March 10, 2018 Comments Off on From Uruk to Alexandria: how ancient cities propelled change at civilizational scale Views: 1299 Ancient Stories, Nostalgia

Since always cities have represented great accomplishments for humans. Cities have been milestones in creating and enhancing civilizations and pursuing a more organized way of life. For instance, Uruk was a power-center that became the home of different peoples that roamed ancient Mesopotamia, a hub where cultures were forged with the introduction of metal casting, or, where the first works of art appeared in the world. Uruk was a compelling proof from the ancient days that a structured society will generate a great many cultural accomplishments.

In the case of other ancient cities, of later times, such as Alexandria, it was about establishing a powerful scholarship center. Alexandria was the birthplace of the modern world as Justin Pollard and Howard Reid extensively elaborate and write about in their splendid book entitled The Rise and Fall of Alexandria. In this sense, city-building can also be perceived as a human dream coming true.

For thousands of years, southern Mesopotamia, or what has been ancient Iraq, represented a region in the world where some of the first civilizations on Earth raised to prominence. By around 3,200 B.C., the largest settlement in this specific region, if not the entire planet, was Uruk. It was a city of monumental mud-brick buildings that were adorned with mosaics of painted clay cones.

Some extraordinary pieces of arts were also created in Uruk, included some large-scale sculptures or relief carvings, the very first samples in the world. Metal casting began in Uruk, and it was here that people started using pictographs on clay tablets to count and manage goods as well ratios for workers. Clay tablets were also used by the ancients in Uruk to inscribe what is nowadays considered to be the first work of literature in the world, the epic of Gilgamesh.

In literature, Gilgamesh is regarded a cultural hero, and as some accounts suggest, he could have been the king of Uruk around 2,800 B.C. After his death, he was proclaimed a deity, and his story subsequently continued to occupy an important place in later periods of Uruk and the greater region of Mesopotamia (since the Sumeric civilization onwards).

One aspect of the narrative of Gilgamesh allows us to analyze the binary opposition between cosmos and chaos in the world. In the ancient text, Gilgamesh appears as the founder of the city of Uruk. At least he was the city protector, as it was under his reign that massive walls which protected Uruk were raised. Such kind of act can be interpreted as the rational use of Gilgamesh energy. On the other hand, his peoples were somewhat afraid of him, which gives a certain share of tyranny to his character. Because of that, the people complained to the deity An (heaven) and Enkidu was created.

Those familiar with the narrative will know that Enkidu becomes the almost-equal to Gilgamesh. Even a subtle homo-eroticism can be further felt in the entire Gilgamesh-Enkidu relation. The story complicates as Enkidu dies and Gilgamesh embarks on his quest to seek eternal life. As soon as he proceeds with the journey, the narrative also gravitates away from Uruk, and this is like moving away from the territory of order, peace, familiarity, or cosmos.

Outside the boundaries of the city is where humans have stopped using their energy to sculpt the landscapes of nature in their attempts to transform chaos into cosmos. The wilderness of nature, the chaos, is the locus where the arduous journeys happen, such as looking for the elixir of life. The prominent walls of Uruk further fulfill a demarcation function; they clearly distinguish where is the border between cosmos and chaos in the world.

Numerous other examples can be reviewed in history, where a city unquestionably holds a special status. The building of Alexandria within the Ptolemaic Kingdom of ancient Egypt is an excellent example of what efforts the ancients pursued in forming one of the world’s most significant scholarship centers back then. Alexandria was the capital of knowledge in the ancient world, where humans advanced different branches, included astronomy, geometry, anatomy, and medicine, to name just a few. For the first time, there was a city where both Greek and Egyptian scholars were able to work together and share knowledge with each other extensively.

The Library of Alexandria was a project where the ancients aimed to collect, copy, compile and catalog the entire written knowledge that was available on the planet at that point. It was an effort larger than life, and it generated with extraordinary accomplishments. It was in Alexandria where the first translations were created of what later became the most published book of all times, the Bible. It was also here that Euclid of Alexandria, or perhaps better known as the “Father of Geometry” completed one of the essential books in mathematics, Elements.

As Pollard and Reid write in The Rise and Fall of Alexandria, Euclid’s Elements was the principal textbook in teaching mathematics for the next two millennia after its production. Chapters in the book covered algebraic system, Euclidean geometry as well as the ancient Greek version of elementary number theory. Over time, the textbook proved vital for the development of logic and modern-day science.

In medieval ages, this textbook remained lost, but when it was rediscovered in the late 15th century, it became the most studied book after the Bible. Astonishingly its relevance did not cease in the 20th century, as Elements further helped in providing “the basis of some of the calculations that NASA needed to put a man on the moon” (Pollard and Reid, 2006).

Just another example of great achievements that were propelled in Alexandria is the output of the Greek engineer Ctesibius who invented the pipe organ during the 3rd century B.C. The same scientist is also attributed to improving the clepsydra, which became the world’s most accurate clock, for more than 18 centuries.

When the Library of Alexandria was later destroyed, it was nothing but a tremendous loss to humanity, all along reducing the importance of Alexandria as a city. Some even believe that the destruction event significantly contributed to the expanse of the Dark Ages in Europe.

But as some cities lose power, others gain power. In Europe, Florence gradually emerged as one of the wealthiest cities in medieval times. In Africa, the old Benin City was considered to be one of the best-planned cities of the medieval ages. More often than not, cities rather than countries were there to propel great civilizational changes. Such were the prospects in the past – such are the prospects also for the future.

Stefan Alijevikj

Tags: Alexandria, ancient cities, Ancient Explorer, Babylon, Egypt, Gilgamesh, Sumer, Uruk