Here are the largest cities in history, though some would count as mere towns by today’s standards.
First, the long view:
Here is the largest city every thousand years. I will use Ian Morris’s numbers from 2010 since he breaks it down that way and goes back the furthest. Size is given in millions, country names are the present ones:
- 8000 BC: 0.0005: Mureybet, Syria
- 7000 BC: 0.0010: Beidha, Jordan
- 6000 BC: 0.0030: Catalhoyuk, Turkey
- 5000 BC: 0.0040: Tell Brak, Syria
- 4000 BC: 0.0050: Uruk, Iraq
- 3000 BC: 0.0450: Uruk, Iraq
- 2000 BC: 0.0600: Memphis, Egypt
- 1000 BC: 0.0350: Haojing, China
- 0001 AD: 1.0000: Rome, Italy
- 1000 AD: 1.0000: Kaifeng, China
- 2000 AD: 28.4000: Tokyo, Japan
So Mureybet had only 500 people but it was still, based on current knowledge, the biggest town in the world!
How much top city size increased in each millennium (where 2.00, for example, means it doubled):
- 8000 BC: 2.00
- 7000 BC: 3.00
- 6000 BC: 1.30
- 5000 BC: 1.25
- 4000 BC: 9.00
- 3000 BC: 1.33
- 2000 BC: 0.58
- 1000 BC: 28.57
- 0001 AD: 1.00
- 1000 AD: 28.40
The biggest changes belong to the last thousand years (rise of industry), the thousand years before Christ (rise of empires) and from 4000 BC to 3000 BC (rise of civilization).
At the current rate the top city in 3000 should have 800 million people, probably in Asia. Hong Kong and cities nearby already have 120 million.
Now here is the largest city every hundred years. I will use George Modelski’s numbers from 2003 since he breaks it down that way and goes back the furthest, again in millions:
- 2500 BC: 0.060: Lagash, Iraq
- 2400 BC: 0.050: Mari, Syria
- 2300 BC: 0.080: Girsu, Iraq
- 2200 BC: 0.050: Girsu, Iraq
- 2100 BC: 0.100: Ur, Iraq
- 2000 BC: 0.040: Isin, Iraq
- 1900 BC: 0.040: Isin, Iraq
- 1800 BC: 0.060: Mari, Syria
- 1700 BC: 0.060: Babylon, Iraq
- 1600 BC: 0.075: Avaris, Egypt
- 1500 BC: 0.060: Thebes, Egypt
- 1400 BC: 0.080: Thebes, Egypt
- 1300 BC: 0.120: Yinxu, China
- 1200 BC: 0.160: Pi-Ramses, Egypt
- 1100 BC: 0.120: Pi-Ramses: Egypt
- 1000 BC: 0.120: Thebes, Egypt
- 900 BC: 0.125: Haojing, China
- 800 BC: 0.125: Haojing, China
- 700 BC: 0.100: Thebes, Egypt
- 600 BC: 0.200: Babylon, Iraq
- 500 BC: 0.200: Bablyon, Iraq
- 400 BC: 0.320: Xiadu, China
- 300 BC: 0.500: Carthage, Tunisia
- 200 BC: 0.600: Alexandria, Egypt
- 100 BC: 1.000: Alexandria, Egypt
- 001 AD: 0.800: Rome, Italy
- 100 AD: 1.000: Rome, Italy
- 200 AD: 1.200: Rome, Italy
- 300 AD: 1.000: Rome, Italy
- 400 AD: 0.800: Rome, Italy
- 500 AD: 0.500: Constantinople, Turkey
- 600 AD: 0.600: Constantinople, Turkey
- 700 AD: 1.000: Chang’an, China
- 800 AD: 0.800: Chang’an, China
- 900 AD: 0.900: Baghdad, Iraq
- 1000 AD: 1.200: Baghdad, Iraq
- 1100 AD: 1.200: Baghdad, Iraq
- 1200 AD: 1.000: Baghdad, Iraq
- 1300 AD: 1.500: Hangzhou, China
- 1400 AD: 1.000: Jinling, China
- 1500 AD: 1.000: Beijing, China
- 1600 AD: 1.000: Beijing, China
- 1700 AD: 1.000: Ayutthaya, Thailand
- 1800 AD: 1.100: Beijing, China
- 1900 AD: 8.500: London, UK
- 2000 AD: 28.400: Tokyo, Japan (from Ian Morris)
Three countries had the top city 72% of the time: Iraq, China and Egypt.
Here is how much top city size increased in each century:
- 2500 BC: 0.83
- 2400 BC: 1.60
- 2300 BC: 0.63
- 2200 BC: 2.00
- 2100 BC: 0.40
- 2000 BC: 1.oo
- 1900 BC: 1.50
- 1800 BC: 1.00
- 1700 BC: 1.25
- 1600 BC: 0.80
- 1500 BC: 1.33
- 1400 BC: 1.50
- 1200 BC: 0.75
- 1100 BC: 1.00
- 1000 BC: 1.04
- 900 BC: 1.00
- 800 BC: 0.80
- 700 BC: 2.00
- 600 BC: 1.00
- 500 BC: 1.60
- 400 BC: 1.56
- 300 BC: 1.20
- 200 BC: 1.67
- 100 BC: 0.80
- 001 AD: 1.25
- 100 AD: 1.20
- 200 AD: 0.83
- 300 AD: 0.80
- 400 AD: 0.63
- 500 AD: 1.20
- 600 AD: 1.67
- 700 AD: 0.80
- 800 AD: 1.13
- 900 AD: 1.33
- 1000 AD: 1.00
- 1100 AD: 0.83
- 1200 AD: 1.50
- 1300 AD: 0.67
- 1400 AD: 1.00
- 1500 AD: 1.00
- 1600 AD: 1.00
- 1700 AD: 1.10
- 1800 AD: 7.73
- 1900 AD: 3.34
Sharpest rises:
- 7.73: London in the 1800s
- 3.34: Tokyo in the 1900s
- 2.00: Ur in the 2100s BC
- 2.00: Babylon in the 600s BC
- 1.67: Alexandria in the 100s BC
- 1.67: Chang’an in the 600s
Sharpest falls:
- 0.40: Ur in the 2000s BC
- 0.63: Rome in the 400s
- 0.63: Girsu in the 2200s BC
- 0.67: Hangzhou in the 1300s
- 0.75: Pi-Ramses in the 1100s BC
Population milestones (using Morris’s and Modelski’s numbers together):
- 8000 BC: 500
- 7000 BC: 1,000
- 4000 BC: 5,000
- 3000 BC: 10,000
- 2500 BC: 50,000
- 2100 BC: 100,000
- 300 BC: 500,000
- 100 BC: 1,000,000
- 1900 AD: 5,000,000
- 2000 AD: 10,000,000
See also:
Pretty interesting stuff. It breaks the monotony and sort of puts things into perspective. I suppose I’m just outside of the “Piedmont Atlantic” according to the map (essentially Atlanta).
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Indeed, the Pearl River Delta region, an area that compares to Greater Los Angeles (with Orange County / Santa Barbara / San Bernadino), already has 120 million. There are several cities in the region which have around 7-10 million (eg, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Zhuhai, Foshan, Macau, etc.). It is like putting greater metropolitan Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, Dallas, Washington, Boston and Atlanta and Las Vegas all inside the state of New Jersey.
Does the world have a larger megalopolis? Maybe Tokyo/Nagoya/ Osaka / Kyoto comes next?
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excellent post! now where are the guys who always brag how white europeans were on the edge of the development. Not in urbanisation most of the time and many scientists cosider cities as the most developed forms of human civilizations, at least the most complex.
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Doesn’t Great Zimbabwe get a mention?
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I find it interesting that africa is’nt even in the picture.
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@ Jefe
Tokyo has a little over 13 million as of 2011. Nagoya, Osaka and Kyoto are a lot smaller. Only ranging from 2 to almost 3 million. You really the notice the difference travelling from Tokyo to one of the less populated cities.
I think Shanghai may have the highest population at 23 million.
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@ Iris,
As Abagond mentioned, although Tokyo may have a little over 13 million, its greater urbanized area (including, eg, Yokohama) does indeed have over 30 million. I stayed in Tokyo for a few months.
Abagond was referring to the urbanized area, not the population within the city limits.
Greater New York City has over 20 million — can easily compare to Shanghai– places I am both very familiar with. Greater Mexico city also has over 20 million.
But, actually, that was not my point at all. I was talking about the huge megalopolis in the Pearl River Delta region — with 120 million, I think no other great megalopolis in the world compares close. Even the East Coast USA (BosWash) or the Tokyo/Nagoya / Osaka areas (or even eastern China – Shanghai / Suzhou, Wuxi, Nanjing, Hangzhou / Ningbo) added together are only half as much.
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@bulanik: I think that list may change in the future as we get more knowledge from Africa or from Amazonas. I once read that there where huge “villages” on the Amazon basin, which went on miles and miles along the great river routes. These were big on any scale and population was quite tense. This reagion revived the stories of El Dorado and amazons, hence the spanish and portugese conquistadores, who were looking for the El Dorado in the region, gave the name Amazonas.
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Something I wrote about in an earlier draft of this post is the Western bias it has:
1. Both lists are made by Westerners, who will, without even trying, know way more about the great cities of their own past than those of Africa, India, China, etc.
2. There is way more archaeology done in the Middle East than almost anywhere else outside of Europe. That comes from a view of the past Westerners got from their Bibles, which, archaeologically, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
3. The West has way more money to support archaeology than other parts of the world, so naturally way more is known of their past.
The exception that proves the rule in all this is Java Man: the remains of a Homo erectus from 500,000 years ago that were found on the island of Java. The man who discovered it thought that mankind came from the lost continent of Lemuria which long ago sank under the Indian Ocean. Completely wrong – there never was such a continent – but it led him to look where no one else was looking.
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^Java man. This discovery was basically the right side of a chin from the lower jaw with three teeth attached to it. A year after that discovery they unearthed a detached primate molar tooth nearby. Two months later they found an intact skullcap about one meter away from the tooth A year following that, they found an nearly complete left thigh bone,which was located between 10 to 15 meters from the skullcap. This is the extent of the entire Java Man fossil.
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@Abagond
Doesn’t Morris place Waset (Thebes) as the largest city circa 1000 BC?
Nevertheless, I tend to agree moreso with Tertius Chandler that most of the world’s largest known cities prior to 500 BC were in the Nile Valley…Morris doesn’t even mention Abdu (Abydos), which was undoubtedly one of the world’s largest cities, and the world’s first city of pilgrimmage.
Considering archaeological evidence, I think it’s utterly absurd to assume Uruk, Mureybet and those other Mesopotamian cities were larger than those of the Nile prior to 3000 BC. Do Morris or Modelski actually use some type of measurable way to determine the size of ancient cities?
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@resjan:
I once a document where they were trying to figure out a huge remains of walls in somewhere in western China (it was on desert region), what and when etc. If I remember correctly the walls were simply huge, like miles long and 30 meters high and even thicker (they now looked like huge earth banks). Some of the archeologists were trying to explain the remains as fortress (for tens of thousands, or more???) others as some sort of camel corrals etc. For me they looked like any city walls, except they were really old and nobody knew anything about them. In the end they could not come up with any explanation since they found no reference to that place in any ancient texts.
Thing is, we only know what somebody has studied. The old cities built on wood or even older ones consisting tents or lighter structures have dissappeared without of trace. For all we know, there could have been cities of thousands of people before ice age. We simply do not know. Interesting still.
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@sam
“The old cities built on wood or even older ones consisting tents or lighter structures have dissappeared without of trace. For all we know, there could have been cities of thousands of people before ice age.”
I’m fully aware that there could be many uncovered cities, and therefore I am viewing these lists as the largest KNOWN cities of the world.
However, if Morris and Modelski contend that certain ancient cities were the largest, then I expect to see some methodology (I haven’t read their books personally, so I don’t know whether or not they’ve adopted methodologies). Even if such cities were not built of stone, there are human remains and other artefacts that could be used as evidence to bolster their claims.
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