March 12, 2020 31
The First Mean Streets
Tim Flannery
Cities : The First 6,000 Years
by Monica L. Smith.
Viking, 293 pp., $30.00
Against the Grain:
A Deep History
of the Earliest States
by James C. Scott.
Yale University Press,
312 pp., $18.00 (paper)
T he r i s e of t he c it y i s lo oke d up on a s t he
dawn of civilization, but a deep mystery
surrounds the first city-dwellers. All we
are left with as we strive to understand
their lives are fragments unearthed
by the archaeologist’s trowel, and that
is a slender basis on which to recon-
struct entire lives. In two recent books,
Monica Smith and James Scott offer
highly contrasting interpretations of
these enigmatic, long-vanished people.
Smith’s Cities: The First 6,000 Years
imagines the world’s first citizens as
happy folk, dedicated to festival-going,
shopping, and displaying their social
status. In contrast, Scott’s Against the
Grain, published in 2017, depicts them
as disease-ridden, subjugated, and des-
perate to escape the city’s bounds.
Smith is a professional archaeologist
who has excavated many ancient ruins
around the world. As she conjures the
lives lived among those now tumbled
stones, she depicts people who bear
an uncanny resemblance to contem-
porary, urban Californians. If she has
conjured aright, the nature of the ur-
banite has been more or less set from
the start. Scott, an anthropologist and
political scientist, has never wielded a
trowel, but his research is extraordi-
narily meticulous and detailed, and
the lives of his imagined first citizens
are unlike anything existing today. His
analysis implies that the history of the
metropolis has been marked by one
long struggle by ordinary citizens to
free themselves from oppression.
Perhaps not unexpectedly, Smith and
Scott disagree on the starting point of
cities. Smith posits that the first urban-
ites lived six thousand years ago, in a
now-abandoned settlement called Tell
Brak, in what is today northern Syria.
Scott traces their advent to a few hun-
dred years later, in a constellation of
cities that sprang up on the Mesopota-
mian alluvium around what was then
the northern end of the Persian Gulf.
Before the shallow sea was filled with
sediment, its shore lay just two hundred
miles south of Baghdad, half the cur-
rent distance.
What makes a city different from a
large village? In the 1930s the Austra-
lian archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe
laid out ten criteria for identifying cit-
ies that are still used by researchers,
though some in modified form. Childe
noted that cities are larger and more
complex than the settlements that pre-
ceded them and possess monumental
architecture and specialized workers.
They conduct trade over long distances,
and their citizens pay taxes to a central
authority.
A fundamental question, addressed
most fully by Scott, concerns why cities
only emerged some five millennia after
the first crops and herds were domesti-
cated in the Fertile Crescent. Accord-
ing to Scott, one of the most convincing
explanations has been put forward by
Melinda Zeder, a theorist of early do-
mestication at the Smithsonian Insti-
tution. She thinks that a village-based
lifestyle, which mixed agriculture with
hunting and gathering, provided a more
sustainable and stable resource base
than the less diverse sources of suste-
nance available to the inhabitants of
cities. Shifting to a city meant reliance
on a few species of grains and domes-
ticated animals, and giving up hunting
and gathering, because wild resources
within reach of a city are quickly ex-
hausted by the large, sedentary popu-
lation. If Zeder is correct, then some
strong force must have acted upon the
first citizens to cause them to give up
the benefits of a hunting- gathering-
farming life. What that force may have
been is hinted at by the existence of
central taxing authorities.
The issue of taxation looms large in
the arguments put forward by Scott.
It is a remarkable fact, he says, that
many crops—such as grains, potatoes,
taro, and breadfruit—can support high
human population densities. But it was
only in the grain-based societies that
the world’s first cities arose. This is be-
cause, Scott claims, grain is the perfect
crop for taxation. It is storable, allow-
ing for the accumulation of wealth; itmatures simultaneously and predict-
ably and is impossible to hide before
harvest, making the tax collector’s job
easy; and because grain is divisible,
rulers can maximize their take, leaving
the grower with only enough for bare
subsistence. Compare that with a crop,
like potatoes, that grows underground.
A portion of any root crop can easily
escape the tax collector’s notice, pro-
viding the grower with a measure of
independence. For a ruler, that can be
dangerous: well-fed and economically
independent people are less likely to be
induced to labor on monumental build-
ings, or indeed to accept any imposi-
tions from above.Smith broadly agrees with Childe’s
criteria for defining cities, so it is re-
markable that the subject of taxation
does not even merit an entry in her
book’s index. Instead, she focuses on
opportunity. She speculates that Tell
Brak’s pioneers formed the world’s first
city because they “were captivated by
the opportunity to make a permanent
festival atmosphere,” and that the so-
cial and economic patterns resulting
from the unprecedented density of
settlement and population size stimu-
lated new forms of entrepreneurship
and “staggering new projects of reli-
gious architecture.” In Smith’s view,
these first urbanites lived lives much
like ours, enjoying conspicuous con-
sumption and accumulating vast piles
of trash. You can recognize their spirit
in the modern shoppers who purchase
knockoffs of high-end fashions, carry
them home in nonreusable plastic bags,
then toss the clothes away after a few
uses. In ancient Rome, enough broken
pots were discarded at Testaccio to
form a hill 115 feet high and 10,000 feet
wide.
The symbol for kingship in ancient
Sumer was the “rod and line,” “almost
certainly the tools of the surveyor,”
Scott informs us. Surveyors are benign
figures in modern societies, but in the
earliest cities they were more sinister,
for they provided the raw data for taxa-
tion. The earliest administrative tab-
lets, from Uruk, are lists of grain and
manpower compiled by surveyors, and
the taxes levied based on their work.These writings suggest that the ancient
state was all about classifying and con-
trolling land, livestock, and workers.
The names of the earliest cities that
have come down to us—Ur, Uruk, and
Eridu (Tell Brak is more recent)—ap-
pear not to be Sumerian in origin,
though all were in Sumer. This, Scott
suggests, indicates that these cities had
been seized and colonized by foreign
armies. He speculates further that “the
bas reliefs depicting prisoners of war in
neck shackles suggest another means by
which the population was augmented.”
And in the first cities, population was
in perpetual demand. So severe were
the conditions in Sumer that the popu-
lation of prisoners/slaves could not re-
place itself through reproduction.
Indications that the early cities were
conquered by outsiders, along with the
tight control of workers documented in
the clay tablets of Sumer, give rise to
the possibility that the inhabitants of
the earliest cities were, in effect, slaves.
Frustratingly, it’s uncertain to what ex-
tent slavery existed in the earliest cities,
but, Scott argues, “provided that we
keep in mind the various forms bond-
age can take over time, one is tempted
to assert: ‘No slavery, no state.’” Cer-
tainly, by around 4,500 years ago in
Egypt, slavery had taken on a truly
horrific nature, with prisoners of war
being branded and forcibly resettled
to labor on royal plantations. The con-
nection between slavery and the state
has proved tenacious: the writer Adam
Hochschild has noted that as late as
1800, up to three quarters of the world’s
population was still living in bondage.*The bevel-rim bowl, Smith tells us,
regularly wins the “ugly artifact” com-
petition at an annual archaeology cura-
tors’ ball. It is coarsely made, and one
of the most abundant items unearthed
during excavations of Mesopotamia’s
early cities. She sees it as the Styrofoam
cup of antiquity. Because the bowls
were manufactured thousands of years
before the first money, Smith suggests
that their contents were obtained by
barter. But it’s difficult to comprehend
how people could have kept track of
frequent and small transactions such as
those for daily meals.
Scott sees this artifact quite dif-
ferently. The bevel-rim bowl, he tells
us, holds almost exactly two liters of
barley—the daily food ration for the
lowest class of workers in Umma, Mes-
opotamia. According to Scott, the bowl
held rations rather than food obtained
through barter, and the workers who
ate from them were little better than
slaves, if not actually slaves. Under this
interpretation, the difficulty of keeping
track of bartered goods vanishes, be-
cause trade is monopolized by a ruler
who doles out a bare subsistence to his
workers.
Textiles, the most important trade
goods generated in the early Mesopo-
tamian cities, were produced in state-
supervised workshops (Scott refers
to them as “gulags”) that engaged
as many as nine thousand women*Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels
in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves
(Houghton Mifflin, 2015), p. 2.A panel from the Sumerian Standard of Ur depicting fish, animals,
and goods being brought in procession to a banquet, circa 2600 BCBritishMuseum