5
" But what one finds in the New World os not just a collection of houses and buildings, which might have had the same common ancestor in the mesolithic hamlet. One discovers, rather, a parallel collection of cultural traits: highly developed fertility ceremonies, a pantheon of cosmic deities, a magnified ruler and central authority who personifies the whole community, great temples whose forms recall such functionally different structures as the pyramid and the ziggurat, along with the same domination of a peasantry by an original hunter-warrior group, or (among the early Mayas) an even more ancient priesthood. Likewise the same division of castes and specialization of vocational groups, and the beginnings of writing, time measuring, and the calendar-including an immense extension of time perspectives among the Mayas, which surpasses in complexity and accuracy even what we know of the cosmic periods of the Babylonians and the Egyptians. These traits seem too specific to have been spontaneously repeated in a whole constellation. "
― Lewis Mumford , The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
6
" Creativity is, by its nature, fitful and inconstant, easily upset by constraint, foreboding, insecurity, external pressure. Any great preoccupation with the problems of ensuring animal survival exhausts the energies and disturbs the receptivity of the sensitive mind. Such creativity as was first achieved in the city came about largely through an arrogation of the economic means of production and distribution by a small minority, attached to the temple and the palace. In the epic of creation Marduk remarks of man: "Let him be burdened with the toil of the gods that they may freely breathe." Shall we err greatly if we translate this as: "Let our subjects be burdened with daily toil that the king and the priesthood may freely breathe"? "
― Lewis Mumford , The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
9
" Two ways were in fact open for the development of human culture, once it had passed beyond the stage reached in the neolithic community-the way of the village or the way of the citadel: or, to speak in biological terms, the symbiotic and the predatory. They were not absolute choices, but they pointed in different directions. The first was the path of voluntary co-operation, mutual accomodation, wider communication and understanding: its outcome would be an organic association, of a more complex nature, on a higher level than that offered by the village community and its nearby lands. The other was that of predatory domination, leading to heartless exploitation and eventually to parasitic enfeeblement: the way of expansion, with its violence, its conflicts, its anxieties, turning the city itself into an instrument, as Childe properly observes, for the "extraction and concentration of the surplus." This second form has largely dominated urban history till our own age, and it accounts in no small degree for the enclosure and collapse of one civilization after another. "
― Lewis Mumford , The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
10
" Even today, only a small part of the total energies of the community go into education and expression: we sacrifice far more to the arts of destruction and extermination than to the arts of creation. But it is through the performance of creative acts, in art, in thought, in personal relationships, that the city can be identified as something more than a purely functional organization of factories and warehouses, barracks, courts, prisons, and control centers. The towers and domes of the historic city are reminders of that still unfulfilled promise. "
― Lewis Mumford , The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
11
" But the object of primitive interchanges of blows between armed men was not the killing of a mass of people in battle or the robbing and razing of their village- but rather the singling out of a few live captives for ceremonial slaughter, and eventually serving up in a cannibal feast, itself a magico-religious rite.
Once the city came into existence, with its collective increase in power in every department, this whole situation underwent a change. Instead of raids and sallies for single victims, mass extermination and mass destruction came to prevail. What had once been a magic sacrifice to ensure fertility and abundant crops, an irrational act to promote a rational purpose, was turned into the exhibition of the power of one community, under its wrathful god and priest-king, to control, subdue or totally wipe out another community. Much of this aggression was unprovoked, and morally unjustified by the aggressor; though by the time the historic record becomes clear, some economic color would be given to war by reason of political tensions arising over disputed boundaries or water rights. But the resulting human and economic losses, in earliest times no less than today, were out of all proportion to the tangible stakes for which they were fought. The urban institution of war thus was rooted to the magic of a more primitive society: a childish dream that, with the further growth of mechanical power, became an adult nightmare. This infantile trauma has remained in existence to warp the development of all subsequent societies: not least our own. "
― Lewis Mumford , The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
13
" Heaven and Utopia both had a place in the structure of ancient cities; yet to the extent that the best human plans may miscarry and the most successful human dreams may, through their very success, succumb to internal perversities, Hell became part of the formative structure, too. The resulting material form often outlasted the ideal that originally quickened it: as is the fashion of containers, old buildings and public ways may serve, with minor changes, to hold a new dream. But that is a late development. So important was the symbol itself for early urban rulers, that more than one city was razed to the ground, to be rebuilt again by the destroyer on the same site. No rule of common sense or economics can explain that. "
― Lewis Mumford , The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
15
" If anything were needed to make the magical origins of war plausible, it is the fact that war, even when it is disguised by seemingly hardheaded economic demands, uniformly turns into a religious performance; nothing less than a wholesale ritual sacrifices. As the central agent in this sacrifice, the king had from the very beginnings an office to perform. To accumulate power, to hold power, to express power by deliberate acts of murderous destruction-this became the constant obsession of kingship. In displaying such power the king could do no wrong. By the very act of war the victorious king demonstrated the maximum possibilities of royal control and invoked further divine support by the wholesale infliction of death. That, as Isaiah reminds us, is the burden of Egypt and Babylon and Tyre. "
― Lewis Mumford , The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
18
" Now, there were large elements of coercion even in the most gentle moments of the Egyptian rule, and there were many joyful expressions of human co-operation and intellectual and emotional enrichment even under the most ruthless of totalitarian monarchs in Mesopotamia. In both cases, many of the higher functions of the city were promoted and enlarged. Neither Egyptian nor Mesopotamian form, then, was pure; for the more co-operative kind of local grouping had features that raised disturbing parallels with insect societies in their tendency to fixation and self-stultification; while in the communities most lamed by neurotic anxieties and irrational aggressive compulsions, there was nevertheless a sufficient cultivation of the more positive aspects of life to create a system of law and order, with reciprocal obligations, and to develop some degree of morality for insiders, even though a growing number of these insiders were slaves, captured in war, or remained the cowed inhabitants of villages compelled under threat of starvation to labor like slaves. So much for the forces that in the early stages of civilization brought the city into existence. We shall soon make a provisional appraisal of the cultural results. "
― Lewis Mumford , The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects