�atalh�y�k and the first cities

Ther is a surely older one in T�rkey, the name is something like....Tepe... with a lot of gravoured (animals) menhirs (from 2 pieces, they look like a half T).

Other ancient cities:

--Recent excavations in the Anhui Province of china have uncovered remains of a city at the Lingjiatan site dating back 5,500 years ago. This find is significant because it predates China's earliest city by 1,000 years
www.china.org.cn

--Jericho
www.utexas.edu/courses/wilson/ant304/projects97/kingp/jericho.html

--Mohenjo Daro (and Harappa to a lesser extend)
www.mohenjodaro.net/index.html


Cities seem to have firstly appeared near waterways (i.e. Tigris/Eufrates, the Yellow River in China, the Indus). Whether this is significant or not is still to be determined. Cities need a lot of things that are not produced locally so rivers might have facilitated trade. Also, a city needs extensive agricultural land surrounding it to ensure a staple of supplies. Perhaps that's why we don't see any early cities in, say, the Sahara.

A city usually cannot support itself from the surrounding land and needs to bring commodities over from a distance. A city has enough concentration of population that others deem it profitable to come and sell. Thus markets and trade appear and increase as populations and needs increase. This is possible in a State-level society where enough concentration of wealth and an efficient re-distribution system (along with the bureaucracy to administer it) have been reached. A society in a band or tribal level of social organization are not very likely to find large urban centers, one reason being that the level of economical activity cannot support the increased population of a city--the city population itself being at a heightened risk of things like epidemics and famine because now they have narrowed their living quarters and nutritional basis compared to hunters-gatherers, i.e. cities ARE NOT panacea (different subject).
Also, cities are associated with large, ceremonial-style architecture that tend to leave distinct archaeological signatures (especially today with the extensive use of RST). Thus, if there is a city we oughta be able to find it via the various techniques of archaeological excavation and surveying. If there are some still hidden  in the desert or the tropical rain forest, I have faith that they too soon will be unearthed. One more reason to support scientific and unbiased--as much as the human factor can allow--archeology and interpretation of its finds.  


Edited by konstantinius - 19-Nov-2007 at 09:03

One thing that archaeologists are intrigued about is what attracted people to Catalhoyuk. It must have either been in a particular fertile land or it offered other sources of wealth that still had not been unearthed.