Urbanization

Origins of Cities

The first permanent human settlements usually are estimated to have begun some 10,000 years ago (8000 BC). Urban life appears to have developed independently some 7,000 years ago in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China. The early cities in Sumer have been the focus of much attention, such as in V. Gordon Childe's well-known and often-reprinted essay “The Urban Revolution,” as it was here that humans first developed writing, mathematics, and other sciences, as well as a complex division of labor, class-based social structure, and governmental systems. And it was in ancient Sumer, in Ur, the city of Abraham, that the religious ideas that gave rise to the three Old Testament religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) were born. These cities were the site of the Great Traditions that would spread to civilizations in the Middle East, Europe, and north Africa; similar developments in China have been less well studied, although the written records of the Chinese state are superior to those of the West.

Recorded human history begins with Herodotus of Halicarnassus's Histories (written ca. 330 BC), an account of the Greek and Persian wars and description of travels across the Greek world. Athens emerged as the dominant power in the Greek world and is often considered the beginning point of Western culture. While many Greek city states established colonies throughout the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, the first urban civilization was that of Rome, where cities were linked by roads that connected the farthest reaches of the empire and Egyptian territories produced wheat that was imported to feed the population of the capital city. Roman cities were considerably larger than the earlier Greek city-states, with the population of Rome reaching as much as a million persons at the height of the empire, and administrative and trading centers such as Palmyra (in modern-day Syria) reaching populations of around 200,000 persons.

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