CathInfo.com

As always, I was looking forward to this video, but I'm sorry to say that a lot of this doesn't hold up great. My area of expertise is Mesopotamia, and Mumsford in particular is so steeped in Orientalism as to be practically useless and actively misleading.

Just as a basic example, ancient Near Eastern cities were vastly larger and more capable of mobilising manpower and resources than those of Classical Greece ever were (as the ancient Greeks already recognised!). Likewise, Mesopotamian cities were neither particularly centralised or autocratic, but featured many elements of participatory politics, including popular assemblies. Neither was the planned city built on virgin soil a new phenomenon of 17th century Europe -- throughout Mesopotamian history, gargantuan capitals from Nineveh to Baghdad were planned new foundations!

I would encourage you to read more widely when making videos rather than relying on only a single or a small handful of outdated syntheses. There has been a fair amount of work on cities in Mesopotamia for one (van de Mieroop 1997, "The Ancient Mesopotamian City" would be a good synthesis, but I fully expect there has been a lot of more recent work on areas I'm less familiar with. For ancient Greece, Ma 2024, "Polis", comes to mind). As an aside, I would also be interested in seeing to what extent Marchetti's "constant" has been challenged in more recent sociological work -- things are rarely so neat.

Yeah that comment made me raise an eyebrow; famously the match-up between the Iron-age Greek city States and the Achemenid Empire was lopsided by all raw statistics, and the Bronze age fertile crescent cities certainly would have commanded a larger proportion of the world's resources at the time (individually and collectively) than Classical Greece ever did (excepting the Hellenistic East). When put into the context that those Mesopotamian cities were sometimes running their own empires on scales that were larger both in land and population than anything commanded by any Greek polity except Macedon and its descendants, it feels like a bizarre comment for him to make.

Legitamitely though: great criticism. Civilis uses old Socialist works to support his anthropological videos, and those works are not only wrong on basic economics but are also incredibly Eurocentric. That would be fine if the video's topic was just on European cities, but... it isn't; it's presenting itself as a study on human constants and human city-building, which 20th century socialists weren't the greatest experts on.