ABSTRACT
It has become a cliché to preface surveys of urban history with the statement that the first cities appeared in the area extending from lower Mesopotamia to the Nile valley. Indeed, from the end of the fourth millennium to the early third millennium BCE, scores of cities emerged in what we now call Iraq, Egypt, and Bilad al-Sham. The European influence was not exactly a sudden development. Europe and the ‘Orient’ (essentially the Eastern Mediterranean) had had a long relationship, fraught with epic wars, creative mythologizing, and enduring suspicion. The rivalry, however, never hindered a continuous and variably intense commercial, cultural, and intellectual exchange (Braudel, 1972). The exchange had been bi-directional for hundreds of years. Many Levantine architectural relics – outdated, exhausted, and abused – still stand. They have been the subject of intellectual and emotional battles among the educated (new) bourgeois and the remaining former aristocrats and Levantines over their nostalgic value and the need for their preservation.
