Verticality, Part V: Global Threads
How Defense and God provided the initial thrust for the verticality narrative
This chapter is part of a series that compose the main verticality narrative. The full series is located here.
Once our ancestors ceased to be nomadic and began establishing permanent settlements, two major threads of our development emerged. The first was the need to defend our territories against others; once we’d accomplished this, our attention shifted to our relationship with the unknown, or God. Each of these threads would evolve over time, and each was approached through the lens of verticality.
Defense
One major question for our ancestors was where to locate our permanent settlements. This was a tricky decision because resources were limited and mistakes in the early days could be deadly. Consider the world our ancestors were living in for a moment. It was a perilous place. We knew the members of our tribe, but any outsiders could be friendly or hostile. There were no rules or laws to govern behavior, so we had to keep our guard up and protect against external threats. This is why so many of our earliest settlements were built for defensive purposes.[1] One way we did this was to use verticality. When the landscape provided high and low places, we would locate our settlements at high places that were difficult to access. This involved more risk than building down below for a few reasons. First, it took much more time and effort to sustain a life in a high place because people and goods had to be transported up and down. Second, there was most often a limited amount of high land we could build on, which meant land for agriculture was usually placed outside the settlement and down in the valley. Third, there was a risk of death from falling when steep slopes, cliffs or gorges were present.
A drawing of Civita di Bagnoregio Citadel in Italy from 1874. The settlers of this site were no doubt interested in defending their village.
The ancient world is full of citadels and towns located in high places that were difficult to access.[2] When the natural landscape didn’t have high places, we created our own by building up a mound of earth, called a tell in the Middle East or a motte in Medieval Europe. A few notable examples of ancient settlements in high places include the Mycenae Citadel in Greece, Erbil Citadel in Iraq, the Citadel of Aleppo in Syria, Civita di Bagnoregio in Italy, the Gozo Cittadella in Malta, Citadel of Ghazni in Afghanistan, Machu Picchu in Peru, the Sigiriya Fortress in Sri Lanka, Acoma Pueblo and the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings in the Southwest United States, Taktsang Dzong Monastery in Bhutan and Potala Palace in Tibet. It took much time and effort to build at these locations, but the benefits clearly outweighed the risks, otherwise we wouldn’t see the decision being made so many times throughout history and all over the world. It was clearly important to these people to be above the surrounding landscape.
Being above your surroundings means you can take advantage of gravity and height during conflicts. This concept, commonly referred to as occupy the high ground, can be traced all the way back to Sun-tzu in fifth century BC China.[3] In addition to locating a settlement on high ground, individual structures began to develop in order to further meet the needs of defense. Two of these structures were towers and walls, and they would become staples of defensive architecture throughout history. Both of these structures use verticality for defense by creating high ground to occupy and defend from. Other defensive structures that utilize verticality include mottes, trenches and ramparts, but these constructions aren’t as prolific or crucial to our early settlements as towers and walls. Another reason towers and walls became so common was most likely their connection to trees and mountains, respectively, but more on this in the next chapter.
Throughout history, we can see the influence that defense had on people and their architecture. In general, the level of this influence is a function of how developed a civilization is and how hostile its neighbors are. The less developed it is, the more defense is a requirement for individual buildings within the village or town. The more hostile the neighbors are, the more defense is required for the village or town as a whole. In general, as a society develops and the rule of law becomes commonplace, the need for defense wanes and the built environment becomes more open. Defensive architecture doesn’t completely go away, however.
The concept of occupy the high ground has expanded over time to include non-military applications as well. Real estate prices are nearly always more expensive for lots on higher ground or for spaces on higher floors of a building. Houses and residential buildings of today usually locate the most private places (the bedrooms) on the highest level or farthest from the entrance. Even when experiencing a new neighborhood, you can get a sense of how safe it is (or is thought to be) by paying attention to how defensive the architecture is. If you’re driving down a residential street and all the homes have high walls, fences and/or gates along their lot lines, or the windows all have iron or steel bars covering them, these are clear indications that the owners of these buildings are protecting themselves from external threats. On the other hand, if that same residential street has green lawns without fences and the buildings have large, unprotected windows, the residents must feel safe enough to do away with the defensive means employed in the first example.
Defensive architecture provided our ancestors with protection from external threats, but another thread would begin to emerge alongside it. As our permanent settlements developed and were defended, villages grew into towns and then into cities. Successful places saw their population grow much larger than the original tribe who established the place. Combine this with a stable food supply through agriculture and a better division of labor from the higher populations, and the people began to have more free time to let their minds wander. As we’ll discuss next, they quickly began to ponder verticality and the nature of the surface, the sky, and the underground.
God and Ego
One consequence of becoming self-aware from the Cognitive Revolution was our ability to conceptualize things not present to our senses. As discussed previously, our ancestors slowly gained the ability to have ideas. This ability provided us with many opportunities for progress, but for our purposes here we’ll focus on one major one: theories about unknown or abstract elements in our environment, or religion. Throughout this text, these ideas, theories, and religions will be collectively referred to as God.
A favorite theme of these theories was the nature of the sky and the underground. Our ancestors didn’t have modern science to help them understand their environment, so they looked to the sky and created theories about the movements of the objects we see up there. As we’ll see in the next chapter, many of our earliest constructions were related to the sky in some way. These were attempts by our ancestors to connect themselves with the world above us, and they spent great amounts of time and effort to do so. This also created a duality between the sky and the underground, with many belief systems based on this duality. The sky is generally seen as a positive place, and one associated with paradise. It was a place to aspire to. The underground is generally seen as a common or negative place, and one associated with punishment. It was a place to escape from. This duality of the sky and the underground can be found the world over. The Ancient Greeks and Romans had Elysium and Tartarus. The Norse had Valhalla and Niflhel. Christianity has Heaven and Hell. Judaism has the Olam Haba and She'ol. Islam has Jannah and Jahannam. Buddhism has the Devas Realm and the Naraka Realm. Hinduism has Swarga and Naraka.
Religion and God have had a profound effect on civilizations throughout time. This 1884 illustration from Cram’s Unrivaled Atlas of the World shows the tallest buildings in the world from the time, and nearly all of them are based on God in some way.
Our early ideas and beliefs about God combined nicely with our tribal nature. This led religion to galvanize massive numbers of people toward a common goal. In our early days, these belief systems were usually based on a system of human values that come from some sort of superhuman or other-worldly order. This alone was not enough to unite millions of followers, however. In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari presents two elements that help to unite vast and disparate groups of humans. First was universality, meaning the beliefs must be true always and everywhere. Second, it must be missionary, meaning the religion must insist on spreading to everyone.[4] The effectiveness of these systems throughout history is hard to ignore. Think about all the major construction efforts over time that humans have built. Nearly all of them were based on God in some way, and most required massive amounts of people to cooperate (or be forced to cooperate) in order to make them a reality.
The profound influence of God on our ancestors created a duality within us. All the time and effort put into satisfying God was time taken from the needs of humanity. Throughout this text, I’ll refer to the various needs of humanity as Ego. For example, let’s say a small village is thinking about building a temple for their god. This is an important choice for the villagers, because all the resources that will go into the building’s design, construction, and maintenance is time that could have been spent farming or building houses. This creates a tension between the needs of God and the needs of Ego.[5]
The tension between God and Ego is a timeless one, and along with Defense these concepts have been closely tied to the story of verticality. As we’ll see in the following chapters, our original need for Defense would be replaced by the God/Ego struggle. Each would come to dominate our attempts to escape the surface for much of our history, with God dominating the storyline until modern times. With Modernity came the rise of Ego-centric constructions. We’ll begin this journey by exploring our ancestors‘ ancient civilizations and their first attempts to escape the surface through their architecture.
Keep reading: Verticality, Part VI: Archetypes.
[1]: Semper, Gottfried. "The Four Elements of Architecture: A Contribution to the comparative Study of Architecture." In The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, 101-29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1851. 112.
[2]: Ferree, Barr. Primitive Architecture. New York, 1890. 30-31.
[3]: Sun-tzu. The Art of War. Translated by John Minford. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. 63.
[4]: Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2015. 210.
[5]: This doesn’t mean religious constructions are bad or negative, per se. Throughout time, many religious structures have served to unify communities around them and give people a place to exercise their spirituality. They can have wonderfully positive effects on their communities, but the zero-sum game of resources still creates a choice to be pondered.