Arabian Sea
Pillars of ancient administration, an Egyptian vizier (opposite) and a Mesopotamian lugal (below) retain their authority even in effigy. At all levels of urban government, religion played a crucial role. As senior official in a highly organized bureaucracy, the vizier was appointed by the pharaoh, himself seen as a god. The lugal, meanwhile, was considered to be the earthly representative of his city's local deity; but while his power was theoretically absolute, it was exercised only after close consultation with the priesthood.
Of stairways, which was dedicated to Ur's patron deity, the moon-god Nanna. The precinct around the ziggurat was enclosed by walls and a religious complex of open courtyards and chapels. Outside this enclosure stood a royal palace, a temple storehouse, and a residence for the high priests. It was, an architectural concept that was to be echoed in cities throughout Mesopotamia for another 1,500 years.
Around Ur's temple and royal complex lay the city proper—a 150-acre maze of two-story mud-brick dwellings arranged along winding streets and alleyways. There was little attempt at planned growth, and houses sprang up according to the accidents of landownership. The streets were unpaved and in times of heavy rainfall turned into a deep mire. The streets were not wide enough to accommodate wheeled vehicles, which were probably left at the city gates, all further movement within the walls being that of people or pack animals. To protect this fragile traffic from injury, the corners of the houses were rounded, and mounting blocks were provided in the streets for the convenience of riders.
A certain amount of respect was reserved for public rights: "If a wall is threatening to fall and the authorities have brought the fact to the knowledge of its owner," ran one admonitory law, "and if he does not strengthen the wall, which then collapses and causes a freeman's death, then it is a capital offense." But little attention was paid to public sanitation, although the temples themselves were fitted with impressive drains—perforated, baked-clay pipes that sank some forty feet into a potsherd-lined dry well. Defenses were not neglected—the whole city was protected by a massive, sloping rampart surrounded by a sturdy, baked-brick wall—but in the temporary peace granted by unification, citizens felt secure enough to live in suburbs, which stretched about a mile beyond the city walls. And beyond them lay the irrigated fields on whose produce Ur depended.
Among Ur's 20,000 citizens were priests, temple staff, scribes, administrators, schoolteachers, and every kind of artisan from riveters to carpenters. But perhaps the most valued members of the community were the merchants. Inside the city walls were two artificial harbors linked to the Euphrates by canals. And from here Ur's merchant marine set sail for the Persian Gulf and the city's major trading partner, the small island of Dilmun—modern-day Bahrain.
From this bustling entrepot, they returned with luxury goods to suit the most sophisticated tastes—gold and silver vessels of the finest workmanship, jewels, intricate beaded headdresses, toilet boxes, and cosmetics. The seal stones of merchants, with which they marked imports and exports, and bills of lading written on clay tablets, detailed a far-flung web of commerce that stretched from the Indus Valley and Afghanistan in the east to Egypt and Lebanon in the west. One such tally from the early second millennium BC showed an incoming ship to have carried gold, copper ore, pearls, ivory, hardwoods, and precious stones.
With bureaucratic zeal, scribes recorded nearly every aspect of commerce and the administration of the state, using a wedge-shape stylus to write on tablets of flattened clay. The old pictographic script had developed into a rectilinear form for easier inscription, and by about 2500 BC, it was being used to represent spoken language, thus enabling the writer to express ideas and not simply record commodities. With this new tool of communication, scribes recorded the numbers of laborers working in the temple's fields, and the amount of work involved in cutting reeds, shearing livestock, or weaving bolts of cloth. Issues of beer and food rations, which was the way wages were paid, were listed; gifts of animals to state officials for "services
Rendered" were recorded, as were sacrificial offerings to the gods and gifts to the king from foreign ambassadors and vassals.
Considerable attention was devoted to the administration of the king's wide dominions. Among the officials who worked in Ur's temple complex were the treasurer; ministers of war, agriculture, justice, and housing; the controller of the royal household; the master of the royal harem; and directors of livestock, dairy work, fishing, and donkey transport. Mesopotamia was divided into between forty and fifty city-states, each governed by an ensi who was usually directly answerable to the king. To prevent an ensi from building up too much local power, he was frequently transferred from district to district. The commanders of district garrisons were also directly answerable to the king, and if a dispute arose between a district commander and an ensi, it was resolved in a court of law. An efficient system of messengers was established to ensure that the king was regularly informed of events in outlying districts.
Ur's dominance of Mesopotamia was to last a scant century. But in the centuries to come, the system of sound central administration and social cohesion established by the Sumerians of Ur survived. Time and again, conquerors or invaders discovered there was no better system; so they adapted it to their purposes.
Only three centuries separated the beginning of Egyptian civilization from that of its neighbor Mesopotamia. Both civilizations sprang from the same conjunction of natural and social causes, but Egypt, inward-looking and deeply conservative, developed in a strikingly different way.
Like its Mesopotamian equivalent, the rich alluvial soil deposited annually with the flooding of the Nile was fertile ground. And by about 3500 BC, its surplus crops were nurturing a scattered civilization that had developed skilled crafts, a pantheon of gods, and the art of writing in hieroglyphs. But unlike Mesopotamia, Egypt was a closed country. Bounded on both sides by desert, the Nile Valley was relatively safe from outside invasion. And it was not long before one king achieved hegemony over the whole area, establishing the capital city of a united kingdom at Memphis, just south of the Nile Delta.
This ancient Egyptian kingdom, which anticipated the unification of Mesopotamia by some eight centuries, was based on a highly stratified society that consisted of a descending hierarchy of the gods, the king, the dead, and humanity. The pharaoh, or king, considered to be the earthly embodiment of a god, stood at a pinnacle of power, communicating with his subjects through his priests—often members of his own family—who were at the same time the administrators of the state. This powerful oligarchy, numbering about 5,000 in 3000 BC, ruled a population estimated at 870,000, most of whom were engaged in primitive agriculture.
The maintenance of power depended on the propagation of the cult of the god-king and the awe in which he was held. The early pharaohs traveled their dominions ceaselessly, impressing their subjects in grand style. At Memphis, for instance, the royal palace and administrative center consisted of a huge, rectangular pavilion made from wood and matting, and hung with bright carpets. It had elaborately carved timber pillars inlaid with gold, yet the whole could be easily dismantled to accompany the pharaoh on his royal progress.
The reverence accorded to the pharaohs had a direct impact on city life. Although cities would have originally been surrounded by a wall—Egyptian nomads were no less threatening to settled farmers than those of Mesopotamia—the unifying presence
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THE lilt OF THE CIMimilTy
An impression from a stone seal discovered in the archives of the temple of Ishtar-Kititum depicts a worshiper, accompanied by a goddess, approaching a bearded figure enthroned on a dais—pos&i-blv the city's ruler.
Lore than just religious centers, Mesopotamian temples played an integral part in urban life, using the revenues from their vast landholdings to support the communities around them. Their granaries and other reserves enabled them to feed the population when a harvest failed, ransom prisoners, float merchants in need of capital, or tide a poor farmer over to the next season—often without interest. They also provided shelter for the homeless, taking care of orphans, illegitimate offspring, and children given to the temple by poor families.
One such benefactor was the temple (right) dedicated to the goddess Ishtar-Kititum. Constructed around 2000 BC in the city of Neribtum (modern Ischali), it comprised three separate shrines and a series of administrative buildings grouped around a spacious courtyard. The whole complex, as befitted its central role in the community, was raised ten feet above ground level on a solidly built terrace faced with kiln-fired bricks set in bitumen. The main shrine, which also contained the temple treasury, stood at an even higher level than the rest. Massive grooved towers flanked each entrance, adding extra authority to a structure that already dominated the town and surrounding countryside.
Scribes, such as this assiduous pair depicted in an early-fourteenth-century BC Egyptian tomb relief, monitored the complicated religious and commercial transactions of the ancient world's great temples.
He flow of humanity through the temples of the ancient world was ceaseless. Not only were they places of individual worship, where citizens left votive offerings to secure blessings or avert evil, but their day-to-day functioning involved the use of every skill and profession practiced in the city.
In Mesopotamia, the soothing and appeasement of the gods demanded battalions of priests, singers, and musicians. These, in turn, required a sizable force of household staff—cooks, maids, and cleaners. No less important were the temple's secular operations: Regiments of slaves labored in the temple's fields and granaries, while armies of local artisans toiled to supply the holy precinct with necessities such as textiles, pottery vessels, and furniture. Indeed, some temples became vast trading estates, with areas for manufacturing— spinning, tanning, weaving, and milling— storage, and distribution. And, overseeing all, there was a senior corps of scribes and officials that administered the smooth running of operations, allocating labor and resources, drawing up land surveys, recording donations, totting up income, and listing expenditures.
In Egypt, too, temples were bustling centers that combined trade and administration with worship. Among their many workshops, there were even special schools vyhere would-be bureaucrats could learn to read and write. Nor was all this activity solely for the benefit of the living. The Egyptian dead were expected to have much the same requirements as they did when alive, and temple precincts could encompass entire cities specially built for life beyond the grave.
An alabaster effigy of a worshiper from the goddess Nintu's sanctuary in the Mesopotamian city of Khafajah intercedes for a citizen in 2600 BC.
A vignette of everyday life in the fifteenth century BC, painted on the wall of an Egyptian vizier's tomb, depicts a gang of Nubian and Syrian laborers making mud bricks. In the lands of the Middle East, where timber and stone had to be brought from a distance, mud provided a cheap and readily available building material. Dug from the ground and loaded into baskets (center), the mud was mixed with straw before being poured into molds (upper right) to bake in the sun. Once hardened, the bricks were removed and stacked ready for use (upper left). Buildings built of mud rarely lasted long. But what the material lacked in durability it more than made up for in convenience: When a house disintegrated, it was a simple matter to mold bricks for a new one.
Of a divine ruler turned citizens' attention away from the dangers without to the glories within. What walls existed were for definition rather than for defense, and towns became open developments of dwellings around a central temple dedicated to the pharaoh or one of his sibling deities.
As in Mesopotamia, the temples were more than places of worship. As well as being centers of administration, from which the pharaoh's bureaucracy governed the surrounding countryside, the temples also acted as economic siphons, controlling, collecting, and counting the wealth produced by their citizens. Within their huge, walled enclosures stood offices, archives, storerooms, and living quarters for officials and priests. Their power was enormous: At the time of Ramses III in the twelfth century BC, his temple in the southern capital of Thebes controlled one-fifth of the nation's farmland, owned 400,000 head of cattle, and employed more than 86,000 people. Its wealth in silver, gold, and other precious metals was incalculable.
But if the temples sucked in the country's material wealth, they offered their citizens a good spiritual return on their investment, for the belief that preserving the body meant survival in the afterlife pervaded Egyptian religious thought. Even the poorest peasants mummified their dead in the desiccating sand of the desert. And if survival after death was important for such ordinary mortals, it was even more so for their god-king. Accordingly, the country's wealth, in labor, property, agricultural produce, minerals, and trade, was conveyed through the temples to one end: the building of a fitting tomb for the pharaoh. Egypt had become a nation of undertakers.
Along the Nile, huge pyramidal edifices and imposing rock-hewn chambers were
Created to house the embalmed remains of successive pharaohs. Their construction demanded all that the temples could offer. The Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, for example, on which work started in 2575 BC, is estimated to have taken more than 100,000 men twenty years to build—an enormous diversion of human and material resources. Nor was it sufficient for the pharaoh to have just a tomb. In the hereafter, Egypt's rulers needed to live just as they had done in life, surrounded by their family, nobles, and retainers. As the tombs of Egypt's aristocracy gathered around those of their masters, the country became dotted with twin cities: one to house the dead and one to house the project's laborers.
The centralized endeavor that dominated the country left its stamp on urban construction. At the center of each city of the living stood an official royal complex, containing temples and palaces, as well as housing for the pharaoh, his family, the priesthood, and state officials such as the police chief and mayor. Outside sprawled the residential suburbs of the citizens, a mixture of rich and poor, but with those farthest from the center being reserved exclusively for workers.
In one city. Tell al-Amarna, a specially built capital erected midway between Memphis and Thebes in the fourteenth century BC by the pharaoh Akhenaton, the villas of the wealthy followed roughly the same plan: pillared reception halls, baths, and lavatories, plus luxurious family quarters, their surrounding gardens imaginatively laid out with terraces, pools, and decorative niches for statues. Elsewhere in the compound were accommodations for household servants, plus a kitchen and bakery.
The gap between rich and poor was great. But as an essential cog in the machinery for perpetuating the cult of the pharaoh, the lowly workers were not entirely neglected. The settlement at Deir el-Medina, for example, founded in 1500 BC in an isolated valley just outside Thebes, housed craftsmen specializing in the construction of royal tombs. As royal employees, these tomb builders enjoyed special privileges: Water was brought to them daily by teams of donkeys; they had their own fishermen to keep them supplied with fresh and dried fish from the Nile, and specially employed launderers to wash their clothes. Within an area of slightly more than one acre, a compound wall enclosed some seventy dwellings, laid out in straight terraces and separated by narrow alleys. The houses were long, narrow, and cramped, but far from slums. Each contained a hall, reception room, workshop, and bedroom. At the rear stood a courtyard kitchen, often with stairs down to a storage cellar.
Not all craftsmen were so favored. Many of the inhabitants of Egypt's cities would have been transient, seasonal workers. The massed labor required for tomb construction could only be freed from the fields between July and October, when the Nile's flooding made agricultural work impracticable. And the material from which the cities were made was as ephemeral as their occupants; although Egypt had access to huge natural deposits of stone, the quarried blocks were mainly reserved for temples and tombs. Dwellings of the wealthy might have the luxury of a stone door frame, or costly imported timber pillars, but otherwise they, like those of the less well off, were made entirely from mud brick. In time, they would all crumble to dust, leaving as sole monument to Egypt's glory the tombs of the pharaohs, whose scale was so immense as to defy destruction.
While Egypt's workers were toiling to raise tombs to their kings, another people far to the east were laboring to construct their own urban legacy. Like the ancient world's other civilizations, that of the Indus Valley prospered from the annual inundation of
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Its river, whose rich deposits of alluvium yielded surplus crops for its farmers. In the middle of the third millennium BC, a growing cultural uniformity throughout the valley seems to have brought about the establishment of a central government, with its capital city probably at either Mohenjo-Daro, which lay near the mouth of the Indus, or at Harappa, situated about 350 miles to the north on a tributary, the Ravi.
It was a prosperous society, which thrived not only on agriculture but also on commerce. Major trading centers grew up to handle the lapis lazuli, turquoise, and metals from Afghanistan, Persia, and central Asia, which were trundled south by oxcart or donkey train to be transferred to ships bound for the Persian Gulf. At the same time, the Indus Valley towns developed their own exports, notably semiprecious stones and valuable hardwoods such as teak, cedar, and rosewood. So great was the flow of goods that on occasion Indian merchants had to set up permanent residence as trading agents in the cities of Mesopotamia.
To the accompaniment of harps, lyres, and reed pipes, defeated citizens march forth to greet their Assyrian conquerors. One of the fruits of civilization, music was initially deployed not for individual pleasure, but in the service of religion. But by the time this relief was carved in the seventh century BC, music was giving rhythm to the life of citizens as they marched to battle, danced at festivals, or joined in communal labor.
While the necessity of organizing and maintaining irrigation systems had brought Egyptian and Mesopotamian societies together, citizens of the Indus were united by the river in a different fashion. The annual floods that gave the valley life also brought it destruction: Whole villages would have to be evacuated before the massive force of the Himalayan thaw, and occasionally, the river would change its course, bringing life to new areas but at the same time rendering old settlements obsolete. At the mouth of the Indus, the situation was complicated still further by earthquakes. On at least three occasions, a huge ridge of the earth's crust was thrown up, blocking the
River's course. As the resultant lake increased in size, it reached back to all but engulf Mohenjo-Daro. Strong levees were constructed to hold back slight rises in water level. But when the full floods came, the only strategy was to retreat. While the Mesopotamians and Egyptians toiled to raise walls, tombs, and temples, the people of the Indus labored at a much more basic task; that of literally raising their civilization above the threatening floodwaters on huge mounds of earth and rubble.
Their efforts were not always successful: Disasters such as the one that occurred at Mohenjo-Daro were more than even the Indus engineers could cope with. But after every reversal, the citizens bent their backs to rebuilding their cities, brick for brick, exactly as they had been before. And the people of the Indus were nothing if not methodical. Weights and measures were standardized, baked bricks were of uniform size, and the 100 or so substantial towns in the valley were built according to a broadly similar plan.
At Harappa, for example, a central citadel was raised on a mound that stood forty feet above the plain, faced with a thick embankment of bricks to safeguard against erosion. Nor were the Harappans vigilant only against the forces of nature: A high, crenelated wall studded with towers topped the flood defenses. Within the citadel were crowded administrative offices, temples, and the residences of officials. To the north, meanwhile, on a slightly lower mound was the residential quarter, as much as 640 acres in area, laid out in straight parallel streets about thirty feet wide. Between these main arteries were large blocks of houses built of baked brick and divided by unplanned lanes onto which the entrances of the houses opened.
If the Harappans were threatened by water, they had at least learned how to live with it in the most effective way. A feature of the Indus Valley cities was the sophistication of their drainage systems. Many houses had shower rooms and toilets whose waste pipes discharged into dry wells or central sewers in the street. The sewers, which were maintained by a municipal authority, were roofed in with brick and provided with regularly spaced manholes for inspection and maintenance.
The people of the Indus Valley were not the only ones to struggle to overcome the might of a river. According to Chinese mythology, civilization arose in that country due to the activities of a leader named Shen Nung. It was he who instructed his people in the arts of agriculture and commerce, and also taught them the techniques of flood control. They had good need of the wisdom he imparted, because, from the fourth millennium BC, Chinese farmers had been congregating in villages around the course of the Yellow River in the north of the country. The river was well named. As it flowed down from the northern mountains, it carried with it huge quantities of the area's yellow soil, which colored both it and the Yellow Sea into which it ran. Not only did this cause erosion in the river's upper reaches, but in the lower stretches, the accumulated sediment caused the river to rise above the level of the surrounding plains. In times of flood, the river would burst its banks to cascade calamitously onto the farmers' fields and settlements.
Over the centuries, the combined necessities of tapping the river for irrigation and at the same time building dikes to battle the deluge had united the Chinese in a civilization that, by the middle of the third millennium BC, centered around a collection of well-fortified towns. Their society was highly stratified, ruled at the top level by hereditary kings, priests, and nobles. The priests were a vital prop of rulers because they were believed to have access to the spiritual universe from which they brought
Wisdom and foreknowledge. Invested in the kings, this knowledge reinforced their authority to guide and command. At the bottom level were the peasants, who produced agricultural surpluses, acted as army conscripts, and provided unpaid labor on a huge scale for such public works as irrigation and flood control. In between was a growing class of specialists skilled in arts such as jade and bone carving, bronze smelting, and particularly fine ceramic work.
In the late third millennium BC, the northern regions of China were united under a single leader, Yu the Great, whose origins, according to legend, were inextricably linked with the river. In 2297 BC, after a particularly disastrous flood, Yu was charged with taming the waters. It took him and thousands of workers thirteen years of dredging and digging before the task was completed. The result was a placid river— which supposedly remained so for 1,600 years—that gained Yu the title of emperor.
Sturdy walls, built of kiln-baked brick to a thickness of five feet, enclose a well-appointed dwelling in the city of Mohenjo-Daro. Set in the fertile Indus Valley, Mohenjo-Daro was, by the third millenium BC, home to one of the most sophisticated civilizations in the world, and the houses of its well-to-do offered every domestic convenience. On the ground floor, an interior well (center) supplied fresh water, while an adjacent bathroom—its floor waterproofed with a coating of brick dust and lime—drained out into either a dry well or the city’s elaborate network of open, brick-lined sewers. Windows were few and small, to keep the house cool, but a balustraded courtyard and an opening onto the mud roof afforded ready access to fresh air. The householder and his family lived on the upper floor, while the servants—including a resident doorman, whose cubicle was situated in the entrance hall (left)—were billeted below, near the kitchen and other working quarters.
What truth there is in the story of Yu will never be known, but if the legend is to be believed, it was while the Yellow River was still under his thrall that China's first recorded civilization began to emerge. For by the latter part of the second millennium BC, China's scribes were using ideograms to detail important events in civic life; court events, proclamations, treaties between noble factions, the lineage of clans, and historical events. Moreover, since about 1500 BC they had been working for definable masters: China's ruling Shang dynasty, who for some five centuries brought efficient government—as well as the intricacies of chariot warfare and an accurate calendar—to a centralized kingdom that embraced most of the tribal groups north of the Yangtze River.
Little remains of the Shang's urban achievements. The scribes who recorded their rulers' movements did so for the most part on perishable materials, and the cities themselves were built mostly of wood and earth. From the foundations of the settlements, however, it is possible to ascertain that the Shang not only moved their capital several times, but that each was built along similar lines; a high defensive wall, within which the city was divided into regular, rectangular blocks, at least one of which was an imposing palace enclosure that doubled as a religious center. The bulk of the population, meanwhile, lived outside the city walls in simple houses whose floors were sunk up to nine feet below ground level for insulation; in times of crisis, however, the people sought safety in the city.
The extent of the Shang's building operations was concrete testimony to their power. At one capital, Zhangzhou, for example, the thirty-foot-high city wall ran for more than four miles to enclose a rectangular area of 800 acres. The very building of such a defense would have been a monumental task. The wall was made of neither mud brick nor stone, but of earth, laid down in four-inch-deep layers between boards and compacted by the force of stamping feet. It has been estimated that to construct Zhangzhou's walls—which were sixty-five feet wide at the base—would have required the services of 10,000 laborers for twenty years.
There is no doubt that the wealth and manpower would have been available. Around the capital, for a distance of almost two miles, spread the mass of suburban villages that housed Zhangzhou's population. Manufacturing was carried out on a vast scale: One of Zhangzhou's many potteries comprised no fewer than fourteen kilns, while a single bronze foundry occupied an area of almost 10,800 square feet. And even if warfare occasionally disrupted production, the citizens of Zhangzhou were quick to turn it to profit; The city's bone workshop did a brisk trade in arrowheads and cups made from human skulls.
Compared to the unruly spread of huts and workshops outside its walls, Zhang-zhou's interior layout was a model of orderly planning. Its dwellings, probably wealthy residences, were laid out in a rectangular grid, while to the north there stood the palace—a long, timber-framed building, raised on a platform of tamped-down earth and equipped with a thatched roof for protection against the summer heat.
The pattern set by the Shang capitals was to provide the basis for urban growth in China over the following centuries. Ruling dynasties might occasionally be overthrown—the Shang kings fell to a subject people, the Zhou, at the end of the second millennium BC—but no foreign invaders disturbed the evolution of Chinese civilization. Cocooned from outside influences, the walled cities grew in size and number over the centuries, ceremonial and administrative centers for an empire that, by the middle of the first millennium AD, was the most populous and wealthy in the world.
The achievements of the world's first citizens notwithstanding, their lives were still immutably bound to their agricultural origins. And in many cases, their downfall could be ascribed to the very rivers that had given them life.
For all the sophistication of the Indus Valley civilization, it suddenly disappeared in around 2000 BC. The exact reason for its demise is unknown, but one likely explanation is that the river, which the Indus peoples had battled so hard to subdue, finally got the better of them. At Mohenjo-Daro, for example, it was probably a shift
Ball Court
Great Plaza
Stepped temples, a low-lying ball court, and a spacious plaza form the center of the Mayan city of Copan, as reconstructed by the scholar Tatiana Proskouriakoff. Though latecomers to the civic scene, the Maya of Central America led their continent in urban construction during the first millennium AD. Centered around a main complex of public buildings, temples, and palaces, each city was spread over a large but sparsely populated area. The central area of Copin, for example, which was built about the mid-seventh century AD, stood at the heart of a suburban sprawl that covered more than fifteen square miles but housed only 20,000 citizens. Between 200 and 300 of the city's elite dwelled permanently in Copin's center, but thousands would pack the complex to watch heavily padded figures, such as the one below, competing in ceremonial ball games.
In the course of the Indus that turned fertile fields into desolate tracts. In other areas, denudation of natural forests to provide fuel for the baking of millions of bricks may have led to erosion, with the river reclaiming the valuable topsoil it had once deposited. Whatever the reasons, the once-proud civilization disintegrated into isolated agricultural settlements, many of its people drifting eastward across the Ganges watershed where a more lasting urban development was about to begin. Not until the mid-nineteenth century AD would Harappa's mighty brick edifices once again support civilization—as ballast for British India's Lahore-Multan Railway.
The downfall of the Indus civilization was felt as far afield as Mesopotamia. Deprived of one of its major trading partners, Ur dwindled in importance, and the center of civilization moved north to the city of Babylon. But a trade recession was just one factor in Ur's demise. Due to vagaries in the earth's climate, the water table in that area was steadily sinking. And the rivers that might once have come to the aid of Ur's farmers were now working against them. While opening up land for cultivation, the Sumerians' extensive network of irrigation canals was also steadily poisoning the fields. Waters that had once run deep were now spread over a multitude of shallow channels, and as they evaporated in the heat of the sun, they deposited residues of salt. As increased salinity rendered the soil unusable, so Ur became moribund. By the fourth century BC, it had been abandoned altogether. Egypt as well lay at the mercy of its river. During the second millennium BC, a series of consistently low floods caused a period of famine, which devastated town and countryside alike. Agricultural yields plummeted as farmers turned to pastoralism rather than a settled farming existence. By the twelfth century BC, grain prices were soaring, and even the royal craftsmen were beginning to riot. In 1153 BC, the tomb builders at Deir el-Medina stopped work and approached a scribe to petition the pharaoh on their behalf: "We have come here driven by hunger and thirst. We have no clothes, no fat, no fish, no vegetables. Write this to the king, our good lord, so we may be given the means to live." Nor was it in foodstuffs alone that Egyptian citizens were feeling the pinch. Commerce was suffering, and an additional source of outrage for the temple artisans was that they were unable to get the oil with which all Egyptians were accustomed to clean themselves. Increasingly, as people sought desperately for the means to sustain themselves, state records began to detail the trials of tomb robbers rather than temple income. It was symptomatic of a deep malaise within the kingdom, and the rot was as evident to those without as to those within. In centuries to come, successive waves of invaders would sweep through Egypt, cannibalizing whatever remained of the kingdom's cities for their own purposes.
In 323 BC, however, one particular invader arrived whose coming signaled new hope for Egypt's—and the world's—cities. When Alexander the Great brought his Greek armies first to Egypt and then through Mesopotamia to the crumbling ruins of the Indus Valley, he brought with him the seeds of a new kind of civilization. In the years to come, it would be the classical stamp of the Mediterranean powers that would give new impetus to the rise of cities.
World History
