Gates, Ch. 2011. Ancient Cities: The Archaeology of Urban Life in the Ancient Near East and Egypt, Greece, and Rome. – London, Routledge

Abstract

The vast scope of this book almost inevitably makes any review of it partial and partisan. Who could possibly know everything about all of the cities that fall within its remit, much less the varied cultures that created them? How can the fragments of urban experience, represented here by the fragments of ancient cities that survive, ever be fully understood? Is it even worth bothering to condense the material into a single volume? The answer, for didactic purposes, must be in the affi rmative. I wish that I, when an undergraduate student of architecture, had been given the opportunity to benefi t from a course such as that which inspired this book – one that its author has clearly taught on countless occasions. But back in the 1980s all that we architecture students had to sustain us was a sliver of the Classical World rather than the whole pie with its diverse fl avours. Read more...