The oldest continuously inhabited place in the world. And its got oil.

[dixiegrrrrl]

Erbil Revealed

The 100-foot-high, oval-shaped citadel of Erbil towers high above the northern Mesopotamian plain, within sight of the Zagros Mountains that lead to the Iranian plateau. The massive mound, with its vertiginous manmade slope, built up by its inhabitants over at least the last 6,000 years, is the heart of what may be the world’s oldest continuously occupied settlement. At various times over
its long history, the city has been a pilgrimage site dedicated to a great goddess, a prosperous trading center, a town on the frontier of several empires, and a rebel stronghold.

http://www.andrewlawler.com/erbil-revealed/

Link has pic and allows further reading in pdf format.

This is the city in Iraq that the US was especially keen to protect, and which has been under attack by ISIS.
Very good read.

[bemildred]

1. Yes, the Kurds are an old people.

Saladin was a Kurd. He kicked our asses in the Crusades.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saladin

They've been there forever, like the Basque and the Berbers.

But anyway, thanks for the link.

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. Lawler is one of the authors I track

another reason I worship the internet.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Except the article says the Kurds have been there for under half the 6,000 years

After so many centuries of regional domination, the Assyrians’ fall was sudden and swift—and Arbela proved to be the sole surviving major settlement. A coalition of Babylonians and Medes, a nomadic people who lived on the Iranian plateau, destroyed the Assyrian capitals in 612 b.c. and scattered their once-feared armies. Arbela was spared, perhaps because its population was in large part non-Assyrian and sympathetic to the new conquerors. The Medes, who may be the ancestors of today’s Kurds, likely took control of the city, which was still intact a century later when the Persian king Darius I, third king of the Achaemenid Empire, impaled a rebel on Arbela’s ramparts—a scene recorded in an inscription carved on a western Iranian cliff around 500 b.c.

Certainly, Kurdish is an Iranian language group, while the Assyrians spoke a Semitic language. While the Hurrians, also mentioned as early inhabitants of Arbela, spoke a language related to neither group. The city has been multi-ethnics for thousands of years.

[greendog]

4. I've heard that Nikolski, Alaska is the worlds oldest continuously inhabited place.

Aleuts have been there for 8000 years. There isn't much to it. Not much in the way of architecture and only a handful of people live there, but they've been there a looong time.