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My Top Five Ancient City Tours

If I could go back to any ancient city in the past, where would I go? Outside of the usual destinations of Rome, Athens and Egypt, there are a vast amount of other early civilisations that offered their own unique structural and cultural perspectives on cities. The fact that many of the cities were in ruins by the time Europeans re-discovered them underscores their importance to world history in their creativeness and longevity, but also highlights biased Western views of its own supposed superiority in city-building.

My choices, out of potential thousands, are skewed as a student of Archaeology. These cities fascinated me and one especially where if Europeans had come a century earlier could have had a momentous impact on the way the world is now. The descriptions are just brief thumbnails with suggested further reading at the end.

CATALHOYUK
My first city would be Catalhoyuk, Turkey. It was founded around 9,500 years ago on the Konya Plain in central Turkey. Discovered by James Mellaart in 1958, work/excavations continue to this day with an international team. What I love about this city of cities is the sheer denseness of the dwellings without roads or an outer wall, so movement was probably via rooftops. It was one big mass of settlement, rebuilt upon itself time after time. It is renowned for its cattle cults and murals of bulls, pottery and figurines of the celebrated Mother Goddess as well as a huge mural of a nearby volcano, which supplied obsidian for tools and weapons. The first proto-city must have been a glorious site to behold and it inspired or at least co-evolved with other early urban centres.

TEOTIHUACAN Teotihuacn, in the north-eastern part of the Valley of Mexico was founded around AD100 and abandoned around AD750. When the Aztecs came centuries later, they named it The City of the Gods'. The site is dominated by the Pyramid of the Sun and Pyramid of the Moon, and various palaces, all connected by the ominous sounding Avenue of the Dead. The overall sense is of a large religious centre, though there is archaeological evidence that the unknown culture traded as far as Guatemala 1000km away and may have been a war-like culture too, depending on interpretations of images of war gods. Though later Mesoamerican civilisations built monumental urban centres, Teotihuacn built the first and most iconic city of all. It is the sheer scale and layout of the city that impresses and the audacity of the makers to envision such

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