The first cities of the world in a bird’s-eye view
The first cities of the world in a bird’s-eye view

Summary/Abstract: The paper presents an overall view of the first cities of the world which are considered to be the origin of urbanization, as they are reflected in historical bird’s-eye views and maps, on one hand, and in aerial views, obtained using modern technologies such as aerial photogrammetry, on the other hand. Historical bird’s-eye views of ancient cities, having a more artistic style rather than a technical one and requiring thousands of hours to be created, have been replaced nowadays with aerial photography allowing realistic representations. The paper illustrates several bird’s-eye views and maps created between the 16th and 18th centuries by famous engravers in order to picture well-known cities, referring at the same time to modern digital techniques that are used today to map, visualise, analyse and manage remains of ancient cities. The use of new research methods in archaeology, such as aerial photogrammetry, high resolution satellite imagery, UAVs, GIS and GPS techniques combined with classical surface or sub-surface survey tools is being exemplified in the case of 5 cities, origin of urbanization, constituted in the first 4 millenniums BC.

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