Proto-city

A proto-city, or a proto-town, is a large village or town of the Neolithic such as Jericho and Çatalhöyük,[1] and also any prehistoric settlement that is distinguished from a true city in that it lacks planning and centralized rule. For example, Jericho evidently had a class system, but no roads, while Çatalhöyük apparently lacked social stratification. This is what distinguishes them from the first city-states of the early Mesopotamian cities in the fourth millennium, B.C. [2]

Prehistoric Egypt and the Ubaid period of Sumer featured what some call proto-cities. The break from these later-mentioned settlements and urban settlements is the emergence of Eridu, the first Sumerian city, in the Uruk period, around 4000 BC. A European example of this would be the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture of eastern Europe and north of the Black Sea, which dates back to the fourth millennium, BC.[3]

Definition

The label of a proto-city is sometimes applied to archaeological sites such as Jericho and Çatalhöyük that are large for their time but lack most other characteristics that are found in later urban settlements such as those of the Mesopotamian city-states in the 4th Millennium BC.[4] These later urban sites are distinguished by a dense population with social differentiation and stratification, alongside a level of organisation that facilitated the building of public works, the redistribution of food surpluses and raids into surrounding areas.[2] In contrast, proto-urban sites such as Çatalhöyük are population dense but lack clear signs of central control and hierarchy.[5]

See also

References
  1. Rice, Michael (2003). Egypt's Legacy: The Archetypes of Western Civilization: 3000 to 30 BC. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-0-203-48667-2. On the Konya plain in central Anatolia lies the extraordinary settlement of Catal Huyuk, which was nothing less than a proto-city (perhaps, indeed, the proto-city), founded in the mid-seventh millennium BC.
  2. Grant, Jim; Gorin, Sam; Fleming, Neil (31 March 2015). The Archaeology Coursebook: An Introduction to Themes, Sites, Methods and Skills. Routledge. ISBN 9780415526883.
  3. "Trypillian Civilization. Introduction". Trypillian Civilization Journal. Archived from the original on 29 March 2019.
  4. Ur, Jason (2016-08-20), "The Birth of Cities in Ancient West Asia", Ancient West Asian Civilization, Singapore: Springer Singapore, pp. 133–147, doi:10.1007/978-981-10-0554-1_9, ISBN 978-981-10-0553-4, retrieved 2022-04-07
  5. Mazzucato, Camilla (2019). "Socio-Material Archaeological Networks at Çatalhöyük a Community Detection Approach". Frontiers in Digital Humanities. 6. doi:10.3389/fdigh.2019.00008/full. ISSN 2297-2668.
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