Metropolis [antikvár]

Cities are places of hopes and dreams, of vision and order, as well as centres for destruction and conflict. Although cities are not creations of the modern era, for many people they represent the core element of life as we live it today, when most of the world's population lives in an urban hub of commerce, technology, transport and social interaction between people, and in communities of often quite diverse cultures. Whereas only a century ago perhaps 10 per cent of humankind lived in a city, now most people do and the world's economic development is characterised by the relentless, and often unrestrained, expansion of our ever-growing urban metropolises. Globally, cities have become inextricably identified with this sense of progress, success and advancement, whether individual, social or economic; cities are believed to be places where things 'happen'. In fact, historically, this has long been the case, with cities impossible to separate from the evolution of human civilisation. Trade and religion are two of the oldest practices of humankind, and cities originated and grew to facilitate the complex human webs of exchange involved in both, which have left their marks throughout the millennia on the form and features of our cities - to facilitate the buying and selling of goods and to enable people to gather for matters more transcendant and less material. And just as civilisation grew out of humankind's conscious attempt to control, change and organise our environment, so cartography and mapping arose out of our need for tools to measure, record, understand, navigate, plan and protect our surroundmgs. Cities - centres of spiritual, economic and political power - became leading centres of mapmaking as well as prime subjects for cartographers. City maps are among the most popular, as well as oldest, forms of cartographic representation. However, the survival rate of early maps is limited and most maps date only from the last 500 years. Early maps are fragments; sometimes literally in the physical sense, but also because our knowledge of them is incomplete, based upon a partial understanding of the cultural context within which they were made, though it seems quite clear that the world such maps depict was centred upon the culture of origin and that cities loomed large as places that gave meaning and identity to those same cultures. THE FIRST CIVILISATIONS The shift to crop cultivation encouraged the production of regular food surpluses, which made it possible for some workers to specialise in other tasks. Urban development rested on agrarian systems that were able to support substantial populations, and these were found first in fertile river valleys, such as the Euphrates and, later, Tigris of Mesopotamia (Iraq), the Nile valley of Egypt, and the Indus valley of modern Pakistan. In Andean America, in what is now Peru, large temple mounds appeared in the central Andes along the Pacific coastal river valleys, in places such as the Supe Valley, from c.2500bce. In East Asia, the Yellow River was the later basis for Erlitou, founded in about 1900bce, China's first city. In Mesopotamia the city-state of Uruk developed in about 3500BCE. The sacred enclosure of a raised mud-brick ziggurat temple complex was an important feature of the early Mesopotamian cities, not only because the priests provided sacral power but also because the temple administered much of the city's land while the priests could record production and store products. By about 3300bce walled towns had begun to be built along the Nile in predynastic Egypt, Nekhen, or Hieraconpolis, and Naqada being the earliest. When