City and Society in Ancient Mesopotamia

Abstract

Abstract These words by Austen Henry Layard standing on Tell Afar in northern Iraq announced the birth of modern Western exploration in ancient Mesopotamia, and identify what is most striking about this region. The innumerable mounds scattered throughout the countryside of modern-day Iraq and northern Syria cover the remains of myriad ancient cities and towns, many of which survived for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Mesopotamia was not only the oldest urban civilization, but also the most urbanized society of antiquity. From the mid-fourth millennium BC onwards, cities were in existence in Babylonia (southern Mesopotamia), and despite many vicissitudes they never disappeared entirely from the land-scape. Urbanism may have emerged only later in Assyria (northern Mesopotamia), but soon some Assyrian cities became gigantic in extent. At their most flourishing, the most important Mesopotamian cities dwarfed their contemporaries in the rest of the ancient world, to the amazement of Greeks, such as Aristotle, who could not consider Babylon to be a city, but only as the equivalent of a nation because of its enormous dimensions. The dense concentration of Mesopotamian cities was also unparalleled; large urban centres lay within sight of one another.