Making Ancient Cities

Making Ancient Cities

Author: Andrew Creekmore

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-04-28

Total Pages: 443

ISBN-13: 1107046521

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Investigates how the structure and use of space developed and changed in cities, and examines the role of different societal groups in shaping urbanism.


Ancient Cities

Ancient Cities

Author: Charles Gates

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-04-15

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 113467662X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Well illustrated with nearly 300 line drawings, maps and photographs, Ancient Cities surveys the cities of the ancient Near East, Egypt, and the Greek and Roman worlds from an archaeological perspective, and in their cultural and historical contexts. Covering a huge area geographically and chronologically, it brings to life the physical world of ancient city dwellers by concentrating on evidence recovered by archaeological excavations from the Mediterranean basin and south-west Asia Examining both pre-Classical and Classical periods, this is an excellent introductory textbook for students of classical studies and archaeology alike.


The Life and Death of Ancient Cities

The Life and Death of Ancient Cities

Author: Greg Woolf

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-04-08

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 0190618566

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The dramatic story of the rise and collapse of Europe's first great urban experiment The growth of cities around the world in the last two centuries is the greatest episode in our urban history, but it is not the first. Three thousand years ago most of the Mediterranean basin was a world of villages; a world without money or writing, without temples for the gods or palaces for the mighty. Over the centuries that followed, however, cities appeared in many places around the Inland Sea, built by Greeks and Romans, and also by Etruscans and Phoenicians, Tartessians and Lycians, and many others. Most were tiny by modern standards, but they were the building blocks of all the states and empires of antiquity. The greatest--Athens and Corinth, Syracuse and Marseilles, Alexandria and Ephesus, Persepolis and Carthage, Rome and Byzantium--became the powerhouses of successive ancient societies, not just political centers but also the places where ancient art and literatures were created and accumulated. And then, half way through the first millennium, most withered away, leaving behind ruins that have fascinated so many who came after. Based on the most recent historical and archaeological evidence, The Life and Death of Ancient Cities provides a sweeping narrative of one of the world's first great urban experiments, from Bronze Age origins to the demise of cities in late antiquity. Greg Woolf chronicles the history of the ancient Mediterranean city, against the background of wider patterns of human evolution, and of the unforgiving environment in which they were built. Richly illustrated, the book vividly brings to life the abandoned remains of our ancient urban ancestors and serves as a stark reminder of the fragility of even the mightiest of cities.


Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East

Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East

Author: Ömür Harmanşah

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-03-18

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 1107311187

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book investigates the founding and building of cities in the ancient Near East. The creation of new cities was imagined as an ideological project or a divine intervention in the political narratives and mythologies of Near Eastern cultures, often masking the complex processes behind the social production of urban space. During the Early Iron Age (c.1200–850 BCE), Assyrian and Syro-Hittite rulers developed a highly performative official discourse that revolved around constructing cities, cultivating landscapes, building watercourses, erecting monuments and initiating public festivals. This volume combs through archaeological, epigraphic, visual, architectural and environmental evidence to tell the story of a region from the perspective of its spatial practices, landscape history and architectural technologies. It argues that the cultural processes of the making of urban spaces shape collective memory and identity as well as sites of political performance and state spectacle.


Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

Author: Annalee Newitz

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2021-02-02

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 039365267X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and Science Friday A quest to explore some of the most spectacular ancient cities in human history—and figure out why people abandoned them. In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes readers on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today. Newitz travels to all four sites and investigates the cutting-edge research in archaeology, revealing the mix of environmental changes and political turmoil that doomed these ancient settlements. Tracing the early development of urban planning, Newitz also introduces us to the often anonymous workers—slaves, women, immigrants, and manual laborers—who built these cities and created monuments that lasted millennia. Four Lost Cities is a journey into the forgotten past, but, foreseeing a future in which the majority of people on Earth will be living in cities, it may also reveal something of our own fate.


The Archaeology of Ancient Cities

The Archaeology of Ancient Cities

Author: Glenn R. Storey

Publisher: Eliot Werner Publications

Published: 2020-12-31

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1734281804

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Cities are the largest "artifacts" investigated by archaeologists--entities that have been under academic scrutiny for a long time. Urban places are both physical and social agglomerations, fostering the most intense interaction of any human settlement. Archaeological evidence illustrates how ancient cities worldwide were similar in origin, development, and maturation, showing considerable isomorphism with modern cities. This book explores issues of definition and the essential elements of cities, offers a new heuristic typology of cities, and reviews case studies of six ancient cities (Copan, Great Zimbabwe, Gyeongju, Hierakonpolis, Rome, and Teotihuacan) with illustrative exercises at the end of each chapter. Cities have been characterized as "social reactors" working much like a star in creating an explosive increase in human connectivity. Urban planning, both ancient and modern, helps us understand the essence of this--the most exciting and vibrant product of the human tendency to nucleate.


The Ancient City

The Ancient City

Author: Arjan Zuiderhoek

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0521198356

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book provides a survey of modern debates on Greek and Roman cities, and a sketch of the cities' chief characteristics.


Intercultural Urbanism

Intercultural Urbanism

Author: Dean Saitta

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2020-07-23

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1786994127

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Cities today are paradoxical. They are engines of innovation and opportunity, but they are also plagued by significant income inequality and segregation by ethnicity, race, and class. These inequalities and segregations are often reinforced by the urban built environment: the planning of space and the design of architecture. This condition threatens attainment of wider social and economic prosperity. In this innovative new study, Dean Saitta explores questions of urban sustainability by taking an intercultural, trans-historical approach to city planning. Saitta uses a largely untapped body of knowledge—the archaeology of cities in the ancient world—to generate ideas about how public space, housing, and civic architecture might be better designed to promote inclusion and community, while also making our cities more environmentally sustainable. By integrating this knowledge with knowledge generated by evolutionary studies and urban ethnography (including a detailed look at Denver, Colorado, one of America’s most desirable and fastest growing ‘destination cities’ but one that is also experiencing significant spatial segregation and gentrification), Saitta’s book offers an invaluable new perspective for urban studies scholars and urban planning professionals.”


The City in the Making

The City in the Making

Author: Marcel Hénaff

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2015-10-06

Total Pages: 143

ISBN-13: 1783485280

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An ambitious, interdisciplinary exploration of the emergence of the urban phenomenon and its social, political and cultural dynamic.


Buried Beneath Us

Buried Beneath Us

Author: Anthony Aveni

Publisher: Roaring Brook Press

Published: 2013-11-19

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 1596439130

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A beautifully illustrated look at the forces that help cities grow—and eventually cause their destruction—told through the stories of the great civilizations of ancient America. You may think you know all of the American cities. But did you know that long before New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or Boston ever appeared on the map—thousands of years before Europeans first colonized North America—other cities were here? They grew up, fourished, and eventually disappeared in the same places that modern cities like St. Louis and Mexico City would later appear. In the pages of this book, you'll find the astonishing story of how they grew from small settlements to booming city centers—and then crumbled into ruins.