Engraved in 40 cities that have become symbols of innovation
Decisive moments in 10,000 years of human history!

From ancient Mesopotamia to 21st-century Silicon Valley
Crossing the present and past, oceans and continents
The Ultimate Guide to World City History

★★★ Recommended by Harvard University psychology professor Steven Pinker!
★★★ Highly recommended by urban literature scholar Kim Si-deok and Big Star teacher Choi Tae-seong!

Is human history a process of regression or progress? With war, terrorism, dictatorship, and climate crisis, human history seems increasingly regressive.
But this book traces the key turning points of civilization, showing that humanity continues to advance on the stage of the city.
From the agricultural revolution to navigation, the first universities, and space exploration, innovations unfolded in cities, and they became the driving force behind the advancement of human history.
This book selects 40 cities that played a decisive role in world history and connects each city to a key keyword in an engaging way.

It encompasses not only familiar cities like Athens, Florence, Tokyo, and New York, but also less familiar ones like Göbekli Tepe, where the first religious building was built; the Nan Madol archaeological site, a result of the 'Austronesian expansion'; Jericho, considered the first city; and Mohenjo-daro, where the giant bathhouse was located.
Readers will not only experience the vivid atmosphere of the time while reading a vivid historical account, but will also enjoy imagining in which city humanity's next leap forward will take place.

People are always flocking to the city.
And wherever large numbers of people gather, the potential for amazing things to happen increases.
From an evolutionary perspective, Homo sapiens' greatest strength is not physical strength or speed.
Compared to the top predators, humans are an insignificant species.
But no other species can match their problem-solving abilities, which are maximized when working together.
Cities are centers of consumption and production, and sources of creativity where artists compete and collaborate.
The city is a laboratory, a giant classroom where we discuss and learn from each other.
However, this is only possible when certain conditions are met.
With some exceptions, cities reach their peak of creativity during times of peace.
Cities thrive when cultural exchange and trade are active, social and economic freedoms are relatively well-guaranteed, and population density is high.
Strictly speaking, not all the areas presented in this book fit modern criteria for classifying cities.
But in a historical context, it was an important place where people gathered, and those people made progress thanks to the freedom and abundance it provided.

--- p.13

As you enter the temple entrance, you may encounter a groundbreaking figure who changed history.
He was the accountant or record keeper who marked the number on a clay tablet every time a sack of grain was brought into the temple.
They drew small stalks of grain and wrote tally marks next to them, just as record keepers in other cities had done for thousands of years.
But this picture of a grain stalk looks a bit too rough to be called a painting.
This is because record keepers kept simplifying the drawings to make it easier to keep track of inventory more quickly.
Eventually, the images used to represent grain in temple records no longer resembled stalks of grain in the slightest.
That is, the hieroglyphs that meant grain evolved into a symbolic system unrelated to pictures.

--- p.48

The Indus people were the first people to have indoor plumbing, dating back to around 3000 BC.
In houses with toilets upstairs, reddish-brown pipes were installed vertically to carry wastewater into the street.
They made pipes out of baked clay and applied tar to them to prevent leaks.
Pipes were laid along all the streets of the city and connected to underground tunnels, which served as drainage channels.
Thanks to the invention of the drainage system, the streets of Mohenjodaro displayed a level of hygiene that was astonishing for the ancient world.
As the city's population grew and the amount of wastewater that needed to be treated increased, people built higher walls to prevent the wastewater from overflowing into the streets.
There is actually archaeological evidence that the walls grew higher.
The people of Mohenjo-daro used drains and underground sewers to carry wastewater out of the city, protecting the wells that served as water sources at the time from contamination.
The latrines of Mohenjodaro, like those of modern times, were used for various sanitary activities, including bathing.
Judging from the relics that have survived to this day, the Indus people used ceramic jugs to collect water and washed their bodies with clay scrapers.
I also used a porcelain grater to remove cuticles and file my nails.
Residues of what appears to be oil were found in some of the toilet ruins, suggesting that the residents of Mohenjodaro used oil in their toilets for skin care.

--- p.61

In 1519, Magellan set sail from Seville with a fleet of five ships, including the flagship Trinidad and San Antonio, and the armed merchant ships Concepción, Santiago, and Victoria.
The Victoria was built in the Ondarroa shipyard in northern Spain and was named Santa Maria shortly after, used as a trading ship between Castile and England, until it was purchased by the Spanish crown in 1518.
Magellan renamed his ship Victoria after his favorite chapel in Seville, Santa Maria de la Victoria.
After a long journey across the Atlantic and a arduous quest to find a passage along the coast of South America to the Pacific, the Santiago was shipwrecked in a river in Argentina in 1520 during a typhoon.
Later that year, the expedition discovered a route across the American continent to the Pacific Ocean via Chile, which was later named the Strait of Magellan.
This strait was the only safe shipping route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans until the completion of the Panama Canal in 1914.
The San Antonio abandoned its exploration of this strait and returned to Spain.
The crew tried to justify their abandonment by portraying Magellan as a psychopath.
As a result, Magellan's reputation in Seville rapidly deteriorated, and even his wife and children were sentenced to house arrest.
Only after Pigapette made the story of his voyage public was Magellan able to regain his reputation, but even today, opinions about Magellan remain quite divided.

--- p.229