REVIEW — The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History
Greg Woolf mixes evolutionary biology and history to craft a radical new history of urban living in the ancient world.
The Tower of Babel serves as the cover image for Greg Woolf’s most recent history book. It’s origin myth is apt, since ancient cities reflected many aspects of the biblical city and associated tower. Urbanisation and monumental architecture were the products of ultimately human collaboration. Moreover, like God coming down and confusing the inhabitants of Babel, dispersing them, so too did factors come together to rapidly undo said collaboration and see a return to depopulated countryside living in the 6–8th centuries CE.
Of course, Greg Woolf’s account has no need of a God to explain either end of the ancient urbanisation phenomenon. His is a ‘natural history’. Something which has become all the rage in the last decade or so. As Kyle Harper recently explained, historians of every period have been able to surf the rising tide of climate science. Whether it be unlocking the secrets of carbon dioxide locked in ice cores in Greenland or fossilised pollen samples taken from the bottoms of lakes or bogs, scientists have built for themselves a picture of the history of the Earth’s climate. Of course, while their own research is focused on contrasting this with the present to understand how humanity is affecting its climate today, historians are piecing together the historical implications of the new data. Greg Woolf’s book is another step forward in the marriage of science and history.
When Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived at the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan in 1519 he might have found some surprising familiarity in its public buildings, temples, and population in excess of 200,000. The historian, therefore, needs to explain how it was that cities could appear in spatially and temporally disconnected parts of the world while still appearing similar in scope and look. Part One of Woolf’s book seeks to answer this conundrum by constructing the idea of an ‘Urban Animal’, utilising evolutionary science to explain how humanity is genetically predisposed to urban life and why it happened 6,000 years ago. That isn’t to say that humanity was always ‘destined’ for urbanism, but that, evolutionarily, we possess some aspects to our being that incline us towards living in cities.
Our large brains have a capacity for collaboration, invention, and compromise — so important to our survival as hunter-gatherers in the absence of claws/teeth (building tools, embarking on complicated hunts, etc.) — which inclined us to create communities of hundreds of people based on a web of social ties. Our wide diets and rare status as omnivores allowed us to thrive after domesticating plants, especially wheat and barley, and use agriculture to escape from a completely nomadic lifestyle. Our sense of justice and fairness propel us towards creating conventions, institutions, and, eventually, micro-states to enforce them. In each of these ways, Woolf argues, we are truly Urban Animals. Why, then, does the creation of cities take so long? Woolf’s answer lies in climate. The Holocene era, roughly the last 12,000 years, which followed the last ice age created the conditions in which humanity could finally exploit this evolutionary gift and put ourselves on the path towards city-building.
This first Part is, I think, the strongest section of the book while also its most radical. It directly challenges the romanticised/racist picture created of “western civilisation” rising from a distinct set of European principles. Urbanism in the ancient Mediterranean is often viewed as the pinnacle of Europe’s superiority over other peoples. Woolf explicitly dismantles this view with a universal, biological explanation that disposes of any kind of exceptionalism. All humans are Urban Animals, just waiting for the right conditions. There were some aspects I found tricky while reading, though. Chapter Six, especially, felt as if it had lots of false starts. After reading it, I had to go back again and figure out which city had actually come first. It is something that is repeated throughout the book. Examples come thick and fast, although not always arranged according to chronology. Archaeological sites from Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Anatolia are quickly darted between before the “point” of the chapter is laid out in the final few paragraphs. That’s without mentioning the frankly awful copy-editing and proofread this book (I read the hardback) received before being published. Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and even the inability to get BCE and CE the correct way around are frequent. When the dates are wrong, that’s a massive red flag.
From Part Two onward, however, the book follows a more conventional narrative history of the first cities in the fertile crescent and Mediterranean, taking the reader from archaeological site to archaeological site. Woolf’s writing style is easily digestible and his academic pedigree is second to none. That said, I was surprised and later annoyed by quite how few citations Woolf chose to make in the course of his arguments. Whole paragraphs of information would go by without a single reference while sometimes the most mundane of sentences would have a little number tacked onto its end. It felt random and then frustrating as my desire for further reading became dependent on the unpredictable whim of the author to reference his work. Further, Woolf’s brief departures into the realms of ecology are blunt in their explanation and implementation. A chapter is even named “The Ecology of Roman Urbanism,” which itself might appear to be a contradiction in terms going by the view of Horden & Purcell, who wrote the book on ecological studies, The Corrupting Sea, a chapter of which is devoted to attacking the arbitrary dichotomy between the rural and urban in ecology studies.
Perhaps the most interesting idea advanced in the latter parts of the book was that the extent of urbanisation across the whole of Europe under the Roman empire was reliant first on the conquests of Alexander the Great. Woolf argues that the establishment of a variety of Hellenistic successor states and their respective capital cities brought the concept of the Greek city-state to the Near-East and provided an easy means of control for their subsequent Roman overlords. The success of this system of control meant exporting the city-state to the Empire’s west: to Gaul, Spain, and even Britain. The Roman system of government both required cities to function and stimulated their growth. The political stability granted by the Empire coaxed peoples down from their hillforts and into Roman cities with amenities, transport links, and much higher populations. These cities, in turn, would cultivate a local elite that would govern themselves and their local area, ensuring peace and tax revenue.
The book covers the ‘death’ of ancient cities too, although this final Part is relegated to two relatively short chapters. Woolf sets up two competing views of decline, the climactic and the political. It is here again that climate science rears its head, even if only for a disappointingly short time. Exploring the developing theories of decline which stem from climate change and disease regimes is one of the most exciting and vibrant fields of ancient history and while there are very good books dedicated to just that topic (The Fate of Rome by Kyle Harper is one), more time should have been given to this view. That is not to say Woolf’s own explanation in political terms is lacking. The diminishing state capacity of the Roman empire ultimately sealed the fate of what Woolf termed the megalopoleis, like Rome and Alexandria, who could no longer be fed by imported grain or having lavish building projects to employ those who could not otherwise feed themselves.
Ultimately, Woolf’s book argues that climactic, evolutionary, and ecological factors all conspired to lead humans to create the first cities. From there, politics and state-building followed, putting, first, the fertile crescent, and, later, the Mediterranean, on the path of urbanisation. When the underlying factors changed in the later Roman empire, it all came apart again. Europe’s urban “moment” was unprecedented but not colossal. At least three quarters of Romans didn’t live in cities and it was only the extremely rich who benefited most from an urban lifestyle. That said, it provided a blueprint for the modern world, in which over half the human beings on earth currently live in cities; with that figure projected to rise as the 21st century continues.
In this endeavour, it succeeds.
