Astute viewers may notice that this is indeed a re-upload. Some editing mistakes made their way in at 1:56 and 3:37, where I had accidentally cut myself off mid-sentence. This video turned into quite the stressful ordeal to finish and get out by Sunday (my usual upload day). Even then there is still a lot I had to leave out of the video, but depending on how well this video does, there is always potential for a second part!
I gotta be honest, I don’t see anything wrong with you maybe posting later than Sunday. Who says you have to remain consistent, we will still watch you. If a video isn’t ready on time, maybe just wait a few days? Idk ur situation, I’ve only seen a few vids, but too many UA-camrs are to hard on their selfs ab this
There are quite a few ancient-city-builder games, but none of them (at least that I've found) are anywhere as in-depth as something like Cities Skylines
I have always wanted a cities skylines style game that starts in ancient times and allows you to work your way into the modern era, forcing you to bulldoze, rebuild, replan, adapt with times, weather, technology, etc... And then all the while having the threat of outside invaders trying to conquer your city state.
Pompeii had a cistern on a hill that would release water to regularly flood the streets and wash away the manure and trash. The elevated sidewalk and stepping stones allowed foot traffic to continue when the streets were flooded.
Math is magic. If you don't have 2 miles of parking lots around each building, you don't need to traverse 4 miles of parking lots to to reach your neighbor.
I am not sure what a mile is, but towns don't have these. To take Aarhus as an example it is practically impossible to even find a parking spot inside the inner ring and the city council have declared that they will ban cars entirely in that sector by 2030
@@rphb5870 towns do have these, in the US and Canada. Large parts of the original downtown areas in many cities there have been bulldozed to make parking lots and new development is mostly very sparsely built because of their parking lot requirements. Europe thankfully never took to the car centricity nearly as much.
@@houndofculann1793 yea I heard stories about it but I have a hard time actually believing it. It sounds absurd. another is zoning, take my little town for instance. On one side of my road we have single family houses, on the other multi storage apartments. There is a hotel and a doctors clinic on the top of the hill, and a supermarket on the other side. While we don't have hairdressers on my street, we do have a lot of those. Many women have repurposed a room in their house to a salon. Doing this or opening any other business on our property is a right not something we have to ask permission of, but if we apply for mixed use and can prove that it is so, we get a tax rebate
@@KhAnubis Please! The ending of the video made me longing for more. Making a video is a lot of work, but even releasing a script or notes would be awesome
I like how even though there was no internet in those times, the ancient civilizations all over the world followed similar design conventions when building cities despite them being separated from one another.
There was also a rather effective way of spreading your design conventions across the world. Build and empire, meaning conquer your neighbours, their neighbours, etc. etc. till you have the Roman Empire.
The Polynesians travelled all over the Pacific in their tiny boats. If they could do that, others could have done that before them. Or they could have transported passengers. People from a different civilization with the know-how to build big stone structures.
9:15 it's always weird to be watching a video in my free time and hearing a reference to myself. 😉 I went to Pompeii last year and took a bunch of footage, but never got around to making a video about it, so thanks for making this. The "crosswalks" are really interesting to walk across in person. They also had what we would call "bollards" to cut off cart traffic from certain streets and busy areas (like the centre square). The Romans also had problems with carts being driven dangerously fast, so low speed limits were introduced to many cities, and as you said, cart traffic was often limited to only certain times of the day. We could actually improve our cities quite a lot by just copying what the Romans did. But maybe without the lead pipes and raw sewage in the streets.
Man, the more we advanced technologically, the more things stayed the same. Reckless and entitled cart drivers, carts polluting and spewing literal manure, the need to enforce speed limits, modal filtering, and even which side of the road to drive on...
Fun fact: President Ulysses S. Grant once got a speeding fine for riding his horse "too fast" on a busy street in DC Edid: upon further research this seems to be a load of crap
Dude, you are doing an absolutely *excellent* job for being a one-man show. You have good, naturally-paced self-narration on a concise, interesting script and totally solid video editing. Not many people can research, write, narrate, and video edit equally well by themselves. This is a seriously high-quality proof of concept without having a paid team backing you, and I am shocked more people don't support you financially yet. I'll do my part to at least slightly remediate that last bit.
It's cool to look at how ancient cites and towns around the world were built to accommodate different environmental conditions. Like how the Incas built at high elevations in the Andes, and how Venice and Tenochtitlan were built on water.
I've seen a video of what Pergamon look like and my, it's a very dramatic position to build a city on. No wonder the famed altar look like that, it was on steep terrain.
Around the time where cars and electricity got around, London had about 5 million people. If placed in America today, it would be the second largest city, a few million off of new york.
@carso1500 13sq km for 1 million people That's insanely small Less than 4km in diameter, assuming a road crossing it is straight , it could be walked across in an hour
@@carso1500 1 Million people in 13km² = Density of 76 923hab/km² Nowadays the most dense city on earth is Manilla with 43 614 habitants per km² (1,85 Million habitants on 42,34km² (The 3 most dense city on the planet are all from the Philippines) The most dense neighborhood is Imbaba in the city of Giza (Egypt) with a density of 177 038hab/km² (1 465 875 habitants on 8,28km²) While the most dense neighborhood in a not poor country is Yorkville in Manhattan (New York City) with a density of 61 607hab/km² while Manhattan itself is at 27 010 Yorkville is the 25th most dense neighborhood Number of neighborhoods per country in the top 24 : Nigeria :6 (3rd ;4th ;5th ;10th ;12th and 17th) Bangladesh :4 (2nd ;6th ;11th and 15th) India :4 (7th; 9th ;20th and 23th) Egypt :2 (1st and 21th) Turkey :2 (13th and 18th) Philppines :2 (14th and 16th) China :1 (8th) South Africa :1 (19th) Liberia :1 (22th) Kenya :1 (24th) The list does not include place that are less than 1km² in size The old city of Kowloon had a density of 1 350 000hab/km² (35 000 habitants on 0,026km²)
@@PingSharp That's mainly because of how cities in the US work. The "Metro Area" is a better standard since a lot of US cities are actually like 8 cities. Phoenix is like 1/4th the population of the Phoenix Metro Area which also includes Mesa, a city of 500,000 people encased entirely within Phoenix.
Cross walks existed so that people wouldn’t step on horse feces. Furthermore rainwater would pass from the lower part. Crosswalks also helped keep horses on the correct track. Therefore, sidewalks and crossroads preceded cars.
@@nuclearwinter1984so weird how this comment has 74 likes… did that many people not care to watch a few more minutes? Or is this dead internet theory? Either way it’s dumb
I clicked this video half expecting to click away pretty soon but I was impressed with the thinking of this young guy. Well done you. I’ll watch more of your vids. Thanks and well done
7:36 As someone who lives in a large modern American city, whose local rivers are full of sewer feces water and we pipe in clean water from elsewhere, this sounds like home.
Seeing the Assassin's Creed gameplay reminds me that we need more adventure and roleplay games set in a realistic historical setting, where actual historians worked with the game developers.
Note that the small (in area), highly dense cities like Rome is specific to the west. Many non-european civilizations built cities much larger in area than Rome such as medieval Baghdad (Islamic), Chang'an (Chinese), Angkor (Khmr), Vijayanagara (Indian) and Tikal (Mayan) to name a few.
That prolly has to do with the social structure and the existance of truly independent semi-democratic local governments, ie. a city councils within a wider feudal society. A merchant in the west was limited by the city's walls but he was free from feudal system, he could climb the social ladder just by adding more floors to his house, renting space and opening more shops. He owned his land and house. There was an incentive to squeze more out of limited space. Merchant class existed across the entire old world but in the west private property of said merchant was protected from kings and emperors by the city itself. A good example of the difference the jurisdiction makes in 18th century Warsaw, the town within the walls was a domain of merchants and the buildings there were densly packed while the built area outside the walls was orders of magnitude greater than the old town but it was under the jurisdiction of the king and the nobles, it consisted of palaces, manors and a vast low density sprawl. It was a lot more like old Chinese or Japanese cities in terms of density and organisation.
@@kacperwoch4368 that arrangement doesn't really explain why Rome or other cities during antiquity in the west were similarly small in area, highly dense urban centers, even more so than those in the medieval period
I really like how you’re making videos now. It feels like you’re playing into the unprofessional or unpolished feel. It makes the video more genuine and easy to watch.
Your ending is goldmine for more content: Cover how specific civilisations did their civil design, the cultural influence behind certain choices, and their pros and cons.
People often forget that the earliest cars were often called horseless carriages/carts/buggies. Before we had cars we had horse drawn carts that served many of the same uses and had similar infrastructure needs as modern automobiles. There are differences for sure but many of the same issues of how do you move a large transport vehicle down a street that also has pedestrians applied and had similar answers.
A lot of times the city wall was torn down because the city grew far beyond it, and the inner area needed a road way more than it needed a wall. That's why you see a lot of European cities with an arterial road running in a circle around the center; it was built on the space that the old wall previously occupied.
In essence, medieval cities were walkable neighborhoods. Which is why they were so small in size. Of course, in a walkable city, citizens only need to worry about travel time between their own house and all the facilities. Not about travel time from their house to the gate on the other side of the city. You'd probably take the gate nearest to your location.
Great video! Popped up on my recommended and I subscribed right away. The visuals are interesting, you're a good storyteller, and the information is fascinating. I'll be watching more of your videos now :)
This is really cool! I'm working on an industrial setting for my DnD campaign and I'm learning a lot about city-building from this. Would love to see more like this!
Small tip, please add the medium date of games or other sources, so we know for example that Assasins Creed made the game in 2018, which displays (431 BC) Love the use of this game scenes, very very helpful 😍
It was my understanding that residents of insulae mostly used chamber pots... Sure there were public restrooms and villas with running water and sewer connections, but I remember reading that insulae were usually built on the cheap, and that a private connection to an aqueduct required special permission from the government.
Another amazing vid, off topic but the Q&A helped me to be more execpting of my Autism diagnosis, for a while i thought I could battle it and become normal but learned to except my strength and weakness and work with them
A bit of a 'modern' example of fortifying a city could be Belfast, where parts of the city were sectioned off in a 'ring of steel' during the Troubles in order to clamp down on paramilitary activity and control the movement of people. They're not so much a 'wall' though, more like various fences and gates on the streets to section off certain parts of the city. Or even the peace walls, many of which still exist today.
in stead of being an anonymous internet troll, i imagine back in the day id be the bloke at the back of the pub or back of the mob, shouting things from the safety of the rear 😉
There was some kind of "police" walking around making sure that everything was in order or deal with domestic issues? Or the guards that secured the walls had to step in?
Oh wait I totally should have talked about emergency services in this video! (Maybe I’ll do it as a short actually) But from what I know, at least in Ancient Greece it was mostly just hired guards keeping certain residences safe
from what I gather, police and their bureaucratic organisations are a more modern thing. it seems to have varied between groups of armed gangs sworn to noble families/guilds, vigilante groups and soldiers, whether as permanent formation like the Praetorians and Varangians, or soldiers raised in shifts by city leaders so they dont get too bribe comfortable.
The Praetorian Guards also do policeman duty inside the city walls of Rome, yes. Most walled cities have a permanent detachment of soldiers, that also do police duty. The more interesting thing about ancient Rome is how the firefighting and fire insurance are rolled into one thing. You pay the insurance, and if your insula caught fire they'll try to save it. But oftentimes they'll extort you for more money or offer to buy the literally still burning building from you for cheap. I recall some channels have touched on these. It's either Voices of the Past or Invicta or both, I can't recall.
Nope. Police patrolling around is not a thing that happened in most medieval cities. Locals might hire guards, sometimes a city would have a Nightwatch that walked around with lanterns to deter thieves at night. Many times it was a volunteer force. Gated communities did exist and they would have guards at the gates to prevent undesirables entering the, typically, noble, areas. City Guard where they existed were more about keeping watch and keeping the peace and protecting the wealthy and powerful, supporting customs and excise, not so much about maintaining law and order for the masses. The thing to remember is that non-productive people are expensive to keep when every ounce of water and food they need to survive has to be shipped in and paid for somehow. Standing armies were unusual and typically smaller than we would think. The same goes for Guards of any kind. Places like Paris, Rome and Constantinople were pretty extreme outliers benefiting from perfect locations of traderoutes, seaports, navigable rivers, water supply and ample arable land nearby.
Local gang/neighborhood watch. Hired guards. Local soldier garrison. Generally it just had a lot of crime and if you didn’t have a social connection to help you seek vengeance and you were unable to enact it yourself you were screwed. Police are largely a 19th century thing
I appreciate all the clips from Assassin's Creed and Minecraft in this, lol. On another note, this was a very interesting video. I would love to see future videos covering other aspects of ancient construction, urban planning, logistics, etc. in cities from around the world. Thank you for this one! God be with you out there, everybody. ✝️ :)
This is a fantastic video. You’re thorough but clear. Most of your examples are from the Mediterranean. Do you have examples of cities in other parts of the world, like sub-Saharan Africa, China, and Mesoamerica? What about island cities? Were they different in predictable/consistent ways?
Yeaaah! Finally saw my hometown POTSDAM in a KhAnubis video :) Fun fact: the Brandenburger Tor here was built BEFORE the famouse one in Berlin. Both are still standing today.
A notable exception to the city size rule is Tokyo, which became more densely populated over time but still occupied roughly the same area it does today due to the flat land, good crop land, and easy access to fresh water. It is worth noting though that it wasn't a single city until a few centuries ago, and before this it was a bunch of smaller towns, cities, villages, and hamlets. Also worth noting that 1 AD Rome's density is more than some countries today, which is fairly impressive. Places like Iceland, Malta, Montenegro, Estonia, and Northern Ireland are around the same size despite being larger and more industrious.
I'm always fascinated by how tiny they were, footprint wise. Even medieval, even, though larger, the great classical metropoles of great civilizations, and especially bronze age.
Thanks for making this video KhAnubis im actually writing a fantasynovel where the Protag is currently in a greek inspired pre industrial city so this helps a bit with visualizations
Bruh please make or release an extended versions with all the details, I know none of the details it takes you to make it but if you did I would watch and I believe others would too
2:13 I always wonder if the cart wheel gauge was the same all over the empire...or imagine you bought a new cart in gaul, took it to anatolia and then found out, damn, my wheels are too wide for the crosswalks here. that would probably suck.
One of the biggest issues that goes unchallenged is how disabilities are used as a cudgel to prevent positive change. Having a disability does not prevent people from living in walkable cities, it just prevents cars being the only way that disabled people are allowed to get around.
Most of ancient cities had length from south to north or from west to east equivalent to 2-4 modern days bus stops. That’s how cities functioned without cars
Zoning in cities has extremely backfired since most workplaces are no longer dirty factories. Especially in the US has lots of suburbs lacking infrastructure, so that people are obliged to have a car to reach the next supermarket or public transport. There is a great channel here on YT about comparing these problems: Not Just Bikes Actually, US Americans are amazed when they come to Europe and see that many people here live happily in the cities without owning a car, but relying on waling, biking and public transport, thus saving a lot of money and avoiding pollution.
Astute viewers may notice that this is indeed a re-upload. Some editing mistakes made their way in at 1:56 and 3:37, where I had accidentally cut myself off mid-sentence. This video turned into quite the stressful ordeal to finish and get out by Sunday (my usual upload day). Even then there is still a lot I had to leave out of the video, but depending on how well this video does, there is always potential for a second part!
Ah damn. That’s neat in all. However, I know me alone won’t make it happen, But I’m just speaking my voice. I’d love a part 2.
You could do a "long version" of this one, fixing the mistakes and adding the rest. I would watch a 20 min version of this.
FWIW I just found your channel from this video and really enjoyed the topic - a part 2 or expansion would be cool.
How did carts maneuver through these raised stones?
I gotta be honest, I don’t see anything wrong with you maybe posting later than Sunday. Who says you have to remain consistent, we will still watch you. If a video isn’t ready on time, maybe just wait a few days? Idk ur situation, I’ve only seen a few vids, but too many UA-camrs are to hard on their selfs ab this
Imagine an ancient City Skylines game where you plan city’s with old technology they used in order to gain a better perspective
There are quite a few ancient-city-builder games, but none of them (at least that I've found) are anywhere as in-depth as something like Cities Skylines
I've been wanting something like this 😓 traffic would be so different
Try our songs of syx. It’s fantasy with races and more complex than city skylines but it’s medieval so low tech level.
Age of empires
I have always wanted a cities skylines style game that starts in ancient times and allows you to work your way into the modern era, forcing you to bulldoze, rebuild, replan, adapt with times, weather, technology, etc...
And then all the while having the threat of outside invaders trying to conquer your city state.
Pompeii had a cistern on a hill that would release water to regularly flood the streets and wash away the manure and trash. The elevated sidewalk and stepping stones allowed foot traffic to continue when the streets were flooded.
I hear they also had a cistern filled with magma on another hill that served a similar purpose but had much more gruesome effects
is that how they made cobblestone roads
That's awesome
@@brentbowman4498the set up required for this joke was actually crazy
@@brentbowman4498 LOL!
Math is magic. If you don't have 2 miles of parking lots around each building, you don't need to traverse 4 miles of parking lots to to reach your neighbor.
Who could have thunk it
Who'da thunk@@kylezdancewicz7346
I am not sure what a mile is, but towns don't have these. To take Aarhus as an example it is practically impossible to even find a parking spot inside the inner ring and the city council have declared that they will ban cars entirely in that sector by 2030
@@rphb5870 towns do have these, in the US and Canada. Large parts of the original downtown areas in many cities there have been bulldozed to make parking lots and new development is mostly very sparsely built because of their parking lot requirements. Europe thankfully never took to the car centricity nearly as much.
@@houndofculann1793 yea I heard stories about it but I have a hard time actually believing it. It sounds absurd.
another is zoning, take my little town for instance. On one side of my road we have single family houses, on the other multi storage apartments. There is a hotel and a doctors clinic on the top of the hill, and a supermarket on the other side. While we don't have hairdressers on my street, we do have a lot of those. Many women have repurposed a room in their house to a salon. Doing this or opening any other business on our property is a right not something we have to ask permission of, but if we apply for mixed use and can prove that it is so, we get a tax rebate
I would honestly LOVE a long-format video talking about all the ins and outs of ancient city dynamics, with all the info you said you had to cut off.
If anyone wants to commission an hour-long documentary on historical city planning, I'm perfectly down to do so (just saying)
@@KhAnubis crowdfund it bro I'm willing to throw in a $20
@@KhAnubis Please! The ending of the video made me longing for more. Making a video is a lot of work, but even releasing a script or notes would be awesome
@@KhAnubis How would one go about doing that? Do you have a set rate, or is it a contact and play it by ear situation?
I like how even though there was no internet in those times, the ancient civilizations all over the world followed similar design conventions when building cities despite them being separated from one another.
Convergent evolution: if something works, it will be achieved independently by multiple occurrences...
@@adrianblake8876yup, the stacks of bricks that toppled over aren't around any more
There was also a rather effective way of spreading your design conventions across the world.
Build and empire, meaning conquer your neighbours, their neighbours, etc. etc. till you have the Roman Empire.
Same logic can be applied to the building of pyramids across different continents.
The Polynesians travelled all over the Pacific in their tiny boats. If they could do that, others could have done that before them.
Or they could have transported passengers. People from a different civilization with the know-how to build big stone structures.
9:15 it's always weird to be watching a video in my free time and hearing a reference to myself. 😉
I went to Pompeii last year and took a bunch of footage, but never got around to making a video about it, so thanks for making this.
The "crosswalks" are really interesting to walk across in person. They also had what we would call "bollards" to cut off cart traffic from certain streets and busy areas (like the centre square).
The Romans also had problems with carts being driven dangerously fast, so low speed limits were introduced to many cities, and as you said, cart traffic was often limited to only certain times of the day.
We could actually improve our cities quite a lot by just copying what the Romans did. But maybe without the lead pipes and raw sewage in the streets.
Man, the more we advanced technologically, the more things stayed the same. Reckless and entitled cart drivers, carts polluting and spewing literal manure, the need to enforce speed limits, modal filtering, and even which side of the road to drive on...
Fun fact: President Ulysses S. Grant once got a speeding fine for riding his horse "too fast" on a busy street in DC
Edid: upon further research this seems to be a load of crap
My answer: baked sewage
Couldn't agree more!
Especially the gladiators would make for an awesome improvement ⚔️🤘🏻😎😎
Im actually dutch so stop the cap in your vids
Dude, you are doing an absolutely *excellent* job for being a one-man show. You have good, naturally-paced self-narration on a concise, interesting script and totally solid video editing. Not many people can research, write, narrate, and video edit equally well by themselves. This is a seriously high-quality proof of concept without having a paid team backing you, and I am shocked more people don't support you financially yet. I'll do my part to at least slightly remediate that last bit.
Hey thanks, I really appreciate the kind words and your support!
It's cool to look at how ancient cites and towns around the world were built to accommodate different environmental conditions. Like how the Incas built at high elevations in the Andes, and how Venice and Tenochtitlan were built on water.
I've seen a video of what Pergamon look like and my, it's a very dramatic position to build a city on. No wonder the famed altar look like that, it was on steep terrain.
A city of 1 million during that time is INSANE I live in a big city with like 800k people I couldn’t IMAGINE how grand Rome must’ve seemed then
Around the time where cars and electricity got around, London had about 5 million people. If placed in America today, it would be the second largest city, a few million off of new york.
More like pretty compresed, 1 million people in such a small area must have been... Pretty interesting
@carso1500 13sq km for 1 million people
That's insanely small
Less than 4km in diameter, assuming a road crossing it is straight , it could be walked across in an hour
@@carso1500
1 Million people in 13km² = Density of 76 923hab/km²
Nowadays the most dense city on earth is Manilla with 43 614 habitants per km² (1,85 Million habitants on 42,34km² (The 3 most dense city on the planet are all from the Philippines)
The most dense neighborhood is Imbaba in the city of Giza (Egypt) with a density of 177 038hab/km² (1 465 875 habitants on 8,28km²)
While the most dense neighborhood in a not poor country is Yorkville in Manhattan (New York City) with a density of 61 607hab/km² while Manhattan itself is at 27 010
Yorkville is the 25th most dense neighborhood
Number of neighborhoods per country in the top 24 :
Nigeria :6 (3rd ;4th ;5th ;10th ;12th and 17th)
Bangladesh :4 (2nd ;6th ;11th and 15th)
India :4 (7th; 9th ;20th and 23th)
Egypt :2 (1st and 21th)
Turkey :2 (13th and 18th)
Philppines :2 (14th and 16th)
China :1 (8th)
South Africa :1 (19th)
Liberia :1 (22th)
Kenya :1 (24th)
The list does not include place that are less than 1km² in size
The old city of Kowloon had a density of 1 350 000hab/km² (35 000 habitants on 0,026km²)
@@PingSharp That's mainly because of how cities in the US work. The "Metro Area" is a better standard since a lot of US cities are actually like 8 cities. Phoenix is like 1/4th the population of the Phoenix Metro Area which also includes Mesa, a city of 500,000 people encased entirely within Phoenix.
Cross walks existed so that people wouldn’t step on horse feces. Furthermore rainwater would pass from the lower part. Crosswalks also helped keep horses on the correct track. Therefore, sidewalks and crossroads preceded cars.
Yeah, he said that.
@@nuclearwinter1984so weird how this comment has 74 likes… did that many people not care to watch a few more minutes? Or is this dead internet theory? Either way it’s dumb
I clicked this video half expecting to click away pretty soon but I was impressed with the thinking of this young guy. Well done you. I’ll watch more of your vids. Thanks and well done
As a city planning nerd, i absolutely LOVE this video!
One thing anyone with a fantasy of living in ancient cities is that they would immediately be overcome by the stench.
Only OGs know this was a reupload
this comment made itself untrue
@@winterwatson6437 Damn!
6:20 "ancient citys grew around places that looked cool"- minecraft logic
Thanks for making this video man, really fascinating stuff in a very digestible format
7:36 As someone who lives in a large modern American city, whose local rivers are full of sewer feces water and we pipe in clean water from elsewhere, this sounds like home.
Seeing the Assassin's Creed gameplay reminds me that we need more adventure and roleplay games set in a realistic historical setting, where actual historians worked with the game developers.
This is like perfectly curated for my niche interests.
Incredible work on this video. Also, very much appreciated the usage of Rumelihisarı in the thumbnail!
Give me the 2 hour long form deep dive into ancient city infrastructure and transportation!!!
4:27 say that again?
short answer: HORSES GO **COLP CLOP CLOP**
those re just coconut shells banged against each other.
And PLOP PLOP !
A horse is gonna do what a horse is gonna do. Or an ox, mule, donkey, ass, camel etc.
@@mpetersen6 isn't a donkey and an ass the same thing?
@@mpetersen6 I wonder when the horse diaper was invented, and why it couldn't have been invented earlier.
Note that the small (in area), highly dense cities like Rome is specific to the west. Many non-european civilizations built cities much larger in area than Rome such as medieval Baghdad (Islamic), Chang'an (Chinese), Angkor (Khmr), Vijayanagara (Indian) and Tikal (Mayan) to name a few.
The comparison was between the modern city and the ancient ones. I'm sure modern Baghdad is way bigger than the ancient one.
That prolly has to do with the social structure and the existance of truly independent semi-democratic local governments, ie. a city councils within a wider feudal society. A merchant in the west was limited by the city's walls but he was free from feudal system, he could climb the social ladder just by adding more floors to his house, renting space and opening more shops. He owned his land and house. There was an incentive to squeze more out of limited space. Merchant class existed across the entire old world but in the west private property of said merchant was protected from kings and emperors by the city itself.
A good example of the difference the jurisdiction makes in 18th century Warsaw, the town within the walls was a domain of merchants and the buildings there were densly packed while the built area outside the walls was orders of magnitude greater than the old town but it was under the jurisdiction of the king and the nobles, it consisted of palaces, manors and a vast low density sprawl. It was a lot more like old Chinese or Japanese cities in terms of density and organisation.
@@kacperwoch4368"Town air makes free" indeed. I read a serf that manage to stay in a city for a year is considered a free man after.
@@kacperwoch4368 that arrangement doesn't really explain why Rome or other cities during antiquity in the west were similarly small in area, highly dense urban centers, even more so than those in the medieval period
@@oiaeyu Aside from Rome, which cities? Buildings taller than two storeys were rare across the empire.
I really like how you’re making videos now. It feels like you’re playing into the unprofessional or unpolished feel. It makes the video more genuine and easy to watch.
Your ending is goldmine for more content:
Cover how specific civilisations did their civil design, the cultural influence behind certain choices, and their pros and cons.
this has been an amazing video! thank you. we need to rethink our cites.
The City as Resource is a great book you might like by the way :)
People often forget that the earliest cars were often called horseless carriages/carts/buggies. Before we had cars we had horse drawn carts that served many of the same uses and had similar infrastructure needs as modern automobiles. There are differences for sure but many of the same issues of how do you move a large transport vehicle down a street that also has pedestrians applied and had similar answers.
Fun fact: roads that are half the width of a standard avenue are officially called halfenues. True story
pics or didnt happen
In Italy, narrow roads are called vicolo instead of via.
A lot of times the city wall was torn down because the city grew far beyond it, and the inner area needed a road way more than it needed a wall. That's why you see a lot of European cities with an arterial road running in a circle around the center; it was built on the space that the old wall previously occupied.
In essence, medieval cities were walkable neighborhoods.
Which is why they were so small in size.
Of course, in a walkable city, citizens only need to worry about travel time between their own house and all the facilities.
Not about travel time from their house to the gate on the other side of the city. You'd probably take the gate nearest to your location.
Great video! Popped up on my recommended and I subscribed right away. The visuals are interesting, you're a good storyteller, and the information is fascinating. I'll be watching more of your videos now :)
I like the fun flourishes. Very entertaining.
Your appreciation for nature’s beauty is truly inspiring!
This is really cool! I'm working on an industrial setting for my DnD campaign and I'm learning a lot about city-building from this. Would love to see more like this!
shit man, I really want a deeper dive on this topic, like multiple hours. Even if broken into multiple videos. Keep up the excellent work!
One of the most interesting videos ive watched recently. Thanks!
Pretty solid vid keep it up man
Small tip, please add the medium date of games or other sources, so we know for example that Assasins Creed made the game in 2018, which displays (431 BC)
Love the use of this game scenes, very very helpful 😍
U fixed urself getting Thanos snapped?
lol
Yeah that was an uncomfortable experience
Wish we could all do that!
It was my understanding that residents of insulae mostly used chamber pots... Sure there were public restrooms and villas with running water and sewer connections, but I remember reading that insulae were usually built on the cheap, and that a private connection to an aqueduct required special permission from the government.
That's actually an awesome video and in the end I learned something about my city
Another quality documentary. Thank you
I love the Tone and Pitch of your videos. Smart, Querky, Geeky, and yet interesting and funny
Part 2!!!!!! PLEASE
I love this format❤️
Shout out for steady IBD treament! With you brother ✊️
Great video! Thank you.
Amazing! Great job :)
Now I want a Cities Skylines Ancient edition.
That's simple. Legs and horses. Sometimes those carts or enclosed lounges hauled by the plebs.
Great video! Peace out
Simple. Beautifully.
this video was amazing!! Give us the full cut 😭😭
Excellent video!!!
Is back!
Another amazing vid, off topic but the Q&A helped me to be more execpting of my Autism diagnosis, for a while i thought I could battle it and become normal but learned to except my strength and weakness and work with them
Excellent work !
Can you make a video about the Shibam in Jemen? I think it’s the most well preserved example how similar people lived 1700 years ago :)
A bit of a 'modern' example of fortifying a city could be Belfast, where parts of the city were sectioned off in a 'ring of steel' during the Troubles in order to clamp down on paramilitary activity and control the movement of people. They're not so much a 'wall' though, more like various fences and gates on the streets to section off certain parts of the city. Or even the peace walls, many of which still exist today.
Wonderdraft being used for a video like this is actually pretty cool. Was definetly suprised to see it here, but not dissappinted
I love "Plebs" such a good show!
AC Origins was soooo good! Thank you for reminding me of that game!
Cant wait to put this into my worldbuilding projects
more of this sort of thing please
in stead of being an anonymous internet troll, i imagine back in the day id be the bloke at the back of the pub or back of the mob, shouting things from the safety of the rear 😉
Humans truly never change
There was some kind of "police" walking around making sure that everything was in order or deal with domestic issues? Or the guards that secured the walls had to step in?
Oh wait I totally should have talked about emergency services in this video! (Maybe I’ll do it as a short actually)
But from what I know, at least in Ancient Greece it was mostly just hired guards keeping certain residences safe
from what I gather, police and their bureaucratic organisations are a more modern thing. it seems to have varied between groups of armed gangs sworn to noble families/guilds, vigilante groups and soldiers, whether as permanent formation like the Praetorians and Varangians, or soldiers raised in shifts by city leaders so they dont get too bribe comfortable.
The Praetorian Guards also do policeman duty inside the city walls of Rome, yes. Most walled cities have a permanent detachment of soldiers, that also do police duty.
The more interesting thing about ancient Rome is how the firefighting and fire insurance are rolled into one thing. You pay the insurance, and if your insula caught fire they'll try to save it. But oftentimes they'll extort you for more money or offer to buy the literally still burning building from you for cheap.
I recall some channels have touched on these. It's either Voices of the Past or Invicta or both, I can't recall.
Nope. Police patrolling around is not a thing that happened in most medieval cities. Locals might hire guards, sometimes a city would have a Nightwatch that walked around with lanterns to deter thieves at night. Many times it was a volunteer force. Gated communities did exist and they would have guards at the gates to prevent undesirables entering the, typically, noble, areas.
City Guard where they existed were more about keeping watch and keeping the peace and protecting the wealthy and powerful, supporting customs and excise, not so much about maintaining law and order for the masses.
The thing to remember is that non-productive people are expensive to keep when every ounce of water and food they need to survive has to be shipped in and paid for somehow. Standing armies were unusual and typically smaller than we would think. The same goes for Guards of any kind.
Places like Paris, Rome and Constantinople were pretty extreme outliers benefiting from perfect locations of traderoutes, seaports, navigable rivers, water supply and ample arable land nearby.
Local gang/neighborhood watch. Hired guards. Local soldier garrison. Generally it just had a lot of crime and if you didn’t have a social connection to help you seek vengeance and you were unable to enact it yourself you were screwed. Police are largely a 19th century thing
this vid fucks hard, subscribed, comment for the algorithm. Yeah and a big thanks for it mate
I appreciate all the clips from Assassin's Creed and Minecraft in this, lol. On another note, this was a very interesting video. I would love to see future videos covering other aspects of ancient construction, urban planning, logistics, etc. in cities from around the world. Thank you for this one!
God be with you out there, everybody. ✝️ :)
The cross walks existed, there is a lot of them in Pompei
This is a fantastic video. You’re thorough but clear.
Most of your examples are from the Mediterranean. Do you have examples of cities in other parts of the world, like sub-Saharan Africa, China, and Mesoamerica? What about island cities? Were they different in predictable/consistent ways?
I can see all of the points given, around my local town here in Greece
You forgot about the Hok Tor
I was just gonna comment this 😭
They did and now they don’t. Great video thanks!
Your censor at 2:37 made me subscribe
No joke, I had that gag planned out weeks before I wrote the rest of the script
Yeaaah! Finally saw my hometown POTSDAM in a KhAnubis video :) Fun fact: the Brandenburger Tor here was built BEFORE the famouse one in Berlin. Both are still standing today.
Love the font 🖖🏻
A notable exception to the city size rule is Tokyo, which became more densely populated over time but still occupied roughly the same area it does today due to the flat land, good crop land, and easy access to fresh water.
It is worth noting though that it wasn't a single city until a few centuries ago, and before this it was a bunch of smaller towns, cities, villages, and hamlets.
Also worth noting that 1 AD Rome's density is more than some countries today, which is fairly impressive.
Places like Iceland, Malta, Montenegro, Estonia, and Northern Ireland are around the same size despite being larger and more industrious.
I'm always fascinated by how tiny they were, footprint wise. Even medieval, even, though larger, the great classical metropoles of great civilizations, and especially bronze age.
Cool, THANKS!
6:06 I assume office buildings were something different back then.
Thanks for making this video KhAnubis im actually writing a fantasynovel where the Protag is currently in a greek inspired pre industrial city so this helps a bit with visualizations
Bruh please make or release an extended versions with all the details, I know none of the details it takes you to make it but if you did I would watch and I believe others would too
I need this video to be 5 hours long. Do that please
This is gonna be a huge help for my Minecraft builds.
Very nice video 👍👍
Cool video:)
Great video.
I didn't expect you to predict people, such as myself, watching this for worldbuilding purposes, lol
"A city of 1 million people is nothing impressive "
Cuts to Birmingham UK
Just imagine having to _walk_ everywhere! The horror!
2:13 I always wonder if the cart wheel gauge was the same all over the empire...or imagine you bought a new cart in gaul, took it to anatolia and then found out, damn, my wheels are too wide for the crosswalks here. that would probably suck.
What is the Minecraft mod used in this? It looks so unique!
That would be Conquest Reforged, really great mod! (It's also available as a resource pack)
@@KhAnubis Thank you for this!
Wow, that makes sense, the biblical "city gate" is so important to social life
One of the biggest issues that goes unchallenged is how disabilities are used as a cudgel to prevent positive change. Having a disability does not prevent people from living in walkable cities, it just prevents cars being the only way that disabled people are allowed to get around.
Most of ancient cities had length from south to north or from west to east equivalent to 2-4 modern days bus stops. That’s how cities functioned without cars
Fun fact that i learned in an Asian history class: during the Tang dynasty in China (618-907) you could be reprimanded for speeding in the capital
Zoning in cities has extremely backfired since most workplaces are no longer dirty factories. Especially in the US has lots of suburbs lacking infrastructure, so that people are obliged to have a car to reach the next supermarket or public transport. There is a great channel here on YT about comparing these problems: Not Just Bikes
Actually, US Americans are amazed when they come to Europe and see that many people here live happily in the cities without owning a car, but relying on waling, biking and public transport, thus saving a lot of money and avoiding pollution.
Well done laddy