The 5 oldest cities in the world still inhabited they are located in the famous area of Near East call “Fertile crescent“, where the first were born crops and the first farms. The city born thanks to the Revolution of Neolithic When our ancestors discovered theagriculture and thefarmbegan to produce more food than necessary: this surplus it could be exchanged in the marketsand was probably one of the reasons why people decided to meet in inhabited centers. In short, it is thanks to these great changes that humans began to live together In increasingly large and organized places.
Establishing what are still inhabited among the cities still inhabited in the world is certainly not simple. Must be taken into consideration multiple factorsincluding the settlement continuity (if in the life of the town there have been periods of abandonment or re -foundation), the nature of the archaeological finds which allows you to understand if a place was an urban settlement or not, and the stratifications That many of these centers have undergone over time having been inhabited for millennia. The estimates reported by archaeologists are therefore based on the knowledge we have at the moment: let’s see them from the most recent to the oldest.
- 1El Faiyum: 5000 BC
- 2Aleppo: 8000 BC
- 3Biblo: 8800 BC
- 4Damascus: 9000 BC
- 5Gerico: 9500 BC
El Faiyum: 5000 BC
The city of El Fayumin Egyptit is most likely The oldest urban center still inhabited on the African continent. It is located on the banks of the Nileabout 100 km south of the capital, Cairo. According to archaeologists who dealt with the site study, there are traces of attending the territory of El Faiyum already in Paleolithicaround the 9 000 BCbut it is with the arrival of the Neolithic revolution in Egypt that we can talk about a true urban center, which can be trained probably Around 5 000 BC
The city flourished starting from III Millennium BCduring that phase of Egyptian history known as “Ancient kingdom“, was called”Shedet“And it was a central place for the worship of the god Sobekrepresented with the head of crocodile. For this reason the Greeks called it “Krokodilopolis“,”The city of Crocodrillo“. To date, El Faiyum is known above all for realistic funeral portraits made during the period of the Roman dominationwhich were used to cover the face of the mummies before the burial.
Aleppo: 8000 BC
Aleppoin the north of the Syriais the second city of the country today. In recent years this center has been one of the fulcrums of media attention due to the Syrian civil warconflict that saw Aleppo as one of his main battlefields, so much so that many parts of this city have gone destroyed. To date, archaeological research in Aleppo is still in an embryonic phase, but scholars estimate that The first tracks of an urban settlement in this territory date back At the 8000 BC about. Already at the end of the III millennium BC, with the name of “Weapons“, Aleppo was one of the most powerful cities of ancient Syria, before falling into the hands of the Sumerian Kingdom of Umma between 2300 and 2200 BC. C.
Biblo: 8800 BC
Note today as Jbeilis located on the coast of Lebanon central. Together with Sidone and Tire, it is often mentioned as one of the most important cities for the Phoenician civilization of The Millennium BCbut its origins are much older: the work of archaeologists has highlighted how the oldest phase of the inhabited center of Biblo dates back to Ancient Neolithicwhich in the area is given Between 8800 and 6500 BC. C.
The urban conformation that still retains today went formed Starting from the III millennium BCduring the Bronze Age and the Egyptian domination. Already during this period, Biblo became a commercial port Of great importance in the eastern Mediterranean and, during the first millennium BC, with the flourishing of the Phoenician civilization, his kingdom became one of the most prosperous of the Levant.
Damascus: 9000 BC
The current capital of Syria It became an urban center of a certain importance starting from the second millennium BC, in the period in which the area was dispute Between the two main superpowers of the Bronze Age: theEgypt and the kingdom of Ichthytes. However, according to archaeologists, the oldest traces of a settlement in the territory of Damascus date back Around 9000 BC. C.
After domination apsera (at the beginning of the first millenniums. C.), Damascus passed to Persianto the Macedonian And then to the Romans. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the city became the capital of the great Islamic caliphate of the Omayyadideveloping as one of the main centers of the world Muslim.
Gerico: 9500 BC
To the current state of research, The most ancient inhabited city in the world it would be Jerichoin Palestine. The area in which it stands was already attended at the end of the Paleolithic, Around 10,000 BCfrom human groups belonging to the Natufian culturethe oldest community agricultural sedentary or semi-sedentary of the ancient Near East. The oldest traces of a stable settlement can be dated Around 9500 BC
The inhabited center of Gerico Assonse complex and monumental shapes already on horseback Between the IX and the VIII millennium a. C.as evidenced by the discovery of particularly elaborate buildings and structures. During the eighth millennium BC, Gerico owned imposing fortifications for the time, and dates back to this phase an artifact considered to be one of the oldest representations of a human face.
