Li Gongming| Weekly Secretary: Urban History Research and Urban Disaster Crisis... Problem awareness

Ancient Mesopotamian Cities, by Mark Van der Mirop, translated by Li Hongyan, The Commercial Press, March 2022 edition, 284 pp., 96.00 yuan

Reading the American scholar Marc Van de Mieroop's Ancient Mesopotamian City (original title The Ancient Mesopotamian City, 1997, 1999; translated by Li Hongyan, The Commercial Press, March 2022), I felt very deeply that the author put forward the problem awareness of urban history research with ancient Mesopotamian cities as the core topic. For readers who do not specialize in the history of ancient Mesopotamia, the reading perspective of urban history research may be more grounded, especially combined with the thinking of various urban man-made disasters, the problem awareness of urban history research is more practical.

The first is the western-centrist problem in the study of urban origins. In the study of urban history by Western scholars, although the study of the origin of cities will basically start in Mesopotamia, as mario Riverani's article "The Ancient Near Eastern City and Modern Ideologies" clearly states, which the author endorses, Modern views on the urbanization process in ancient Mesopotamia reflect the prejudices and ideological positions of different scholars and their times. In this book, Mirop says that he proposes the ancient Mesopotamian urban model and tries to integrate it into Max Weber's ideal type of "ancient city", in order to dispel the European-centered historical teleological view of the West versus the East and the greek of "our" civilization. He argues that "colonial preaching still exists in the field of ancient Near Eastern studies 20 years after it has been heavily criticized by the humanities and social sciences", so there is an urgent need for academics to study ancient Mesopotamia from a post-colonial perspective. (Paperback Foreword, p. 5) However, Mirop did not simply propose and oppose non-Western models of urban development, he believed that such an approach would ignore many of the nuances and changes that exist in reality, especially in the contrast between East and West, and would run the risk of perpetuating the Orientalist view that these regions are fundamentally antagonistic and that their differences can be explained by summarizing their characteristics into a simple list. His aim was to compare the ancient Mesopotamian city as a type with the urbanization process of the ancient Greco-Roman world, again with a valid, controversial dialogue on the level of abstract concepts. (Introduction, p. 9) As can be seen here, opposition to Western-centrism is not simply to argue for an opposing non-Western model of the city, nor is it to adopt and arrange narratives as in some global historical narratives, but to establish a cross-cultural and cross-regional dialogue model between the two, an urban history narrative under the holistic observation of human culture. Guided by this awareness of the problem, the authors' study concludes: "We can say that the ancient Mesopotamian cities conform to the types of ancient cities described by Weber and Finley." In economic and social terms, the similarities between ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Greece and Rome are greater than the differences. ...... We hope that scholars will give serious consideration to both the ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world. (pp. 252-253) Although the author does not discuss in detail the similarities between ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Greece and Rome, the similarities should not be difficult for Western urban historians.

Breaking the Western-centrism is a major issue in global history and cross-cultural research, correspondingly speaking, in the field of urban history research, there are not only the problems of the transformation and integral reconstruction of the perspectives of the East and the West, but also the problem consciousness that should be generated is how to understand and break the political centrism and power centrism, and only by breaking the solidified centrological model can we present the global vision and cross-cultural pluralism of urban history research. This is both a geopolitical issue in the study of urban history and a question of the relationship between power and geography in the study of political history. There are many specific problems that can be derived from this, such as the changes in the urban power structure at a moment when it is seriously out of control, the source of personnel in the urban bureaucracy, cultural background, performance appraisal system, reward and punishment mechanism, and so on. In today's urban history research, there are always various clues and possible collection of this information and related historical materials in any case, and problem awareness is often the best guide for excavating historical materials.

The second is the awareness of problems within the study of urban history. First, although most scholars agree with the importance of Mesopotamia in the process of urbanization, "they only discuss this area as the place where the earliest urban culture occurred, and do not pay due attention to the development of Mesopotamia after that." It is necessary to study the cities of Mesopotamia in various historical periods, rather than jumping from the achievements of the end of the fourth century BC to the situation of the Greeks in the first century BC". (Introduction, p. 8) The problem is simple, urban origins are only one part of the study of urban history, and urban development should be a more important focus of research, but if you look at the concept of Greco-Roman cities as typical urban models, Mesopotamian cities end their mission after the origin narrative. This is actually a revised Western urban center theory, and non-Western cities are still difficult to enter the study of typical models. Second, the study of urban history is obscured by the political research institute, the city itself is only a location and material background in the mainstream vision of historical research, and the political, economic, military, social and spiritual and cultural life in the mainstream historical narrative often has no substantive connection with the study of urban history. Mirop notes that anthropological and archaeological studies of cities were discontinued after the question of the origin of cities ended, "leaving the later stages of development to historians." Historians, however, are focusing on other issues, especially political history. Similar to the situation among historians who studied ancient Greece, cities were often defined as city-states by scholars of Mesopotamia, and their study focused on their political events rather than on their function as urban centers." (p. 12) "Thus, even in the expert concept, the final image of the mesopotamian city is very blurry. (p. 13)

In fact, from the perspective of the discipline of history, although urban history as a discipline emerged in the United States around World War II, it still failed to attract the attention of historians until the 1970s, such as G. Barraclough's influential "Main Trends of Research in the Social and Human Sciences: History". 1978), there is no mention of urban history studies at all. On the other hand, there are various uncertainties in the academic positioning of urban history itself, research methods, and adjacent fields, and whether it is "Urban biography" ( David Harvey 's "Paris" (Capital of Modernity) (2003) is in my opinion the most exciting case of neo-Marxist urban studies in this kind of research perspective . It is also an interdisciplinary field of knowledge in the history of macro civilization, and there has always been confusion and controversy. Mirop's emphasis on the "pure historiographical study" of the ancient cities of Mesopotamia indicates the expectation of the academic orientation of his study of urban history. "I want to make it clear that the city was a central institution in ancient Mesopotamia, on the basis of which the entire civilization was built," he said. Cities are of vital importance in terms of politics, economy, social life and culture, and any of these aspects of Mesopotamian life cannot be properly understood without understanding their urban context". (Introduction, p. 8) That is to say, the study of urban history should be regarded as an important field of historical research.

The third problem is that the historical periodization and chronological framework under the domination of political history and military history narratives basically separate the historical continuity in the perspective of urban history research, and the historical periodization distinguished by the change of dynasties has become the dominant model of historical narrative. However, "existing staging is flawed and easily misleading." It is not a model of sustainability, but an emphasis on instability and change. This fragmentation is even more misleading when many aspects of Mesopotamian civilization do not directly depend on the fortunes of the dynasties studied." (p. 17) Mirop argues that "political and military activity are only two aspects of society, and while they do present the most important evidence of changes in Mesopotamian history, these changes are also exaggerated in modern academia." (p. 16) Citing the results of the work of A. Leo Oppenheim in the 1960s and 1970s, he argues that "we should see in the thousands of years of mesopotamian civilization its fundamental unity, not the separation of traditional historical periods." In mesopotamian urban studies, such a question is not difficult to understand: "The economic structure of a region should be more important than the ethnic or linguistic background of the ruling class." Mesopotamian basic economic structure has always been like this: it was a pre-industrialized society based on an agrarian economy. The ecological environment of this region has never changed fundamentally from the emergence of agriculture until oil became a valuable commodity. ...... The administrative and economic functions of the city have remained largely unchanged in the history of Mesopotamia. We need to look for such continuity, rather than focusing on the apparent changes in political forces. (p. 17) In such a historical context, continuity should indeed not be interrupted by the dynastic division of historical narratives, which is of course determined by the peculiar ecology of Mesopotamia. At the same time, it should be noted that acknowledging this continuity does not mean treating it as a universal pattern of history.

There is no doubt that in the history of the development of many other cities, it is difficult to see a historical situation in which the economic structure is more powerful and more important than the political structure and political authoritarianism of the ruling class. However, from the perspective of the problem consciousness of historical research, although the author discusses the continuity and change of urban history in Mesopotamia, it also has reference value for the study of modern and modern history, and there is a problem consciousness worth thinking about: whether or not it holds the view of historical continuity, urban history research is an important correction to the absolutized political-military history perspective, especially for the Whig historical narrative that is divided before and after. The upheaval of the times in the political-military narrative will of course change the set on the urban stage, and even resurrect urban civilization to the point of alienation, but the factor of historical continuity will still exist and flow in the capillaries of the city. Especially in the narrative of rural-urban antagonism, the historical teleology expressed in terms of "encirclement", "occupation", and "transformation" in various languages may eventually be discarded by the results of urban history research in the historical perspective of medium and long periods.

The last problem that impressed me was the question of the relationship between historical materials and historical narratives. The first is the question of historical data, such as the material remains and documents found in archaeological excavations, which are often very geographically concentrated and do not fully reflect the true history of the hundreds of Mesopotamian cities that once existed: "If we limit our research to one city, then most of the problems we want to solve are faced with a lack of or complete lack of information. (p. 15) And the kinds of historical sources that are often widely corroborated by researchers in urban history studies in other regions are missing here in Mesopotamia, such as demographic tables and tax records. For example, when trying to study the affairs of the city government in detail, it will also encounter serious difficulties in the lack of historical materials. "For example, we often see courts resolving disputes over land ownership, which means that citizens accept a decision by a government agency. But can we infer from this that citizens also appeal to higher institutions about other aspects of their lives? Such a conclusion cannot be drawn on the basis of the available evidence, and thus becomes the intuition of scholars. (pp. 123-124)

Thus, Mirop proposes the awareness and solution to the problem: "If we abandon the strict positivist approach prevalent in the field of Mesopotamian studies, especially among linguists, the problem of data limitations is somewhat less serious." The presence or absence of literature is usually a prerequisite for restoration, and people pay too much attention to the existing material and think that only what is mentioned in the literature has happened. (p. 18) But he argues that "the lack of information may have many causes, rather than illustrating a lack of activity." Most scholars acknowledge the contingency of restoration, but fundamentally believe that everything was recorded somehow. Instead, we should question why what we know is being recorded and why other possible activities are not. For example, we don't have a record of retailing food or artisanal products because that sale didn't happen, or can we explain it another way rather than if they didn't appear in the records? We must admit that many activities can exist outside the written record, and even simply accepting that they can happen allows us to paint a richer picture as we know it." (p. 19) Mirop's questioning is both legitimate and imaginative. This is not only a bold hypothesis, but also a question of how to boldly verify.

In this monograph on the comprehensive study of ancient Mesopotamian cities, the specific problem consciousness is also manifested in various aspects, and the above are only a few main aspects. In fact, it should be said that this feeling of problem awareness is obtained from reading and at the same time from outside the book. Because the object of urban history is closely related to real life, its problem awareness comes from the real urban crisis in addition to the academic context. In life, people are always easily confused by the appearance of the central city, and only after a serious disaster, in the ruins of its collapse, do they find that its foundations are so unreliable and fragile. Especially in the great disaster caused by man-made, the basic humanity as the foundation of the city has completely exposed its distortion and lack. When people experience or hear about the catastrophic upheaval of a city, the solidification illusion of a city in the past collapses in an instant, which is an opportunity for urban history research, and in the sense of crisis, it gives birth to the problem awareness of urban history research: for example, what is the real relationship between the power structure of the city and the economic structure, what changes have occurred to the dominant power and constrained factors of the city in the region, and how the competition of economic models to solve the problems of urban people's livelihood should be solved. In the serious moment when natural disasters and man-made disasters coexist, where is the bottom line of the city, the problems exposed in the urban crisis should make urban history researchers aware of the problems that have been ignored and obscured in past research.

In order to break through the limitations of documentary materials, Miropp set his sights on image materials, and there are several cases of "image history" in the book. To illustrate that the second resource of political power in ancient Mesopotamia was a question of ideology, he used the example of a late fourth-century BC relief found on a stone vase in Uruk (figure 2.1 is its line drawing) that "shows a row of naked men walking toward a goddess holding utensils containing agricultural products, identifying her as inaninuation by the symbols behind her." In front of her stood the ruler of the city, depicted in an image taller than his minions, dressed in ceremonial robes, apparently acting as an intermediary. Fertility ceremonies, including rulers and goddesses, prevailed until the 18th century BC. It is reasonable to assume that religious ideologies were used by priests to extract agricultural products from the rural population, but the exact method is not yet known to us." (pp. 38-39) Similarly, "iconographic data also indicate the importance of the city as a political center." (p. 60) He cites the example of a crown that may have been worn only by queens in Assyria from the ninth century BC onwards, a crown with the shape of a city wall; Figure 3.1 is a line drawing reproduced from an artifact depicting a silhouette of a queen wearing such a crown. His interpretation was: "This crown later became very popular. It was the standard crown of the Persians, while in the West, the Greeks after Alexander considered it to be the symbol of goddesses such as Kybele, apparently inspired by the Near East. And it still influences the popular image of the crown today, as any child draws an image of the king suggests. This is followed by a relief photographic image, "A Model of a City Dedicated to the Assyrian King" (Fig. 3.2), who notes that "perhaps the image of people dedicating models of their cities to the victorious Assyrian conquerors best expresses the idea that handing over a city is a symbol of renouncing political power." Moreover, this image has a long history in Europe: in Byzantine and Renaissance art, rulers dedicated a model of their city to God, which became a symbol of obedience to God". (Ibid.) This interpretation is somewhat persuasive. In the fourth chapter, "The Urban Landscape," in order to illustrate the significance of the city walls to a city in the eyes of the ancient Mesopotamians, he points out that "of the relatively few Mesopotamian descriptions of the city, the Reliefs of the Assyrian Palaces provide the best record." Typical images of the city include one or more circles of defensive walls with numerous regularly spaced towers on the walls that seem to indicate a fortified fortress and one or more walls (Figure 4.4). The same idea manifests itself in the model of the city dedicated to the Assyrian king as a sign of submission—only one wall, and, interestingly, in the description of the Assyrian military camp (Figure 4.5). The general emphasis on walls in iconographic material reveals the Mesopotamian notion that they are a key feature of a city." (80 pages) These are all iconographic research methods to explain the ideological, political concepts and other issues in urban history, although it is still relatively weak from the perspective of image interpretation and literature comparison, but the image historical materials have been able to play a certain role. In today's urban crisis events, the mobile phones in the hands of citizens have become an important source of huge historical materials for historians, and the historical iconography method in urban history research will inevitably play a more important role.

In the study of ancient economic history, there is a controversy between the so-called "primitivism" and "modernism", the former arguing that the pre-capitalist or non-capitalist economy is very different from the modern Western economy, and the concepts or models in modern economics are not suitable for studying them; the "modernist" school of thought holds that the ancient Greek and Roman economies showed such a developed capitalist development that there is only a quantitative difference between them and the modern economy. Mirop argues that "a complete set of 'modern' economic values and motivations can be shown to exist in ancient Mesopotamia: the thirst for profit, the maximization of economic resources, and a market economy that included a labor market that set prices." There are many empirical data that prove the existence of these economic elements: loan documents, sales bills, employment contracts, and so on. The key issue is to assess their role in the economy." (p. 23) On the one hand, he acknowledges that the existing historical sources cannot fully confirm this view, and on the other hand emphasizes that the market economy in the ancient Mesopotamian cities was extremely important for the survival and development of the city, and although "large economic entities need a bureaucracy", it is the market economy that ultimately plays a decisive role. He reminds us that since archaeological exploration is concentrated on temples and royal palace sites, the records of public institutions centered on temples and royal palaces are far richer than those of private economies, so it cannot be used to prove that the state economy and public power dominate economic life. (pp. 27-28) At the same time, he reminds us to pay attention to the food supply in cities, "land ownership, political and bureaucratic organization, market and redistribution centers, land use and agricultural technology, all of which have an impact on our understanding of how people access food." (p. 172) In an urban catastrophe crisis, this is really a matter of life and death: How do people get food? What to get and how much to get? Questions that seem to be far-reaching or academic in Mirop's research suddenly become very grounded.

In this context of reading, chapter VI, "Urban Governance: Kings, Citizens, and Officials," becomes more relevant: "We can be aware of the two poles of power relations in mesopotamian cities: on the one hand, the king and the public institutions that underpin his rule, and on the other hand, the whole citizen with some inexplicable power." The liaison between these two poles is a group of officials. ...... The relationship between the king and the townspeople varied from time to time and depended on the general political situation. My view is that in the history of Mesopotamia, the power and independence of citizens have increased day by day, rather than another trend that people usually think of. (p. 121) Thus, the "modernist" school of thought in the aforementioned study of the "ancient Mesopotamian cities" is of interest not only in the field of economic history, but also in the study of urban political history.

After all, the study of urban history and the awareness of problems in urban disaster crises have gradually emerged, and I believe that more and more research results that have both historical significance and practical significance will continue to emerge. I believe that in those studies that can be expected, kings and officials will not always be seen as the only political force in Mesopotamian society, and the question of how the citizens who are not dependent on the royal palace will organize their own government can also be solved in the study of the citizens of the city.