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URBAN WORLDS

Extraordinary Cities: Early ‘City-ness’ and the Origins of Agriculture and States

PETER J. TAYLOR

Abstractijur_1101 415..447 I explore the ramifications of applying some recent research on cities, built on the work of Jane Jacobs, to early city development. A communications approach to ‘city-ness’ is offered as a way of understanding early cities as qualitatively new social worlds enabling world-changing processes. Returning to Jacobs’ use of Çatalhöyük to push back the timing of the first cities, I review recent work on the site to support her thesis. In the process I also argue in favour of her controversial thesis of cities inventing agriculture using Sahlin’s ‘stone age economics’. Further, and going beyond Jacobs, I argue that states were also invented in cities and harness evidence for this in Mesopotamian studies. In both cases I provide generic conclusions that briefly indicate examples from other parts of the world.

Introduction: taking cities extremely seriously Let me start with an admission: my main title is a non sequitur. This article is not about a select number of ‘great cities’ — say the cities Sassen (1991) famously designated as ‘global’. Rather I follow Jacobs (1969) in arguing that the inherent complexity of cities distinguishes them from all other settlements: every city is extraordinary. Unlike ‘simple towns’, cities are astonishing in their growth potential and amazing in their resilience. Thus the fundamental premise of this article is that all cities are extraordinary; my title is for emphasis.

The corollary of this premise is that cities are so special that they should be taken extremely seriously. By this I mean moving cities to centre stage to create a city- centric — and therefore a new and very different — geohistorical social science. Thus this article is part of an intellectual experiment in putting cities first for understanding macro-social change. As such it is firmly located in the spirit of Wallerstein’s (1991) oeuvre, in which he reveals the limits of nineteenth-century paradigms to argue for ‘unthinking social science’. It is surprising how influential ideas from a century or more ago still predominate in much of contemporary social science. This is certainly true in urban studies; it is necessary to look no further than The City Reader (LeGates and Stout, 2000), which begins with Gordon Childe’s (1950) evocation of a Mesopotamian first

I acknowledge the sensible comments of two IJURR referees who indicated key improvements that I have made in my argument, and the editors for helpfully steering this unusual article towards publication. I thank Raf Verbruggen for his bibliographic assistance.

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Volume 36.3 May 2012 415–47 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.01101.x

‘urban revolution’ that is suffused in Victorian progressive (as progression) thought. This otherwise splendid volume offers no alternative to Childe’s very traditional ideas on urban origins — I will. Further, since arguments about the coming of cities are closely entwined with the origins of both agriculture and states, these also form part of my subject. I take the urban theory of Jane Jacobs (1969; 1984) and relate it to these key changes in economy and society. Like Soja (2000), I reaffirm Jacobs’ argument that cities are implicated in the invention of agriculture and I go beyond Jacobs to argue that cities are also locales where states were created. This is what I mean by taking cities extremely seriously.

The ‘Urban Worlds’ I review and critique comprise the treatment of cities by archaeologists and ancient historians; they are Childe’s progeny to varying degrees (plus those of some users of central place theory). I bring selected alternative recent considerations of the interrelations of cities to bear on interpretations of the origins of cities. The article divides into three main sections. I begin with my particular take on cities with a description of the concept of ‘city-ness’. This is the process that generates and sustains the unique settlements that are known as cities. It combines intra- and inter-city relations, thereby bringing Jacobs (1969) to the fore to derive a ‘central flow theory’ as an alternative to traditional central place theory for understanding complex inter-city relations (Taylor et al., 2010a). The second section considers Jacobs’ controversial thesis of cities first and then agricultural development. I focus on the debates surrounding interpretations of Çatalhöyük in Anatolia as a very early (pre- Mesopotamian) city, and outline a city-based mechanism for the ‘invention of agriculture’. The third section then moves on to interpretations of the great cities of Mesopotamia in the third and fourth millennia BCE. Separating the concepts of city and state, I trace how the former generated the conditions for ‘invention of the states’, initially as city-states. Both these substantive sections deal in detail with just one large case study. However, the basic argument of the article is that the city-ness process is generic and has developed in several different places at different times. Thus each section has a ‘generic conclusion’ wherein I identify other parts of the world beyond Western Asia where cities may have been instrumental in the development of agriculture and states. In both cases, I am essentially arguing against traditional evolutionary models of social change following the critiques of Yoffee (2005: 8–15) and Gamble (2007: 10–32). The bottom line in my argument is that something as world-changing as agriculture and state formation requires the qualitatively new social worlds of cities as a prerequisite.

City-ness: the overwhelming communication advantage of cities As a form of human settlement, cities exhibit several unique features. Recently Ivan Turok (2009: 14) has presented these very clearly and succinctly:

Cities are complex adaptive systems comprising multitudes of actors, firms, and other organisations forming diverse relationships and evolving together. Frequent face-to-face contact and other cooperative and competitive interactions enabled by proximity help to increase people’s knowledge and skills, to improve their capacity to respond creatively to economic challenges, and to develop new and improved products, processes and services. Other places cannot easily replicate these conditions.

Accepting this position, I will add a further dimension. I interpret my specification of the contemporary world city network (Taylor, 2001; 2004) as representing generic inter-city relations (Taylor et al., 2010a). Cities have always constituted networks interlocked by economic practices: commercial ‘agents’ and merchant ‘houses’ in multiple city locations are historically ubiquitous. Such linking creates an incessant turnover of non-local actors who join in the processes that Turok describes above. The effectiveness

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of the density of interactions he identifies is hugely enhanced by the cosmopolitan nature of a city’s residents and visitors. Thus the complexity of cities includes both internal links (clusters/agglomeration) and external links (networks/connectivity). It is this combination that makes cities so special: to borrow Edward Glaeser’s (2011: 43) memorable phrase, I treat every city as ‘a mass of connected humanity’.

Although the internal and external relations of cities have long been recognized as being necessarily linked — from Harris and Ullman (1945) through Berry (1964) and Amin and Thrift (1992) to Bathelt et al. (2004) — they have been theorized in two largely separate sets of literature. For the last two decades or more, clusters/ agglomeration activities have been a major research focus in urban economics (e.g. Fujita and Thisse, 2002) and the new economic geography (e.g. Storper, 1997). More recently, and on a much smaller scale, network and connectivity activities have been central to understanding cities in globalization (Taylor et al., 2006; 2010b). Jane Jacobs (1969; 1984) is the key urban theorist appearing in both literatures (Krugman, 1995; Taylor, 2004) but, more importantly, she tightly integrates these two strands of work theoretically. She explicitly defines cities as constituting a process generating rapid economic expansion through new work in ever-increasing divisions of labour. This is modelled as an import replacement and shifting mechanism in which agglomeration and network activities are combined. This is what I term ‘city-ness’, to emphasize that I am dealing with a process.

This recent literature on the relational natures of cities, more or less deriving from Jacobs’ oeuvre, has focused on contemporary cities. Jacobs was very historical in her personal remit, however, and there are important studies that have continued historical applications of these ideas. The key examples are: Hall (2000) with his description of leading cities as centres of creativity; Soja’s (2000; 2010) concepts of synekism and regionality of cityspace in urban revolutions; McNeill and McNeill (2003) with their references to cities in the ‘human web’ of world history; Algaze’s (2005a; 2005b) work on internal and external relations in Sumerian cities; LaBianca and Scham’s (2006) applications of Castells’ (1996) space of flows to ‘antiquity’; and Tilly (2010) starting with Uruk to explore city/state relations. These are discursive harnessings of evidence to support the critical importance of cities in historical social change that I draw upon below, but I will start from a slightly different perspective. In the study of cities, both contemporary and historical, there is one common measure that enables comprehensive city comparisons: population size. From modern censuses to the population estimates of historical demographers, this is a basic common denominator that is moreover directly implicated in the various relational concepts that assert the importance of cities. In other words, I can start with a quantitative grounding to illustrate and confirm the qualitative difference a city makes. I use this general availability of city population estimates and combine them with some elementary network theory to suggest a most basic level of city process: city-ness as communication potential.

The difference that size makes: communication potential

Direct measurements that are available for comparison of early settlements are perforce relatively limited. But one common feature that is known is the areal extent of sites. These physical measures have been used to generate indirect measures (estimates) of the populations of early settlements by Tertius Chandler (1987) and George Modelski (2003). From these sources I can use demographic size to infer the type of social world a historical settlement would have encompassed. From population figures it is possible to produce broad relative estimates of the potential quantity of communication that is generated within and through a settlement. These empirical derivations are of theoretical interest because communication is central to both the cluster/agglomeration activities and the network/connectivity activities that define cities as process. In other words the uniqueness of cities as special creative locales, different from all other settlements, should be discernible in terms of measures of potential communications.

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This argument can be summarized and operationalized as four basic ways to measure settlement size (Table 1).

1 Geographical size is the direct measurement of area of a site.

2 Demographic size is derived by assuming a given population density of persons per hectare — see Modelski (2003: 7–12) and Chandler (1987: 6–7) for discussion and limitations of this method of estimation.

3 Sociological size represents potential contacts between people; it relates to economic opportunity and innovation potentials of population concentration. This is what Urry (2003: 52) means when he relates size to complexity. It is also a network measure known as ‘Metcalf’s law’ in which size is computed by the square of the number of members: this defines the total potential number of connections within a given network (Algaze, 2005b: 21).

4 Jacobsean size is how cities are understood from a full communication perspective. This is an attempt to combine internal links with cosmopolitan connections to other cities in a city’s network. Obviously this generates many more and richer contacts than sociological size alone. There is no straightforward way to estimate this addition. Assuming external contacts are equally as important as internal ones, I simply double sociological size to generate this new measure (in network theory terms a ‘double Metcalf’).

The purpose of this exercise is to show how this basic communication approach to city-ness produces such massively large quantitative sizes in communication potentials that early cities can be reasonably represented as completely new social worlds of human experience.

To make this point, I have in Table 1 added a ‘hunter-gatherer group’ that has a population of 150 persons; such groups constituted the common human experience for the vast majority of the modern human species’ existence. The full communication boost that city-ness generates can be found in the fourth column of Table 1. For the smallest settlement in the table, Çatalhöyük, its effective Jacobsean size makes it 5,688 times larger than our ubiquitous passing band. This huge differential illustrates the new

Table 1 The communicative potential of early cities

Examples

Measured Estimated Potential Effective

Geographical Size of Urban Site

Demographic Size

Sociological Size

Jacobsean Size

(hectares)a (200 persons per hectare)b

(square of population)c

(double sociological size)d

Hunter-gatherer band — 150 22,500 —

Çatalhöyük (7000 BCE) 15.5 5,500 30,250,000 60,500,000

Eridu (Early Uruk) 40 8,000 64,000,000 128,000,000

Ur (Ur Dynasty III) 50 10,000 100,000,000 200,000,000

Mohenjo-daro (2000 BCE) 100 20,000 400,000,000 800,000,000

Uruk (3000 BCE) 250 50,000 2,500,000,000 5,000,000,000

Uruk (Early Dynastic I) 400 80,000 6,400,000,000 12,800,000,000 aTaken from data in Modelski (2003: 8) except for Çatalhöyük, which is from Hodder (2006: 7). bThis is the site-density multiplier used by Modelski (2003); for Çatalhöyük I use the midpoint of the range of estimates given by Hodder (2006: 7). cThis is the total number of potential contacts. dThis is a new measure that tries to incorporate additional external contacts through networks, using the assumption that internal and external linkages are equally weighted (a ‘double Metcalf’ in network theory terms).

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economic and innovative power that comes with even the earliest cities, what Soja (2010: 365) calls ‘an explosive leap in societal scale and complexity’. For the later Uruk, the enhanced communication potential is really staggering: more potential communication by a factor of 568,889 than a hunter-gatherer band. Of course, the exact numbers listed in Table 1 are to be treated as simply indicative, not as definitive. This is why precise numerical comparison is not the key point; what I am showing is evidence to support the notion that cities are a distinctive qualitative change from life in a small relatively isolated band. The numbers in Table 1 give a sense of this world-changing difference of human experience, so that from this communication perspective I can argue that innovations as fundamental as inventing agriculture or states should, in all probability, have occurred and diffused as part of a city-ness process.

City-ness and town-ness

At this point, a short digression is required. The communication theory use of sizes of settlements is not the only theoretical framework that employs such demographic information. In archaeology and ancient history, areal and demographic sizes are commonly used to rank settlements that are then interpreted as urban hierarchies in central place terms. Since this is a completely different interpretation of inter-urban relations to the one proposed here, some clarification is required. With the study of cities in contemporary globalization, central place theory was found wanting as a description of inter-city relations in Castells’ (1996) ‘network society’. The consequent new approaches to understanding inter-city relations are reviewed in Taylor et al. (2010a) where a generic alternative to central place theory has been proposed; only the essence of the argument is presented here and for full details reference should be made to the original article.

Central place theory was originally devised in 1933 to show how the market areas of urban settlements are organized (Christaller, 1966). Basically these were modelled as a hierarchy with larger settlements servicing larger market areas, and with tiers of lesser central places and their smaller market areas arranged below them. This model has dominated how inter-urban relations have been treated, being extended to national urban systems — with national urban hierarchies — in the 1960s. However, these are not the inter-urban relations that are central to Jacobs’ (1969) thinking: no city ever grew from only trading with its hinterland. The inter-city relations she deals with are between cities across many sizes, not arranged in a simple hierarchical format. The differences between these two conceptions of inter-urban relations can be viewed as the difference between town-ness and city-ness (Taylor et al., 2010a).

Central place theory is essentially about the local relations of urban places, albeit at different scales of ‘local’ as the urban hierarchy is ascended. The focus is on the central place as it services its local area. This process can be equated with town-ness, a relatively simple flow of people to the ‘town’ to access public goods or buy private goods. City-ness, on the other hand, deals with non-local flows of people, commodities and information between cities, which has been termed ‘central flow theory’ (ibid.). This terminology indicates that as a network process, the emphasis is on the flows rather than cities as places per se.

It is important to understand that central flow theory does not replace central place theory; rather the theories complement one another. Since both town-ness and city-ness are processes, they can and do occur simultaneously in urban settlements. Typically big cities have their central place functions of shopping and entertainment (‘downtown’) that are their town-ness, which operate alongside the wider economic links that are their city-ness. Because I am interested in macro-social change (and following Jacobs), it is central flow theory — city-ness — that is used below. But central place theory has had to be introduced here because this has been the theory of choice for inter-urban relations in archaeology and ancient history (Renfrew, 1975; Renfrew and Bahn, 2008: 177–230). Clearly choice of theory makes a big difference to interpretation of evidence, as will become apparent as the argument proceeds.

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Cities and agriculture: two revolutions or one? When did cities first become part of human society? For most people, both experts and the interested public, the answer to this question is straightforward: Mesopotamia in the fourth and third centuries BCE. Thus Gwendolyn Leick’s (2001) book on Mesopotamia is subtitled The Invention of the City. She is part of an almost unanimous archaeological tradition that goes back many decades.

The most famous statement of this tradition is that of the Marxist Gordon Childe (1950) who coined the term ‘urban revolution’ to describe the rise of cities in the alluvial civilizations of the Nile, Indus and Tigris–Euphrates, the latter being the earliest. His ideas have been so influential that they deserve to be quoted at length:

About 5,000 years ago irrigation cultivation (combined with stockbreeding and fishing) in the valleys of the Nile, the Tigris–Euphrates and the Indus had begun to yield a social surplus, large enough to support a number of resident specialists who were themselves released from food-production. Water-transport, supplemented in Mesopotamia and the Indus valley by wheeled vehicles, and even in Egypt by pack animals, made it easy to gather food stuffs at a few centres. At the same time dependence on river water for the irrigation of the crops restricted the cultivatable areas while the necessity of canalizing the waters and protecting habitations against annual floods encouraged the aggregation of population. Thus arose the first cities — units of settlement ten times as great as any known Neolithic village (ibid.: 8).

Despite the massive increase in our knowledge of the subject matter since then, his framework for understanding the origins of cities largely prevails (Smith, 2009): cities appear with Bronze Age civilization and not before. As part of his recovering of the achievements and skills of ‘pre-civilization’ peoples, Rudgley (1998: 209) refers to this position as ‘the ideological wall . . . that has been placed at 5,000 years ago to represent the beginning of history’. Following Jacobs (1969) and Soja (2000), I am minded to breach this wall.

From the perspective being deployed in this article, Childe’s final sentence above is intriguing with its reference to a tenfold difference between his ‘first cities’ and Neolithic villages. In fact in his list of 10 traits to identify a city, ‘size’ is ranked first. But a multiple of 10 is a far cry from the massive multiples derived from the communication approach reported above (Table 1). The Childe approach is wedded to place-based explanation for the first cities, as indeed his use of a list of traits to identify cities confirms. Although the penultimate trait is ‘long-distance trade’ which defines flows, this is not an important feature as witnessed by its omission in the key quote above . Cities are deemed to have first appeared in special places where food surpluses released people to congregate in new large settlements that were not sustainable under ordinary (non-irrigated) agriculture. In this argument, agriculture had been around for many thousands of years before the emergence of cities. Thus the convention is for two key transformations: ‘agricultural revolution’first, followed some millennia later by Childe’s ‘urban revolution’.

In Figure 1(a) I have described this conventional position as basic evolutionary thinking stripped to its essentials in terms of a settlement sequence. The key transformation is the invention of agriculture by hunter-gatherers that leads on to agricultural villages. Evolution is indicated by increasing size of settlement consequent upon agricultural improvements (adding to the food supply), leading first to market towns when production exceeds subsistence needs, and finally to Childe’s cities where surpluses are much greater due to irrigated agriculture. But as Soja (2010: 365) has pointed out, ‘there is no clear evidence of early agricultural villages that somehow grew into cities’. With its emphasis on generating surpluses, this is clearly a supply-side model; but why produce more food than you need, why not just work less? In other words, it is not obvious where the demand comes from to provide the initial stimulus for surplus generation. It is for this reason that in this article I stay with Jacobs’ ‘cities first’ position rather than modifying it to Soja’s (ibid.: 366) ‘mutually stimulating development of cities and agriculture’.

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Jacobs’ alternative thesis

For Jacobs (1969; 1984), cities are the crucibles of fundamental economic change and this includes agriculture. In Figure 1(b) I provide another schematic based on her ideas: this is a communication alternative sequence that is demand-led. Following Soja’s (2010: 365) argument that trade is ‘the primary urbanizing force’, in this figure it is trading networks of hunter-gatherers that are emphasized. These may lead to economic specialization at trading posts and, in the relatively rare circumstances of large increases in trade and production, create unprecedented population concentrations several times larger than the norm for hunter-gatherer bands (around 150). If several such posts generate a strong and permanent trading network, these populations can grow to have a communication potential that qualifies them as small cities. Such cities are the critical step: they usher in Jacobs’ (1969) famous ‘explosive’ economic expansion. The point of the two diagrams in Figure 1 is to contrast the two ‘pivotal’ steps: complex cities seem much more likely locales for agricultural invention than conventional evolution’s emphasis on the inventiveness of hunter-gatherers where:

change takes the form of future-creep [in which] . . . differences are expected to happen eventually and can be explained simply by the passage of enough time, a commodity with which human prehistory is abundantly blessed (Gamble, 2007: 23).

This is the mechanism that Jacobs’ (1969) urban theory aspires to replace. However, it is this link to agriculture that remains the really controversial step in

Jacobs’ city theory. Within the trading networks, the posts (that are to become cities) originally imported their food from hunter-gatherers in exchange for their trading goods, but with population growth the demand for food begins to outstrip what hunter-gathering can provide. Thus agriculture is invented in city hinterlands as an import replacement, opening up more growth through new import shifts (allowing extra commodities to be traded into the settlement). With growth of agriculture (and herding) keeping up with the consequent new population growth, the amount of food production necessitates workers being located outside the city: villages are created. If the food-producing hinterland grows further, there may be the need for some urban functions to be transferred to the hinterland to service the villages: market towns are created. Thus the initial

Figure 1 Origins: Two settlement development sequences

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‘common-sense’ evolutionary sequence of increasing size — village to town to city — is replaced by a communication-led sequence — city to village to town.

This is all very well in theory, but where is the evidence for cities existing as early as agriculture, which is known to be practised many thousands of years before the rise of Mesopotamia’s great Bronze Age cities? For Jacobs (1969) the answer is Çatalhöyük. This site, a large mound of some 32 acres in Anatolia, was excavated by James Mellaart in the 1950s and 1960s. He estimated the population of the settlement as high as perhaps 10,000. And he dated it to 7000 BCE, four millennia before the Mesopotamian cities. Jacobs (ibid.: 32) calls it ‘a city of crafts, of artists, manufacturers and merchants’ and the evidence does seem to show strong city-ness characteristics. Specifically, Mellaart (1964; 1965a) provides descriptions of how Çatalhöyük functioned both internally and externally. In terms of the internal relations of cities, Jacobs (1969: 32–3) famously quotes Mellaart (1964: 99; later also quoted by Soja, 2000: 39–40) as follows:

the weavers and basketmakers; the matmakers; the carpenters and joiners; the men who made the polished stone tools (axes and adzes, polishers and grinders, chisets, maceheads and palettes); the beadmakers who drilled in stone beads holes that no modern steel needle can penetrate and who carved pendants and used stone inlays; the makers of shell beads from dentalium, cowrie and fossil oyster; the flint and obsidian knappers who produced the pressure- flaked daggers, spearheads, lanceheads, arrowheads, knives, sickle blades, scrapers and borers; the merchants of skin, leather and fur; the workers in bone who made the awls, punches, knives, scrapers, ladles, spoons, bows, scoops, spatulas, bodkins, belt hooks, antler toggles, pins and cosmetic sticks; the carvers of wooden bowls and boxes; the mirrormakers, the bowmakers; the men who hammered native copper into sheets and worked it into beads, pendants, rings and other trinkets; the builders; the merchants and traders who obtained all the raw materials; and finally the artists — the carvers of statuettes, the modelers and the painters.

I have quoted this at its full length to show the detail of the complex division of labour in Mellaart’s work that so impressed Jacobs and Soja. But elsewhere, in terms of fuller exposition of the external relations of Çatalhöyük, Mellaart considered that trade might be ‘the most important source of income’ because the city held ‘the monopoly of obsidian trade with the west of Anatolia, Cyprus and the Levant’ (Mellaart, 1965b: 84). He describes a classic case of entwining trade with production:

In exchange for obsidian, the fine tabular flint of Syria was obtained and widely used for manufacture of daggers and other tools. Sea shells, especially dentalia, were imported in great quantities from the Mediterranean for the manufacture of beads, and stones of great variety were brought to the city for manufacture of stone luxury vessels, beads and pendants, polishers, grinding stones, pounders, mortars and querns, or to be used (like alabaster and marble, black and brown limestone) for the manufacture of small cult statues. Greenstone occurs on a ridge in the plain and it was used for fully polished adzes and axes, and for jewellery. Ochres and other paints came from the hills around the plain together with fossil shells, lignite, copper and iron ores, native copper, cinnabar and galena (ibid.: 84–5).

For Mellaart (ibid.: 134) this makes Çatalhöyük to be ‘worthy of a metropolis’ but Jacobs (1969) and Soja (2000) are more theoretically specific: Jacobs (1969: 35) spies a settlement exhibiting that most ‘valuable’ and ‘wondrous’ resource: ‘a creative local economy’ and Soja (2000: 41–2) finds ‘extraordinary creativity and innovation . . . in an “urban Neolithic” ’. For this to have emerged, Jacobs (1969: 35) conjectures a city network: ‘several little cities were simultaneously serving as expanding markets for one another’. Thus, she concludes, ‘it was the fact of sustained, interdependent, creative city economies that made possible many kinds of new work, agriculture among them’ (ibid.: 36).

On reading Mellaart (1964; 1965a; 1965b), his findings at Çatalhöyük appear to fit Jacobs’ ideas on city as process almost to the letter. It is very tempting to reverse the relation: her ideas about city economies in The Economy of Cities (Jacobs, 1969) are so

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far advanced from those initially developed in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs, 1960) that I would wager Çatalhöyük had a prime role in developing her theory of cities. This may explain why, in the later book (Jacobs, 1969), she took the surprising decision to begin with ancient history in a first chapter entitled ‘Cities First — Rural Development Later’. It is here that she presented her outlandish idea that agriculture was invented in cities in order to produce the food such new large settlements required (as sketched out in Figure 1(b)). Thus was Mellaart’s empirical challenge to archaeological orthodoxy supplemented by a new and original urban theory that remains important in urban studies today (Glaeser et al., 1992; Soja, 2000; Taylor, 2006). But the undermining of the sequence of two ‘revolutions’ in archaeology’s evolutionary thinking appears to have been a step too far in historical studies (Soja, 2000: 42). In this area of research, Hansen (2000b: 11) assesses that her ideas have ‘been rejected almost unanimously’. For instance, in a typical dismissal, Balter (2005: 112) describes Mellaart’s claim of finding the first city as being ‘a notion popularized by Jane Jacobs’, seemingly unaware of her social science status as an important urban theorist.

And so two parts of academia — social science/urban studies and archaeology/ancient history — have parted company when it comes to appreciating the work of Jane Jacobs. For my part, I do think a communications approach to the rise of cities, and a concomitant view on the invention of agriculture, remains far more compelling than the archaeologists’ basic model (Figure 1(a)). As a social scientist, I look for credible mechanisms of social change; this is what Jacobs provides but they appear conspicuous by their absence in evolutionary thinking. This is indicated in the spatial framework they use: instead of central flow theory, their interpretations remain wedded to traditional central place theory.

Downgrading Çatalhöyük

One very obvious indication that archaeologists have a problem dealing with Çatalhöyük is they don’t know what to call it (Soja, 2000: 29). Here are some descriptions of Çatalhöyük that indicate the conceptual confusion that has been endemic to the study of this site. Mellaart (1965b) uses both city and town in his initial descriptions — thus indicating ‘urban’ — but later on it appears that, under the pressure of archaeological orthodoxy, he preferred the non-committal term ‘settlement’ (Balter, 2005: 296). Renfrew (1975: 7) refers to Çatalhöyük as an ‘early farming village . . . almost urban size’. Bairoch (1988: 9) coins the strange term ‘preurban town’, and even ‘pre-urban city’ can be found (Tellier, 2009). Both Nissen (1988) and Hodder (2006) consistently call it a ‘town’ but with the quotes emphasizing its problematic nature. The ‘official biographer’ of the current excavations translates Hodder’s ‘town’ into ‘an enormous village’ (Balter, 2005: 3). Yet when the new excavations began at the site, two publications introducing the work (Balter, 1998; Shane and Küçuk, 1998) trumpeted the ‘first city’ claim in their titles! These equivocal positions are well represented in The Times Atlas of Archaeology: the section on Çatalhöyük uses the phrase ‘a farming village’ for its title (Scarre, 1988: 82) but quickly finds ‘many features . . . puzzling’ resulting in later reference to a ‘highly sophisticated early town’ (ibid.: 83). I think this conceptual confusion can be traced back to using the wrong inter-urban theory: archaeologists have been searching for town-ness rather than city-ness.

The very influential archaeologist Colin Renfrew, using quantitative methods ‘inspired by geography’ has argued that ‘a permanently functioning central place is a feature of every civilization’ (1975: 3, 12). This implies a system of related settlements in contrast to a landscape of isolated settlements, which is ‘the very antithesis of civilization’ (ibid.: 7). Such an argument has been developed in full by Nissen (1988) in his early history of ancient Western Asia. For the period 9000 to 6000 BCE he traces the development of permanent settlement but notes the lack of ‘systematic mutual connections’ (ibid.: 33). He calls the next period, 6000 to 3200 BCE, ‘from isolated settlement to town’ (ibid.: 39) in which he traces the evolution of settlement systems

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(ibid.: 41) through three tiers of central places to four. The latter first appears in Sumer with ‘Uruk at its head’ (ibid.: 66) indicating the emergence of ‘early high civilization’ (ibid.: 65) and therefore cities. It is from this perspective of a central place system history that Nissen engages with the problem of how to interpret the ‘type of settlement, sometimes called a “town” ’ (ibid.: 36) represented by Çatalhöyük and another inconveniently early large settlement, Jericho (Kenyon, 1960; Soja, 2000: 27–35).

Basically the argument is that these large Neolithic settlements differ from towns ‘in one decisive criterion’: they are ‘not the center of a settled countryside’ (Nissen, 1988: 36). Thus Jericho, for example, ‘was not part of a settlement system’; it exhibited no ‘real centrality’ (ibid.: 36–37). Hence he is able to comfortably conclude:

The special development of Jericho and, to a limited extent, also of Çatalhöyük, in no way therefore changes anything in our general characterization of the period as one of separate open settlements (ibid.: 37–8).

This is also why Emberling (2003: 258) rejects Jericho and Çatalhöyük’s city credentials: neither developed ‘a differentiated rural hinterland’. In other words, applying central place theory rules out Jericho and Çatalhöyük as cities.

Notice that in the quotation from Nissen above, the ‘isolated settlements’ he identifies for the time of Jericho and Çatalhöyük are characterized as ‘separate open settlements’, and it is the openness (trade) that I have previously emphasized. From the perspective of central flow theory, Çatalhöyük, Jericho and their ilk represent the beginnings of city- ness. They are unusual for our understanding of contemporary cities in that in these relatively small urban settlements city-ness appears to dominate over town-ness. This is consistent with the communication model, where city precedes hinterland and the creation of ‘lower order’ towns (Figure 1(b)). But there is now a fascinating new episode providing fresh information to this debate. Since Mellaart’s work reported above, there have been new excavations that focus in particular on reinterpreting the internal relations within the settlement.

Return to Çatalhöyük: domestic mode of production or city-ness?

The second excavation of Çatalhöyük has been described as ‘the greatest concentration of scientific fire power ever focused on an archaeological dig’ (Balter, 2005: 4). What has all this new research revealed? Hodder (2006: 18) provides a fascinating report on the work that focuses on ‘the mysteries of the elaborate symbolism at Çatalhöyük’ and ‘how people were living’. He reports new estimates of the population size of the settlement — varying over time between 3,500 and 8,000 — and then states his key argument against Çatalhöyük being a city or town:

So in terms of size, we might call this settlement a ‘town’. But it has few of the other characteristics that we might mean by that term. Despite careful sampling of the surface of the mound, we have found no public spaces, administrative buildings, elite quarters, or really any specialized functional spaces . . . Indeed in 2004 we undertook excavation specifically to explore the idea that there might be some centralized functions at the site . . . What we found was more prosaic . . . all there is at Çatalhöyük are houses and middens and pens. There is none of the functional differentiation that we normally associate with the term ‘town’. Çatalhöyük is just a very large village — it pushed the idea of an egalitarian village to its extreme. Most production, even where there is some specialization of production, is carried out at the house level. And indeed, this is perhaps the greatest enigma of Çatalhöyük — that given the domestic scale of production and much social and economic life, why did people aggregate into such a major centre? (ibid.: 95, 98–9).

Within this critical argument, the crucial reference is to the nature of production; this goes to the heart of Jacobs’ and Soja’s division of labour interpretations drawn from results of the earlier excavations by Mellaart.

424 Peter J. Taylor

Hodder (2006: 107) describes ‘an internal organization of the “town” ’ that is ‘so atomised and small-scale’. The houses were all largely separate — with few ‘party walls’ — and each was largely self-sufficient in function. Thus the production processes described in detail by Mellaart appear to occur in every house. For instance, there are no general builders of houses; each has bricks of ‘different composition or shape’. Thus, ‘it is as if, despite the dense packing, each house retains its autonomy’ (ibid.: 94–5). Since Jacobs’ and Soja’s division of labour argument requires specialization, this is a powerful argument against. However, once again I must emphasize city-ness as an ongoing process. Here skills are being honed, and in fact Hodder presents evidence for supporting Jacobs. As well as house-based activity, there is also ‘plenty of evidence of collective behaviour’ (ibid.: 107). For instance, ‘there is much evidence for long-distance trade and exchange’ (ibid.: 80) which would have been done collectively like planting and herding (ibid.: 94). Obsidian was an important traded good and there is evidence of possible value-added production in this case:

It seems clear that obsidian came as pre-forms from the sources in Cappadocia 170 km (105 miles) away, and was taken into the house where it was buried. People then dug up and excavated pieces when they needed them and worked them nearby inside the house (ibid.: 173).

There appears to be some tension in Hodder’s argument between ‘town-wide’ and house-based activities:

Undoubtedly, some specialization of production does occur, but in most such cases, such as bead or bone tool production, or obsidian mirror manufacture, the specialization seems at best part-time, and fully embedded within a domestic mode (ibid.: 179).

In fact, Hodder identifies two important trends: ‘specialization of production may have increased through time’ (ibid.: 182), and that there may have been ‘a shift away from the centrality of the house to the importance of exchange between houses’ (ibid.: 177). Thus with more specialization, particularly skilled people may have supplied neighbours with bone tools and obsidian mirrors (ibid.: 182). Here there are traces of a possible transition from a domestic mode of production to a city-ness division of labour.

Thus I concur with Soja’s (2010: 366) reassertion that ‘what happened in Çatalhöyük was extraordinary’: I think there remains enough evidence to warrant keeping to Jacobs’ sophisticated process of city-ness, with its emphasis on process. But the more radical part of her argument — cities inventing agriculture — appears to be more difficult to sustain. To begin with, there is a straightforward empirical issue to confront. Hodder (2006) does not deal with the Çatalhöyük–agricultural revolution link for the simple reason that the settlement is only 9,000 years old, which is much later than the domestication of animals and plants (Hodder, 2006: 18). Where does this leave Jacobs’ controversial thesis? As she foresaw, there has been subsequent evidence for even earlier urban settlements in Anatolia (Özdoğan and Başgelen, 1999) and therefore Jacobs did not tie her theory down to this one particular settlement as the originator of agriculture. She refers to ‘cities such as Çatalhöyük’ (Jacobs, 1969: 37) in her discussion, carefully noting that this is only the ‘earliest city yet found’ (ibid.: 31). To find the putative ‘first city’ (but it would be in a network of cities), Jacobs invents a fictitious city ‘New Obsidian’, and it is here that she describes how ‘hunter- gatherer’ city-dwellers invent agriculture. But, as is common in archaeological disputes, a final resolution by evidence is not possible; the actual process of change will remain unknown, and is perhaps unknowable. Thus one critic of Jacobs, Bairoch (1988: 17), concedes: ‘while her arguments do not prove that agriculture was invented in the city, the margin of uncertainty around that period is such that the hypothesis cannot be rejected outright’.

But I cannot just leave it there. In such situations of knowledge uncertainty, it is the plausibility of theoretical positions that matter. Hodder (2006: 250) briefly refers to Sahlins’ (2004) concept of domestic mode of production as the structure of Çatalhöyük’s

Early ‘city-ness’ and the origins of agriculture and states 425

house-based organization. This seems to be appropriate for Hodder’s interpretation: Sahlins describes this mode of production as ‘a kind of petite economy’ (ibid.: 78) that was ‘atomized and small scale’ (ibid.: 79). I will use and elaborate on Sahlins’ ideas on ‘stone age economics’ to explore further Hodder’s (2006: 99; see also Balter, 1998) very basic question of why people aggregated into places like Çatalhöyük. There are two steps in the argument, one casting doubt on the conventional idea of the agricultural origins of cities, and the other introducing trade as a better candidate for stimulating aggregation.

Sahlin’s ‘stone age economics’

Sahlins (2004: 1) has famously described hunter-gatherer societies as the ‘original affluent society’. By this he means that their ‘wants are finite and few’, and therefore their simple means for attending to these wants is generally adequate: ‘a people can enjoy unparalleled material plenty — with a low standard of living’ (ibid.: 2). This interpretation is the opposite of our usual Hobbsian views of ‘primitive peoples’ living ‘brutish lives’. But anthropological studies of work in hunter-gatherer societies show that rather than struggling for subsistence, these peoples spend only two or three days a week satisfying their needs (ibid.: 14–26). They have much leisure time; they appear to be lazy (ibid.: 26). The question is, therefore, why should such affluent leisure societies want to domesticate plants and animals? As Sahlins says of a contemporary group of hunter- gatherers, ‘tutored by life and not by anthropology (they) reject the Neolithic revolution in order to keep their leisure’ (ibid.: 27, original emphasis). Given that Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, unlike their contemporary representatives, were not reduced to living in marginal lands, it follows that their ‘pristine affluence’ (ibid.: 29) would be likely to make them even more sceptical about the benefits of farming. Thus Sahlins (ibid.: 35) concludes:

The Neolithic saw no particular improvement over the Palaeolithic in the amount of time required per capita for the production of subsistence; probably with the advent of agriculture, people had to work harder.

Why and how the Neolithic agricultural revolution therefore? Why bother? Another common denigration of hunter-gatherers is that they live isolated lives:

Sahlins disputes this too. There was no ‘domestic autarky’, the households were not self-sufficient and therefore there was swapping of goods. But the key point for the domestic mode of production is that production remained for use and not exchange (2004: 83–4). This is because this mode of production ‘is intrinsically an anti-surplus system’ (ibid.: 82). The result is that Sahlins develops a ‘theory of value in nonexchange’ (ibid.: 277). Thus, although there are examples of long-distance trade, trade networks, and even supply and demand effects (ibid.: 280), it is ‘social relations, not prices, [that] . . . connect “buyers” and “sellers” ’ (ibid.: 298). He interprets this as being ‘the diplomacy of exchange’ (ibid.: 303) rather than an economic market of exchange.

The obvious place to search for the invention of new commercial practices is in the complexities of different spatial forms of trading as portrayed by Renfrew (1975: 41–5). As previously argued (Figure 1(b)), the most likely source of change would seem to come from the rise of large aggregations of people, perhaps trading posts adding production to their activities, wherein the enhanced Jacobsean size facilitates the fundamental rethinking required to overcome cultural resistances to creating surpluses for gain. This is such a huge turnaround in making a living that it requires an immense level of social contact to have a reasonable probability of emerging as a new means of production. And this is what cities are about; this is where the ‘finite and few’ wants of the old world could be ditched, and spiralling new needs and wants created and acted upon to create a new social world. High new levels of communication potential are needed to generate the social revolution leading to a commercial way of life. It is the latter that would then enable the innovation for farming to happen alongside

426 Peter J. Taylor

hunter-gathering as the latter failed to keep up with city food demands. In other words, Jacobs’ (1969) conjecture of ‘cities first; agriculture follows’ is not all that implausible after all. In fact the story can be developed further.

The evidence presented so far for this process has been limited to just two well-known examples, mainly Çatalhöyük plus some references to Jericho. What is needed for city-ness is a completely new social context: cities in city networks. The critical size can be debated, but it is probably somewhere between settlements of 2,000 and 5,000 people in a network of 5 to 10 such places. In fact Soja (2000) has harnessed evidence for numerous small cities in Western Asia during the millennia before Mesopotamia. Here are his additional cases of potential cities:

During these four millennia (of Jericho’s occupation, 9000 to 5000 BC), a number of other urban centers developed in a broad T-shaped region and became linked together in an expansive trading network of cities: Abu Hureyra (even larger in size than Jericho), Bouqras, and Mureyra along the upper reaches of the Euphrates and Ras Shamra on the coast of present-day Syria; Ain Ghazal, Abu Gosh, and Beidha in the southern Levant; Zawi Chemi, Jarmo, and Ali Kosh in the borderlands of Iraq and Iran drained by the Tigris; and, from east to west in Anatolia, Çayönü, Asikli Hüyük, Çatalhöyük (probably the largest . . . of the first cities), and Haçilar (ibid.: 28–9).

This is a new world of city networks (Düring, 2005) originating in modern-day Turkey, where Asikli Hüyük (Esin and Harmankaya, 1999), Çayönü (Özdoğan, 1999), and Göbeki Tepe (Schmidt, 2008) are the best known nodes. This is a totally different world from that described by Nissen (1988); it is not a stagnant world of isolated settlements, it is a new creative world of economic expansion through cities.

First generic conclusion

Soja’s (2000) interpretation of a pre-Mesopotamian, multi-city Western Asia is that it represents a first ‘urban revolution’. Thus he develops a thesis of three urban revolutions: this early one, Childe’s Mesopotamian urban revolution and the modern industrial urban revolution. Such historiography risks being interpreted as a rather traditional trajectory to the modern world starting in Western Asia (Bookchin, 1995; Southall, 1998); this is far too geographically limiting for my liking. An alternative approach is to ask whether there are possible cities that existed before the ‘rise’ of accepted ‘civilizations’ elsewhere in the world? The basic argument I am presenting is not just about the case study of Çatalhöyük; it aspires to be a general argument about the rise of cities and agriculture (Figure 1(b)). Therefore this generic conclusion consists of searching for early signs of city-ness and concomitant agriculture in many other regions across the world. I am looking for claims of finding cities in the wrong places at the wrong time.

This search has resulted in Table 2. Here I provide brief indications of more than a dozen settlements outside Western Asia that may well be cities in a time before there should be cities. I do not have the space to describe these cases in any detail, but the simple fact that I can list this many is itself potentially informative. Also their worldwide distribution is impressive. Obviously they vary somewhat in their credibility to fit the sort of role Jacobs would expect of them, but the idea that ‘precocious cities’ occur only in Western Asia is clearly undermined.

I will draw important lessons from two of the better documented early cities in Table 2 that are from opposite sides of the world: Sannai Maruyama in Japan and Cahokia in the USA. Both cases inform the question of why there are still so few known ‘early cities’ given that every one of my examples is presumed to be part of a network of cities.

The first reason is that the incomplete nature of archaeological evidence becomes inevitably more fragmentary the further back in time the research extends. Sannai Maruyama illustrates the serendipity at play in finding these early cities. Sannai Maruyama is impressive and famous for its size — 35 hectares in which over 1,000

Early ‘city-ness’ and the origins of agriculture and states 427

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buildings have been found (Rudgley, 1998: 31). Part of the pottery-making hunter- gathering Jomon culture, the settlement existed between 3500 and 2000 BCE (Hudson, 1996). Hudson is impressed by the ‘scale and complexity’ and expects other large settlements will be found; Rudgley (1998: 32) describes the craft specialization using exotic minerals such as obsidian and amber, indicating ‘clear evidence of long distance trading networks’. This is a very clear example of a pre-Neolithic city in the Jacobs mode. And yet this site is only known because of luck. If a new baseball stadium had not been planned in Aomori City in 1992, the surveying work that led to finding the site of Sannai Maruyama would not have happened. Had this very large settlement remained unknown, the ‘dramatic reappraisal of Jomon culture’ that it necessitated would not have occurred (ibid.: 30). The point is that the full extent of other lost ‘Sannai Maruyamas’ across the world is not known, and will never be known. There are hints of further examples: Mithen (2003: 503) bemoans the general lack of knowledge of early African settlements and (for another region) he goes as far as saying: ‘While substantial settlements most likely existed in the New Guinea lowlands at 6000 BCE, archaeologists have yet to find them’ (ibid.: 339). Similarly, in his brief discussion of ‘astonishingly early settlements’ (Çatalhöyük and Jericho), Southall (1998: 23) alludes to numerous other equivalent settlements, ‘few of which may ever be known to us’.

But there is a second reason why there might be many sites that will elude our knowledge. Cahokia, in the Mississippian culture, appears to be a perfect replication of Jacobs’ (1969) urban process. According to Pauketat (2004: 67), there was a ‘historical disjuncture’ when the population of Cahokia, near the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio rivers, ‘more than quadrupled over a fifty year period’ (ibid.: 79) to about 10,200/15,300 by 1050 CE. Coincidently, there was a ‘transformation of the rural countryside that accompanied the AD 1050 flashpoint’ (ibid.: 99). This ‘resettlement of farmers that accompanied the Cahokia-centric restructuring of the regional landscape’ resulted in them being ‘tethered in some way’ to Cahokia and other settlements (ibid.: 97). With Cahokia being at the centre of a huge natural water-transport system, there are plenty of examples of large-scale and non-local patterns of raw material procurement and production distribution (ibid.: 121–22). Dincauze and Hasenstaub (1989), Kelley (1991) and Peregrine (1992) interpret Cahokia as a mercantile centre controlling large riverine commercial networks. But Cahokia declined as quickly as it rose: it was abandoned by 1300 CE and ‘a huge fourteenth- to sixteenth-century “Vacant Quarter” opened up across the middle-river regions’ (Pauketat, 2004: 41). It is this latter feature that I want to discuss. Kennedy (1994: 244) describes this as ‘a cyclical history of the Great Valley before the coming of the Europeans’ — a ‘flowering’ followed by a ‘period of exhaustion’. Pauketat (2004: 158) suggests soil erosion or political unrest as the cause: it seems to me that desiccation of the land would undoubtedly lead to political conflicts. If such a pattern is typical, then early cities cover relatively short historical periods with consequently less evidence left for archaeologists to find.

I think the rise and fall of Cahokia may not be that unusual. Thus I will use this example to further develop Figure 1(b) supporting the idea of farming being invented in cities. A situation can be envisaged where the demand for food in early cities creates new agricultural practices with little or no knowledge of how to maintain soil fertility, techniques essential for sustainability. With land desiccated around the city, agriculture moves further away in a process that may eventually contribute to the demise of the city. With the city gone and the land desiccated, most people will migrate to other sites and the migrant farmers are likely to create new ‘subsistence villages or hamlets’ now largely separate from urban worlds. This is illustrated in Figure 2(a) that shows how an urban network can be reduced to a landscape of agricultural villages without cities. The alternative, Figure 2(b), is for sustainable agriculture to be developed so that food production intensifies and keeps up with urban growth. Innovations such as terracing and irrigation are the sorts of developments I am thinking of here. Of course, some millennia after the demise of Çatalhöyük, it was irrigation that characterized the agriculture supporting the great cities of Mesopotamia. Childe emphasizes the food surpluses this

Early ‘city-ness’ and the origins of agriculture and states 429

generated; the argument developed in this article is that sustainability — river replenishment of fertility — may have been the crucial feature to sustain this later and very successful city network.

Cities and states: two eras of development My position is that the earliest known states were invented in ancient Mesopotamia. This is conventional in timing but I will be unconventional in terms of process. That is to say, it is largely understood that Mesopotamia is the locus of the first states, which were city-states. But therein lies the problem. Traditionally, cities and states are seen as evolving together as a single institution, hence ‘city-state’ (Charlton and Nichols, 1997a). But I treat them as two different processes that do not necessarily run exactly in parallel. It is this that allows me to identify first cities without states to be followed by cities in states, initially one city per state or city-state. Just simply identifying cities as city-states in the rise of Mesopotamian civilization is, from my perspective, to conflate two processes in a most unhelpful way (Soja, 2010: 364). However, compared to my cities– agriculture conjecture, my argument on cities and states does have some support within the archaeology and ancient history literature.

My position mirrors that of Monica Smith (2003b). She is explicit on the importance of recognizing that ‘cities do not require a state level of authority to exist and thrive’ (ibid.: 12). Therefore:

it is . . . time for the understanding of cities to be uncoupled from the necessary presence of states. By breaking this pairing of cities and states, we allow cities to be understood on their own terms as centers of political, economic, and social organization that may be considerably more complex than the territories and regions in which they are located (ibid.: 13).

She traces this conflation back to Childe (1950: 12) who created a framework in which ‘theorizing about urbanism has often really been about states rather than cities’. This key point had been made much earlier than Smith, by Price (1978: 175):

Figure 2 Bifurcation: economic contraction or economic expansion

430 Peter J. Taylor

The relation between urbanism and the state, however, has been the cause of profound confusion for a variety of reasons, both scholarly and ideological. Childe’s Mesopotamian data combined urbanism and the state in a single sequence and permitted the uncritical evaluation of this particular association.

Smith (2003b) indicts Robert McCormickAdams, the great chronicler of Mesopotamian urbanism; she points out that in his classic The Evolution of Urban Society (Adams, 1966), he states (paradoxically) that, despite the book’s title, his ‘central concern is the growth of the state’ (ibid.: 90, quoted in Smith, 2003b: 12). Conversely, Smith argues that ‘cities in the premodern world did not require a state level of organization’ (ibid.: 15).

It is only after unravelling the city/state conflation that it is possible to see cities as sites for the invention of states (Figure 3(a)). For Yoffee (2005: 45), ‘cities were the transformative social environments in which states themselves were created’, which he explains using the generic sociological concepts of differentiation and integration (ibid.: 32–3). The communication potential of cities creates new, ongoing differentiation to produce the complex city and city network. This creates a political demand for integration that invention of the state satisfies: new rule, first at the local city-state scale, and then at the non-local city-empire scale. Thus, as with the invention of agriculture, it is the creation of complex city-ness that is the pivotal step in the invention of the state (Figure 3(a)).

Although conflation of city and state is common in the archaeological literature, there is another, more influential tradition that provides an evolutionary sequencing for the creation of states, and where cities are by no means pivotal. In this approach, states are interpreted as the culmination of a sequence beginning with simple bands that evolve into increasingly more complex ‘chiefdoms’ (for a recent review, see Abrutyn and Lawrence, 2010). In one example, the idea that states derive from chiefdoms is linked to settlements through a rather simplistic application of central place theory: settlement hierarchies are used to define the emergence of states (Figure 1(b)). Flannery (1998: 16) states this position succinctly:

chiefdoms tend to have only two or three levels [or tiers] of settlements, whereas states tended to have a hierarchy of at least four levels: cities, towns, large villages, and small villages.

Figure 3 Alternative origins of states

Early ‘city-ness’ and the origins of agriculture and states 431

Although he qualifies this by calling it a useful ‘rule of thumb’ rather than a ‘law’, such an approach invites thinking about states simplistically as a set of attributes. However, the evolutionary sequence in Figure 3(b) does not lead specifically to city-states as four-tier urban systems, as might be expected with cities occupying the top tier. Following Marcus (1998: 92), in this diagram I specify chiefdoms evolving into larger ‘territorial states’. In her argument the mechanism for city-state creation is a subsequent spatial disintegration of larger territorial states (Figure 3(b)). The latter result from the process of ‘competing chiefdoms’ (ibid.: 62; see also Marcus and Feinman, 1998). In other words, in this argument territorial states come before city-states.

Yoffee (2005: 34) is a trenchant critic of this ‘neo-evolutionary’ approach. He suggests a more process-orientated argument:

In the process of city-state formation, leaders of various co-resident social groups compete for power. And new arenas for competition are created to channel this struggle . . . [T]hese arenas are themselves products of urban interactions (which include new relations with a concomitantly ruralised countryside . . . [Therefore] the city state can be considered an ‘invention in itself’ (Yoffee, 1997: 261).

He argues that states are not the next stage after chiefs; rather he treats states as qualitatively different from chiefdoms. From our communications perspective, although both sequences pivot on stages invoking ‘complexity’ (in Figure 3), it should be noted that the commercial complexity of cities and city networks is at a completely different level above the governance complexity of even the most ‘advanced’ chiefdoms. Note that I do not dispute the fact that the fragmentation of territorial states can have occurred historically to produce city ‘statelets’, but I do not accept this to be a primal process: there had to be earlier city-states to have generated the territorial state before its dissolution.

I broadly followYoffee’s position below, but with more emphasis on external relations as indicated by the need to build city walls. I harness evidence from Mesopotamian studies to put detail onto the abstraction that is Figure 3(a). This is done in three parts: first I specify key elements in identifying two distinctive eras of development; second I look in more detail at the city-ness of the initial era; and third I examine the state-making process of the second era.

Dividing governance development into two eras

In this argument, the two eras are separated at about 3000–2800 BCE. The earlier era is interpreted as featuring city-ness strongly, the later era as particularly featuring state formation. Table 3 shows the roster of earliest cities that are the subject in this section: 19 different cities from 3700 to 2000 BCE in Sumer (lower Mesopotamia).

The first period is pre-literate but can be reconstructed from later texts. I draw heavily on the reconstruction by Jacobsen (1970). I have found his interpretations particularly meaningful in relation to the theoretical structure I am deploying. His key insight is the division of ancient literature into myths and epics (ibid.: 140). Myths are societal in nature through their treatment of origins with cities as gods; epics deal with later times and are concerned with the deeds of human individuals as heroes. It is this distinction between two ‘historical records’ that provides the basis for defining and understanding the two eras of development.

In the myths, the Sumerian Eden ‘is not a garden but a city’ (Leick, 2001: 2); Eridu is the oldest city, ‘a holy place, the very site of creation’ (ibid.: 29). When Heaven located the city on Earth, the countryside was then created to feed the people. Thus it can be noted that these Sumerian gods agree with Jacobs’ ‘cities first, agriculture second’ thesis! Current archaeological findings confirm Eridu to be the oldest of the Sumerian cities, going back to the early fourth millennium BCE period, but it never grew large. It remained important symbolically, however, as a cult centre. In the myths, Eridu is one of

432 Peter J. Taylor

five initial Sumerian cities, the others being Larak, Shuruppak, Sippar and Badtibira. These are on the southern branch of the Euphrates, and Eridu is the most southern city of all. The key point is that the myths identify five cities, enough to build a small but vibrant network of cities.

But what evidence is there that there was a network of cities and not just separate cities? Back to Jacobsen (1970: 139), who describes a ‘regional’ pattern of politics in the myths based upon ‘the quite unique position held by the city of Nippur and its chief god, Enlil, in Sumerian politics’. From earliest times this city was considered the source of Sumer-wide governance, but there is no evidence that this was the result of Nippur conquering other cities. Rather it was the locale of an all-Sumer assembly convened to deal with emergencies. This was the transient meeting place for conducting trans-city business. Jacobsen (ibid.: 140) concludes: ‘since its temporary and loose character precludes terms like “state” or even “nation” . . . [I] choose the relatively noncommittal term “Kengir League” ’. Jacobsen times this league of cities to coincide with our first era (ibid.: 141). What he describes is a non-state governance process that deals with crises in an ad hoc manner, providing for administrative or military leadership on a temporary basis.

This political network developed parallel to a commercial network of the early cities. Jacobsen (ibid.) mentions jar seals inscribed with the names of major cities:

Since such collective seals imply collective responsibility for the goods sent under the seal . . . [this is] a feature most easily understandable in terms of a league of cities such as the Kengir League.

Table 3 Estimates of Mesopotamian city populations in the third and fourth millennia BCE*

City 3700 3500 3300 3000 2800 2500 2400 2300 2200 2100 2000

Adab 10 20 10 10 30 10 10

Akkad 30

Akshak 10 20

Eridu 6–10 10 10 10

Girsu 40 80 50 80 40

Isin 40

Kesh 40 10 10 10

Kish 30 20

Lagash 60 30

Larak 10 10 10

Larsa 16 10 40

Nina 10 10

Nippur 10 10 20 20 30 30 30 30

Shuruppak 30 30 10

Suheri 10 10 10 10 10 10 10

Umma 20 40 40 40 10 20 25

Ur 12 10 10 20 40 100 20

Uruk 14 40 40 80 40 30 30 30 30

Zabalam 10 10 10 10 10 10 10

*Figures refer to populations in thousands; italicized figures and city name indicate the largest at a given time Source: Modelski (2003: 22, 28)

Early ‘city-ness’ and the origins of agriculture and states 433

In fact when the pre-literate archaeological content of the period is explored in terms of tokens, tablets and seals, it is found that it is economic transactions that are overwhelmingly dominant (Nissen et al., 1993). This is a form of governance primarily concerned for ‘control over economic activity’ (ibid.: 14): in our first era dominated by the city of Uruk, ‘the proto-cuneiform script was almost exclusively restricted to bookkeeping; it was an “accountants script” ’ (ibid.: 30). Even in early written documents there is no religious narrative or historical topics (i.e. myths or epics) (ibid.: 21) since it is only in the third millennium BCE that writing achieves ‘a degree of complexity to become a universal means of communications’ (i.e. representing the human language) (ibid.: 30). In other words, the political process developing here is city/city network governance largely for facilitating and regulating commercial practice.

Overall, there is an ongoing economic administration operating alongside transient organization, including military operations. And there is a cultural glue, represented by a religion constituted by mutual respect for multiple city-gods, that facilitates economic and political governance. Does the sum of such organizational processes constitute a state, a city-state? My view is that these early governance processes have yet to take on a state form in this first era. Emberling (2003: 261) defines the position well:

Our analytical category ‘the state’ . . . had little direct reflection in the practices of early Mesopotamians, and in fact homogenizes a series of disparate political and administrative institutions.

This is an era of dynamic cities that were to become the crucible of state-making, but no more.

It is all change during the Early Dynastic I period (after 3000 BCE), in a new world described by the epics:

In the myths life was on the whole peaceful, with only an occasional serious threat of war; in the epics war is the rule, the cities are ringed with huge defensive walls, their rulers think of war and conquest only, danger of sudden attack is ever present. The risks involved in such attacks, furthermore, are real and serious. Large prosperous cities may be looted and burned and even completely destroyed; if a city yields to the attacker it may see the canal system on which it depends readjusted to favor the city of the victor and may have to send its inhabitants off year after year to do forced labor in the victor’s fields or on its building projects to the detriment of its own economy. How real and constant these dangers were can be gauged from the prevalence of city walls in the epics, for no community would have accepted the enormous burden of constructing such walls were the need for them not both patent and pressing (Jacobsen, 1970: 143).

I take the building of city walls to be a signal for the changing balance between commercial and governance practices that suggests formal state-making. Several features indicate such an interpretation of this change. First, in terms of political leadership, en meaning ‘chief administrator’ is replaced by lugal, the military leader now translated as ‘king’ to indicate permanence (ibid.: 144). Second, assembly politics changes with decisions in the city assemblies moving away from voting to be replaced by divine favour (i.e. kings representing the relevant city-god’s will) (ibid.: 145). Third, even the gods that had been relatively egalitarian in organization become increasingly hierarchical (Leick, 2001: 147–8). This is state-making whereby new concerns for security are concentrated through coercion into a new institutional framework. This is dated by Jacobsen for completion in Early Dynastic II (after 2800 BCE), as indicated by both archaeological evidence of ‘the widespread appearance of city walls’ and traditional sources of epics such as the Sumerian King List (ibid.: 147).

The most famous hero in the Sumerian King List is Gilgamesh, a king of Uruk in Early Dynastic I. Nissen (1988) uses this example to describe the change to state formation. At the beginning of the eponymous epic poem, ‘we are told how Gilgamesh had to suppress the people of Uruk in order to be able to erect the city wall’ (ibid.: 95).

434 Peter J. Taylor

And what a wall it was: over nine kilometres long, seven metres high and with some 900 semicircular towers regularly set in the ramparts (Nissen, 1988: 95; Leick, 2001: 56). In this new era of inter-city warfare Gilgamesh is able to overrule the city assembly and defeat the aggression of Kish (Leick, 2001: 81). Uruk is no longer simply a city; it is a city-state.

In the next two sections on Mesopotamia, I consider city-ness and state-formation separately. Although the former will be weighted towards the earlier era and the latter to the later era, it is important to note that I do not use a city/city-state boundary to completely separate the discussion. My argument above is based upon the balance between commercial and political governance practices; commercial practices continue in city-states and governance practices were necessary before city-states.

Mesopotamian city-ness

In searching out the making of new social spaces that are town-ness and city-ness, I am looking for local commerce and non-local commerce. These coincide with what Yoffee (2005: 35) identifies as two sources of economic power in early civilizations: subsistence and storage of surpluses, and mercantile activity. The first derives from the countryside, from a city’s hinterland. Yoffee describes this in a very Jacobsean manner: ‘the urban implosion was accompanied by an equally important creation of the countryside’. This entailed ‘first depopulation of the rural and then its reconstruction: new villages, towns and hamlets arose in the backdraft of urbanization’ (ibid.: 60). This is clearly an example of the creation of town-ness. At the same time ‘long-distance, regular networks of exchange’ are important not just because of the direct acquisition of wealth thus obtained, but also because this new wealth is separate from the moral economy of the local (ibid.: 35). This is clearly the making of the process of city-ness. To understand this city-ness in Mesopotamia, I turn to the seminal work of Guillermo Algaze.

Algaze (2005b) draws explicitly on Jacobs (1969) to understand what he terms ‘the Sumerian take-off’. Although he does not use the term city-ness, a key feature of his work is that he treats production and exchange together and thereby links internal complexity of cities to their external connectedness. Thus he incorporates the environmental advantages of southern Mesopotamia (irrigation agriculture) with the transport advantages of its vast dendritic network for movement of commodities and information.

The ‘urban take-off’ (Algaze, 2005b: 12) is described as a process of cumulative multiplier effects drawing on Myrdal (1957), Pred (1966), Jacobs (1969) and Krugman (1995). The most important process derives from the latter two: import replacement. This requires a size of settlement that can sustain economic expansion; this can certainly be placed below the 10,000 entry qualification for Table 3. Thus Algaze is able to push the beginning of a dynamic urban network as far back as the late fifth and early fourth millennia. Here he identifies ‘by far the most important case of import substitution processes: the adoption of wool-bearing sheep from the surrounding highlands’ (Algaze, 2005b: 14). Initially imported from the latter regions, by the second half of the fourth millennium a new wool textiles industry using local wool was central to the urban economy. With access to a wide range of dyes and with larger pools of labour, the growth of this industry provided for new forward and backward linkages. Algaze (ibid.: 15) describes this as a ‘textbook case’ of multiplier effects, and it is worth quoting this process in full:

[Forward linkages] are provided by the fulling of semi-finished woven textiles with oils and alkali and the dyeing of fulled cloth. Both these practices . . . require a substantial input of value-added labor and new resources . . . Examples of backward linkages, in turn, are provided by a variety of labor-intensive activities that contributed necessary inputs to the weaving establishments but largely took place away from them. Minimally, these included pasturing the sheep, washing, plucking and/or shearing, combing, and spinning the wool, separating the wool

Early ‘city-ness’ and the origins of agriculture and states 435

by quality, and delivering it . . . No less important . . . this would have required scores of bureaucrats to record, store, and redistribute the output, and also to supervise the housing of the laborers and the distribution of subsistence rations.

In Jacobs’ terms, this is economic expansion in action in early Sumerian cities. Dynamic cities encompass multiple economic expansion processes, and this was the

case in Sumer. Although originally cities were differentiated by different economic niches relating to the resource base they exploited, with success came ‘competitive emulation’ (ibid.: 13). This replacement of imports from nearby places reduced regional specialization in Sumer, but in the process sparked a growth spurt due to new productive capacities being developed. It was at this stage, in the Late Uruk, that longer-distance trade came to prominence as exchanges between Sumer cities decreased. This ‘foreign’ trade exploited the immense water-transport advantages of Sumer and in addition coincided with the domestication of the donkey, facilitating overland trade (ibid.). The resulting input replacement was now metal-based: from buying fully finished products from metal-producing areas like Iran and Anatolia, Sumer cities created new metal- processing industries that relied ‘on imports of only lightly processed ores and of semi-processed ingots of smelted copper’ (ibid.). This is a network world of cities with people, commodities, ideas and knowledge circulating within and between cities with ever-increasing demands for innovations.

By far the greatest innovation of Sumer cities was the invention of writing. I have previously noted how pre-literate accountancy practices were developed through the Uruk period and writing ‘appeared for the first time in the Late Uruk period’ (Nissen et al., 1993: 19). Also previously noted, the new writing was largely about economic administration and therefore supplemented earlier accountancy practices rather than supplanting or transcending them (ibid.: 21). The important point from a city perspective is that this development consolidated a large category of new work in a new archetypally urban profession — scribes. This was the first ‘knowledge industry’, what Algaze (2005b: 23) calls ‘technologies of the intellect’. Nissen et al. (1993: 105) find it ‘difficult to conceive how the application and maintenance of administrative structures were possible without an orderly transmission of expertise and experience’. In other words scribes must have obtained ‘training’ within a community of scribes. This is the context for ‘experiments . . . to achieve more efficient methods of control’ (ibid.): writing itself will likely have been a result of such experimentation. Thus literacy derives from what it is cities do so well, in the first known long-term sustainable network of cities.

The scribes were not the only new addition in the making of an increasingly complex division of labour, and their work records this. Among the few non-economic texts, there are ‘lexical lists’ that order items in logical lists. The most famous is the ‘Titles and Professions List’ that mixes status positions with economic roles: ‘an orderly progression [of] . . . titles, professional names and functional designations’ (ibid.: 111). The best preserved tablet is from the middle of the third millennium BCE, but this is copy of a well-known text that goes back to the Late Uruk period (ibid.: 110). Since it was copied over a period of 800 years, the assumption is that it was used as for scribal training (ibid.: 106, 111). Although subsequently translated in later languages as ‘king’, it is noteworthy that the first rank in the original Sumerian designates the leading administrator; the Sumerian word for king (lugal) is not used (ibid.: 111). At the second level there are functional leaders with responsibilities for administrative areas such as justice/law, the city, the troops, the plough and barley (ibid.: 106, 111; see also Nissen, 1986: 329). Next come other high ranks: high priests, ‘chairman of the assembly’, advisors (‘wise men’), ambassadors, and other court and assembly officials. The remainder consists of lower- ranking priests, gardeners, cooks and craftsmen such as coppersmiths, jewellers, potters and bakers (Nissen, 1986: 329; Nissen et al., 1993: 111). One interpretation is that the text describes an initial Uruk complex division of labour. But it is very hierarchical, putting all work practices in their ranked place. As such it is a simplification, a classic political state document (Scott, 1998) that is still deemed to have some relevance in the

436 Peter J. Taylor

later world of city-states. The fact that it lasts so long does indicate that it is used by state officials to simplify, and make sense of, what were highly complex social entities, the cities. However, if the text were still an accurate description of the division of labour in the mid-third millennium, this would indicate a sclerotic stagnation, which is known not to be the case (Table 2).

Finally, what of the development of relations between these Sumerian cities and other regions? In an earlier work, Algaze (2005a) has interpreted Uruk’s non-Sumer relations as an ‘Uruk world-system’ with Sumer as the core. This leaves the other regions as periphery, indicated by the presence of Uruk trading posts and enclaves in non-Sumerian cities in upper Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Iran. Clearly this is using the dendritic transport potential of Sumer to link northwards, up the rivers and further into the highland sources of raw materials. A key point of this research is that it is not describing a ‘Uruk empire’; these were only dense trading links. Algaze (ibid.: 110–15) refers to the Uruk expansion as an ‘informal empire’ in the ‘Uruk world-system’, a process whereby regions are brought into an economic sphere of influence without the costs of military conquest (for a contrary position that does not contradict the non-military nature of the relations, see Stein, 1999). And, of course, this is how it must have been, given the ‘two eras’ argument developed above. Economic power was strongly harnessed in the Uruk period, but political governance processes were not yet developed to support non-local warfare and conquest. For this, states were necessary.

Mesopotamian state formation

The city-ness process in Mesopotamia was immensely successful from an economic perspective, and culminated in Uruk reaching a demographic size of some 80,000 people (Table 3). But this commercial success was running ahead of governance capacities. In the governance process that leads to state formation, I have previously suggested that the building of defensive city walls is a local indicator that state-ness has been achieved.

Jacobsen (1970: 143–4) uses epic texts to suggest how this change from city to city-state may have come about. As previously described, the separate administrative and military leaderships of Sumerian cities were appointed initially for dealing with specific emergencies. Jacobsen argues that there would have been ‘inherent tendencies’ for office-holders to try and extend their authority beyond the duration of an emergency (ibid.: 143). When in the epics sporadic war converts to a permanent condition, then ‘the officer who was dealing with it could not but become permanent with it’ (ibid.: 144). Thus arises a ‘king’ whose personal military followers become a regular standing army; his household locale becomes a ‘palace’. In this way cities become garrisoned and walled; hence ‘the close connection between Gilgamesh and the building of the city wall of Uruk in the Gilgamesh Epic’ (ibid.). This interpretation equates with Webb’s (1975: 164) notion of a ‘conditional state’ wherein the conditionality of leadership has to be overcome to create a state attained through ‘reliance on force’ (ibid.: 165). Although I do not like the concept of ‘conditional state’ because of its automatic evolutionary implication, the outcome with its association between state and coercion is, of course, classically Weberian in nature (Weber, 1978). Webb (1975) defines very well the process I am describing.

Webb (ibid.: 184–94) also considers the reason for the increased conflict that enables state formation. He is sympathetic to Carneiro’s (1970; 1978) non-urban ‘circumscription hypothesis’ that evokes an environmental causation: limited agricultural land (e.g. contained in a valley or lake basin) creates a situation where warfare cannot be resolved by movement of the defeated group to new land. The losers have nowhere to retreat to and therefore become slaves in an enhanced social stratification that culminates in a state. Webb (1975: 190) considers this argument to be lacking in consideration of trade and its contribution to creating more complex societies. This brings cities into the equation; cities consist of massive investment in social capital (flows/networks) and physical capital (place/territory) that are developed as ‘constricted spaces’. City-dwellers

Early ‘city-ness’ and the origins of agriculture and states 437

have nowhere to retreat except behind their walls: the building of walls says ‘we are not leaving’. This is a city circumscription hypothesis of state-making.

City-states combine commercial and political governance processes, with the latter now in the ascendency. The question arises as to how sustainable such a commercial/ political governance relation can, and has, been. When expansion of commercial practices grows the city, it thereby becomes an inviting target, a place of rich pickings for outside or inside military predators. Thus the city network phase without states is ultimately unsustainable: success creates the conditions requiring change in order to survive. Enter the city-state. New success in this sphere, expansion of governance practices, growing the city’s territory (hinterland), threatens other cities and their territories. Thus the city-state as a political structure also creates new conditions leading to another round of necessary change to survive. Enter the territorial state or city-empire, a successful city-state that has conquered other city-states and relegated them to provincial status. It is the story of city-empire that is the stuff of the epics.

But let’s start with the initial competitive phase of multiple city-states. Nissen (1988: 131–3) provides an interesting example of the competition between city-states in third- millennium Mesopotamia. Drawing ‘spheres of influence’ around the main cities, he shows that initially they were far enough apart not to encroach on each other’s territory. However in the early thirty-third century BCE, when the route of the Euphrates changed to the advantage of the small settlement of Umma, this grew into a new city. It reached a point where it encroached on the neighbouring city-state of Lagash and its major city Girsu. This produced a conflict zone between the cities over water usage and canals (ibid.: 135). This conflict, which became seemingly perennial, is only known because it features prominently in texts of the Early Dynasty III (ibid.; see also Jacobsen, 1970: 151), but Nissen (1988: 135) argues that it represents a new norm for what he calls ‘the period of rival states’ from 2800 to 2350 BCE (see Table 2).

From the epics there are records of rulers, conflicts and successions. Interpretations of these show fluctuating fortunes, with different Sumer city-states rising to regional leadership followed by a return to squabbling city-states, until another hero-king raises his city to overlordship. Although lacking continuity, the common title taken by those achieving the latter is ‘king of Kish’ irrespective of their own home city. This is a curious title because the city of Kish is not in Sumer, but is located on the Euphrates to the north. Nissen (1988: 144–5) suggests that the city of Kish held a strategic riverine position relative to all Sumer, and therefore its kingship meant countrywide control. However, it is not known whether the title merely represented ‘power to raid and to exact tribute unopposed’ or whether it was a more solid political structure (Jacobsen, 1970: 153). Jacobsen notes that one such ‘king’ adjudicated in the long-running dispute between Umma and Lagash/Girsa (ibid.) suggesting real jurisdiction.

However the ‘kings of Kish’ are interesting because their conquests revealed the need for new political mechanisms that were required for the establishment of a multi-city territorial state. This was the conversion of defeated city-states into new imperial provinces:

As soon as a polity was enlarged beyond the boundaries of one city-state, ‘branch offices’ were needed. Each previous independent state constituted a convenient province, which could be accurately delimitated territorially, on the basis of the previous boundaries of the separate city-states (Postgate, 1992: 151).

But this process was fraught with difficulties, as the fragile Kish kingships were merely local city-state rulers confronted by the pitfalls of non-local governance. The result of conquest was a centre/non-centre dichotomy. The king represented the centre’s rule across the territory, but he is opposed by the particularities of other cities and their special gods. And the latter had to be respected. The solution of treating the non-centre as ‘provinces’ is a new administrative invention. According to Nissen (1988), this political innovation was not made until the end of the third millennium BCE in what he calls the ‘period of the first territorial states’ from 2350 to 2000 BCE.

438 Peter J. Taylor

In fact, the new administrative mechanisms were developed twice to produce city- empires that had dynastic reproduction of several generations. First, Sargon of Akkad famously produced the first ‘world empire’ (Mann, 1986). His origins are obscure but he signalled a break from the past by centring his rule on a new city, Akkad. This city became the base of a ‘centralized administration and communication system’(Nissen, 1988: 167). His new rule used ‘governors’fromAkkad to rule conquered cities that were garrisoned by Akkad soldiers and whose walls were destroyed, indicating not just removal of defence but also elimination of their separate statehood (ibid.: 168; see also Jacobsen, 1970: 154). The Akkad dynasty lasted five rulers covering nearly 200 years before succumbing to outside invasion. Sumer was not then unified again until the ‘Third Dynasty of Ur’ that had five rulers lasting for 109 years. Jacobsen (1970: 155) argues that it was this empire that solved the problem of continual non-local rebellion by instituting a senior administrative elite, answerable to the king, who could be moved from post to post to reduce development of local ties (Nissen, 1988: 194). A key feature was that military affairs were kept separate from the civil administration (Postgate, 1992: 152). This is a state bureaucracy treating the former city-states of Sumer as merely provinces. Thus was born the territorial state, a city-empire where rival cities are reduced to provinces.

Once this territorial state formation is completed, Sumer’s relations with other regions change dramatically. In the cities era of Uruk, it was previously shown that trading led to an ‘informal empire’ of enclaves and trading posts as the means of projecting the economic power of Sumer’s great cities (Algaze, 2005a). But states project political power through coercion (or the threat thereof) to create formal empires, lands of conquest. Sargon attempted to extend his empire far beyond Sumer, north into today’s Syria and Anatolia, but the outer areas were not always meant to be permanent possessions; they could represent merely a buffer zone (Nissen, 1988: 168). The Third Dynasty of Ur empire was at least as large as the Akkadian empire, and in this case appeared to be more strategic by including regions to the east to protect the eastern flank from the threats posed by peoples of the northeast mountains (ibid.: 196). Further, the northwest was protected by the erection of the ‘Martu wall’ as a sort of city-state protection mechanism writ large. It was the overrunning of this wall that marked the end of the great empire of Ur.

Second generic conclusion

As with the ‘cities first, agriculture later’ section, this ‘cities first, states later’ section, as encapsulated in Figure 1(a), is intended as a general statement about the rise of states deriving from the communication approach to understanding early cities. Hence, this is a second generic conclusion linking the detail learned from a case study to a wider range of known examples. The comparisons here are with other regions where the development of primal ‘civilizations’has been identified. My main source for this exercise is a group of books consisting of 68 chapters that between them provide a reasonably balanced worldwide assessment of the development of cities and states — Nichols and Charlton (1997); Feinman and Marcus (1998); Hansen (2000a; 2002); Smith (2003a). Using these sources, I have searched out indications of early cities transmuting into city-states and territorial states (empires) as in Figure 3(a). The results of this exercise are shown for the six main ‘civilization’regions in Table 4. This indicates that I can find interesting evidence to support my generic argument in all cases. But this is by no means clear-cut; there are, of course, debates about the interpretation of the evidence (Spencer, 2010). I will conclude by focusing on just three cases — Egypt, China and Mesoamerica — where the interpretation I support in Table 4 is definitely a minority position.

According to Wenke (1997: 27), it has become a cliché to refer to Egypt as a ‘civilization without cities’. Thus Egypt would seem to constitute one of the severest challenges to the framework developed in this article. Wenke (ibid.: 45) understands the importance of cities as creative places, but argues that Egypt developed without such city-ness:

Early ‘city-ness’ and the origins of agriculture and states 439

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440 Peter J. Taylor

the early Egyptian state was able to do everything necessary for an advanced preindustrial civilization without large, functionally differentiated communities, simply by linking, via the Nile and an elaborate bureaucracy, the many functional elements one might find in a single Mesopotamian city-state. In Egypt these elements were distributed throughout the Nile Valley and Delta.

In other words, economic development was by the state rather than by commercial elites (ibid.: 44). And yet Egyptian cities do feature in Modelski’s (2003) demographic survey of ancient cities, not as plentifully as in Mesopotamia but not insignificantly either. Therefore I follow Yoffee’s (2005: 46–8) position that first there is reasonable evidence for early cities as described in Table 4, wherein city-states and then the larger territorial state were invented. He argues that the difference with other regions of civilization is not the lack of cities, but the fact that they did not play a major part in political governance because the large ‘linear’ territorial framework of the state ‘made urbanism a part of the trends towards territorial unification rather than a factor opposing such trends, as was the case elsewhere’ (ibid.: 48). But the state inventions are the same in arriving at this unusual situation.

The other two cases, China and Mesoamerica, are very different in many respects, but they share one intriguing feature in their debates over the origins of cities and states. In both cases there are strong arguments for the reverse of the process argued in this article, with states seemingly preceding cities. And in both cases promoters of this orthodoxy have been accused of ideological distortions in their interpretations. Thus in China, although ‘the Spring-and-Autumn period (711–481 BCE) was the age of the city-state in China’ (Lewis, 2000: 359), ‘it left surprisingly little trace in later history’ (ibid.: 372). For Robin Yates (1997), this neglect of cities and city-states in Chinese history is a historiographical artefact. Basically he argues that both Marxists and traditional Chinese scholars have been searching for suitable imperial antecedents in the pre-empire period (before 221 BCE) and, for both searches, neither cities nor city-states were of any relevance or interest. Similarly, but for different reasons, Western scholars have traditionally argued that ‘the Maya did not have either cities or states’ (Pyburn, 1997: 155–6). But Pyburn treats this negative thinking as an example of treating the Maya as a simple and ‘exoticized other’ (ibid.: 156). She challenges a set of unexamined assumptions ‘head on’, including one that is particularly pertinent to the argument developed in this article: ‘Most reconstructions of ancient Maya civilization begin with the assumption that individual communities were economically self- sufficient’ (ibid.). This ‘othering’ negates the complexity of Maya political economy, but Pyburn notes with approval that ‘the possibility of complex intersite relations of both an economic and political nature has begun to be suggested by some authors for some ancient Maya cities’ (ibid.). She argues explicitly that ‘local subsistence patterns and population densities are a product of intersite political economy as much as local resource availability’ (ibid.: 156–7). From my perspective she is discovering city-ness and state formation.

The argument of this article has come full circle. I began by setting out a city- centric position to counter state-centric social science thinking, but it should not be thought that state-biases in our thinking is restricted to contemporary situations. In history, and in the various ‘ancient’ histories I have dealt with, there always remains a strong tendency for scholars to ‘read back into the past the conditions and practices of their own day’ (Yates, 1997: 75). Of course, I have delved into histories where the amount of evidence varies but is never as complete as one would want. This provides for a lot of leeway in interpretation. Hence the importance of the theoretical perspective that engages with the evidence. I consider my communication perspective of city-ness to provide a powerful lens through which to view what is known about the times and places where cities, agriculture and states were appearing on the world stage. In debates on these topics, I expect contrary arguments to feature a model equally or more powerful than the processes and mechanisms I have postulated. But

Early ‘city-ness’ and the origins of agriculture and states 441

for now I merely repeat: all cities are so extraordinary they contain the capacity to invent both agriculture and states.

Peter J. Taylor (crogfam@yahoo.com), School of Built and Natural Environment, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 8SP, UK.

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Résumé Des études récentes sur les villes, fondées sur le travail de Jane Jacobs, sont appliquées au développement des villes primitives, créant des ramifications explorées ici. Une approche de la nature urbaine (‘cityness’) par les communications permet d’appréhender les villes primitives comme des univers sociaux, nouveaux sur un plan qualitatif et ouverts à des processus de changement mondial. Reprenant l’utilisation que Jacobs fait de Çatal Höyük pour repousser la chronologie des premières villes, l’article s’intéresse aux études récentes de ce site qui corroborent sa théorie. En parallèle, s’appuyant sur ‘l’économie des sociétés primitives’ de Sahlin, il défend l’idée controversée de Jacobs selon laquelle les villes ont inventé l’agriculture. Dépassant ensuite Jacobs, il soutient que les États ont aussi été inventés dans les villes, la démonstration tirant ses arguments d’études mésopotamiennes. Dans les deux cas, des conclusions génériques sont présentées, illustrées de courts exemples issus d’autres parties du monde.

Early ‘city-ness’ and the origins of agriculture and states 447

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