The Cambridge World History: Volume 3, Early Cities in Comparative Perspective, 4000 BCE-1200 CE

Description

From the fourth millennium BCE to the early second millennium CE the world became a world of cities. This volume explores this critical transformation, from the appearance of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia and Egypt to the rise of cities in Asia and the Mediterranean world, Africa, and the Americas. Through case studies and comparative accounts of key cities across the world, leading scholars chart the ways in which these cities grew as nodal points of pilgrimages and ceremonies, exchange, storage and redistribution, and centres for defence and warfare. They show how in these cities, along with their associated and restructured countrysides, new rituals and ceremonies connected leaders with citizens and the gods, new identities as citizens were created, and new forms of power and sovereignty emerged. They also examine how this unprecedented concentration of people led to disease, violence, slavery and subjugations of unprecedented kinds and scales.

Norman Yoffee is author of Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations (Cambridge, 2005); Professor Emeritus, Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Anthropology, University of Michigan; Senior Fellow, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University. He has taught at the University of Arizona, the University of Sydney, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Oxford, and the Free University of Berlin. He is the author or editor of 13 books, over 100 articles and reviews, and more than 200 invited lectures in 33 US universities and in 22 foreign countries. He holds an honorary degree (Doctor of Letters) from La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He is also Editor of the Cambridge World Archaeology series (28 volumes).