The Fabric of Cities: Aspects of Urbanism, Urban Topography and Society in Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome

Leiden: Brill, 2014. First edition. Octavo. vi, 260pp. Index. Text in English with some Hebrew. Red buckram lettered in yellow. Illustrated with 2 maps, stylized street plans and 15 text figures. A fine, as new copy.

"The Fabric of Cities presents an interdisciplinary collection of articles on urbanism in ancient Mesopotamia, Israel, Greece and Rome, which focuses on the social dimension of cities' topographical features. The contributions of this book offer investigations of neighbourhoods, city gates, streets, temples and palaces drawing on textual and archaeological sources as well as art. The topics treated in this work encompass the diverse functions of public and marginal spaces in Mesopotamian cities and Rome, the role of agency in the development of Babylonian neighbourhoods, the relationship between public and private in Assyrian palaces, the connection between political strategies and temple building in Sumerian literary texts, and the communicative uses of language in Classical Greek texts to talk about urban space." (Publisher)

Contents: Acknowledgements; Introduction: Urban Topography as a Reflection of Society?; The Cost of Cosmogony: Ethical Reflections on Resource Extraction, Monumental Architecture and Urbanism in the Sumerian Literary Tradition; Gates and their Functions in Mesopotamia and Ancient Israel; City Streets: Reflections on Urban Society in the Cuneiform Sources of the Second and First Millennium BCE; The Babylonian Cities: Investigating Urban Morphology Using Texts and Archaeology; From bābānu to bētānu, Looking for Spaces in Late Assyrian Palaces.; "Ich bin die Grenze der Agora." Zum kognitiven Stadtbild der Athener in klassischer ZeitReligiöse Topographie Roms: Der Aventin Innerhalb der Stadt und ausserhalb des Pomeriums; Index; Keywords; Personal and Divine Names; Geographical and Place Names; Sources; Words and Terms in Ancient Languages.

This is Volume 68 in the Brill series, "Culture and History of the Ancient Near East."