Willet/Geography of Urbanism, 2. The Rise of the Roman Urban Pattern

This chapter deals with the various forms of urbanism in Asia Minor present before the rise of the Roman Empire. Here a short history of cities and the most important sites in Asia Minor is presented before the second half of the first millennium BCE, before delving deeply in reconstructing the patterns of cities during the Classical and Hellenistic periods. Here, various sources of data are combined to create a hitherto unseen sequence of urban development. When they started to get a grasp on the region, the Romans did not encounter a blank canvas during the second century BCE, but rather encountered an already thriving distribution of cities, which the Romans would impacted and expanded upon.