Rise of Cities Part 3: The Earliest Cities in Human History

The first steps towards urban life

Depiction of a Mesopotamian king as master of animals found in an Egyptian ivory knife at Nekhen, one of the world’s first cities. Image source: Wikimedia.

The history of humanity is one of humans taking one step at a time before achieving a breakthrough. After thousands of years of experimentation, favorable climatic conditions following the end of the Ice Age led to the Neolithic revolution. Settlements started growing in size resulting in the rise of proto-cities.

Neolithic farmers made important strides in sciences, art, and architecture, as we saw in the previous post. The next step was to crack the code of urbanization.

In this post and the next, we will discuss some of the first cities in human history. You may wonder why two posts? I want to distinguish between “the earliest cities” and the “oldest cities,” since these terms mean different things to different people.

The “earliest cities” are the first cities built by humans that are no longer inhabited. For example, the legen…