Subscribe now for full access and no adverts
The narrative about the rise and fall of civilisations and their infrastructures is still omnipresent in scholarship about past cities. It is a story that sells well. Think, for example, of the ruins of Pompeii and Gerasa in the Mediterranean region, the monuments of Persepolis in modern Iran, the temples of Angkor in Cambodia, or the remains of Maya cities in the jungles of Mesoamerica. Many people will have heard about these places and images of ruins naturally spring to mind – frequently tied to romanticised visions of them crumbling amid what have become picturesque landscapes, where nature merges with the grand relics of past urban societies. In some modern cities, ancient remains also remind us, on a daily basis, of the longevity of occupation – often with ups and downs along the way – these places have experienced. Cities such as Athens, Rome, Mérida, and Trier are famous examples of urban centres from the classical world that have survived in bits and pieces over millennia, with the ancient remains becoming part of contemporary cityscapes as they changed over time. The past percolates into the present, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the palimpsests of material remains that compose our historic cities.
A few years ago, the French classical archaeologist Alain Schnapp published a monumental work entitled Une Histoire Universelle des Ruines (A Universal History of Ruins), which engages with the relationships that cultures across the globe have cultivated with their pasts, attempting to explain how they are shaped by the manifold ways in which different societies perceive former eras. He brought to the forefront some crucial examples of engagement as well as non-engagement, including one which stands out, namely a Japanese shrine that is destroyed every 20 years only to be rebuilt as a replica – never to become a ruin.
One might ask: why are perceptions of ruins important to the topic of urbicide? The short answer is: because we reconstruct the past through the fragments – archaeological or literary – left to us, so our narratives will always be influenced by present perceptions of those fragments as we strive to fill in the lacunae. And so the questions remain: Were cities ever killed? Did they die off? Or are there stories that are not relayed through those patches – no matter how substantial – left for us to study?
Slaying a city
The term ‘urbicide’ is a modern one, which has become increasingly used in the last few decades since the seminal writings of scholars such as Marshall Berman and Bogdan Bogdanovic´. It is employed to designate the deliberate destruction or ‘killing’ of a city (from the Latin terms urbs ‘city’ and occido ‘to kill’). ‘Deliberate’ is a crucial aspect here, since it distinguishes human-made devastation from natural catastrophes such as the destruction of the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, or the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Unfortunately, the history of humanity is replete with examples of violent, large-scale devastation of cities as a result of armed conflicts. The term ‘urbicide’ has been applied to numerous modern urban sites affected by massive intentional destruction, including Second World War scenarios such as Stalingrad and Hiroshima, or Sarajevo during the Bosnian War in the 1990s. Even more recently, some scholars have used the term to describe the large-scale destruction of the built environment of some cities located in conflict areas such as Ukraine or the Middle East.
But the history of urbicide is not restricted to our modern world: one could argue that it is as old as cities themselves. Since antiquity, cities were not only strategic targets to be taken during war, but also the places in which wars were planned, where intrigues played out, and where power was focused. Cities were built environments in which elites took pride and societies bragged with their monuments, which could even be depicted on widely circulated coins – ensuring others saw just how fantastic cities like Rome, Ephesus, or Damascus were. This prominence ensured that capturing or erasing cities communicated a powerful message, too. Carthage, for instance, was completely and systematically destroyed by Rome in 146 BC, marking the end of the Third Punic War – this is attested not only by written sources, but also archaeologically. Jerusalem suffered a similarly grim outcome in AD 70, and many other examples could be added to the list for the ancient world. In the medieval period, Genghis Khan was another prominent destroyer of cities, with urban centres such as Herat and Merv being largely erased by his Mongol army.
Down, not out
However, as catastrophic as all these events were, the subsequent history of the sites shows us that in most cases urban life ended up resuming – sometimes shortly after the destruction, other times several generations later, with cities being repaired, rebuilt, or refounded. This teaches us an important lesson about the resilience of the urban phenomenon across space and time. To paraphrase the famous Janine Turner quote: you can take the human out of the city, but not the city out of the human. For example, Sylvian Fachard and Edward Harris’s 2021 edited volume The Destruction of Cities in the Ancient Greek World tackled some of the evidence left to us and aimed at disentangling and setting straight narratives about cities that are often viewed as having been killed off. Athens, Corinth, and Miletus are just three notable examples that can be brought to the forefront. The bottom line is that these places all survived in one shape or another, despite sustaining massive damage during invasions. This may not be a surprise – but it is still an important reminder. Similarly, the Roman sackings of the oasis city Palmyra in the Syrian desert in AD 272/273 are examples of intended destruction that led to the total collapse of the city’s control over large parts of the interregional caravan trade, extending from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and beyond. But, despite the fact that Palmyra as a city was largely destroyed, research carried out over the last few decades has shown that life there was not entirely extinguished. Emanuele Intagliata’s book on the late antique and early Islamic phases of the place underlines this, and tackles the issue of the ways in which at least part of the society could reinvent itself.
There are, of course, cases of sites that never recovered, where urban life ceased completely. Among the many instances that could be pointed out is the large, fortified settlement (oppidum) of Monte Bernorio in northern Spain. This major centre of the Cantabri was violently destroyed by the Roman army of Emperor Augustus during the conquest of the region at the end of the 1st century BC. The investigations carried out by J F Torres-Martínez and colleagues have revealed archaeological evidence for a massive Roman assault that destroyed the town (see CWA 85). Following this dramatic event, the site was never resettled, with the exception of a small Roman fort established in order to control the situation in the years following the conquest.
Regardless of whether cities resumed or ceased after episodes of urbicide, what we should never forget is the human side of the story, the suffering associated with these tragic events. Cities might often have continued – but not necessarily the lives of their inhabitants. The frequent resilience and recovery of urban life should not mask the traumatic effects on individuals and communities that are linked to the violent destruction of cities. When archaeologists see layers of ash and monuments razed to the ground, they should always remember the people behind those remains and try to recontextualise them. Because, ultimately, as Shakespeare eloquently expressed in his play Coriolanus, ‘What is the city but the people?’
Manuel Fernández-Götz is Professor of Later European Prehistory at the University of Oxford. His main areas of research are the archaeology of identities, early urbanism, and conflict archaeology. Together with Rubina, since 2026 he is the main editor of the Journal of Urban Archaeology.
Rubina Raja is Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at Aarhus University. She also heads the ‘Locally Crafted Empires' Semper Ardens Advanced Grant project and the ‘Lost Cities' Gerda Henkel Foundation project on urban excavation legacy data. She is the founder and main editor of the Journal of Urban Archaeology.
