City walls conquered the ancient world and then disappeared. Why?

City walls conquered the ancient world and then disappeared. View our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed City walls conquered the ancient world and then disappeared. The story of how one of civilization’s most enduring technologies became a picturesque relic.

History and SocietyHistoryAncient HistoryUrban StudiesCities Adapted from A Brief History of Cities in 32 Inventions: The Ideas and Technologies That Made Modernity Possible by Jonn Elledge. Published by The Experiment. Ancient cities — the kind we know of more through archaeology than written history — tend to have a bunch of features that set them apart from smaller, less ambitious settlements.

Most of these are still familiar, in some form, and not just in your friendly local metropolis. Look around any small town today, and you’ll spot the contemporary equivalents of monumental public buildings (town halls and civic centers), granaries (supermarkets), and temples (churches, mosques, and, well, temples). There is, however, one feature common to most ancient cities that you’ll find surprisingly hard to locate now: For huge swathes of human history, almost any city worth its salt would be at least partially surrounded by walls.

Nor were the aforementioned swathes restricted purely to ancient history. Paris built its last defensive wall, the 21-mile (33km) Thiers Wall, as late as the 1840s, and if you’ve ever taken the city’s trams 3a or 3b, you’ve traced its former path around the Boulevards des Maréchaux. Copenhagen built its last fortifications, the 19-mile (14km) Vestvolden — western rampart — nearly half a century after even that.

By then, though, such things were rarities. And the most famous urban wall of modern times — which surrounded West Berlin between 1961 and 1989, built by those who lived outside it, in a strange attempt to stop themselves from getting in — is not generally regarded as a good thing. From Carcassonne to Chester, Dubrovnik to Beijing, there are many cities where you’ll still find walls today.

But these are tourist attractions precisely because they’re picturesque historic sites, not still active parts of city life. The earliest settlement at Jericho, in what’s now the West Bank, dates from around 9000 BC. Its first set of walls — perhaps 12–15 feet (4m) high and 6 feet (2m) thick, and equipped with a 28-foot-tall (8m) defensive tower; a complex that would have taken enormous communal effort to construct — dates from perhaps a thousand years after that.