Cities: The First 6,000 Years Audiobook (Free)

‘A revelation from the get and creative flux from the metropolis as time passes.’–Nature

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

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

Six thousand years back, there have been no cities on earth. Today, about Metropolitan areas: The First 6,000 Years over fifty percent from the world’s human population lives in urban areas, and that amount keeps growing. Weaving collectively archeology, history, and contemporary observations, Monica Smith explains the rise of the first urban advancements and their connection to our own. She takes readers on a trip through the ancient world of Tell Brak in modern-day Syria; Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan in Mexico; her have digs in India; aswell as the greater well-known Pompeii, Rome, and Athens. On the way, she presents the unique properties that produced cities singularly in charge of the flowering of humankind: the introduction of networked facilities, the rise of an entrepreneurial middle income, and the culture of usage that leads to everything from take-out meals towards the tell-tale secrets of garbage.

Cities can be an impassioned and learned accounts full of fascinating details of lifestyle in old urban centers, using archaeological perspectives showing how the aspects of cities we look for most irresistible (as well as the most annoying) have been with us because the very origins of urbanism itself. She also proves the rise of towns was hardly unavoidable, yet it had been essential to the eventual global dominance of our species–and that cities are here to remain.