Throughout history, cities have been identified as fundamentally antithetical to our nature and temperament, fostering vice, fostering disease, and causing social ills.
Babylonian mythology has resonated from time immemorial to the present day.
While cities have had a glittering history of success, they can also lead us to ruin.
There are many wonderful things about big cities, but there are also many scary things about them.
So, the idea of ​​embracing this hostile environment, the city, and adapting it to our needs is incredibly appealing.
The city I see in this book is not only a place of power and profit, but also a place that has a profound impact on the lives of its residents.
Metropolis is not a book about grand buildings or urban planning.
The theme of this book is about city dwellers and the ways they have found to cope with and overcome the pressures of city life.

---From "Preface: The Century of the Metropolis"

Several ditches and pits discovered at Uruk are thought to be the remains of a large copper foundry that would have employed around 40 workers.
Many women in Uruk wove fine fabrics from sheep's wool on horizontal floor looms that could maintain high production levels.
Uruk potters employed two significant innovations: the Mesopotamian beehive kiln and the high-speed potter's wheel.
The honeycomb kiln allowed for significantly higher firing temperatures while protecting the pottery from flames.
Previous potters used a turntable (a stone disc that was turned by hand and fitted onto a lower spindle).
By the Uruk period, however, the rotating device was moved by stick or hand and was connected to a wheel-shaped device above the clay by a shaft.
Thanks to this technology, the Uruk people were able to make pottery much faster and much better.

They produced finely textured, lightweight tableware aimed at the luxury market.
They also had the ability to mass-produce relatively crude goods, such as standardized pottery and storage jars. This series of inventions and improvements was possible only when humans were gathered in a dense and competitive environment.
Innovation breeds innovation.
The high temperatures of the honeycomb kiln were used to experiment with metallurgy and chemistry.
Mesopotamian sailors were the first to use sails.
It is an impressive, counterintuitive fact that the city of Uruk was invented before the wheel.

---From "Chapter 1: Dawn of the City, Uruk"

At its peak, Babylon was considered an unrivaled center of knowledge and art, and a sacred city.
Hippocrates, the Greek father of medicine, relied on the data of Babylonian scholars when mathematics and astronomy were advanced in Babylon.
The Babylonians had a passion for history.
Like 19th-century archaeologists, Babylonian scholars traveled throughout Mesopotamia, seeking to understand its 3,000-year history, resulting in countless museums, libraries, and archives.
In addition, Mesopotamian literature flourished based on the myths and legends collected by Babylonian scholars through field research.


Unfortunately, Babylon suffered from an enduring bad reputation because of one of the many ethnic groups that were brought there.
The people regarded Babylon as a place of divine punishment ordained by God to punish them for their sins, and the books they wrote became the foundation of three of the world's major religions.
The hideous image of Babylon was passed on to Christianity.
By the time the age of Christ arrived, Babylon had lost its former glory, but had become a byword for sin, corruption, and tyranny.
The book of Revelation had the greatest influence of all.
The Book of Revelation, with its hallucinatory and dynamic prose of apocalypse, sin, and salvation, has forever entrenched Babylon in the collective memory of Christians and in the culture that grew out of it.
The way Babylon was portrayed by its enemies and victims has had a profound impact on how people have viewed major cities ever since.

---From "Chapter 2: The Garden of Eden and the Cities of Sin: Harappa and Babylon"

Important figures flaunted their status and wealth by entering the bathhouse with naked attendants.
People went to the bathhouse to get work done, discuss politics, have a chat, or get invited to dinner.
They also went to the bathhouse to see something or someone, or to be noticed.
They ate, they drank, they argued, they flirted, and sometimes they had sex in a small room.

He even left graffiti on the marble.
After making plans to eat together, we enjoyed a bath before eating.
In the bathhouse, wine was readily available.
The spacious and comfortable imperial public baths were filled with the cacophony of thousands of people talking and arguing, to the cries of vendors selling bread, candy, drinks, and simple snacks.
The weightlifters groaned and panted.
Someone shouted out the score of a nearby game of ball.
The sound of the masseuses gently patting the flesh with their hands filled the round ceiling.
To my ears, some people even sang while enjoying their bath.
Guests crowded around performers such as tossers, clowns, jugglers, magicians, and gymnasts.


[…] The bathhouse offered a unique and diverse urban experience.
Above all, I was able to experience joint activities.
The rich and the poor had a close relationship.
We made a friendship and it became stronger.
A business deal was attempted.
The sound of conversation was loud here and there.
Such opportunities for socialization, in whatever form they took, were probably the main pleasure of bathing, and so the Romans would not have hesitated to invest time in it.
A boy from Rome wrote the following excitedly after class:
“I need to go and take a bath quickly.
Yeah, it's time.
let's go.
Let's follow the servant, holding a few towels.
“I have to chase after all the guests heading to the bathhouse and say, ‘Hello! Enjoy your bath! Enjoy your dinner!’”
---From "Chapter 4: Pleasures in the Bathhouse, Rome"

Amsterdam's vibrant energy was masked by its pleasant, tranquil atmosphere, its distinctive architectural consistency, and the sober dress of its citizens.
Amsterdam had no monuments or boulevards, but the city's true glory was its citizens' homes.
Peter Mundy, an English traveler who visited Amsterdam in 1640, was impressed by the “neat and clean” dwellings of ordinary citizens “full of joy and contentment.”
Their living quarters contained “expensive and novel” furniture and decorations, such as cupboards and wardrobes, paintings and prints, porcelain, and “costly and exquisite birdcages.”
The average Dutch household was an avid consumer of art.
According to Mundy, not only did middle-class homes have a wealth of paintings and sculptures, but even butcher shops and blacksmith shops had oil paintings.
It was one of millions of paintings produced by countless 17th-century artists.


In that overflowing wave of artistic talent, there was the life of a city and the chaos that arose on its streets.
The drunkards of the tavern became protagonists, no different from the tycoons of the stock exchange.
The paintings of that time do not depict idealized cityscapes of the past, but rather the harsh realities of city life and the impressions the painter felt there.
The comical and enigmatic events that occur, the contrasts in types, the liveliness and energy of city life are a regular theme in modern art, literature, music and film.
The roots of city life lie in 17th-century Dutch genre painting, particularly depictions of Amsterdam's lively taverns.
People drink, smoke, flirt, kiss, fight, play music, gamble, eat like crazy, and sleep.
The chaos, confusion and movement of that moment are captured by the painter.

In Dutch genre painting, a new way of city life is celebrated.
The tavern is likely to be a place of humor and moral instruction.
But the small but wonderful house of the middle class is an object of blind worship.
Such houses seem very close to urban living, and stand out for their unique neatness and harmony.
Housewives and maids sweep and clean the house.
Open your underwear.
Scrub the pot and pan clean.
Work hard at odd jobs.
The children play quietly.
The inside of the house is clean without a speck of dust.
Amsterdammers were known for being fastidious about hygiene and cleanliness.


There were many paintings that praised ideal virtues such as neatness and the perfect family, as if to counter the rotten smell of the wealthy and profit-driven global city.
That holy home was like a levee that held back the tidal wave of the city's vices.
It seemed like a necessary antidote to the rotten stench of the tavern and the harsh world of capitalism.
It was also a new urban world where noble and wealthy women lived away from the filthy, messy and immoral city life.
The dangerous and unclean streets were a man's world.
In other words, it was a world that did not suit women who were supposed to create an ideal family.
---From "Chapter 7: The Hearts of Commerce and Trade: Lisbon, Malacca, Tenochtitlan, and Amsterdam"

In late 17th-century London, news had become a valuable commodity, and coffeehouses had become centers of news.
England and Scotland, embroiled in the civil war of the 1640s that led to the execution of the king, were still politically turbulent when Pascal Rose opened his coffee shop.
Between 1659 and 1660, the political situation was once again in crisis due to a struggle for power between factions.
Coffee shops proved valuable during those turbulent times as places for discussion and news exchange.
Samuel Pepys, a young man curious about news and world affairs and thirsty for connections with powerful figures, frequented coffeehouses to watch debates.
At the Turk's Head coffeehouse in Westminster, he socialized with aristocrats, political thinkers, merchants, soldiers, and scholars who discussed the future of the country.

Those who watched the debate, like Fifth, were amazed at the depth and politeness of the discussion that took place in the coffee shop.
That kind of atmosphere could not be created in a tavern or an inn.
There was something about that hot, dark drink you taste in a coffee shop that helped you calm down and have better judgment.
Guests drank drinks typical of big cities and behaved in big city ways.

The coffee shop's regulars not only consumed news, they also produced it.
Journalists got their stories from the gossip circulating in the bustling coffee shops.
Government spies combed through such rumors to find out the latest information.
Anyway, now the world's affairs are openly discussed in the specific environment of a coffee shop.


In a coffee shop, you had to sit down when a seat became available.
I had to sit down no matter who was next to me.
There were no special seats reserved for the nobles.
According to Samuel Butler, 'the coffeehouse was a place where people of all ranks and status could discuss foreign drinks, news, beer and cigarettes.'
The coffee shop owner did not tolerate 'discrimination against people', and gentlemen, artisans, nobles, and gangsters all mingled together, and they all lived in harmony as if they were practicing the first principle themselves.

The government feared the ramifications of this radical new public space, and saw coffeehouses as hotbeds of sedition and republicanism.
Coffee shops, which had emerged as a new trend, were repeatedly attacked through publications.
Criticism often aimed below the belt.
The authors of The Women's Petition Against Coffee wrote:
“Because of that abominable and heathenish liquid, which is so fashionable lately, called coffee, our husbands have become sapped of their virility, our more amiable lovers have become withered and old, and have become as useless as the desert from which that unfortunate fruit springs.

---From "Chapter 8: Caffeine Communities and Social London"