What Can Your City Learn From The Sumerians?
Copper Spearhead (Digital Image)
Kubaba was a woman tavern-keeper who, listed on the ‘Kings list’ clay tablet that documents the ancient rulers of Sumer, was the first known female ruler of a city. Sumer and the Sumerian civilization was centered around independent self-governing cities that were built by Sumerians. The first known city built by the Sumerians was called Eridu. Like the other major cities in the cluster of cities - which included Eridu, Ur, Nippur, Lagash, Uruk, and Kish - Sumerians believed these centers of ritual and economic activity were built by gods and goddesses as their dwelling places (4). As we see in our cities and countries today (Homs in Syria, Belo in Cameroon, and Kharkiv in Ukraine), the cities of Sumer were constantly at war (5). And just like today, wars were fought over resources because, unsurprisingly, the desire for health, wealth, and security (the basic requirements of every city resident) dictated people's actions. As tools and technologies of trade advanced, so did the need to fortify the homes and cities to ensure that neighbors near and far could not take what the residents of the city now took to heart as theirs.
Just like us in 2023, they lived, they loved, they fought wars and they made merry. Sumerians enjoyed the nutrient-rich ingredients of their beer and hailed it as the key to a ‘joyful heart and a contented liver’, a sentiment that most residents of most American cities in 2023 would agree with. As much as the residents of the cities of Sumer, and all of ancient Mesopotamia, fought wars, they also drank beer. And, much like the people of modern-day China, the Sumerians measured their time using the sixty-second minute and the sixty-minute hour. The origin of this metric of time measurement can be traced back to Sumer. We are not as different from the ancient dwellers in cities as we think we are.
The story goes that the city came before the people. That Eridu, one of the Sumer cities, was created by Marduk the god. Other gods then settled in this beautiful land that Marduk had created. That people/man was then created to serve the gods. That still happens to be the case today. The lives of those people who lived in those cities early on are indicative of the things that we also, in the 21st century, continue to do as city dwellers. The people of cities like Eridu and Uruk loved to eat good food even if they did not cook it themselves and desired to live a healthy existence. The people of Kish had a need to work and shop and commune with family and friends. Exactly as we do today. Physical structures - homes, public places, shopping centers - were built to cater to these needs that the people had. As the number of people increased, the resources to cater to their needs (food, water, and shelter) also increased.
One can consider the approach of Marduk the god to bring people in to serve his needs would have required him to set up some policies for how the people would engage in Eridu. This might have been the first set of city policies developed ever. Policies that form the first leg of the three-legged stool that keeps cities standing. We can find how we came about the second and third legs of the city story by looking at the same city origination stories of old; The technological tools and techniques to ensure these needs were met were also fashioned to cater to these needs. Even as most of the technology in Sumerian days was fashioned for war (similar to how countries always pushed ahead in development during war times), Sumerians also set out to fashion tools and technologies that got sold in the form of industry. This industry created the second leg of the three stools of city systems - policy, economics, and transportation - and the movement of those goods across borders and into other cities was facilitated by the transportation systems of the day. But there were delineations that kept these three separate stools less connected than they are now.
That is not the case today, and is the key difference between the Sumerian cities and New York today, those three legs are interconnected in a way that they are almost indistinguishable from one another. They are interconnected in a way that makes the whole system complex where they were, in a past time, complicated. One thing that has not changed though is the people. And that’s where we will focus right after we discuss the convergence of those subsystems.
What has changed between the life of the Sumerians and ours today is that life has gone from complicated to complex. Especially due to the technological advances that we have. We now believe that the people are here to serve the gods of the city. The gods of the city just now happen to be technology. Technology that we created to serve the people of the cities but now, if you listen to all the apostles of the religion of technology, are slowly becoming the masters. There is no problem with technology, just in how we approach them. But there are some unintended consequences from our over-reliance, subservience even, to these technologies because these technologies have made our lives in cities, and the three legs of the city stool, more interconnected than ever before. Simple actions of the individual parts of a city now produce unintended consequences across the whole of the city.
Cities have always been complex systems but the levels of complexity have grown as cities have become more connected/interconnected due to technologically advanced communication technologies and transport systems. The systems are now interconnected and interdependent, which was not the case before the last few centuries. We now live in a time when the behaviors and inputs into the system that produced a certain behavior in the past, is unlikely to yield the same result the next time those same inputs are combined in a similar way in what is a new state of the system. While patterns develop in a city system today, like in every complicated system, there are complexities that now arise as a result of three properties of a complex interconnected system like the city of the 21st century. These three traits are
multiplicity: number of potentially interacting elements in a system
interdependence: the connectedness of the elements of a system
diversity: the degree of heterogeneity (6)
The thing with complex systems is that all the inputs and the elements of the system interact continually and unpredictably. Making it hard to determine the possible outcomes. What this means is that there are two major issues that are seen with complexity and complex systems; we end up with
unintended consequences that arise as a result of events interacting in unexpected ways, an aggregate of individual elements or the existence of policies beyond a point when they are useful. Or
it is difficult to make sense of the situation due to a vantage point problem where the parts are visible to many people but no one or few decision makers are privy to the whole and, even in some cases, cognitive limits.
But these two are becoming easier to manage with the capability we have to model and simulate an infinite number of possible outcomes and use Artificial Intelligence to draw insights from this infinite number of possibilities. The more information we analyze and risks we consider, the more we can forecast where things might go (and most of the possibilities except the rare ones) and make decisions with a clear view of the tradeoffs we are making.
Critical to this though, is the recognition of the fact that averages of outcome do not work. Especially when we deal with cities. We want to be cognizant of the needs and desires of individuals with a full understanding of their context, which we can now understand with the technology we have, bound by the constraints of resources. We will have to take it back to the individual level of needs. Along with this individual level of assessment, we also have to carry out simulations. With these simulations, we want to look at lagging, current, and leading data. With a skew toward leading data, we can start to build ideas of the future we want to create. While this can be done with technology, we can also just look at history and the narratives around cities that survived from the past, to inform our models for the lagging models. For our lagging data, we have to go back to the very first set of cities to truly understand where we’ve come from, to enable us to manage where we are going to. We will look at the current, through the stories we hear around us and consequently make recommendations about possible future paths.
Especially as the future paths of several industries are converging at the platform that we know and love to call The City.