For most of human—i.e. Homo sapiens—history, people lived in relatively small groups who were engaged in hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plants. The common image of these early human bands describes them as nomadic; they travel from resource area to resource area timing their travels to arrive when the food resources are abundant. According to this view, the people are basically campers who do not devote a lot of time and energy to building homes and other structures. However, there are ecological regions with abundant natural resources which enabled early hunting-fishing-gathering people to establish relatively permanent villages.
With the development of agriculture, the carrying capacity of the land was increased, which allowed larger groups of people to live together in permanent towns and villages. This set the stage for urbanization. Cities are, of course, the primary characteristic of urbanization and archaeologists often define cities as having a large population—over 5,000 people—living in a relatively small space. The space within a city is largely residential with some areas used for administrative, religious, and craft purposes. The agricultural fields which supply food for the city’s inhabitants are outside of the city and may be some distance from the city.
Archaeologists first studied the emergence of ancient cities in Mesopotamia and from those studies developed models of urbanization. According to this model, the first city was the Sumerian settlement of Uruk on the banks of the Euphrates Rivers. Uruk was originally settled as a village before 4000 BCE and over the next five centuries evolved into a city. In her book The Ancient Near East: A Very Short Introduction, Amanda Podany reports:
“Uruk in 3100 BCE was vastly bigger than any community that had existed before, not just in Mesopotamia but, as far as we know, anywhere. It was enclosed by a city wall ten kilometers around, and may have had a population of as many as twenty-five thousand.”
In an article in Archaeology, Megan Gannon reports:
“At its peak, some 50,000 people, including nobles, artisans, merchants, and slaves, are thought to have lived within the city’s mudbrick walls, which enclosed two square miles. This large urban population existed thanks in part to an agricultural surplus managed by a centralized bureaucracy that tracked economic transactions on cuneiform tablets.”
While farming made cities with their larger populations possible, it should be noted that people had been farming for about 5,000 years before the first cities emerged. The emergence of cities is correlated with an intensification of agriculture and in Mesopotamia this intensification was based on irrigation, the plow, and engineered fields. Agricultural intensification generated a food surplus which was used to feed non-farmers. In an article in Current World Archaeology, Neil Faulkner puts it this way:
“What is urbanism? It is an accumulation of surplus wealth invested in infrastructure and facilities capable of supporting a large agglomeration of people in a single central place.”
The concept that the development of cities constituted an urban revolution was first suggested by archaeologist V. Gordon Childe. In his chapter on cultural complexity in The Oxford Handbook of Archaeology, Ian Morris writes:
“Childe wanted to explain the rise of Old World cities in vaguely Marxist terms, and focused on relevant traits.”
Some of the traits commonly associated with urbanization are briefly described below.
Social Inequality
While cities exist because of the surplus food and wealth generated by intensive agriculture, this surplus is not equally shared but is controlled by an elite group. One of the features of the urban revolution is the transition from the egalitarian hunting and gathering groups and the pre-urban farming villages into a social system based on social stratification. In the archaeological record social stratification is indicated by high-status burials and by the existence of elite residences, such as palaces.
Social inequality involves the development of a hierarchical social class system in which an elite occupies the highest level while the farmers, who are actually producing the food, occupy a lower level. In between are the specialists, people who are not actively engaged in producing food. These specialists may include carpenters, bricklayers, masons, potters, storekeepers, scribes, and so on. In his 1936 book Man Makes Himself, V. Gordon Childe writes:
“Priests, officials, merchants, artisans, and soldiers should represent new classes that, as classes, could find no livelihood in a self-sufficing food-producing community, still less in a band of hunters.”
With occupational specialization there is also an increase in material culture, with different kinds of goods, some of which reflect the social status of their owners. With regard to occupational specialization at Uruk, Robert Wenke, in his book Patterns in Prehistory: Mankind’s First Three Million Years, reports:
“Potters, using molds and mass-production techniques, turned out enormous quantities of pottery, including both highly decorated specialized wares and crude utilitarian forms.”
Closely associated with social stratification and occupational specialization was the development of trade. While trade with other peoples had been carried on throughout most of human existence, with the emergence of urbanization, regular long-distance and large-volume trade became an important feature of cities. Imported goods were often prestige items for the social elite.
Centralized Government
Also associated with the urban revolution is the emergence of a central government, often authoritarian. Some scholars feel that this centralized government was needed to organize work parties for projects such as irrigation systems and engineered fields, which were essential to intensive agriculture.
In the model of urban revolution envisioned by V. Gordon Childe, a ruling elite controls the mass of workers and then the surplus produced by these workers would then be redistributed to the people, with the elites getting more than the common people.
The development of a centralized government resulted in the concept of kingship. Amanda Podany writes:
“Around 2900 BCE, hereditary kingship developed in Mesopotamia as—to the minds of the people—the best way to administer a region and its population.”
The idea of a ruling family line seemed so natural that its invention was attributed to the gods. In his book Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study, Bruce Trigger puts it this way:
“The Sumarians believed that the gods had invented kingship as the most effective means for governing themselves and had then transmitted it to humans.”
While many of the early cities were governed by kingship, the archaeological evidence suggests that this may not have been universally true. In Mexico, the Maya city of Chichén Itzá was founded about 600 CE and was flourishing by 900 CE, a time when many other Mayan cities were collapsing. The city does not appear to have had a royal ruler. In an article in American Archaeology, Michael Bawaya reports:
“There’s also no king or queen celebrated in Chichén Itzá’s iconography, unlike other Classic-period Maya sites.”
In the ancient Mesopotamian cities, writing seemed to have evolved to facilitate record-keeping by city administrators and merchants. This led to an early hypothesis that writing was not only an important characteristic of early cities but that writing first functioned as an administrative tool. However, the evolution of writing in other areas, such as Mesoamerica and China, does not support this hypothesis. Furthermore, not all cities developed writing: Cahokia in North America was a city without writing.
Religion
One of the central features of urbanism is hierarchy, a worldview in which certain individuals or groups of people are superior to others. Hierarchy is essential for both the social class system and the centralized governments that were developed in cities. In a similar fashion, religion had to become hierarchical so that it could reinforce the validity of kings and elites.
Religion validates social and economic structures. In his book Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study, Bruce Trigger writes:
“Many anthropologists have treated the religions of early civilizations as theocracies, maintaining the upper classes used assertions of supernatural support to enhance their authority and frighten the lower classes into obeying them. Instead, however, we find a view of cosmic process in which farmers produced food to sustain themselves, the upper classes, and the gods, the gods sustained an environment in which crops would be grown, and the upper classes maintained order, which permitted the populations to produce food, and played a key role in channeling energy back into the supernatural realm through sacrifice.”
Bruce Trigger also writes:
“By assigning farmers, rulers, and gods significant roles in maintaining the cosmic order, this view imposed more limitations on the exploitative behaviour of the upper classes that enhanced the viability of society. Since there had been no need for religious beliefs of this sort prior to the development of larger, class-based societies, their cross-cultural uniformity in early civilizations suggests that they were products of practical reason as it related to some universal forms of self-interest.”
In many of the early cities, religious temples controlled surplus food: the temple would store the food and then distribute it to the people during festivals and to workers engaged in public works.
In the animistic worldviews of the early hunting and gathering bands and farming villages, certain places were associated with spiritual power. As these spiritual entities evolved into gods, it was common for early cities to be identified with these local gods. In his entry on Sumer and Akkad in The Oxford Companion to Archaeology James Armstrong writes:
“Each city was the property of a god; for example, Uruk belonged to Inanna, goddess of love and war, while Ur served Nanna, the moon god. There were, of course, temples to other gods in each city as well. The temples, particularly in Sumer, owned much of the agricultural land—in some cases, most of it—and thus played a major economic role in the lives of the cities and the citizens.”
In his chapter in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, F.A.M. Wiggermann writes:
“Mesopotamian theology defined the gods as rulers, human beings as their servants, and nature as an object to be managed for the profit of both.”
Mesopotamian kings were closely associated with the gods and common people were expected to donate food and labor to the temples in which the gods lived. F.A.M. Wiggermann reports:
“Since to supply the gods with their needs was the only purpose of the state and the justification for its survival, to do so was an obligation that could not be avoided. Avoidance was high treason; it jeopardized peace, prosperity, and life. It was the cult, supervised by the ruler, that met this obligation.”
In his chapter on Mesopotamia in The Grammar of the Ancient World, Andrew Kirk puts it this way:
“The Mesopotamians would not recognize the distinction between religion and secularism, and the service of the city god was not so much a matter of religious faith as simply the central fact that structured their lives.”
Warfare
Urbanization brings with it warfare--the organized, collective, and destructive violence between groups. While interpersonal violence has been a part of human societies for a very long time, warfare itself is fairly recent and seems to be a side effect of agriculture and the rise of cities. In their textbook Anthropology: The Human Challenge, William Haviland, Haral Prins, Dana Walrath, and Bunny McBride write:
“Among food foragers with their uncentralized political systems, violence may erupt sporadically, but warfare was all but unknown until recent times.”
In her book Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, Karen Armstrong writes:
“Hunter-gatherers could not afford the organized violence that we call war, because warfare requires large armies, sustained leadership, and economic resources that were far beyond their reach.”
Urbanized warfare evolved as a way of obtaining more land that could be farmed to produce food surpluses for the city and a way of obtaining more people, both slaves and peasants, whose labor could be used in monumental building projects such as digging irrigation canals, constructing temples, and building palaces for the ruling elite.
Exceptions
For much of the twentieth century, archaeologists and other researchers have viewed the process of urbanization as including social stratification, monumental architecture, writing, centralized governments, and so on. Megan Gannon writes:
“Archaeologists have traditionally envisioned the centralization of government, the invention of complex administrative systems, and the development of social inequality to be essential prerequisites of urban centers.”
As our understanding of the archaeological recording has expanded through new techniques and new sites, we have found some exceptions to this traditional view of urbanization.
In the Ukraine, for example, there are megasites which had populations of as many as 20,000 people, thus placing them in the category of “cities” if we define a city as a settlement with 5,000 or more people. Megan Gannon reports:
“Archaeologists believe that the farmers who lived in these huge settlements thrived without rulers, without monuments, and without wealth disparities, all elements that were present at Uruk and other early cities.”
In the Ukraine, the megasites of Cucuteni-Trypilla flourished from about 5000 BCE until 2800 BCE (the Copper Age) and are thus somewhat earlier than Uruk and other Mesopotamian cities. Furthermore, the sites were not just a series of sprawling farming villages but seemed to have been carefully planned from the beginning.
Monumental architecture in the form of temples, pyramids, ziggurats, and other structures has often attracted archaeologists and others to study ancient cities. Considered by many people to be one of the defining characteristics of urbanization, monumental architecture may be lacking in some cities. Megan Gannon writes:
“While imposing central temple complexes anchored cities such as Uruk, a typical Trypilla megasite featured an empty space in the middle surrounded by thousands of identical homes arranged in concentric rings.”
More Human Origins
Human Origins: Cultural Evolution
Human Origins: Domesticating Fire
Human Origins: Pseudo-Archaeology
Human Origins: Clothing
Human Origins: Rock Art as Proto-Writing
Human Origins: Protolanguage
Human Origins: Sexual Dimorphism
Human Origins: Fossil Evidence