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Archaeologists, like most people, have an urge to grasp the world through something tangible or, even better, countable. There can be a great comfort in numbers, and numbers also convince; many have been the attempts to define cities by countable characteristics: an area of at least 10ha, 10,000 inhabitants, a certain number of public meeting places, a particular thickness of city walls in metres. Five, ten, or twelve ticks on a checklist of features, and so on.
Attempting full quantification and counting ‘stuff’ have long been hot stuff in archaeological scholarship. Admittedly, we do it ourselves. Having hard, numeric data about physical things of all kinds and tracking their distribution over time and space gives researchers a sense that they have a grip on what was going on in the past. Doubters can be presented with copious statistics and graphs that back up hypotheses. Unquestionably, then, numbers are reassuring and persuasive. At the same time, of course, the certainty that numbers seem to offer can be deceptive.
The ancient Greek city-states are one set of sites that became the target of a major counting operation in the 1990s and early 2000s. They were part of an initiative, too, that sought to characterise them as a phenomenon much broader than one simply restricted to the Classical Mediterranean region. Instead, there was a heavy focus on explaining to the broader academic world why ancient Archaic and Classical city-states were important for understanding the development of humanity as well.
The count of Copenhagen
The mastermind behind these operations was Mogens Herman Hansen, a giant in scholarship, who recently passed away at the age of 83. Hansen was a modern legend in the realm of studying Greek city-states – and also, perhaps surprisingly to some, in the field of counting. He was a fixture in the Copenhagen world of letters, known for his unfaltering enthusiasm, piercing wit, flute-playing, and penchant for extemporising limericks on Classical themes. He was most famous, though, for his ancient historical work on the Greek polis (city-state), conducted via a centre that he headed in the 1990s and early 2000s with an enticing name: ‘The Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence Polis Centre’, which was better known as simply ‘The Copenhagen Polis Centre’.
Hansen achieved worldwide renown for his overview of these Greek city-states and his infatuation with trying to produce precise counts of everything conceivably associated with them. This ranged from calculating the number of city walls or mentions in the literary sources, through to organising them into hierarchies. Truth be told, it was Hansen’s endeavours that put the ancient city-state back on the scholarly map after a time when they had fallen far from fashion in the 1960s among ostensibly more progressive themes. Hansen continued working on ancient states and cities long after his retirement in 2010. One would often run into him in the Royal Academy of Sciences and Letters, a building in central Copenhagen, across from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, where he would borrow an office, hold court, and write the copious books and contributions that kept flowing from his desk.
Hansen had received a major grant from the Danish National Research Foundation in 1991. The Copenhagen Polis Centre opened in 1993, and became the first centre of excellence within the humanities in Denmark. It ran for a decade until 2003, with the members of the centre publishing widely on both the archaeology and history of the Greek polis state.
Their work evolved into a global odyssey to count not only the Greek city-states, but also how many other civilisations had possessed city-states. Experts from across the world were summoned to conferences and handed checklists to consider, complete with questions to resolve. The end result, as you might have guessed, was expressed as a number. According to Hansen’s criteria, there have been exactly 35 city-state cultures in world history, each of which was duly described in the centre’s proceedings – alongside one case that turned out not to fit the definition.
After the centre closed, the score was settled and a final count of Greek archaic and Classical city-states was published as An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (OUP, 2005): 1,035 examples was the final verdict, based on archaeological and written evidence from the sites. However, as Hansen had already agonised about in a 2003 paper, there were suggestions that as many as 400 more such sites might have existed. In these cases, though, solid evidence was lacking. Therefore, he and his team elected to stick with the 1,035 locations that were all likely – according to the criteria they had drawn up – to have been poleis.
Digging into the data
This obsession with numbers might seem eccentric, especially when so many uncertain cases remain. But Hansen was not an eccentric collector of numbers – he was a celebrated ancient historian, who also wrote, for example, the standard English-language text-book on Athenian democracy. Perhaps the only thing that would have been even more eccentric for someone this absorbed with the Greek city-states would have been not to count them. Would it not seem absurd if no one in the modern world had ever attempted to determine a full list of such sites? Today, Hansen’s catalogue of city-states finds echoes on a daily basis when researchers conscientiously collect databases about everything from Palaeolitic flint scatters to Roman roads. Without such baseline data, all further study would remain somehow eclectic.
The ancient Mediterranean region was one of the most densely urbanised regions in the ancient world – counted in terms of the physical presence of cities and towns detectable as archaeological remains. Alongside the archaeological evidence, there are abundant epigraphic sources (most conspicuously the thousands of inscriptions incised on stones – alongside the less durable equivalents on papyri, plaster, and so forth) and ancient literary texts (usually not surviving in their original form, but handed down to us complete with scribal errors via manuscripts kept and copied in monasteries for generations). However, it is often the sheer quantity of the material evidence that has encouraged archaeologists and historians to count, rather than to contextualise first and worry about statistics later.
Hansen and his team changed the way that ancient history and archaeology could be done. Their work and research presented a paradigm shift. However, what the Copenhagen Polis Centre also underlined is that the humanities, including ancient history and archaeology, can and should take the lead on big questions pertaining to human life in the past. It is only by combining deep knowledge of a subject with time to engage with the data – including sometimes breaking them into countable segments and contemplating what these numbers mean – that we are able to move hypotheses forward and come to truly new insights. Such large-scale and long-term initiatives should not only emerge from the sciences. Instead, crunching the numbers ought to be an integral part of how we do research in archaeology and the humanities more widely – allowing us to move into a new age without losing our count.
Rubina Raja is professor of classical archaeology and art and director of the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions, Aarhus University, Denmark. Together with Søren, she is founding editor of the Journal of Urban Archaeology.
Søren M Sindbæk is professor of medieval archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark, and co-director of the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions.
