Let's talk about Uruk, one of the first cities in history. What do you think life was like in the first city ever?
Shit
>>63128
literally this.
>no electricity
>limited form of law and equality
>you were born and bred for the sole purpose of building monuments and fighting wars for the king
the smell was probably appalling
>>62810
like India but with slightly less rape desu hth
>>63191
Same today but we have electricity and substitutes for kings.
>>63208
Yeah, the Indus City states where prob much better in that regard.
>>63191
With the exception of monuments how would that be different from life before the city?
>>63410
Did they poo in the loo back then?
>>62810
I've always loved Ziggurats.
>>62810
I'm realizing Uruk looks vaguely like Balmora.
>>63833
I hate the fact that my other computer broke and now I can't play Morrowind, because the only computer available is shitty and has no graphics card.
>>63420
It wouldn't. Live was shit.
>>63864
>is shitty and has no graphics card
I'm pretty sure it has, it wouldn't display anything otherwise. It probably has an integrated GPU, which are too slow for most modern games, but not for Morrowind, a game 15 years old. Unless the computer is as old as the game, it should be able to run it.
Have you tried?
>>64110
I haven't, but this computer can't even play Doom 3.
I guess I could try it though, since I do really want to play Morrowind.
Horrible, I'd guess. Imagine the diseases you'd catch during a "normal" lifetime.
>>63864
Any computer post 2004 runs Morrowind, bro.
>>62810
The Chatal Huyuk site. One of the earliest settlements in mankind.
Fun fact: It has no streets. Houses were built right next to each other. You got around town by walking over your neighbors' roofs.
>>64259
That's fucking retarded. Imagine how many people broke their arms and legs due to falling from high roofs. And the fire hazard, holy shit.
All cities until the 20th century were death traps due to disease.
>>64293
That city was actually fortress, there were no normal doors in it. Only way to get inside the house was a hole in the roof.
Quite smart
>>62810
>streets small and dusty/muddy
>some guy builds his house in the middle of a street and the street is over
>some guy builds his house on top of your house
>some guy has his goats piss in front of your door
not nice
So how did the first city come to be?
I assume farmers where stationed so they was close to their neighbors. And farmers are a family.
Which means a farmer is 20-40 people. Or more. Hence a rather big farm.
So the big questions are: How did traders come to be?
And how long did it take for traders to become important enough that a trade hub could even exist?
And how long until the trade hub had enough abstract resources to wage war? Or maintain walls and monuments.
>>64396
>Enemy comes.
>QUICK MY SON GET THE LADDERS
>>64501
It took a long ass time, Homo sapiens sapiens has been around for what, 200.000 years? The earliest permanent settlements date back to at least 10.000 BCE. People probably started trading when one tribe had something the other needed.
>>64501
I imagine the first traders were some of the people who lived on the farm who volunteered to go to the next farm over and exchange cattle/wheat/clothes or whatever. Probably at first just over the winter or when you're not growing food but gradually that guy got married, had kids.
Trading is a skill, so eventually his family spends all its time trading going from farm to farm or the odd village. Pretty soon your ties to the original farm/clan are more distant than not. Bam, trader class.
>>64556
Yes, but what if the hunter gather was the traders?
Another really important question: How early did trading for spice and minerals become important?
Speaking of cities and early civilizations, how early did taxations become common?
Im gonna assume it started in early tribal society where the strongest worked like the mob and got paid for protection, but does anyone know anything of this?
>>64713
Not that early in the state of the city.
I am going to assume you build a city when several traders realize their route goes trough 1 place, and need somewhere to store stuff that is more valuable in another season.
At some point, several traders realize they can band together.
For taxation to exist, the oligarchy of the strongest traders has to set it up as protection money(can be something as simple as a entry fee to the city), or for one merchant clan to become strong enough to force the other traders to pay a small fee to stay in the city.
>>62810
I wish we had a way of knowing more about life in those periods (kinda like assassin's creed system)
because shit like "they were farmers and some traded" doesn't tell me nothing about their daily life.
All I know is they had a law against diluting beer
And female comedians, singers, and dancers performed naked
>>64780
So these leading merchants eventually evolved into the first kings?
>>64938
Can you give me a source about the female comedians,singers and dancers? I'm interested in reading about it
>>64948
There is several options
1. Merchants choose a glorious leader
2. Army realizes they actually run the show, and somehow end up with a leader
3. All the signs add up to some messiah being born, and this somehow works out
4. There is a farm where the city was founded. The area is trade for the ownership of the city. This means the original main farmers(and not their slaves or distant relatives) becomes the royalty
And I have trouble thinking of anything else. All of these are also possible depending on city. Another important question are how long it it took from council to king, since thats not obvious
>>64501
agriculture allows a far greater population than hunter-gathering. You also get travelling herders and other transient people which start to develop trade networks. Eventually central places develop for economic and organisational functions
![maxresdefault[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/yvj8ipH.jpg "maxresdefault[1].jpg")
>>63833
>you are realizing Balmora sounds vaguely like Baltimora.
>>63615
yes, they invented sewers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUcTsFe1PVs
Thread theme.
>tfw there was a sect of priestesses in Ur that had to fug you if you walked into their temple
>tfw they were super respected members of their society
Gilgamesh taught me a lot.
I wish Ur was the first city.
It's a very simplistic, evocative one-syllable word that sounds like it could totally be the first city.
Eridu is actually the first city though, not Uruk.
>>65397
It also allows for a non harsh life.
Image living a life where you have too much food. Literally.
Contra having days of being hungry, and a harsh winter season.
Disease reducing lifespawn might be a thing, but that would maybe be a few hundred years after most of the transition was made. And it still requires a community living too close, and most major hygene improvements(like boiling water) could be done by hunter gatherers.
>>67313
First city of RECORDED HISTORY
I still wonder how many predates it
I imagine it like current day Detroit.
>>67398
First recorded Empire under Lugal Anne Mundu. He ruled from the city state of Adab.
> pic related
>>65859
God, this is cool, anon. Thanks for sharing.
>>67482
>iveseensomeshit.jpg
>>65859
what's that instrument called?
>>67987
Apparently it's an authentic Ancient Sumerian instrument called Gishgudi. I don't know if that's true though.
girugamesh
>>64938
Female comedians? That sounds horrible. They probably told jokes that relied on observational humor instead abstract zaniness.
>>67313
Hobbes will know that Ur is no mere city. Ur is a State, maybe even the first State. And a state, Hobbes will say, is an “artificial animal.” It is something brand new, something neither Man nor Nature dreamt of. It is “that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth, or State, in Latin Civitas, which is but an artificial man.”
Like the thinking Ensi, Hobbes will know that this artificial man has no life of its own, and he will ask, “may we not say, that all automata (engines that move by themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life?”
The Ensi cannot yet visualize a watch. The more advance Hobbes will no longer be able to visualize nature or human beings. He will ask “what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels...?” In a world of watches, the Leviathan will not appear as strange to Hobbes as it appears to the Ensi.
Hobbes will picture the Leviathan as an artificial English man: masculine, blond, with a crown on its head, a scepter in one hand and a sword in the other, its body composed of myriads of faceless human beings, zeks.
Hobbes will insist that the Leviathan has the head of a man. He might agree with the yet later poet Yeats that the beast has “a lion body and the head of a man.” But he will insist on the man’s head. He will know that the zeks are headless, that they are the springs and strings that operate the body. He will think the monster contains one free and whole man, the Lugal. Hobbes will be able to call the Lugal a King, Monarch, Ruler and other names besides, because his language will have been enriched by the intervening proliferation of Leviathans.
>>68494
The philosophical Ensi already knows better than Hobbes that the beast has neither the body nor the head of a man, whether English Sumerian. The Ensi knows that even the Lugal, the freest man in Ur, cannot go hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon and dancing at night, as his own spirit moves him. He knows of a Lugal who went off hunting only twice, and the second time, while the Lugal was in the woods, his favorite Ensi replaced him as Lugal, and the former Lugal had to beg for asylum in a neighboring city. The Ensi knows that a Lugal who let himself be determined by his own spirit would quickly be overthrown by Ensis or even zeks, and that even the Temple would be in an uproar.
The Ensi, less advanced than Hobbes, is as yet more familiar with living beings than with springs and watches. He cannot envision the Leviathan with either a human head or a lion body. He might use Hobbes’s first description and think of the beast as an artificial animal, but not an animal as graceful and limber as a lion.
He might think of it as a worm, a giant worm, not a living worm but a carcass of a worm, a monstrous cadaver, its body consisting of numerous segments, its skin pimpled with spears and wheels and other technological implements. He knows from his own experience that the entire carcass is brought to artificial life by the motions of the human beings trapped inside, the zeks who operate the springs and wheels, just as he knows that the cadaverous head is operated by a mere zek, the head zek.
>>68504
Among the speculations this Hobbes will give us as offerings to his Ur will be the claim that the zeks actually contracted themselves to imprisonment within the carcass, or as he will put it, that the head made an agreement with the body, if not in Hobbes’s Ur then at least in the original Ur.
The philosophical Ensi, who has by now retired to the Temple, already knows better. He knows the zeks are foreigners who were brought to Ur by force before they even understood the Lugal’s language; the zeks agreed to no contract then, and they haven’t done so since.
The Ensi even remembers that the defeated Lagashians who contracted themselves to repairing Ur’s canals made this agreement only at the point of spears.
Furthermore, no Lugal ever advanced Hobbes’s claim; he would have been laughed out of office. The Lugal knows that even the elders didn’t appoint him, since the elders no longer do any appointing; they take care of the shrines. The Lugal claims that his power comes to him from the violent spirit who lodges in the Ziggurat or artificial mountain. This sprawling man-made phallus shape is the real head of the Leviathan, and it made no contracts.
>>63420
Probably there were better higienic conditions in the countryside.
>>68512
>Ziggurat
Are you referring to the Ziggurat as the phallus shape?
>>68610
Ziggurat is Ziggurat
>>62810
>tfw middle east will never have cool, advanced, progressive civilizations anymore
>tfw middle east will forever stay a shithole because of islam
>>70713
It hurts, doesn't it?
>>70713
I've seen people saying this is just Islam's version of the Reformation. We won't get to see a cultured and developed Middle East, but our great-grandkids might.
>>72484
They won't. They might see a reasonably prosperous Persian state afloat in a sea of shit flinging fanatics, though.
