Big Cities Are Something New Under The Sun

There is nothing new under the sun.

- Ecclesiastes 1:9.

But, one quite new phenomena (certainly since the Hebrew Bible Book of Ecclesiastes was written ca. 450 BCE–180 BCE, probably incorporating older oral traditions) has been the rise of the big cities. 

For example, Denver, Colorado, where I live, which isn't particularly exceptional as large cities go, is more than twice as large as the largest city in the world as of 1800 CE and is three times as large as London was in 1800. London reached the current population of Denver in the 1850s, during the Victorian era (at which time it was the largest city in the world). New York City reached the current population of Denver in 1890 at which time it was the largest city in the United States; Denver has about three times the population that New York City did in 1850.

* The largest city in the world in 2000 BCE was Memphis, Egypt with 60,000 people.

* By 1000 BCE, Memphis had grown to 100,000 people, tied with Babylon in modern day Iraq, and the largest city in the world was Thebes, Egypt with 120,000 people.

* In 100 CE, the largest city in the world was Rome, Italy with 1,000,000 people followed by Alexandria, Egypt with 500,000, and Luoyang, China with 420,000.

* In 1500 CE, the largest city in the world was Beijing, China with 672,000 people, followed by Vijayanagar, India with 500,000, followed by Cairo, Egypt with 400,000. Paris, France which was the largest city in Europe in 1500 CE had a population of about 185,000 people.

* As of 1800 CE, the largest city in the world was Beijing, China with 1,100,000 people, followed by London with 861,000, Guangzhou, China with 800,000 an Tokyo (Edo), Japan with 685,000.

* In 1975 CE, Tokyo was the largest city with 23,000,000 people and New York City followed with 17,100,000 people.

All of these data points represent urbanized areas and not just city-proper populations. The link is to the supplemental materials from:

Meredith Reba, et al., "Spatializing 6,000 years of global urbanization from 3700 BC to AD 2000", 3 Scientific Data 160034 (June 7, 2016).

Wikipedia also has a list of historical city sizes going back as far as there is reliable information that restates the two prior studies relied about by Reba and also a couple of additional sources, and for Europe, here.

The article does seem to omit a few large pre-Columbian New World cities like Mexico City, formerly known as Tenochtitlan in the Aztec period, which had a population of 200,000 to 350,000 in 1500 CE (which would have been the fourth largest city in the world) and Cahokia which had a population 40,000 in ca. 1000 CE (the largest city in the territory that would become the United States until Philadelphia ca. 1780 CE).