Where Was the First City? Why Göbekli Tepe, Jericho and Uruk Keep the Definition Unsettled

The video opens with a provocation: imagine building the largest settlement the world has ever seen, thousands of people on planned streets around a central plaza, then deliberately setting it on fire. More than 5,000 years ago the Cucuteni-Trypillia communities in Eastern Europe did exactly that, with estimates for a single site reaching 46,000 inhabitants, an almost unimaginable density for the time. That deliberate burning immediately frames the central question as more than a calendar lookup: where and when did people build the first city, and why have archaeologists argued about it for over 70 years without settling on one answer.

What counts as a city: Childe's checklist and why it still matters

In the 1950s archaeologist V. Gordon Childe proposed a checklist for what counts as a city across cultures, including a population larger and denser than anything before in the region, monumental public buildings, specialist crafts and full-time artists, long-distance trade, a surplus that can be taxed and concentrated, a social hierarchy with an elite, and a writing system that enables long-term planning. The list is dated in places and not universally used, yet it remains a useful benchmark for testing whether a dense settlement truly functioned as a city, and the video uses it to interrogate each candidate rather than to crown a single winner. Thinking with that checklist makes it clear that ticking a few boxes is not enough, and that early large sites can look urban without sustaining an urban system.

The narrative then moves to Anatolia and to Göbekli Tepe, noticed in the 1960s but fully understood only after excavations three decades later, with a network of related sites that may be even older. Dating is explained through radiocarbon method, which exploits the steady production of carbon-14 in the atmosphere, its uptake by plants alongside carbon-12 during photosynthesis, and its decay after death, so that the remaining carbon-14 relative to stable carbon-12 reveals age; plant bits in wall plaster place the site between about 9700 and 9300 BCE. More than 20 oval stone structures once stood there, the largest with 5.5-meter T-shaped pillars carved with animals and symbols, the oldest known monumental architecture inside a settlement, and therefore striking evidence of early public architecture even before we settle the habitation question.

Whether Göbekli Tepe was permanently inhabited was long doubted, with an early view of seasonal festivals only, but work in the 2010s reinterpreted some large buildings as communal houses and residue analysis in large vessels pointed to mass cooking of carb-rich porridge for large groups. Even so, the lack of a nearby perennial water source beyond collected rainwater keeps year-round occupation debated, and the site's difficulty of maintenance on steep slopes prone to landslides offers an alternative to the older intentional burial story after about 1,500 years of use. Most consequentially, the site predates farming, animal domestication and pottery, blurring Childe's sequence that placed an urban revolution after a Neolithic revolution and raising the possibility that communal ceremony, not village growth, seeded early monumentality, a reminder that location and upkeep decide whether an experiment lasts.

Jericho at Tell es-Sultan in modern Palestine offers the opposite lesson in continuity, with occupation since about 9000 BCE sustained by the Ein es-Sultan spring in an otherwise arid setting. Its claims to fame are stone walls and a tower from about 8000 BCE, just over eight meters high with an internal staircase that looks like a first skyscraper, monumental undertakings that required organization even if the exact purpose remains debated between defense and recent proposals of an astronomical marker aligned with the solstice shadow of a nearby mountain. Population likely stayed at a few thousand and full urban form did not crystallize until around 3000 BCE, yet people never stopped returning, and the hill kept refilling, making Jericho the least failed experiment on the list precisely because water solved the location problem that defeated others.

Density on rooftops: Catalhoyuk

About five centuries after Göbekli Tepe was covered, Catalhoyuk grew from around 7400 BCE into a sprawling tell near Konya, two mounds built from the gradual accumulation of human debris, with population estimates swinging from 600 to 10,000 depending on how many houses were simultaneously occupied and how many people are assigned per house. The town had no planned streets, dense mudbrick houses sharing walls, roof-top entries reached by ladders, and interiors with benches, hearths and plastered ovens; the dead were buried beneath floors, and female children carried five times more grave goods than male children while ancient DNA showed that people buried together were not always biologically related yet houses persisted along maternal lines. Common female figurines and rich wall art point to symbolic density, but the absence of temples, marketplaces or a central administration leaves the site ticking only a few urban boxes despite its impressive scale.

The settlement faded after a long slow decline by about 5950 BCE, and the video pairs climate change with the pathologies of crowding to explain why. Grain-heavy diets left cavities in about one in ten teeth, proteomic analysis of vessels revealed some of the earliest milk consumption, while traces of animal and human feces on house walls, infection markers on a third of skeletons, and skull fractures in more than a quarter point to sanitation crises, disease and interpersonal violence. In other words, Catalhoyuk was an extended experiment in learning to live together, and the experiment strained under the very density it created, a pattern that helps us read other proto-urban failures not as mysteries but as failures of public health and social coordination.

The least disputed city: Uruk and the invention of writing

Mesopotamia is where dispute largely ends, and the video turns to Uruk in what is now southern Iraq, set in the nutrient-rich alluvium of the Tigris and Euphrates alongside centers such as Tell Brak and Ur. Founded around 5000 BCE and within a millennium the world's largest settlement, Uruk displayed temples, a clear social hierarchy, a bureaucracy that manufactured pottery bowls in standardized sizes to define grain rations, and engineered canals and dams to irrigate fields. Its most consequential innovation was the earliest known writing, cuneiform emerging around 3400 BCE just before Egyptian hieroglyphs, used to track the transactions of a growing economy, and together these features satisfy Childe's economic, organizational and symbolic criteria, making Uruk a city by almost any definition and one that remained inhabited until about 700 CE, well into the Middle Ages.

Climate is often blamed for the later unravelling of Mesopotamian cities, but a 2021 paper based on nearly a thousand radiocarbon dates reconstructs population through time and finds rapid growth before the abrupt cold and dry spell around 2200 BCE and a fall afterward. The implication is that drought was the final blow rather than the sole cause, with cities already stressed by the pressures of rapid growth. That paper matters because it reframes collapse as an interaction between environmental shock and internal strain, offering a comparative benchmark for other regions where flood and drought later tested even excellent water engineering.

Experiments everywhere: from Cucuteni to the Pacific

Leaving the Middle East, the video finds parallel experiments almost everywhere people lived, and Eastern Europe's Cucuteni-Trypillia culture is the most dramatic European example. Around 5000 BCE settlements with more than a thousand houses and contested populations of 12,000 to 46,000 followed a ring plan with streets leading to a large central plaza, built in wood so that little stone remains yet the outlines survive in geomagnetic survey, where every material disturbs Earth's magnetic field slightly and burned soil and rock shine brightly because heat resets the field. Some scholars argue these were cities built for strength in numbers against dangerous neighbors, others note the uncertain evidence for year-round occupation, centralized government or hierarchy, though larger and more decorated buildings and figurines depicting a council-like gathering have recently bolstered the urban reading. The most enigmatic pattern is the burning roughly every 70 years, which experimental reconstructions show would have required huge amounts of fuel to achieve, pointing to deliberate firing before abandonment, and the eventual shift around 3200 BCE back to small villages demonstrates that urban life was not a one-way street.

Bulgaria's Solnitsata and Egypt's Nekhen fill out the comparative set with different economies and landscapes. Solnitsata, founded around 5500 BCE and peaking around 4700 BCE, housed only a few hundred people yet stands out for economic specialization in salt mining and long-distance exchange that may have functioned as an early currency, generating wealth displayed in a nearby cemetery rich in gold and copper and protected by massive stone walls three meters high and two meters thick with multi-storey stone houses inside, until an earthquake and possibly drought ended it around 4200 BCE. Nekhen, later Hierakonpolis, rose on the Nile from about 5000 BCE and by 3500 BCE may have held 10,000 people on slightly elevated ground that mitigated floods, and while the river's shifts of kilometers and meters of sediment make excavation difficult, the surviving town beyond the floodplain preserves a template for later Egypt: standardized pottery, administrative buildings, the oldest decorated tomb, large vats where mass spectrometry found barley beer with yeast and dates, and what may have been the world's first zoo as a display of elite power, fading around 2300 BCE as the climate dried and authority moved elsewhere.

In the Yangtze Delta, Liangzhu from about 3300 BCE is presented as arguably the first large-scale city in ancient China, discovered in the 1930s during highway work when jade kept appearing and elite stratification became clear. Rice surplus supported craftspeople and status display in jade, buildings used standardized grass and clay bricks, and the whole city was set on a massive compacted earth foundation in a wetland, protected by an engineered system of 11 dams, earthen walls and an elevated palace and cemetery precinct. A precipitation record from oxygen and carbon isotopes in a nearby cave's stalagmites shows intense monsoons around 2300 BCE overwhelming the dams, the city was abandoned suddenly with little immediate successor occupation, yet artifacts and practices reappeared up to 1,000 kilometers away, so the city did not return but its technology diffused.

North America's Poverty Point in Louisiana, built from 1800 BCE over 600 years, shows a different organizational logic, with six massive semicircular earthen ridges around a central plaza and a largest mound that could have been raised in under 90 days by as many as 9,000 laborers. The site facilitated long-distance exchange, with copper from the Great Lakes and many heated clay balls, the so-called Poverty Point Objects used as cooking stones where natural rock was scarce, and while year-round habitation is uncertain, the monument proves that large-scale collective building did not require intensive agriculture or writing, reinforcing the video's argument that there was no single pathway to aggregation.

The final example is Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley, where around 2500 BCE as many as 40,000 people lived within a Harappan city whose script remains undeciphered. Its modern-seeming order included a square grid of roads, multi-room and multi-storey houses, large public buildings, massive public baths waterproofed with tar between bricks, a sophisticated water collection and distribution system with roughly one well for every three houses, and a centralized sewage system with direct house drains, all supported by flood defenses because the city was inundated up to six times. Even that mastery did not save it when monsoon and river shifts, linked in part to the same global climate anomaly that stressed Mesopotamia around 2200 BCE, brought repeated floods and droughts beyond the system's capacity, and the Indus cities were abandoned by about 1700 BCE. The video closes the tour by noting that after these experiments the urban revolution spread quickly in the next two millennia to places such as San Lorenzo, Great Zimbabwe and Angkor, but the path was thousands of years of trial and error, independent inventions across continents, and repeated abandonment whenever food production, sanitation or social stability failed, until the experiments finally accumulated into durable urban knowledge, rooftop highways of Catalhoyuk aside.