CITIES of the ANCIENT WORLD (The Great Courses) by Steven L. Tuck

 






Published in 2014 by The Great Courses.

Read by the author, Steven L. Tuck
Duration: 11 hours, 48 minutes.
Unabridged.

The publishers of The Great Courses offer college level lecture classes (100 or 200 level) as audiobooks and/or videos. 

Cities of the Ancient Word begins with a discussion of the earliest cities and then moves on to significant cities that came along later. To be a significant city it had to start a new pattern - cities built on rivers, cities built on defensive hills, cities built to take advantage of sea trade, cities with a clear plan, cities built with a plan to mix to allow people of different ethnicities to live together (separately) and so on.
The Roman Colosseum

I very much enjoyed the first part of these lectures. But, once we got to Tuck's specific areas of expertise (Greek, Hellenistic, Roman) the audiobook got bogged down. His last lecture about some of the lessons of ancient cities that have been adopted by modern cities or are becoming popular again was interesting.

My primary problem of the book was that its title says it is about "cities of the ancient world" but it only includes cities in the Mediterranean basin and the Near East - the farthest away is on the border of India and Pakistan.  T

The youngest city he discusses is Constantinople and he discusses it through the 500's A.D. That is late enough that he could have easily have included cities from Asia, the Americas or Africa and I find it odd that he did not considering that he was discussing universal concepts that transcend all cities. Rather than dealing with cities that were influencing each other (a point that he makes over and over again), he could have skipped to an entirely new region of the world and shown that these principles truly are universal.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: CITIES of the ANCIENT WORLD (The Great Courses) by Steven L. Tuck.


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