| Popis: |
In this 1950 Town Planning Review article, archaeologist V. Gordon Childe lays out his theory about how cities first arose and continually developed throughout history in a long process of slow growth punctuated by periods of dramatic change that he termed “revolutions.” Before the first cities arose in antiquity, humankind lived for millennia in Paleolithic, hunter-gatherer bands. Then, perhaps 20,000-30,000 years BCE, the “Agricultural Revolution” ushered in an age of Neolithic settled farming communities, and this was in turn followed by the “Urban Revolution” as, around 5,000-6,000 years BCE, new, highly developed societies arose. These first cities established the idea of the state in the institutions of kingship and priesthood, saw the emergence of specialized occupations and social classes, invented systems of record-keeping that became writing, and built strong defensive walls to protect the city residents from enemies, monumental palaces and temples for the urban overlords, and vast irrigation systems to increase and control agricultural production. Writing in the 1940s and 1950s and strongly influenced my Marxist thought, Childe argued that the most recent human revolution was the “Industrial Revolution” which created the modern world and a period of unfolding technological and socio-political progress. |
