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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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.
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