Locating Resilience in Ancient Urban Networks

One of the striking features of ancient Mediterranean urbanism is the capacity of individual cities to weather all kinds of shocks, from earthquakes, floods, droughts, plagues, and crop failures to sieges and violent shifts in political gravity. This is all the more remarkable given the environmental precarity of ancient Mediterranean life, and the relative instability of so many of the political entities that ruled them. This paper considers these issues in relation to resilience. Resilience theory was developed in the 1970s to investigate why some ecosystems were better able than others to withstand external pressures. Resilient systems “absorb shocks”, “spring back”, or simply “adapt” after major disruptions. The idea has been borrowed by social scientists, including archaeologists and town planners. This paper will ask where resilience is to be located in the ancient world, and will consider the role of urban economics, networks and imperial polities in promoting resilient cities in antiquity.