Humans have been building cities for a very long time. Even the places we think of as old — Jerusalem, Athens, Cusco — are fairly new when viewed as part of the entire timeline of urbanization.
You can now watch the rise and fall of every city in history thanks to a new three-minute video. After researchers at Yale published digitized, geocoded data that maps documented urban settlements from 3700 B.C. to 2000 A.D., data enthusiast Max Galka created a visualization of it for Metrocosm.
Galka's video charts the entire history of cities, beginning with the earliest Sumerian civilization in the fertile crescent.
It then progresses through the founding of Babylon, Constantinople, Mexico City, and the rest of the world’s urban areas, providing important historic milestones as the years go by. Highlights include the construction of the Giza pyramids, the Trojan War, the rise of the Aztec civilization, and the formation of the Commonwealth of Australia.
The entire urbanization of the colonized United States takes place in the final 14 seconds.
Watch the video below: