Comparisons of Cities

A brief reprise of the geological aspects, organization, physical constraints, and appearance of each city will remind us of their common and unique features. Then we can compare them by groups linked by research questions. Agrigento is built on two ridges of 120 and 320–390 m, setting generous limits not yet filled by the modern city. A plain extends from the lower ridge south to the sea. Vistas were provided along contours and across elevations. Grouping the public buildings on stony ridges, with temples above and below and government structures along the west side, made economic and aesthetic sense. Landslides provide important clues to the nature of the hill the city is built on, and they correlate with occupation of various parts of the site. Additionally, the water system shows unexpected correlation with the families of discontinuities in the stone rather than the surface grid of the streets (Ercoli and Crouch 1998; Crouch 1989). Morgantina stretches along a ridge about 600 m in elevation. The agora most clearly reveals the interface of urban design and geology. Sanctuaries and fountains were the focus during the fifth century B. C. E. In the third century, modest but elegant new architecture (theater, great steps, flanking stoas, fountains, sanctuary) combined with pragmatic engineering as framework and connector between points of observation. Morgantina had one aqueduct, from the springs that later supplied Aidone. The site has numerous springs although some are now dry or give less than 1 l/s. Yet, during the third century B. C. E. when the population was at its maximum, the aquifer was also at maximum, and higher springs were fed from it more amply than at present. Improper management of water resources likely hastened the demise of the town after the Roman conquest. At the turn of the era, the shift from small rural towns to great landed estates as centers of population affected Morgantina strongly. Deforestation of the hills and mountains for fuel and building materials could have resulted in desiccation, with climate change a related factor. Occupation by the Hispanii (Spanish veterans) who replaced the Hellenized Sicilians after 211 B. C. E. coincided with a negative water balance.

Central Greco-Roman Cities

Argos, situated in the southern peninsula of Greece called the Peloponnese, lies on the northwest side of the Argos Plain, backed by hills to the north and west that are the eastern edge of an extensive region of mountains and intermountain basins. A road runs northward through the valley and over the hills to Nemea and Corinth. Eastward beyond the capricious rivers lie the old Mycenaean cities of Mycenae and Tiryns on their knolls, with the port of Nauplia closing the circuit to the southeast. Beyond Nauplia is the Argolid peninsula with the ancient pilgrimage and health center of Epidauros. (The term “Argolid” as used in the literature sometimes means all the area near Argos and sometimes means only the peninsula south and east of Nauplia. Herein, we will use Argolid for the latter and Argive Plain for the former.) Between Argos and the gulf about 6 km south is the marshy area of Lerna, remnant of a lake that once reached nearly to the outskirts of Argos, while the southeast part of the plain was until recently a series of lagoons (Piérart 1992). To the southwest, skirting the mountains, runs the road to Sparta. The advantages for Argos of being situated at the center of gravity in the triangular plain (Runnels 1995) continued throughout all the periods studied herein. Argos is unusual among ancient cities because we have ample modern geological investigations of regional structure, morphology, karst geology, and hydrogeology, literary evidence from antiquity, and archaeological data from decades of investigation. These materials contribute to a detailed understanding of how human settlement built on and responded to local resources. We will therefore describe the regional setting of the city before turning to an examination of the urban core. Below its mountains, the city of Argos stands on a shelf overlooking a plain of extensive fertile agricultural land that curves around the site from north to southwest. The stratigraphy is as follows, beginning with the topmost modern layers: . . . Higher plateau and mountains are Tripoli limestone. Tripoli plateau sits amid karstic mountains. (Older) Triassic and Jurassic limestones to the northeast. . . .

General Conclusions

When we began this study, we hypothesized the following: (1) similar geology fosters similar urban development, but not every urban difference has a geological basis; (2) geological differences are likely to result in developmental differences; and (3) geology forms an active backdrop to human actions. We assumed that (1) the growth of classical cities was in response to the setting with which the inhabitants interact, (2) tectonic, sedimentary, structural, and engineering aspects of the geology affect how the city developed and its durability, and (3) hydrogeology defines the nature, amount, and location of water resources. At the end of the study, we have verified that implacable geological forces affected each city. Specific interactions between the local terrane and the residents of these ten sites during the Greco-Roman period can be documented. We have struggled with problems of scale and interpretation, and with which methodologies to use in weighing evidence. We have wondered which links between phenomena and process are the crucial ones. In our research, we have used both the optimism and the informed skepticism that Dincauze (1987) called for in her parallel work of reconstructing paleoenvironments. Temptations in research can be subtle, such as “equating what is observable with what is significant” (Snodgrass 1987). We do not claim to be exempt from these problems. New information does not of itself produce better science or better human history. The contributions of oversimplification to the scientific discourse continued unabated in the last half of the twentieth century, with Wittvogel’s Oriental Despotism (1957), which based urban development and the growth of the state on irrigation, or Vita-Finzi’s concept (1969) of one period of sedimentation for the whole Mediterranean area. The attentive reader may have noticed similar examples of arguing ahead of the data in this present work, in spite of our efforts to be moderate and truthful. We apply scientific and engineering data to the sites in question, and we offer the results as models for investigation rather than exhaustive studies.

History, Geology, Engineering, and Archaeology

For convenience, human knowledge, especially in the German and American educational systems, has been separated into disciplinary packages. Thus chemistry, for instance, is defined by certain analytical actions taken toward certain materials, to answer a particular group of questions. Unfortunately, many topics are not amenable to isolating methodology. Cities, for instance, are so complex that understanding them requires coordinated research by historians of many specialties, by architects and planners, by sociologists and psychologists, and by statisticians and geographers, all of whom also benefit from the insights of scientific disciplines. Planet Earth is even more complicated and calls for every field of expertise to examine it and to synthesize results. Four disciplines that contribute to this study are history, geology, engineering, and archaeology. History may be the most recalcitrant of the humanist disciplines, notorious for partial or complete gaps in understanding and fated to reinvestigate earlier situations and earlier research. History reconstructs contexts in which past reality can be comprehended. Although human knowledge is so variable that no scientific law can sum it up (Wright 1975), we can tell stories that reveal our insights. For every attempt at general history and geography such as that of Herodotus, there are dozens or hundreds of more or less philosophical and dramatic memoirs such as those of Julius Caesar. Sometimes the only surviving data is from dynastic chronologies, for example, I and II Samuel in the Bible. Little of this ancient history involved “research” as we now understand the process (Gabba 1981). Ancient history is still monopolized by philologists, whose first passion is language and who are often out of phase with important methodological developments in history (Ramsey 1890, Ch. 3, History in Classics). Like their ancient predecessors who concentrated on the elite, modern historians of Greco-Roman times may fail to investigate ordinary people. Modern cities are places where people dance, use computers, sing, bathe, and vote. Realization of our diversity of behavior impels us to expand the study of ancient cities to incorporate their similar diversity.

Introduction

Cities are a constant interplay between tangible and intangible, visible and invisible factors. Long-lived cities can provide data to compensate for the brevity of our modern urban experience (Croce 1985). To overcome these gaps in research, just beginning to close, the city is a most useful unit of study. Ancient cities can serve as four-dimensional models (length, width, height, and time) of how humans survived in their ecological niches. Yet comparative studies of groups of cities—such as Rorig’s (1967) of German medieval trading cities of the Hanseatic League, Andrews’s (1975) of the urban design history of Maya cities, and Hohenberg and Lee’s (1985) of the economic history of European cities—ignore the geological setting. The setting of our study is the Mediterranean periphery where cities are united by their Greco-Roman historical and cultural relationships. From the twenty-five Greco-Roman sites studied in Water Management in Ancient Greek Cities, we have selected for further study 10 sites with sufficient geological information to form a basis of comparison. Our comparisons are based on the physical aspects—both form and function—of the local area, not the particular object. There are exciting possibilities, both intellectual and practical, in such an approach. Until recently, ancient Mediterranean cities have been investigated mainly by ancient historians and classical archaeologists. Cities, however, are so complex as to require every possible sort of investigation. Because each model and methodology leaves out too much, the use of a single model from one discipline, whether archaeological, mathematical, engineering, or historic, has limited usefulness. The documents of the classicists and the physical remains located by archaeologists seem to an urban historian like myself to be useful but incomplete sources that take for granted the geographical base, assume a past social organization, and may ignore the technological and scientific aspects of ancient urban life. As classicist M. H. Jameson (1990) has written, “The surviving literature from Classical Greece sheds light only incidentally on practical matters such as patterns of settlement and domestic architecture . . . [yet] conceptions drawn from literature, sometimes with dubious justification, continue to prevail.”

Physical and Intellectual Issues

The issues associated with this study are both physical and intellectual, as are the factors in urban development. The correlation of known data from inscriptions (epigraphy), literary references (ancient history and more recent government and church documents), evidence from destroyed and rebuilt buildings (archaeology), and modern scientific and technical findings (several kinds of engineering and subfields of geology such as seismology and sedimentology) can give a more complete picture of each city’s development than does one kind of information alone. Most of the necessary site-specific studies, however, have not been done. Our problem parallels the study of global warming, where precise records of weather events have been kept for less than 200 years. Urban elements must be studied by experts in that building type and in social expression. Ramparts need more study by historians of warfare, theaters by scholars of drama and literature, stadia by those who study the history of sports, plumbing by hydraulic, civil, and fluids engineers, and temples by historians of comparative religion. Insights into institutional and political aspects of ancient studies and the historiography of all the disciplines involved in ancient studies would be both useful and fascinating (Kardulias 1994). The benefits and difficulties of interdisciplinary research are clearer now to us than when we started. In considering the physical setting and geological processes in the Mediterranean area, is description sufficient or should scholars strive for explanation, even if this involves theory building? “In much of art history and classical archaeology traditional practices have continued without explicit theoretical support” (McNally 1985; but cf. Preziosi 1989). The theorists of archaeology and urban history desire comprehensive and precise theories—even in the absence of enough data to make that possible. Some data may be rescued by followers of one discipline after being ignored or thrown out by followers of another. The awareness of theoretical difficulty is part of the increase in consciousness typical of the second half of the twentieth century when we began to question the nature of both knowledge and culture.

Eastern Grego-Roman Cities

Only since the last two decades of the twentieth century have professional geologists been working specifically at Miletus, investigating the shiny white limestone on top at KalabakHill; the limestone of Theater Hill and Humei Hill; and the limestone of Zeytin Hill (at the west of the hill called Degirmen, west of Kalabak), with sandstone and tuff to the east. The stratigraphy at Miletus is as follows, beginning with the topmost modern layer: . . . Iron deposits in mountains east of Miletus and both iron and brown coal at Mt. Mykale (today Samsun Dag) north of the Meander River valley. Volcanic tuff. Soluble limestone: 200 m of Yatagan or Balat strata of marble with tufa, sand, and gravel from which springs emerge. Early Pliocene limestone, shiny white limestone cap 60–100 m thick, karstified but with few on-site springs, forming ridges, hills, and a thick layer of scree. Miocene marls, sandstones, conglomerates, and clays with springs. Pink-yellow sandstone, sometimes with tuff, around sides of hills. Older clayey limestone deposited in a lake environment. Former large bay, now a swampy river plain with rich alluvial soil. . . . Prof. B. Schröder and his team have done geological research in the area (1990–94) and published their findings swiftly, which I acknowledge with gratitude. Suspected faults run north and south of Kalabak Hill (recognized in C. Schneider 1997). The town of Akköy to the south, where the German archaeological house is located well above the mosquitoes of the archaeological site in the swampy plain, sits on limestone that forms a peninsular ridge, surrounded on three sides by sandstone with tuff. The west coast of Asia Minor is subject to strong relief, steep gradients, and high precipitation; the high amount of energy available allows rapid change in topography (Gage 1978: 621). In Ionia, on average, the sea has risen or the land has sunk 1.75 m since antiquity (Bintliff 1977: 24; 1992). The Greek cities of Asia Minor were without exception built on or next to karst terrain (V. Klemes, 1988, personal communication when he was president of the International Association for Karst Hydrology).

Western Grego-Roman Cities

The polity of Rhodes, with Cretan assistance, founded Gela on the south coast of Sicily in 688 B.C.E. (Herodotus, VII, 153) and assisted in the foundation of Akragas/ Agrigento farther northwest on the same coast in 580 B.C.E. Akragas’s foundation was part of the second wave of Greek city building in Sicily, about 150 years after the founding of Syracuse and other east coast settlements. Much of the Rhodian situation was replicated in the new cities. Settlers found familiar terrain like Gela, on a steep ridge facing the sea, surrounded by generous plains. At Gela, the acropolis at the east end is near the River Gelas, which waters the plains. Agrigento is bracketed by two rivers with plains to the south, and its lower ridge is visually equivalent to the site of Gela. An irrigation system of the Greek period like that known a little to the east at Camarina could have facilitated growing food in the alluvial soil between the two rivers, to the south of the temple ridge (Di Vita 1996: 294). If we notice geological similarities and extrapolate too freely from them to architectural similarities, we may introduce chronological fuzziness to our study. The island-wide Rhodian tradition of dealing with water resources was carried to Sicily by the colonists along with other aspects of the culture. Exchange of ideas continued during the centuries between the founding of Akragas and the synoecism of Rhodes City centuries later. For instance, the grottoes of the acropolis of the city of Rhodes are “cut into the bioclastic limestones of the Rhodes formation, with, in some cases, the floor cut down into clayey and marly units that correspond to a line of seepage” (E. Rice, personal communication). At Akragas as at Rhodes, the builders cut down through the stone to the impermeable clay and marl units, to tap the line of seepage. With similar geology, it is not surprising that many elements of the water system of the two places were similar, developed indepen dently from the old tradition. New concepts of water management were carried from place to place by expert builders, from the seventh through the fifth century B.C.E.