The oldest city in the world still standing in Jericho, Palestine, more on that later. First, let’s find out rare facts about how ancient cities worldwide hide in their ruins.
Oldest City on Earth
What Is the World’s Oldest City? It’s not the lost city of Atlantis, Athens, Egypt, or Rome. The world’s oldest city is Uruk, Iraq. At present, it is uninhabited by civilians and archaeologists have turned it into an excavation site to find out the secrets of the past. It was first settled in c. 4500 BCE and was also the first walled city of the Mesopotamian civilization.
The walls were primarily established for defense, but in due course, people began differentiating each other in terms of status, pushing the weaker ones towards the outer circle.
What Was the 1st City in the World?
- A. Jericho
- B. Byblos
- C. Uruk
- D. Eridu
Historians believe that the chances of Uruk being the oldest city in the world are just a drop from the ocean of hidden history. Currently, Uruk is the only place to have written evidence like cuneiform texts to show its date of origin.
Splendid architecture and urbanization were ways kings would showcase their power, wealth, and ideologies.
Oldest City in the World
The population density, administration level, walls, forts, water, and sewer system facilities decide whether a settlement can be considered a city or not. Technically, Uruk is the oldest city, but Jericho in Palestine is the oldest to be inhabited by people in the modern world.
What Is the Oldest City in the World?
Settlements in Jericho began around 9000 B.C, and it had a famous wall called the Wall of Jericho. Archaeological findings suggest that the wall could have been 12 feet tall during its existence in 8000 B.C.
Do you know that Jericho had been destroyed in several wars but was rebuilt every single time and sustained a continuous population throughout the 11000 years of its existence?
The fossil discoveries of Jericho have shown a complete transition of the city from hunting towards agriculture. The inhabitants were one among the few to conserve water from the West Bank for the summers.
The old city of Jericho has been mentioned in the bible numerous times. The bible explained most of the wars it had with Israel. According to the Bible, it became an evil city after Joshua’s war, but Hiel the Bethelite cleansed it to make it suitable for humans by residing there.
Herod the Great set up a winter residence with Roman architecture making it a center for the Old and New Testament sites. The city then transformed into a winter resort for the British.
Apart from being the oldest city globally, Jericho also became the first city to be evacuated by the forces before being handed over to the nascent Palestinian Authority.
Rare Facts About Old Places
Byblos, Lebanon is yet another strong competitor of Jericho. The city was very similar to Jericho, but it marked the beginning of the Phoenician civilization. Athens, Greece, gave rise to the era of thinkers, writers, and other creators of art and knowledge. Faiyum, Egypt, was the first fertile place to be discovered by migrators. Aleppo, Syria, was a world heritage site destroyed by war. Varanasi, India, is considered the oldest town in the world by many, but the lack of recorded evidence has pushed it back on the list.
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