Which is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world?

Of course, it depends what you mean by ‘city’ and by ‘continuously inhabited’ but, however you define these terms, there are many claimants for the title.

When I visited Israel, I went to Jaffa just outside the modern city of Tel Aviv and this place claims to have been inhabited for the last 4,000 years [my account here].

However, I am about to holiday in the Levant and a number of cities that we will visit claim to be the oldest inhabited in the world: Damascus and Aleppo in Syria and Beirut and Byblos in Lebanon. Whether or not these places are the oldest, they are certainly very, very old.

As usual, there is a page on Wikipedia which attempts to summarise the various claims.


 




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