Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East

by Omur Harmansah

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 (ca. 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."

ebook

First published February 18, 2013

About the author

Currently teaching ancient Near Eastern archaeology, architectural history, and material and visual culture at the School of Art and Art History at University of Illinois at Chicago. Born March 25, 1971, a snow-stormy night in Konya, that conservative town, of all places in Turkey, as the first child to a middle class Turkish family from Cappadocia, an agricultural engineer father and a library scientist mother, who wandered across the country, working for the state farms, dragging their 3 children with them. Omur ended up studying architecture in Middle East Technical University, Ankara, who knows why, stuck between a naive desire to become a poet and being good at math. Ankara's modernist landscapes captured his imagination. His desire to write about buildings rather than designing them, put him inevitably into the field of architectural history. His arrival at Penn, threw him to the world of the Ancient Near East and saved him from becoming a boring classical archaeologist and drawing marble pieces forever (he now draws cruder varieties of stone). He wrote a dissertation (which always seemed never-ending) on the utterly esoteric topic of founding new cities in the Ancient Near East. A monograph came out from Cambridge University Press in March 2013 is a result of this work: Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East. His favorite place in the world is Taskahve in Ayvalik.