The archaeological site of Tell Brak (ancient Nagar), Syria.
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Woolf’s model of urban evolution is more a series of intersecting and overlapping sine waves than a linear progression. Instead, he highlights the instability and fragility of urban systems across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, with all but the largest megalopolis subject to cycles of growth and decline. That being said, Woolf eschews a traditional, unilinear, evolutionary model that draws a single, upward trajectory leading from small villages to grand cities and from the swamps of southern Mesopotamia to the banks of the Tiber. Archaeologists have long been conflicted about the application of biological models and metaphors to social phenomena, and debates over the utility of evolution as an interpretive framework within archaeology have been especially vociferous.
Wherever possible, he relies on metaphors drawn from the natural world for example, we are urban apes, living in urban jungles that we have constructed to serve as nests. Woolf’s book offers a “natural history” of ancient urbanism, that is, an account grounded in careful observation, thick description, and “an explicitly evolutionary agenda.” Woolf explores the ecological niches occupied by ancient cities, the feeding habits of their inhabitants, the webs of interconnection that linked them with other settlements and regions, and the architectural skeletons on which the urban fabric hung.
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Composed as a series of interwoven urban biographies full of gritty detail, the picture that he paints for us feels far more real and recognizable than the monochrome, idealized antiquity of our collective dreams.
In so doing, Woolf introduces us to the messy, colorful, local, diverse, and often short-lived reality of urban experimentation across the ancient Mediterranean world. Greg Woolf’s new book, The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History, puts to rest the idea that there is any such category as “the ancient city” and disabuses us of the notion that the monumental, gleaming-white, marble architecture of our imaginings was somehow the norm in classical cities. For many Americans, the idea of “the ancient city,” an urban form modeled on Athens and Rome in their heyday, looms large.
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