Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Early Mesopotamian city
change, war, and disease, early agrarian settlements ebbed and l owed. At
i rst, the majority of people lived outside of these creations, but as civilizations
grew, so did the propensity of citizens to leave the dangers of the country for
the comforts of the city. Large settlements took shape about three thousand
years ago. Babylon, for example, in what is now Iraq, sheltered two hundred
thousand. Between one thousand and two thousand years ago large cities
were rare and centered in rich agricultural regions such as the Nile and Yangtze
River valleys (Nanjing, China, may have been home to one million residents)
and the Basin of Mexico (two hundred thousand lived in Tenochtitlán-
Tlatelolco). Metropolises that we would recognize today are more recent in-
ventions; three centuries ago only Constantinople, Edo (the former name of
Tokyo), Peking, London, and Paris housed more than i ve hundred thousand
people, and only thirty-four cites were home to more than one hundred thou-
sand. The lure of cities proved irresistible, so appealing in fact that in 2008,
 
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