‘Israel’s ancient NYC’: 5k-year-old Canaanite megalopolis may rewrite history | Hacker News Reader

‘Israel’s ancient NYC’: 5k-year-old Canaanite megalopolis may rewrite history

timesofisrael.com

45 pointsHerrMonnezza12 comments

Megalopolis, really? At the same time, Mesopotamia's cities were much larger. Uruk's population was probably more than 30,000 people. Even outside Mesopotamia, Ebla, south of Aleppo, was a large city where nearby villages provided agricultural resources. In these regions, technology and art was apparently centuries ahead. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruk_period for some achievements before 3000 BC.

> Among the interesting artifacts revealed at the site was a cylindrical stamp impression of a man holding his hands up in the air, as well as several figurines of people and animals and tools imported from Egypt.

This was surprising for me. A city that cannot build tools, but imports them. And if the site was fertile and inhabited for milleniums, how come these artefacts look

Awesome that they got 5000 students involved in the excavation.

>A massive 5,000-year-old metropolis that housed some 6,000 residents

That's 1.2 ancient denizens per student. The size of the research is nearing the size of the ancient city.

> that housed some 6,000 residents

is this article an exaggeration? a quick search shows NYC has over 8,000,000 residents

It might compare the roles these cities have for it’s time, not absolute size.

No, not at all. When Herodes decided to genocide Judea he completely destroyed the then capital of Judea with 200.000 being killed in this city. He completely flattened it, they had to rebuild a completely new capital, with the historical Jesus working on that. Maybe they mixed it up. And population numbers in the big cities did increase significantly in those 2K years.

At the time, the whole world had a total population of about 5 million people. So both this city and modern-day NYC would have about 0.1% of the global population. The comparison seems apt.

it wouldn't need nearly as much infrastructure and innovation to house 6,000 compared to 8,000,000. it is not in any way comparable in scale

It's a simile, that it's a simile is obvious, and you know that that's the case. No-one is reasonably going to expect that the Canaanites literally built an NYC. Don't be persnickety.

pretty obvious he was talking about the global relevancy of the restaurant and theater scene; not like he expected ancient subways!

Innovation relative to what had come before it is equally impressive. Gotta crawl before you walk, and its a marvel how babies somehow learn to do it.

You would at least need:

- A constant agrictultural surplus being able to support a city of this size.

- A political system with some form of taxation and probably a kind of military and/or police.

- A construction and manufacturing industry.

This is all really basic stuff for a modern society, but we only got here, because we built on giants.

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