Title: Urban legends ,
By:
Database: Academic Search Premier
Section: CIVILISATION
Urban legends
Contents
Model city
Birth of a bureaucracy
Long thought to be the world's first city dwellers, the citizens of ancient Uruk now face competition from some out-of-towners.
FROM far away across the plain it looks rather
undistinguished, a squat, brown hill that barely tops the horizon. But drive
closer and it quickly becomes apparent that this is no minor geological
feature. Tell Brak is not a hill but a mountainous artificial structure, the
remains of thousands of years of human habitation layered one over the other.
Similar mounds, or tells, can be found across the
For one thing, it is the site of the ancient city of
But as impressive as these credentials are, they are not what makes this bit of raised earth on the Syrian plain so special. For that you need to cross the threshold of recorded history and go back more than 6000 years, to a time before writing was invented and when stone tools had yet to be fully displaced by metal. Because if the archaeologists excavating the site are right, Tell Brak is the world's oldest known city.
To some this claim is nothing short of heresy. It would be
like discovering a Gothic cathedral dating from the Dark Ages in
According to the orthodox view, the world's first cities
originated in about 3500 BC more than 600 kilometres south-east of Tell Brak, a
huge distance in a world without domesticated horses or even wheels. The daddy
of them all is the Sumerian city of
"You'd recognise it as a city," says Paul Collins,
an expert in the ancient
There also has to be evidence of functional
"zoning" clear differentiation between administrative centres,
residential quarters, markets and so on. Fortification, too, is important, as
it indicates wealth that is worth defending. By 3500 BC Uruk has all of these
in spades. Earlier large settlements, such as 7th-millennium BC Çatalhöyük in
modern-day
Model city
Uruk isn't just considered the first true city. It is also
seen as the origin of the wave of urbanisation that swept across
But in the past couple of decades, the focus has shifted to
the supposedly backward provinces of northern
One of those archaeologists is McGuire Gibson of the
But in 1999, Gibson's team began excavation at Hamoukar, and over three digging seasons has unearthed evidence that suggests otherwise. Hamoukar is unusual in that deposits from the early 4th millennium BC are readily accessible on site. At most tell sites, this layer is deeply buried under others that have yet to be excavated. Deposits from this period are naturally of great interest to students of early urbanism, and Hamoukar's have not disappointed. In fact, they suggest that the site had already attained an advanced state of urbanisation before Uruk started throwing its weight around.
Even as early as 3700 BC, Gibson believes, Hamoukar covered about 12 hectares and was enclosed by a defensive city wall. Inside the wall are the remains of a large building containing a series of beehive-shaped mud brick ovens. The size of these ovens suggests they were used for preparing food on an industrial scale. This was a large, secular and possibly public building a canteen of some kind.
The team also found numerous kinds of "seal stamps", which were used to impress a symbol on wet pieces of clay or bitumen in order to keep track of goods or "lock" doors. Seal stamps are well known from later sites in southern Mesopotamia, including Uruk, and are widely accepted as solid evidence of urbanism because they indicate that systems of accounting, administration and hierarchies of responsibility were in place.
Those from Hamoukar are just as convincing, says Gibson. They come in several different sizes and styles, ranging from simple criss-cross patterns to figurative scenes featuring lions, leopards, fish and birds. Impressions of the seals are found on doors and containers. The more elaborate seals were probably reserved for officials doing important jobs, while the simple ones were like everyday rubber stamps.
Back in 3700 BC, then, Hamoukar already had many of the telltale features of early urban life. Yet there is no sign of a southern influence: Uruk-style pottery only starts showing up around 3200 BC. It seems as though the people of Tell Hamoukar were living in a city, independent of Uruk and possibly even unaware of its existence, at least 500 years before cities supposedly arrived in their area. "Hamoukar is the earliest city at the moment," says Gibson.
Perhaps not for long. Nearby at Tell Brak, an even more spectacular story is unfolding. Brak sits at a dominant position at a river crossing on a major trading route from the Tigris valley to the mineral wealth of Anatolia. The mound itself is huge, attesting to lengthy occupation, as befits such a strategically important site.
Brak was first excavated in 1937, and was reopened in 1976 by David and Joan Dates, a husband-and-wife team from the University of Cambridge. Much of the digging has concentrated on the 2nd and late 3rd millennia BC, largely because this is what is accessible. "You can't just bulldoze later occupation out of the way," explains Joan Dates, now of the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research at Cambridge.
But in 1981 the team caught a glimpse of the distant past. Under the foundations of a city wall from the 2nd millennium BC, close to the northern edge of the mound, they stumbled across some deposits dating from about 3000 BC. It seemed that the people who built the wall had done what the archaeologists could not and cleared away at least a thousand years' worth of debris.
It took another 10 years to raise the funds to open a new area of excavations beneath the deposits under the wall. But when they did, they discovered a complete and relatively undisturbed record of the 4th millennium BC and earlier the only lengthy record of this period in all of Mesopotamia, including Uruk. And right at the bottom the team struck gold. They found the remains of a spectacularly large building, with walls a metre and a half thick and a huge doorway opening out onto a courtyard. When they dated the building they came up with the astonishing figure of late 5th millennium BC earlier than 4000 BC.
Large buildings are not unknown from this time, but they are all temples, and none is on the same scale. And this clearly wasn't a temple. It was a large, secular building.
Birth of a bureaucracy
The past couple of field seasons at Brak have revealed more clues to the building's purpose. To the west the team found a cluster of workshops full of bone and stone tools. And next to the building itself, appended to the northern wall on the courtyard side, was a row of small rooms. "They look exactly like the money-changers' or letter-writers' booths you see outside government offices across the Arab world," says Joan Oates. "They're providing services to people who are coming to the building." So what was the building? "This is pure speculation," she says, "but I think it housed some kind of administrative institution, perhaps connected with trade since it lay near the north gate of the city, perhaps a sort of caravanserai."
And there's more. Seal stamps like the ones Gibson found at Hamoukar have also turned up in Brak and other northern sites from the 5th millennium BC. And much of the pottery from the time of the Hamoukar seals bears evidence of some kind of accounting and administration system: sets of repeated symbols imprinted on jars and bowls, for example. Together these suggest that the people of Brak were using complex administrative technology well before Uruk.
At both Hamoukar and Brak, then, archaeologists have uncovered telltale signs of urban life long before it was supposed to have been invented 600 kilometres away. The obvious conclusion is that cities did not originate in southern Mesopotamia in 3500 BC, but earlier, and in the north. "It is hard to see how places like Hamoukar are influenced by southern Mesopotamia," comments Jonathan Tubb, an expert in ancient Syria at the British Museum in London. "You'd say it would have to be the other way round."
But most archaeologists Tubb included agree that the case is not yet closed. "We don't know about the comparable period in the south," explains Joan Oates. It is possible that southern Mesopotamia had fully fledged cities before 4000 BC, but no one has yet dug deep enough to find them. Unfortunately, levels that date this far back are not well preserved at Uruk, at least in the areas excavated before digging was suspended in the late 1980s. Work probably won't resume for several years. In the meantime, archaeologists are hoping that the site has not been looted beyond repair.
To Gibson, a southern origin remains highly plausible. He points out evidence of a "pulse of trading" coming out of southern Mesopotamia about 4500 BC: southern pottery and other artefacts suddenly show up all over the region, as far afield as the Mediterranean and the Arabian peninsula. It's possible, he says, that this exchange of goods also transported urban culture to the Syrian sites now being excavated.
"What's needed is to get back into Iraq and start digging," he says. Both Gibson and Joan Oates point to a site in southern Iraq called Tell el-Oueili, a few kilometres east of Uruk. It, too, has not been touched since the late 1980s, but before it was closed down, excavators found evidence of what Oates says are "strikingly large houses" dating to 6000 BC. "It may be that in 20 years the experts working in Sumer will be saying, we told you so," she says.
"Tell Hamoukar had already attained an advanced state of urbanisation before Uruk started throwing its weight around"
"Archaeologists need to get back to Iraq and start digging. They are hoping the sites have not been looted beyond repair"
Read previous issues of New Scientist at http://archive.newscientist.com
MAP: DAWN OF URBANISATION: Uruk is traditionally seen as the earliest true city, but discoveries further north are changing the picture
PHOTO (COLOR): Tell Brak in modern Syria is the site of what may be the world's oldest known city
PHOTO (COLOR): Ancient Uruk (left) and modern-day Damascus (below) share urban design characteristics
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Investigated by Graham Lawton
Suburban life
Çatalhöyük, an ancient habitation in what is now Turkey, is sometimes referred to as the world's first city, but it doesn't make the cut because it is too unstructured. Instead, Çatalhöyük suggests an answer to an even more profound question in human history: why did our ancestors suddenly decide, after millennia of nomadic existence, to start leading settled lives?
Discovered in 1958 by British archaeologist James Mellaart, then of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, Çatalhöyük quickly captured the world's imagination. It looked like a city, but it was far, far too early: the oldest remains dated to about 7000 BC, firmly in the Stone Age and only 1000 years after the supposed origin of the very first villages. But the evidence was overwhelming: the 13-hectare site contained hundreds of buildings packed tightly together. Mellaart estimated it was home to 10,000 people.
Mellaart's excavations ended more than 30 years ago, but in 1998 the site was reopened by a team led by Ian Hodder, then at the University of Cambridge and now at Stanford University in California. In Hodder's opinion, Çatalhöyük lacks a key feature found in true cities and towns. "In terms of population size and density, it certainly seems to be an urban centre," he says. "But in most towns you get functional differentiation between zones residential, industrial, places of worship, cemeteries and administrative centres. In Çatalhöyük all you have is lots and lots of houses and rubbish dumps."
There is no evidence of public spaces or buildings. The people of Çatalhöyük, it seems, carried out all their activities from home, even burying their dead under the floor. And Çatalhöyük is not a one-off: similar Stone Age "cities", such as Mureybet in Syria, have started to turn up all over the eastern Mediterranean.
This widespread mixture of high population density and the absence of zoning poses a problem for theories of urbanisation. The standard story is that farmers first settled to be near their crops and animals. Eventually, agricultural surpluses allowed some people to give up farming and take up other occupations, such as metalwork. This division of labour led gradually but inexorably to the formation of urban centres, as specialist craftspeople needed to be near others who possessed skills that they lacked. But at Çatalhöyök and elsewhere, people were clearly massing together in large settlements long before division of labour.
"What that means is that people came together for reasons other than the ones we think," says Hodder. But what? "I think people are pulled together by ritual and social factors finding a mate, or having a big feast. People come together for social reasons."
PHOTO (COLOR): At Çatalhöyük, ritual needs could well have pulled people together