Lost Cities - An Oldest City and a legend verified

[Samudragupt]

Originally posted by Ethelred

Its still Damascus. 6BC is nothing. Rome was founded centuries before that and its a youngster in comparison to Damascus or even Athens. You gotta work on your math.

Ethelred : thanks for suggesting math work to me . After putting in requisite amount of work it turns out I did make an error , not only in the case of Damascus but also Benaras . Damascus is, as you said , 3rd millineum BC but Benaras too is 6th millineum BC. So I guess status quo remains as far as the previous post was concerned. Now after further net research it seems that there is a very tough fight between Damascus and Banaras (and I cant decide one way or the other) but certainly not between Banaras and Athens (or Rome) which is a virtual knockout in Banaras' favour.

PS : If I were you I wouldnt work on my Math but certainly on my attitude .

[Ethelred]

Originally posted by Samudragupt
PS : If I were you I wouldnt work on my Math but certainly on my attitude .

Bleep off. Is that enough attitude for you? If not I am sure I can manage more but I could get banned that way.

Benares or Varanasi as far as I can tell is frequently claimed to be the oldest or one of the oldest cities continually inhabited either in the world or in India but I can't find a thing to back the claim. Its mentioned on a bunch of sites that Buddha was there in 500BC but that isn't far enough back to qualify. I haven't found a thing to support a date of 6000BC. Not even 2000 BC for that matter.

Can you supply a link that has some actual dates? Preferably with some evidence unlike all the tourist sites I keep finding that don't even give a general idea of the city's actual age. I don't care what city is the oldest except for I like to know everything I can. Which city it is doesn't matter to me. Everything I can find so far still points to Damascus for Oldest Continually Inhabited city. Lots of cities make the claim but Damascus seems to have evidence to support a claim of at least 5000 years of continual habitation.

There a LOT cities making claims:

Knya, Turkey

http://www.khgm.gov.tr/isd.htm

Konya, one of the Turkey’s oldest (6800 B.C.) continuously inhabited city was known as Iconium in Roman times.

Even Athens is into this hyperbole as if it needed more recognition.

http://www.travelling.gr/helloathens/Capital.html

The oldest inhabited city in the world, the cradle of democracy and Western civiliza-tion as we know it today, was begun as a small fortified village built on top of the Acropolis rock as far back as 3.000 years B.C.

Here is one in Bulgaria making claims of being the oldest. No evidence just claims.

http://www.plovdiv.org/history.html

Kendros, Eumolpia, Philippopolis, Pulpudeva, Thrimonzium, Pulden, Populdin, Ploudin, Filibe -- those were the ancient names of Plovdiv throughout its 6000 to 8000 years of existence. The name Plovdiv first appeared in 15 century documents and has remained till today.

The 6000 year claim seems a tad more likely. That puts it at the start of the Bronze Age in the Balkans and surely bronze wasn't usually being made in villages.

From what I can see just about any city that has no idea of when it was founded is making exagerated claims of age.

[ThaddeusAlexander]

Wow Ethelred, I don't think there was a single remark in the above post that i disagree with.

One small point (not big)

Everything I can find so far still points to Damascus for Oldest Continually Inhabited city. Lots of cities make the claim but Damascus seems to have evidence to support a claim of at least 5000 years of continual habitation.

One of my texts published the start of 2002 reaffirms Damascus as having the longest continually inhabited run of 5400 years. I checked some older texts and two from 2001 state 5400 as well, one from 2001 states 4900 and others pre-and-up-to 2000 state anywhere from 4500 to 5000.

Which makes sense to me because through my last years in school and work in Europe there was much talk about Damascus and an archeologist by the name of (if i remember correctly) Jacob Defrance (Difance or something like that) was tracing historical records to narrow down the date. And yes, if it makes you feel better, I'm sure he did some C14 testing on specifics too . I think his work is proving Damascus to have a longer than previously thought inhabited state.

I think he was looking back to the founding of the city ... after all, Damascus didn't pop up over night Again you need to set a firm borden on when it started as a "city" which in itself is a crude term now. Regardless, I'll check back up on that... but there were no credits in the text.

Cheers
~Thadalex

PS I'll try to find the archeologist's name and see if his work is published anywhere reputable on the net, or if anything is published elsewhere.

[Theseus]

You are all extremely wrong.

The oldest cities in the world weren't cities initially, they were towns.

And most of them were founded in 4000BC, with a few shortly later in 3950BC.

C14 testing has confirmed it, with no possibility of error.

[ThaddeusAlexander]

Originally posted by Theseus
You are all extremely wrong.

The oldest cities in the world weren't cities initially, they were towns.

And most of them were founded in 4000BC, with a few shortly later in 3950BC.

C14 testing has confirmed it, with no possibility of error.

Oh god, not again...

~Thadalex

[Ethelred]

Forgot about the Game we are supposed to be discussing Thatdeus? The cities in Civ III are founded in 4000 BC.

Unfortunatly there is no silicon equivalent of C14 so I couldn't make a good joke about that to counterpoint his. All the naturally occuring istotopes of silicon are stable and all the radioactive isotopes are fairly to very short lived. Longest is silicon 32 at 160 years. The rest are hours or less.

[Theseus]

Thanks, Ethelred.

Although the tennis match has been interesting thus far, I think you guys should relax. As well as I understand dating, quantum brouhaha is going to seriously screw up exactitude in any form of element approach... thus leaving a combo of dating methodologies as good as we can get, and, in the absence of sediment layers, a great deal of uncertainty.

More interesting, I think, and certainly more OT: what defines the beginning of a civilization? In a pretty funny way, you have both referenced the same 'event' as the entree point... the first city (i.e., my Settler built a town!!).

I'm not as into this subject as you guys, but I'm fairly well read... in post-school reading, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" has been my favorite.

4000BC... I'm sticking to it.

[Ethelred]

Originally posted by Theseus
As well as I understand dating, quantum brouhaha is going to seriously screw up exactitude in any form of element approach... thus leaving a combo of dating methodologies as good as we can get, and, in the absence of sediment layers, a great deal of uncertainty.

Its not quantum effects that are the problem with C14. Its the quality of the sample and the lab and the choice of the sample. A bone could be from someone that ate a lot of seafood which often has a lot of old carbon in it or a piece of burnt wood might have come from a tree that died a long time before it was put in the fire pit. The sample can be contaminated with old carbon from ancient sources or from newer carbon as well.

C14 is produced in the upper atmosphere by cosmic ray bombardment and the production of it varies from day to day and more to the point year to year. Tree ring dating has been used to calibrate it but the living trees don't go back as far as the habitations we have been discussing. The oldest tree in the world isn't as old as Damascus may be so the calibration gets a bit hazier back that far although it has been done with long dead trees from the same forest. The catch with the dead trees and even the live ones is they grow very slow so counting the rings is subject to error and cross dating the dead ones with live ones and with each other adds in more room for error.

Nice page on the Bristlecone Pines

http://www.sonic.net/bristlecone/home.html

Page specific to dendrochronolgy. He seems more certains about the results than others are.

http://www.sonic.net/bristlecone/dendro.html

A nicer site at least it looks better

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/methuselah/

More interesting, I think, and certainly more OT: what defines the beginning of a civilization? In a pretty funny way, you have both referenced the same 'event' as the entree point... the first city (i.e., my Settler built a town!!).

Depends on what you are calling civilization. While it literly means citification what a city is is the question. Towns are cities. Just small ones but does a village qualify and what differentiates a large village from a small town. Well at one time a wall certainly would do that but its not the only criterion available.

Personally I don't see a jumble of houses as a city. To me a city has reached the point where the city is more than a collection of families or kin groups where everyone lives pretty much the same except maybe a shaman or three. Specialization by people to have different ways of making a living is a big change from everyone being farmers and hunters even when they are community leaders.

I'm not as into this subject as you guys, but I'm fairly well read... in post-school reading, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" has been my favorite.

4000BC... I'm sticking to it.

I need to get around to reading that but I read a lot Jared Diamond's articles in magazines and I had allready seen much of his thinking on this from them.

[Demerzel]

IIRC someone who ate a lot of fish in their life will indeed have a C14 "date" that is older than truly accurate, however they will also have an elevated nitrogen count which can be used to recalibrate the data.

Saw that on a documentary on the Discovery channel, where the lab initally went for it being a 12th century bone from a priest but then revised it to 13th century due to the priest being a bit of a fish fanatic.

[ChrisiusMaximus]

So there is something fishy about this C14 testing after all.

[Demerzel]

oh dear

if you keep up with that I'll have a bone to pick with you

[ChrisiusMaximus]

Yes yes okay I apologise but do you know how old the bone is,

[ThaddeusAlexander]

Its all coming together now ...

I apologize for being away from the discussion but tomorrow is thanksgiving after all and there's lots to be done!

Cheers!
~Thadalex

[Demerzel]

thanksgiving, whats that then?

[ThaddeusAlexander]

Originally posted by Demerzel
thanksgiving, whats that then?

You don't know what thanksgiving is?

~Thadalex