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This course is an introduction to the study of life in cities. Why did humans begin to live in cities? What were the advantages and disadvantages of urban life? What were the consequences of urbanism? What might life might have been like there? The course will focus on archaeological and material culture analyses of representative urban centers of the ancient Near East, Egypt, and the Mediterranean world. We will trace the evolution of ancient urbanism from the Near East to the classical worlds of Greece and Rome, beginning with the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to urbanized, state-level societies in the Near East and ending with the decline and fall of Rome.