ABSTRACT
A necessary condition of the emergence of cities in Europe was the diffusion of Neolithic agriculture and animal husbandry from the Near East, first of all to mainland Greece and Crete. From there, these technologies spread through the Danube Valley, and by about 3000 BCE had been adopted throughout Europe. How much the emergence of cities in Europe owed to direct contact with the urban civilizations of the Near East, rather than to the diffusion of agriculture, is more debatable. According to V. Gordon Childe’s diffusionist model of the Urban Revolution, the interacting primary centres were Egypt, Sumer and the Indus Valley; the demand of the primary centres for raw materials drew secondary centres, including the Aegean region, the subject of this chapter, into economic specialization and external trade. The preconditions for the transition from self-sufficient agricultural village to city were thereby spread (Childe, 1966, pp. 169–70). In particular, after the discovery of bronze’s advantages over copper, the quest for tin ores was stepped up; this would take Phoenician traders from the Levant as far as southern Spain during the first millennium BCE. The existence of desirable raw materials in a locality was insufficient to bring about urbanization; there also had to be fertile land close by, to generate the agricultural surplus necessary to feed specialists in the production and processing of industrial raw materials. Accordingly, there was no urbanization around the copper and turquoise mines of the desert region of Sinai, and it was limited in other mineral-rich, mountainous areas.
