Evolution of Politan City Planning

Prehistoric Polis (2000 BP - 0 AFC)

How can there be a "Prehistoric Polis" if Polis was founded in 0 AFC?

Polis is traditionally said to have been founded in 0 AFC -- indeed, the years of the Byzlander calendar are numbered After the Founding of the City, the city being (as it almost always is in Byzland) Polis.

Archaeological evidence, however, suggests there has been human habitation at what is now Polis since at least 2000 BP (ironically, Before Polis), and whether the mythological foundation of the City happened exactly as legend has it is rather questionable at best.

New archeological dating techniques have led historians to look at parts of Polis that were previously thought to have been built as part of the "founding" in a new light. In fact, it now seems almost certain that Polis was home to one of several castellanies in the greater Byzas region.

At this time, the region was populated mostly by small villages, homesteads, trading settlements, and perhaps the occasional town. Concepts of unified states or taxation had not yet developed. Instead, one of many types of settlement was the citadel compound. These would act as centers of gravity for the surrounding area, providing a centralized place for commerce and trade while providing protection for the surrounding area. While the exact terms, structures, and polities used varied from place to place, historians have adopted the umbrella term "castellany" for the area under the influence of a specific citadel and "castellan" for the leader of that citadel.

The leaders of smaller villages, towns, or even other citadels would come to the citadel, swear fealty to the castellan, and become their client in return for certain responsibilities from the castellan as their patron. Modern readers will be tempted to see this as a kind of feudal fiefdom structure, but it was much fuzzier than that. Instead, modern readers should think of what the local "big city" is for town dwellers in their area, and how some of their neighbors might support a sports team from one city but commute to another. (Unless, of course, their local big city is modern Polis.) Some homesteaders might agree to sell their harvest at one citadel but also agree to patrol a part of a nearby trading road for another citadel, for example. Consider how a person knows when it is day and when it is night, but there's not one moment one can pinpoint where day becomes night or night becomes day -- similarly, one might know when one is in one castellany or another, but there will be no clear dividing line between them.

It appears that such a citadel was located on the Skopelion in what is now modern Polis. From this location, it could regulate all water traffic from the River Amnis and the Ekvoli through the Narrows into the Byzic Straits. It also could provide rapid response to protect local homesteaders and villages from banditry and piracy or provide a safe haven for those clients if needed. As such, it became a key trading hub for the region, so traders and traveling merchants were more likely to know its language, use its units, and bring the best to the citadel.

We do not know the name of this citadel, as the written language at this time was still mostly ideographic in nature, but later Politans called it the Arx.

The Layout of the Arx

The Forecourt

To reach the Arx, one would have walked up a switchback path cut into the limestone cliff of the Skopelion until you reached the area which historians call the Forecourt. For someone arriving at the Forecourt for the first time, it would have appeared like a shelf cut into the limestone, roughly 127;0 cubits deep and 140;0 cubits wide. At first glance, it would have appeared that the cliff continued upward, but in actuality it was a wall built out of limestone using cyclopean masonry -- rough-hewn boulders of various sizes, the gaps of which are also filled in with smaller stones. At the base of the wall, a mud-brick glacis covered in gleaming white lime plaster reached to a height of 7;0 cubits. The rough stone wall extended into the sky for another 18;0 cubits.

(Note for non-Byzic readers: Byzic languages use base-12/dozenal numbers. These numbers use ; as the dozenal point, and 10 and 11 are thus represented either by A and B or X and E in dozenal. 127;0 is one gross, two dozens, and seven ones, or 129.0 in base-10/dozenal, 140;0 is one gross, four dozens, and zero ones, or 192.0 in decimal, 7;0 is seven ones, or 7.0 in decimal, and 18;0 is one dozen and eight ones, or 20.0 in decimal.)

In the exact center of the wall stood a square gatehouse built out of similar cyclopean stone A;B cubits in length and A;B cubits in width, with a gate located at a height of 11;6 cubits. The gate, 10;0 cubits tall, was made of heavy wood and reinforced with bronze. It was a simple pivot gate -- it rotated around a central stone socket, and when closed, heavy wooden bars could be slid into place to keep it from rotating open. The gate, however, did not face out over the Forecourt, but rather to the gatehouse's left (the right of a viewer looking across the Forecourt.)

Immediately outside the gate, a series of wooden planks bridged over a 2;0-cubit gap. These planks were designed to be quickly removable -- each night, the planks would be picked up and carried back into the gatehouse, and in an emergency they could be picked up and dropped into the Forecourt. The planks connected to a mudbrick ramp 127;0 cubits in length that hugged the wall.

Complicating matters, the Forecourt was used as an informal market, with traders and merchants setting up tents and portable stalls to hawk their wares. Guards from the Arx would have patrolled the aisles of the Forecourt to maintain order and to keep the first 30;0 cubits before the wall clear, but would otherwise have not enforced any specific regulations -- it was a true case of caveat emptor. To get through the wall, then, a traveler would have had to make their way between all the stalls and vendors to their right until they reached the base of the ramp, then walk up the ramp and across the bridge into the gatehouse.

Behind the forecourt and the initial cyclopean stone, the wall was built out of mudbrick treated with white lime plaster and reinforced with timber. The thickness of the wall ranged from 23;0 cubits thick at its base to 7;0 cubits at the top, where a 1;0 cubit-thick parapet protected soldiers walking along the 6;0 cubit-thick wall walk. This wall, which served to fence off the Forecourt from the rest of the Skopelion, also served as the back wall of the Theater Gate.

The Theater Gate

The interior of the gatehouse was a room A;0 by A;0 cubits in size and dominated by a central pillar built out of timber and mudbrick, forcing large groups to form smaller single- or double-file lines to get around it. The ceiling of this gatehouse, 7;0 cubits above the floor, was a timber grate with holes 1;2 x 1;2 cubits in size and covered with wooden planks so that the guards above could remove a plank and drop stones, spears, or boiling liquids onto an enemy that entered the gatehouse. The entrance out of the gatehouse through the wall was flanked by stone grooves, 0;9 cubits wide, so that the defenders could drop a limestone portcullis and seal off the interior entirely as a last resort.

Travelers who made it through the gatehouse would find themselves at the top of the ritual Amphitheater. Attackers would need to split and go down one of two aisles before finding themselves faced with an open pit, 5;0 cubits long and 6;0 cubits deep, at the base of the stage, with no obvious way to climb up from the pit to the stage. Sluice gates embedded in the walls lining the sides of the amphitheater could open to fill this ritual pool with water from the castellany's cisterns, drowning any attackers that managed to reach that far. (While most of the side walls were made of treated mud-brick, this portion of the walls were made of fired masonry.) However, travelers arriving and going on a normal day would find that two stone piers, located in the middle of the ritual pool, were used to support two sets of two wooden planks, each plank being 2;6 cubits long, 3;4 cubits wide, and 0;2 cubits thick. These four planks and two piers made two bridges over the ritual pool, one for incoming and one for outgoing traffic. In the event of an attack, the planks could be lifted and brought back onto the stage or, in an emergency, dropped into the ritual pool for later retrieval. The piers were just low enough that they would have been just barely covered by the waters of the pool, meaning that jumping to the pier and then to the stage would have been incredibly risky for an attacker.

The stage itself was made of fired masonry, and the entire back wall of the amphitheater was built with ashlar limestone. There were two bastion towers on either side of the stage, with entranceways from the stage to the towers and from the second floor of the towers to a smaller platform located 8;0 cubits over the stage. Both the main stage and this platform could be used for ritual purposes -- in fact, archaeologists have found evidence that the main ritual altar was located precisely in the center of the stage along the stage wall, with a smaller raised dais in directly above it on the second level. Two viewing boxes were located on the side walls above the sluice gates and the orchestra pits at a height of 12;0 cubits above ground level, providing prestigious views for the castellan and advantageous defensive positions in case of attack.

Travelers who passed through the stage and through the "stage left" or "stage right" bastion doors would again face gatehouses with similar pivot gates and, in the event that attackers get this far, similar stone portcullises as the main gatehouse that could be dropped to seal off the exits. Because the stage was actually A;6 cubits below ground level, travelers then would have ascended up 21;0 steps to reach actual ground level and the Yard of the Arx.

It must be noted that it would have been rare for someone to completely traverse the Theater Gate. Clients arriving to meet with the castellan as patron would have been received in the Amphitheater itself and would likely not have been accepted into the Yard. Traders without any connection to the Arx would not even have been allowed into the Amphitheater and would have remained out in the Forecourt. Only residents of the Arx and those they invited would have been allowed into the Yard and thus into the Arx itself. Rituals linking the Arx and its castellan with the clients of the castellany would be administered from the stage.

The Amphitheater, in fact, served as a type of market when it was not being used for rituals or defense. Its quasi-subterranean position and the evaporative cooling from the ritual pool meant that the climate was much more agreeable than the Forecourt or the bare ground of the Skopelion, and various Arx officials would oversee the goings-on from the raised dais on the second level. The various market leaders would assign stall locations, with the locations closest to the stage being the most sought-after, enforce tax collection, and then would open the theater for trading with a trumpet blast. The presence of clay tablets with precursors to early Byzic script suggests that the market may have also had elements akin to a stock market or futures trading as well.