The Urban Landscape of the Ancient Near Eastern City

Noah Wiener AE120

Marc Van De Mieroop attempts to define the urban landscape of ancient

Mesopotamia in the fourth chapter of his book, The Ancient Mesopotamian City, by approaching the ancient city through a study of suburbs, ports, and the city center itself.

While his approach is successful in distinguishing components of urban spaces, he neglects to elaborate on how these divisions affected the inhabitants of Mesopotamian cities, how the edges that he defines shaped social practices and accessibility within urban space, and how over time city landscapes evolve to fulfill the needs of the inhabitants. He also attempts to create an overall picture of Mesopotamian cities, and in the process downplays differences between individual cities (aside from a distinction between Assyrian and Babylonian cities, and planned versus organic cities), and therefore is unable to determine distinct urban landscapes. In this paper, I will focus on a few elements in Van De Mieroop’s paper that build an inappropriate city landscape model, and then, rather than attempt the impossible task of creating an overall picture of the

Mesopotamian city, I will discuss important elements necessary to understanding ancient landscape.

Van De Mieroop begins with urban entrances to cities, by describing external trade centers and surrounding regions. This approach is partially successful in that it accounts for visual and spatial entrances to the city, while still trying to define these spaces through their functions. He comments that southern cities, northern cities on rivers, and northern cities with overland trade routes all had ‘harbors,’ or kārum—then follows by using this common title as justification for linking all of the trade centers under one category of urban landscape. After establishing these trade centers as a single entity, he follows by attempting to create an image of a kārum simply from the one site that we have evidence for, Kārum Kanish. In trade centers outside of the main cities, one must account for the fact that these were populated in part by foreign merchants, and that there could not be homogeneity between the kārums, as the goods, merchant populations, means of travel, and ideologies of those in these sites varied enormously based on the sources of the trade routes. The harbors are one of the few parts of the city that Van De

Mieroop attempts to define based on function, yet for him to be successful in this endeavor, he would need to include descriptions of the means and vehicles of trade to accurately identify the landscape of kārums.

Van De Mieroop’s next section focuses on gardens and orchards. He introduces them by declaring them “owned by urban residents”1 and follows by describing King

Assurnasirpal II’s construction of gardens at Kalhu as a royal creation. When identifying these gardens, there is not a distinction between public gardens and an individual ruler’s pleasure gardens. Joan and David Oates’ studies of Kalhu describe how of the 25 square km irrigated by the Patti-hegalli canal, “part of this was occupied by gardens and orchards; the remainder was almost certainly used to feed some of the additional populace of the new capital.”2 This implication, as well as the location of the gardens at

Kalhu, suggests that the function of them was to please the royal family, which serves a completely different social function from more public gardens, such as on the Eastern

Terrace at Nineveh, which most likely contained public gardens.3 Nineveh and Kalhu

1 Van De Mieroop, page 67. 2 Oates, page 34. 3 P192 Lumsden, page 192. were fairly close in time and location, and yet the gardens and orchards within highlight the differences in urban landscape created by variations in accessibility.

Van De Mieroop’s description of suburbs gives a more accurate depiction of city landscape, partially because of the fact that suburb plans usually reflect a “single period of occupation.”4 In his analysis of suburbs at Tell Taya, he describes the fact that the road systems were geared toward movement around the city, rather than to its center, and that only two major roads approached the city center. He acknowledges the difference between the domestic and workshop structures found at these suburbs, and notes the absence of suburban monumental structures. As a whole this is the strongest part of his text, because he accounts for social functions of suburbs without attempting to over- simplify the similarities, which would result in the creation of uniformity by ignoring temporal and setting based differences. Still, he does not draw enough bridges between suburban and agricultural communities that made up such a vast amount of the

Mesopotamian populace and landscape.

To conserve space I will highlight only certain aspects of the inside of the city— those that pertain to errors that Van De Mieroop makes in evaluating urban landscapes.

His first subject pertains to city walls, which he suggests are a crucial characteristic of the city because of “the ubiquitous emphasis on the walls in iconographic material.”5 He is correct to identify walls as a focal point of urban landscape, as they are referred to in monuments, literature, and kings’ achievements, and are found in all Mesopotamian cities. Still, he does not distinguish the purpose of the walls, instead using them to divide the city into central and external parts. To discuss the importance of walls, he must

4 Van De Mieroop, page 68. 5 Van De Mieroop, page 73. include in his model their practical significance and those affected. (who was actually stopped by these walls?) External walls featured fantastic monumental gates, such as that of Ishtar in Babylon, but he also discusses internal walls to divide the lower cities from the religious centers, and does not discuss whose movement would be restricted by these walls, and how they affected daily lives, and social practices.

Van de Mieroop describes the maze of roads found within Mesopotamian cities, and describes how they often lack a plan. While walls were planned, at least in Assyria,

“internally the street pattern was irregular.”6 Around the roads were houses whose archaeology is described to contrast with the monumental structures, while mentioning briefly that within these areas were “industrial sectors where craft production took place.”7 If craft production was completed in these areas, then these seemingly random streets would have developed in order to best facilitate the residential and economic needs of the city dwelling people. Van De Mieroop does not focus on this as much as he does on monumental structures and city planning, but this would define urban practice for many of the residents, whose landscape might only include religious or political centers during times of festival.

Van De Mieroop focuses much of his remaining arguments on city planning, and divisions within cities that separated monumental and governmental centers from the populace, yet he admits far too frequently to variances between these cities, and therefore the inter-city model that he creates falls short. The discussion of the kārums, suburbs, walls, and domestic areas are all parts in which he could develop a more concrete model based on how social practices were affected by urban landscape, and how they in turn

6 Van De Mieroop, page 91. 7 Van De Mieroop, page 82. shaped the landscape. The generalizations which Van De Mieroop draws negate his worthwhile individual studies because he attempts to conflate the cities into set regions that dictate the landscape without accounting for the role that they play in citizens’ lives.

He does a good job of distinguishing between clearly defined/constructed landscapes and organically developing ones, but in the process ignores the individual city elements within each of these categories. Whether or not most of a city was built by a single ruler, such as Kalhu, the purposes of the walls, the nature of the trade settlements, and the organizational structure of the city reflect the landscape of the city more than the goals of the initial construction.

An overall model of the ancient Mesopotamian city would be impossible, because it could not account for the differences developed over time, the varying economic and religious significances of many cities, and how each city’s structure affected the practices within. Still, to improve upon Van De Mieroops model, a few distinct changes can be made. First, one must look at surviving trade records and goods, and note how far a city’s goods traveled and whether they were created in large workshops or by individual craftsmen at home. This would reveal an immense amount of information about the nature of kārums, and also would shed light on the nature of the organic development of a city. The random road layouts will seem eternally random in Mesopotamian cities if only considered in the light of whether they led in/out of a city, to monuments, or between neighborhoods. Instead, we should examine whether they led to craft or trade centers within the neighborhoods that they appear randomly placed in, in order to understand how the development of urban landscape was shaped by social practices. The most important change that needs to be made to Van De Mieroop’s model is an account of how the distinct walls, city regions, and natural edges affected accessibility within the ancient city. The variances between the monumental upper cities and the domestic lower cities/suburbs that he proposes are insignificant without knowledge of how that affected the lives of those in the city. He never discusses whether monumental centers would be accessible to common people, or whether the gardens were for the king’s pleasure or the people’s needs. As a result, the model of the urban landscape lacks definition, because the distinctions made within do not account for how those in the city could perceive urban landscape. Other urban models can be created without pidgeonholing regions of the city—UNESCO’s model8 distinguishes between urban patterns, such as “clearly defined,” “organically evolved,” and “associative cultural” landscapes, which can be applied to all cities without diminishing differences between cities for simplicity’s sake.

Within each of these categories, urban landscape for individual cities/regions could be defined, but any sort of model that attempts to categorize urban variation over a great distance and time will ultimately neglect how the urban landscape of individual cities depends on the social functions within the city, and on the city’s trade and political relations with its immediate neighbors and more distant urban partners.

Bibliography

 Van de Mieroop, M.; 1997. “The urban landscape,” The ancient Mesopotamian city. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 63-100.\

 Keith, Kathryn; 2003. The spatial patterns of everyday life in Old Babylonian neighborhoods” in The social construction of ancient cities. M.L. Smith (ed.). Washington D.C. : Smithsonian, 56-80.

8 Knapp, A. Bernard and Wendy Ashmore, page 9.  Knapp, A. Bernard and Wendy Ashmore; 1999. “Archaeological landscapes: constructed, conceptualized, ideational,” in Archaeologies of landscape: contemporary perspectives. W. Ashmore and A.B. Knapp (eds.), Blackwell: Malden MA, 1-30.

 Lumsden, Stephen; 2005. "The production of space at Nineveh," in Nineveh: Papers of the XLIXe Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, London 7—11 July 2003. D. Collon and A. George (eds). London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq

 Mumford, Lewis; 1968. “The nature of the ancient city” City in history: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. Harvest Books: 94-118.

 Oates, Joan and David Oates; 2001.Nimrud: An Assyrian Imperial City Revealed.. British School of Archaeology in Iraq: London, pages 13-35.