Heartland of cities : surveys of ancient settlement and land use on the central floodplain of the Euphrates
"Southern Mesopotamia was the center of urban, literate civilization. Sedentary life on the alluvial plains between the lower Tigris and Euphrates rivers can be traced back into at least the sixth millennium B.C., and by the early fourth millennium the world's earliest cities had come into existence there. The region has retained a deeply impressed urban stamp, yet Robert McC. Adams argues that the powers of cities were always contingent and transitory even in their heartland. The difficulties of irrigation agriculture in an arid landscape produced rivalries and uncertainties that could never be overcome for long. The whole urban edifice of power, privilege, tradition, and ceremony rested in the end on the subordination and exploitation of shifting, tribal agriculturalists and semi-nomads in restive hinterlands. Most existing evidence provides only an urban perspective on the interaction of cities with each other and with the countryside. In order to reconstruct the rural perspective, Adams analyzed the findings of more than two decades of archaeological surface reconnaissance, much of it in previously unsurveyed desert and all of it dependent upon the use of aerial photographs and satellite images. His findings establish broad patterns of change affecting the entire regional network of settlements and its supporting irrigation systems. In this way, Adams is able to place the oldest and most continuously documented example of the processes of urban genesis and decline in a more comprehensive geographical and historical setting than has ever been possible."--The dust-jacket flaps
Print Book, English, 1981
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1981