Foundations: What is a city?

• Çatalhöyük: Deconstructing the World’s First City s Burcu Tung—Anthropology, UCB
• Uruk: The First City s Prof. John Hayes—Near Eastern Studies, UCB

Footprints: The city shaped.

• Imperial Rome: Monuments, Resources, and Power s Prof. Carlos Noreña—History, UCB
• Cities in China: The Early Evidence s Prof. Michael Nylan, History, UCB
• The Built World of the Incas s Prof. Jean-Pierre Protzen, College of Environmental Design, UCB
• Walking in the City: Mapping St. Petersburg circa 1910 s Dr. Stiliana Milkova, Comparative Literature, UCB

The Arts: The city observed.

• Ecological Apocalypse in Dickens’ London s Prof. Robert Alter, Comparative Literature, UCB
• Motion, Mechanization, and Migration: The Urban Experience in Walther Ruttmann’s Weimar Film “Berlin: Symphony of a Great City” (1927) s Dr. Noga Wizansky, Institute of European Studies, UCB
• Paris of the Impressionists s Prof. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Art History, UCB

Modernization

• Extreme Urban: Mumbai – City in the Developing World s Prof. Tanu Sankalia, Visual Arts, U.S.F
• Modernization of Seoul, Korea s Dr. Hilary Finchun-Sung, Institute of East Asian Studies, UCB
• From Paris to Phnom Penh: The City as Archive s Prof. Penny Edwards, South and Southeast Asia Studies, UCB
• Urban research panel
• Dubai: A Local, Regional and Global Perspective s Reem Alissa, Architecture, UCB
• Urban Informality in Lagos, Nigeria: A New Paradigm? s Joseph Godlewski, Architecture, UCB
  
• Istanbul: the Bridge and the Mosque s Kathryn Schild, Slavic Languages and Literatures, UCB
  
  
• Tokyo Stories: Tales from the Four-Hundred-Year History of Japan’s Capital s Dr. Cary Karacas, Geography, UCB

SUMMARIES

Çatalhöyük: Deconstructing the World’s First City
Burcu Tung—Department of Anthropology, UCB
(Summarized by Robert Nelson)

Note: Burcu Tung has been working on the Çatalhöyük site since 1997, and is currently looking at the architecture of the site.

Introduction

The idea with which this talk will engage is that Çatalhöyük was the world’s first city. This idea has been printed time and time again in countless publications; however, I believe that we should look at Çatalhöyük differently. Çatalhöyük is not necessarily a city. In order to examine this difference, I will introduce you to the history of the excavation and the history of the concepts associated with this excavation site. I hope to show you why this site is interesting, and how the distinction between what is a city and what is not a city is historically important. Can we see Çatalhöyük in a different way?

This image is a photograph of ongoing excavation at Çatalhöyük. It is a dense archaeological site; you can see people doing things everywhere in this photo, in many different buildings that were constructed adjacent to one another. The building of Çatalhöyük took place during a transition phase of growing animal and agricultural domestication. During this time some people decided to settle down, and this is of extraordinary importance. Archaeology focuses on settlements and the people who move back and forth within these settlements.

If you take a look at this map of the modern Middle East, you can see that Çatalhöyük is in present-day southern Turkey. Çatalhöyük dates back to the Neolithic (New Stone) Age, and was dated to approximately 12,000 years ago. In the early twentieth century, the radio-carbon revolution allowed archaeologists to give approximate dates to organic materials, a very important step in the field of archaeology. This Neolithic Revolution was a term coined by Gordon Childe, and refers to a very important period in human history during which people began to settle down and create the first permanent settlements. The research that took place in the Middle East has uncovered many interesting sites that have led archaeologists to talk about the changes that took place during the Neolithic. They asked many questions:

1. Did people settle down and become sedentary during this period (Sedentism)?
2. Did people domesticate animals?
3. What was the symbolism of the period?
4. What happened to people during this period?
5. Was there a change in the way people depicted human and animal forms in figurines, etc?

The answers to these questions are disputed. What we know from archaeology is a disputed record. We only have certain things, and only a handful of sites. Many researchers, for example, are quite loath to talk about a revolution in symbolism. The evidence is inconclusive because the Paleolithic record is not protected from the environment. To take another issue, how does one define sedentism? One answer is that most people have a primary settlement and live there throughout the year, but this is also open to interpretation.

“Cities: A Theater of Social Activity” (Lewis Mumford)

One of the guide questions in this conference is: “What is a City?” Lewis Mumford defined it as a “theater of social activity.” Generally, we see it as a central place with centralized control (for example, a palace, temple, government building), hierarchical relations, social division of labor, a means for transportation or movement, a means of infrastructure, and communal areas for social interaction. Archaeologically, we define cities through their imprints and their architecture; more importantly, we see the city through its human experience and community formation. Architecture is the surviving footprint, and unfortunately, for the Neolithic, we only have a partial record. Given the evidence that follows, I believe it is wrong for us to refer to these settlements as cities.

Defining Cities Archaeologically (mostly relying on architecture): Jericho

First, let’s look at the settlement of Jericho, which is in the modern day a disputed territory of Israel/Palestine. Jericho was a beautiful settlement, and has a long history of excavation. Kathleen Kenyan found a tower that dated to the Neolithic. This is the first communal structure that has been found in Jericho, and the first structure to require a communal effort for construction.

Defining Cities Archaeologically (mostly relying on architecture): Nevali Çori and Göbekli Tepe

Across this particular landscape, there are quite a few settlements that show a very interesting shift in the way people were constructing settlements. These two sites in Turkey are marked by big buildings, stones that were cut by people, and the widespread construction of certain symbolic forms. Both of these sites predate Çatalhöyük and date to a time when agriculture was much less commonly practiced in the region. There were other things happening at a similar time as well.

Defining Cities Archaeologically (mostly relying on architecture): Çayönü

This site was excavated by Robert Braidwood for many years. This site shows a continuous span of settlement, and a much different culture from that of Çatalhöyük. A sacred site, where they found approximately 400 human skulls and a stone slab blotted with blood residue, marks the building.

Defining Cities Archaeologically (mostly relying on architecture): Çatalhöyük

Now we move to Çatalhöyük. It is a big site, only a small portion of which has been excavated. New excavations are taking place in the northern areas, but what we know is based on the excavation of only about 6% of the site. The houses were built one on top of the other, and it is fairly obvious that this hill was artificially made.

The first excavations took place in the early 1960s, at a time when archaeologists were very excited about the Neolithic period. They were finding sites all over the world, but the “Fertile Crescent” became the focus of archaeologists’ gaze as they came to believe that domesticated crops and human culture spread out from that area. At that time, people did not think that the Neolithic existed in the area that is present-day Turkey. The discovery of Çatalhöyük was a hit with archaeologists, and provided the field with much new information. James Mellaart could delineate about 10–12 layers of buildings, built one on top of the other. He also believed that this site was occupied for about 1000 years, a theory that has largely been confirmed by subsequent excavations.

The settlement was very dense. Built on top of an alluvial plane, Çatalhöyük is marked by its mud-brick houses as there was no rock with which to begin construction. Wooden posts were used to prop up the houses and their roofs. They were built immediately adjacent to one another, with doors being on the roofs as in a honeycomb.

Question: So there was a hole in the roof?
Answer: Yes. There was a ladder inside the house that would lead to a hole. We think there was a wooden door that would close it off from rain and snow. There could be adjoining rooms with crawl holes as well.

Question: Was the cooking done on the inside or on the outside?
Answer: Both. At the southern end of the house, there was a stove with a hole for exhaust, but there were also hearths on the roofs.

Question: Is there evidence of animal discards?
Answer: Yes, there is evidence of animal discards. There is no evidence of ritual slaughter, but there is evidence of feasting.

Question: A settlement pattern like this may have been an adaptation to the harsh weather. It would be cooler in the summer, and warmer in the winter. Is this an advanced innovation?
Answer: We are still debating the reasons for this. Was this a major innovation? There is another site in Central Turkey that predates Çatalhöyük by 700–800 years, where the houses are positioned next to one another and the doors were on the roofs. This practice must have been learned from someone else, because archaeologists went deep into the first layers to find where this came from, and they weren’t able to.

Question: Did they share a wall?
Answer: Each had their own walls. This is another reason why the site it is important, because it shows definitive households with different identities, differences. They were similar, yes, and you can guess where you are going to find an oven or food bin, but the details are different.

Question: Did they have furniture?
Answer: There are traces of matting, bits and pieces of wood that may have been used as some form of furniture, but nothing like tables and chairs.

Question: Sixth Grade textbooks talk about built-in platforms…
Answer: Yes, on the eastern and western walls. This is for the differentiation of space. People would cook on the southern end, and seemed to have been particular about keeping their platforms clean.

James Mellaart uncovered the architectural density that looks like what you see in these pictures. This site is archaeologically very complex. We have good dating techniques, but we don’t know when it was first inhabited or when it was finally abandoned. This makes any guess as to the density of the settlement somewhat problematic. Some say as many as 8,000 inhabitants, some say as few as 2,000 inhabitants.

Mellaart also found a good deal of symbolic expression in Çatalhöyük. He believed some of the buildings to be shrines, decorated with bullhorns, ibex horns, mother goddesses, leopards, bulls, etc. He thought that the cattle depicted here were domesticated, and theorized that cattle domestication took place in Çatalhöyük in the Neolithic and then moved to Europe. These designs are far from being simple geometric patterns; for example, one image shows a mother goddess giving birth to a baby. After looking at images like this, Mellaart decided that this was a place where people domesticated plants and animals. The boar represents males, while the figurines (seen here) represent females. Given this form of symbolic expression, Mellaart concluded that Çatalhöyük was indeed a city. However, with the progress of archaeology and a greater number of excavations, some of his ideas have become a little outdated.

Burials

This is difficult for us to understand in North America, but in Çatalhöyük, they buried their ancestors under the floors of their houses. This is a practice we see throughout the world in different places and at different times. In terms of burial practice, archaeologists have not yet been able to define the difference between the respective roles and status of men and women.

Trade and the Beginning of Agriculture

Mellaart also knew that this site participated in the obsidian trade. He said, “Ok, great, this is the center of trade in Turkey, and people were extremely involved in this trade. This is a city in the sense that residents went to Cappadocia to get goods, and Çatalhöyük became the center of a trade route.” As a result of Mellaart’s excavations and theories, Çatalhöyük became a world-famous site. Recent excavations, however, have been a little more meticulous and more reserved in their conclusions.

Ian Hodder, for example, excavated and documented only a few houses, in addition to reopening excavation on Mellaart’s houses for the first time. He looked for an answer to the following questions: What was it about animal domestication that was important? Was this really an important agricultural center? Was this really the center of the obsidian trade? The new excavations also took a multiple-scale approach. What happened in one particular house? What happened in the environment around Çatalhöyük? How did the environment shape its people?

The site itself was located next to a river, and Neil Roberts, a geomorphicist, determined that it could possibly have been flooded for three months of the year. The farming that took place at Çatalhöyük was dry-land farming, but the site itself was swampy. The whole idea of Çatalhöyük as an agricultural center began to fall apart. It was decided that 1) We didn’t really know what was happening; 2) People were farming about twelvemiles away from the city; or 3) They may have built canals that would allow them to practice agriculture on drier grounds.

The UC Berkeley Team, Directed by Ruth Tringham

Archaeologists from the UC Berkeley team have also been excavating Çatalhöyük, and are interested in the daily life of Çatalhöyük. Archaeologists are learning a lot about the residents' diet, which was made up mostly of legumes (peas, lentils, chickpeas), fruits and berries, nuts, barley, wheat, and small portions of sheep or goat (difficult to tell the difference between the two). Our new research on cattle bones leads us to determine that cattle were not domesticated. The bones belonged to a wild species that was hunted. Deer and boar were also hunted from faraway mountainous regions. All in all, they seem to have had a fairly high variety of food in their diets.

Question: Is there an easy way to tell whether livestock was wild or domesticated?
Answer: You compare the size of the bones…domesticated stock is generally smaller. Also, it is important to look at the morphology in the skull, because when animals become domesticated, they are more juvenile in their features. In Çatalhöyük, the sheep and the goats were wilder than the others. Age can tell you whether they are herded or not, or if you have a majority or males or not. There are multiple lines of evidence.

Questions: Did they have other domesticated animals?
Answer: They may have had dogs, but we haven’t found any in the Neolithic site. They had a lot of birds—as it was a swampy area there were storks. There is a considerable amount of fishbone, but we think it might have been in the mud and brick already. There were no chickens.

The Berkeley team had a great house that we worked on, which looks fairly complex from this image. The holes next to the walls are post-retrieval kits: when they abandoned a house, people recycled the wooden posts because wood was scarce. A platform on the northeastern side is a burial kit, where five individuals were buried, but because they were buried in different times, the earlier burials were more disturbed. There is also a wall with symbolic association.

Question: Do the walls go all the way to the ceiling?
Answer: Walls were 3 meters high, but what we have left is 1.5 meters’ worth of wall. They would knock them down into the house, and then smooth out what was there and build on top of it. Sometimes they built on a dump area, sometimes they built on top of someone else’s abandoned house, sometimes half and half, very complex. Built up in a funky way, difficult for us to understand when one was abandoned.

Question: Why build on top of the old rubble, and not on a virgin site?
Answer: They had nowhere else to go. They had to construct in the actual settlement. It was important for them not to leave where they were. They had ancestors buried in their floor. We don’t know who had the chance to build a house. If I were them, I wouldn’t have gone away either!

Question: Did the settlement expand at all from the original footprint?
Answer: We can’t tell. We hit virgin soil, and the architectural record shows only two buildings here. One level shared a wall, one had its own building. We don’t know how big it was or how far it went.

New Interpretations

We can’t call this site a city anymore. But the website says it still is. There are certainly politics involved here. More funding will follow the excavation of a major site. So why not call it a city? It all comes down to the question of how one defines a city. In the modern sense, we look at population density. But in ancient times, people think the biggest ones conteained 5,000 inhabitants or so. A city shows a specific division of labor and hierarchical divisions (whether open or covered) but there are also central locations from which the city can be governed. These are things we don’t necessarily see at Çatalhöyük, nor do we see the control mechanisms we associate with the city.

Question: If you got to the center of the mound and found some sort of central building, government structure, etc. would you redefine how you feel about it?
Answer: No…I don’t believe that you will find a central structure. Maybe call it a proto-city, but I am uncomfortable looking at a city like this. I think there is a lack of evidence. What is a city?

Question: Ruins . . . do all of the ruins show domestic activity? Were there religious things going on in some rooms, and domestic things in other ones? Was there a division of room use?
Answer: There were rooms for domestic and symbolic activities. They were integrated together, one with the other. Replastering the walls, repainting the doors, were symbolic as well. When Mellaart found things on the walls, he thought they were shrines, but they do also show domestic activity. They were all households, and what was found may have represented specific lineages and plans, may have been core houses for a family in which all family members were buried, with satellite houses around it. This is evidence for it to be a city, with evidence of hierarchy and power relationships where people are trying to negotiate their status. But there is no evidence of aggression, disputes . . . things worked quite fluidly. There is one level where there are burnt houses, but that’s for another day.

Question: While we find burials at each of the domiciles, households, was their any evidence of special significance of one particular person—someone with eminence, status, privilege, etc.?
Answer: We don’t see that. It is a disputed factor. One thing that we found a few years ago was a burial with a woman holding a plastered skull in her hands. The first thing we thought was that the skull must be a man’s. Based on the analysis done on the bone the first time an anthropologist saw it, it may have been a woman’s. There was decapitation: some burials have skulls; we find skulls on the ground. No sexual preference involved. In the beginning the anthropologists thought some might be female which now they call male. It is very difficult to be certain about this. Everything is very disputed, up in the air.

Question: How do you know that replastering was symbolic and not functional?
Answer: It was done consistently throughout every house, and there are phases of replastering with different colors coming at similar times—cycles. Some walls were repainted and plastered. We don’t know 100% percent, but we think that it was symbolic. One thing that is important in archaeology that we have to use analogy for our findings.

Question: Was the reason to create this city choice? Did a natural disaster force people here? Did they want to create a tighter community or become city-dwellers instead of nomads? If you look at us now, the closer we are, the further we are symbolically. We have no sense of community.
Answer: The beginnings tie in to the creation of the community. This place was inhabited continuously for 1400 years; things changed through time but much was repeated. This community stayed until the bitter end. One of the newer findings is that plastering was symbolic and found in the Neolithic Age. We actually see the making of lime here, and Plaster of Paris was used to make the floors; we see this as a regular practice. We see this in many sites, but people stopped making it. It is easy to do, mix lime with water and splash it on.

Question: Was the entrance to the house above the flood line?
Answer: Houses themselves were built above the flood line. The first layer was probably built on perma-dry soil.

We were also doubting some of the fantastic bulls’ heads found by Mellaart. We weren’t finding any because we excavated very slowly. Now we do, in about one house per year. He found about one per day. Anyway, we found some impressive bulls’ heads after all. One thing that challenges the ideas about changes in symbolism is a figure shaped like a bear. It was believed by Mellaart to represent a mother goddess, and we think that the mother goddess was most likely a bear. Animals protected a house, a family, or a clan. Some people believe that the Neolithic saw a shift to specific gods and goddesses, but at Çatalhöyük this had not yet taken place. The definite females only constitute a certain percentage of the figurines.

Question: What caused the site to be abandoned?
Answer: It was never really abandoned. That is, it was abandoned but a site was built right next to it, and the cultures are quite continuous. In archaeology, the latest levels are usually eroded, so we don’t have much to say about the connections.

Archaeologists and the Site: Transparence, Outreach, Education

The website has a lot of features that can easily be accessed at http://www.Catalhoyuk.com. There is a new website that will be much more involved, but it isn’t up and running yet, so stay tuned. It is being developed through UC Berkeley to promote digital preservation and outreach. This website also has a sixth-grade activity, so if you are teaching world history, there are plenty of resources. The idea is to remix other people’s work, mixing, citing in a scholarly manner, and producing your own remixes as well.

Uruk: The First City
John Hayes—Near Eastern Studies Department, UCB
(Summarized by Robert Nelson)

We know a lot about Mesopotamia, because archaeologists have been excavating there for over a century and a half. We also have many cuneiform tables, hundreds of thousands of them in fact, and many more still await discovery. Most of these tablets are economic, administrative, and bureaucratic recordsF—records of private individuals, of the temple, and of the palace, keeping track of the movement of goods of all kinds. When mankind first started to write, they wrote about sheep! So on the one hand, we know a great deal about Mesopotamia. On the other hand, there are still basic aspects of Mesopotamian civilization that scholars argue about, such as: Which city was the first city?

The average person on the street knows less about Mesopotamia than about Egypt, because Mesopotamia didn’t survive as well. You can go and look at the pyramids, temples, and palaces in Egypt, but if you go to Mesopotamia, what you will see are big mounds of dirt. In Mesopotamia, there is very little stone, so buildings were constructed of mud brick, which does not survive the way that limestone in Egypt does. This is true of the city of Uruk. Here is the mound of Uruk (image). This will not impress the average visitor in the same way an Egyptian pyramid would.

The city of Uruk made the news a few years ago because of the “Uruk Vase.” This is a vessel made of alabaster, weighing about 600 pounds, with a pictorial image of a ritual procession. This dates to about 3200 BCE. In the year 2003 it was ripped out of the Iraqi National Museum and then was returned to the museum in the form of 14 pieces.

Some people may have read the Epic of Gilgamesh, which has poetic descriptions of the architecture of Uruk. Even at the time of Gilgamesh, Uruk was known to be an ancient city that had been there long before Gilgamesh lived. We find numerous references to it in Mesopotamian historical and literary texts. It is also mentioned in the Book of Genesis.

Archaeologists have been digging in Uruk since 1850, but modern scholarship really began in 1913 with scientific excavation by German scholars, who dug there until 1989, when all archaeology in Iraq was halted by the Persian Gulf War. You can see [Map] how Uruk is in the south of what is currently Iraq. Neolithic settlements tended to be in the upper reaches of the Fertile Crescent because there was more rain. Most archaeologists would say that are no settlements in the south until about 6000 BCE. So how old is Uruk? It is difficult to tell. Even though Uruk has been excavated for quite some time, we still haven’t hit virgin soil. Best guess: it probably dates to about 5500 or 6000 BCE.

In the Sumerian King List, ancient Sumerian scholars attributed the founding of Uruk to a king named Enmerkar, who was the grandfather of Gilgamesh. By 3000 BCE Uruk was a huge city marked by monumental architecture. Most scholarship contends that cities appeared in the south before the north, but many archaeologists are digging in Syria and Lebanon and finding sites that could nearly be called cities. Our knowledge of the record is biased. For example, archaeologists have recently found what may be cities in Syria that, ten years ago, we didn’t even know existed.

By 2800 BCE, Uruk was surrounded by a twenty-foot-high city wall, with numerous gates, towers, and observation posts. The Sumerian accounts say that Gilgamesh himself built the wall, but we doubt it; it was there before he was born. The walls enclosed an area of 6 or 7 square kilometers, quite a large chunk of land, making Uruk bigger than any of its contemporary cities by far. How many people lived there? The population has been estimated at between 50,000 and 80,000 inhabitants, but you should take this figures with a grain of salt. Archaeologists and anthropologists do not yet have the tools to accurately estimate population size.

Who built Uruk? Presumably the Sumerians. The Sumerians are the first people we know of by name in the history of the world, and their language, Sumerian, is the first language we know of by name. Are the Sumerians native to Mesopotamia? The question of the ultimate origin of the Sumerians is known as the “Sumerian Question.” We don’t know the answer. Some think they were there from the onset of settlement in the south of Mesopotamia, but others think that they were relative newcomers, that in fact they only came in the 4th millennium BCE. There is all kinds of speculation about where they may have come from. We do know that there were other people in Uruk besides the Sumerians, but we don’t know where they come from; we really only know of the existence of these other peoples because some words from their languages made it into the Sumerian vocabulary.

Why was Uruk built? This is a thorny question. There are different factors that figure into the building of Uruk, or any city, and scholars disagree about which factors were more important, and about which factors actually led to the building of the city, and which resulted from the presence of the city.

The most important factor was probably water. There is agricultural potential locked up in the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, but someone had to tap into those waters, distribute them, regulate them, and build the canals and dykes in order for the water to be used for agriculture. Someone had to organize all of this. In this scenario, there is water and a need to control it, and complex organization arises to take care of this problem; that organization led to city-states. This view on the origin of cities and civilization was adumbrated by the archaeologist V. Gordon Childe, who said in 1942 about the Euphrates:

The waters teemed with fish, the reed brakes were alive with wild fowl, wild pig, and other game, and on every emergent patch of soil grew date palms offering each year a reliable crop of nutritive fruit... If once the flood waters could be controlled and canalized, the swamps drained, and the arid banks watered, it could be made a Garden of Eden. The soil was so fertile that a hundred-fold return was not impossible....

This is what has been called a “hydraulic” civilization. The presence of water and its control lead to abundance and surplus, which then leads to social complexity. Exactly how all this happened, we will never know; the earliest stages will not show up in the archaeological record.

Some scholars now see the sequence of events in reverse. In this view, as population increased, social complexity developed, and then attention was turned to organizing the distribution of water. Moreover, Uruk was also involved in long-distance trade, ranging from Anatolia to as far away as India and Bahrain. Trade requires organization, which also contributes to social complexity. Water, complexity, and trade are just some of the issues that must be considered when thinking about the origins of cities.

How did rulers and their institutions arise? We will probably never know the real answer. The speculation is that there was some sort of evolutionary path: a nomadic leader became a tribal leader, a tribal leader became a king, and so on. In Mesopotamia, there may have been an intermediate stage, where an assembly of leading citizens would pick one person to solve a conflict, and that person would come away with greater control. We know of these assemblies primarily from later, literary sources, and have no idea how much this corresponds to history. There is hardly anything we can say about how it happened.

By and large, the Mesopotamian temple was more important than the palace. Uruk was surrounded by 20-foot-high walls, and had several temple complexes. Someone had to build these structures. Religion may have provided the ideological justification for coercion, whereby people were convinced by the temple authorities to give up part of their resources and part of their labor, for the good of their community and their deity.

Writing
Writing may in fact have been invented in Uruk. While the Egyptians attribute the invention of writing to the god Thoth, the Mesopotamians had several theories. One attributes the invention of writing to King Enmerkar, he who the Sumerian King List says built Uruk. This attributes writing to human invention. In the prescientific Western tradition, it was usually said that God taught Adam how to write.

The system of writing used in Mesopotamia is known as cuneiform. It is a system of writing, and not a language; it used for many languages, related and not. It was used by Sumerians to write in Sumerian, a language of unknown affiliation; it was used to write Akkadian, an early Semitic language; and it was used to write an early stage of Persian, an Indo-European language. [Image of Clay Tablets]

Question: At least two civilizations were coexisting at the same time and sharing writing?
Answer: Yes, Mesopotamian civilization is really the fusion of Sumerians and Akkadians.

In 1931, archaeologists found thousands of archaic-looking tablets at Uruk, which seemed to belong to the genre of administrative and economic texts. They were not obviously understandable, and so were published without translations, which means that historians tended to ignore them. Most of them were found in a rubbish heap. Much of the city of Uruk was filled with temples for Anu and Inanna. The ancient Urukians would periodically rebuild and enlarge these temples, and in so doing would throw out tablets that had no further usefulness. Since they were found in a rubbish heap, they are very hard to date. We now have some 5,000 or so of these archaic tablets, found in various places in the Middle East but mostly from Uruk. These tablets are fairly complex with complicated counting mechanisms and thirteen different metrological systems. Scholars began to reexamine these tablets in the 1980s, and now we know that they record such things as grain rations, beer rations, debits and credits, account-keeping, etc.

How did these cuneiform signs start out? Many signs have their origins as pictograms. So the sign representing a pig looks like a pig, a head like a head, etc. Some signs, however, look more like abstractions than like pictograms.

How did this system originate? Up until the 1970s, scholars thought that writing was consciously invented, more or less at one specific point and place in time, with no obvious antecedents. In the 1980s, an archaeologist at the University of Texas, Austin, Prof. Denise Schmandt-Besserat, developed the idea that the immediate precursor of writing was a system of physical “tokens.” These are small items of different sizes and different shapes that have been found at excavations throughout the Ancient Near East, and which have often been neglected by archaeologists. These tokens were used for counting; each shape counted a different thing. One token of a particular shape counted sheep, another counted beer rations, etc. They didn’t represent “one” in the abstract,but one concrete thing. Why did any one particular shape indicate one particular thing? That we don’t know. In addition to the tokens, we also have clay “envelopes” used to contain tokens, although none have been found at Uruk.

Some time around 3200 BCE, someone got the idea of pressing these tokens against the envelope, thereby creating a symbol on the outside of the envelope, this being the origin of writing. What is the evidence? We actually have a few clay envelopes preserved with tokens inside, and impressions on the outside, and they correlate with each other. Furthermore, once you have the impressions, what do you need the actual tokens for?

Where was writing invented? For now, we think Uruk, but it is logically possible that it may have been invented somewhere else, at some unexcavated site. Who invented it? Most scholars think it was the Sumerians. It is, again, logically possible that it comes from someone else. Why was it invented?? Mostly for bureaucratic purposes; a complex society with a complex bureaucracy needs a complex notational system.

Although 4/5 of the tablets known to us are bureaucratic, about 1/5 are not. They form a genre that we refer to as “lists.” They generally listed things like material inventories, or different professions. Why? They may have been used in scribal training in order to help scribes learn cuneiform. Another potential reason is to organize the known universe, to gather up the facts and try and sort them out. Some scholars think that this might have been the reason for the invention of writing. In any case, the point here is that writing was an invention. It was the result of a conscious process and deliberate effort. It was an act of the will.

Writing is a hallmark of civilization. It also has its dark side. It is found in societies based on exploitation, and it is connected first and foremost with power, inventories, censuses, and catalogues. Some men exercise power over others and their worldly possessions, and writing is one way by which this power is organized and articulated.

Imperial Rome: Monuments, Resources, and Power
Carlos Noreña—History Department, UCB
(Summarized by Robert Nelson)

What is a city? This is notoriously difficult to determine. What matters? Size, density, division of labor, functions, goods, and services are features that distinguish a city from its countryside. I would like to explore the city as a key element in a larger configuration. In this case:

Rome: 1 million inhabitants
Larger Configuration: Empire

Guide Questions
How does the city reflect political power within the Roman State?
How does this city constitute power of the State?

I. Conventional Periodization of Roman History

a. 753 BC: Foundation

b. 753–509BC: Regal

c. 509–31 BC: Republic—People exercised their sovereignty, but in reality it was the Senate that ran the show during the Republic

d. 31 BC–AD 395 (or 476): Empire—High-stakes game of power ends with Augustus. After 31 BC, there is an emperor.

e. AD 395/476–1453: Byzantine Empire

f. AD 1453: Fall of Constantinople

g. Today we will focus upon the period, approximately 200 BC–200 AD.

II. Map of the Roman Empire

Monuments

To begin with, if you have ever seen the HBO series “Rome,” it generally gives a more realistic picture of Roman topography, and captures the ancient city in details and grandeur better, than the movie “Gladiator.”

Its physical topography can be seen on this map, where you see the main hills and the River Tiber. This triangular area (capital) is one of the biggest hills in Rome. Between them, there is a small plain that was later filled by the Roman Forum (monumental center). It is no accident that the monuments are here. The other main area here was the Campus Martius (Mars Field), a monumental space in the large and low flood plain. It also developed here because that part lay outside of Rome’s religious boundary (this is indicative of the centrality of religion to the organization of Roman life and public space) and there were certain rules about what you could and could not do in Roman public space.

One of the key features of Roman topography is the clustering of religious and secular buildings. For example, the Roman Forum, in the center of the city, was a political, economic, and religious center all in one. Here are marked all of the buildings that one would call administrative, financial, or political; and here are marked those that we would call religious. You can see, they are to be found one beside the other, clustered together, with no strict separation. This is very convincing visual proof of the integration of religion into politics and business. Furthermore, religious buildings could often be used for a secular purpose, and vice versa. For example, the Senate would often meet in a temple, or temples could be converted into banks or archives. The fact that they are clustered together like that tells us a lot about the religious nature of Roman life, and how different it was from the classical Greek world, because of their separation.

Urban Monumental Development

Here we must distinguish between the ways in which monuments developed under the Roman Empire and the Roman Republic. Under the Republic, development was highly chaotic. There was no master plan for the layout of the city. It was very much the result of the pluralist constitution of the Roman republic in which there were elections for officials who hold office for one year and had power-sharing with other colleagues. This fragmentation precludes the development of a monumental master plan. This makes a very strong contrast with Greek city-states and even with the Roman Empire.

Under the Empire there was no fragmentation of decision-making, as all decisions came from the Emperor and his circle. For example, the proliferation and spread throughout the city during the Republican period of monuments celebrating victories took place during the 1st and 2nd century BCE. Here there is a correspondence between military victory and monument building. Generals would pray to a god for victory, make a vow (if you lend me support, I will repay the debt by building a temple in Rome), typical of this type of transactional religion. This really shaped the urban fabric of the city, forming a striking visual expression of the relationship between religion and warfare.

Triumphal monuments in the Republican period came in the form of temples. Each temple was designed according to convention, with a frontal staircase and a temple that sits on top of a platform. Roman temples emphasized frontality, as opposed to Greek temples, which were accessible on every side. This building type was also useful for the aristocratic general, whose name would go in very big letters on the front. It would henceforth be known that this aristocrat was the patron of this temple. What then developed was an intense competition between aristocrats who would go to war, stomp a hapless enemy, build a temple, and then go and do it again. All in all, we know of 96 temples from the mid-Republican period of Roman history, showing very clearly the lack of any master plan for urban monumental development. One cluster on the Campus Martius became the destination of processions and parades celebrating the god Jupiter and frequently marking the onset or termination of a war. There is in fact no strong correlation between temple building and city development. The generals and aristocrats treated them as private initiatives. This kind of aristocratic, senatorial competition intensified in the 1st century BCE. The stakes got higher, and the results were violent. 1st-century BCE temples were built as a result of civil wars. In the late Republic, you get a procession of very power figures who put their imprint on the city with monumental buildings; Pompey and Caesar are important examples. With Caesar, there was a transition from haphazardness to autocratic control of the city in the Empire.

Caesar’s Forum

Caesar’s Forum was an ambitious undertaking, designed to remake the Roman Forum in his own image. He began by creating an entirely new forum, the Forum Julium, adjacent to the old forum, and many of the functions that took place before were moved. The crowning monument of this form is the temple of the Venus Genetrix—goddess of love, whom Caesar claimed as a family ancestor—as a monument to his family. He attached his own name to the Curia Iulia, the new Senate House. Within the forum itself, he built a massive new Basilica Iulia that had a lot of administrative functions and law court activity, all in his name. Whereas earlier, aristocrats had dedicated a temple here, paved something there, Caesar systematically overhauled the basic configuration of the forum, putting a Caesarian stamp on the city and foreshadowing what Augustus and future Emperors would do.

Contemporaries always complained that the chaotic development did not look the part of a worthy capital city, and that such haphazardness was an embarrassment, or worse, backwards and barbarian. That began to change under the Empire, when new material resources began to pour into the city as a result of conquest. The city-scape became more spectacular as emperor after emperor completed building programs. It is impossible to see every construction in the time allotted, so we will get a handle on imperial monumentalizaiton through a typology:

Imperial Residence

[Map view of the Imperial Palace on Palatine the Hill] The Roman emperors needed a suitably grand residence as a way of expressing their status. They developed their residences on the top of the Capitoline Hill. By the 1st century AD, the hill was monopolized by the palace complex—thus, Palatine Hill. Geographically, it is highly central to the city itself.

Question: Did Caesar have bigger plans?
Answer: Yes, man. One of his plans was to divert the Tiber and make a straight river. The result would be a flat, axonometric city like those he saw in the east for new monumental buildings. Augustus actually put many of these things into action. This is only meant to be an illustration of the scale and complexity of the new construction.

Question: Was there a military motivation for this as well?
Answer: No. Back in the early history of the city, they were constructed for military purposes. But by this time, the city walls were in decay, and practically undefended. This was seen as a testament to the Roman sense of security.

Back to the palace. It was restricted, so one couldn’t just show up and get an audience with the emperor. The scale of the residence is not particularly ostentatious or overwhelming, and when compared to Versailles is quite modest.

Temples

The temples were usually colonnaded squares, paved walkways with central courtyards, flanked by priceless works of art. You get a development of a characteristic mix of religion, Greek culture, and leisure. Among other things, the emperors put their resources into developing structures for the good of the population.

Forums

Several Emperors created their own Forums. They were all bunched together in the center of the city, adjacent to Caesar’s Forum. If you take a look at the image here, you can see how close they were, one to the other.

Bath Complexes

The bath complexes were very large. Baths and bathing culture was central to Roman society. So, a trip to the Baths was not about hygiene, but about socialization and athletic competition. Many of these bath complexes had libraries or even small museums, amounting to a mix of hygiene, socialization, athletics, and Greek culture. There were a few large bath complexes, and hundreds of smaller bath houses, the bigger ones being Trajan’s and Caracalla’s.

Question: Was there a fee involved?
Answer: Yes, but it was nominal. Very often, it was very small and within reach of most people. Aristocrats would pay for their friends, and the emperor would sometimes give out tokens.

Question: Were slaves allowed into the baths?
Answer: Possibly. Most likely there were specific baths and specific times when slaves could come in, but unless they were accompanied by their masters, probably not.

Question: Were these bath houses co-ed?
Answer: That is another debated point. There is evidence of ethical debate over whether or not it was appropriate to admit women to men’s baths; most times, it was probably not appropriate. Some times, it certainly was.

Public Entertainment

Aside from the palaces, forums, and temples, there were also venues for public entertainment with which you are probably familiar. There were theaters, stone amphitheaters for gladiatorial combat, and circuses for chariot racing built and maintained by the Roman emperor. A quick glance at the Circus Maximus shows it to have a capacity of about 250,000 people. The size and presence of such a structure would have been a symbolic presence of the emperor’s power.

Provisioning the City

Rome was perhaps the biggest pre-industrial city, and perhaps the only one to reach a population of 1 million inhabitants before London in the nineteenth century. We know a little about its population due largely to records that survive detailing the free grain distribution to the city’s poor. Its population was a testament to Rome’s size and strength, and the ability to provision it a testament to its organization and planning. The majority of cities at that time would have been provisioned by the immediate hinterland, but as Rome grew, it could no longer do so, and had to import its grain from other parts of the Italian peninsula, and even more farflung areas of the Empire like Egypt, North Africa, Sicily, and Sardinia. Because Rome controlled these areas militarily and politically, they could use them to sustain their own population.

In terms of water, they were dependent on the Tiber River. Water had to be imported to the city, and this was done by aqueducts that operated on the principle of gravity. They did have siphon technology, but gravity was most frequently used. How did they get their water, and how was it distributed? Historians have a remarkable document from a Roman senator who wrote a pamphlet on the water questions, complete with amazing detail on its distribution:

Three basic categories existed:

• In the name of the emperor (17%)—the imperial palace, those built by the emperor;
  
  
• For private citizens (39%)—for those individual citizens who were permitted to bring a tap into the aqueduct and bring some into their home;
  
  
• For public uses (44%)—water for markets, military barracks, fountains, public basins, where the majority of the population gets their daily water (Public basins 13%)

Juvenal, Satires, 10.78–81

The Roman people, which once bestowed imperium, fasces, legions, everything, now foregoes such activities and has but two passionate desires: bread and circuses.

Fronto, Principles of History, 17

It was the height of political wisdom for the emperor not to neglect even actors and the other performers of the stage, the circus, and the arena, since he knew that the Roman people is held fast by two things above all, the grain supply and the shows, that the success of government depends on amusements as much as on serious things.

Balance sheet

What was the lived experience? It depends on social and economic status—high life for the urban aristocracy, miserable quality of life for the totally destitute. What about the masses in the middle? Material and cultural?

Good:
Free grain distribution (Roman cities went above and beyond by giving free grain to the people . . . as many as 150 thousand people were given monthly distributions of grain)
Water supply (availability of water in drinking basins seen as a perk)
Public entertainment (dramatic performances, Greek tragedies, Romances, public plays, monuments of unparalleled splendor—see the example of Pompey’s theater—chariot racing, gladiators a very common and a very regular feature of daily life, originally staged in Rome as part of aristocratic funerals but that association disappeared and it became public entertainment)
Spread throughout the city of portico complexes, colonnaded squares and shade from the elements (showing of the Campus Martius)
Other advantages of a large commercial city: you can take advantage of the availability of staples and luxury items, many opportunities for employment, especially in building . . . not built solely through slave labor, but paid, free labor as well

Bad:
Total absence of basic state services that we take for granted: no public health care, no public education, no public firefighting service, no police force (free-for-all situation), disaster and violence mitigation, urban sanitation (serious limitations, see Strabo quotes…he is right, but it is a typical aristocratic viewpoint . . . unpleasant for the urban masses, most houses did not have toilets, waste tossed out of window), 1 million produced about 50k kilograms of body waste per day, plus the anecdotal evidence of filthy streets, dogs and birds eating dead animals, corpses lying around for days, contagious diseases, multiple references to urban slums. Problem of apartment buildings collapsing (Cicero quote).

Strabo, Geography 5.3.8
“The Romans were farsighted about matters to which the Greeks gave little thought, such as the construction of sewers which could wash waste matter out of the city and into the Tiber. The sewers, covered with a vault of tightly fitted stones, are so large that hay wagons could drive through them. And the quantity of water brought into the city by aqueducts is so great that rivers, as it were, flow through the city and the sewers, to which almost every house is connected.”

Cicero, Letters to Atticus
“Two of my buildings have fallen down, and the rest have large cracks. Not only the tenants, but even the mice have moved out.”

Question: Do you have a visual of the temple of Venus?
Answer: No; it would usually have been locked shut, used to store money and archives. Inside would have been a cult image of a god or goddess kept behind closed doors. What is missing is the altar, placed about halfway up the stairs, where sacrifices took place and formed the centerpiece of Roman religion.

Question: In what kind of numbers was the military presence in the city?
Answer: Another important distinction between Republic and Empire. Republic, no police force, no public service for security. The result was that aristocrats had private armies for protection, and could offer protection in exchange for votes or loyalty. In the Empire, Augustus implements some sort of paramilitary forces, and Trajan creates a military that would become the Praetorian Guard. Later, consider it about 25k armed men in the employ of the Emperor.

Question: Was there any mass transit?
Answer: No, and there were often regulations about the hours of the day when wheeled vehicles could be brought into the city.

Question: Did they have public latrines?
Answer: Yes. This has only recently become an area of scholarly interest. In the past twenty years, the daily life of people has become more interesting to historians, as opposed to the lives of the Emperors. The anecdotal evidence is suggestive of the level of public filth, but public latrines did exist.

Question: Poor people—were they ghettoized or homeless?
Answer: The standard explanation is that Rome is unique in its mix of rich or poor. There was no zoning of poor and rich. I don’t think that is right . . . in macroscopic terms, there seems to be a certain hierarchy, based on water distribution. Tenements and slums coexist with wealthy hotels, etc., so it’s a mixed bag.

Question: Was Roman expansion really more about the idea of conquest for a glorious Rome, rather than to provision the city?
Answer: A vast majority of rank and file soldiers would have been intimately familiar with the city of Rome. The city had the reputation of not caring about the Empire, but there is a split between the professed ideals of the state and its existence within the city of Rome.

Cities in China: The Early Evidence
Michael Nylan, History Department, UCB
(Summarized by Bartholomew Watson)

Cities are not just the location of social, economic, and political activity, but prime agents and aspects of that activity. This talk will focus on the early urbanization of Han China, taking place at about the same time as the Augustan Age of the Roman Empire, with a particular focus on the Han Capital, Han Chang’an, found in China’s northwestern province, which was closely linked to the areas further west along the Silk Road, areas such as the so-called autonomous regions of Tibet or Chinese Turkestan. Five other capitals of the Han Empire could also have been considered global cities, and I use the term “global cities” advisedly but anachronistically. On the one hand, “global city” suggests the massive scale of urbanization, by which rural communities outside of the city take on the urban pattern as well. This level of urbanization existed in Han China, but not everywhere. The capital itself, Chang’an, boasted 600,000 inhabitants, and its metropolitan area had 917,000 inhabitants. No fewer than five other cities in China had a roughly comparable size. Far to the southwest was the city of Chengdu, a city of only sixteen square miles whose greater metropolitan area counted 1.2 million inhabitants. City dwellers were therefore a substantial portion of the sixty million residents of Han China, whose population was fairly evenly distributed, unlike modern Asian cities, which have become magnets for lopsided population growth.

The modern global city, in the words of Rem Koolhaas, is “dead” because (a) its downtown area empties out at night, leaving only a fraction of its population behind; and (b) its boundaries are hard to map. Something similar was true of Chang’an, since only the imperial family, their servants, and some 30,000 or so resident bureaucrats lived in or adjacent to the palace confines. The palace walls were shut and bolted at night, leaving the doings of the capital to its few inhabitants. Moreover, Han cities were typically divided into wards like this, each of which was tightly shut at night and in times of crisis. Even in Chengdu, the beginning of the Silk Road and one of Han China’s most vibrant cities, merchants haggled only from dawn to dusk over their precious metals and silks. Modern studies that see China’s government as an oriental despotism would also see the iron fist of administrative law extending outwards from the city to its hinterland. Major cities in classical Chinese are called “daju,” a term which is often (mis)translated as “great agglomeration,” but which refers instead to the “coming together of the greats,” in other words, the political elites. However, when we turn from the institutional structures of the grand cities to everyday life, we see that the Han people came, then as now, to cities mainly for opportunity. They came for economic reasons, for better jobs, to seek justice, for entertainment, and even for sight-seeing. Chang’an was certainly a major destination for such travelers. Rubbings from tomb tiles and bricks show carriage processions through the city. Once a year, the imperial robes and caps paraded in all their splendor through the streets of the city to impress the throne’s majesty upon the people. These processions were standard from one palace to the next. The emperor also had traveling palaces outside the city walls, in which similar processions might take place. In addition to imperial processions, high officials would also have their own processions.

Merchants and businessmen were also fairly common in this area. A Chinese legend tells the story of a man who made the equivalent of 100 million dollars in one day, and was hired by a private family to help them increase their funds. Local industries were highly sophisticated, and they included silk, copper, iron, lacquer, and chariot industries. Trade in silk alone made Han China the dominant economic power in the world during the Han period. However, we must not fool ourselves into thinking that, even with all this material wealth, daily life in Han China was similar to what it is today.

What would have astonished the modern observer is the city’s hinterland, or that which lies beyond the city walls. Within the city, there was a modern administration, and in fact, many of the forms of administration used in Europe and the United States originally came from China via the Italian city-states. There were approximately 130,000 functionaries and administrators working in the Han civil service and compiling documents. Outside of the walls of the major cities, however, there would have been only small outposts, analogous to the old frontier outposts in the western United States. The officers and bureaucrats of the Han city tried to stake their claim to large areas that appeared to be beyond their grasp. The Empire itself was often compared to an unseaworthy boat, in that when it sprang a leak in one location, you patched it up, but it would leak again somewhere else.

Han Chang’an

As is typical of planned cities in Han China, Chang’an was built on a square plan with fortified walls. The main palace city that contained the royal residence and governmental offices and workshops was situated in the western part of the city. Surrounding the walls of the capital was a moat that measured approximately eight meters in width, and was spanned by several wooden bridges. The fortified wall, which was made of rammed earth and brick as was typical in Han times, ran for 25.7 kilometers, and was some twelve meters high and even wider than this. The outer wall was pierced by twelve gates, three to each side of the quadrilateral formed by the town. Each gate had three access passages, measuring six to eight meters in length, and wide enough to accommodate three to four carriages abreast.

Four of the gates communicated with those of the two great palace complexes, the Changle Palace and the Weiyang Palace. The other eight gates opened up avenues that crossed the town. The longest of these avenues is approximately 5400 meters long. The main thoroughfares in Han cities were usually five to eight meters wide in smaller cities, but in Chang’an they measured 45 meters in width. The central lane, the widest of the three, was reserved for the exclusive use of the emperor, and its surface was paved with rammed earth.

Liu Bang, the creator of the restored Qin Shi Huangdi, or “Palace of Eternal Joy”, chose Chang’an as the Han capital in 202 BCE. Under his successor, the city wall was completed in 190 BCE. The city assumed its definitive shape in 141-87 BCE when many buildings and terraces were introduced both inside and outside the city walls, in particular, the pleasure palace to the west and southwest including the Mingguang Palace north of the Changle Palace, and the Gui Palace and North Palace, north of the Weiyang Palace. Palaces occupied some two-thirds of the city, and it is outward from these palaces that the rest of the city developed with little or no planning scheme. We know that some of the palace towers were as tall as ninety meters in height. There were also several closed parks, including the Sung Dang Park and a hunting park in the western suburbs. This image shows an elevated walkway that connects two different palaces; it was built so the emperor and his entourage could pass back and forth in secrecy.

Chang’an in Western Han, in other words, was not originally constructed according to a pre-established plan that mimicked the Great Bear constellation [SLIDE 9], as has been claimed ever since the sixth century AD, because of a work entitled the San Fu Huang T’u. According to Chinese city planning texts, Chang’an was built according to a central plan; however, we believe that to be false. Its shape and its layout became significant later on. For example, its shape was soon analogized to the seven stars of the Dipper. After all, in the Han political scheme, the palace is the center of the social world of the earth, and the chamber of the emperor is like the North Star around which all revolves.

The site of the Changle Palace bureaucratic offices has been thoroughly excavated. Inside, we have found bone documents, recording the name, measurements, and dates of manufacture of a number of palace goods, including how and when they were made. Archaeologists haven’t yet located the library, but they have found an arsenal that occupied an enormous space between the Weiyan and the Changle palaces. Here seven storehouses also contained various types of weapons, mainly of iron, and items of equipment, placed on weapon racks and shelves. As mentioned earlier, to the north of both the Weiyang Palace and the Gui Palace were the Eastern and Western markets, each surrounded by a high wall with two gates on each side. Excavations have revealed within the enclosures of the Western Market’s surrounding walls (550 m E-W by 480 m N-S) an industrial complex under the management of imperial officers that comprised an iron foundry; twenty-one potter’s kilns producing funerary statuettes for the imperial tombs; and a workshop where coins were minted. The presence of blast furnaces so close to the imperial palace is astonishing, for this was a choice with many drawbacks. The blast furnaces must have consumed enormous quantities of charcoal, possibly producing shortages of the limited fuel available to the population; they would also have increased pollution, waste, and the risk of explosions. Any or all of these reasons would have justified moving this type of industry away from the center of major towns. Most believe that the reason behind this choice to locate production sites so near administrative offices—and indeed the palaces of the emperor—was the desire of officials to maintain strict control over production, once a government iron monopoly was instituted in 119 BCE.
.
Zooming in for a still closer look at the palaces within Chang’an, we should imagine the palace as a Han poet did, allowing for a bit of exaggeration on his part:

Joined by lofty towers and leisure lodges,
The Hall of Fresh Coolness, the Proclamation Chamber, the Warm Chamber,
Hall of Divine Immortals, Hall of Enduring Years,
Hall of Golden Splendor, Jade Hall,
White Tiger Hall, Unicorn Hall:
Within the palace compounding, buildings like this
Were too numerous to be recounted.

Inside the palace:

They had carved columns of jade pedestals,
Decorated brackets with cloud-patterned crossbeams,
A triple staircase and a tiered balustrade,
Engraved railings with figured edging.
On the right was a ramp, on the left was a staircase
Blue was the door-engraving; red was the floor.
... Gilt paving stones, jade-decorated staircases
Vermilion courtyards shone with a fiery glow...

Palaces also contained:

Repositories of documents and writings.
Here the court commanded:
Elder officials, diligent in instruction,
Famous scholars and tutors,
To lecture and discourse on the Six Classics.

The hunting parks are also of some significance. They not only served as hunting grounds for the imperial suite, but they functioned as training grounds for infantry and cavalry, they acted as storing grounds for certain precious goods and confiscated items, rare plants and even zoos. Zoos were not the only entertainment though, by far. The capital was famous for its “Hundred Entertainments,” which daily delighted all residents of the city regardless of rank or class. For example, there were sword swallowers, tightrope walkers, magicians, dragon dancers and so on who performed for the residents in the market areas. The city also had a sophisticated system of water drainage that brought water from the interior areas of the city to the nearby river. Channels ran alongside the streets. Some of these channels for carrying water and draining it away were built of stone blocks, but most were earthenware and mass-produced, as were the facings of well walls. While it may not be much to look at, it was effective in carrying “night soil” outside the city limits and away from the water supply. “Night soil” could also be used as fertilizer to enrich soil and crops. That may be one reason why even outside the capital city walls of Chang’an there grew up flourishing markets, mostly situated to the north and the northwest, between the capital and the mausoleum counties, which were convenient for the powerful families in those areas whom the throne wished to keep under close supervision. Cemeteries and religious centers were situated outside the walls. There were also cemeteries and certain religious centers, including a shrine to the dynastic ancestors, found outside of the city limits.

Current Research

Since the 1950s, nearly 150 Han towns have been discovered, not including the numerous settlements in the north of China. There were several highly dense areas of settlement, including the area around Chang’an and the area alongside the Yellow River. Urban growth was relatively high in the first and second centuries BCE, but slowed down significantly in the first and second centuries CE. This slowdown affected both the number of towns and the size of their populations. We have a good deal of information, but the excavation of these towns is not yet enough to give us a more complete version of this story. At the moment, our excavation gives us a monolithic picture of urban planning, but this picture may well change if settlement archaeology ever really develops in China outside of the old major centers of the north and the Yellow River Valley.

It is notable that not one of the three capitals of the Qin dynasty or Han dynasty were natural towns. The Qin capital, which was destroyed by fires during the conquest, was chosen for its strategic value. All three capital cities developed as seats of imperial power to which things, goods, and people eventually gravitated, but not where they had originally settled. Three controversies centering specifically on Chang’an have stimulated considerable reflection on Han town planning in general: (1) the status of Chang’an as strictly a palace city (nei cheng) or as a town whose significance lay as a commercial or industrial center; (2) the presence or lack of extensive suburbs to the city; and (3) the location of the Eastern and Western markets, specifically whether they were inside or outside the city walls.

The controversies, as it happened, pitted a historian, Yang Kuan, against an archaeologist, Liu Qingzhu. Yang Kuan believed the capital to be modeled on other capitals, and insisted that most of the population would have lived not within the city walls, but in the northeastern suburbs that offered the natural protection of the river. Li Qingzhu believed that Chang’an was a producer city, in that normal people who engaged in economic and productive activities populated sections of the town. Li Qingzhu cited the lack of fortifications outside the city walls and some 160 residential wards inside the city as evidence for this argument. Eventually, Li Qingzhu’s argument was confirmed, and today, most scholars believe that twenty to thirty percent of the city’s residents lived inside the capital city’s walls. The wealthiest inhabitants preferred the suburbs found outside the city walls, but there was no strict separation between rich and poor. Beside this, we know very little about the placement of the residential ward. In part, this is because Chang’an lies underneath the modern city of Xi’an, so in order to excavate, you would have to destroy some of the modern city. Current research has established Chang’an as a political, administrative, and cultural center that was by no means a parasitic town. Chang’an was a fully functioning city in all respects. All current research into city planning is based on material remains: town walls, terraces, the foundations of buildings, bricks, roof tiles, roads, sewers, industrial and craft workshops. Town walls constituted the main vestige of early towns, but sometimes serve as the foundations for modern structures. In addition to these kinds of structures, there might be pottery, architectural models, and tombs with pictorial representations from the first to the second century CE, but nobody has listed or maintained a typology or catalogue of all these different representations. This is necessary for a more thorough critical analysis. Taken together, material remains make the analysis of early urban sites possible, but barely.

Our knowledge of Han town planning is still somewhat sketchy, for three main reasons: First, the poor state of the preservation of buildings made of earth (mud-brick, wattle-and-daub, and rammed earth) and wood, instead of baked bricks or stone. Most of the remaining structures are “hollowed out” of the earth and few walls or examples of architectural decoration have survived. The second reason is that urban excavations in north China have been impeded by alluvial deposits and present-day urban development. Urban development is progressing rapidly, in many cases without preliminary excavations, and ancient sites are being destroyed as a result. Under these conditions, most of the excavations are selective at best. Third, representations of houses are not at all uncommon, but the identification of these representations remains problematic. Nor do Han representations show how city and countryside were connected one to the other; city life was disconnected from the agricultural economy and the environment of landowners and farmers. One aspect that would be worth studying is that of end tiles, as these are, first, often the only surviving elements from aboveground architecture and, second, an excellent indicator of the building’s dates and functions.

All of this patchy evidence allows us to hazard a few observations. We know that apart from new towns on northern and southern borders, most Han towns developed by expanding older sites. All of the so-called capitals during Han times had also been capitals from pre-imperial times. These capitals have the same basic plan: inner city, wall, outer city, wall. There were new urban developments in Han China, including satellite towns around Chang’an, which is a good example because of its mausoleum towns. Another departure is that all major Han cities shifted their cemeteries outside of the city walls. Why? We don’t know. The final change is that whereas pre-imperial cities were under the jurisdiction of independent polities, Han cities were ruled by central powers, and therefore needed central planning, and were ranked according to importance to the crown.

More discoveries and better knowledge of foreign influences will improve our knowledge. More integration, less narrowly focused excavations will help us all. Many things have yet to be weighed or assessed. To explain material, ideological and social conditions of those in the past is complex.

Question: Were Han cities independent of their hinterlands?
Answer: No, they needed grain and other things. Right around the cities, there grew up quite a few farming communities in the suburbs because of the night soil.

Question: Who lived in the suburbs? Was it reserved for a certain caste?
Answer: There was no caste system; there was great social mobility. It was nothing like India. If we talk about how many people were in the imperial family, literally just the imperial family (clearly the family was connected with the nobility through ties of intermarriage) it would have been less than 1% of the population. The remainder was divided into 18 ranks. This sounds hierarchical, but the ranks are often given to everyone upon the accession of the emperor, or through good harvest, etc. Merit-based promotions took place as well. It is important to remember that pre-modern economies were not run by money, but by status.

Question: Where were the temples located?
Answer: There was no organized religious activity prior to 150 CE. What you had was imperial cults, but nothing like present-day Buddhism. The closest things to temples were the imperial and ancestor shrines. Buddhism comes in the first century BCE, but doesn’t catch the elite consciousness until later.

Question: Was city planning inspired by feng shui?
Answer: We don’t know when this started. By 500 AD, yes, it was cosmologically based. A 6th-century text tells us that Han Chang’an was done so as well, but we don’t believe it. The earliest traditions were pretty much in the realm of legend and lore.

Question: Did the emperors change residences with seasons?
Answer: There was talk about the emperors changing residences; what is referred to, however, is that they changed residences within the actual home. They aren’t changing geographic locations. This is following the cosmic orders.

Question: Is there any information about gender roles?
Answer: Yes, soon there will be more on this. By next year, the new supplement to the Cambridge History of China will be out. The best place is Michael Bowie, Daily Life in Han China. That would work pretty well for most of imperial China…we think of vast aristocracies, but that’s not accurate. The Emperor seems to have been responsible for the economic livelihood of his people

Question: What is rammed earth?
Answer: You build a wooden frame, put earth in it, and ram it in there. This makes soil into a compacted base, and that compacted base is virtually stone. In areas covered by this loess soil, the earth can be made into virtual rocks. Rammed earth was always used for platforms of Chinese buildings.

The Built World of the Incas
Jean-Pierre Protzen, College of Environmental Design, UCB
(Summarized by Robert Nelson)

When most people think about the Incas, they think about Machu Picchu—the beauty of its natural scenery, the unity of its architecture, gives it unsurpassed harmony, and the perfection of the stone masonry is exquisite. It rivals the best of any civilization.

The Incas were a remarkable people who emerged around Cuzco around 1200 AD. For about 200 years, they remained within its confines, governing an agricultural state of minor importance. It was not until

about 1438 that they embarked on an unprecedented empire-building enterprise in the relatively short time until the Spanish conquest in 1532. They assembled the largest empire the New World ever saw, which stretched from Ecuador to Chile, west to the Pacific Coast, East to the Amazon basin and into the Argentine Pampas. Its greatest length was about 4000 km, or the equivalent of the distance from Cairo to Moscow. The Incas are often compared to the Romans for military exploits and as administrators, agronomists, and architects. The Incas laced their empire with an extensive road network, estimated at about 45,000 km in length. The major highway was at the back of the Andes along the coast, but there were numerous others. On this map, I would like you to remember Tambo Colorado and Cuzco. The roads were paved or cut out of bedrock, steep grades were overcome by stairs, obstacles were tunneled through, and sheer cliffs were crossed with daring structures and rivers with suspension bridges.

To gain much agricultural land, the Incas like their ancestors terraced entire hillsides. It was a major intervention into the landscape, but the intervention did not destroy the landscape, it enhanced it. To protect agricultural lands, they straightened out rivers. To irrigate, they built thousands of lines of canals. To conserve the fruits of their labor, they build innumerable storehouses all over the Incan Empire. Now, my initial fascination was with the awesome feat of their stone masons. They had no iron tools and no mortar, but made absolute perfect fits between huge stones. They put them together without mortar, and their precision defies imagination. How the Incas did this is a subject of another lecture. This one is not about construction techniques, but about cities.

Ollantaytambo

Now, I did much of my research on Inca quarrying and stone-cutting techniques in Ollantaytambo near Machu Picchu. The more time I spent there, the more I became intrigued by the complex as a whole, namely, the various components and their temporal and functional relationships to one another. The site reveals good understanding of morphology, geology, and imagination. It reflects a rationality of deliberate decision; in other words, a plan or a design. People still live there, and use the site as it was used in Inca times. An art historian once called it the longest and best preserved Inca settlement. It sits in a valley sacred to the Incas (the slide shows all the infrastructural elements at the mouth of the valley, well connected with the road network coming from Cuzco. There are two roads, one on each side of the river. The river here has been diverted to change directions. At both ends we see control posts, one on the left, one on the right. A bridge close to the settlement in the Ollantaytambo connects the tow roads. The pier and the abutments are the originals. There is terracing climbing the foot of the hills all along the valley. There is also one rather intriguing staircase that climbs about 700 meters, which allows farmers to climb the mountain and exploit different altitudes for their agricultural potential. At the bottom it is warm, so they grew beans and corn. Higher up, they planted potatoes, which are resistant to cold. There is one particular set of terraces opposite the town that are intriguing because they are irrigated with a well-situated cornice, which is dry most of the year. It has a catching basin that runs year-round. In the sunken valleys, you will find sunken terraces, averaging 2°F higher than elsewhere. So they exploited these areas for special crops. On the other side of the valley there is an old riverbed surrounded by fancy walls. You see the remains of the walk, and at the very end of it you see a structure which some have identified as a palace of a local lord. There is a site further up the river where someone experimented with crops that did not belong at this end of the river.

Ollantaytambo has many storehouses—high, cool, and windy places that are ventilated, and perhaps provide protection from predators. Storing crops here was a part of a primitive freeze-drying technique that helped to preserve crops. There is a bench in the back that was drained and ventilated. The unit was dry and appropriate for storing food (probably maize) but archaeologists have never found traces of this practice. Another type of storage arrangement was much smaller, rectangular or square, and had an opening at the bottom where the buildings were separated from each other for ventilation to keep food dry. There was also a quarry, about 1000 meters above the valley floor. This implies an enormous infrastructure serving the town.

Ollantaytambo is situated at the mouth of the river valley, and it uses very little land. You see the Inca town situated on longitudinal roads and latitudinal roads. It forms a square-like shape. If you map only the Inca parts, you find that all of this part (the square section) is the original Inca town. One can pretty much reconstruct the rigorous plan; the streets are parallel, with transverse streets at right angles—90 degrees, 88 degrees, 86 degrees—perfectly oriented to an imaginary point. They had a way of surveying, but we don’t know how. The end of the town, in Inca times, was marked with water channels. The town was supplied with water like this until 1982. Streets ending in water channeles were the ones that gave access to city blocks.

As you have seen on the map, part of the town was built in a very regular fashion. In town, at the fifth transfer point, you see a change in architecture: there is cut stone in the lower, whole stone in the upper. The significance is that Andean communities are even today separated into two sections and have two mayors, as is represented here in the architecture. This system of communities being divided into upper and lower parts probably predated the Incas. The lower parts of town are built up in these courtyard structures in buildings called canchas, which is a word of Incan origin. Two canchas back to back make one city wall. There was no communication between sides, with a two-story building dividing them. The cancha was entered through a building that was open to the court. We find two opposite symmetrical buildings, with the two-story one in the middle. On either side, there were symmetrical buildings, all built the same. The original doorway was much higher than the current one. The roof is steep, and the original gables are still there. The courtyards were left open, and animals were herded into them and kept there. There is still a stairway that leads to the second story of the two-story building. When you look back, you see the entrance.

Now, Ollantaytambo has terraced hills, and each of the settlements have a sort of residential area, but there were also ceremonial centers, and this is the most important one here. When you climb the stairs, you see unfinished monoliths. This one is the Temple of the Sun. At the bottom of the temple hill, there are these hard rock faces all over the place. These are really amazing to see; we don’t know how they were used. They were described as wachas, or holy cities. There were obviously some sacrifices, but we don’t know why or how many. You see how the whole face is carved out of the hillside. There is also carved stone laying around everywhere. There are also wachas distributed throughout the landscape. Here we find all the elements of a city: urban planning, water, ceremonial center, etc.

Cuzco

Now we should turn our attention to Cuzco. Many people have argued that because the previous city was so well drawn, we want to see if that prototype really holds. The Incan Cuzco was situated between two rivers, but in Incan times, there were canals that directed the river flow. Although Cuzco was burned down by the Incas themselves in 1535–36 and was rebuilt by the Spaniards as a Christian town, we can still reconstruct the Inca town by its well-preserved walls. Sometimes the whole street was preserved, sometimes only sections of it. We can reconstruct the shape of the Inca town here—we see the streets and the remaining walls, more walls than are shown on this plan. There was a plaza that was open on one side, and like Ollantaytambo we have a regular street pattern, but not so much as in Ollantaytambo because it had to be squeezed between these two rivers. The grid was broken to fit the landscape.

Question: So the Spanish maintained the center, and built out from there (and put in cathedrals)?
Answer: Yes, here is a cathedral and here is a Jesuit church. One interesting fact is that, in Inca times, sand was brought from the Pacific to cover the plaza. The Spanish wanted it used for mortars, which nearly caused another rebellion. Up here, dominating the town is a Spanish structure—not a fortress, but a ceremonial center.

Question: So the ceremonial place was outside the city?
Answer: Yes, but there were also ceremonial centers in the middle of the city. In Ollantaytambo there was also one in the city. There is some ethnographic evidence that at least in their minds it might have looked like a ceremonial site.

So there was the center, the ceremonial outside, and then the Coricangha (Temple of the Sun). These walls were restored and formed into the Dominican church and monastery. In 1950, the monastery was damaged in an earthquake. The Spanish section was damaged, the Inca section was not. An interesting thing is that there were imaginary lines coming from the coricangha, and here they are all listed. One of the Spanish chroniclers named all these lines; there were wachas on each one of them, and he named every one along the line. Each three lines together were charged to two families, one noble and one non-noble, to maintain the shrine and make sure the proper ceremonies were performed. There was a calendar to indicate which ceremonies should be performed at what time. Following the wachas around gives you another way to understand the city. Some were in the city themselves; some were out in the countryside.

Question: When you look at that outcrop, there is no identification that this is a shrine in particular
Answer: No, we know because the line leads to it.

Tambo Colorado

Ollantaytambo was a private city, Cuzco was the capital, and Tambo Colorado was an administrative town. It does not fit anything we described. It has a plaza, and is built out from the sides. It is called Tambo Colorado because it was painted. It is amazingly well preserved, and the colors are still there to be seen. It is one of the best-preserved Incan sites along the coast. There was no street pattern; a huge plaza was built up on three sides. This [indicating a building on the slide] is referred to as the northern palace. This resembles a cancha, with a single entrance and buildings all around. Tambo Colorado was built in a very tightly structured hierarchy. Come into the front, and there is this cancha, then you go into a double doorway, and if you go left or right, you come to another plaza with double-jambed doorways. There you have two compounds, but it is a roundabout trip to get to them all. It is a very tightly controlled hierarchy, with controlled access. It does have a number of features, like waterworks, found within the compounds as at any other place. Yet it also was different, not just in layout, but in incorporating elements of coastal, rather than Inca, origin. When the Incas conquered people, they took elements of their architecture. We recognize the windows and the doors as Inca, but with new elements incorporated into it.

Question: Is there any evidence that this was built on another city?
Answer: No; this was not necessarily virgin land, but it was relatively untouched. There were lots of settlements in the surrounding areas, a dense population, but no city on that site.

Question: What is a double-jambed doorway?
Answer: There is a recessed second frame, and it never led into a room or building, but always into other compounds. It signifies a higher status for people.

Machu Picchu

A colleague of mine thought Machu Picchu was the prototype of an organically grown city, but I thought he was wrong, because there is a grid. The roads either follow the contour lines, or they cross at right angles, but there was a plan. That is another element of the planning is this division. There were canchas, courtyards, but these canchas had to be squeezed in because of the land. There were also water-works at Machu Picchu.

Most tourists come up a switchback highway, then they go to the hotel and the site. The Inca did not come this way. The old Inca road runs along the ridge, and you miss a very important feature of the city if you don’t come this way. You would have come from Cuzco through the jungle on the highway, and would not have seen much as you went along. There is a structure from which you would discover Machu Picchu for the first time. As you go away from that new point, you pass by another control place, but your sight is taken away from it, and you don’t see Machu Picchu anymore until you come to another cliff and there it is.

If you come in on the old Inca road, the sight of the city is taken away again, but when you go down and approach the main entrance, what do you see there? There is one peak, there are two peaks, and these frame the city. This is no accident. As you go through a gate toward the temple plaza, there is the Temple of the Three Windows, and if you look through the center window, another mountain is framed. This mountain has a platform, from which you can look back towards the city. As you turn around in that plaza toward the sun, on a good day, you see in plain sight a mountain range that has several sacred peaks. Then you are looking out on the snowy peaks, and you go up some stairs and you come to a place where you see the Intiwatana hitching post. It is sort of an observatory, with certain shadows cast at certain times of years lining up with edges, and it certainly has something to do with the sun. When you are up there and you look back through one of the windows, you see Machu Picchu peak. These amazing features (there are also such features at Ollantaytambo) are well and significantly integrated into the layout of the place. The Incas had a great reverence for mother earth, and as I said things could become sacred, objects of worship. Therefore the landscape was a part of the structure. It lacks those ideas that we have of built cities like diversity of economic and social structures, large populations, which may have existed in Cuzco but only marginally. There was not much of a public life, although there were ceremonies on plazas; there is nothing like people going to the forum in Rome. I wanted to show this as a way of integrating nature into the city.

Walking in the City: Mapping St. Petersburg circa 1910
Stiliana Milkova, Comparative Literature Department, UCB
(Summarized by Robert Nelson)
(Complete paper also available here.)

Project Website: http://stpetersburg.berkeley.edu

Reading Literature with the help of a city map has become a common teaching practice. Many 19th-century novels require knowledge of a map, including but not limited those of Dickens and Flaubert. The knowledge of urban space has informed literary production in the West. Therefore, using a map to get insight into the diurnal activities of a city’s inhabitants is crucial to a better understanding of Western literature. One can gain insight by plotting characters’ lives and deaths, food sources, and entertainment. This project traces such life-itineraries by going through the city of St. Petersburg, using a city map as a conceptual tool in research.

First, a brief account of the appearance of St. Petersburg. Its history coincides with that of the Russian Empire, but the city sprang primarily from the vision of one man. In 1703, Peter the