Lists of the world’s oldest cities usually begin with a confident number and end in an argument. Jericho, Damascus, Byblos, Aleppo, Erbil and Susa appear again and again, yet they are not all old in the same way. Some have very ancient settlement layers but a broken urban history. Some have remained inhabited for millennia but changed name, size and location. Some were great cities of the Bronze Age and are now archaeological sites beside modern towns.
The useful question is therefore not “which city wins?” It is what kind of antiquity we are measuring. Archaeology can tell us when a place was occupied, when it became an urban centre and how often it was rebuilt. It is much less comfortable with a simple league table.
Why the oldest-city ranking is so difficult
Three different claims are often treated as if they mean the same thing. The first is early settlement: people lived at the site in a very distant period. The second is urban status: the settlement had the density, planning, social organisation or regional role that archaeologists recognise as a city. The third is continuous habitation: people kept living there through the many centuries between the early settlement and the present.
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Those histories rarely begin on the same date. A Neolithic village may predate a Bronze Age city by thousands of years. A famous ancient capital may have a long sequence of occupation but no direct continuity with the modern town nearby. Even the word “city” has changed. A walled oasis community, a royal administrative centre and a modern municipality do not belong to one timeless category.
That does not make the ancient places less remarkable. It makes their stories more precise. Here are several of the strongest cases and the reason each one belongs in the conversation.
Ancient Jericho / Tell es-Sultan: one of the earliest permanent settlements
Tell es-Sultan, northwest of present-day Jericho, contains archaeological deposits reaching back to about 10,500 BCE. UNESCO describes a substantial permanent settlement by the ninth to eighth millennium BCE, with a wall, ditch and tower. The same tell later preserves evidence of Early Bronze Age urban planning and a Middle Bronze Age Canaanite city-state.
Jericho is often called the oldest city in the world, but the phrase compresses several histories. The prehistoric settlement and the later urban centre occupy the same rich oasis landscape, while modern Jericho is not a frozen continuation of one unchanging town. Its real importance is larger than a ranking: Tell es-Sultan records the long transition from mobile life to permanent settlement and then to urban society.
Byblos: a continuous coastal history
Byblos in Lebanon offers one of the clearest cases for deep continuity. UNESCO describes a history of uninterrupted construction beginning with a fishing community about 8,000 years ago, continuing through Bronze Age temples, Persian fortifications, a Roman road, Byzantine churches, a Crusader citadel and later medieval and Ottoman townscapes.
That sequence explains why Byblos is so often named among the oldest continuously inhabited cities. Its significance is not simply age. The city was a maritime bridge between the Levant and Egypt, then a major Phoenician centre associated with the transmission of the alphabet. The layers are still visible because the place remained a living town instead of becoming a deserted ruin.
Damascus: an ancient site and a still-living city
Damascus is another powerful continuity claim, but it needs two dates rather than one. UNESCO notes evidence of occupation in the surrounding area as early as 8,000 to 10,000 BCE, while historical and archaeological sources place the city’s origins in the third millennium BCE. It was not documented as an important city until the arrival of the Aramaeans.
That sequence is exactly what a careful oldest-cities list should preserve. Early habitation around Damascus is extraordinarily old. The urban and commercial centre has its own later history, shaped by Aramaean, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Islamic periods. The city’s survival owes much to its position at a crossroads linking Africa, Asia and the Mediterranean world.
Aleppo: a crossroads built through repeated change
Aleppo has been a meeting point for trade routes across northern Syria since at least the third millennium BCE, according to UNESCO’s Silk Roads programme. Its history includes changing rulers, new building phases and periods of destruction, yet its role as a commercial crossroads endured across the ancient, medieval and modern worlds.
That is an important correction to the romantic idea of an ancient city as a place that never changes. Long-lived cities survive because they change: walls are rebuilt, markets shift, rulers leave their own layers and neighbourhoods adapt to new economies. Aleppo’s antiquity lies in the persistence of the place as a hub, not in architectural stasis.
Erbil: a settlement written into Mesopotamian history
The Citadel of Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan rises from a tell formed by generations of occupation. NASA’s Earth Observatory has described it as possibly the oldest continuously occupied human settlement on Earth. Written references to Erbil appear in early Mesopotamian records, while archaeology suggests that the mound itself may be much older.
The word “possibly” matters. The citadel is an exceptional contender, but exact uninterrupted occupation over thousands of years is hard to prove at the same resolution as a modern property record. Its broader historical status is secure: Erbil was part of the political, commercial and cultural world of ancient Mesopotamia, built one layer at a time on a mound that still dominates the city.
Susa: a city whose ancient layers outlived empires
Susa, in southwestern Iran, belongs on any serious list of ancient urban centres even though it is better understood as an archaeological city than as a straightforward modern continuity claim. UNESCO traces a continuous succession of urban settlements there from the late fifth millennium BCE to the thirteenth century CE. Susa became a major Elamite capital and later an Achaemenid centre, with palaces, administrative buildings and residential quarters preserved in the site’s layers.
Its importance lies in the continuity of urban occupation across changing political worlds. Susa shows how a city can be reborn repeatedly: a religious centre, a commercial hub, an imperial capital and then an archaeological landscape with the memory of all those lives under its surface.
What these cities reveal about the ancient world
The first cities were not copies of one another. They formed around springs, rivers, coastlines, trade corridors and defensible ground. Their populations experimented with irrigation, storage, walls, temples, markets, administration and long-distance exchange. Some grew into imperial capitals; others stayed regional centres for thousands of years.
What links them is persistence. Cities are not just buildings. They are habits of gathering people, moving goods, organising labour and remembering a place. When one dynasty fell, another often reused the same water source, road network or defensible hill. That is why an ancient city can look like a pile of ruins to one visitor and a living organism to another.
For a related look at how settlements accumulate physical layers over time, see our guide to ancient cities built on top of older cities. The buried foundations are not an accident of archaeology; they are evidence of people returning to the same useful places, generation after generation.
Sources
UNESCO: Ancient Jericho / Tell es-Sultan
UNESCO: Byblos
UNESCO: Ancient City of Damascus
NASA Earth Observatory: Erbil Citadel
UNESCO: Susa
