The Age of Relative Age

I went out for a little ramble, a little explore today, through Vlorë. And among other things, I found a wall. Well, pieces of a wall. I'll get to that. The point is it's an old wall.

The Wall in Question

Or is it? What is "old"? I suppose it depends on whether we are discussing goldfish, or people, or walls. But it depends on other things too, like where you are.

I'll explain. In the United States the oldest continuously inhabited city is generally agreed to be Saint Augustine, Florida, coming up on its 460th birthday. (I know there is some argument about Jamestown, Virginia and St. Augustine having a little gap. But I don't want to wade into that controversy. Because 460 years old isn't old.) That may seem old by American standards, but is it?

First, we can wade into the contentious argument of when a city becomes a city. There were Native American villages in the land that is now the United States that predate that. But were they continuously occupied? Were they cities?

And even wadeless (meaning we won't wade into the contentious argument), St. Augustine is a baby compared with other cities in North America. Already San Juan, Puerto Rico is older by a few decades, and shouldn't that count? But even San Juan is a baby compared to North America's oldest city: Tepoztlán, Mexico which was founded somewhere around 1500 BCE. Yeah, 3500 years kicks the four-hundreds in their, well, let's just say its greater than.

The wall I saw today was from around the sixth century CE. That's pretty old, around 14 to 15 centuries old. But Vlorë is even older. It was originally founded as a Greek colony called Aulon in the sixth century BCE! That's 26 centuries of continuous occupation, baby! (Still not as much as Tepoztlán.) But here I am looking at something ancient, but then realizing that it is only a little more than half as old as the city I'm standing in as I look at it.

For a species that lives only 100 years if we're incredibly rare, something that is 2600 years old is staggering. And that's just a fraction of the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, thought to be Damascus, Syria. Here we don't have an exact founding date, but archaeology has evidence that the city started somewhere between 10,000 and 8,000 BCE. This city is 11,000 years old, give or take a century. All of a sudden, Vlorë looks like its barely in its adolescence.

People say that everything is relative, though wouldn't that means that even relativity is relative and so we can't conclude everything falls into the category? It's kind of like saying there's an exception to every rule. Isn't there an exception to the rule that says there's an exception? Which means there isn't an exception to every rule, though maybe every rule but one. (Incidentally, I was once described as being the exception to every rule. I know it was meant to be insulting, but I still take a certain pride in it. But I'm straying from the point.)

My point is this: One thing I love about travel is not only how it broadens my understanding of where things are, but also when things are. Yes, the spatial dimension seems so much more real and expansive, but so does the temporal one. I lived most of my life in a country where a 400 year old structure is ancient, the oldest there is. But as I see more, I realize that is only the surface of what history has left behind for us to see today. And I'm looking forward to (or backward to) seeing it.