History & Antiquity3000 BCE–1900
Largest Cities in History
Five thousand years of the world's biggest city, in thousands of people. The crown passes from Uruk's mudbrick walls to Babylon (first past 200k), to Rome's million under Trajan, to Baghdad, to Song China's river metropolises — until industrial London blows the doors off at 6.5 million. Watch Rome crash to a ghost town of 30k in the dark ages along the way.
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Source: Tertius Chandler, "Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth" Pre-modern city populations are scholarly estimates with wide error bars; figures follow Chandler/Modelski-style reconstructions and are illustrative. illustrative data Updated 2026-07-07