Reconstructed setting· The columns of time
River cities
3,275 BCE → 801 BCE
A temple on its terrace, a pyramid on the skyline, date palms over mudbrick roofs. The first cities were built beside rivers, by people who had never seen a city.
What the evidence shows
The temple is Uruk, where monumental precincts rose in the late fourth millennium BCE and where the earliest proto-cuneiform tablets were found: the city and the written record appear in the same place, and not by chance, since a city cannot be administered without accounts. The pyramid is Giza, built around 2560 BCE, and it is drawn on the horizon rather than in the foreground because it belongs to a different river and a different state. The date palms mark the moment orchards enter the picture: olive, grape, date and fig were the first tree crops of the Near East.
Bounds and conventions
Two civilisations compressed into one view, six centuries apart, because the band is 2,500 years wide and a single scene must stand for all of it. The Indus and the Yellow River, where cities rose within the same band, are not shown at all.
Sources
- Nissen, H. J., Damerow, P., Englund, R. K. (1993). Archaic Bookkeeping. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226586596. Monographie, à valider en relecture.
- Lehner, M. (1997). The Complete Pyramids. Thames & Hudson. ISBN 0500050848. Monographie, à valider en relecture.
- Zohary, D., Spiegel-Roy, P. (1975), Science, doi:10.1126/science.187.4174.319