A comparative study between the cities of ancient Sumer and Egypt civilizations within the frame of Gordon Childe's ten criteria

Date

2023-4-14

Author

Kula, Göktuğ

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Although humans have been wandering on earth for 2.5 million years, the concepts of city and urbanism are relatively very new notions with their approximately 6.000 years of past in our history. Our ancestors lived millions of years as hunter-gatherers within small human groups, and they used natural formations like caves, oases, and forests as shelter. Then, just a few thousand years after they invented agriculture, we come across the two earliest and great civilizations: Ancient Sumer first and then Egypt in the 4th millennia B.C. The purpose of this thesis is to provide an evaluation and comparison between the two earliest societies of human civilization by means of their cities rather than defining what a city is. As a starting point and a frame Gordon Childe’s ten traits model from his article “The Urban Revolution” was consulted after its validity was discussed. The sample cities studied were Uruk, Ur, and Nippur from the Sumerian Civilization and Thebes, Akhetaten, and Heit el-Ghurab, which was a worker s site, from the Egypt Civilization. It is important to state that the term “civilization” was used in its etymological root from the Latin “civitas”, that is, the person who belongs to the city.

Subject Keywords

Ancient Sumerians, Ancient Egypt, Gordon Childe, First cities

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/103694

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Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis