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metropolis of the XIIIth Nome of Lower Egypt”—see E.A.Wallis Budge,
The Topic
of the Dead
1920/1960 n. 1 24), is a wonderfully compressed pictogram, a circle cir-
cumscribed around a cross. This hieroglyph illustrates the two principal functions
of a city.The cross represents the crossroads—the junction where travelers meet. At
such intersections can begin true commerce, not merely exchange but planned and
centralized commerce from which, by extension, can grow all organized industry
(not local crafts traded to third parties) and business. The circle stands for the sur-
rounding wall, not only protection in a physical sense (a pen for cattle or a wall
against marauders), but a border between the city and non-city. This circular bar-
rier, a palisade, demarcates the city-slicker from the hick or hillbilly, one who is
“beyond the pale.” Throughout his writings Charles Olson made the point of the
city as embodying these characteristics and having been first established at spots to
which early nomadic peoples felt constrained to return periodically—where they
buried their dead. Hence, he stipulates, a third quality: necropolis preceded
metropolis.
4. For example, we learn that when the putative “Aryan” invaders of ancient India
encountered the indigenous population's citadels, “for these cities the term used in
the Rigveda is
pur
meaning 'rampart','fort', or 'stronghold”' (Sir Mortimer Wheeler,
“Harappan Chronology and the Rig Veda,”
Ancient India
no. 3 (1947), 78;
Ancient
Cities of the Indus,
ed. G. Possehl,Vikas Publishing, 1979, 291). See note 3 above on
how close the idea of 'palisade' is related to 'fort', indicating the central function of
the bastion in earliest cities.
5. Ingrid Rowland, “Etruscan Secrets,”
New York Review,
July 5, 2001, 16.
6. My mother-in-law, for example, who has lived her whole life in western Penn-
sylvania, pronounces the word “borough” as “burr,” which is understood by her
similarly accented neighbors without correction to be a complete word. Linguistics
legitimately offers the opportunity to use and rely on very small samples of native
speakers.
7. See, among many such sources treating the Indo-European word root “pele”
(sometimes thought to mean “fortified high place”), Joseph T. Shipley,
The Origins
of English Words
( Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). A broader view of this
word root is taken by Mario Pei in
The Families of Words
(Harper, 1962).Yet even in
Pei's more embracing construction all of the urban roots remain.
8. Ezra Pound delights in the transcription
“Brododaktylos.”
(For a discussion of
this apparent aberration see Hugh Kenner,
The Pound Era,
University of California
Press, 1971, 56.) Kenner notes, citing the original manuscript source, that
Brododak-
tylos
as Sappho used it in her dialect did not refer to the Homeric “rosy-fingered
dawn.”) That dialect B, incidentally, shows up as an important link as it unites—by
means of the b/v substitution as found in “brodo”—the otherwise unattested
