THE OLD WORLD

First signs

The pristine cities and earliest empires test our aspiration to frame the story of the city in a theoretical perspective. The logic of the data suggests concentration on Sumeria and China, with glances at striking cases: Jericho and Çatal Hüyük, and in the New World a complementary focus on Teotihuacan and the Maya, with passing glances at Andean valleys and highlands, Olmec and Monte Alban. The urban civilization of the Indus valley will be mentioned briefly, because little that is illuminating and uncontested can be said about it.

Doubtless many heroic attempts were made, few of which may ever be known to us. The astonishingly early settlements of the eighth millennium BC, at the ‘walled oasis town’ of Jericho, in Palestine; Hacilar and Çatal Hüyük in the Konya plain of south central Anatolia and Jarmo in the foothills east of the Tigris stand out before the successful establishment of continuous urban settlement. Jericho with its extraordinary spring in the midst of arid terrain seems to have attracted unusual settlement by mesolithic hunters in flimsy huts even in the tenth millennium and by the ninth produced a massive stone wall with at least one tower, and round, domed, brick houses, which Kenyon (1957, 1981) claims as a town of 2,000 to 3,000 people, without pottery, but with the earliest wheat and barley known and perhaps the necessity of irrigation.