The City in History

WORKING

Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. NYC: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961. San Diego, NYC, and London: Harvest-Harcourt, © 1961, renewed 1989. Available with strong restrictions on Internet Archive here.[1]

Other Mumford works we have looked at can be found here.[2] A key passage for users of the wiki from this work by Mumford uses for the ancient labor army the figure of the machine.

The Neolithic Age of containers joined its facilities with the Bronze Age of machines. The new machines themselves have long awaited recognition, or rather, proper identification. For the earliest complex power machines were composed, not of wood or metal, but of perishable human parts, each having a specialized function in a larger mechanism under centralized human control. The vast army of priests, scientists, engineers, architects, foremen, and day laborers, some hundred thousand strong, who built the Great Pyramid, formed the first complex machine, invented when technology itself had produced only a few simple 'machines' like the inclined plane and the sled, and had not yet invented wheeled vehicles [sic (they had them in Mesopotamia)].

No works of civil engineering modern man can now conceive [...] were beyond the capacity of these first great human machines. Even speed was not lacking in this homo-mechanized economy. While the cathedrals of the middle Ages often required centuries for completion, many an Egyptian tomb was finished within the lifetime of the Pharaoh whose mummy was destined to be placed in it, sometimes within a single generation. No wonder the central authority that set such machines in motion seemed authentically godlike. (Harvest-Harcourt edn., p. 60; ch. 3, section 1)

Note for the blurring of borders between humans and machines, for building achievements like those of gods.

Also: Among the Mesopotamian cities, as typified in the severity of the Code of Hammurabi, and as opposed to Egypt—

Even without the incessant outbreak of war, there was an undercurrent of terrorism and sadistic punishment in such a regime, similar to that which has been resurrected in the totalitarian states of our own day, which bear so many resemblances to these archaic absolutisms. Under such conditions, the necessary co-operations of urban living require the constant application of the police power, and the city becomes a kind of prison whose inhabitants are under constant surveillance: a state not merely symbolized but effectively perpetuated by the town wall and its barred gates. (ch. 3 section 7; p. 83)

RDE, finishing, 20Jan26, 24Jan26