I. ANCIENT CITIES
The religious and cosmic symbolism of the city
reaches back to the early stages of human culture. It
seems that in none of
the great archaic cultures have
cities been understood simply as
settlements, arbitrarily
established at a certain place and in a given
form; both
the placing and the shape of cities were conceived as
related, in a hidden or manifested form, to the structure
of the universe.
The most common form of this sym-
bolism is
the belief that the cities have astral or divine
prototypes, or even
descend from heaven; sometimes
they were believed to have a relationship to
the under-
world. In both cases, however,
they refer to an extra-
terrestrial
reality.
Babylonian cities were believed to have their proto
types in the constellations: Sippar in Cancer, Nineveh
in Ursa
Major, Assur in Arcturus. Sennacherib had
Nineveh built according to the
“form... delineated
from distant ages by the writing of the
heaven-of-stars.”
This model, situated in a celestial region,
antedates the
terrestrial city. The terrestrial city, usually with the
sanctuary at its center, is a copy of the divine model,
executed according
to the command of the gods. This
is still reflected in the Wisdom of Solomon 9:8—“Thou
gavest command to build a sanctuary in thy holy
mountain, and an altar in
the city of thy habitation,
a copy of the holy tabernacle which thou
preparedst
aforehand from the beginning.”
Similar ideas are found in India. Royal cities are
believed to have been
constructed after mythical
models. The relationship between model and
copy
sometimes implies an additional meaning: in the age
of gold the
Universal Sovereign dwelt in the celestial
city; the earthly king, residing
in the terrestrial city
built after the celestial prototype, promises to
revive
the golden age.
Somewhat similar ideas are also found in Greek
philosophy. Plato's ideal
city also has a celestial proto-
type (Republic 592; cf. 500). The Platonic
“Forms” are
not patterned after the planets, but
they, too, are
situated in a supra-terrestrial, mythical region, and
at times reference is made to astral bodies (Phaedrus).
In the Western tradition, the best known example
of a city with a celestial
prototype is Jerusalem. Ac-
cording to several
sources it was created by God before
it was built by men. The Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch
II (4:2-7) suggests that the
celestial Jerusalem, graven
by God's own hands, was shown to Adam before
he
sinned. The Heavenly Jerusalem inspired the Hebrew
prophets and
poets (e.g., Isaiah 60ff.; Tobit 13:16ff.).
Ezekiel is transported to a
high mountain to be shown
by God the city of Jerusalem (Ezekiel 40:2).
According
to the Apocalypse 21:2ff. the new
Jerusalem actually
descends from heaven. “I John saw the holy
city, new
Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven,
prepared as a
bride adorned for her husband.” In later
Jewish traditions the
divine city was actually the start-
ing point
of creation. According to Yoma, “the
world
was created beginning from Zion,” the holy city.
Adam,
too, was created and buried in Jerusalem, and there-
fore, according to well-known Christian traditions,
the
blood of the crucified Christ could drip down on him
and redeem
him.
The spot on which the city is placed may also have
cosmic significance. In
the Near East the city was
sometimes believed to mark the meeting ground
of
heaven, earth, and hell. Babylon was a Bab-ilani,
a
“gate of the gods,” for it was there that the
gods
descended to earth. But it had also been built upon
the “Gate of the
Apsu”—
Apsu designating
the waters
of chaos before Creation. In the Roman world, the
mundus—i.e., the trench dug around the place
where
a city was to be founded—constitutes the point where
the lower world and the terrestrial world meet.
Macrobius (
Saturnalia I, 16, 18) quotes Varro as saying
that
“when the
mundus is open it is as if the
gates
of the gloomy infernal gods were open.”
Another common form of granting significance to
the city's location is to
assume that it marks the center
of the world. In some Indian cities the
foundation stone
is said to have been placed above the head of the
snake
which supports the world; in other words, it is placed
exactly
at the center of the world. The map of Babylon
shows the city at the center
of a vast circular territory
bordered by a river, precisely as the
Sumerians pic-
tured Paradise. This belief
persisted into later periods.
It has rightly been said that the pilgrimages
to holy
cities (Mecca, Jerusalem) are implied pilgrimages to
the
center of the world (see M. Eliade).
The shape of actual ancient cities (as excavated in
archaeological
campaigns) does not always conform to
the vast body of religious symbolism.
Some basic con-
cepts of city planning go back
to the third millennium
B.C. The earliest pattern of a planned city, the
gridiron
scheme (i.e., straight parallel streets crossing other
straight parallel streets at right angles) is found, in a
slightly
irregular form, in India (Mohenjo-Daro,
roughly 2500 B.C.). This pattern
probably emerged
from the practice of “orientation,”
i.e., the establishing
of a connection between man-made structures and
celestial powers. The grid pattern is also found in
Mesopotamia, and in
Egypt King Akhnaton followed
it in building his capital (ca. 1370 B.C.).
In Greece, ideas on town planning do not appear
before the fifth century
B.C. The acropolis, the original
nucleus of the Greek town, developed from
a fortified
place of refuge, and usually consisted of an accumula-
tion of irregularly shaped and
dispersed volumes. Greek
architectural thought was focused, as most
scholars
agree, on the individual building rather than on the
town as
a whole. Similarly Greek artists were more
deeply interested in the volume
and structure of bodies
than in the space surrounding the figures.
The decisive step towards a regular layout of the
city as a whole is
traditionally connected with Hip-
podamus of
Miletus (active ca. 470-430 B.C.), a half-
legendary “Homer of city planning.” The
“Hip-
podamic
system” is basically the gridiron scheme with
particular
emphasis on space classification, and a ten-
dency towards symmetry. Aristotle contrasts the “Hip-
podamic system” distinctly with
the archaic procedure
of building without plan. Originally the system
may
have been influenced by the mathematical thought of
the period, and perhaps also by some symbolic religious
traditions; in the diffusion of the system, however,
economic advantages
and practical hygienic consid-
erations
seem to have played a more important part.
In Greece, no ritual laws seem
to have existed for the
foundation and layout of new settlements.
The Romans evinced a deeper concern for the city
as a whole, and made
significant and lasting contri-
butions to
town planning. Roman towns developed
mainly from the castrum, basically a gridiron pattern
subdivided into four major
parts by two main axes, the
cardo and decumanus. A square was
placed at the
crossing of the two axes. Both the major buildings and
the square proper had an axial location. In laying out
military settlements
with permanent fortifications,
which were established along the expanding
frontiers,
the Romans followed the same pattern (the so-called
castra stativa). Another characteristic feature of
the
Roman town is that it was set off from the landscape
surrounding
it (contrary to the transition from town
to landscape in Greece).
Although functional considerations clearly played an
important part in
establishing this pattern, the town
plan and the foundation of cities did
not lose their
symbolic significance. The historian Polybius and the
geographer Hyginus Gromaticus (early second century
A.D.) describe the
standard layout of the castrum town,
but also
discuss in detail the “orientation” of the towns
and
the consecration rites of newly established settle-
ments. According to Pliny, measurements and propor-
tions of the castrum were based
on “sacred numbers,”
but so far no conclusive
archaeological evidence has
supported his statement.
The major Roman contributions to city building, the
feeling for strict
regularity, the organization of the city
in large areas, and the firm
shaping of space (best
expressed in the patterns of squares), declined with
the
decline of the Empire.
