Beyond Eternal: Identifying The World's Oldest City

Cities from India to Syria to Hungary can claim to be the world's oldest continually inhabited city, with permanent habitation going back more than 4,000 years. But when the evidence is thousands of years old, the title becomes elusive.

1 minute read

February 22, 2015, 9:00 AM PST

By Josh Stephens @jrstephens310


Rome calls itself the "Eternal City," but plenty of cities from antiquity have been around a lot longer—and are still around. Archeologists are engaged in a robust debate over what is actually the world's oldest continuously inhabited city. Candidates include Varnasi, India; Plovdiv, Bulgaria; Erbil, Iraq; and sentimental favorite, Jericho, Israel, whose walls may date back 11,000 years.

"Beyond the easy task of immediately discounting every city in North America and Australasia, identifying the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city is an uncertain business. There is a mess of claim and counterclaim, myth and legend, architectural digs and disputed evidence."

Part of the challenge lies in choosing continuously inhabited cities. Out of the running are places like Catal Huyuk, which is considered the first city but was abandoned long ago. Byblos, Lebanon, has solid documentation for its 7,000-year run of habitation.

Ironically, and tragically, the best contender for world's oldest city is also one of the world’s most threatened cities: Aleppo, Syria, which is in the heart of that ancient country’s civil war.  

Friday, February 20, 2015 in The Guardian

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