These cities are beautiful open air museums
List of oldest continuously inhabited cities
121–130 of 224 posts
Re: List of oldest continuously inhabited cities
#122What 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…
It's somewhat misleading to base the spread of humans on the age of cities. There were homo sapiens in Canberra, for example, for at least 20,000 years before Europeans came and built a city on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canberra#The_first_inhabitants
Re: List of oldest continuously inhabited cities
#123What 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 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.
Re: List of oldest continuously inhabited cities
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia’s date for that is 43 AD, there’s a long list of European cities that stops a lifetime before that.
> "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
That wouldn't be "London city" that would be "a village which the latter settlement of London expanded to encompass"; which is significantly different. Not longest inhabited areas, but continuously inhabited city.
Re: List of oldest continuously inhabited cities
#125Indian history hasn't been well researched because of various reasons. However, recent efforts are pushing back continuous settlement dates by multi-thousand of years. For instance: Varanasi is in above wiki link with 1200 BC as inhabited since. However [0] pushes it back to at least 4500 BC. 0: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/Varanasi-is... >>> The results that have come from a detailed geo-explorat…
We need more than a single, probably biased and non-peer-reviewed study in an unreliable newspaper and without any references for such claims, especially given the nationalistic propaganda being pushed throughout India right now.
Re: List of oldest continuously inhabited cities
#126Indian history hasn't been well researched because of various reasons. However, recent efforts are pushing back continuous settlement dates by multi-thousand of years. For instance: Varanasi is in above wiki link with 1200 BC as inhabited since. However [0] pushes it back to at least 4500 BC. 0: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/Varanasi-is... >>> The results that have come from a detailed geo-explorat…
Why hasn’t Indian history been better researched as you say? Curious about this.
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
Re: List of oldest continuously inhabited cities
#127What 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…
It's somewhat misleading to base the spread of humans on the age of cities. There were homo sapiens in Canberra, for example, for at least 20,000 years before Europeans came and built a city on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canberra#The_first_inhabitants
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.)
Re: List of oldest continuously inhabited cities
#128Reading through the comments I see people from all over the world offering insights about various places. Then I realised all the comments here are in English. There must be an equivalent for languages continuously spoken over time.
Languages change -- sometimes dramatically -- over the course of centuries. English wasn't even a thing until the 1100s or so (Middle English). It would be very hard to exchange thoughts and ideas with the people of this time -- not only because of the different cultural and technological contexts but also because of its pronunciation and phonology.
Its predecessor: Anglo Saxon is even more distant from it. Try to read the passages here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English#Beowulf
Latin (as an artificially conserved language) has not changed that much since Roman times, but it isn't a language that is actively used in everyday life -- so you cannot claim it is: "continuously spoken over time".
Hebrew and Arabic could be interesting cases -- maybe someone more knowledgeable than me can chime in on these... But I assume ancient Hebrew and Arabic are also not mutually intelligible with the corresponding languages today.
Re: List of oldest continuously inhabited cities
#129In the UK there's a common derision of tourists from (sorry but) the USA who find themselves dumbfounded by the age of some rickety old pub from the eighteenth century they've tracked down. This Wikipedia page emphasises how little this old rock's got on the rest of the world.
Apart from Australasia.
Though seriously, I appreciate that Oceana's indigenous peoples are highly nomadic, but is it really the case that there's no continuous settlement there until European colonisation?
Re: List of oldest continuously inhabited cities
#130While I don't see any examples of on this list, except perhaps for Pula, emerging archaeological evidence indicates that in the Balkans region around 7000 years ago massive towns (cities?) began emerging with up to 40,000 people living in some settlements. The homes were arranged in tight lots next to one another, with evidence for some homes even being 2 story structures. The inhabitants of these communities were th…
The famous Pelasgian civilization, that we don't know much about....