Susan in NC’s Reviews > Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention > Status Update

“ Uruk and the Mesopotamian cities speak powerfully to us. The ghosts of once mighty centres laid waste by climate change and economic decline, they are haunting reminders of the ultimate fate of all cities.”

“…by 700 the mysterious ruins were completely abandoned, almost 5,000 years after Uruk had arisen from the marshes to greatness. Deprived of irrigation, the great wheat fields were swallowed up by desert. When the city was rediscovered in 1849 it was a buried ruin…Its discoverers found it hard to believe that a great urban civilisation could have flourished so long before biblical times...”

“ Here, then, are Uruk’s two gifts to the world: urbanisation and the written word. The first achievement led to the second. This was not a society afraid of radical innovation or assaults on established ways of thinking. Writing and mathematics emerged from the urban cauldron as an administrative technique of managing complexity.”

“ If Uruk was an experiment in how humans might live and thrive together, it proved highly attractive. People adopted Uruk’s religious ideology, its dietary habits and social structures. Like a mighty seed head, Uruk broadcast its culture over a huge distance. It was the mother city, the world’s original metropolis.”

“Innovation begat innovation. The high temperature of the potters’ kiln was used for experiments in metallurgy and chemical processes. Mesopotamian boatmen were the first to use a sail. It is a memorable and counterintuitive fact that the invention of the city came long before the invention of the wheel.”

“The end of the last Ice Age, approximately 11,700 years ago, profoundly altered human life on earth. Around the world, hunter-gatherer societies began to cultivate and domesticate wild crops that benefited from a warming planet. But it was the Fertile Crescent—a semicircle that stretches from the Nile in the west through to the Persian Gulf in the east…that provided the most favourable area for agriculture.”

“ “Uruk” means simply “the city.” It was the world’s first city and for over 1,000 years its most powerful urban centre. When people clustered into vast communities things changed with incredible velocity; the citizens of Uruk pioneered world-changing technologies and experienced radically new ways of living, dressing, eating and thinking.”

“ Cities from Uruk and Babylon to Rome, Teotihuacan and Byzantium, from Baghdad and Venice to Paris, New York and Shanghai, have bedazzled people as the idealised cities of the imagination made real, the pinnacles of human creativity.”

“ This global urban sprawl is pushing our cities into wetlands, wildernesses, rainforests, estuaries, mangrove forests, floodplains and agricultural land—with devastating consequences for biodiversity and the climate. Mountains are being moved to make way for this epic splurge of urbanisation.”

“ The rapid proliferation of skyscrapers and shanty towns alike heralds the present “urban century.” Citizens of even the most strained megacity earn more, educate their children better and enjoy greater material comforts than their rural cousins.”