The Long Way Back to Ourselves

2.5

The First City: Çatalhöyük, Jericho, Uruk

This episode compares three sites — Çatalhöyük, Jericho, and Uruk — to ask when a large settlement actually becomes a city, and the answer corrects a common assumption. At Çatalhöyük, archaeologist Ian Hodder found houses so uniform that no palace, temple, or storehouse marks anyone as more powerful, though thousands lived there for over a millennium. Using ten traits a prehistorian listed in 1950, only Uruk, around 3500 BCE, qualifies as a city, with tens of thousands of mass-produced ration bowls pointing to centralized labor control. It closes on Uruk's decline, abandoned once the Euphrates shifted course, as a reminder that a city is a relationship to a hinterland you depend on, not a wall.