PolledHistory: Weekly Voted: History of Settlements and Citie

 I forgot to put the vote in the end of last time's blog. So, I will do a non-series post this time and then have a vote for a series in the bottom of this post. Also, I think that the Friday nonvote series is discontinued, at least for now. 

At first, people were migratory and nomadic, but eventually started to settle down in settlements, the first of which known is Geobekli Tepe i  modern day Turkey. Many more began to appear everywhere, expanding into societies and cities. Often, they were located on rich areas, such as on the banks of a river.

In the ancient era, there were three major pockets of civilization: the Mediterranean-Near East, South Asia, and East Asia, particularly China. Here, massive cities formed, notable ones including Babylon (Mediterranean-Near East), Carthage (Mediterranean-Near East), Luoyang (East Asia) and later Alexandria (mediterranean), Pataliputra (south asian), Rome, etc.

During the first few centuries AD, cities maxed out at 600 thousand people, and the largest cities were Alexandria, Rome, Luoyang or Antioch. City population began to decline in the 300s as Constantinople became the largest. Cities often had walls and some of which were truly impressive, even to today's standard, with things like sewers, although sewers is actually a very old idea.

Most prominent cities were on water features. The rise of Islam saw the rise of a great city, Babylon, which had a magnificent circular shape, a well known "House of Wisdom", which was a famed library and intellectual center, and tough walls that only evetually succumbed by 1258. Baghdad reached one million people population by 854 AD. However, Baghdad ffell in population. 

In more diffucult places to build, there were still many notable cities, one of which being Timbuktu in the middle of the Sahara in a region called the Sahel, which has some rivers. Still, Timbuktu was a major trade and literary site.

Fast forward some time later and not much notable happened in cities beside the sack of Vijayanagara, a large South Asian city, which was utterly destroyed. By the 1600s, most large cities was either in modernizing Europe or in Asia, which was more ideal than Europe for large amounts of people.

By the industrial era, many cities formed just because of prominence in industrialization, and of course cities and urban planning as a whole adapted to new technologies. Aviation also had some effect in cities.

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