green_amber

((WRote this yesterday at airport but wouldn't post! so here it is..)

Inspired by the Acroplis and the Agora Museum..

Wikipedia lists the oldest cities in the world that have been continuously inhabited..

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

The oldest of these I've been to is Jericho (3000BC) - well strictly I didn't go there but it WAS just on the right as we drove down the West Bank towards the Dead Sea .. the oldest I've been to proper is Jerusalem (2800BC though that contradicts its own Wiki entry by some 1200 years..) . And bar places in Israel and Athens itself (c 1400BC)the oldest European city I've been to is Liabon. How did *it* get to be so old? And indeed, how does somewhere in Bulgaria end up being as old in terms of continuous habitation as all these places in the Fertile Crescent/Middle East/ancient Med?

Is this list bollocks really? Swisstone? La marquise? What about Timbuktu? And Egypt? But I *am* interested to discover how relatively recent the great Mayan centres were. I had no idea.

But today is definitely my day for being boggled at how modern we were thousands of years before Christ. In the Agora museum , heart breaking miniature pots and toys and charioteers buried with deceased infants in Neolithic times - can anyone say these people were less civilised than us? I bought a book on Athenian litigation, something I should definitely know more about. Do you know the evidence of slaves was admissible only IF received under torture? Something to make us think in our post Guantanamo Bay days.. and something I did know, but had forgotten - how rival politicins used to organise to ostracise each other for 10 years at a time from Athens. Anyone who was too much of a demagogue and likely to inflame the populace could be exiled by popular vote as too likely to become a tyrant. Now that's how to do democracy! And possibly reality TV too.. (no I won't mention Jade here..)

Today was the day I really *liked* Athens. The fact that it didn't rain certainly helped..:) I walked and I shopped and by great good luck I wandered to the top of ana-Plaka (not Plokta), the least touristy part of tourist town. It was more like a Tyrolean village than trashy Monasteriki; I ate Greek salad and lovely slow cooked lamb amidst smoking locals and healthy backpackers and felt strangely virtuous. Missed the Jewish Museum entirely but wotthehell. The ancient Agora was mindboggling to see, to be in, really. I remeber how much I liked the Athenians now and 30 years ago: not killing machines like the Spartans, not organised bureaucrats like the Romans, but wiley chaotic clever-by-half squabbling wannabe lawyers, every one of them, just like me:)