Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

In the classical definition, civilisation consists of three or more of the following: cities, writing, the specialisation of occupations, monumental architecture, the formation of capital.² But this, while not wrong, ignores the underlying principle. Sometime in the late fourth millennium BC, people came together to live in large cities. The transition transformed human experience for the new conditions required men and women to co-operate in ways they never had before. It was this close contiguity, this new face-to-face style of cohabitation, that explained the proliferation of new ideas, particularly in the basic tools for living together – writing, law, bureaucracy, specialised occupations, education, weights and measures.

According to research published in the autumn of 2004, the first urban sites were Tell Brak and Tell Hamoukar in northern Mesopotamia, on the Iraq–Syria border, dated to just before 4000 BC. They had rows of brick ovens for preparing food on an industrial scale and numerous ‘seal stamps’ used to keep track of goods and to ‘lock’ doors. But they were relatively small – Hamoukar was twelve hectares – and the first cities proper emerged further south in Mesopotamia about 3400 BC. These sites included Eridu, Uruk, Ur, Umma, Lagash and Shuruppak (more or less in that order). By the end of the third millennium BC, 90 per cent of southern Mesopotamia was living in urban areas.³ These cities were very large: Uruk, for example, had a population of 50,000. Why did they develop and what was the experience like? Several reasons have been put forward for the development of cities, the most obvious of which is security. But this argument can no longer be supported, and for three reasons. In the first place, there are some large ancient cities – notably in West Africa (such as in Mali) – that never developed walls. Second, even in the Middle East, where city walls were sometimes vast and very elaborate, the walls came after the initial settlement. At Uruk, for example, the city had been largely formed around 3200 BC, but the walls were not built until roughly 2900 BC. (On the other hand, Uru means a walled area.⁴) Finally, there is a much more convincing explanation, with a great deal of empirical support.