Ancient Jericho

Unfortunately, due to my then wife damaging my phone in the Dead Sea and our subsequent divorce (unrelated events), I don’t have any photos of our trip to the Holy Land.  

Jericho is at least 10,000 years old, probably 12,000, maybe older. Americans have trouble wrapping our heads around such long ago time periods. Jericho dates back to the beginnings of agricultural settlements around the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia. The last Ice Age was ending and a warming world enabled people to settle permanently. Jericho as a community likely predates those first agricultural settlements, although such simple groups leave no traces. The walls are 9,000 years old—the oldest known walled city in the world—, and that’s of course what made the city so famous. But the Bible story of Jericho (Joshua 6:1-27) only dates back 3,500 years, and the song less than 200 years. I find it powerful that it was enslaved Americans who created the song, Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho, before the Civil War, perhaps dreaming of the day when the walls that confined them might come tumbling down, that the ram’s horn, trumpets and children’s shouts would be enough to bring down the plantations of their oppressors. So, that dream popularized the song that made the Old Testament story known to all Sunday school kids about the Bible story that drove archeologists to dig in Jericho that found the walls that brought my family here.  

Our visit was several years ago, but I …

Jericho supposedly is the world's oldest and/or longest and/or fortified inhabited city. Or one of them. In the pre-Neolithic things get a bit fuzzy.

While Els general comment holds (oldest till they find something older), I think there can be little doubt that Jericho belongs on the list, offering ample historical and archaeological remains ranging from pre-Neolithic times to 500 BCE. Humans settled here permanently after the Ice Age had ended, somewhere between 10.000-9.000 BCE. The location had two things going for it. There is a spring, Ein as-Sultan. And the low altitude (at -250m Jericho is the lowest city in the world) meant it was a bit warmer.

The settlement lasted from Epipalaeolithic, the Neolithic to the mid Bronze Age. It was refounded in the Iron Age, but then destroyed by the Babylonians and abandoned under the Persians. The famous Walls of Jericho have both Neolithic remains as well as Bronze Age ones.

When you visit, you will find a field of ruins in the sand, with the massive walls the most notable structure. It definitely could use better efforts at management and preservation, agreeing with Paul, but the time being this won't happen.

As a Bronze Age site, this would be pretty mediocre. As a Neolithic site, this is probably as good as it gets. If it weren't for those Neolithic ruins and the political situation, Jericho would have been better served as an extension to the Biblical Tells.

Getting There

With …

I am one of the people who visited as a tourist before heading off somewhere else. (Dead Sea, Massada & Beersheba) on a long day trip from Tel Aviv in late 1978. I had a guidebook, pre Lonely Planet and a Guide, Israeli who gave us a short, about 15 min tour. A couple of signs, noting to show that it had been there about 8000 years. I remember it as a dilapidated version of Troy, only a whole series of foundations and only to be seen with a guide who knew what he was talking about. Thankfully he did, a quick intro about Joshua before mentioning that the tale was dubious, the layer destroyed by an earthquake was hundreds of years before him. He then described the visible layers then we were on our way again. It needed interpretation boards and restoration. It does not look as though anything has happened apart from banning Israeli tourists. As Palestine's oldest site it needed a WHS designation. 

As is appropriate for what is claimed to be the World's earliest (known) walled city, Tell es-Sultan (better known as “Jericho”) has been nominated for our list of "Top 50 Missing" sites. It also of course has significant Biblical associations – Joshua and all that. I first visited it as long ago as 1964 but only remembered a sandy hill with a mishmash of excavated pits and stones which I couldn’t really understand – there were no interpretation boards in those far off days! So I had long wanted to re-visit it to gain a better appreciation - we did so in 2014.

The politics since those days have seen it pass through several changes of governance from Jordan, to Israel in 1967 and then in 1994, following the Oslo Accords, to the Palestinian Authority. At that point great things were hoped for from both Israeli and international tourism. As a result, significant investment took place to develop an infrastructure to handle the expected large numbers of tourists in the form of a cable car, hotels and a casino. The Second Intifada saw those initial hopes dashed however and today the city of Jericho sits as rather crumbling Palestinian enclave defined as a Category A area - i.e under full Palestinian control and into which no Israeli citizen is legally allowed, but totally surrounded by Area C still under full Israeli control. The main sites still receive a fair number of international tourists but these largely arrive as tour …