Kent

(İng. city)

Göndermeler

Mevlânâ'dan

-Şehirli- dedi: “Bu doğrudur. Ey oğulcuk! Fakat kendisine iyilik yaptığın kişinin kötülüğünden sakın. Dostluk son nefesin tohumudur. Onun bozulması endişesiyle korkuyorum.”

Ey dostlar! Gönül, güven yurdudur. orada pınarlar, gül bahçesi içinde gül bahçesi vardır. Ey yürüyen! Kalbine yönel ve yürü; orada ağaçlar ve akan pınarlar vardır. Köye gitme; köy adamı ahmak yapar; aklı nursuz ve cansız yapar. Ey seçkin kişi! Peygamberin sözünü dinle: “Köyde yerleşmek, aklın mezarıdır.” Kim bir gün ve gece köyde kalsa, bir aya kadar aklı tamam olmaz. Bir aya kadar ahmaklık onunla birliktedir. Köy otundan bunlardan başka ne biçilir. Köyde bir ay kalan kişide bir zaman cahillik ve körlük olur. Köy nedir? Ermemiş, taklide ve delile tutunmuş şeyh. Bu duygular, küllî akıl şehri önünde değirmende gözü bağlı eşekler gibidir.

Tahta oturduklarında padişahların elleri kılıçlı dehşetli adamları bulunur. Sopa, mızrak ve kılıçları vardır; heybetlerinden aslanlar titrer. Çavuşların seslerinden ve sopaların korkusundan canlar gevşer. Bu sesler, geçmekte olan özel ve halktan kişileri padişahtan haberdar etmek içindir. Bu haşmet, halkın, başlarına kibir külahı koymamaları içindir. Böylece onların ben ve bizleri kırılır; bencil nefis, fitne ve kötülük yapmaz. Şehir, padişahın ceza olarak darbesi ve yakalaması olduğu için güvendedir.

Aristoteles

The political nature of Stagira’s “place” is equally ambiguous. Mogens H. Hansen (1995, 75) describes it as “the borderland” between city-state and municipality, an entity that transgresses conventional (oppositional) principles of territorial identification, bearing characteristics of both an independent entity (polis) in Hellas and a dependent entity (ko̅me̅) associated with barbarian habitations in Macedon. Stagira, Aristotales'in doğduğu kenttir. (DrOS)

Diğer

The issue was not destined to be settled by economic factors alone, with victory going to the competitor who could supply Europe with spices at the lowest price. Portugal went east as crusader and trader, determined to get a monopoly of the westward flow of goods and also to wage the holy war on new battlefields. To establish the monopoly she must gain control of the producing regions and exporting harbors, close the entrances to the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, and wipe out any Arab or Egyptian ships that came in sight. For the crusade she must provide a considerable army and navy for combined operations and draw on Abyssinia for material and men. For about two decades she acted with vigor. In 1502 Vasco da Gama broke up Arab-Egyptian shipping so thoroughly that in 1504 scarcely any spices reached the Levantine ports or Mediterranean Europe. From 1506 to 1516 Albuquerque, commander of the fleet and after 1509 governor general of the Portuguese Indies, was untiring, aggressive, and triumphant. He captured Ormuz in 1507, thus blockading the Persian Gulf. He strung a chain of outposts from East Africa to China. He laid plans to capture Aden, establish a base inside the Red Sea, burn the Egyptian navy in harbor, and destroy the Moslem holy city of Mecca. He even suggested that engineers be brought from Europe to divert the upper Nile from its course, thus turning Egypt into a desert. Though Albuquerque died before he could seal up the Red Sea, he did reduce and render fitful the traffic from India and points east to Alexandria and Aleppo. Portugal became for a time the leading, and in some years the only, recipient of East Indian produce. Her ships, laden with some European goods and well stocked with gold from Africa, went out regularly, returning to Lisbon with cargoes that were sent on to Antwerp to be sold. The king claimed a royal monopoly of the trade in pepper, his factors and agents tried to keep the price as high as possible, and he seemed to be richly rewarded for the enterprise of his ancestors. It is probable, however, that much of the royal profit was swallowed up in the cost of sustaining the forces needed in the Orient to suppress rivals. It is certain that those rivals were not permanently or completely suppressed. The Turks, who had gone on from capturing Constantinople in 1453 to conquer Syria in 1516 and Egypt in 1517, were eager to revive the old trade routes because of the revenue to be collected from them. Their eagerness was shared by the Venetians, by the French, who were competing more and more with the Italians in the Levant, and by the Arabs. After about 1520 the Portuguese blockade grew weaker, the administration became incompetent or corrupt, the Red Sea could not be closed tight, and Arab bribes brought freedom from restraint. By 1540 at latest, goods were flowing once more in considerable volume through Aleppo and Alexandria to Venice, Ragusa, Marseilles, and other ports. Professor Lane estimates that by 1560 Venice was receiving more pepper than she had done before the trade was interrupted; that shipments through the Red Sea equaled and sometimes exceeded the Lisbon imports; and that the European consumption of pepper increased greatly —perhaps even doubled- between 1500 and 1560. It has been suggested that Portugal's appropriation of the African gold supply had reduced the Italians' ability to pay for what they wanted in the Levant. If that diversion of precious metal was a serious blow, the damage was repaired by the mounting supplies of silver coming from mid-European mines and then by the influx from America.

“There he is!” the hunter exclaimed. “That is the savage man I have brought you to see! As soon as he sees you, he will approach you. Do not be afraid, for I am certain he will not hurt you. Let him get to know you, and teach him what it is to be a human being.” Enkidu was fascinated by the woman, and he spent six days and seven nights with her. He forgot the grassy plain where he had been born, the hills where he had roamed, and the wild animals that had been his companions. Later, when he was ready to rejoin the wild beasts of the plain, they sensed that Enkidu was now a human being. Even the gazelles drew away from him in fright. Enkidu was so surprised by their change in behavior that, at first, he stood completely still. When he tried to rejoin them, he found that he could no longer run with the speed of a gazelle. He was no longer the wild man that he had been. However, he had gained something in return for the speed that he had lost, for he now possessed greater understanding and wisdom. He returned to the woman, sat down at her feet, and looked into her face attentively. The priestess said, “Enkidu, when I look upon you now, I can see that you have become wise like one of the heavenly gods. Why do you still want to roam over the grassy plains with the wild beasts? Leave this wild country to the shepherds and the hunters, and come with me. Let me take you into the strong-walled city of Uruk, to the marketplace and to the sacred Temple of Anu and Ishtar. In Uruk you will meet the mighty King Gilgamesh. He has performed great heroic deeds, and he rules the people of the city like a wild bull. You will love him as you love yourself.”

All three foci of high culture depended on the condition of agriculture. The basis of temple and court was agrarian in that their wealth and power presupposed chiefly arrangements concerning agricultural production. The market depended on agriculture less directly than did temple or court, for the traders brought goods from afar subject to other hazards than that of the local weather, and (provided there were sufficient stored savings) sold their goods in lean years as in fat. Yet, in the long run, the merchants too depended on the state of agriculture and their profits presupposed the peasants' surplus. Even when, as in Syria, mercantile city-states arose which depended primarily on distant trading by sea and land, their trade depended so intimately on the agrarian societies about them that both morally and materially they too lived ultimately from the peasants. Even the pastoralists, including the desert nomads, who depended on the agriculturists for much of their food and goods, were part of the same social complex. Accordingly, the type of social order which was introduced into the agricultural regions (and the areas dependent on them) with the rise of cities may be called agrarian-based or (to be more comprehensive) agrarianate citied society. (I say 'citied', not 'urban', because the society included the peasants, who were not urban though their life reflected the presence of cities.)

The culture of agrarianate citied society can be characterized as a distinct type in contrast both to the pre-literate types of culture that preceded it and to the Modern technicalistic culture that has followed. In contrast to precitied society —even to agricultural society before the rise of cities— it knew a high degree of social and cultural complexity: a complexity represented not only by the presence of cities (or, occasionally, some organizational equivalent to them), but by writing (or its equivalent for recording), and by all that these imply of possibilities for specialization and large-scale intermingling of differing groups, and for the lively multiplication and development of cumulative cultural traditions. Yet the pace of the seasons set by natural conditions imposed limits on the resources available for cultural elaboration, moreover, any economic or cultural development that did occur, above the level implied in the essentials of the symbiosis of town and land, remained precarious and subject to reversal —in contrast to the conditions of Modern times, of our Technical Age, when agriculture tends to become one 'industry' among others, rather than the primary source of wealth (at least on the level of the world economy as a whole).

Furthermore, in contrast to Greece, where civic identities could be subsumed into wider regional ones (for instance, citizens of Athens could define themselves by their deme, city or nationality – e.g. Archarnian, Athenian, Greek), in Phoenicia there was no concept of a common or shared identity beyond the level of the city state.

The larger of these coastal cities specialised in exporting highly sought-after commodities (such as olive oil, wine and wood) whilst importing foreign commodities such as fish and wheat from Cyprus, gems and precious stones from Egypt, and silver from Anatolia.

The Early Iron Age was therefore a period of commercial expansion for the coastal cities of Phoenicia, both at home and overseas. This period of prosperity also resulted in the emergence of urbanisation, an important innovation that would come to be synonymous with the Phoenicians. At Tyre and Sarepta, for instance, architectural innovation and a move towards urbanism led both cities to alter their layout significantly during this period.

Viewed holistically, the evidence from Tyre shows that as the profits from inter-regional exchange increased, the power of the king became progressively more constrained by the city’s wealthy mercantile families who were keen to influence public affairs.

By the dawn of the first millennium, the Phoenician cities had become large industrial and commercial centres which specialised in the manufacture of luxury and prestige items. Due to the exceptionally high prices such items could command, they were either destined to be exchanged in markets outside of the Levant or, less frequently, to satisfy the needs of a very restricted number of wealthy clients within Phoenicia itself.

This perhaps helps to explain why, in comparison with other urban centres in the ancient Near East, Phoenician cities were relatively small in size, ranging from an average of 2–6 hectares (5–15 acres) for smaller cities (such as Berytus and Sarepta) to 40-plus hectares (100-plus acres) for the largest cities (Arwad and Sidon).

Significantly, as evinced in De Dea Syria, the Phoenician cities still showed signs of religious autonomy in the second century CE despite all of the inducements towards syncretism which had been offered firstly by Hellenisation and then by Romanisation.