Exploring A 5,000-Year-Old City

[seneschal]

An ancient city recently unearthed in Israel managed to be the Big Apple of the Bronze Age not once but twice!  Lots of videos posted but here's the longest one.  And based on the layout, there was apparently a good side and a bad side of the tracks even way back then.

Apparently the pre-biblical world was a lot more urban than we've suspected.

Edited October 15, 2019 by seneschal

[seneschal]

Thirty-five views so far but no comments?  Come on, you Glorantha fans!  Here is a real-life Big Rubble -- a 5,000-year-old city sitting atop a 7,000-year-old city.  What do you think?  What can you do with it in your campaign?

[soltakss]

7 minutes ago, seneschal said:

Thirty-five views so far but no comments? 

The sound on my PC doesn't work, so I can't easily watch it.

Also, we all knew that the Bronze Age had cities and a lot of them were built on earlier Neolithic or Bronze Age cities. Troy, Jericho, Jerusalem all had cities built on top of cities.

It looks interesting. Maybe I can open it here and then watch it on my phone.

Oh, and I liked it, for some positive feedback.

Edited October 15, 2019 by soltakss

[soltakss]

OK, watched it now. It's an interesting documentary, but goes over some tired old ground, Santorini being the Atlantis Myth and not known how they moved a large stone block over half a mile, being just two.

The Temple is interesting, as is the fact that the figurines are similar to those found in Iraq, indicating a link between the two, or a more widespread civilisation.

What really gets me about Bronze Age cities is how small they are, compared to even modern villages. 

[Sir_Godspeed]

1 hour ago, soltakss said:

What really gets me about Bronze Age cities is how small they are, compared to even modern villages. 

Population-wise, area-wise or both?

[seneschal]

Area big but population 5,000.  By comparison, Pauls Valley, OK, Garvin County seat, had a population of 2,000 circa 1983.

Site apparently discovered in the 1950s but only now being excavated by archaeologists with the help of an Israeli road construction company.

[soltakss]

2 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Population-wise, area-wise or both?

Area-wise, mainly. Most of the ones I have seen on maps are very small compared to normal English towns, for example. They would normally fit into a city-centre area in England.

Population-wise, I can't remember how big they normally got, but our populations are a lot larger than at any other time, so they don;t really compare. A city of 5,000 people is big in the Bronze Age, a village of 5,000 people in England is unremarkable.

[seneschal]

Here is another take on the project.

 

[Thalaba]

So , it was about 1/10th the population and 1/10th the size of it's contemporary, Uruk, and they want to call it a 'New York'? Talk about gilding the lily.

If you're curious about how big a 'large city' was in history, Wikipedia has an interesting (though hardly definitive) chart:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_throughout_history

[seneschal]

Well, you know what they say, "He that controls the cylinder seal writes history."  😉

Yeah, part of this is the initial excitement of discovery:  I'm sure we will get a more sober and informative assessment as they actually get to study the place.  And the Big Apple stuff was my own hyperbole.  Can't blame the hard-working scholars for that.

[Thalaba]

NBC must be quoting you, then 🙂 https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/ancient-lost-city-uncovered-israel-was-new-york-city-its-ncna1063661

I'm sure the hyperbole is part excitement, part inducement to draw funding. Israel is rich with Archaeological sites, after all. It would be cool if they could find the ancient name of the place.

There's a lot of gaming potential in ancient ruins - they're places for bandits to hide, spirits to haunt, scorpionmen to make a home, treasures, menaces, and alien artifacts to lie buried. But maybe most interesting of all is coming up with interesting things about the people who once lived there, and what kinds of rites and practices did they observe. Perhaps this city was devoted to the worship of Bethel, the stone god, brother of Dagon... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethel_(god)