‘A revelation from the drive and creative flux of the metropolis over time.’–Nature

‘This is a must-read book for just about any city dweller using a voracious appetite for understanding the wonders of cities and just why we’re so attracted to them.’–Zahi Hawass, author of Hidden Treasures of Old Egypt

A sweeping background of towns through the millennia–from Mesopotamia to Manhattan–and how they have propelled Homo sapiens to dominance.

Six thousand years ago, there have been no cities on the planet. Today, about Towns: The Initial 6,000 Years more than half from the world’s human population lives in cities, and that quantity is growing. Weaving jointly archeology, history, and contemporary observations, Monica Smith explains the rise from the first metropolitan developments and their connection to our own. She requires readers on the trip through the ancient world of Inform Brak in modern-day Syria; Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan in Mexico; her own digs in India; as well as the more well-known Pompeii, Rome, and Athens. On the way, she presents the initial properties that produced cities singularly in charge of the flowering of humankind: the introduction of networked facilities, the rise of the entrepreneurial middle income, and the culture of intake that results in from take-out meals towards the tell-tale secrets of trash.

Cities can be an impassioned and learned accounts full of fascinating details of daily life in ancient urban centers, using archaeological perspectives showing the aspects of cities we find most irresistible (and the most annoying) have already been with us since the very beginnings of urbanism itself. She also proves the rise of towns was hardly inevitable, yet it had been imperative to the eventual global dominance of our species–and that metropolitan areas are here to remain.