Ancient Jericho/Tell es-Sultan

Ancient Jericho represents one of humanity's first experiments in permanent settlement. Around 9,500 BCE, as the last ice age ended, Natufian peoples established year-round habitation near the spring. Within a thousand years, they had built the earliest known monumental architecture. The site then passed through Canaanite, Israelite, Babylonian, Persian, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, and Ottoman hands—each layer visible in the archaeological record, each adding meaning to what endures.

The story begins with climate. Around 9,600 BCE, the Younger Dryas cold period ended, temperatures rose, and the conditions that had made nomadic life necessary began to shift. Near a spring in the Jordan Rift Valley, hunter-gatherers who had long moved with the seasons found they could stay.

Within centuries, they were building. The earliest structures were circular, semi-subterranean, with walls of mud brick and roofs likely of thatch and mud. They buried their dead beneath the floors of their homes—and sometimes, they returned to those burials, removed the skulls, and covered them in plaster to recreate living faces.

By around 8300 BCE, the community had undertaken something unprecedented: the construction of a stone tower eight and a half meters tall, with an internal staircase of twenty-two steps. Adjacent to the tower, a massive wall and ditch further enclosed the settlement. Whether for defense, flood control, ritual, or political display, this was architecture beyond the scale of individual household need. It was communal effort toward lasting purpose.

This is what we can say with reasonable confidence. What we cannot say is what it meant to them—what they believed about the skulls they kept, the tower they climbed, the dead beneath their feet. The excavated evidence suggests sophisticated spiritual life. The particulars remain beyond recovery.

The biblical narrative enters later. According to the Book of Joshua, after forty years in the wilderness, the Israelites stood before Jericho as the first obstacle to the Promised Land. God commanded them to march around the city daily for six days, then seven times on the seventh day, and when the priests blew their horns and the people shouted, the walls fell. Joshua cursed anyone who would rebuild.

Archaeology and scripture do not easily reconcile here. Kathleen Kenyon's excavations showed that the massive walls collapsed around 1550 BCE, perhaps centuries before traditional dating of the conquest. More recent work by Lorenzo Nigro has complicated the picture, finding evidence of Late Bronze Age habitation and wall refurbishment. The debate continues. What remains clear is that this site held significance enough to generate stories that endure three thousand years later.