Exactly when and where and how the first cities arose remains a matter of conjecture. Received scholarly wisdom has it that the emergence of cities-of relatively large human settlements in which residents did not provide their own food-was dependent upon certain developments in technology, especially the invention of writing and the plow. 7 The first cities are usually said to have appeared between 4,000 and 3,000 B.c., or perhaps somewhat later-the estimates vary according to how the archeological evidence is read, how the investigator defines a city, and so on-and they are usually placed in Mesopotamia. 8 A few scholars have lately challenged this conventional truth, arguing that recent archeological work in Turkey-at the mound known as Catal Hiiyiik-indicates that cities may have existed as long ago as 7,000 B.c. or earlier (Mellaart, 1964). And, basing her thesis on the Catal Hiiyiik findings, Jane Jacobs (1969) has argued that rather than the agricultural revolution's making possible the emergence of cities, cities made possible the agricultural revolution.

XREF: Challenges the conventional textbook timeline linking writing, plow, and Mesopotamian city origins; connects to scholarship on early agricultural development.

XREF: Challenges the standard narrative that agriculture enabled urban settlement — connects to debates about urban origins and the direction of causality in early civilization. SEED: Could seed an essay about how foundational assumptions about history get overturned by archaeological evidence.

Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order a…, loc. 71