Atlas Trail
Eight Cities of the Levant and Iraq in Order of Founding, from Hama to Dimona
These eight cities run from a settlement first inhabited in the fifteenth century BCE to a desert town established in 1955. Read in order of founding or first record, they show how the region was settled in layers: ancient river and road towns first, then Ottoman-era foundations, then twentieth-century agricultural, refugee and development towns.
Stop 1 of 8.
Cities
Hama sits on the banks of the Orontes River in west-central Syria, 213 kilometers north of Damascus. Its recorded start is the earliest on this trail: it was first settled in the 15th century BCE, according to the Wikipedia infobox on the page. It is the capital of Hama Governorate and is known for the local cheese dessert Halawet el Jibn.
Stop 2 of 8.
Cities
Rafah is first recorded in an inscription of the Egyptian pharaoh Seti I from 1303 BCE, where it appears as Raphia. That makes it the oldest dated record of any stop here after Hama. It is the capital of the Rafah Governorate in the southern Gaza Strip, 30 kilometers south-west of Gaza City, and had a population of 171,889 in 2017.
Stop 3 of 8.
Cities
Zahlé was founded in the eighteenth century as a small Christian settlement, with its recorded foundation year given as 1711. By 1820 trade had brought it 5,000 inhabitants, and it became the main depot for the grain harvest of the Beqaa. It stands about 55 kilometers east of Beirut, at the junction of Mount Lebanon and the Beqaa Valley.
Stop 4 of 8.
Cities
Nasiriyah was established in 1872 by Nasir al-Sadoon Pasha of the Al Sadun family, who gave it his name, and it became the administrative center of the Muntafiq sanjak that same year. It lies on the lower Euphrates near the ruins of Ur and is capital of the Dhi Qar Governorate. The 2024 census counted about 704,976 people, making it the ninth largest city in Iraq.
Stop 5 of 8.
Cities
Kfar Saba was established in 1898 as a Jewish moshav, with permanent settlement beginning in 1903. It was destroyed and rebuilt more than once, and during the First World War it sheltered about a thousand refugees of the Tel Aviv and Jaffa deportation. It received city status in 1962 and had 99,410 residents in 2024.
Stop 6 of 8.
Cities
Herzliya was founded in 1924 as a semi-cooperative farming settlement and named after Theodor Herzl. It grew from about 5,300 residents in 1948 to city status in 1960, when its population reached 25,000. The page records 110,884 residents in 2024 and notes the beachfront district of Herzliya Pituah.
Stop 7 of 8.
Cities
Beit Shemesh was established in 1950 on the site of a displaced persons camp, with permanent housing built from 1952. Its name means House of the Sun and comes from the biblical Beth Shemesh, and it lies near Tel Beit Shemesh, an archaeological site reaching back to a Bronze Age Canaanite settlement. It had 176,786 residents in 2024.
Stop 8 of 8.
Cities
Dimona was established in 1955 as one of Israel's development towns, and its first residents were 36 families of Jewish immigrants from North Africa. It lies in the Negev about 30 kilometers southeast of Beersheba and grew from 300 residents to 39,590 in 2024. The Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center stands 13 kilometers southeast of the city.
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