So, when does a settlement become a "city"?

Metallurgy was developed on the Balkans and/or the Middle East at the start of the 5th millennium. This part of the world proceeded to producing bronze alloys earlier than the rest of the world. Just because western scholars in the 19th century put the start of the bronze age at approx. 2300 absolute dating doesn't mean the Bronze age started at the same time at other parts of the world. The official Mediterranean chronology is EBA I, II and III, dated 3500/3300-2000 BCE.

early civilization: 1000
bronze age: 5000
late bronze age: 10000
iron age: 20000
early classical: 50000
late classical onwards: 100000
industrial revolution onwards: 1000000

A city cannot sustain itself but can project power to a large area
Or post 1066
A town is a large settlement
A city is a settlement with a cathedral

What does metallurgy have to do with city size?

Bronze age Nordics has settlements with like 20 huts on average and had fine bronze swords and artefacts, meanwhile Aztecs had cities with 200,000 inhabitants and used Obsidian weapons

that's some quality shit, isn't it

The specialization of labour wouldn't be a very good benchmark, i'd say a better bench mark would be when the settlement doesn't produce enough food to sustain tiself, which does imply a specialization of labour, but ensures you wouldn't get a city out of a shack, a farmer and his wife the carver.

A good criteria would whether that city exports its goods (pottery, food and other luxurious objects) or not, basically if it's got a surplus of good and a specialized artisan and or merchant class

>ugh, how can you refer to ages that only represent to a small region of the globe, this is old world centrism, I'm literally shaking
k

Obsidian and flint were traded as early as the Late Paleolithic. Trade is one of the indicators of behavioral modernity.

I mean huge amount of refines traded objects, Not just some Rocks/ metals

He's right though. Metallurgy based ages are specific, retroactive labels we just use for eurasian history.

Trying to apply it outside of that context is stupid, especially to the americas, which were entirely isolated. The aztecs only had stone, wood, and maybe copper weapons, but had better waterworks tech then even 16th centurry europe, adminstrative complexity on par with the romans, and their architecture and engineering abilities were around that/middle aged europe if not better in some ways then europe's at the time as well.

The comparsion just doesn't fucking work outside of the context it's meant to describe.

The exact transition point at which a town becomes a city is rather nebulous. Especially since this transition is often very poorly documented. Most cities didn't take much interest in investigating and recording their own history until they were already quite large. Just look at Rome. It's probably the most well-documented history of any city in existence, yet the details of the early years of Rome are still very fuzzy. Extremely little is known about the Regal period of Roman history, which preceded the Republican era. Most of what we do know about early Roman is a nebulous mixture of folklore, legend, and wild speculation. The Romans themselves eventually took a very strong interest in their own history, yet the early years tended to be quite a puzzle even for them.

A site called Kamenovo in NE Bulgaria has been excavated for the past several years, dated ~4500 BCE, or middle chalcolithic according to the local relative chronology. This last year the team, consisting of no more than 20 people, working 6 days a week for less than a full month, found more than 40 000 flint artefacts, including debitage, blanks and cores, ready to be exported. To give you an idea and better understanding of what that means, I was at excavations a couple of years ago at a site dating back approximately to 4300-4100 BCE. In a single day we would find not more than 10 flint artefacts.
Despite this, none of the scholars here is daring enough to call Kamenovo a city, but a production centre. We have several examples from the chalcolithic era for production centers, mainly for salt and bone/lithic tools. Organized trade is not unique to the Bronze age or to complex societies.

pic related.

The fact that we don't know a lot about early Rome is also related to the fact that the Gauls burned down the Roman archives

Those fucking savage retards

Depends if you have a society

It has been speculated that the Gauls burning down Rome some time around 393 BC is what may have triggered Rome's militarism, and thirst for outward expansion. At very least, it certainly prompted the Romans to build very, very thick walls as they rebuilt the city. Whatever happened, the inhabitants of the city were determined that it would never happen again. And they were quite successful, as Rome wasn't sacked again until literally hundreds of years latter.

>1000-5000
Village

>5000-15,000
Town

>15,000+
City

That's just my opinion though. Village and town have a more intimate connotation to them and thus should be reflected in population size. Once you start getting into the tens of thousands that intimacy begins to be lost thus it moves from town to city.

So Troy was a village?

Interesting...

I think it is safe to say that if Troy in any way matches its reputation, it obviously had a population well in excess of 15,000.

It had 1000 inhabitants

You'll be hard pressed to find a community of over 500 people where most residents know everybody else.

They should be classified by their populations as a percentage of the population of the society's capital or most populous city.