The Ancient City New Perspectives on Urbanism in the Old and New World

Cities are so common today that we cannot imagine a world without them. In fact, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, and that number is expected to increase to two-thirds in the next century. For most of our history, however, there were no cities. Understandably, scholars want to know why, how, and when urban life began. Was the emergence of the city just a matter of nucleating previously scattered populations, or was it more? As the diverse case studies in this book show, it was much more. When it came time to select a title for this book, we picked The Ancient City for two reasons. One was to honor the scholar who conceived the first book with that title. The second was to draw attention to ancient cities, many of them innovations for their era. These diverse settlements not only have much to tell us about the social, political, religious, and economic conditions of their times but also say something about our own. Since the literature on modern urbanism continues to be far more extensive than that which exists for ancient urbanism, this book contributes to correcting that imbalance. The database on ancient cities has been expanding as a result of ongoing excavations all over the world, but much of that work remains unpublished. These excavations are enabling scholars to document intra-city changes through time, city-to-city