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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

Are walls really a requirement for something being considered a city? Off the top of my head, I've been to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston and don't recall anything I'd describe as a "wall" around any of them. Is not having walls just an American thing?

I could imagine the historical definition of "city" not being consistent with modern cities, but if that's the case, it's no wonder that this would confuse people and require clarifications like the one you give here.

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Walls are generally not a formal requirement, but are implied so due to their commonality. All ancient cities, especially pre-civilization, had walls though, often several layers of walls built on top of each other as the given cities were pillaged and rebuilt.

Its not confusing to anybody vaguely aware of ancient history.

IIRC, the Sumerians (through the Akkadians perhaps) left records stating they had to build walls around their cities. Which to me certainly implies the Sumerians had cities without walls for some time. Pretty big deal that, to have recorded it.

Don't assume things not stated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent

Cities subjected by some empire or another were sometimes forced to tear down their walls and there were perhaps periods of relative isolation and peacefulness during the founding of some cities where one wasn't immediately necessary, but even very ancient settlements commonly had at least palisades. There are probably some other exceptions; Sparta famously did not have walls under the philosophy that nobody should ever dare even try them, but they were also blessed by geography.

*All ancient construction that we've found and called cities had walls

Neither ancient Rome nor Sparta had walls for centuries after their rise to prominence. A number of per-Colombian Andean cities didn't have walls. Tenochtitlan didn't have walls and it doesn't look like Cholula did either. And in the Indus Valley Civilization Harappa and Mohenjo-daro didn't have walls.

Tenochtitlan didn't have walls because it already had natural defenses (water); so that's a particular case.

Neither of the other city states in the Aztec Triple Alliance had walls either and they weren’t built on islands.[1] They seem to have had some walled precincts to separate sacred spaces from common areas but now broader system of defensive walls. Much like Ancient Rome they had large and well organized armies.

[1] https://www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9/1-CompleteSet/MES-SAA-0...

I'm not sure Tenochtitlan was technically a city.

The defining characteristic of a city is that it can't feed itself. (Hence the "urban" vs "rural" dichotomy.)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Tenochtitlan was a closed system and used to have farms on the lake and the islands.

I’m not sure that’s a good definition of a city, and not one I’ve seen elsewhere. I’ve read quite a lot about urban planning and Tenochtitlan would fit right in with English garden cities of the early 20th century. It also had a larger population than almost any city in Europe at the time, and certainly the Spanish called it a city.

Knossos didn’t have any walls and it might have had up to 100k people at its peak. Even if the population was 10x lower it would still have been a major city

That's a good point; how do we know that the cities without walls didn't just get ruined over time to the point that we don't know about them (or assume they were much smaller)?

Mohenjo-daro (built circa 2500 BCE) did not have a city wall.

Rome itself effectively didn’t have walls during its peak (the city expanded well past the old walls and they weren’t really maintained). IIRC same applies to many other Roman cities which weren’t close to the borders or in less safe areas.

Knossos or other Minoan cities didn’t have walls either. Sure they were in an island but Crete is large enough for there to be enough opportunities for large scale internal conflicts, yet it implies that their societies were relatively peaceful.

I don't know about "required" but in ancient times walls were what typically defined the city as a "city" rather than simply an undefined agglomeration of dwellings / farms

They were absolutely necessary as protection for stores of food (food storage being a defining feature of a city)

So Sparta (they famously claimed that they don’t need walls) wasn’t a city?

Sparta was more a collection of villages rather than a city like Athens or Rome.

Rome didn’t really have walls during its peak and prior to the late 200s either. Supposedly the old walls from the Republican period were in a similar state to the medieval walls in some modern cities.

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