15 Greatest Cities in History

Business Insider
Updated
Carthage: Biggest city in the world in 300 B.C.
Carthage: Biggest city in the world in 300 B.C.



By Robert Johnson and Gus Lubin

What New York City was in the 1900s, London was in the 1800s, Constantinople was in the 600s, and so forth, back to Jericho in 7000 BC. They were the largest cities in the world, and arguably the epicenters of human civilization. These cities led mankind to new heights of culture and commerce -- though in the end each of them was surpassed and some of them destroyed.

Historians Tertius Chandler, Gerald Fox and George Modelski identified the largest cities throughout history through painstaking study of household data, agricultural commerce, church records, fortification sizes, food distribution, loss of life in a disaster, and more. We have parsed their work in the following slides.

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