{"id":5072,"date":"2021-10-19T01:24:25","date_gmt":"2021-10-19T01:24:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2021\/10\/19\/some-of-the-earliest-cities-may-have-been-highly-egalitarian\/"},"modified":"2021-10-19T01:24:25","modified_gmt":"2021-10-19T01:24:25","slug":"some-of-the-earliest-cities-may-have-been-highly-egalitarian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2021\/10\/19\/some-of-the-earliest-cities-may-have-been-highly-egalitarian\/","title":{"rendered":"Some of the earliest cities may have been highly egalitarian"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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For decades, researchers have regarded roughly 6,000-year-old Mesopotamian sites, in what\u2019s now Iraq, Iran and Syria, as the world\u2019s first cities. Those metropolises arose after agriculture made it possible to feed large numbers of people in year-round settlements. Mesopotamian cities featured centralized governments, bureaucratic agencies that tracked and taxed farm production, and tens of thousands of city dwellers packed into neighborhoods connected by dusty streets. Social inequality was central to Mesopotamia\u2019s urban ascent, with a hierarchy of social classes that included rulers, bureaucrats, priests, farmers and slaves.<\/p>


Over the last decade, however, researchers have increasingly questioned whether the only pathway to urban life ran through Mesopotamian cities. Chapman, along with Durham colleague Marco Nebbia and independent, Durham-based scholar Bisserka Gaydarska, is part of a movement that views low-density, spread-out settlements in several parts of the world as alternative form of early city life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article\/ancient-urban-megasites-may-reshape-history-first-cities<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For decades, researchers have regarded roughly 6,000-year-old Mesopotamian sites, in what\u2019s now Iraq, Iran and Syria, as the world\u2019s first cities. Those metropolises arose after agriculture made it possible to feed large numbers of people in year-round settlements. Mesopotamian cities featured centralized governments, bureaucratic agencies that tracked and taxed farm production, and tens of thousands […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-1jO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5072\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}