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The First Towns?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Mortimer Wheeler
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Extract

‘Gunpowder, Printing and the Protestant Religion’, said Thomas Carlyle in 1827, are ‘the three great elements of modern civilization’. I wish we could be as contentedly concise about the more ancient varieties. What indeed are the primary qualities of urbanity? At what definable point did Man step across that thin borderline between rus and urbs ? The question matters; the moment at which Man first became something more than a brigand or a hind (without necessarily losing either of those characters) was a climactic one. It counts for a great deal in our estimate of human achievement.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 30 , Issue 119 , September 1956 , pp. 132 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1956

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References

1 Social Evolution, London, 1951, p. 161.

2 V. Gordon Childe, New Light on the Most Ancient East, London, 3rd ed., 1952 ; Henri Frankfort, The Birth of Civilization in the Near East, London, 1951.

3 R. Heine-Geldern, ‘The Origin of Ancient Civilizations and Toynbee’s Theories’, in Diogenes : a quarterly publication of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies, no. 13, University of Chicago Press, Spring, 1956, pp. 81-99. The author concludes that ‘the birth of the oldest civilization was a unique fact, due to exceptionally favourable circumstances. Certainly, under the conditions that existed in the Near East in the fourth millennium B.C., the unfolding of civilization was practically inevitable. It was perhaps only due to the advent of new stimuli during the Uruk period, thus to what one could call “an historical accident”, that Babylonia was the first to take the decisive step, and not Egypt or Syria. But the fact remains that Babylonia was the first, and that all the other civilizations of the world are in a certain measure, directly or indirectly, derived from it’.

4 It has been calculated that ‘it would have taken 1,500 men working a 10-hour day five years to build one of the temple-terraces at Erech’. Childe, New Light . . ., p. 132, following A. Falkenstein.

5 Agricultural Origins and Dispersals, American Geographical Soc., New York, 1952, pp. 20 ff.

6 I have in mind a vivid flight over the drowned valley of the Brahmaputra during the monsoon; and the considerable sums spent annually to preserve the remains of Mohenjo-daro from the Indus flood. Yet both these valleys are to-day heavily engineered.

7 Such details as are cited here were described by Miss Kenyon in a lecture to the Palestine Exploration Fund, the British School of Archaeology at Jerusalem, and the British Academy on the 27 June 1956. On the same occasion Professor F. E. Zeuner was to have announced the preliminary radio-carbon results but was unfortunately prevented by illness. It is to be hoped that precise and verified results may be available in the near future. Nothing in archaeological radio-carbon analysis is more important than this.

8 What Happened in History, Pelican Books, 1942, ch. III ; Man Makes Himself, London, 1936, p. 87.

9 To Palestine has often enough been accorded a prior claim to the cultivation of wheat. See, e.g., Man, 1938, 36, and 1939, 53. Without over-insistence, it may be affirmed that the botanical evidence is consistent with the early cultivation of Emmer there or in Syria and the adjacent lowlands. I wish we knew a little more about the Natufians of Mount Carmel, with their composite sickles.