List of oldest continuously inhabited cities

Giza?

Mm, but it's not just the towering Mount Ararat and the river of Hrazdan that make Yerevan obviously Yerevan. The name of the city has remained extremely similar for about 2,000 years, the language, the writing...

Nice, in my opinion (I've only been there twice) has very little connection to the Nice of old. The geography is not very unique (travel the Mediterranean coast and I promise you you'll find plenty of places that look nearly identical.) It's cycled through plenty of languages and was even originally 2 different cities (Cemenelum and Nikaia.) Put an occupant of Cemenelum in modern day Nice and I doubt they would know it was the same place. The once large river Paillon is dried to a part of what it once was and covered up by concrete; the language is completely different (and has changed many times) - hell, Nice wasn't even part of France until the late 1800s!

In Marseille, sure, an ancient inhabitant would recognize it due to the islands if nothing else. But as much as I love Marseille (one of my favorite places in the world, actually) - I get much less of an "ancient" feeling there than anywhere in Armenia or Iran, for example.

> Marseille and Nice (both Greek colonies)

No shit?! I had no idea the greek empire(s) stretched up this far. Was it a peaceful colonisation?

>The first inhabitants would definitely recognise them immediately today from the unique landscape (like Yerevan).

I doubt someone would recognize Marseille at first sight. If they looked hard enough they might recognize the harbour having vaguely the same shape and some mountains outside the city being the same.

I actually annotated a drawing of Roman-era Marseille with the names of modern features a few years back [1].

The natural features were massively overbuilt or even erased (like during the 19th c. to make way for avenues), which made things level off somewhat. The same goes for every city. Go to Rome someday. The famed hills are now invisible, expect for the Capitol (although it would look far less remarkable if the Forum hadn't been excavated).

[1] https://i.imgur.com/zsc0Zz1.jpg

Jericho even had town walls complete with a tower at 9kya. Absolutely astonishing, because they were even pre-pottery.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho it looks like the city has moved around a bit (not a huge amount, but a few kilometers) over time. It looks like the modern city's location was finally decided in the 4th century AD. Also it seems to have been razed and rebuilt quite a few times. Given that many structures from the Byzantine period had to be excavated (as in they were buried beneath the ground), I suspect the current city streets are quite a bit younger than dating from the Romans.

Even in Athens I can imagine an ancient inhabitant being lost and confused amongst a grid of midrise concrete buildings. Then they'd turn a corner and catch a glimpse of the Acropolis...

London, sort of continuously inhabited since Roman times, wouldn't pass the test even if an ancient Roman inhabitant was standing on a street following the line of a Roman road and looking direct at the foundations of the London wall. Even the river course would be unfamiliar.

Slightly off topic, but playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey brought out an infatuation with Greece within me. I am truly envious of your Greek heritage and that you get to enjoy such a rich history, a relatively secular society, and gorgeous scenic areas. I am actually Persian and although we also have a rich history and scenic lands, I find Greece and Greek history far more appealing. Getting to explore many facets of ancient Greece in Assassin's Creed Odyssey has been an absolute treat.

EDIT: a word

I've always wondered how super old cities like Athens and Rome deal with infrastructure. I mean, if you need to install new sewer or cabling systems underground you're dealing with literally thousands of years of stuff under the city, and I'm guessing there is no good documentation for what's there. How do civil engineers know where it's safe to build?

Way better? I spent a week in both Georgia and Armenia recently and although I think the two counties are some of the coolest places I've been I found Armenia to be more interesting. That may have been because I had a local guide in Armenia though. (I like to travel with Couchsurfing as you get to meet and stay with locals, and for whatever reason Georgia is the only country I've visited where I couldn't find a host.)

In particular, I spent a day in Kutaisi and although it was a lovely little place I didn't find it super interesting.

I'll definitely be back though, I hadn't heard of Mtskheta and it seems really interesting, I'd like to check it out.

I assume you're Georgian, from the name :) Any other places you'd suggest to visit in Georgia? I personally prefer the really unusual/out of the way stuff myself.

The current Xi'an walls were built in the 1370 during the Ming dynasty.

Mt. Rainier is only visible from Seattle on exceptionally clear days.

It’s often because of political influence campaigns that history is actually destroyed, and in such periods there is no appetite for objective historical research. If you are a Muslim ruler trying to convert your subjects and the Sun Worshippers are leading a resistance then destroying their 700 year old temple that reinforces their identity is a no brainer.

This type of thing is widespread throughout the world [1] so there’s no reason to doubt it has a much longer history than records can follow.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_destroyed_heritage

I started studying Indian history and I immediately ran into problems.

The first one is language - in the region I am interested in (the southern parts of India) - primary sources appear in several different languages. It's not sufficient to have passing familiarity with a language - a ton of these ancient writers were poets trying to out-do each other with their skills at crafting verses. To research Indian history, one must learn several languages.

As someone who isn't trying to actively research history, secondary sources suffice for me. But then, one runs into the next big hurdle there. There have been very few authors writing about south Indian history post Independence. In 1928 (if I recall correctly), someone at the University of Madras wrote a PhD thesis on the Pallavas. I haven't been able to find any other material focused on the Pallavas published since then. Oh, and the 1928 PhD thesis - there's only a handful of those copies in the really large libraries around the world. A low quality scan of one of these copies has made it to the internet - and that remains my best source of information on the Pallava dynasty.

Then there are people like the Khalbaras - a bunch of rulers who came out of nowhere and ended up dominating 3 superpowers in that region. Yet, these guys didn't leave behind any historical record and only passing references to them as "the imprisoners of 3 crown princes" remain as tombstones and signposts for a group of rulers who would have to take down armies of war elephants multiple times to get to that point.

There are also open problems of Chronology in several important periods (for example, the era covered by the Sangam literature - Karikala and all those guys). This is basically a group of poems that record history in disconnected joints. (It's not known how much of this is real history and how much is invented by poets). We have the pieces of a puzzle, with possibly some fake pieces, but we don't know how you'd arrange them in a timeline.

And then, there's the wars. Anyone who studies Indian history will quickly realize that Gandhi is an extreme anomaly. In southern India, it was a matter of pride for a king to die in battle. Imagine a culture where the rulers have cultural incentives to be suicidally belligerent (with War Elephants!!!). Now imagine a world where that is the cultural norm for over a thousand years. These rulers were warriors and the literature that they encouraged were mostly poets who wrote verses praising various military exploits. Several of these kingdoms emerge and disappear all the time - and they all chose different languages as the court language, several of them invented their own alphabets (looking at you Pallavas), they all straight up lied in several records. It's a lifetime's task to sort out 300 years of history for an area half the size of Germany.

Then, to make matters worse, almost all historical artifacts from south India were removed from the temples and forts that they have been found and made their way to various collectors and museums in Britan during the Britsh Raj. If you want to study south Indian history, a trip to a museum in London will give you a lot more than walking around endlessly in South India.

Then there's the lack of funding. It's absolutely embarrassing how little the various historians in India earn. Lately, I've been finding more books by historians in America (and even Japan) than those written by people in India.

Then you have the frauds like Sanjeev Sanyal who destroy history by mixing up well established history and his own opinions on history and using the authenticity of the accepted history to add credibility to his baseless opinions.

Studying Indian history is hard.

Can't say much about recent history, but the deep archaeological past of India (>~5kya) is difficult to study in part because of the environmental conditions. The heat and humidity make preservation of artifacts over long periods of time nearly impossible, meaning that even though the Gangetic plain was one of the most populated regions on the planet for millennia in the past, there's minimal trace of this civilization left. Ancient tools, shelters, and human remains just decompose in that type of climate rather than being preserved like in the deserts of the Middle East or the cold regions of Northern China and Europe.

Because there's definitely a Western/European bias in the study of history, I recommend Jack Goody's "The Theft of History" [1]

> Professor Jack Goody builds on his own previous work to extend further his highly influential critique of what he sees as the pervasive eurocentric or occidentalist biases of so much western historical writing. Goody also examines the consequent 'theft' by the West of the achievements of other cultures in the invention of (notably) democracy, capitalism, individualism, and love.

[1] https://books.google.ro/books?id=jo1UVi48KywC&redir_esc=y

The unbridled truth is that marxist communist and socialist thought dominated the Indian establishment - polity, academia, media - close to a century and still is well entrenched. Their portrayal of history is nothing but dark ages then glorious Islamic rule. And the hostile Islamic neighbour controlling many of the politicians like their puppets using many strategies didn't help either. And the religious conversion lobby were unfettered in creating atrocity literature and demonisation of native culture, mostly with help from enormous foreign aid.

All other reasons people give here are mere technicalities.

If there is a peer-reviewed article, this newspaper article does not link to it.

Edit: This article is speculating what might be discovered even before the people doing the research have found something:

>... by the time the data collection is over, there would be enough to prove that this date can be pushed back to about 4500BC.

sigh

Edit 2: For context: The era of the proto-indo-european language family is dated to start around 4500 BC somewhere near the Pontic-Caspian Steppe.

4500 BC would imply a culture that co-existed with the Harappa civilization. Such a discovery would have made news all around the world. This newspaper article would not be the first place to mention it.

I'm not convinced by any claim made by this article.

The note there lists that Tangier was founded by the Carthaginians. But Carthage itself was located near modern-day Tunis, the capital of Tunisia.

Marahba!

Yeah, it's either that, or the fact that Tunis (the new capital) was founded 10 miles away after the Umayyads took Carthage from the Byzantines (mentioned by u/scythe).

I don’t think that the ‘ploughed salt’ approach is considered true anymore. The articles I want to link to are paywalled but there is a good discussion in the below reddit thread. The tldr is the salt was very expensive.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/269786

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/...

Hmm, that makes sense. I suppose a 10 mile move was significant pre-industrialization.

I agree, I don't mind lists like "Largest countries" as that is fairly definitive but when you get into subjective lists of things that are hard to properly define, measure or record like "costliest hurricane damage"[1], "longest-living organisms"[2] or "deadliest animals"[3] then the articles become a joke.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atlantic_hurricane_rec...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-living_organis...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_animals_to_h...

I think your analysis is overly critical. The stated purpose of Wikipedia's no-OR policy is not to "reach or imply a conclusion not stated by the sources". The only novel conclusion being drawn here is that one can conceive of a list of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Wikipedia policy also notes that "The potential for creating lists is infinite." and prohibits lists that do not comply with Wikipedia's overall content policy as being "trivial, non-encyclopedic, or not related to human knowledge". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Stand-alone_lists#Ap...

I personally think that this list is really interesting and does in fact advance the state of human knowledge. The fact that it's currently at the top of HN and has garnered comment interest shows that you're probably in the minority in your disagreement.

If you feel strongly that this list is trivial, poorly organized, or simply "awful" you're absolutely free to join the discussion and contribute edits at Wikipedia.

I think if you downgrade the definition of city to any grouping of animal skin tents, then the entire exercise loses meaning because those were everywhere.

I didn't mean that the entire earth is as dense as a city. I meant that there are very few places you can go and not be within (say) a day's walk of another human. It's kind of like saying that the world is overrun with ants. That is plausibly true, notwithstanding that there are still a few places that are devoid of ants.

I probably should have used a different word. What I meant was that the last 200 years or so is the first time in history that human civilization has extended across the entire planet simultaneously.

Good point. I guess I should have said "modern technological civilization" or something like that rather than "homo sapiens", although MWC is not quite right either. What I was trying to get at was whatever quality it is in humans that moves them to build cities. Whatever that is, the humans in Canberra in 20000 BCE didn't have it. (That's not meant to be a value judgement, just an observation.)

Even for Latin, apparently Ecclesiastical (Church) Latin, which is more familiar to most people today, differs in pronunciation from Classical Latin. For example, Ecclesiastical Latin uses a soft 'c', where the ancient Romans would have used a hard 'c' -- Cicero's name would have been pronounced like "keekero" in his day, whereas most people now think of him as "Sissero". Although the Roman empire was large and diverse enough that Latin probably had quite a variety of dialects and maybe Ecclesiastical Latin was one of them.

Hebrew is an unusual case because, like Latin, it was mostly a dead language that for centuries only continued to be used in religious and a few other contexts. It was revived in the 19th century. Because of its long period of cryostasis the parts that were preserved probably haven't changed that much, although necessarily it's expanded greatly into a living language.

Farsi (Iranian) is another one that lasted a long time without too many mutations as far as I know.

Arabic is divided into "proper, classical" Arabic which is used for religious purpose (and maybe some other "official" things), a bit like Latin in the middle ages; and various mostly unintelligible dialects used day to day.

If I remember correctly, modern Hebrew is pretty much the same as old Hebrew, with various additions to fit the current world. It's somewhat artificial in that it wasn't really spoken before, and was the chosen as the official language in the early 20th century. It's like if someone decided nowadays to use Latin as the official language.

If you're suggesting that the 753 BC date is archaeological, you're incorrect. 753 BC is the legendary date. There's archaeological evidence of habitation on the hills of Rome earlier than that.

The column next to that date notes that there is village structure dated to the 9th century BC; the 753 date is actually downright mythical rather than archeological, but where some mythical dates exaggerate antiquity (e.g. lists of Sumerian kings) this mythical date cuts antiquity short to give city founding credit to the (probably entirely mythical?) Romulus rather than give recognition to the prior Greek settlement on the Palantine Hill (which Roman sources mentioned, while still claiming to be only as old as Romulus' city). It's an odd cultural carry over from Roman times to see in a wikipedia page, recognized in one column and ignored in the one prior.

That's not an estimate based on archaeological discovery, it's the classical date given by Varro Reatinus, which he took from Titus Atticus (I'm mentioning Varro Reatinus simply because this timeline is now called the "Varronian timeline"). Titus Atticus came up with it based on various traditions and works available to him, but it's really just one of the dates that have been proposed by people in that age. It's the most common traditional date today largely because of a pretty complicated tradition of politics, and of legal and written works, that ends with Joseph Scaliger in the 16th century. It became, more or less, the "official" chronology used by the Roman state at one point, and it ended up inscribed on Augustus' Arch and on the Fasti Capitolini. But that's about it. In fact, it's likely that everyone even back then knew at least a good part of it was made up, since it was based on a bunch of traditional dates that didn't quite add up, and Tittus Atticus (edit: or Varro Reatinus? I don't remember which one) had to insert various "dark years" and "anarchic periods" in-between so that his chronology would match the timeline of consulships.

It's hard to put a date on it, because Rome likely developed out of several villages in the region. The oldest arcaheological evidence from the area is way older than the 8th century BC. The Romans themselves didn't have anything other than a best guess about it, either (and several were put forth, not just this one).

Edit: yep, I'm really fun at parties!

Turns out Rome was built in a day. Specifically, the 21st of April.

I found it to be a really interesting tour. I think it's free, as well.

Yeah in 1775 it happened during All Saints Day, and I think they still say "Todos os Santos não chegaram"which translates to something like "All saints were not even enough to save us"

By splitting into different regions it masks the difference in numbers and age across the world.

A list of "oldest cities" which contains places like Canbera and Detroit, but not places like London and Venice, seems very odd

> "Wikipedia’s date for that is 43 AD"

There was a story a couple of weeks ago[0] about pottery dating from around 3600BCE being found at a site in Shoreditch (which was being excavated for the new Amazon HQ), suggesting London may have been inhabited considerably longer than previously thought.

[0] https://www.mola.org.uk/blog/largest-group-early-neolithic-p... & https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2178-z

Where: Belgorod-Dnestrovsky (ex Ancient Greek colony) on the Black Sea coast.

Have you lived in any of the older cities on the East Coast? The Philadelphia and Boston areas have an enormous amount of history still present and visible, especially in the outskirts that haven't faced as much commercial pressure. Even downtown in both cities there's quite a lot that's been maintained from the colonial era.

Yes. Mostly North American, but also UK ones. Older cities definitely have more history to explore (our town had medieval fortress and original Ancient Greek colony ruins).

But quality of life matters more. This is the defining charasteristic of the city for me to live in.