They were the largest cities in the world, and arguably the epicenters of human civilization.

These cities led mankind to new heights of culture and commerce—though in the end each of them was surpassed and some of them destroyed.

HistoriansTertius Chandler, Gerald Fox, and George Modelski identified the largest cities throughout history through painstaking study of household data, agricultural commerce, church records, fortification sizes, food distribution, loss of life in a disaster, and more. We have parsed their work in the following slides.