First Cities

WHY DID THE FIRST CITIES START?

During the Stone Age, cavemen started farming. As they got better at farming, they started growing more food than they could eat. They exchanged the extra food in markets, which was the beginning of trade. Cities started growing around these markets. Living in cities made people feel safe. People often lived near castles and built walls around their houses. Two hundred years ago, cities started growing much faster because of the industrial revolution. People went to work in the cities because there weren’t enough jobs in villages.

WHERE WERE THE FIRST CITIES?

Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley, in Pakistan, was one of the first cities. It was built more than 4,000 years ago. About 40,000 people lived there. If we look at a map of Mohenjo-Daro, we can see the streets were straight and that there were a lot of houses and big buildings. About 2,000 years later, the biggest city in the world was Rome. It was the capital of the Roman Empire for a thousand years. About one million people lived there. London was the first city to have more people than Rome. It was the biggest city in the world between 1831 and 1925. Then, New York grew bigger than London. Now, the biggest city in the world is Tokyo.