Services in Early Urban Settlements

Before the establishment of permanent settlements as service centers, people lived as nomads, migrating in small groups across the landscape in search of food and water. They gathered wild berries and roots or killed wild animals for food (see Chapter 9). At some point, groups decided to build permanent settlements. Several families clustered together in a rural location and obtained food in the surrounding area.

Settlements may have originated in Mesopotamia, part of the Fertile Crescent of Southwest Asia, and diffused at an early date west to Egypt and east to China and to South Asia’s Indus Valley. Or settlements may have originated independently in each of the four hearths. In any case, from these four hearths, settlements diffused to the rest of the world.

Largest Urban Settlements Through History

Services in the Earliest Settlements

What services would nomads require? Why would they establish permanent settlements to provide these services? No one knows the precise sequence of events through which settlements were established to provide services. Based on archaeological research, settlements probably originated to provide consumer and public services. Business services came later.

Early Consumer Services

The earliest permanent settlements may have been established to offer consumer services, specifically places to bury the dead. Having established a permanent resting place for the dead, the group might then install priests at the site to perform the service of saying prayers for the deceased. This would have encouraged the building of structures—places for ceremonies and dwellings. By the time recorded history began about 5,000 years ago, many settlements existed, and some of them featured places of worship.

Early Business Services

Early urban settlements were places where groups could store surplus food and trade with other groups. People brought plants, animals, and minerals as well as tools, clothing, and containers to the urban settlements, and exchanged them for items brought by others. To facilitate this trade, officials in the settlement set fair prices, kept records, and created currency.

Early Public Services

Early settlements housed political leaders as well as defense forces to guard the residents of the settlement and defend the surrounding hinterland from seizure by other groups.

Pause & Reflect 12.4.2

In prehistoric times, before the invention of settlements, why might caves have played an important role in the lives of early humans?

Ancient Urban Settlements

Settlements were first established in the eastern Mediterranean about 2500 B.C.E. (Figure 12-37). These settlements were trading centers for the thousands of islands dotting the Aegean Sea and the eastern Mediterranean and provided the government, military protection, and other public services for their surrounding hinterlands. They were organized into city-states, which were defined in Chapter 8 as independent self-governing communities that included the settlement and nearby countryside.

Largest Urban Settlements Before 350 B.C.E.

Settlements were places to house families, permitting unburdened males to travel farther and faster in their search for food. Women kept “home and hearth,” making household objects, such as pots, tools, and clothing, and educating the children. People also needed tools, clothing, shelter, containers, fuel, and other material goods. Settlements therefore became manufacturing centers. Men gathered the materials needed to make a variety of objects: stones for tools and weapons, grass for containers and matting, animal hair for clothing, and wood for shelter and heat. Women used these materials to manufacture household objects and maintain their dwellings.

The rise of the Roman Empire encouraged urban settlement. With much of Europe and Southwest Asia & North Africa under Roman rule, settlements were established as centers of administrative, military, and other public services as well as retail and other consumer services. Trade was encouraged through transportation and utility services, notably construction of many roads and aqueducts, and the security the Roman legions provided. Rome—the empire’s center for administration, commerce, culture, and all other services—was the world’s most populous city 2,000 years ago and may have been the first city to reach a half million inhabitants.

Largest Urban Settlements 350 B.C.E.–1750 C.E.

With the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century C.E., urban settlements declined. The empire’s prosperity had rested on trading in the secure environment of imperial Rome. But with the empire fragmented under hundreds of rulers, trade diminished. Large urban settlements shrank or were abandoned. For several hundred years, Europe’s cultural heritage, such as books and art, was preserved largely in monasteries and isolated rural areas.

Medieval Urban Settlements

After the collapse of the Roman Empire, most of the world’s largest urban settlements were clustered in China. Several cities in China are estimated to have been the world’s most populous at various times between 600 and 1500 C.E., including Beijing, Ch’ang-an, Hangzhou, Kaifeng, and Nanking.

Urban life began to revive in Europe in the eleventh century, as feudal lords established new urban settlements. The lords gave residents charters of rights with which to establish independent cities in exchange for their military service. Both the lord and the urban residents benefited from this arrangement. The lord obtained people to defend his territory at less cost than maintaining a standing army. For their part, urban residents preferred periodic military service to the burden faced by rural serfs, who farmed the lord’s land and could keep only a small portion of their own agricultural output.

With their newly won freedom from the relentless burden of rural serfdom, the urban dwellers set about expanding trade. Surplus from the countryside was brought into the city for sale or exchange, and markets were expanded through trade with other free cities. The trade among different urban settlements was enhanced by new roads and greater use of rivers. By the fourteenth century, Europe was covered by a dense network of small market towns serving the needs of particular lords.

The largest medieval European urban settlements served as power centers for the lords and church leaders as well as major market centers. The most important public services occupied palaces, churches, and other prominent buildings arranged around a central market square. The tallest and most elaborate structures were usually churches, many of which still dominate the landscape of smaller European towns.

In medieval times, European urban settlements were usually surrounded by walls even though by then cannonballs could destroy them. Dense and compact within the walls, medieval urban settlements lacked space for construction, so ordinary shops and houses nestled into the side of the walls and the large buildings. Most of these modest medieval shops and homes, as well as the walls, have been demolished in modern times, with only the massive churches and palaces surviving. Modern tourists can appreciate the architectural beauty of these medieval churches and palaces, but they do not receive an accurate image of a densely built medieval town.