ZMT: Daily Fact: What is the world's oldest continuously inhabited city?

Daily Fact: What is the world's oldest continuously inhabited city?

Original photo by GA161076/ iStock

Jericho is likely the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world.

Although scenic metropolises like Toronto and Vienna may top the rankings of greatest cities to call home, these urban centers have nothing on Jericho when it comes to historical charm. After all, this Middle Eastern oasis has hosted human residents for at least 11,000 years, making it likely the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world.

Thanks in large part to the nearby water supply now known as Elisha's Spring (or Ein es-Sultan), nomadic hunter-gatherers began settling these fertile grounds as the Mesolithic Period drew to an end, perhaps around 9000 BCE. By around 8300 BCE, inhabitants had already constructed a bordering wall of stone, along with a 28-foot tower that may have served as a cosmological marker. Although the initial colony of 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants had dissipated by 7000 BCE, subsequent communities sprung to life as residents continued to hone agricultural techniques, with each settlement building on top of the previous one. Altogether, some 23 layers of civilizations have been uncovered in the area.

With the site once serving as a popular private retreat for leaders such as Alexander the Great and King Herod, the population of Jericho waxed and waned as it passed through the grasp of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. Now part of the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, the city leaves only a modest imprint on the global radar, even as the older sections hint at its incomparable ties to a formative era of human history.

Numbers Don't Lie

Height, in feet, of Jericho's earliest wall

Number of steps inside the tower of Jericho

Year of the first archaeological excavation of Jericho

1868

Population of Jericho, New York

14,526

Some researchers believe the biblical account of the fall of Jericho to be (at least partly) true.

According to the Bible's Book of Joshua, sometime around 1400 BCE the Israelites circled Jericho for seven days, before letting loose with a torrent of screams and trumpet blares that caused the city walls to come tumbling down. Modern research has determined that Jericho was indeed destroyed in the second millennium BCE, so could the biblical description be accurate? Critics cite the work of archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, who has concluded that the city was razed a century or two before the Israelites came marching in. Yet others have pointed to the remains of a massive fire and charred stores of grain that line up with Joshua's narrative, as well as the physical remnants of a wall that mysteriously crumbled from the inside out. The latter camp's evidence is compelling enough to think that the Bible may have gotten the chronology correct, even if we'll never know for sure just how much the deafening trumpets contributed to the city's demise.

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Daily Fact: What is the world's oldest continuously inhabited city?