Legend has it that Jericho was the first city in history.
The descendants of Cain would have formed the first city around 8,500 BC.
At least that is what the Bible says.
For Jean-Marc Stébé and Hervé Marchal, it is not so:
For them, it was nothing more than a large village. The real cities would have developed later.
But can we not say that 8,500 years BC this“large village” was already a form of city for the time?
Contrary to what we have read here and there, Jericho cannot be considered as the first city in the world. It was nothing more than a large village in the early Neolithic period (8,500 BC). The social diversity that creates an urban way of life only appears much later on the (proto)historical scene. It was in fact in the 4th millennium that the first forms of urban life appeared in Lower Mesopotamia: between the Tigris and the Euphrates (present-day Iraq), urbanism developed, which consisted of rationally organizing the lives of thousands of men concentrated in a limited space. This phenomenon took place in other regions of the world, notably in the Indus Valley, in China, in Egypt and in South America, but probably at slightly later dates.
Jean-Marc Stébé, Hervé Marchal, Urban Sociology
