Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

In general, towns are defined by archaeologists as occupying 30 hectares or less, whereas cities are 31 hectares and more. In the case of Uruk, by the time its wall was built, it occupied about 5.5 square kilometres, roughly 2.5 kilometres by 3.0 kilometres at its most extended points but in a rough diamond shape. With a population density of around 100–200 inhabitants per 1,000 square metres, this would give a total head-count of 27,500–55,000. The built-up area of Ur occupied 100 acres (roughly 41 hectares) with perhaps 24,000 inhabitants. Its surrounding territory of 4 square miles ‘may have been occupied by half a million people . . . Girsu, a site adjacent to and apparently part of Lagash, is said to have had 36,000 males which means a population of 80,000–100,000.’¹² All this compares favourably with Athens, c. 500 BC, which covered an area of 2.5 square kilometres, or Jerusalem at the time of Christ which was but 1 square kilometre. Rome at the time of Hadrian was only twice as large as Uruk had been three thousand years earlier.¹³ A measure of the rapidity of the change at this time can be had from the survey reported by Hans Nissen which shows that at the end of the fourth millennium rural settlements outnumbered urban ones by the ratio of 4:1. Six hundred years later – i.e., the middle of the third millennium – that ratio had reversed completely and was now 9:1 in favour of the larger urban sites.¹⁴ By this time Uruk was the centre of a ‘hinterland’, an essentially rural area under its influence, which extended roughly 12–15 kilometres around it. Next to this was an area some 2–3 kilometres wide which showed no influence, and then began the hinterland of the next city, in this case Umma.¹⁵ There were at least twenty cities of this kind in Mesopotamia.

The achievements of these cities and city-states were astonishing and endured for some twenty-six centuries, with a remarkable number of innovations being introduced which created much of the world as we know it and live it. It was in Babylonia that music, medicine and mathematics were developed, where the first libraries were created, the first maps drawn, where chemistry, botany and zoology were conceived. At least, we assume that is so. Babylon is the home of so many ‘firsts’ because it is also the place where writing was invented and therefore we know about Babylon in a way that we do not know history before then.

Excavations have shown that these early urban areas were usually divided into three. There was an inner city with its own walls, inside which were found the temples of the city’s gods, plus the palace of the ruler/administrator/religious leader and a number of private houses. The suburbs consisted of much smaller houses, communal gardens and cattle pens, providing day-to-day produce and support for the citizens. Finally, there was a commercial centre. Though called the ‘harbour’, this area was where overland commerce was handled and where foreign as well as native merchants lived. The very names of cities are believed in many cases to have referred to their visual appearance.¹⁶

In these first cities, much life revolved around the temple. People associated with the cult were the most prominent members of society.¹⁷ At Eridu and Uruk the existence of temple platforms shows that there was already sufficient communal organisation to construct such buildings – after the megaliths these are the next great examples of monumental architecture.¹⁸ As time went by, these platforms were raised ever higher, eventually becoming stepped or terraced towers crowned by shrines. These are known as ziggurats, a word based on the Assyrian, and probably on an earlier Akkadian term, zigguaratu, meaning summit or mountain top.¹⁹ This increasingly elaborate structure had to be maintained, which required a highly organised cult.

The temples were so important – and so large – that they played a central role in the economic life of the early cities. Records from the temple of Baba (or Bau), a goddess of Lagash, show that shortly before 2400 BC the temple estates were more than a square mile in extent. The land was used for every kind of agricultural purpose and supported as many as 1,200 people in the service of the temple. There were specialist bakers, brewers, wool workers, spinners and weavers, as well as slaves and an administrative staff.²⁰ The tenant farmers were not slaves exactly; instead, their relation to the temple seems to have been an early form of feudalism.²¹ In addition to the new specialisations already mentioned, we may include the barber, the jeweller or metalworker, the costumier and cloth merchant, the laundryman, the brick makers, the ornamental gardener, the ferryman, the ‘sellers of songs’ and the artist. From our point of view the most important specialist was the scribe.