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English word “Rose” (a common enough word, but, nevertheless, a word with
murky sources) with its distant cousin in Hebrew “Vered,” meaning rose. If the
V/B is dropped, as it usually was in
Brododaktylos,
the remaining root is a cognate,
which, again, indicates that proto-Indo-European was affiliated with other lan-
guage groups, many of which today share a common word for the urban core.
9. Even “suburb” has a long history that wends it way through proto Indo-
European and the Semitic languages so that the French
purlieu
shows the core word
for city, but, at least according to one scholar, so does the Hebrew words for sub-
urb and wilderness. See Isaac E. Mozeson,
The Word
(Shapolsky, 1989), N.B. “Bar-
rio,” 28.
10. Nadav Na'aman, “It Is There: Ancient Texts Prove It,”
Biblical Archaeology
Review,
July-August 1998, 43. Na'aman, continues that, “all of the names of places
with these determinatives mentioned by the Jerusalem scribe should be translated
as the names of towns.”
11. D. Dennis Hudson, “Madurai:The City as Goddess,” in
Urban Form and Mean-
ing in South Asia: The Shaping of Cities from Prehistoric to Precolonial Times,
Howard
Spodek and Doris Meth Srinivasan, eds. (University Press of New England for
National Gallery of Art, 1993). Hudson (p. 125) makes a distinction between how
Tamil townspeople “perceive their village as two different ways: as a map (
granman
)
and as a person (
ur
). As a
granman
the village is a legally defined space, but as an
ur
it is a personal space.”
12. Interestingly, the
Epic of Gilgamesh
begins with the invocation of a city, indicat-
ing that all of the ensuing journey-narrative contrasts to the city that is left behind.
The “Prologue” begins “O Gilgamesh . . . was the king who knew the countries of
the world,” meaning that he was widely traveled. A few lines later the “Prologue”
ends:“Climb upon the wall of Uruk; walk along it, I say; regard the foundation ter-
race and examine the masonry; is it not burnt brick and good? The seven sages laid
the foundation.” (translation by N. K. Sandars, Penguin 1960, 59) These claims are,
and remained ever after, the two most important assertions in city planning. The
lofty beauty of the city was constructed of the best indigenous materials, fired brick
(not sun-dried), and the seven circumpolar stars were used to perfectly align the city
along a propitious north-south axis. Good materials were wedded to good design
in this advertisement.
13. This ideal showcase for architecture is hardly Le Corbusier's monstrous
Voisin
plan for Paris of the mid 1920s, a perfect piece of Stalinist oppression. Although I
cannot digress for such a discussion, it must be noted that modernism neither
implies nor is best represented by the worst excesses committed in the name of the
“international style”; therefore, the defense of modernism is hardly the point of the
present article, although thinkers and builders as various as Soleri and Hundert-
