[falsedan]

Yes I love travelling to Babylon, or visiting the sites of Troy. And the trip to Machu Picchu is definitely worth it!

I know London and New York look like that will be around forever, but no city in the US is older than 600 years. We don’t have enough evidence to support that cities are stable on millennial timescales, since a few hundred years is enough for drastic change.

[Zardoz84]

Cartago, Cartago Nova(Cartagena), Roma, some Egyptian cities, etc are far older. we are talking of two/three millenniums. But is true that some older cities disappeared, displaced by more modern cities, climate changes, geopolitical changes or recurrent races by frequent wars.

[nafey]

Indian cities like Patna have been around before Roman empire

[baud147258]

> We don’t have enough evidence to support that cities are stable on millennial timescales

Some cities have existed for millenia, like Rome, but with ups and down. And drastic change can be even quicker than hundreds of years, for example a plague or a conflict will cause change quickly.

[chimprich]

London is not a great counter-example because it has been a major settlement for at least a couple of millennia.

[falsedan]

No it hasn't, Londinium was abandoned when the Romans vacated Great Britian.

[TheCoelacanth]

The Roman settlement was, but London as a whole was only abandoned briefly if at all. There was a major Anglo-Saxon settlement outside the Roman walls in what is now Covent Gardens and the Strand definitely in the 6th century and possibly in the 5th. The Roman settlement started declining in population towards the beginning of the 5th century.