The history of the world's largest cities from 3000 BCE to modern times.

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Notes on data:

1) Pre-modern estimates are highly uncertain
2) Figures are based on urban area, not official
city limits or metro area
3) My own estimation was used to keep data
consistent and reasonable.
4) Cities that only appear briefly are not shown
Historical coastlines are omitted
5) Cities in the ranking panel are given their modern
(not historical) country affiliation. These are
denoted by their three-letter ISO 3166-1 alpha-3
code