I’ve been on a bit of a human history journey here lately, basically just jumping around various dates and eras to see what we know about the people of the time.
What occurs to me and what I haven’t come across yet, is how do towns and cities even get started? If I have come across that, I didn’t rightly understand what I was reading.
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A few different reasons. Good farmland will attract people so they will move to an area. Then support infrastructure will come in around them. Other resources, like mines will similarly attract people and support businesses/people will move to the area. Major transportation routes are a key part of this and amenities will be built, at varying distances between major stops for travelers, generally at least a day apart from other stops. Ports will attract people because of the ships coming in and the trade goods they bring in. After trains became a thing people started moving to areas close to train tracks in order to use those for transporting the goods they produce.
Essentially it starts out as an area people move to for some resource or another and then other infrastructure comes in. And it just keeps expanding from there.
Agriculture. If you’re a hunter-gatherer culture you generally have to be nomadic or at least pretty small, otherwise you rapidly exhaust your resources. The invention of agriculture allowed people to stay put and farm in one spot. As people got better at farming they started producing more than they could eat, so they had a surplus to trade for other things – so people started specialising in producing that other stuff, rather than farming. And those people needed to be somewhere where all the farmers could come to them to trade, so they started living in a town roughly in the centre of a bunch of farms. Now you have a town full of craftsmen supplying the farms – generally via a market. But now you need someone to keep order at the market, and someone to keep everyone honest with regard to weights and measures (otherwise your farmers might go to another town) so you need a town council and a civil service… and suddenly you’re a city.
We can only speculate how cities like Sumeria were originally settled. But I think the American West is a good microcosm of the process.
The American government more or less just told settlers “if you build a farm out west, the land it’s on is yours”. So that’s what settlers did. Now all these people live in the middle of no where, living off the land, but they still want to trade for things amongst each other. So every few days, they would meet and trade and talk and pray and whatever else they needed to do. Typically, this was located wherever the local church decided to set up, because everyone had to go there every Sunday anyway. Eventually, some settlers who did something other than farm would arrive, and they would set up shop at that meeting place, because that’s where the trade is. More and more of those non-farmers would show up, trade with each other, and attract more people. And before you know it you have a town.
Strategic location: near major crossroad, or a confluence of rivers, or a river ford, or a mountain pass, or a water source, or a good natural port, or generally in an area with disbursed population like a farming community
Tactical (defensible) location: on a hill, or a cliff, or a peninsula, etc
Take a little journey. You are a hunter/gatherer leaving Africa for the first time. You move up to the shore of the Mediterranean, and find fertile soil.
Over time, you develop skills to actually plant the crops you need for food. You learn to domesticate animals. But you are still nomadic. You continue north.
As these skills develop, you begin to create some levels of permanent settlements, where you can keep your domesticated animals and tend to your crops. Other people move in near you. There are even community built sites (Gobekli Teppe) so groups can gather. But the nomadic life is still part of your understanding.
You move north to find new places to settle. But run into impassable mountains. You follow them East until you hit a river. Farther east is more mountains, so you follow the river south. And you wind up in an incredible river valley, with fertile soil and access to everything you could need. Farther on, you hit a sea, so your nomadic journey is at an end. You settle in and make your home in that river valley.
More people join you. There is nowhere else for them to go, and the land is perfect. Settlements get larger. They begin to join together. There begins to be cooperation between neighboring settlements. Society grows to the point where people can specialize. Not everyone needs to farm, because the farmers can support everyone. Not everyone needs to hunt, because there is enough food for everyone.
People begin to invent. They build houses. They take up trades. Society begins to become more substantial. People even have more time for leisure activities and philosophizing. Some people learn how to administrate and organize society around religious centers, and the settlements grow. Sooner or later, you have a city. You call it Uruk. And there is a neighboring one called Ur. And Eridu. You have priests and kings. You have a society. Then it’s all downhill from there.
As a note, this is generic for ELI5. The first actual city appears to be in Turkey. More of an urban area than Golbekli Teppe. It formed in much the same way as I described here, but I skipped over it to get to the importance of Uruk, Ur, and Eridu.
I go with those who put trade ahead of agriculture. I side with those who believe the exchange market formed the first centre of a town before farms and farmers and specialists did. I believe we were traders before we were farmers.
– Reliable, clean source of drinking water.
– Protection – escarpments, hillocks or cliffs with a good view of the surrounding country.
– Food – reliable hunting grounds.
Generally these are the reasons people choose to settle in a place – you need all three for a truly good settlement.
So some group of people who are nomadic or have been displaced find an ideal spot, with running water, forests nearby with game and some sort of protection against the elements and against warring raiding parties, such as height/rock formations. They decide to stop and see if they can eek out an existence and before long they are thriving, building walls and planting crops. The reliable agriculture provides enough for them and enough for storing as grain for the winter but also a surplus that they do not need – which they can sell for other things that will help them with their settlement.
Soon the settlement grows into a hamlet, then a village with multiple trades on site. A village might get larger and larger until it needs a perimeter wall to protect its most precious aspects such as a blacksmith, armorer, mill, grain stores etc. Soon, before you know it, you have a town.
Agriculture developed slowly over time, with increasing complexity. It would start with hunter-gatherer groups regularly returning to abundant areas to harvest them. Then, since humans are very clever, they would figure out ways to help plants in that area grow more food. Things like killing pests and removing weeds. This would result in both increasing effort and increasing yield. So more time was spent managing these crops, and less time was spent elsewhere hunting and gathering. That time would result in more food produced, meaning that the cultivated crops would make up a greater fraction of the caloric intake of the people cultivating them. Greater complexity could result in even more yield. Once you start tilling soil, sowing seeds, selectively breeding crops, making fertilizer, and building irrigation systems, farming becomes a full time job, and it produces enough food to become the primary food source in a society. It also produces enough food to sustain a much larger population.
Now you end up with a sedentary society that focuses primarily on cultivating crops. Hunting and gathering become a supplemental food source, and being nomadic is no longer advantageous. The main goal of society becomes agriculture. Now there is enough surplus that not everyone has to be dedicated to food production. People can specialize into different roles, and societal complexity continues to increase. Without a focus on mobility, people can start making things that they don’t have to be able to carry with them. Buildings to live in, walls for protection, heavy tools like plows and mills. Pretty soon you have a village. Societal complexity can continue to increase from there until eventually there are supercomputers, space ships, and nuclear weapons.
As for location, cities start in places where agriculture is viable. That depends on climate, access to water, and the presence of native plants that are suitable for cultivation. This is why so many cities, and pretty much all of the earliest cities, were built on rivers. They are a perfect place to farm crops. It isn’t until technology advances further that we can start cleverly overcoming geographic limitations, which is how a sun-blasted hellhole like Arizona ends up with 7 million people living in it.
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