This video is sponsored by Nebula.
Real quick, I just wanted to say
that I produced six videos in the Great Cities series
and the most recent one on Cairo is up on Nebula right now.
If you're interested in the ancient origin of cities,
you'll love that video.
Nebula gave me a higher budget to produce those
and they're worth a watch.
There's a link to the video in the description below.
Jericho in Palestine could make a good case
for being the oldest city in the world.
UNESCO says that it was founded around 10,000 BCE,
right about the time
humans started domesticating plants and animals,
a period known as the Neolithic.
This is sometimes referred to as the Stone Age
because people hadn't figured out how to use metals.
It was also before writing.
Jericho was founded by the people of the Natufian culture.
It would make sense that they would be
one of the first cultures to build a city.
They were hunter-gatherers,
but moved quite a bit less than most.
They are, in fact, considered the first sedentary culture,
settling down in 12,000 BCE.
That's 2,000 years before they figured out agriculture.
In 2018, researchers found evidence
that Natufians may have been the first culture
to brew beer around this time.
I'm not saying that there's a correlation between beer
and wanting to stay put,
but I'm not not saying that either.
For sedentary Natufians,
locating their first real settlement
at the site of Jericho makes a lot of sense.
It's located in a little oasis of green
near the Jordan River in the Dead Sea.
Its natural springs and fertile soil likely attracted them
and Jericho started as a village
in the center of a small agricultural area.
This was right around the time
that they were domesticating plants and animals
and Jericho was simply a great place to do that.
You can actually still see the location of Ancient Jericho
located to the northwest of the modern city.
We can safely say that it was not a peaceful time back then
as Jericho was known as the first city with fortifications.
Residents also built a ditch,
as well as a tower with 22 stairs,
making it one of the earliest examples
of a monumental fortification.
Within the first 1,000 years of existence,
Jericho residents developed irrigation
that helped increase their urban population
to an estimated two or 3,000 people.
The original buildings were round,
but rectilinear buildings came later.
This is a common theme in these Neolithic cities.
Many start with round buildings
and eventually develop rectilinear ones.
Right angles are sort of an evolutionary step
in city building.
When you have buildings,
streets and people all clustered together
like in Neolithic Jericho you have a city.
And, fundamentally,
these are some of the same building blocks we use
to build cities today,
but it can be hard to remember the ancient origins of cities
when our cities look like this one here.
We can see evidence of older versions of our cities,
historic buildings and structures from previous eras.
Some cities even have structures
that are millennia old still in use,
but Jericho and the other first cities go so far back
that archeologists are still figuring out
how they were constructed and why they were constructed.
In this video,
we're gonna look at what life was like just before cities
to understand and answer the question
of why humans invented cities.
Then we'll look at how they looked and how they functioned.
Let's hop into our DeLorean after the bike bell!
(bike bell ringing)
Humans, homo sapiens, have been roaming this planet
for the last 300,000 years or so.
For majority of this time up until 12,000 years ago,
humans were hunter-gatherers.
In fact, the practice of hunting and gathering
goes back two million years to our pre-human ancestors.
Most humans in this era lived in small groups
of maybe a hundred or so and lived a nomadic lifestyle.
They had to have territories as large as 500 square miles
to find all the food they needed to survive.
Needless to say, this lifestyle didn't facilitate
the construction of much human settlement.
Human groups lived in caves, huts or tents,
temporary structures, really, but around 12,000 years ago
humans began what we today call the Neolithic Revolution.
Those hunter-gatherers were familiar with cereal grains
like wheat, barley and rye.
They began to understand how they grew
and how to cultivate them.
In the ideal conditions
found in the Fertile Crescent at that time,
these humans began to plant farms
and curtail their nomadic lifestyle.
They built irrigation to water their crops,
one of the first kinds of permanent infrastructure.
Neolithic people began to build buildings to live in
and house themselves.
As they began to domesticate animals
structures were built to house them too.
Now, these Neolithic humans
didn't have to learn how to build permanent structures
out of nothing.
They were nomadic,
but they often returned to the same place year after year
and built permanent structures there,
oftentimes for religious reasons.
This is one of the interpretations of Göbekli Tepe,
a well-known archeological site of this era
located in Southern Turkey.
It was initially believed that this area
was only seasonally inhabited
and served a religious purpose.
New evidence, however, suggests that humans
may have permanently inhabited this site
as early as 9000 BCE.
The more that we learn about the Neolithic era
the more it becomes clear that this happened
over thousands of years gradually
and at different times and in different places.
Therefore, there's no one point in the origin of cities
that we can point to and say,
aha, yes, you were the first city.
Jericho might be the first-ever city,
but it could be just as likely
that the first city was built somewhere else first,
thrived for a thousand years and then disappeared.
In fact, many scholars don't refer to the settlements
of the Neolithic era to be cities at all,
but instead proto-cities.
Proto-cities were larger than their predecessors,
but really only had about several thousand people at most.
They often lacked things like a town center, monuments,
major marketplaces,
things that we might associate with cities today.
A great example is the proto-city of Çatalhöyük
built around 7000 BCE in present-day Turkey.
It was nothing more than residential buildings
crammed together in sort of a honeycomb.
If you lived in the center of the city,
you had to get to your place
by walking on the roofs of your neighbors.
They hadn't really figured out
the whole concept of streets just yet.
What were these first proto-cities like?
Well, for the inhabitants
they probably weren't actually that great.
Switching to agriculture
actually make health outcomes worse,
and life expectancy dropped.
Cereal-based diets of the time were less nutritious
than hunting and gathering.
Disease and parasites spread more easily
with people living in close quarters.
These new proto-cities
also had to deal with social upheaval.
Settlement in agriculture
meant that farms were producing a surplus
and not everyone had to be involved
in the production of food.
This was generally a good thing,
but it also created the beginnings of social hierarchy.
You could have a permanent religious class of priests,
or a class of merchants and craftsmen.
Agriculture and cities
also introduced the idea of owning land.
Paired with social hierarchy
and you have the makings of wealth accumulation
and inequality, awesome,
but even with all the downsides
of this early form of urban living
people clearly found proto-cities advantageous.
Many of them sprung up in the Fertile Crescent
in this time period.
Before we move to the Bronze Age
I wanna mention one more thing
about why humans invented cities.
Yes, agriculture was a big cause, but not the only one.
Some cities were invented for religious significance
like Göbekli Tepe.
The Neolithic temples on the island of Malta
are another great example of these early temple settlements.
Now in the Bronze Age
city building began to get more sophisticated
and we see the rise of actual cities, not just proto-cities.
There's no one answer
to what was the earliest and oldest true city,
but some of the contenders are Eridu, Uruk, and Ur,
all of which are situated in present-day Iraq.
The Indus Valley,
the western floodplain settlements
of the Yellow River in China,
cities in Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Guatemala
and the Yucatan region of Mexico
are just some of the many other places where cities began
in the millennia between 3300 BCE and 200 CE.
One of the hallmarks of cities of this era
is a more sophisticated town plan.
We saw in Jericho that that proto-city
had more of an organic form.
Jericho sort of looked like an amoeba or a bean,
or something,
and the building seemed to be arranged haphazardly,
but during the beginnings of the Bronze Age
there were cities with grid plans.
Dholavira, a city in the Indus Valley civilization
is an example of a rectilinear plan.
The neighboring city of Mohenjo-daro
also had a gridded city with roughly even blocks.
Two main axes were designed wider than the rest.
There was a citadel to the west and a wall for protection.
Another hallmark of cities of this era was population.
Now, as I mentioned before
proto-cities could have two, three, 4,000 people,
but cities in the Bronze Age
could have tens of thousands of people.
The Bronze Age coincided with the rise of Ancient Egypt
best known for constructing the pyramids.
Memphis was the largest and most important city of that era.
The city boasted a population of 30,000 people.
This was probably the largest city in the world
4,000 years ago.
Eventually, Memphis would fall into ruin
and be eclipsed by a new city to the north,
what we now call Cairo.
Cairo's origins were well after Ancient Egypt
and actually began during the Roman Empire.
That's a topic for another video,
another video found on Nebula.
It chronicles the entire history of Cairo
and includes all of the invasions, battles and rulers
that shaped it.
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