Agriculture

[Lab Monkey]

No offense meant to all of you who, like Kal-el, have made Agriculture a tech, but wasn't one of the pre-requisites of city building a knowledge of farming? This allowed nomads to settle in permanent villages and holdings. Therefore it should be assumed that all civs capable of building settlers and workers will all know techniques of farming.

Or is this one of those 'chicken and egg' things?

 

[Smoking mirror]

I highly recomend you read Arnold Toynbee's "Mankind and mother earth" for detailed information on any period of Civ development (pre-Victorian eras). Toynbee is one of the historians who pop up from time to time in the Civ series in little charts saying;

"Toynbees five greatest civilizations"
1 The great English

4 The average Greeks etc...

Yes agriculture is a pre requisite of city building. The cities of the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations were the first cities to be built and that was because agriculture on its own only alows farming on a flood plane. Crop rotation and Domestication are required for farming along side rivers with no regular flood patern (the nile floods like it does because the land surounding it is lower than the river itself. When the river increases in volume, the water rises above the banks and covers the fields of egypt).
For cities outside of flood planes, away from rivers and which don't recieve rain for most of the year, Irrigation is required.