The World's Oldest Cities

• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Byblos: The Ancient Port of the Papyrus Trade
• Chapter 2 Jericho: The Walled City of the Jordan Valley.
• Chapter 3 Aleppo: The Crossroads of Ancient Commerce.
• Chapter 4 Damascus: The Enduring Capital of the Levant.
• Chapter 5 Susa: The Persian Imperial City
• Chapter 6 Faiyum: The Oasis of the Crocodile God.
• Chapter 7 Sidon: The Phoenician Jewel of the Mediterranean.
• Chapter 8 Plovdiv: The Thracian City of Seven Hills.
• Chapter 9 Gaziantep: The Pistachio Capital with an Ancient Soul.
• Chapter 10 Beirut: The Resilient Heart of Lebanon.
• Chapter 11 Jerusalem: The Sacred City of Three Faiths.
• Chapter 12 Tyre: The Island Fortress of the Phoenicians.
• Chapter 13 Erbil: The Citadel City of Kurdistan
• Chapter 14 Kirkuk: The City of Black Gold and Eternal Flames
• Chapter 15 Jaffa: The Ancient Gateway to the Holy Land
• Chapter 16 Luoyang: The Cradle of Chinese Civilization
• Chapter 17 Athens: The Dawn of Western Civilization
• Chapter 18 Larnaca: The City of Kition, Birthplace of Zeno
• Chapter 19 Thebes: The City of a Hundred Gates
• Chapter 20 Cádiz: The Phoenician Outpost on the Atlantic
• Chapter 21 Varanasi: The Spiritual Capital of India
• Chapter 22 Lisbon: The City of Explorers on the Tagus River
• Chapter 23 Chania: The Venetian Harbor of Crete
• Chapter 24 Argos: The Peloponnesian Powerhouse
• Chapter 25 Delhi: The Imperial City of the Mughals and Beyond
• Afterword

What is a city? The question seems simple enough. We picture skylines, bustling streets, and the dense hum of human life. A city is a place of commerce, of culture, of governance. It is a node in the vast network of human connection, a concentration of ideas and innovation. But what if we strip away the modern connotations? What is a city at its most fundamental level? Is it defined by a certain number of inhabitants? By the presence of walls and public buildings? By a stratified society with a ruling class and a specialized labor force? The answer, much like the history of cities themselves, is complex and layered.

This book embarks on a journey to explore this very complexity by visiting twenty-five of the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities. The term "continuously inhabited" is our guiding principle, but it is a surprisingly slippery concept. It does not necessarily mean that a city has enjoyed an unbroken, peaceful existence for millennia. On the contrary, the stories of these ancient urban centers are often punctuated by violent conquest, devastating earthquakes, catastrophic fires, and periods of severe decline. Yet, through it all, people endured. They rebuilt on top of the ruins, often using the rubble of the old as the foundation for the new. This resilience, this stubborn refusal to abandon a place, is the thread that connects every city in this volume. A settlement might shrink from a sprawling metropolis to a fortified village and back again, but as long as a community remained, the chain of habitation was not broken.

Determining the age of these ancient places is a monumental task for historians and archaeologists. The very act of continuous settlement creates the primary challenge. Over centuries and millennia, cities grow upwards, with each new generation building upon the debris of the last. This process creates layers of history, forming artificial mounds known as "tells." Excavating a tell is like reading a book written in a dozen different languages with pages missing. Archaeologists painstakingly peel back these layers, analyzing pottery shards, carbonized seeds, building foundations, and human remains. Techniques like radiocarbon dating can provide age estimates for organic materials, but even these methods have limitations and margins of error. Consequently, the claim to be the "oldest city" is often a matter of fierce debate, both in academic circles and as a point of national or civic pride. Several of the cities in this book lay claim to that title, and the evidence for each is compelling in its own right.

The geographical focus of our journey will be immediately apparent. A great number of these ancient urban centers are clustered in the region known as the Fertile Crescent, the arc of land stretching from the Persian Gulf, through Mesopotamia, and into the Levant. This is no coincidence. The agricultural revolution, which began in this region roughly 12,000 years ago, was the catalyst for permanent settlement. For the first time, humans could produce a surplus of food, freeing a portion of the population from the daily toil of hunting and gathering. This surplus allowed for the development of specialized trades: potters, weavers, masons, priests, and soldiers. With specialization came social stratification, governance, and the construction of monumental structures like temples and walls. The rivers of Mesopotamia—the Tigris and the Euphrates—and the Nile in Egypt provided the lifeblood for these burgeoning societies, enabling irrigation, transportation, and trade. From this crucible of civilization, the concept of the city was born and would eventually spread across the globe.

As we travel from the shores of the Mediterranean to the plains of India and the river valleys of China, we will encounter a stunning diversity of human experience. Yet, common themes emerge. The importance of geography is paramount. A city's location, whether on a defensible hilltop, a natural harbor, or at the crossroads of major trade routes, was often the single most important factor in its survival and prosperity. We will see how control over resources, be it the cedars of Lebanon for Byblos or the waters of the Jordan for Jericho, shaped the destiny of entire civilizations.

War is another constant companion in the annals of these cities. They are living museums of conflict, their walls built and rebuilt, their temples razed and reconsecrated by a succession of conquerors. Akkadians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, and Ottomans are just some of the peoples who marched their armies across these ancient landscapes, each leaving an indelible mark on the cities they sought to possess. These layers of conquest are etched into the architecture, the culture, and even the genetics of the modern inhabitants.

But these are not simply stories of strife and survival. They are also chronicles of human ingenuity and cultural achievement. It was in these cities that writing was invented, monumental architecture was perfected, and the first codes of law were established. They were the homes of philosophers and prophets, poets and pioneers. In the markets of Aleppo, goods and ideas from three continents were exchanged. In the academies of Athens, the foundations of Western philosophy were laid. In the sacred spaces of Jerusalem and Varanasi, belief systems that continue to shape the lives of billions were born and nurtured.

The selection of the twenty-five cities featured in this book is, by necessity, a curated one. A comprehensive list of every ancient settlement with a claim to continuous habitation would be an encyclopedic endeavor. Instead, we have chosen cities that not only possess a deep and verifiable history but also have a compelling story to tell. Each chapter focuses on one city, tracing its history from its earliest known origins to its place in the modern world. We will explore its key landmarks, its legendary figures, and the pivotal moments that defined its trajectory.

This book is an invitation to walk through the layered gateways of time. It is a chance to stand in the shadow of structures built by civilizations that have long since vanished and to recognize that the past is not merely a foreign country, but the very foundation upon which our present is built. The streets of Damascus, the citadel of Erbil, and the ghats of Varanasi are not relics; they are vibrant, living spaces where the echoes of antiquity resonate in the daily lives of millions. By understanding their past, we gain a deeper appreciation for the enduring power of human community and the remarkable saga of our shared urban heritage. The journey begins now.

Nestled on a sandstone cliff overlooking the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean, some 25 miles north of modern Beirut, lies the city of Jbeil. To the casual visitor, it is a picturesque Lebanese fishing town, with a charming medieval center, a formidable Crusader castle, and a harbor bobbing with colorful boats. Yet, beneath the cobblestones and behind the restored souks lies a history of staggering depth. For Jbeil is the modern name for Byblos, a city that has been continuously inhabited for at least 7,000 years, and where evidence of human settlement stretches back even further, to the misty dawn of the Neolithic age. It is a place where Stone Age huts, Phoenician temples, Roman colonnades, and Crusader fortifications occupy the same piece of land, creating a mosaic of human history unlike almost any other on Earth.

The story of Byblos begins not with kings or empires, but with a small community of fishermen. Sometime between 8800 and 7000 BCE, in the era known as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period, the first settlers were drawn to this ideal location. The spot offered a defensible double hill, a freshwater spring, and two sheltered coves that provided a safe landing for their boats. Archaeological excavations, most notably the decades-long work of French archaeologist Maurice Dunand, have peeled back the layers of this ancient settlement. The earliest inhabitants lived in single-room rectangular huts with floors of crushed limestone, their lives revolving around the bounty of the sea, simple agriculture, and animal husbandry.

Over the next few millennia, this humble village evolved. During the Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, its people began to bury their dead in large pottery jars, often within or near their homes. They crafted more sophisticated pottery and began using copper tools, evidence of burgeoning trade networks that reached as far as the Caucasus for metal and Anatolia for obsidian. By the 3rd millennium BCE, Byblos had transformed into a true town, one of the first urban centers to emerge in the region. This was the period when the Canaanite civilization, later known to the Greeks as the Phoenicians, began to develop, and Byblos was on its way to becoming their preeminent city-state. The haphazard huts gave way to well-built houses of uniform size, and the first defensive walls were erected, signaling the arrival of wealth that needed protecting.

The source of that wealth, and the single most important factor in the city's rise to prominence, lay just across the sea to the south, in the kingdom of Egypt. The two civilizations were a perfect match. Egypt, a land rich in gold, grain, and papyrus, lacked one critical resource: high-quality timber. The Nile Valley was poor in large trees, and wood was essential for building the ships that plied the great river, for roofing the monumental temples of the gods, and for constructing the sacred sarcophagi of the pharaohs. The mountains behind Byblos, however, were thick with the legendary cedars of Lebanon, the finest timber in the ancient world.

From the dawn of the Egyptian Old Kingdom, a vibrant and mutually dependent trade relationship was established. This "Byblos Run," a coastal shipping route, saw convoys of up to forty ships at a time making the journey between the Nile Delta and the Canaanite port. Records from the Palermo Stone, an ancient Egyptian stele, mention Pharaoh Sneferu of the Fourth Dynasty (c. 2600 BCE) bringing back "40 ships filled with cedar wood." Indeed, one of the oldest Egyptian words for an ocean-going vessel was a "Byblos ship." In the tombs of the earliest pharaohs and even within the Great Pyramid of Khufu, boats made entirely of Byblos cedar have been found, preserved for eternity.

In return for its precious wood, Byblos was inundated with the riches of Egypt. Gold, alabaster vases, linen, and rope flowed into its harbor. The city became so thoroughly saturated with Egyptian goods and culture that for long periods, particularly during the Middle Kingdom, it functioned almost as an Egyptian colony. The rulers of Byblos adopted Egyptian titles and burial customs, and the city's chief deity, a goddess known as Baalat Gebal, or the "Lady of Byblos," was readily identified with the Egyptian goddess Hathor. The main temple in Byblos was filled with offerings from the pharaohs, a testament to the city's strategic importance.

This deep connection also wove Byblos into the fabric of Egyptian mythology. According to the myth of Osiris, after the god was murdered and dismembered by his brother Set, his coffin was cast into the Nile and eventually washed ashore at Byblos. There, a magnificent tamarisk tree grew around it. The king of Byblos, unaware of the coffin within, had the tree cut down and made into a pillar for his palace. It was only when the goddess Isis, Osiris's grieving wife, arrived in the city that the coffin was revealed and her husband's body recovered. This legend further cemented the sacred link between the two lands.

But the most culturally significant Egyptian export to Byblos was not gold or grain, but papyrus. The city became the primary hub for the distribution of this revolutionary Egyptian writing material to the entire Aegean world. The Greeks, who imported the reed paper in vast quantities through the city, came to call the material byblos. From there, the Greek word for book, biblion, was derived. Ultimately, the English word "Bible," meaning "the book," traces its etymological roots directly back to this ancient Phoenician port, a permanent linguistic legacy of its most important trade commodity.

Byblos maintained its close ties to Egypt through the turbulent Middle and Late Bronze Ages. For a time, the city, along with much of the region, was dominated by the Hyksos, a chariot-driving people who also ruled northern Egypt. When the pharaohs of the New Kingdom expelled the Hyksos and forged an empire in the Levant, Byblos became a key vassal city. The famous Amarna Letters, a cache of diplomatic correspondence discovered in Egypt and dating to the 14th century BCE, include some 60 tablets from a king of Byblos named Rib-Hadda. In his letters to Pharaoh Akhenaten, Rib-Hadda writes with a mixture of deference and desperation, constantly pleading for Egyptian soldiers and support against the encroaching Hittites and rival city-states. His correspondence provides a vivid, first-hand account of the delicate and often perilous politics of the time.

It was in the aftermath of the Late Bronze Age collapse, around 1200 BCE, that Byblos and its sister cities entered their golden age. With the great empires of Egypt and the Hittites in decline, the Phoenician city-states rose to become the masters of Mediterranean trade. While its neighbors Tyre and Sidon would eventually eclipse it in power, Byblos held a special place of honor, particularly for its role in one of the most significant intellectual achievements in human history: the development of the alphabet.

Building upon earlier, more complex writing systems from Mesopotamia and Egypt, the scribes of the Levant developed a radically simplified script consisting of just 22 characters, each representing a consonant sound. This Phoenician alphabet was a tool of breathtaking efficiency, easy to learn and perfectly suited to the needs of a mercantile society. Byblos is where some of the oldest and most crucial examples of this script have been found.

The most famous of these is the inscription on the sarcophagus of Ahiram, a king of Byblos who ruled around 1000 BCE. Discovered in 1923 by French archaeologist Pierre Montet, the limestone coffin is a masterpiece of early Phoenician art. Its sides are carved with scenes of the king on his throne, flanked by winged sphinxes, and a procession of mourners. But its true importance lies in the 38-word inscription carved on its lid. Written by Ahiram's son, Ittobaal, it is one of the earliest known examples of the fully developed Phoenician alphabet. The text identifies the tomb's occupant and places a dire curse on anyone who might dare to disturb it: "...may the sceptre of his rule be torn away, may the throne of his kingdom be overturned, and may peace flee from Byblos!" This inscription is not just a historical curiosity; it is a direct ancestor of the alphabets used by billions of people today, including Greek, Latin, and Arabic.

The independence of the Phoenician cities was not to last. Beginning in the 9th century BCE, the shadow of a new Mesopotamian power fell across the Levant: the formidable Assyrian empire. King Sibittibaal of Byblos is recorded as having paid tribute to the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III in 738 BCE. The Assyrians were followed by the Babylonians, and then the mighty Persian Achaemenid Empire, under which Byblos became one of four vassal kingdoms in Phoenicia. Though no longer fully independent, the city continued to thrive as a commercial and religious center, and was even allowed to mint its own coins.

In 332 BCE, a new conqueror arrived from the west. After his victory at the Battle of Issus, Alexander the Great marched his Macedonian army down the Phoenician coast. Having witnessed the brutal fate of Tyre, which had resisted him and been utterly destroyed, the king of Byblos wisely chose to surrender without a fight. With Alexander's arrival came the Hellenistic Age. Greek culture, language, and architecture were overlaid on the city's ancient Semitic foundations, creating a unique cultural blend. After Alexander's death, Byblos found itself caught in the crossfire between his successors, first falling under the control of the Ptolemies of Egypt and later the Seleucids of Syria.

The arrival of the Roman general Pompey in 64 BCE ushered in several centuries of relative peace and prosperity. As part of the Roman province of Syria, Byblos was adorned with the hallmarks of a proper Roman city: a colonnaded street, a small theater, and an elaborate nymphaeum, or public fountain. The city also became a notable center for the cult of Adonis, the handsome youth from Greek mythology who was loved by the goddess Aphrodite and was killed by a wild boar in the nearby mountains. The annual festival of Adonia, a rite of mourning for the dead god followed by a celebration of his resurrection, was observed with great ceremony in the city.

With the division of the Roman Empire, Byblos fell under the sway of the Byzantines in Constantinople. It began a slow decline, overshadowed by other ports in the region. The city suffered a devastating earthquake in 551 CE but remained inhabited. A new chapter began with the Arab conquest in the 7th century, when the city received its current name, Jbeil. But the most dramatic transformation since Roman times came in 1103, when the city was captured by the armies of the First Crusade.

Known to the Crusaders as Gibelet, the city became an important lordship within the County of Tripoli, a Crusader state. Its new European masters, the Genoese Embriaco family, set about fortifying their prize. Using indigenous limestone and, in a practice common for the age, recycling the massive stone blocks and columns from earlier Roman structures, they built the imposing castle that still dominates the archaeological site today. Surrounded by a moat, the castle served as the military and administrative heart of the Crusader lordship for nearly two centuries. The city was briefly captured by the great Muslim sultan Saladin in 1188, who ordered its walls dismantled, but was retaken by the Crusaders in 1197, who promptly rebuilt them. The Crusader interlude finally ended in 1266 with the conquest by the Mamluk Sultan Baibars. Byblos eventually passed into the hands of the Ottoman Empire in 1516, under whose rule it remained for the next 400 years, a quiet backwater whose glorious past was slowly buried by the sands of time.

The rediscovery of Byblos began in the 19th century with the French scholar Ernest Renan, but it was the systematic excavations of Pierre Montet in the 1920s and Maurice Dunand thereafter that truly unveiled the city's incredible history. Today, the archaeological site is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a stunning open-air museum where visitors can walk through 8,000 years of history in a single afternoon. One can stand before the foundations of the Temple of Baalat Gebal, gaze into the deep shaft tombs of the Phoenician kings, sit on the stone seats of the Roman theater, and climb the ramparts of the Crusader castle. And just beyond the boundaries of the ancient tell, life in the modern city of Jbeil goes on, a living link in an unbroken chain of habitation that stretches back to the very beginnings of urban life.