ABSTRACT
In China Mieville’s magnificent novel, The City and The City, two different cities occupy the same space, but in different dimensions. These cities, named Ul Quoma and Beszel, are what the people in Mieville’s novel call ‘crosshatched’. At Tiwanaku the stone monolith chachapumas that guarded the portals to temples drew out particular qualities in human beings, ensuring they were ready to encounter other stone persons within the city. In turn Omur Harmansah traces a politics of authority in the Hittite world that revolved around water as a critical element, drawing on the assemblage through which water emerged and flowed. The relationships with water were more mediated at Tiwanaku. If water is a differentially emergent substance, with alternative capacities and properties depending on its assemblage within the urban spaces of the past, the same can be said for stone. The chapter also presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book.
