First Cities

Before there were cities, there were no strangers. Then, in a handful of river valleys and plains across the world, thousands of people who were not kin decided to live side by side — and everything changed.The First Cities is a world tour of the urban beginning, told one excavation at a time. Walk the tower of Jericho and the streetless rooftops of Çatalhöyük. Stand in Uruk as clerks press the first writing into clay — not poems, but beer rations. Descend into the Royal Tombs of Ur, pace the drained grid streets of Mohenjo-daro, read the cracks in Anyang's oracle bones, and climb Monks Mound at Cahokia, the great earthen city north of Mexico.Margaret Selwyn follows the archaeology honestly: population figures are hedged where they are guesses, the Hanging Gardens are treated as the debate they are, undeciphered scripts are admitted to be undeciphered, and no collapse is ever blamed on a single cause.Inside you will discover:Why Göbekli Tepe's temple may be older than the farming that supposedly made temples possibleHow granaries, seals and ration bowls turned surplus into power — and writing into a bookkeeping toolWhat Mohenjo-daro's drains and wells achieved millennia before modern sanitationHow cities flourished without kings at Çatalhöyük and Jenne-jeno — and without coins almost everywhereWhy some cities were abandoned within centuries while Jericho and Damascus endured for millenniaWho this book is forFor readers of narrative history and archaeology, museum-goers and heritage travellers, and anyone who lives in a city today and wonders when — and why — we first chose the crowd.Open the gate. The first experiment in living together is still running, and its ruins are the instruction manual.