ABSTRACT
The first cities in human history arose in the Middle East and Central America several thousand years before the birth of Christ. Historians have mostly abandoned earlier theories basing the origins of cities in the preliminary rise of settled agricultural communities. Jane Jacobs has even argued that urban settlements preceded and in fact gave rise to agriculture. Excavations of one of the earliest known cities, Jericho, have revealed the existence of sophisticated urban structures and rudimentary grain cultivation at roughly the same time. Increasingly, historians have emphasized demographic pressure on resources in bringing about new levels of population concentration and thus the origin of urban civilization. By the beginnings of the 1st millennium BC important urban centers had developed in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Central America, northern China, and the Indus River valley of India.
