Karakorum, the first capital of the Mongol world empire: an imperial city in a non-urban society
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Karakorum, the first capital of the Mongol world empire: an imperial city in a non-urban society Jan Bemmann 1
&
Susanne Reichert 1
Received: 29 August 2020 / Accepted: 28 October 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Cities within a steppe environment and in societies based on pastoral nomadism are an often overlooked theme in the anthropological literature. Yet, with Karakorum, the first capital of the Mongol Empire (AD 1206–1368), we have a supreme example of such a city in the central landscape of the Orkhon valley in Mongolia. In this paper, we ask, what is the city in the steppes? Taking Karakorum as our starting point and case of reference and to attain a better comprehension of the characteristics of urbanism in the steppe, we apply a list of urban attributes compiled by Michael E. Smith (2016) to provide a thick description of Karakorum. The discussion not only comprises comparisons to other contemporary sites in Russia and Mongolia, but also addresses in detail the question of city–hinterland relations as a fundamental necessity for the survival of the city in an antiurban environment. The analysis shows that during the Mongol period we can identify urbanism but no urbanization: there is no process of independent, natural growth of cities carried out by the population, but cities are “political” in the sense that they are deeply intertwined with the authority and have therefore much to tell about the relation between power and authority on the one hand and the ruled on the other. Keywords Mongol empire . Urbanism . Imperial city . Urban planning . Nomads
1 Introduction “The concept of ‘city’ is notoriously hard to define” (Childe 1950: 3). This initial statement by V. Gordon Childe in his seminal paper on the so-called Urban Revolution is all the more true if we look at urban settings within the steppe environment of eastern Asia. Comparative archaeological debates of urban settings (Cowgill 2004; Smith 2011) and handbooks on early cities (Marcus and Sabloff 2008b; Clark 2013; Yoffee 2015) more or less neglect the constructed centers of nomadic empires in the Eurasian Steppes. As far as we know there is no book, no special volume of a journal, no conference proceeding that focuses on urban sites in the Eastern Eurasian steppes. There are only a monograph with collected studies by Kyzlasov (2006) on permanent settlements and urban sites mainly in Tuva, a book by Tkachev (2009) on the history of Mongolian architecture, and an edited volume by Kradin * Jan Bemmann [email protected] 1
Department of Pre- and Early Historical Archaeology, Bonn University, Brühler Straße 7, 53119 Bonn, Germany
(2018) on urban sites in Mongolia, Transbaikalia, and the Russian Far East. The Eurasian Society and the University of Bern in 2016 hosted a conference on “Urban Culture in Central Asia.” The proceedings of this conference, however, include only lectures about the former Soviet republics in Central Asia from the Bronze Age to the Qara Khanids (Baumer and Novák 2019). There may be two explanations
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