Abstract
Today, concern about population displacement triggered by climate change is prompting some sovereign states to tighten security measures, as well as inciting ethically and politically motivated calls to relax border controls. This paper explores resonances between the current climate predicament and events in the mid-Holocene. Paleoclimatic and archaeological evidence is reviewed, suggesting that an abrupt turn to cooler, drier weather in the 4th millennium BCE triggered high volume migration to fertile river valleys—most fully documented in Mesopotamia but also visible in other regions around the world. This unprecedented agglomeration of bodies has been linked to the emergence of intensive irrigated agriculture and the rise of city-states. In conversation with the ancient Sumerian Gilgamesh epic, this paper draws upon archaeological research to conceptualize urban wall building and emergent practices of graphical notation as different forms of mediation. Both city walls and early writing, it is argued, deal with the interplay of mobilism and sedentarism, and both ‘media’ entail tactile, plastic use of local materials—namely riverbank clay. This paper addresses the paradox that the underpinning of ‘civilization’ by these once experimental media may now be fundamentally restricting socio-political, cultural, cognitive and embodied capacities to engage effectively with climate-driven upheaval. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Highlights
In the 2015 speech in which he announced his run for the US presidency, Donald Trump memorably declared: “I will build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively
As the Epic of Gilgamesh speaks of Uruk, one of the first Mesopotamian fortified urban centres: “Its towering walls protected it from all sorts of evil, from the armies of enemy kings, from floods, from wild beasts too, and unfriendly gods” (Bryson 1967, p. 1)
The Gilgamesh poems, often referred to as the world’s oldest known work of epic literature, have been pieced together from cuneiform tablets dating back to the 3rd millennium BCE (Johns-Putra 2006, pp. 13–14). Their protagonist is widely accepted to be a historical king of the Sumerian city-state of
Summary
In the 2015 speech in which he announced his run for the US presidency, Donald Trump memorably declared: “I will build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively. Though crude environmental determinism may be long discredited, there is growing willingness at the intersection of climatological and anthropological research to view events of the magnitude of the mid-Holocene climatic transition as involving the crossing of a limit such that it demanded a major response from impacted human populations What interests me about the link between climatic change and the advent of the city-states is less the idea of strict linear causality and more the general sense that climate-driven dislocation is a recurring and constitutive aspect of human life Archaeological evidence, in this way, seems to support what literary theorist Claire Colebrook describes “a history of the world that has always been one of climate change, migration and refuge” To gain further understanding of the material-semiotic dimensions of the state experiment, we turn to what is ostensibly one of the ancient world’s starkest statements of durability and immobilism: the construction of monumental urban perimeters
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