were both the hubs of military administration and royal gov-
ernment as well as the cultural and symbolic centers of mul-
tinational empire.
NIPPUR, BABYLON, AND THE
CULTURAL METROPOLIS
Just as the emergence of cities had depended on the special-
ization of labor within an evolving hierarchy of functions
and classes, so too did the growth and spread of urban cul-
ture throughout the ancient Near East depend on the rise of
a small group of elite centers of specialized, “symbolic” cul-
tural production and religious privilege. Foremost among
these were Babylon, the fi rst great cultural metropolis of the
ancient world, and Nippur, an academic city of scribes and
higher learning. Although it was not the capital of a politi-
cal or military empire, Nippur commanded its own kind of
cultural power and religious prestige as the major center of
Sumerian text production with a sizable “scribe quarter” and
as the locus of an extensive religious precinct with a temple
economy that employed hundreds of thousands of people in
the service of the god Enlil. Its growth unimpeded by the
presence of a secular government, Nippur was well known
for the ethnic diversity of its population and came to acquire
a reputation as a city where peoples of diverse backgrounds
could come together to live peacefully and intelligently. Nip-
pur thus stands as the paradigm of the “cultural” city and
multicultural place, where the priorities of urban life involved
much more than the wealth generated by a specifi c trade rela-
tionship or the politics of a particular dynasty.
Th e endurance of the cultural metropolis is best illus-
trated by the case of Babylon and the Babylonians, whose
civilization fl ourished for centuries, despite multiple foreign
invasions and changes of political regime. Th e city of Babel of
biblical fame was decadent, corrupt, and very worldly, but in
fact it was here that the Bible was fi rst written down, some-
thing that would not have been possible in a less-tolerant en-
v ironment. Babylon probably beca me a la rge cit y as late as t he
19th century b.c.e., aft er the collapse of the Th ird Dynasty of
Ur, and a world power by the 14th century b.c.e., when it cov-
ered an area of about three square miles, with broad, straight
streets and a diverse population that spoke Aramaic. It was
the Neo-Babylonian Empire (625–539 b.c.e.) that triumphed
over the Assyrians and became the main power of the ancient
Near East. King Nabopolassar undertook the reconstruction
of the great ziggurat, a project continued by his son Nebu-
chadnezzar, who also developed the great Processional Way
of Marduk (ca. 605 b.c.e.) and the Ishtar Gate, now housed
in partial reconstruction in a German museum. In 539 b.c.e.
Babylon was taken over by the Achaemenid Persians under
Cyrus II. When Alexander the Great defeated the Persian
king Darius in 331 b.c.e., he chose Babylon as the capital of
his empire and, upon his death, left it under the control of one
of his Macedonian generals, Seleucus I. During the Roman
Period, Babylon fell into decline and became a provincial
town on the outskirts of the Roman Empire.
THE CITY AS A FORUM FOR
EMPIRE AND POWER POLITICS
Th e decline of Babylon saw the rise of the Persian Empire
and its best-known palace complex, Persepolis, begun by
King Darius I in 518 b.c.e. and further developed during the
subsequent reigns of Xerxes and Artaxerxes I. Th is Aache-
menid site was defi ned by a vast terrace, some 40 feet high,
measuring 1,500 by 900 feet in area, and originally topped
by a mud-brick wall about 50 feet high. Th e complex was
approached by a wide, gently graded stairway protected by
a gatehouse with monumental sculptures of bulls and hu-
man-headed bulls, recalling the earlier lamassus (human-
headed winged bulls) of Assyrian palaces. Th e interior of the
complex featured a spacious audience hall, a throne hall, and
the famous Hundred-Column Hall, all of which made exten-
sive use of square spaces and distinctively carved columns
and pillars, some topped with human-headed bull capitals.
Th e great stairways leading to the terraces and platforms on
which these structures stood were decorated with bold carv-
ings of a great procession of tribute bearers, which eff ectively
modeled (or mirrored) the expected behavior of the human
subjects entering the imperial precinct. Like the Assyrian
palace-complexes, Persian sites like Persepolis were essen-
tially imperial centers that sought to promote the ceremo-
nial and prestige of the emperor and his court. Th e Persians’
manipulation of dramatic spatial sequences and the politi-
cal potential of architectural sculptures, however, appear to
have taken the propagandistic message of a vainglorious em-
pire to even greater heights.
Polytheistic theocracy, with its temple economy and de-
manding ceremonial ritual, may have been the major driving
force behind the initial growth of the ancient Near Eastern
city, but over time there emerged a surprising and irrepress-
ible diversity of form, function, and cultural personality
among individual cities, as typifi ed by places as diverse as
Babylon and Persepolis. Th is diversity has both challenged
and ultimately reinforced the region’s prevailing religious and
political conservatism. It is this very duality—of attempting
to uphold traditional religion and politics in the face of the
multicultural diversity and modernization that would appear
to destabilize it—that makes contemporary Near Eastern cit-
ies so dynamic and fascinating.ASIA AND THE PACIFIC
BY NANCY SHATZMAN STEINHARDT
Th e date assigned as the beginning of urbanism in Asia and
the Pacifi c varies from region to region. Group settlement in
extended families or larger units, in which certain aspects of
hunting, gathering, or planting may have been shared, pre-
dated the formation or construction of cities in Asia, oft en
by millennia. Urban settlement also occurred in all parts of
Asia before writing appeared, so that the dates assigned to
cities have been derived from archaeological evidence. Based214 cities: Asia and the Pacific