Three lessons from 'Four Lost Cities'
How sex work in ancient Rome and slow-motion climate catastrophes helped form our world today.
Future archaeologists trying to understand what life was like in today’s cities better know how to scuba dive.
In hundreds of years, if global warming continues at its current rate, New York and other urban centers will be submerged beneath feet of seawater. In a new book, though, science writer Annalee Newitz offers lessons from four ancient societies that experienced their own environmental and social transformations that could help us ward off our own demise.
Or at least prepare for it.
“Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age,” scheduled for release on Feb. 2, functions as a travelogue through abandoned civilizations — Çatalhöyük, Pompeii, Angkor and Cahokia, near modern day St. Louis — and as a celebration of the urban centers that people always have flocked to not only for material wealth, but for new ideas and a sense of community.
“Modern metropolises are by no means destined to live forever, and historical evidence shows that people have chosen to abandon them repeatedly over the past eight thousand years,” Newitz writes. “It’s terrifying to realize that most of humanity lives in places that are destined to die. The myth of the lost city obscures the reality of how people destroy their civilizations.”
Here’s a small sampling of the lessons from the book, which is available for pre-order on Bookshop and more than worth your time and money.
Pompeii was super chill until that volcano erupted
Centuries-old graffiti throughout the city of Pompeii includes dick pics in what were public squares, erotic paintings in the halls of expensive houses and full-blown celebrations of well known sex workers, including a “Queen of the Cocksuckers” inscription that was written as a point of pride. “They are perhaps the most jarring example, for modern Westerners, of the radical cultural disjunction between pre-Christian Roman culture and what came after,” Newitz writes.
Ancient Pompeii was a cosmopolitan city where a visitor could walk down the street to overhear different languages, buy lunch from a food stand or use the toilet by sitting on a bench nearly cheek-to-cheek with their neighbors — with essentially zero expectation of privacy.
The city was a playhouse for the Roman elite but also a waystation for former slaves who could rise through the social classes to start businesses, work as farmers or artisans.
That reputation, as the city of Rome’s more liberated younger sibling, lingered until the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79 AD. In a span of days, the city experienced an earthquake, smoke-filled air and rocks raining down from the mountains. Soon, a wave of super-heated gas instantly cooked everything in its path and toxic ash fell over the city.
The instant devastation killed thousands and would have left refugees traumatized for life. Few first-hand accounts survived, though there are suggestions that survivors would go on to start new businesses in neighboring cities, like a shop in Neapolis that sold a painting of Roman gods weighing a penis as large as their bodies.
“Former slaves could achieve wealth and influence,” Newitz writes of Pompeii. “Women like Julia Felix could be property owners. And the names of sex workers like Murtis [the queen of the cocksuckers] would be remembered for thousands of years, while the names of her clients burned to the ground.”
Climate catastrophes move too slow to notice
Eleven hundred years ago the city of Angkor, in what is now Cambodia, was home to roughly 1 million people, elaborate city walls, golden palaces and breathtaking statutes.
And then the 1% stopped protecting water infrastructure by letting dams burst during rainy seasons, failing to clear canals so mountain water could stream down, and ignoring repairs. Farming got harder. Trade and commerce slowed, which resulted in higher political tension. Within a few hundred years, the population numbered in the hundreds.
“There was no giant sign proclaiming the end of life as they’d known it; instead, there was a mounting pile of annoyances and disappointments,” Newitz writes. “Some of the once-thriving neighborhoods had fallen empty and silent … Younger generations would realize they had fewer economic opportunities than their elders had.”
Don’t trust a neat narrative
The entire notion of a lost city originates with Western explorers who “found” civilizations where the population had scattered or ravaged by disease. Journalists like Charles C. Mann, author of 1491 and 1493, have written extensively about how in North America, in particular, Europeans arrived to find the remnants of societies where tens of millions of people once lived before smallpox.
The civilizations they found weren’t lost, just full of ghosts. And the apparent temptation to classify complicated histories into tidy storylines has perverted our understanding how societies actually rise and fall.
A recent offender is author Jared Diamond, best known for books like Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, for fudging historical truths for the sake of bending a historical storyline into his narratives. Newitz helpfully reminds readers that Diamond’s concept of a collapse — the idea that people abandoned the Mayan civilization or Easter Island because of unsound environmental collapses — is a crock.
Cities don’t suddenly flame out because of a single mistake. They slowly lose populations over time, as residents depart for smaller towns or to help build new communities elsewhere. That spread then helps distribute the characteristics of a place — its attitude, art, technologies and values — to other regions.
“People are resilient,” Newitz explains at one point, “and our cultures can survive volcanoes and floods, even if our cities don’t.”
recommended reading
The Story of John Young, the Original King of Buffalo Wings: The birthplace of the chicken wing remains a subject of contention in Buffalo. The typical story is that a drunk cook at the Anchor Bar downtown decided to fry a discarded piece of chicken and douse it in hot sauce. A growing consensus suggests the real creator was John Young, a Black Alabama native who traveled north during the Great Migration. A beautiful illustrated essay in the Times tells his story. [@rachelwharton + @KorenShadmi]
The yoga world is riddled with anti-vaxxers and QAnon believers: An excellent story about how an extremism researcher encountered the conspiracy theories she studies in real life. This article goes with an examination of how Gen Z moms are building their brands on Instagram, with some help from QAnon, the “mass delusion that purports former president Donald Trump is secretly attempting to help overthrow a satanic cabal of child sex abusers who run the world.” [@CecileNGuerin]
The Obsessive Life and Mysterious Death of the Fisherman Who Discovered the Loch Ness Monster: “A humble Scotsman saw something strange in the water—and daringly set out to catch it—only to have lecherous out-of-towners steal his fame and upend his quest.” [@paulbrownUK]
The Pandemic Has Erased Entire Categories of Friendship: “There’s a reason you miss the people you didn’t even know that well.” [@amandamull]
one more thing
No More Normal is a semi-regular newsletter written by Jeff Stone. You can lend your support by subscribing, sharing with friends or suggesting ways to improve.