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This settlement had an estimated 10,000–20,000 inhabitants in 4000 bc, rising to between 60,000 and 140,000 after a massive protective wall, ascribed to King Gilgamesh, was built around 2900 bc. Like most specialists, Woolf prefers to give the title of first city to Uruk, in Mesopotamia. Credit: Salvatore Laporta/Kontrolab/LightRocket via Getty The Roman city of Pompeii, in what is now Italy, was buried by a volcanic eruption in ad 79. One option is to analyse the water supply to work out how many people it could have served, but this reveals maximum carrying capacity rather than use, and struggles to take into account public baths and fountains.
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As Woolf observes, it is tricky to determine population size in early societies without written records.
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Estimates range from a few hundred to 2,000 or 3,000. But Jericho’s population at the time is uncertain. It was founded before 9000 bc and about a millennium later had a wall - the earliest such barrier discovered. A prime candidate for the world’s first city is perhaps Jericho in what is now the Palestinian territories. In Japan, a population greater than 50,000 is required. In today’s Nicaragua, notes Woolf, any settlement with street lights and electricity counts as a city. When did cities first appear? The answer depends on definitions. He wryly notes that rats and humans thrive in cities, because both can survive on diverse food sources and cope with prolonged periods of hunger. The famous centres of antiquity were “far less grandiose” - Athenian assemblies, for example, debated in the open air. He explains that the neoclassical buildings of modern cities, such as London’s British Museum, give a false impression. Woolf synthesizes intriguing insights from the humanities, social sciences, climatology, geology and biology. It focuses on the hundreds of ancient Mediterranean cities that sprang up during this time, including Alexandria, Antioch, Athens, Byzantium and Carthage, as well as Rome. The Life and Death of Ancient Cities spans from the Bronze Age, starting in the fourth millennium bc, to the early part of the Middle Ages, in the first millennium ad. That was in the reign of the emperor Augustus (27 bc to ad 14). Woolf is an expert on ancient Rome, the city with the highest population in antiquity - at its peak around 2,000 years ago, a mind-boggling one million people lived there, some 0.3% of the global population. His latest book is a deeply researched and ambitious “natural history” of the origins and growth of urbanism. Basic supply networks have been revealed as fragile, and the densely packed social groups that are engines of income, support and enjoyment have become a source of peril.Īs the pandemic forces us to contemplate the future of cities - three-quarters of the world’s people could live in urban areas by 2100 - historian Greg Woolf examines their past. The coronavirus pandemic has shaken our faith in urban life, as lockdowns have emptied streets that are home to more than half the world’s population. They have also incubated hunger, violence, war, inequality and disease - as we’ve so painfully experienced this year. Press (2020)įor millennia, cities have generated power, wealth, creativity, knowledge and magnificent buildings. The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History Greg Woolf Oxford Univ.
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The great bath at Mohenjo-daro, a city of the Indus civilization built around 2500 bc in what is now Pakistan.