The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) (5 page)

As he bowed to the sacred past, Sargon initiated changes that would forever reshape the urban order. Wresting control of the economy from the priesthood, he allowed land now to pass into private ownership as opposed to merely the servants of the local god. The king was “chief entrepreneur” in charge of all the important irrigation canals, building construction, and commerce.
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Critically, Sargon broke with tradition by refusing to adopt one of the existing Sumerian cities as his capital. Instead he built a new imperial center at Agade, near the site that was to become Babylon. Unlike the original, physically constrained city-states, Sargon’s new capital could draw on raw materials, finished goods, and masses of slaves from an empire that sprawled, at least briefly, to the shores of the Mediterranean.
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This first imperial capital, however, did not last long. Within four generations, the Sargonid Empire fell victim to nomadic invasions from the north. Eventually, venerable Ur was restored by a new dynasty as the principal city in the region. The new rulers did not return to the old temple-centered system, however, but instead retained many of the patterns of landownership and centralized control developed under Sargon and his successors.

By 1900 B.C., the focus of Mesopotamian power had shifted to a new capital at Babylon.
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For the next 1,500 years, it would rank among the world’s greatest cities, the incubator of an urban culture on a scale not before seen anywhere.
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Under the Babylonians, the stranglehold of religion over commerce was further weakened and trade encouraged over a wide array of cities.
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This created a need for a system of laws that would be universally applicable to a wide variety of peoples from separate clans and different races.

The most famous laws, enacted by the Babylonian king Hammurabi, covered a wide range of criminal and civil situations. According to the prologue of his laws, Hammurabi had been ordered by the god Marduk to “make justice appear in the land, to destroy the evil and the wicked so that strong may not oppress the weak, to rise like the Sun-god over the black-headed one [humans] to give light to the land. . . .”
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By Herodotus’s time, Babylon had lost its place as the seat of empire but retained its status as a sacred place and center of learning; yet with a population estimated at 250,000, it remained a colossus, the world’s largest urban area. Even under foreign rule, the city’s great legacy inspired both respect and awe. With its vast population and stunning architecture, the Greek historian reported, the city still surpassed “in splendor any in the world.”
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The creation of empire, beginning with Sargon, allowed for the development of ever larger cities. The promise of security over a large expanse, even under such harsh rulers as the Assyrians, sparked an expansion of urban life and commerce. This occurred not only in the capital of Nineveh, the world’s largest city in 650 B.C.,
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but in many smaller urban settlements across the Assyrian Empire.
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This pattern repeated itself elsewhere in the ancient world. The Harappa urban civilization in India rested on the ability of cities to maintain order against invaders. Once nomadic raiders could penetrate the city walls, this early urban civilization collapsed. It would be many hundreds of years before large metropolitan centers would once again rise in the subcontinent.
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Similarly, the first great cities of the Americas—from the Olmecs and Maya in Central America to the pre-Incan civilizations in the Andes— flourished as centers of empires that provided the security critical to large-scale urban growth.
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Under such a protective regime, Teotihuacán, in central Mexico, grew to a population of between fifty and eightyfive thousand from the fourth to the sixth centuries A.D. Yet an invasion by less civilized people from the north in 750 A.D. had left it largely deserted.
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China arguably supplies the most enduring example of the imperial role in city building. A unique, indigenous urbanism in China had begun in the second millennium B.C., but for the most part, the early cities stood as relatively small ritual centers, with surrounding workshops for artisans servicing the court. The creation of the united empire under the Zhou around 1110 B.C. sparked the first development of large walled towns; indeed, the character for wall and city was identical.
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The Zhou dynasty and its successors the Han and the Tang devised a pattern of centralized control unparalleled in its duration and thoroughness.
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For over a millennium, the capital cities of Loyang, Chang’an, and Kaifeng consistently ranked among the world’s largest. Shifts in relative importance depended largely on the location of the ruling dynasts.
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“It is the sovereign alone who establishes the capital,” states the Confucian classic
Zhou Li.
Other cities, whether large administrative centers or the local government unit, or
hsien,
derived their importance largely from their role as administrative centers for a portion of the empire.
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In ensuing centuries, other neighboring Asian countries adopted the Chinese model of urbanism. Japan’s first major centers—Naniwa, Fujiwara, and Nara—consciously borrowed from the Chinese city-empire of Chang’an.
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In A.D. 794, the Japanese constructed a new, and more permanent, capital city at Heian, or Kyoto, which grew to be home to over one hundred thousand residents and served for over a millennium as essentially a ceremonial capital centered around the household of the emperor.
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Similarly, Seoul, established as the capital of the Yi dynasty in A.D. 1394, served, in the words of two Korean historians, as a “pastoral mandarin capital” for roughly five hundred years. Following the classical Chinese model, the city was laid out as an administrative center, surrounded by walls and dominated by the royal bureaucracy.

CHAPTER THREE

THE FIRST COMMERCIAL CAPITALS

The development of imperial cities with control over large areas allowed for the rapid growth of trade in all areas of early urban growth, from China to Egypt, Mesopotamia, and eventually the Americas. Despite this, the overall role of merchants and artisans in urban society remained sharply circumscribed.

Today, the entrepreneurial class is often assumed to be the critical, if not the dominant, shaper of a vital urban area. Yet in the ancient world, even when merchants and artisans accumulated considerable wealth, power remained concentrated in the hands of priests, soldiers, and bureaucrats. Often merchants served simply as middlemen, implementing the trade initiatives of the state or the priesthood. In Egypt, one historian notes, the pharaoh stood as “the only wholesale merchant.”
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In China, urban merchants used their wealth to scale the rigid barriers of class, seeking ways for themselves or their children to enter the government class or the aristocracy. Even the layout of the Chinese city reflected the priorities of the society: The ruler’s palace lay in the middle of the metropolis, while the markets were placed in far less auspicious and peripheral locations.
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The search for the origins of the commercial metropolis—so important to the later development of urbanism—leads us away from the great city-empires and instead to a narrow strip of land between the coastal mountains and the Mediterranean.

The climate in the area that would later become known as Phoenicia was particularly amenable to human settlement. As an Arab poet would write, it “carried winter on its head, spring on its shoulders whilst summer slumbers at its feet.”
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Early port cities, such as Ugarit north along the Syrian coast, developed as trade centers for empires of the Hittites and Egyptians as early as the middle centuries of the second millennium B.C.
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At a time when almost all other city dwellers feared the open sea, Phoenician traders scoured a vast extent of the known world. Their black ships explored everywhere from the far western coast of Africa to Sardinia, Cyprus, Spain, and even Great Britain.
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Although the main Phoenician cities such as Tyre or Sidon never grew much larger than forty thousand people—a fraction of the size of Babylon
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—they arguably spread their influence over a wider array of places than any civilization up to that time.

Unlike the great empires, the Phoenicians never expanded deeply into the interior. Clinging to the coastline, they instead developed an urban life based predominantly on trading goods, and sometimes services, to their more powerful neighbors.
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The Phoenicians’ genius lay in making themselves indispensable, preferably at a healthy profit.

By the ninth and eighth centuries B.C., Phoenician cities such as Bylbos (a key port for the Lebanese cedar trade), Tyre, and Sidon had become wealthy and powerful in their own right. Here, for the first time, we see the emergence of an influential, even dominant, merchant class. Tyre, wrote Isaiah, was “the crowning city, whose merchants are princes and whose traffickers are the honorable of the earth.”
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Phoenician contributions extended well beyond their role as traders in goods. In a way later seen in such cities as Venice, Amsterdam, and Osaka, they also developed skills as artisans and craftsmen. Phoenicians fashioned glass, jewelry, garments, and other adornments worn from the wilds of Spain to the already ancient cities of Sumeria. Homer, in
The Iliad,
speaks of Paris clothing Helen in “the bright robes woven by the women of Sidon.”
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One particularly important industry grew from their mastery of the complex formula for extracting purple dye from the glands of a sea snail found on their beaches. It was from this dye,
phonikes
(“red” or “purple” in Greek) that the region derived its name.
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Phoenician cities also exported their expertise. They were the designers of beautiful urban places, palaces, and temples around the ancient world, including Solomon’s Temple at Jerusalem.
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The Phoenicians’ greatest cultural contribution—the alphabet—also derived from the demands of commerce. Phoenician merchants and artisans learned from the Mesopotamians and Egyptians the value of writing as a way to keep accounts and lay down laws. Starting around 1100 B.C., these practical urbanites devised a system that was both simpler and more accessible than the old hieroglyphs. This system of writing became the basis for the Greek and then the Latin alphabets.
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As befitted talented entrepreneurs, the Phoenicians appreciated their own value. They were quick to remind their customers that they would do their bidding for profit, not out of compulsion. When the pharaoh sent a mission to procure wood for a sacred vessel for the god Amon, the king of Bylbos rudely reminded the Egyptian representative: “Nor am I the servant of him that sent thee.”
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Like the Greek city-states that would inherit their commercial empire, or the Italian cities of the Renaissance two millennia later, each Phoenician city was covetous of its own independence. Cities were run, for the most part, by mercantile interests whose primary concern was expanding trade.

The civic parochialism of the mercantile elite served to limit the Phoenicians as empire builders. When their traders founded permanent outposts far from their native land, their tendency was to build a new, independent city.

Carthage in North Africa was the greatest of these colonies. Tradition has it that Carthage was founded in 814 B.C. by natives of Tyre. Known as Qart Hadasht, or “New Town,” it served as a base for the expanding Phoenician trade with the lands rimming the western Mediterranean. Gradually, the burgeoning trade center’s influence was felt from the Atlantic coast of Spain all the way north to Cornwall and, by some accounts, the coast of Guinea.
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By the fifth century B.C., Carthage’s population surpassed that of Tyre and Sidon combined. It was now among the powerful states in the Mediterranean, with an impressive fleet and a series of alliances with various regional powers, including the Etruscans in Italy. Other Phoenician outposts in the west looked to Carthage for leadership and protection against opposing city-states, largely those established by the Greeks.
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This shift in allegiances away from the home cities undermined Phoenicia itself. Without the help of their progeny, the old cities could no longer stave off assaults from the increasingly aggressive Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires. Eventually, the cities lost both their independence and their place as the primary trading hubs of the ancient Mediterranean. The Phoenician “golden age” was coming to an end.
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In time Carthage, too, would succumb to the limitations inherent in a purely commercial city in ancient times. Proud bearers of Phoenician cultural and political values, the Carthaginians—whose number reached a peak of between 150,000 and 400,000
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—operated a system of government scaled for a city-state, with elected consuls, or
su fetes,
a senate, and a general assembly. This constitutional format was usually dominated by the commercial aristocracy. Slaves and servants did the dirty work, soldiers and sailors fought, priests propitiated, but the wealthy ruled.
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