generous king, Mouseion, wine, all the good things you may
desire, and women more numerous than heavenly stars who
could compete in beauty with the goddesses who sought the
judgment of Paris.” Alexandria was annexed by the Romans
around 80 b.c.e. and once again began to regain its notori-
ety and splendor, which had diminished through wars and
confl icts, both external and internal, during the reigns of
the later Ptolemies. During this time Alexandria served as
a central granary of Rome. Later, in about the third century
c.e., Alexandria became noted as a center of Christian the-
ology and church government, but only aft er Saint Mark,
who fi rst introduced Christianity to the region, was mar-
tyred there in the fi rst century c.e. Nevertheless, many of
the early Christian church leaders, such as Clement, Origen,
Arius, and Athanasius, were Alexandrians or had adopted
the city as their home.
THE MIDDLE EAST
BY DAVID K. UNDERWOOD
Th e Near East, known today as the Middle East, is a region
generally defi ned by archaeologists as that part of Southwest
Asia that stretches from Iran in the east to the coast of the
Mediterranean and Aegean seas in the west. Th e cities of the
ancient Near East are located in four distinct subregions:
Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), Persia (Iran, mostly west of
the Zagros Mountains), the Levant (including Israel, Jordan,
Palestine, and Syria), and Mesopotamia (Iraq). Many of the
earliest and most important urban sites are found in Meso-
potamia, which means “land between the rivers” in Greek
and refers to the fl oodplain and sometimes fertile stretch of
land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. In antiquity
the southern part of Mesopotamia, between modern Bagh-
dad and the Persian Gulf, was generally known as Sumer. Th e
northern part, or upper Mesopotamia, was home to the Se-
mitic cultures of the Akkadians and the Assyrians. Because
of the low levels of rainfall in the region, especially in the
southern lowlands, the growth of cities in ancient Mesopo-
tamia depended on the development of intensive, irrigation-
based agriculture.
NEOLITHIC SETTLEMENTS
It was not until the fourth millennium b.c.e. that there
emerged, in Sumer, an “urban revolution” and the fi rst true
cities as opposed to towns. But the earliest traces of the move
toward urbanization go back to the Neolithic Period and the
agricultural revolution (ca. 8000 b.c.e.), when the domesti-
cation of plants and animals made possible a more settled
lifestyle and the growth of villages and towns. Archaeologi-
cal fi ndings at such sites as Jericho, in modern-day Palestine,
suggest that urbanization and its elements were under way
there as early as 8000 b.c.e. Jericho had a signifi cant, 10-acre
settlement of mud-brick houses protected by impressive stone
fortifi cations with a circular tower (28 feet tall and 33 feet in
diameter at the base).
Another unique example of an early experiment in urban
living is Çatalhüyük in Anatolia, where excavations have re-
vealed a fl ourishing Neolithic culture (ca. 7000–5000 b.c.e.)
that built its wealth from a regular trade in obsidian, a glass-
like volcanic stone used for making tools with fi ne cutting
edges. Th e curious absence of a street plan at Çatalhüyük is
a product of the peculiar arrangement of the houses, which
adjoin one another and have “entrances” through the roofs
instead of doors. Th e advantages of such a system would ap-
pear to be a heightened sense of communal living and de-
fense, not to mention a greater structural stability than would
be aff orded by freestanding walls of mud-brick and timber
frames. A number of richly decorated interior spaces in the
town seem to refl ect a ritual or ceremonial purpose and have
thus been called “shrines” by excavators. Th ese decorations
include wall paintings (some with hunting-related narrative
scenes and one of the fi rst “landscapes” in history), animal
heads, bucrania (bovine skulls), and bulls horns (symbols of
masculine virility), adjacent to plaster reliefs of female breasts
(symbols of female fertility) projecting from the walls. Th e
overall impression of Çatalhüyük at its height is of a pros-
perous Neolithic settlement with several of the material and
artistic foundations of a proto-urban culture, but still more of
a town than a city.CITIES AND CIVILIZATION
Th e question of how to distinguish large towns from the
earliest cities remains a problem for modern archaeolo-
gists. (Jericho’s estimated population in 7500 b.c.e. was
only about 2,000.) It seems clear, however, that the rise of
the fi rst cities is inseparable from the problem of how to de-
fi ne “civilization.” Th e solution seems to lie in the equation
of cities with a higher level of social organization and ma-
terial culture, as defi ned by ten characteristics or criteria
of civilization observed in early Mesopotamian cities, the
most important of which were writing, the exact sciences,
and a socioeconomic hierarchy.
Th e primary characteristics of civilization all relate to
social organization: settlement in cities, specialization of
labor, concentration of surplus production, class structure,
and state organization (government). Th e secondary charac-
teristics relate to material culture and refl ect the impact of
the primary characteristics: monumental public works (espe-
cially architecture and hydraulic engineering for irrigation),
long-distance trade for precious resources, monumental art-
work refl ecting religious or governmental power, writing and
record keeping, and math and science (especially geometry
and astronomy). Th e signifi cance of these categories lies in
the fact that the earliest cities of the ancient Near East, espe-
cially in Sumer, possessed all of these characteristics. To this
list should be added the invention of the wheel, the early use
of basic metals and alloys (especially bronze), and a certain
population size, perhaps between 7,000 and 20,000 people.
Th e weakness of such materialistic theories of civiliza-
tion is ironica lly a lso revea led by t he earliest cities of t he an-210 cities: The Middle East