“Cities That Shaped the Ancient World”, edited by John Julius Norwich

Funerary relief from Palmyra of a couple named as Mal’ and Bolaya

“The cities that shaped the ancient world bore hardly any resemblance to cities as we understand them today, just as the ancient world itself had little in common with that in which we live,” writes the late John Julius Norwich in the introduction to Cities That Shaped the Ancient World

 

But we owe them, none the less, an enormous debt. It was they, after all, who laid the foundations for life as we know it; they who saw the birth of literature, of drama, of painting, sculpture and architecture; they who learnt the first painful lessons of large communities living together; and they who gradually, over countless generations, built up the knowledge and the experience that we nowadays take for granted.

 

The lavishly-illustrated 2014 hardcover edition of Cities That Shaped the Ancient World has been reissued as a rather less lavishly illustrated paperback which, as a result, is largely a collection of relatively brief city-by-city essays. At about five pages each, these are hardly longer than encyclopedia entries. Each starts with a quotation (including one from Ozymandias) and highlights each city’s special role in history. The value of the volume lies not in the depth of each entry—although they are all well-written, as might be expected when the contributors include such luminaries as Betthany Hughes and Frances Wood—but rather in the opportunity to compare and contrast across continents and centuries. “This is not a history book,” Norwich continues.

 

It does not, like history books, trace progress. Instead, it spins the globe and watches, as the earth’s endlessly varied peoples take their first tentative steps in that most challenging art of living together …

 

Some of the cities included may be little known even to those who dip in and out of ancient history. Hattusa, capital of the Hittites is there, as is Meroë in Nubia and Caral, now generally considered to be the oldest city in the Americas:

 

People were constructing massive platform mounds and impressive architecture here at around the same time that the giant pyramids were being built at Giza in Egypt.

 

 Cities that Shaped the Ancient World, John Julius Norwich (ed) (Thames & Hudson, paperback edition, February 2022)
Cities that Shaped the Ancient World, John Julius Norwich (ed) (Thames & Hudson, paperback edition, February 2022)

Although some two-thirds of the book is made up of cities of the Near East and Mediterranean, the volume also includes five cities from East Asia and six in the Americas. While the obvious ones are all there (Rome, Athens, Alexandria, Ur), some choices—Paestum, Pompeii, Nîmes and the Pont du Gard—seem to have been selected more for the importance, extent and accessibility of their remains than their importance at the time.

That the “West” seems over-represented is due in part to “Ancient” in the title: the same cut-off that includes Rome but not Constantinople also presumably eliminates Angkor Wat, Cusco and Tenochtitlan; of the six American cities, five are in Mesoamerica: the relatively late Tikal slips in, but the only South American entry is the extremely ancient Caral. Editor Norwich puts some of it down to geography:

 

Most of our ancient cities enjoyed one other inestimable blessing: the Mediterranean. Seeing it on the map for the millionth time, we tend to take it for granted; but if we try to look at it objectively we suddenly realize that here is something utterly unique, a body of water that might have been deliberately designed, like no other on the surface of the globe, as a cradle of cultures.

 

A relatively small number of photos have been grouped into two sets of colored plates. Given that that words rather than illustrations predominate in this volume, Cities That Shaped the Ancient World is as much an introductions to the fine writers who have contributed as it is to the cities themselves. Each of the entries is an invitation to seek out the contributor’s longer works.


Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books.