So I started listening to this episode of the AskHistorians podcast the other day, and I was very interested to hear about how historians have been revising earlier, racist assumptions that African conurbations weren't "true" or "full" cities. Maybe it was just that I haven't gotten far enough in the podcast yet, and it comes up later, but I want to hear more about what exactly an ancient Horn-of-African city would have looked like and how it would have behaved differently in comparison to a European city of roughly the same time. Obviously I support the idea that these places were true cities, and I don't mean to excuse the racism or the racist people that were responsible for excluding these cities from city-hood, as it were, but I want to know what the differences were, if there were indeed any, so that I can understand why this was even a question in the first place, and so that I can describe the differences accurately and in anti-racist ways.