What interests me the most is not so much the #1 oldest, but more those cities where the past is still visible, or the city is similar to the same one that stood there thousands of years ago. Specifically, I find Yerevan very interesting. If someone from 2,000 years ago stood there today, they'd certainly realize it was the same city: the same Mount Ararat towering over the city, the same river Hrazdan running by the…
Yeah, Georgia has way better artifacts than Armenia, for example: Vani, Mtskheta, Kutaisi, etc. For some reason Poti is missing from the list too.
In the '70s and '80s when Japan was booming there was a popular meme that they were advantaged by having their cities destroyed in the war so were able to rebuild them along more modern lines. I don't know if it's true but it seems plausible. In Stranger in a Strange Land, Michael Valentine Smith talks about the Martian habit of abandoning places when the memories became too intense to tolerate. If we earthlings were…
What is most striking to me about this list is how you can use it to trace the broad sweep of human habitation on the planet. The oldest continuously inhabited cities date back 5000 years and the youngest (in Oceania) only a few hundred. So for 5000 years humanity lived on a planet with unexplored and unexploited regions. That's all done now. The entire planet is now completely overrun with homo sapiens, but that pro…
> The entire planet is now completely overrun with homo sapiens Eh, not precisely. Most of the earth is still empty of human life or very sparsely populated. https://www.luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#3/18.40/127.00
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.
> The entire planet is now completely overrun with homo sapiens Eh, not precisely. Most of the earth is still empty of human life or very sparsely populated. https://www.luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#3/18.40/127.00
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 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.
I mean, isn’t that true for most of Canada, Russia, Antarctica, central Australia, Mongolia, and even large parts of the American West?
What interests me the most is not so much the #1 oldest, but more those cities where the past is still visible, or the city is similar to the same one that stood there thousands of years ago. Specifically, I find Yerevan very interesting. If someone from 2,000 years ago stood there today, they'd certainly realize it was the same city: the same Mount Ararat towering over the city, the same river Hrazdan running by the…
It's complete so you can still walk the entire 4 sides of the wall in one hike, or rent a bike and circle the entire city in ~1 hour or so.
When you're atop the city wall, there's definitely a sense of being in two different times, both ancient and modern, at the same time as the modern Xi'an skyline makes up the background while you trek on stones that are hundreds (thousands?) of years old.
Born and raised Athenian here, oldest capital of Europe. Downtown Athens and most of the suburbs are filled with ancient and byzantine ruins, despite the damage that wars, christians and muslims did. I've watched plays in millennia old theaters. This is damn powerful.
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…
Well heritage is a double edged sword. From one hand you do feel proud and blessed to live in a place so rich in history because it's everywhere around you. But in the same time it's kind of a burden that drags society in worshiping the past. A lot of fellow Greeks live on the premises that because our past was so glorious everyone else is dipshit and we shouldn't even bother finding our place in the modern world.
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 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. I mean, isn’t that true for most of Canada, Russia, Antarctica, central Australia, Mongolia, and even large parts of the American West?
You'll be surprised. You can actually use Google earth to explore these regions. Even in what seems at first to be empty space you will find little towns, military installations, vacation lodges. Yes, there are still a few remote regions that are truly untouched by humans, but they are quite rare. Extreme latitudes (Antarctica, Siberia, northern Canada) and the Amazon are probably about it. Numbers are hard to come by but I'd be surprised if more than 20% of the earth's land area was more than a day's walk from civilization.
What is most striking to me about this list is how you can use it to trace the broad sweep of human habitation on the planet. The oldest continuously inhabited cities date back 5000 years and the youngest (in Oceania) only a few hundred. So for 5000 years humanity lived on a planet with unexplored and unexploited regions. That's all done now. The entire planet is now completely overrun with homo sapiens, but that pro…
Unexplored by whom though? The Americas are a great example of places that might have made the list in greater numbers if history had gone a little differently, but those settlements were wiped out except for a handful of prominent ones. Then suddenly in the 1500s you get a lot of new Spanish settlements making the list.
It doesn't qualify as continuously inhabited, but that doesn't make it unexplored. In many cases I'm sure one can consider it more or less a coincidence that one town happened to be conquered while inhabited and another might've had the whole town die of smallpox or whatever.