Tag: cities

This first civilization came to be known as Sumer. By about the year 3000 [B.C.E.], a city called Uruk near the mouth of the Euphrates River, just inland of the head of the Persian Gulf, had eighty thousand residents. A thousand years later Iraq, the land along the Euphrates and its sister stream, the Tigris, would be named for this early metropolis of Uruk. Sharing the land of Sumer, about the size of [modern] Belgium, with a dozen other city-states, Uruk was not always the foremost among its rivals in the land. But for most of its existence, spanning the two millennia of the Sumerian world, Uruk was the greatest city on earth.

— Land Between The Rivers, Prologue

A dozen (small) cities in such a small area. Every square meter of arable land was claimed and constantly fought over. I do not see much of this in fantasy roleplaying campaigns.

The eighty thousand people living in Uruk by 3000 [B.C.E.] sheltered behind walls that were forty feet high and six miles long. Archaeologists estimate these to have cost over five million man-hours to build. The fourth-millennium city occupied about 1.7 square miles, a little bit less than imperial Rome at its peak (2.1 square miles) and larger than classical Athens.

— Land Between The Rivers, Prologue

To talk about the night watch, we first have to talk about night itself. In a pre-industrial world, artificial light was expensive. Candles of tallow and beeswax are animal products, so can be produced only in limited amounts. Firewood, peat, and dried dung are labor-intensive to gather and prepare. So too is olive oil or flaxseed oil for lamps. Before gas and kerosene, you could light the night if you really wanted—but it would cost you. Consequently, nights stayed dark. Most Europeans were home by twilight, barred their doors, and stayed indoors. In the Middle Ages, many cities imposed curfews: only a select few were permitted out after dark. This cut down both on burglaries and people breaking their necks falling into open cellars.

But having an entire city asleep posed its own problems. The biggest was fire! Medieval European cities were tinderboxes. Entire city blocks burned down every year. And if no one was awake at midnight when someone’s improperly-banked coals set their house on fire, the blaze might spread to multiple houses before anyone even noticed. Plus, you had the problem of crime: if no one else was about after dark, that gave thieves full run of the night. The solution to these problems (and honestly more the former than the latter) was the night watch.

Many night watches began as citizen’s brigades, with each able-bodied male resident assigned to patrol the streets so many nights a year. As early as 1150, the guilds of Paris were on the hook for providing the city’s watchmen. Sentinels sat in the tallest church steeple in town to watch for fires. (Amsterdam was big enough that the watch manned four separate steeples!) Other watchmen patrolled the streets alone or in pairs watching for fires and thieves. Your beat might cover the whole city or just your own neighborhood. If you saw a fire, you set up a cry so sleepers could awaken and help put it out. If you saw a burglar, you tried to grab him so he could appear before a magistrate in the morning. For worse crimes, you also started the ‘hue and cry’ to summon your sleeping neighbors to help. This watch system, while practical, was unpopular. No one much liked being a watchman. If you could afford it, you hired a substitute to take your place….

— Tangling With the Night Watch – Molten Sulfur Blog

Author’s emphases.

Prompted by the excellent essay Rethinking Fantasy Feudalism: What’s a Guild?

In addition to the real world guilds, having separate wizards guilds in every city would make things interesting. Thieves Guilds are already treated that way, in fact.

A city wall was made of whatever local material best served the purpose. In Sumeria and Babylonia, there is practically no stone or hardwood. In fact, the most abundant natural resource of these lands is mud. Hence, in Mesopotamia, walls were made of clayey mud. At first the mud was simply scooped up and piled in handfuls. Then it was found that a neater, straighter wall, without visible weak spots to invite attack, could be made by molding the clay into bricks and making the wall of these….

Where stone was to be had, city walls were made of stone—preferably the largest stones that could be moved with the techniques of the time. Even before mortar was invented, men could build a good, solid wall of small stones, which would stand up to the weather better than a wall of mud brick. But then, all an enemy had to do was to pry out a few stones with his spear, and down came a whole section of the wall.

Therefore, many early fortifiers made their walls of very large stones. They trimmed the stones to fit roughly together and stopped up the chinks by pounding in small stones. The sheer weight of the large stones kept the foe from pulling them out, especially if the defenders on top of the wall were raining missiles upon him. Such walls are called “cyclopean” because the ancient Greeks, seeing the ruins of rough walls made of huge stones, built several centuries earlier, thought that the large stones must have been put in place by the mythical one-eyed giants called Kyklopes.

To protect a city, any wall had to be at least 30 feet high and 15 feet thick. If the wall were much lower than this, a numerous enemy could overrun it with scaling ladders. And if the wall were too narrow on top, the defenders could not move along it fast enough to gather at threatened points.

A wall meant more safety, and greater safety fostered the growth of population, partly by natural increase and partly by immigration. As populations waxed, the crowding that ensued made it necessary to use the space inside the wall more efficiently. Therefore, in lands where round houses of stone or clay had prevailed, the round house gave way to the rectangular house; for an oblong house could occupy the whole of a small rectangular lot, whereas a circular house left wasted space at the corners….

— Great Cities of the Ancient World, Chapter 1

The earliest cities were probably independent political units of the kind the Greeks called a polis, which we awkwardly translate as “city-state.” Although this kind of polity nourished for thousands of years and gave the world many of its most creative minds, it has now almost wholly vanished.

The polis ruled enough land around it to feed its folk and, whether republic or monarchy, ran its affairs as an independent nation. Every native dweller regarded himself as a citizen of Larsa, or Tyre, or Athens, or Rome as the case might be and looked upon everyone else as a foreigner. He would fight like a fiend to defend his city but would seldom join forces with the people of another polis for defense against a common foe. Since groups of city-states were always divided among themselves by murderous hatreds, a strong outsider was likely to conquer them sooner or later, one by one.

The first cities were organized along the same lines as the peasant societies whence they had sprung. People were grouped into families, clans, and tribes, and each tribe had its own section of the city. Usually the city had a king, who might be a high priest who left the fighting to someone else or who might be a general who left religion to someone else. Or he might combine the military and religious functions.

Power shifted back and forth among the leading groups: the king and his supporters; the senate, a gathering of the heads of the richest families; the priesthood; and the assembly, a gathering of all the armed men. Poor men, women, and slaves, having neither wealth, supernatural powers, nor armed might, did not count for much. Sometimes the senate got rid of the king, or at least reduced him to purely ritual functions, and ran the resulting “republic” to suit itself.

Government was rather loose and informal. No ruler could afford to be very tyrannical, because it was too easy for his subjects to flee to a neighboring polis. The earliest kings dressed and lived much like their subjects. A visitor to a small polis was not surprised to find His Majesty thatching or painting his own palace, while the queen wove him a royal robe on her own loom and screamed at the royal children when they got out of hand.

When a polis grew large and powerful, its government usually became more autocratic and centralized. Then the king might set out to conquer his neighbors. In Iraq, for nearly 2,000 years, one ambitious king after another founded a short-lived empire. Such conquerors had an advantage peculiar to Iraq, which is mostly semi-desert and needs irrigation to flourish.

In early Sumerian times, irrigation was on a small scale; each polis dug its own canals regardless of what its neighbor was doing. When kings conquered large empires, however, they put all the canals under one management, because this was more efficient and enabled the land to support more people. This larger taxable population furnished the king with additional wealth and power and made it easier for him to extend his conquests still further. Since circumstances favored large-scale organization, as fast as one of these watershed empires fell, another arose in its place.

— Great Cities of the Ancient World, Chapter 1

Assaulting cities is the oldest, and often the most brutal, expression of warfare. The earliest Western literature begins with the biblical siege of Jericho and the Achaeans’ attack on Troy. The most moving passages in Thucydides‘ entire history of the [Peloponnesian] war—the Plataeans’ pleas for mercy, the debate between Cleon and Diodotus over the fate of the Mytileneans, the Melian Dialogue, the butchery of the boys at Mycalessus, and the great siege at Syracuse—revolve around the assault on communities of men, women, and children when war came to the very doorstep of the Greek family. Indeed, Mycalessus proved horrific precisely because the Thracian mercenaries sought no real military objective other than the psychological terror of slaughtering children at school—the ancient version of the Chechnyan terrorist assault on the Russian school in Belsan during early September 2004, which shocked the modern world and confirmed Thucydides’ prognosis that his history really was a possession for all time, inasmuch as human nature, as he saw, has remained constant across time and space.

There is something surrealistic about storming a city. Sieges are final, ultimate verdicts about not merely the fate of soldiers but of a very people. Nothing is more chilling, for example, than the final hours of Constantinople—10,000 people huddled under the dome of St. Sophia, praying in vain for the angel of deliverance on the early afternoon of May 29, 1453 [C.E.], as the sultan’s shock troops burst in to end for good the thousand-year culture of Byzantium. In sieges, women and old men fight from the walls. Ad hoc genius is manifested in countermeasures—history’s array of missiles, flame, cranes, and flying roof tiles—as the fate of thousands sometimes depends solely on their own collective intelligence and resolve. In the age of bombers, whose aerial weapons can make walls superfluous, sieges might seem a thing of the past, until one recalls that Leningrad and Stalingrad were two of the greatest and most costly sieges of the ages.

— A War Like No Other, pp. 179-80

Neither Persians, Greeks, nor Chinese [circa 500 B.C.E.] achieved any marked improvement over the engineering techniques which had been employed by the Assyrians. Fortifications had, in fact, progressed about as far as available means would permit; the art of siegecraft had failed to keep pace. Save for a few exceptional instances of surprise, ruse, or betrayal, walled cities or fortresses were impervious to everything but starvation.

— The Encyclopedia of Military History, p. 18

The Mesopotamian civilization was based on cities. From the earliest phases there were at least a dozen large population centers. They ranged from in size from 40-50 hectares to the colossal 450 hectares occupied by Uruk in the early third millennium [B.C.E.]. They were surrounded by often massive city walls, enclosed heavily built-up areas of streets and houses and large centrally placed public buildings, usually in their own separate enclosures.

The public buildings fall into two main categories, temples and palaces, which represent two major institutions. The buildings were truly monumental. The temple was the first institution of the two. Temples varied in form but generally shared a number of features. They were usually set in an enclosure, were often elaborately decorated in a variety of techniques, and frequently were built on an elevated platform. By the later third millennium [B.C.E.], the temple on its platform had developed into the true ziggurat or staged temple tower for which Mesopotamia is famous.

The Mesopotamian temple was not simply the religious center of the city, it was the economic and administrative center. The temple was run as a household with the god or goddess at its head; every citizen belonged to a temple and was regarded as one of the people of the god or goddess. The temple community comprised food-producers, officials, priests, merchants, craftsmen, and people involved in running the temple establishment itself (bakers, brewers, gardners, etc., and a considerable number of slaves). The temple was itself a major landowner, and it served as a center for the accumulation and redistribution of most of the food produce of the land. It was also a center for the concentration and redistribution of raw materials from foreign trade. Equally important, it was a center for the concentration and organization of labor, which made possible large-scale works beyond the scope of small communities, such as the building of the temples themselves and the construction and maintenance of the irrigation canals.

— The Making Of Civilization, p. 12-13