The human race is on a 10,000 year urban adventure. Our ancestors
wandered the planet or lived scattered in villages, yet by the end
of this century almost all of us will live in cities. But that
journey has not been a smooth one and urban civilizations have
risen and fallen many times in history. The ruins of many of them
still enchant us. This book tells the story of the rise and fall of
ancient cities from the end of the Bronze Age to the beginning of
the Middle Ages. It is a tale of war and politics, pestilence and
famine, triumph and tragedy, by turns both fabulous and squalid.
Its focus is on the ancient Mediterranean: Greeks and Romans at the
centre, but Phoenicians and Etruscans, Persians, Gauls, and
Egyptians all play a part. The story begins with the Greek
discovery of much more ancient urban civilizations in Egypt and the
Near East, and charts the gradual spread of urbanism to the
Atlantic and then the North Sea in the centuries that followed. The
ancient Mediterranean, where our story begins, was a harsh
environment for urbanism. So how were cities first created, and
then sustained for so long, in these apparently unpromising
surroundings? How did they feed themselves, where did they find
water and building materials, and what did they do with their waste
and their dead? Why, in the end, did their rulers give up on them?
And what it was like to inhabit urban worlds so unlike our own -
cities plunged into darkness every night, cities dominated by the
temples of the gods, cities of farmers, cities of slaves, cities of
soldiers. Ultimately, the chief characters in the story are the
cities themselves. Athens and Sparta, Persepolis and Carthage, Rome
and Alexandria: cities that formed great families. Their story
encompasses the history of the generations of people who built and
inhabited them, whose short lives left behind monuments that have
inspired city builders ever since - and whose ruins stand as stark
reminders to the 21st century of the perils as well as the
potential rewards of an urban existence.
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