W.'s latest book, characterised by bold, sweeping brushstrokes, sets out to explain why humans choose to live in cities and why we seem to thrive in urban environments. Using the ancient Mediterranean as his main case, W. aims to show that urbanity is in no way our predestined mode of living and that we should not understand urban life as the natural end to a linear development.
The book has twenty chapters and is divided into four parts. It also has a preface, afterword, further reading list, timeline, bibliography and general index. The first part is the most theoretically oriented and deals with how humans became ‘urban animals’(p. xii) and how Neolithic villages developed into the city-states of the Levant. The second part introduces the developments in the Bronze Age and discusses how agriculture spread to Europe and led to the development of urban life. In the third part, which deals with ancient Greece and Rome as examples, we are shown how the scattered existence of independent city-states came to serve the purposes of empires. Finally, the shorter fourth part aims to explain how and why cities declined in late antiquity.
Throughout the book W. makes several important observations with regard to Greek and Roman cities, by showing how fundamentally different they were from the megalopoleis of Athens and Rome. Furthermore, he points out that cities appear late in the archaeological record of mainland Europe in comparison to the Middle East and that their origin should not be reduced to being the result of a diffusion of ideas. The most important point in my reading, however, is that ancient Mediterranean cities were highly diverse in their layout and organisation and that one of their main functions was to connect various local communities to regional and intra-regional networks of commerce and power. Cities thereby become something more than spontaneous amalgamations of people; they are the result of social strategy and ultimately of political technology. This interpretation brings tremendous insight into how we should approach urban societies in general, and – very importantly – presents a way of harmonising archaeology with written sources.
In spite of these important and interesting themes, there are several issues with the execution and structure of the book. Although the order of the narrative is overall chronological, it is difficult to follow because of numerous digressions, which involve shifts in topic, time and place. Periodisations are used inconsistently, and vague expressions such as ‘at roughly the same time’ (pp. 107, 350) or ‘a little later’ (pp. 110, 131) can mean anything from millennia to a decade. The many repetitions of phrases and sections of text are also frustrating, since they complicate the argument. In the preface W. states that his book has ‘an explicitly evolutionary agenda’, which ‘offers a way to understand change as the result of selective pressure operation on a species, or part of one’ (p. xiii), and that the aim is to explain why ‘city-dwelling humans have … squeezed out, dominated, and replaced many of the [other humans]’ (p. xiv). This is an interesting line of enquiry, and W. presents some thought-provoking ideas on the biological evolution of humans as urban dwellers. However, this agenda is not supported by coherent argumentation. The word ‘evolution’ (in its biological sense) is barely used after the third chapter, and there is no further discussion on the evolutionary aspects of urbanism in relation to the main examples of the book, nor does the concluding afterword contain any reference to it. Instead, most of the text consists of a grand and often anecdotal narrative of Mediterranean history from the Bronze Age to late antiquity. Although there is some discussion of the process of urbanisation (Chapter 4), its implications are not explored in detail, and the issue of de-urbanisation (the death of cities) is hardly addressed.
The bibliography lists an impressive 737 items, but W. rarely engages closely with previous research: only two references give the relevant pages, making the endnotes unhelpful. Expressions such as ‘some scholars’ (pp. 64, 412) often lack references, much to my frustration. References to edited volumes often do not include the author or title of the relevant paper. Less than 50 of the cited works are non-anglophone, and important research in other languages – most notably German and Greek – is not taken into account.
There are also significant gaps in the anglophone bibliography, including some recent and highly relevant works on similar topics, such as J.C. Scott's – much debated – Against the Grain (2017) and A. Chaniotis's War in the Hellenistic World (2005), whose chapter on foreign garrisons in Greek cities would have been a beneficial addition to W.'s argument.
Apart from the collective effort in An Inventory of Archaic and Classical poleis (2004), W. does not engage with the numerous publications of the Copenhagen Polis Centre (CPC). Their absence raises one of the most serious conceptual issues with the book, namely the assumption that ‘polis’ always translates as ‘city’. Highlighting the multiple possible meanings of the word, the CPC collected and discussed the abundant evidence that indicates that many poleis were not urbanised before the Hellenistic period, if ever. Interpreting the CPC's inventory of poleis as evidence for c. 850 ‘cities’ in Greece by 400 bc (p. 364), W. consequently presents a picture of the formative classical period that poorly reflects the current archaeological understanding of this period. A closer engagement with the CPC research and a more structured discussion of the relationship between social communities and forms of settlement organisation would have provided W. with further support for his main argument.
The book is characterised by some surprising factual errors (e.g. Old Iranian was written in cuneiform, p. 62), the erroneous uses of terms (e.g. ‘German’ for ‘Germanic’, pp. 411–14), and the uncritical treatment of archaeological material (e.g. the mythical palace of Iolkos as an archaeologically identified location, p. 141) and textual sources (e.g. Wenamun as a historical figure, p. 124). A more thorough copy-editing process would have removed many of the numerous repetitions and off-topic sections. Overall, the volume bears many of the hallmarks of haste, with a large number of spelling mistakes and inconsistencies, syntactic errors, duplicated endnotes, bibliographic entries that are not cited and misplaced figure captions. The 36 figures are stock photographs of generic places and items relating to the ancient world and add little to the text they are meant to illustrate. It would have been more useful to include illustrative plans of the cities mentioned in the text, highlighting their spatial development. The eight maps add little to the argument; for example, the map of Alexander's route through Asia does not mark the cities founded by the Macedonians (Map 6).
It is difficult to identify the intended audience of W.'s book. The specialist terminology and the numerous references to ancient topography suggest that it is not primarily intended for the general public, but the lack of proper referencing and the uncritical treatment of the source material reduces its utility for scholars.
In spite of my critical remarks, I am of the firm opinion that we need such ‘grand narratives’ of history in order to approach and understand the long-term processes that continue to shape our societies. If W. had followed his aims as stated in the preface, I am certain that this book would have been an important contribution to our understanding of human societies and urbanity. As it stands, however, the volume tells us comparably little about the life and death of ancient cities.
