City Foundations: Perspectives from Archaeology and History of Religion

Abstract

In this article, I propose a new reading of different types of historical artifacts and traditions around the idea of a city’s foundation. Rather than taking such stories at face value or to look for dim historical traditions behind them, I start by suggesting to take them seriously as an expression of what is introduced as “urbanity” at the beginning of the article as well as strategies of place-making. Across continents and periods, the importance of one's own city seems to dictate that this place should also have a significant founding figure, a founding narrative, and a founding ritual. From early on, urbanites have wanted to live not only in places of importance but in a place that belongs to a special, indeed the highest class of places, that is, in “cities” or their equivalents. In order to plausible this hermeneutic approach, narratives about founders of cities and about rituals to found sacred center of such cities, a city-temple, or even the city as a whole, are analyzed. They cover ideas about founding cities in the Indian Arthashastra and the Roman architectural treatise by Vitruvius, the Gilgamesh narrative for the foundation of Mesopotamian Uruk, and the late 1st millennium BCE foundation narrative of Rome, a ritual ascribed to the twins Romulus and Remus.