Downtown B.C. -- Not exactly Bedrock

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Beautiful downtown Catalhoyuk East

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uploaded by denseatoms

"When you're alone
And life is making you lonely
you can always go
down town."

-- "Downtown" (1965), lyrics by Tony Hatch

Nice thoughts. But suppose that Petula Clark stepped into a time machine. How far back could she go in time before there was no "downtown" to sing about?

The Catalhoyuk East site in central Anatolia (Turkey) is "believed to be the world's first urban center," wrote Orrin Shane and Mine Kucuk. [1] From 7,500 to 9,000 years ago, thousands of people lived there in houses with plastered floors and walls, as well as decorative murals. Archeologists have also uncovered "a complex history of building remodeling" on the site.

Matt Crenson described the houses as "packed together like New York City apartment buildings, with entrances that would have made Catalhoyuk a tough town (for invaders) to ransack." [2]

In the Jordan River Valley, Jericho -- first occupied around 9000 B.C. -- saw development between 8000-4000 B.C., for which the city is known as "the oldest walled town in the world" [3]

Damascus is probably the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. An urban center existed southeast of Damascus in the 4th millennium B.C., and the earliest written reference to the city itself dates from the 15th century B.C. [4]

Sources Cited:

[1] Shane III, Orrin C. and Mine Kucuk in "The World's First City" (Archaeology, March-April 1998).

[2]  Crenson, Matt. "Is War Part of Our Nature?" The Minneapolis (Minn.) Star Tribune, June 3, 2001.

[3] Achtemeier, Paul J. Harper Collins Bible Dictionary.

[4] Encyclopedia Britannica.