Search the history of over billion web pages on the Internet. The City's Beginning 1. The Invention of Agriculture 25 2.
The Invention of Walls 32 3. The Beginning of Culture : Uruk and Kish 42 5. Cities of the Dead and of the Gods : Memphis and Thebes 48 6. This Was Babylon 63 2. Nineveh, the Murderous City 83 3. The Labyrinth of Knossos 92 4. The So-called Democracy of Athens 5. Archimedes and Cleopatra 6. The Bloodstained Queen of the Seas 7. The Bulwark on the Bosporus 2. A Thousand and One Cities 3.
The Dream of Ancient Nuremberg 4. Italy's Golden Cities 5. Babylon on the Seine 2. Under Clouds of Steam 3. Peter's Burgh and Stalin's City 4. The Tragedy of Berlin 5. From Dunedin to Murmansk 2. The "Largest" City on Earth 3. A Multiplication Problem 4. Joining the Crowds 5. The So-called City of Tomorrow 33i 2. Brasilia and its Kind 4. The City that Does Man Justice 5. After hours of flying over oceans, forests, mountains, jungles, deserts, and icy wastes, we welcome the sight of a civilized area where human beings crowd together.
But for a long time great cities have been etching their traces even in the sparsely inhabited parts of the earth. Because Copenhagen and Los Angeles wanted the shortest possible route to each other, airfields were blasted out of Greenland's ice; because our cities need oil for their factories and their cars, pipelines now run across the Sahara Desert.
All roads lead to the city. Even though cities are mere islands in the countryside, they dominate the world. The fate of mankind is being decided in Moscow, London and Washington. The Poly- nesians drape themselves in printed cotton cloth from Manchester, while the Egyptian fellahin toil to deliver the cotton to the British textile manufacturers in Manchester. Where, why, and when cities developed, how the rise and fall of entire tribes of people and of cultures were tied up with a city, what the cities in remote times and countries looked like, how people lived there, and what caused the cities to die— all this is as fascinat- ing as any chapter in history.
