Centrifugal Forces Impacting Urbanization in the Eastern Mediterranean during Roman and Early Islamic Times

Abstract

My goal with this essay is to make the existence of a distinctive Levantine cultural paradigm a lens through which to examine long-term patterns of urbanization and cultural change in the Eastern Mediterranean—focusing especially on present-day Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian territories. Inspired by the agenda and approach of global history, the essay is an attempt to highlight a number of salient features of societal formation processes in this region that set them apart from such processes in the heartlands of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. The paradigm holds that societal formation dynamics in the Levant have been dominated more by centrifugal than by centripetal forces, thus predisposing local social order in the region towards greater local agency, resiliency, polycentrism, heterarchical social structure and societal complexity less conspicuously reflected in grand monumentality. The implications of this hypothesis for understanding urban resilience in the Late Roman and Early Islamic periods in the Eastern Mediterranean will be explored drawing, in particular, on previous research on the “cities of the Decapolis” and on findings of archaeological excavations at Tall Hisban and the wider Madaba Plains region in Jordan.