that of public property. But to make these new and more secularized and oligarchic relations accepted by the population at large, it was deemed necessary to represent private property ownership and its associated economic stratification as being part of an immutable kosmos.
To sum up, whether representing the interface between public and private sectors or that between worldly and celestial life, the first boundaries were urban and sanctified. Despite the fact that towns began as temporary sites for populations who spent most of their time on the move, urban property—above all the public areas—had a unique degree of permanence not found on the rural landscape. Archaeologists have dug up boundary stones demarcating palace properties dating from c. 2400 BC, engraved with representations of Enki or similar boundary deities, and various celestial symbols, above all the circle-and-cross. (A survey of Mesopotamian boundary stones may be found in Gelb/SteinkellerSpecify CitationCould “Steinkeller” be the 1981 work cited in Chapter 3’s Bibliography?OpenSee All Queries 199_.)Specify CitationCan you help us identify the year and text referred to here by “Gelb/Steinkeller 199_”? There are multiple options for Gelb in this chapter’s Bibliography, although none is coauthored with Steinkeller.OpenSee All Queries Communal land tenure was more transitory, being subject to periodic redistribution (Gelb 19__).Missing DigitCan you help us identify the year and text referred to by “Gelb”?OpenSee All Queries If there were markers on this family-held land, they have not survived from Early Bronze Age times. Only public land-markers were made of stone. This reflects the fact that whereas the sale or forfeiture of rural land to creditors was subject to recovery by the seller/debtor or their family members, urban town houses could be sold irrevocably and were exempt from such recovery rights and from the periodic rural property redistributions.
The “circle and square” symbolism and related Hermetic cosmology found on the most archaic property markers are relevant to the evolution of property. I have noted the practice of carving or otherwise decorating early city gates with protective solar or zodiacal symbols such as lions and bulls. These were the same symbols that demarcated boundaries of public usufruct-yielding property to indicate that it had become permanent and inalienable. Wherever this cosmological symbolism was found, it no doubt was accompanied by formal ritual acts. The ensuing idea of property boundaries began with Mesopotamian temples and royal property demarcated by stone markers. Subsequent notions of the permanence and indeed of the sanctity of private property seem to have taken their models from the public sector, as was the case with debt-claims and many other dimensions of ancient social evolution.
The only extant Mesopotamian boundary stones signified royal lands, e.g., the stela of Manishtushu of Akkad (Illustration 9.14).Missing IllustrationCan you help us find this illustration?OpenSee All Queries These boundary stones were engraved with the symbols of Enki as patron god of boundaries. By contrast, markers for privately or communally held lands were made of more perishable materials, apparently on the logic that such lands were redistributed periodically (Gelb 19__).Missing DigitWhat year is missing in the Gelb citation (“Gelb 19_”), and what work was cited?OpenSee All Queries
In sum, the kosmoi of urban public spaces were associated with inalienable public property on the one hand, and permanently (that is, irrevocably) alienable town houses on the other. What was coming into being by around 2000 BC in southern Mesopotamia was the notion of boundaries in terms of property as well as of urban entrepôts and their originally sacred temple spaces with their associated boundaries to the kosmos of life and death.
The symbolism originally developed to sanctify urban public space ended up protecting private property. Each family ended up with its own economic kosmos, while the surrounding society fell apart.
Deurbanization of the Ancient World
The Roman Empire became cosmopolitan in subjecting all its provinces to the same body of law and uniform contractual procedures. It established a common coinage, and in 301 AD the Edict of Diocletian went so far as to decree uniform prices throughout the empire. But what made this cosmopolitanism possible was the destruction of local authority. In this respect Roman empire building was the antithesis of the public regulation that had characterized archaic Near Eastern temple centers. Rome’s senate refrained from taxing aristocratic wealth, putting all the burden on the middle classes. (The lower orders for their part were too impoverished to be squeezed of any taxes, and the middle orders soon fell into poverty, as Rostovtzeff[125] and JonesSpecify CitationCan you help us identify a full name and citation for “Jones” so we can add it to a footnote and a bibliographical note?OpenSee All Queries have described vividly.)
Most of the population was reduced to poverty as slavery and usury concentrated wealth at the top of the economic pyramid. Unable to tax the rich, the government debased the currency in an attempt to get by with insufficient revenues. Europe’s economy west of Byzantium disintegrated into localized subsistence production. Families no longer sought to employ their wealth in international centers or commerce, but rather converted what money they had into landed property. The wealthiest estates became self-sufficient as commercial exchange all but disappeared. Economic life became uniform in its poverty, cosmopolitan mainly in the sense that political authority was lacking to make one region much different from any other.
At the inception of urban history in Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia, social intercourse had been highly formalized so as to avoid disorder in city life. Various forms of ritualized order, in commerce under temple aegis and also at New Year festivals and temple or city-foundation ceremonies, were designed to imbue earthly exchange with a kind of cosmological order. The objective was to create a higher order than egoistic individual self-serving, while still providing room for economic flexibility outside the gates of the cosmologically demarcated urban kosmos. But whereas towns began by providing a formalized context for local families and tribal groups to trade, Roman antiquity culminated in reducing towns to the status of mere prey for well-to-do families that long since had broken free of central controls. The trappings of archaic cosmology that they retained were little more than attempts to sanctify their secular activities and consolidate their political authority as they took over the state. Ultimately the wealthy had no homeland, and proved to be enemies of the state just as the earliest town-builders had sought freedom from rules, not a new authority and control.
Key Concepts
This glossary of key concepts will help readers who are new to the subject of archaic human history.
Keywords: “Civil” (from Latin “civitas”), “urbane” (from Latin “urbs”), “polite” (from Greek “polis”). Also “regime” (viz. “regular” and “regulate”), as cities were centers of standardization and uniformity.
Key images: Cities typically were divided into four quarters, reflecting the seasons in spatial mandala-like form. Also embodying a cosmological symbolism were the mundus trench, boundary stones and herms, and the public hearth. Cosmological symbolism is found most of all in the temples and other major public buildings that constituted the essence of ancient cities.
Lunar symbol: The city-founding ceremony was a fertility ritual, throwing auspicious “good things” in the boundary trench (e.g., the Roman mundus), depositing laws in the foundation walls of temples (as in Sumer), and sacrificing animals at the public hearth.
Solar symbol: The cardinal orientation of major public buildings oriented to the four cardinal directions and the rising sun. Most major cities from Mesopotamia to China had 12 gates, and typically four quarters. The Babylonian akitu house was situated ritually beyond the city gates, visited by the ruler on the New Year.
Principle of regularity: Gridiron planning of rectilinear cross-streets and avenues. Within cities, laws were standardized and citizens in principle were equal as to their rights and obligations. The classical administrative selection device in democracies was the taking of lots, indicating that one person’s lot was the equal of others. This distribution was held to reflect divine chance—one’s “lot in life.”
Periodic renewal ceremony: City-foundation ceremonies typically were repeated annually, especially on the New Year when new temples were dedicated, new rulers took the throne, military victories were celebrated, or urban boundaries were extended to incorporate new areas. When temples were dedicated, new laws were embedded in their foundations—a rite of passage for the body politic.
Integration with the calendrical kosmos: The city’s four or 12 gates reflected the seasons in the year, often being oriented to the cardinal directions, thus linking time and space.
International interface: Cities began as neutral zones, somewhat like offshore commercial enclaves or amphictyonic centers.
Public character: Archaic cities were administrative seats, and “the city” referred originally to the public area. The major public buildings were stone edifices symbolizing permanence, and typically were of a symbolic square or circular templum shape.
Religious sanctification: Archaic cities took their urban characteristics from their temple. The earliest urban sites seem to have developed as sacred “neutral areas,” as ritual meeting and trading sites sanctified from looting or destruction by their temples. Inasmuch as these meeting places were attended by community members widely scattered throughout the land, their concourse was calendrically set.
Ultimate dissolution: Urban sprawl and overpopulation, followed in the late Roman Empire by deurbanization and a descent into the Dark AgeKey Concept Missing in Chapter BodyCan you help us add the phrase “Dark Age” to the Chapter 9 body in proper context of the late Roman Empire?OpenSee All Queries as commercial activity decayed and families withdrew to self-sufficient estates on the land.
Bibliography
Robert McCormick Adams, “The Study of Ancient Mesopotamian Settlement Patterns and the Problem of Urban Origins,” Sumer, Vol. 25 (1969), pp. 111–123.
Pierre Amiet, Culte et Mythologie (Paris: 1951).Text AccessWe were unsuccessful at trying to find this text. Can you help to find it, and/or verify its details?OpenSee All Queries
Aristotle, Politics, Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 21, H. Rackham (tr.) (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1944), via Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library Project.
A.L. Frothingham, “Circular Templum and Mundus,” American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 18 (1914), pp. 302–320.
A.L. Frothingham, “Ancient Orientation Unveiled,” American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 21 (1917), pp. 55–76, 313–332,Verify CitationCould you help us confirm this essay spans these page ranges as well? We were only able to verify pp. 420–448.OpenSee All Queries 420–448.
I.J. Gelb, “Approaches to the Study of Ancient Society,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 87, No. 1 (1967), pp. 1–8.
I.J. Gelb, “On the Alleged Temple and State Economies in Ancient Mesopotamia,” in Studi in Onore di Edoardo Volterra, Vol. VI (Milan: 1969), pp. 137–154.
I.J. Gelb, “The Arua Institution,” Revue d’Assyriologie, Vol. 66 (1972), pp. 1–32.
I.J. Gelb, “Ebla and Lagash: Environmental Contrast,” in Harvey Weiss (ed.), The Origins of Cities in Dry-Farming Syria and Mesopotamia in the Third Millennium B.C. (Guilford, Connecticut: 1986), pp. 157–167.
W.R. Lethaby, Architecture, Nature and Magic (London: 1956).Verify CitationCan you verify this title (Architecture, Nature and Magic) and details?OpenSee All Queries
Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization (New York: 1972).
James McCreadie, “Hippodamus of Miletus,” in David Gordon Mitten, John Griffiths Pedley, and Jane Ayer Scott (eds.), Studies Presented to George M.A. Hanfmann (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1971).
Plato, Laws. From Plato in Twelve Volumes, R.G. Bury (tr.), Vols. 10 and 11 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1967 and 1968), via Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library Project.
V.V. Struve, “The Problem of the Genesis, Development and Disintegration of the Slave Societies in the Ancient Orient,” [1933], in I.M. Diakonoff (ed.), Ancient Mesopotamia (Moscow: 1969), pp. 17–69.
Edith Douglas van Buren, Foundation Figurines and Offerings (Berlin: 1931).
G.R.H. Wright, review of Herzog 1986, Zeitschrift fur Assyriologie, Vol. 78 (1988), pp. 155–156.
Xenophon, Anabasis, Xenophon in Seven Volumes, Carleton L. Brownson (tr.) (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1922), via Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library Project.
Xenophon, Cyropaedia, Xenophon in Seven Volumes, Walter Miller (tr.) (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1914), via Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library Project.
Norman Yoffee, The Economic Role of the Crown in the Old Babylonian Period (Malibu: 1977).
Carlo Zaccagnini, “Patterns of Mobility among Ancient Near Eastern Craftsmen,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 42 (1983), pp. 245–264.
Carlo Zaccagnini, “The Dilmun Standard and Its Relationship with Indus and Near Eastern Weight Systems,” Iraq, Vol. 48 (1986), pp. 19–23.
Carlo Zaccagnini, “Aspects of Ceremonial Exchange in the Near East during the Late Second Millennium ВC,” in Michael Rowlands, Mogens Larsen, and Kristian Kristiansen (eds.), Centre and Periphery in the Ancient World (Cambridge: 1987), pp. 57–65.
9.1 The seven-staged Birs Nimrud ziggurat at Borsippa: William Simpson, The Tower of Babel or Birs Nimrud Restored, c. 1885. Public domain via the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
9.2 Aerial photo of the citadel of Gur, near Firuzabad, Iran, dating from Achaemenid times: a cosmic city and fortified residence of the Sasanian dynasty, with concentric circular ramparts and four gates in the cardinal directions at the ends of a cross pattern of avenues. (H.P. l’Orange,[126]Studies in the Iconography of Cosmic Kingship, 1953:_.)Missing Page NumberHelp us identify what page number(s) the image is on.OpenSee All QueriesMissing Illustration LocationWhere in the body text is this illustration supposed to go? (We have renumbered images in this chapter, so the current 9.2 may not apply.)OpenSee All Queries
9.7 Sumerian cylinder seals showing the barag city-symbol, from Pierre Amiet,[131]Text AccessWe were unsuccessful at trying to find this text. Can you help to find it, and/or verify its details?OpenSee All QueriesCulte et Mythologie (1951), plate 132, #1791, 1787 and 1788, Plate 109 #1450, #1453 and #1454, and Plate 112, #1484. (Ischali 34/36, Kish K1420 and K2038, and Brett No. 13.)Missing Page NumberCan you help us identify page numbers if there are any? And verify the plate numbers? And help us find the images and identify their sources?OpenSee All Queries
9.8 Tiryns megaron, Kaiserliche Deutsche Archaeologisches Institut in Athens, Vol. II (Athens: 1912), Tafel xix.Specify CitationCan you help us identify the publication? It didn’t appear to be in Chapter 9’s Bibliography.OpenSee All Queries
9.9 Some Athenian herms (also a picture of a tortoise shell, and Chinese “cash-coinage”).Illustration QueryWhat source is this image from?OpenSee All Queries
9.13 Picture of __Missing TextWhat is missing here? Is it the cross-in-circle 𛲜 pattern or “squared circle” ⧇ pattern?OpenSee All Queries patterns on modern clockfaces, and phone dial.Missing Illustration LocationWhat is the source of this image/images? And where in the body text of Chapter 9 is this image supposed to go?OpenSee All Queries
9.14 Stela of Manishtushu and other Mesopotamian boundary stones. Also, from Pope[134] 1957: fig. 3 ziggurat-like parapets from Persepolis (from Rostamyk, Teheran Museum).Specify CitationCan you help us identify this image source?OpenSee All Queries And fig. 4 (from D. Schlumberger),Verify CitationCan you help us identify this image source?OpenSee All Queries ziggurat-like symbol from Afghanistan, combining rosette, pointed spear, and door into the “sacred mountain.”Missing Page NumberCan you help us find the page number(s) for the image source for Pope 1957? The page numbers in the footnote were a guess based on the Chapter 9 Bibliography.OpenSee All Queries
↑V. Gordon Childe, “The Urban Revolution,” Town Planning Review, Vol. 21 (1950), pp. 3–17.
↑V. Gordon Childe, “The Urban Revolution,” Town Planning Review, Vol. 21 (1950), p. 317.
↑V. Gordon Childe, “The Urban Revolution,” Town Planning Review, Vol. 21 (1950), p. 317.
↑Herodotus, The Histories, A.D. Godley (tr.) (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1920), via Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library Project, Book I, Chapters 98–100.
↑Polybius, Histories, Evelyn S. Shuckburgh (tr.) (New York: 1962 [1889]), via Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library Project, Book X, Chapter 27.
↑He is reported to have ruled 53 years, 708–655 BC. The records of Sargon II (722–705 BC) stated that he was captured in 715 BC in one of the ongoing Median revolts. Deioces initially may have organized the Medes in the process of mobilizing army contingents to fight Assyria.
↑Herodotus, The Histories, A.D. Godley (tr.) (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1920), via Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library Project, Book I, Chapters 181–183.
↑Henry Rawlinson (1840: p. 130, citing Hotty’s Researches [Hanover 1829]) also made another point reflecting the ancient historiographic tendency to merge historical personages into formalized stereotypes (discussed in Music, Temperament, and Social Concord). Scholars have long suspected that the character of Deioces/Dejoces was based on the Zend-Avesta’s mythical Jamshid/Jemshíd (described in the Vendidad, Fargard i) or conversely, that “many of the great deeds of Dejoces were transferred, in oriental tradition, to Jemshíd, the favoured hero of romance. … Jemshíd, it is said, erected a Var, or fortress, sufficiently large, and formed of squared blocks of stone; he assembled in the place a vast population, and stocked the surrounding country with cattle for their use. …” “The Var of Jemshíd refers, I believe, exclusively to the citadel. The original root of this word is the Sanskrit Vara, signifying, ‘encompassing, surrounding;’ and in all succeeding ages the name was applied either as a proper title, or in its general signification of a fortress to this citadel of Ecbatana. Thus the Zend Var, the basis of the Greeks, which is always employed to denote the treasury-citadel of Ecbatana; the Vera of Strabo, applied to the Median fortress, which was attacked by Antony,” etc.
↑Jack Lindsay (Helen of Troy: Woman and Goddess [London: 1974], p. 108) observed that “Maze rituals were linked with the sacred nature of the city. They set up magical obstacles to the entry of the uninitiated.”
This decontextualizing of urban ceremonies reflects a new type of tradition. As individuals broke free of the checks and balances that archaic Mesopotamia had imposed on wealth when it was still concentrated primarily in the temples, the old cosmological symbolism degenerated into the rather hollow trappings of authoritarianism.
Just as Deioces built Ecbatana at the beginning of his reign nearly 200 years earlier, so in 515 BC Darius began building Persepolis as a great ritual city to help legitimize his rule. The intrigues that marked his accession were replaced by ritual formalities whose cosmological symbolism signified eternal stability.
↑In The Pivot of the Four Quarters (1971: p. 411) Paul Wheatley described how Chinese capital cities used a “cosmo-magical” geometry to symbolize their moral and administrative rectitude. Each of their four walls contained three gates—making 12 in all—aligned to the four cardinal directions and hence to the celestial microcosm (Illustration 9.2).Missing IllustrationHelp us track down an image to insert.OpenSee All Queries Public buildings and the most prestigious private houses were aligned by the art of geomancy, feng shui, whose tool was a compass surrounded by circles containing zodiacal and calendrical information (Illustration 9.3).Missing IllustrationHelp us track down an image to insert.OpenSee All Queries In India the mandala was employed, while Roman city planners used a templum diagram—a cardinal cross enclosed in a circle (Illustration 9.4).Missing IllustrationHelp us track down an image to insert. Or, is this the cross-in-circle 𛲜 symbol, rather than a separate illustration file?OpenSee All Queries At first this procession was led around the city by the ruler as a sacred ceremony to purify its farmer-infantry. But by the end of the Roman Republic the triumph had lost nearly all traces of this archaic function as a purification ritual. Rome’s peasant-army had long since been replaced by mercenaries. The triumph ended up as a display of the personal ambitions of victorious generals. Archaic cosmological symbolism henceforth survived mainly in the trappings of arbitrary authoritarianism.
↑Xenophon, Anabasis, Xenophon in Seven Volumes, Carleton L. Brownson (tr.) (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1922), via Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library Project, Book III, Chapter 5, Section 15.
↑Xenophon, Cyropaedia, Xenophon in Seven Volumes, Walter Miller (tr.) (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1914), via Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library Project, Book VIII, Chapter 6, Section 22.
↑Lord Raglan, The Temple and the House (London: 1964), p. 142.
↑In less economically centralized communities, Stonehenge and other solar-aligned monuments were primarily calendrical and ritualistic. We have no way of knowing whether they also served as a meeting ground for the exchange of goods, but this seems likely—although there are no traces of workshops or other production facilities, permanent storage depots, offerings made of precious metals, or other Near Eastern–type elaborations.
↑Louise Adams Holland, Janus and the Bridge (Rome: 1961), pp. 10–13.Verify CitationThe page numbers might be from a different edition; can you help us verify the range? We inserted the en dash in the page range.OpenSee All Queries
↑Herodotus, The Histories, A.D. Godley (tr.) (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1920), via Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library Project, Book IV, Chapter 36.
↑Pierre Amiet, Culte et Mythologie (Paris: 1951).Text AccessWe were unsuccessful at trying to find this text. Can you help to find it, and/or verify its details?OpenSee All Queries
↑Pierre Amiet, Culte et Mythologie (Paris: 1951).Text AccessWe were unsuccessful at trying to find this text. Can you help to find it, and/or verify its details?OpenSee All Queries
↑Herodotus, The Histories, A.D. Godley (tr.) (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1920), via Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library Project, Book II, Chapter 109.
↑The ritual of rulers perambulating the city was documented from the Babylonian New Year festival through the Roman amburbium at the Lupercalia (a festival celebrated in early February).
↑I Kings 16:34 described this curse as being efficacious, for “In Ahab’s time, Hiel of Bethel rebuilt Jericho. He laid its foundations at the cost of his firstborn son Abiram, and he set up its gates at the cost of his youngest son Segub, in accordance with the word of the Lord spoken by Joshua.”
↑Like other Italian towns, Rome had three names: its public name (Roma), a priestly one (Flor or Florens), and a secret anagram (Amor). Plutarch’s Roman Questions #61 and Pliny’s Natural History (III.56)Verify CitationCan you help us check this Pliny citation?OpenSee All Queries reported that a magistrate who improperly revealed the city’s secret name was executed for his indiscretion.
↑James McCreadie, “Hippodamus of Miletus,” in David Gordon Mitten, John Griffiths Pedley, and Jane Ayer Scott (eds.), Studies Presented to George M.A. Hanfmann (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1971).
↑Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks (London and Boston: 1983).
↑Lord Raglan, The Temple and the House (London: 1964), pp. 75–84.
↑Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks (London and Boston: 1983), pp. 127ff.
↑As described in the Athenian “Homeric Hymn to Hermes,” dating from 520–511 BC according to Norman O. Brown (Hermes the Thief, 1990 [1947]: pp. 112, 66, 77).
↑Lord Raglan, The Temple and the House (London: 1964), p. 155.
↑Aristotle, Politics, Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 21, H. Rackham (tr.) (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1944), via Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library Project, Book II, Section 1,267.
↑Plato, Laws. From Plato in Twelve Volumes, R.G. Bury (tr.), Vols. 10 and 11 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1967 and 1968), via Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library Project, Section 745.
↑Pierre Amiet, Culte et Mythologie (Paris: 1951).Text AccessWe were unsuccessful at trying to find this text. Can you help to find it, and/or verify its details?OpenSee All Queries
