For the History Channel, I wrote about the enduring legacies of cities that have thrived since ancient times.
The earliest evidence of human habitation on Athens’ famed Acropolis dates to between 7000 and 5000 B.C. By the mid-second-century B.C. Athens was an important outpost of the Mycenaean civilization, and remained a leading trading center for centuries due to its central position in the Greek world. In the fifth century B.C., when the city already had thousands of years of history under its belt, the so-called Athenian Golden Age began, endowing the world with lasting contributions to democracy (Pericles), drama (Sophocles and Euripides), history (Herodotus and Thucydides), medicine (Hippocrates) and philosophy (Socrates, Plato and Aristotle).
Once styled the “Paris of the Middle East,” Lebanon’s cosmopolitan capital is actually about 3,000 years older than Paris itself (which was founded around 250 B.C.). The first historic reference to the city is found in letters sent by a local king to Egypt’s pharaoh around 1400 B.C. Since then, the harbor city has been ruled in turn by Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Ottomans and French troops before becoming capital of an independent Lebanon in 1943.