Mesopotamia : The Invention of the City (original) (raw)

2001

Abstract

The invention of cities may well be the most enduring legacy of Mesopotamia. There was not just one but dozens of cities, each controlling its own rural and pastoral territory and its own system of irrigation. Historians have tended to highlight the emergence of centralized states which exercised control over often extensive territories, but the most successful socio-political unit to emerge in Mesopotamia remained the city state. This book tells the stories of ten Mesopotamian cities in a way that will do justice to this urban paradigm. The individual stories are heterogeneous, reflecting the often contradictory thought and conclusions of the archaeologists who interpret the physical evidence of sites, of the epigraphists and Assyriologists who have copied and translated the cuneiform tablets, of the historians, geologists and anthropologists who have considered the findings. Most importantly, each city tells its own story through its discovery and a gradual understanding of its hi...

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