The life and death of ancient cities : a natural history

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The life and death of ancient cities : a natural history

Greg Woolf

Oxford University Press, 2022 , c2020

  • : pbk.

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注記

First published 2020, first published in paperback 2022

内容説明・目次

内容説明

The human race is on a 10,000 year urban adventure. Our ancestors wandered the planet or lived scattered in villages, yet by the end of this century almost all of us will live in cities. But that journey has not been a smooth one and urban civilizations have risen and fallen many times in history. The ruins of many of them still enchant us. This book tells the story of the rise and fall of ancient cities from the end of the Bronze Age to the beginning of the Middle Ages. It is a tale of war and politics, pestilence and famine, triumph and tragedy, by turns both fabulous and squalid. Its focus is on the ancient Mediterranean: Greeks and Romans at the centre, but Phoenicians and Etruscans, Persians, Gauls, and Egyptians all play a part. The story begins with the Greek discovery of much more ancient urban civilizations in Egypt and the Near East, and charts the gradual spread of urbanism to the Atlantic and then the North Sea in the centuries that followed. The ancient Mediterranean, where our story begins, was a harsh environment for urbanism. So how were cities first created, and then sustained for so long, in these apparently unpromising surroundings? How did they feed themselves, where did they find water and building materials, and what did they do with their waste and their dead? Why, in the end, did their rulers give up on them? And what it was like to inhabit urban worlds so unlike our own - cities plunged into darkness every night, cities dominated by the temples of the gods, cities of farmers, cities of slaves, cities of soldiers. Ultimately, the chief characters in the story are the cities themselves. Athens and Sparta, Persepolis and Carthage, Rome and Alexandria: cities that formed great families. Their story encompasses the history of the generations of people who built and inhabited them, whose short lives left behind monuments that have inspired city builders ever since - and whose ruins stand as stark reminders to the 21st century of the perils as well as the potential rewards of an urban existence.

目次

List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements PART 1: AN URBAN ANIMAL 1: To the City 2: Urban Apes 3: Settling Down 4: Uruk 5: First Cities 6: Cities of Bronze PART 11: AN URBAN MEDITERRANEAN 7: The First Mediterranean Cities 8: Mariners and Chieftains 9: Western Pioneers 10: A Greek Lake 11: Networking the Mediterranean 12: Cities, States, and Kings PART 111: IMPERIAL URBANISMS 13: City and Empire 14: Europe Awakes 15: Cities of Marble 16: Founding New Cities 17: Ruling Through Cities 18: The Ecology of Roman Urbanism PART IV: DE-URBANIZATION 19: The Megalopoleis 20: Postclassical Afterword Further Reading Timeline Notes Bibliography Index

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