32 The New York Review
and children, who are referred to as
slaves in most sources. Astonishingly,
these laborers accounted for around 20
percent of Uruk’s population. The tex-
tile workshops were, Scott writes, criti-
cal to the elites, as it was only through
bartering textiles that the city’s rulers
could obtain metal, stone, timber, and
other desirable products that could not
be had on the alluvial plain.
It is telling, Scott says, that Meso-
potamian scribes use identical marks
for laborers as they do for “state-
controlled herds of domestic animals.”
To Scott, this indicates that “in the
minds of the Uruk scribes... such la-
borers were conceptualized as ‘domes-
ticated’ humans, wholly equivalent to
domestic animals in status.” The prac-
tice, alluded to by Scott and Smith, of
sacrificing and burying large numbers
of both animal and human subjects in
royal graves upon the death of a ruler,
gives some credence to these ideas.
Let us think for a moment about what
life must have been like for the aver-
age citizen of Uruk some five thousand
years ago. At the time, Uruk contained
the largest concentration of humanity
ever, its population of 25,000–50,000
being ten to twenty times greater than
any earlier community. Its humans co-
habited not only with their livestock but
also with commensal species such as
rats, mice, and sparrows. Uruk, which
is located on a low-lying, flood-prone
plain, must often have been muddy,
feces-soaked, and pestilential. The
bones of livestock preserve evidence
of chronic infections, high mortality
among newborns, and a proliferation of
pathologies resulting from inactivity—
maladies that humans likely shared.
The humans of the first cities also
suffered health crises: deadly epidem-
ics are attested to in the earliest writ-
ten records, as are the practices of
isolating the stricken and quarantining
new arrivals. It is evident that density-
dependent diseases such as measles
(which requires a population of 300,000
to persist) arose around the time that
the first cities were established. And
measles, which probably originated in
sheep and goats, is just one of a host of
ills that leaped from herds to humans
as population densities and proxim-
ity to livestock increased. The scale of
disease transfer in the early cities must
have been overwhelming: we share
twenty-six diseases with poultry, thirty-
two with rats and mice, thirty-five with
horses, forty-two with pigs, forty-six
with sheep and goats, fifty with cattle,
and sixty-five with our oldest compan-
ion, the dog. In the majority of cases,
the transfer was one-way—humanity
is a “dead end” for most infections. In
effect, a new ecology was taking shape
in the first cities, within which diseases
and parasites did as well as, if not bet-
ter than, the city’s human and animal
inhabitants.
Smith deals with the issue of disease
in the first cities rather summarily,
stating that “trade-offs were constant:
there was a greater chance of communi-
cable diseases, but also more doctors to
treat them.” Given the lamentable state
of medicine before the scientific break-
throughs of the twentieth century, one
wonders how effective such treatments
were. Early writings from cities provide
some answers—the Akkadian word for
epidemic disease translates literally as
“certain death.”
If the rise of the first cities was a boon
for diseases and parasites, so too, Scottargues, were they a boon for barbarians.
Barbarians have been variously defined
by different cultures at different times,
but Scott suggests that they are best
understood as people who are not “do-
mesticated” by city rulers. “Barbarians
are to domesticated subjects as wildlife,
vermin, and varmints are to domesti-
cated livestock,” he says. The relation-
ships between barbarians and the cities
they lived close to are complex. Barbar-
ians have at times devastated cities, de-
manded tribute, or offered themselves
as militias to a city’s rulers.
If we follow Scott’s definition, some
remarkable parallels between barbar-
ians and diseases emerge. Diseases
often kill their hosts when they first
arrive in a native population, but over
time they become less virulent, so that
infection leads to chronic illness rather
than death. This situation, which can be
thought of as a sort of taxation on the
host’s health, is far better for the dis-
ease, since the host lives long enough
to transmit the infection to others.
When barbarians first encountered cit-
ies, they destroyed some entirely. But
soon they stilled their hand, learning
that they could demand tribute instead,
thereby turning the city into a sustain-
able resource.Pity the poor inhabitants of Scott’s
first cities. These malnourished citizens
would go out into the fields or other
worksites to labor under a triple bur-
den: they had to produce enough excess
to support their elites, the nonhuman
parasites and commensal species that
lived on, in, and with them, and the
tribute-demanding barbarians as well.
They were fortunate if enough food re-
mained to support their bare existence.
The purposes of enclosing walls,
which Childe identified as a crucial
marker of cities, remain disputed.
Smith emphasizes the importance of
city walls in delineating the “metrop-
olis as a distinct place with distinct
rules.” She imagines Mesopotamians
debating “for centuries” over the need
for “flashy” new additions such as the
Ishtar Gates, with their brilliant blue
enamel glaze and images of animals
and gods (today they can be seen in
Berlin’s Pergamon Museum). Interest-
ingly, neither Scott nor Smith sees city
walls as primarily defensive structures.
Scott instead posits that city walls were
used chiefly to keep people in. In his
view, the inhabitants of the first cities
would escape at the first opportunity,
to pursue the more leisurely life of the
mixed hunter-gatherer-farmer.
Escape from cities seems to have
been common enough that bounty
hunters specializing in tracking down
and returning fugitives are well docu-
mented in early writings. But on occa-
sion the entire state would collapse, its
inhabitants evaporating into the hinter-
lands. The causes of collapse of early
cities seem to have been many and
varied, from military assault to disease
and environmental deterioration. But
one cause championed by Scott is par-
ticularly enlightening. “Politicide,” he
says, occurs during times of resource
stress, when a city’s elites refuse to
share the burden by reducing their in-
comes. Their subjects, reduced to des-
peration by the insupportable burden
they must bear, either meekly starve or
are forced to rebel.
Smith thinks too much is made of
the collapse of cities, Scott too little.Smith’s claim that “the ‘collapse’ part
of ancient urban life is greatly over-
played” is based on the observation
that many cities, from Athens to Sa-
markand, are thousands of years old.
But that hardly rules out collapse, for
many old cities have collapsed and then
been built up again.
Scott imagines the early cities as five-
tiered human pyramids, which usually
collapse before they are completed,
the few successes swaying and trem-
bling briefly before their inevitable
demise. Most historians seem to side
with Scott, agreeing that individual
Mesopotamian city-states were fragile
and short-lived; one expert expressed
astonishment at the longevity of the
Third Dynasty at Ur, during which five
kings ruled for over a hundred years.
When an ancient city collapsed, its
great temples, walls, and other monu-
mental constructions were left to rot,
giving a sense of general decay. Scott
says that archaeologists pay little at-
tention to the people who fled from
a city after its collapse, for they built
no monumental architecture and left
no writings. But these periods deserve
study, not least because the lives of the
city’s workers may have greatly im-
proved a s a resu lt of fleei ng : t hey wou ld
no longer have to pay taxes, labor on
others’ projects, or be as exposed to
disease as they had been. Rome, in the
centuries after its fall, saw vigorous in-
dependent communities reassemble in
hovels built into the niches of formerly
imposing amphitheatres and temples.
Indeed, Scott says, such periods may
have been looked upon as golden ages
by those released from behind the city
walls.
Smith seems to view inequality as
a natural condition for humans, and
writes that in the first cities it led not
to oppression but opportunity. She sees
the elites of ancient cities as “patrons.”
Nor is there the slightest sense in her
book that the consumption that occurs
in cities, with its rapid uptake and dis-
carding of the latest fads, is related to
the current environmental crisis. She
finds city life—with its consumerism,
fashion, and constant interaction—so
attractive that she can’t conceive of life
without it. I put down her book filled
with dread, fearing that if cities have
always generated prodigious moun-
tains of waste, then perhaps our envi-
ronmental problems have no solution.
Against the Grain deserves a wide
readership. It has made me look afresh
at the urban world. Now when I see
monumental architecture, I think of
the workers who in many cases liter-
ally slaved over its construction. And,
having been awakened to the concept,
I see cases of near-politicide every-
where, from the growing inequality of
wealth in our societies, to the taxpayer-
funded bank bailouts following the
2008 financial crisis. If Scott is right
about the world’s first citizens, then
cities and their inhabitants have been
on quite a journey. Over the millennia
the ordinary people of the city have,
with some measure of success, striven
to wrest back control of their lives. But
the journey is not yet complete: slav-
ery continues to exist, and even in our
modern democracies the wealthiest
continue to exert vastly disproportion-
ate political influence. Viewed this way,
movements like Occupy and Extinc-
tion Rebellion are the latest manifesta-
tions of a struggle that is as old as cities
themselves. QFor the best book on the
decorative arts, design
history, or material culture
of the Americas.Submissions due April 1, 2020
For more information:
bgc.bard.edu/horowitzprize
Polly Platt. Mand chenille emap sambroidery on silk. The Mpler made at Pleasent Valley Quaker Boarding School, 1809. Silk etropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase,
Frank P. Stetz Bequest, in loving memory of David Stewart Hull, 2012.The Einstein Forum and the Daimler and Benz Foundation are
pleased to announce the
Einstein Fellowship
to reward creative, interdisciplinary thinking by supporting
outstanding young thinkers who wish to work on a project in a
different field from that of their previous research.
The fellow will receive a stipend of EUR 10 000 and reimburse-
ment of travel expenses and will live and work in Einstein‘s own
summerhouse in Caputh, near Berlin, for five to six months in 2021.
For more information, visit: http://www.einsteinforum.de/fellowship
Applications should be received by May 15, 2020
and emailed to: [email protected]
Einstein Forum, Am Neuen Markt 7, 14467 Potsdam, Germanyand more at nybooks.com/dailyIMPRESSIONS OF PLACELandscapes of Louisiana
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