If only these walls could speak

The Walls of Theodosias stand as a testament to the spirit of a city that once promised to protect all the people of the world and shelter them in its embrace, to the power of the people who once held the remnants of Rome together into a flourishing and stable empire, a wellspring of art and culture, and a repository of knowledge of the past that would pass its wealth onto the generations that came after.  They stay as symbols of an empire that never truly died, but lives on today, ingrained in the fabric in the cultures of both east and west, Europe and Asia, Christian and Muslim, reaching back down the ages to the time of the Ancients.  (Dr Paul Cooper, Fall of Civilisations Podcast)

A few weeks ago I walked the Walls of Constantinople, in particular the Theodosian Walls.

What struck me as I meandered around the ruins, dodged local cars, was the ingenuity of how the modern people of Istanbul have integrated these great structures into their everyday lives, using them for gardens, social spaces and event venues.  These walls have had many purposes but the real question is why do we build them in the first place.

According to the God of the Underworld Hades in the musical Hadestown:

Why do we build the wall?

My children, my children

The wall keeps out the enemy

The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free

Because we have and they have not
Because they want what we have got
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free

What do we have that they should want?
We have a wall to work upon
We have work and they have none
And our work is never done!
My children, my children!
And the war is never won

Here is the endless cycle – the only way to be free is to build walls, but by building walls we perpetuate our entrapment.

Most human cities throughout history have had walls and the assumption has been that these have been for defensive purposes – to protect what lies within.  Which means that what lies within needs protecting, in this case freedom.

But what is freedom?  Depending on ones’ perspective freedom can mean different things but let’s put a stake in the ground and take it to mean the ability or right to change or act without constraint (Wikipedia), to go where one wants and to live as one pleases.  The ‘traditional’ theory has been that until the birth of agriculture humans were largely ‘free’, nomadic, and able to move freely from place to place, most likely creating temporary structures to provide protection from the natural environment, but not needing the protection from other humans.

But then something happened.  We became domesticated whether for reasons of self-control, as a result of the agricultural revolution or perhaps something else. The case for human domestication can be linked to our building of walls, and has long been used to justify our adoption of hierarchical social structures and the growth of inequality.  This perspective is now being challenged by numerous archaeologists, anthropologists and historian who are postulating that our creation of larger societies and more permanent environments might have been for reasons other than self-defence.

Archaeologist David Wengrow, to whom I referred to in a previous post, refers to this era as ‘pre-civilisation’:

the era of the first global village … with the social innovations which enabled people to do all these things without forming centres of raising up a class of permanent leaders over everybody else. … Without the concentration of humanity into larger units we wouldn’t have achieved all we have to be ‘civilised’ … and yet long before the birth of democracy in Ancient Greece there were already well organised cities on several of the worlds continents which present no evidence of ruling dynasties.  (David Wengrow)

So what is ‘civilisation’, in the past, in the present, and in the future?

Civilisation may be described as

any complex society characterised by the development of the state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond signed or spoken languages (namely, writing systems and graphic arts).

Civilizations include features such as agriculture, architecture, infrastructure, technological advancement, currency, taxation, regulation, and specialization of labour.

Wengrow postulates that when we use the word ‘civilisation’ we are actually referring to human societies that are deeply stratified and unequal consisting of cities led by families of kings, the existence of rigid social classes and the ruthless exploitation of one class by another.  To me this actually doesn’t sound very civilised nor something where people are ‘free’, and it may be as we in the 21st Century, armed with our smart intelligence and unprecedented technologies, should explore some of the alternative ways that we can more effectively organise ourselves for the future.

This was uppermost in my mind as I recently explored Turkey on this New Scientist tour of the Neolithic and Bronze Age which provided a sweeping overview of some of the most important ‘pre-civilised’ sites currently discovered in the ‘Fertile Crescent’, the region considered to be the birthplace of ‘civilisation’ and several technological advances, including literature, writing, irrigation, agriculture, glass, and the wheel.

The area known as The Fertile Crescent

The archaeological sites of Karahan Tepe and Göbekli Tepe are thought to be the oldest known monumental architecture yet found and were built around 9,500 BC; the site of Aşıklı Höyük with it’s buried houses dates from around 8,200 BC and has the oldest communal buildings found deemed to have been built by sedentary hunter-gatherers before the time of agriculture.

The rather haunting sculptures at Karahan Tepe

The proto-city of Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic and Chalcolithic settlement, is a series of structures built around 7,100 BC which seems to have been composed entirely of domestic buildings built on top of each other over 1,500 years.  It is currently thought that the communities of Çatalhöyük lived in a relatively egalitarian society with little evidence of hierarchy or social stratification.  Some archaeologists have concluded that it was not agriculture but culture and religion that brought these people together rather than the need for defensive structures to protect against human conflict and war.

Visualisation of Çatalhöyük as it might have looked when inhabited

A few thousand years later those defensive structures soon came.

Once we learned how to say ‘us’, we also needed to be able to say ‘them’.  (Hanno Sauer and Joseph Heinrich, The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality)

The Hittite capital of Hattusa was thought to have been built around 3,000 BC and was burned and destroyed around 1,200 BC during the Late Bronze Age Collapse. It’s people fled despite desperate and repeated pleas for help and huge defensive structures.  Dr Carol Bell, who was on the tour with us, provided a fascinating insight in suggesting that the places that survived this collapse did so through economic co-dependency and shared commercial interests (see Dr Carol Bell).  The fate of the Hittites and other societies which suffered during this period demonstrates that there is a trade-off between connectivity and fragility which has salient lessons for our modern hyperconnected world and those we charge to lead it.

The Lions Gate at Hattusa.  Despite these huge defensive structures destruction came.

Walls of defense are one way to try to keep out the enemy and remain free, another way is to hide.  At around the same time as the city of Hattusa was destroyed some Hittites fled their Phrygian attackers and headed to underground cities, which were later used by Christians fleeing the attacking Ottomans.

The caves and underground cities in Cappadocia are a wonder to behold.  It was here that people lived and worshipped in the rock cave Churches of Göreme and sought shelter in underground cities such as Ozkonak.  Architect Virginia Ross pointed out the use of decoration to imitate construction techniques (faux blocks of stone, tiling etc,) which structurally were totally unnecessary but were probably used to provide some sort of psychological comfort and safety in echoing styles from the more traditional architecture elsewhere.

One of the churches of Göreme with it’s ‘faux’ architecture – decorations applied to the stone to mimic structure

Everywhere we went in Turkey there were places built upon other places, buildings used and reused, repurposed and remodelled despite earthquakes, invasions, wars and crusades.  Everything had a purpose and with that purpose came the wisdom and knowledge of those who had built the spaces still relevant and in service of those using the same spaces today.

The Hagia Sofia began life as a Church, then a Mosque, then a Museum, once again a Mosque

The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently. (David Graeber)

And everywhere there were walls.

Good fences make good neighbours (Robert Frost)

Even in Göbekli Tepi and Çatalhöyük there were walls so it seems that walls are a core to what we build.  There is something innate in us that needs to define space, to enclose and to encircle – we love a good wall or boundary and these structures hold the secrets that have been told through millennia, which is what makes them so endlessly fascinating!

So what are the lessons that I have drawn from this and how does this relate to the work that we do at Intersticia?

It seems to me that we humans continually cycle between creativity and destruction.  We can be fearful and cruel, but also creative and kind.  Our neocortex can function at the hightest levels while our primal brain can drive us to unspeakable cruelty, often in the defence of an idea or a concept, not even a real physical threat.

As we move into the next quarter of the 21st Century, armed with our powerful technologies and unprecedented abilities to learn from the past, I feel it is imperative that we need a new way to think, a new way to reflect and consider the world around us and our place within it.  I have written previously that I feel we are approaching an Event Horizon which will challenge us in new and different ways.

We can’t solve today’s problems with the mentality that created them. (Albert Einstein)

We will need to draw on every scrap of knowledge that is embedded in our libraries and resources to meet these challenges, and these libraries include the walls we have built for ourselves.

All photos are taken by the author

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