Jericho - The First City on Earth? // Ancient History Documentary

Six thousand years before the present, the colossal

city

of Uruk, by far the largest in the world, dominated the southern Mesopotamian claims of modern-day Iraq with a population of at least 50,000 people. Eric would not be outnumbered or outsized for an astonishing amount of time. Fast forward 3,000 years to well into the Classic Age, the legendary homeland of Gilgamesh, a colossal adobe wall said to have been erected by the great hero, the King himself, once enclosed cities with an impressive four-mile radius, but impressive as if it were a rock, it did not exist. In a vacuum, the

city

was simply the latest and most successful albert in a long series of similar experiments on life dating back to the Stone Age, more than 5,000 years before the founding of Iraq, other smaller settlements, although not less impressive, had begun to merge. and they form in this region of the world the

first

known examples of static community life in

history

;

In other words, although the exact definition varies, the

first

cities on

earth

, the best known of these settlements, perhaps because of their frequently cited links to the Bible. The Old Testament walls of Jericho remain possibly the most impressive of all. Jericho is a place of first fruits here five thousand years before Iraq was found. The first known settlement in

history

surrounded by walls. One of the first evidences of cooperation between a group. larger than a single clan or kinship, the first significant evidence of large-scale community work and when the first tower complete with walls and steps in history was first discovered, what makes this especially surprising is that, in addition from a scattering of mysterious pictographic symbols, writing did not develop for thousands of years, even pottery did not yet exist;

Yet these people still gathered here all those millennia ago and accomplished something amazing, we don't know where they came from, we don't know their ethnicity, we don't know. We know who their gods were, but we do know that this may be one of the first places on Earth where animals were domesticated and agriculture was experimented with on a large scale. All of this was accomplished an astonishing 11,000 years before the present, just a few centuries after the end. from the last ice age, a time when woolly mammoths still walked the land, what makes Jericho even more fascinating is that, unlike other sites such as Arak, which has always relied on fragile ecological groups and They altered the courses of the rivers, the spring here has never dried up, which means that people still live here today this is the story of Jericho, one of the oldest cities in the world, this video is sponsored by Magellan TV, a new educational streaming service with over 2000 documentaries to watch on all kinds of different topics.

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Come and get free knowledge in January 1951. A plane landed in the Middle East aboard one of the rising stars of archaeology, an academic discipline at the time. Experiencing a revival of new scientific methods pioneered by scholars such as Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, as well as a revolution in scholarship, Oh should end with the implementation of radiocarbon dating, a technique that allowed researchers to accurately date their findings for the first time. time, unlike the archaeologists of the 19th century. The older generation is perhaps best exemplified by Heinrich Schliemann, the brave discoverer of Troy, whose methods essentially amounted to razing

ancient

cities in search of information, much of which was discovered, although countless more were lost forever.

This new body of scholars sought to meticulously uncover sites from the top. causing the least possible damage that archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, student of the famous Sir Mortimer Wheeler and daughter of the director of the British Museum Kenyon had been called to the shores of the Dead Sea to investigate a particularly interesting and controversial site. Because this was not the first time that the city of Jericho had been excavated 20 years earlier, fellow British archaeologist John Garstang had undertaken a six-year investigation of the site and eventually concluded that it was the site of the famous walls of the Old Testament destroyed by the The Israelites Joshua with a trumpet, although still associated with this story today, Stan's conclusions received quite strong criticism and finally, in 1951, with the chaos of World War II somewhat subsiding, Kenyon had been called upon to draw its own conclusions unlike other archaeological sites throughout the region.

It is often found in the desert due to changes in river courses or even underwater due to rising sea levels. Jericho's geography has changed little since the last ice age. It lies comfortably between two mountain ranges and the Dead Sea; it doesn't just rest in a naturally defensible location. But underground water supplies have perfumed the Oasis here since humans lived in the region, a prosperous city, modern Jericho, spreads over an area of ​​about 15 kilometers and encompasses lush fields and orchards in a landscape seemingly arid due to the abundant groundwater that supplies the current However, the work had to be carried out on a solitary hill that rose above the settlements at one end of the city, known today as Tel s Sultan.

At first glance, Tel s Sultan might have looked like a natural hill, especially before archaeological work had been carried out. In reality it is much more, the hill itself is far from natural, as everything says, it is actually the result of thousands of years of collapsed mud brick architecture, a mountain of rubble from previous cities that collapsed, were leveled and finally rebuilt by successive generations. Over the long millennia, as she approached the site, Canyon knew it was ancient, but how old was she and no one else? The techniques Kenyan and his colleagues used are familiar: stratigraphic excavation that meticulously looks at the soil layers as they dig to date.

Kenyon decided that this was simply not enough evidence to conclusively establish the biblical connection, as is often the case with archaeology. More excavations were needed and Kenyon The following year called for reinforcements, a small army of workers arrived at the site and began work that would not be completed until 1958, some six years later, when Jericho had become one of the sites most famous archaeological sites in history. John Garstang had initially dated the first settlements at the site to the 4th millennium BC. C., as far as most scholars of the time were concerned, the widespread domestication of agriculture and animals had only occurred about a thousand years earlier, which Kenyon and his team discovered would change the entire habitat.

In fact, it had continued at the site for an astonishing eight thousand years, between about nine thousand four hundred fifteen and eighty BC. C., with the potential for even earlier occupation, although this final date was later modified to around 1400 BC. C. and still today scholars debate it. does not change the general implications of the Kenyans' findings, perhaps the most surprising and iconic building discovered turned out to be not the walls of the sentry boxes, but a Neolithic tower that was built much earlier, about ten thousand years ago, at the time that was known the first time.

Today on Earth, more than half of the world's population lives in cities, but there was a time when this was far from the case, until about 11,000 years ago the Earth was trapped in an apparent ice age. endless for eons, 25,000 years ago, reaching the coldest point of the last ice age known as the Last Glacial Maximum thereafter, however, a steady and gradual melting eventually occurred after a brief return to cold conditions Known as the Younger Dryas, which may have partly helped boost agriculture out of necessity due to the difficult conditions it was meant to end, the entire world returned to its pre-Ice Age warm period and humans were finally able to flourish. one more time.

In this period, groups of humans often called wealthy hunter-gatherers who had previously huddled together for warmth or simply lived much further south than today found themselves living in a land of plenty, hunting, gathering wild plants and grasses. and they traveled from region to region. They lived a nomadic existence around 9500 BC. C.. Wide arc of the Middle East that we know today as the Fertile Crescent due to its abundant food supply, whether voluntarily or involuntarily due to environmental pressures, begins a new experiment in human life helped on its way by the uniqueness of grasses and seeds in this area. some of which could be cultivated and replanted by human hands rather than simply gathered and thus provide an almost inexhaustible food source for the future, still semi-migratory at first as wild herbs began to be changed and made more edible by hands humans, their descendants settle forever experimenting with plants and animals to feed their families, a need that over time, due to overpopulation and excessive use of natural resources, made their domestication possible and necessary.

One of those places was Jericho, then a great oasis in the underground of the Jordan Valley. Tributaries perpetually flow from that river into the central mountains to the west, making life not only possible here but also incredibly fertile due to the region's unique low-lying geography, which brings it close to the groundwater surface. , home to a large number of wild animals and plants. They have been harnessed here sooner than in most other places on the planet although, of course, Jericho did not exist in isolation from its earliest days, the Oasis was at the heart of a thriving system of trading communities spread throughout the Fertile Crescent, Although our evidence suggests that Jericho was one of the largest, if not the largest, it is almost certainly not the oldest nor the creator of the pre-pottery Neolithic culture that would come to dominate the site, nor agriculture or grazing, as these began elsewhere in the 1990s.

An archaeological discovery was made. In present-day southeastern Turkey, which shocked multiple world-famous academic disciplines such as Gobekli Tepe, perhaps the world's first religious center, the site is believed to have been built and used by numerous groups of wealthy hunter-gatherers who perhaps shared a common community. Religion and culture The strange animal figures on all the pillars here and even at other neighboring sites throughout the region may even be pictographs, a form of primitive hieroglyphics, although their message has yet to be discovered, as well as fueling the idea that Religion and not agriculture had in fact been the catalyst for the birth of civilization, the site also left tantalizing clues about the origins of agriculture, as the oldest known wild relative of wheat is found not far away.

It is not a stretch to think that some of those found in Jericho may have had some kind of connection with gobekli tepe. Professor Steven Mithen even thinks it is possible that after the ceremonies performed here the travelers returned to their respective tribes with seeds and the secret of how to grow them still continues in gobekli tepe. and unfortunately we learn more every year, however, Jeff Alec MA's equally ancient and fascinating site, perhaps a similar ceremonial center for hunter-gatherers and contemporary with the early stages of settlement at Jericho, now lies beneath a flooded lake in the 20th century to make way for a reservoir, this raises the question of whether religion was in fact the main driver in the formation of the first cities, perhaps initially beginningas a ceremonial center like a Quebec Lee Taipei and eventually, over time, as people gathered, they began to settle and build a community, it may even be possible, but some of the first farmers of the land brought the secrets of their technology to the sanctuary here before passing on their secrets over the holidays to two other curious groups of hunter-gatherers, presumably in exchange for some other resource in turn.

They could then have brought the seed back to their homeland along with other resources such as obsidian in the case of Jericho, perhaps the grain even had a ritualized religious quality, perhaps we will never know for sure, but what we do know is that around From the year 9000 BC, great changes in stone technology and a completely new way of life came to the Fertile Crescent, as it was the Neolithic Revolution when people first adopted agriculture, animal husbandry and community life. The Tower of Jericho, often known simply as the Watchtower, is one of the most extraordinary buildings in human history, not because of its intricate architecture but simply because of its age, nothing of its scale or size has become to be found for thousands and thousands of years at around 30 feet in diameter and 28 feet high.

It is estimated that it took around 11,000 work days to build the tower and that does not include planning or resource consultation. When Kenyon first discovered the tower, it was thought to be the first example of communal architecture on the planet built around 8000 BC, a time when the vast majority of humans were still living a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence. His architecture, which included five-foot-thick walls and an interior staircase leading to the roof, seemed unprecedented in both scale and design. A significant part of the work in the community to which the majority has been dedicated. Its construction involved a highly organized and motivated society, but what was the purpose of the tower?

The settlement that was at the heart of part of the culture we now know as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic prospered around 8,500 to 7,000 370 BC, it is not the only settlement in the region, similar sites exist in places such as Zaid and Terra, but with an area of ​​around 425 thousand feet, Jericho is by far the largest we know of. Researchers have come to all kinds of conclusions about the tower's purpose. Perhaps it was a giant grain container, a defense against external enemies, an early form of castle or even all of the above, however, one of the most compelling arguments that links to the ceremonial site at Gobekli Tepe is that the tower served a religious function.

The religion of the pre-pottery Neolithic people is still hotly debated and, although we will probably never know exactly how it worked, we can find parallels with other earlier and later contemporary sites. Scholars like Maria Kim see a mother goddess cult dominating. about the Fertile Crescent interpreted in sculptures and artwork across the region, even arguing that this inspired the jump to agriculture, but it remains a controversial idea and others defend male animal deities often fallaciously depicted at sites such as Gobekli Tepe, perhaps the horns of wild animals. Livestock buried under houses and earlier pottery. Neolithic Jericho could be related to this animal cult.

The tower itself contains very little evidence. There is no pottery here. There are no bones or burials underneath. And it is not yet linked to the other fortifications or buildings on the site. Other than religion, these people's own worldview could have motivated a construction like this, perhaps the tower facilitated accurate observations of the sky of both the stars and the Sun or even their cult doubling as an observatory and temple. We know that in later times shrines were built and shrines to deities were often built on elevated platforms to approach the heavens. This happened throughout the Americas and even in the Greek and Roman world, with August on the Capitoline Mount watching the birds find their destinations.

This tradition even survived in Early Christianity with late classical aesthetics lived on giant pillars to communicate with God. Could the tower of Jericho be an early example of this tradition and, if so, who exactly was doing the communion, assuming the role of intermediary between the community below and the gods above? the similar but slightly later site at Chautala Huia priest-kings we think had controlled city life, a tradition certainly used by later Sumerian cities such as Arak and was to places with sky gods extremely prominent in their religions, perhaps here in Jericho 10,000 years ago shamanic priest-kings led the rituals from the top of the tower, being closer to the other world.

In doing so, I left something that their cultural descendants would continue to use for 10 millennia as far as most people were concerned, which Jericho had the oldest. tower on

earth

then in 1999, without even particularly searching for it, a joint Polish-Syrian team found something surprising not far from the modern city of Aleppo, once again history would be rewritten by pushing the dates back thousands of years in Tell Caramel today. One day in Syria, the team found not just one tower similar to the one at Jericho, but five of them possibly dating back an astonishing 2,000 years, perhaps as early as 10,000 B.C., making the site roughly contemporary with the ritual center of göbekli tepe, the construction of its tower is a long-lost tradition. who once dominated the entire region and now only survives in two places, why did he tell Caramel that he had 5 amazing towers instead of one?

They were used for the same functions and more existed in other sites not yet discovered or already demolished or built on sites. So far in 2019 only about 2% of the tell candy has been discovered, unfortunately with the outbreak of war in 2007 excavations were almost permanently suspended, only the future can tell what other secrets lie hidden beneath the land waiting to be rediscovered. The city is generally defined as a place containing both housing and religious and civic buildings. The tower of Jericho may have both shared a religious and social function in uniting the people of the region to a common course when They first discovered that the tower had become almost immediately associated with the biblical story of Joshua, the leader of the early Israelites who are said to have torn down the city walls using only trumpets and prayers before launching into, of course, the usual looting and mass death associated with that period of history if you want to hear the biblical account of the destruction of Jericho in its entirety, you can do it here on our second channel voices from the past and don't forget to subscribe for more historical content, but of course the tower is too early to be connected in any way with the Bible and, curiously, it seems even disconnected from the defensive works surrounding the Neolithic settlements, which include a ditch and a wall;

However, these works themselves may have been built not as a defense against external enemies but to defend against natural flashes. The floods that regularly plague the region if you live in a mud house, floods and the natural world are both your enemies and outside of us, perhaps most especially during this era when settlements the size of Jericho were almost unheard of in the equally ancient city of Chattel Hoyuk. For example, modern-day Turkey, which reached its peak shortly after Jericho, has rather unorthodox architecture: it has no streets and houses are only accessible via rooftop ladders. Sedentary life here may have begun in part to protect against attacks by wild animals.

Of course the world was still at the forefront of life in these early settlements, although some animals may have been on the path to domestication, the main source of meat still appears to have been the wild gazelle, the people here were domesticating, but not yet on a large scale. Remains of gazelles, wild boars, sheep and goats are found at Jericho, some of which may have been domesticated, although the evidence is scarce and it remains difficult to differentiate between wild and domesticated animals in the archaeological record. they can be wild animals that were caught and kept for food a wild animal can be kept in a cage and fed before being eaten it does not have to be domesticated that takes a long time and many generations the other important source of food for these people was of course , agricultural products such as wheat, barley, peas and beans, all of which had gradually adapted from wild ancestors.

The people of Jericho lived in round houses about 14 feet in diameter with sunken floors of mud and plaster. Each household appears to have been virtually identical with its own grain storage area, suggesting that each household had control of its own food, quite possibly being independent in terms of food production. This is very different to later Sumerian cities like Arak, where the priestly class had a deliberate monopoly on food production and society itself was very socially stratified, also the houses of Jericho seemed to be scattered randomly throughout the site, each one of whom perhaps lived in a different family or kinship group, perhaps each descended from the tribes that had first come to the city to work together all those centuries before.

Rather than being grouped by profession and class, as in later Sumerian cities, people appear to have been grouped around tribal houses, suggesting little social distinction and differentiation between the lower and higher levels of society. Many scholars think that Jericho began quite spontaneously, without a central organizational structure. perhaps being built from scratch by groups of hunter-gatherers rather than deliberately built by priest kings like later Sumerian cities, after all writing the key to Eric's success does not appear for another four or five millennia and pottery is not even was invented but was once thought to be something of an anomaly.

In recent years other similar settlements have been discovered in the West Bank region, all sharing a similar culture often called Natufian with the only major difference between these sites being the enormous size of Jericho that extends over 10 acres. Could these settlements be peripheral to Jericho or simply related sites separated only by geography but united in a shared economic and cultural area? We know from archaeological finds that Jericho enjoyed widespread trade links with several other sites along the Fertile Crescent with especially sharp obsidian. The volcanic rock of Asia Minor was useful for making sharp blades and was a particularly prized material during this ancient era.

Jericho was almost certainly the focal point of this entire region. Their Oasis was simply much more abundant than its neighbors, but great prosperity always comes at a pre-pottery price. The Jericho Neolithic lasted until around seven thousand three hundred or seven thousand BC. C., at which time the tel appears to have been abandoned, much of the city wall collapsed and the top of the tower was eroded, we do not know what ended the first city in Jericho and all kinds of conclusions are drawn. have drawn from the evidence: earthquake, pestilence outside the invasion, decreased soil fertility, or all of the above, have been suggested as possible causes, but within only a couple of lifetimes, in a situation that would eventually become endemic to throughout the long eons. a new city would arise on the old one one of the most emblematic finds of Jericho does not date from the Neolithic before pottery a period of the watchtower but from the following settlement of a rise in the long history of the city a new culture that seems to have It took over the entire region perhaps after a brief period of decline and neglect.

We cannot be sure whether the pre-pottery Neolithic culture emerged as a result of internal change or external invasion, but we know more about its material culture than its predecessors. These were the followers of the skull cult, perhaps one of the earliest known examples of ancestor worship. Kathleen Kenyon, who lived through an era of war and chaos, saw the pre-pottery Neolithic B culture as a hostile conquering people who drove out their predecessors through fire and bloodshed. In reality this is not entirely clear and could have been a natural progression of the previous peoples, perhaps after the environmental devastation we will know that this new group was probably more populous than its predecessors, perhaps growing into a settlement of around of 2,000 people, all defended by asubstantial new wall The round houses of the previous city were replaced by rectangular, sometimes two-story buildings, suggesting a definite cultural change, as the houses of their predecessors here were still made of mud bricks, but were organized around of rectangular patios with plaster floors and plastered walls often painted red. with ochre, we know that these dwellings were furnished with reed mats and perhaps paintings like those in the contemporary town of Catalhoyuk once adorned the walls, although evidence for this is scarce, although people still continued to hunt here gazelles which constitute almost Half of the bones found in the archaeological record animals had definitely been domesticated: with pigs and Orrock goats appearing in significant numbers, there is also evidence at other sites of round houses being replaced by rectangular houses at this time with a phase of destruction by fire in between, perhaps most notably in beta in present-day Jordan, near the Nabataean city of Petra, interestingly two rooms were discovered here which may have been used for ceremonial purposes along with two small figurines believed by some to represent deities of fertility that are also found throughout the region are figures of animals and human appearance. perhaps representing ancestors or spirits, perhaps the most striking feature of pre-Jericho Neolithic pottery, however, was the practice of plastering skulls, a tradition that appears to have been especially long-lasting and widespread after death, the skull was removed from the body maybe after being abandoned. outside for the animals to clean or after a period of display for the community, it was then filled with clay and the external elements were molded with plaster, with shells often representing ice and perhaps paint representing facial features.

It appears that the body was then buried beneath the house with the skull apparently left on display, although this is a matter of debate as some appear to be hidden beneath the house. Evidence of similar practices has been found at neighboring contemporary sites, such as Sheikh Ali, south of the Sea of ​​Galilee. tel Ramat near Damascus bata near Petra and catalhoyuk in Turkey, but what was the purpose of dressing skulls like this? A minority of scholars see them as trophies taken from defeated enemies, similar to later headhunting traditions found as far away as Polynesia and Celtic Europe, others see them. as talismans to ward off evil spirits or ghosts of the deceased, the most likely answer is that they are an example of a religious tradition found throughout the world throughout history, particularly in early agricultural communities such as the which were later found in Britain during the Neolithic period.

Ancestor veneration Ancestor worship takes a wide range of different forms and is carried out for various reasons demonstrated continuity between past and present generations perhaps preserving the wisdom of previous generations may also have been a early form of Property Claim with ownership of the home demonstrated through ancestral display. They may also have simply been some of the first portraits seen in human history.To remember dearest loved ones, the pre-pottery Neolithic settlement at Jericho was an extremely long-lived society that probably existed in virtually the same state for a period of about a thousand years, from the present to the time of King Canute.

It's longer than the entire history of the Western Roman Empire, but nothing lasts forever, and just as Mesopotamia to the east saw the first hints of rock greatness around 6000 BC. C., a period of great decline in Palestine was about to begin. a catastrophe so devastating that some scholars believe the region remained largely unpopulated until the fifth millennium BC. C., well over a thousand years later, Jericho would never again be a regional center during the long period of two and a half millennia separating the pre-pottery Neolithic B settlement. of the Chalcolithic or Copper Age is not easy to explain, according to Kenyon, the site was completely abandoned around 6000 BC.

C., perhaps due to environmental degradation along with overpopulation and poor climatic conditions. There are small hints of similarly devastating conditions at other sites in the Fertile Crescent during this time, causing fringe scholars to suggest that if there had been some sort of genuine apocalyptic flood half-remembered in various later traditions, it may have been during this era when happened in Jericho, there may have been some form of continuation, but nothing as impressive as the previous ones, nothing significant enough to leave a trace that we can find today, perhaps the people returned to a nomadic pastoral existence, as we know happened in elsewhere, gradually getting more food from their domesticated animals than anything else and needing to travel to fairer pastures to get the best food for them perhaps to some extent this had happened even earlier during the lull between pre-pottery Neolithic settlements ;

However, during this mysterious time of wandering tribes great changes began to occur, the adoption of pottery proving that it would be a great social advantage to increase the population size of the groups now that food could be kept safe from vermin and stored for tougher times around 4000 BC. C., another great improvement came perhaps initially brought south from Anatolia as obsidian had been in previous generations that technology was, of course, metallurgy and would soon change everything during the Copper Age, often called Chalcolithic, around the 4000 BC Jericho appears to have been gradually occupied permanently once again, although it remained a peripheral power, reigning material culture known as the Leah casue. throughout much of the region, but little evidence has been found in Jericho even though one of its main settlements exists only a few kilometers away, this has led many scholars to assume that Jericho was not permanently re-colonized. and significant until around 3000 BC.

In most of the vicinity of Jericho, this was not an era of cities or even large towns, but rather was an era of small communities and Wandering villages, but when the third millennium dawned with an auric boom to the east, everything that would change for Bronze. The era had begun around 3,000 BC. C., although surprisingly little is known about it. Jericho was once again definitively occupied this time by a regional power that wielded a new cutting-edge technology. Braun's work was a period of writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt, although apparently not yet in Palestine, although walled cities with strong defenses and walls became increasingly common, Jericho was no exception and within a short time defensive walls were built and presumably some type of army maintained around 2600 BC.

The population of Jericho had reached heights never seen before and two hundred years later an impressive palace complex was built. There was nothing particularly notable about Bronze Age Jericho, which in truth had always been much better off when its neighboring powers were not so powerful, allowing it to flourish as an independent state. This, of course, was not always like this and Around the year 2300 BC. Life in the city collapsed, perhaps in part due to warlike neighbors, but certainly the old enemy of environmental catastrophe also had a role to play until around 2000 BC. BCE, the people of Jericho may have lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle once again, but very soon. a second Bronze Age Jericho would arise.

There is the most significant archaeological information yet seen about Middle Bronze Age Jericho, including a vast cemetery containing vertical shaft tombs and underground burial chambers. The elaborate funerary offerings contained within perhaps reflect the rise of local kings. The city itself was surrounded. by an extensive defensive wall complete with rectangular towers and moats, it is likely that these fortifications were apparently destroyed around 1,500 BC. C. by which it is mentioned in the Bible supposedly in connection with Joshua and the Israelites; However, all that greatness was about to be eclipsed. not from Mesopotamia, with a great city of Uruk that had long since diminished in size and is now dominated by its descendants, but from another cradle of civilization, this one to the south and west, around 1900 BC.

C., an epic story was recorded on papyrus in imperial Egypt. The Land of the Pharaohs, compared by some to Shakespeare, the story of Sinew is widely considered one of the greatest works of ancient Egyptian literature set during the 20th century BC. C., about 4,000 years ago. Sinew is an Egyptian official who flees the imperial court after overhearing a suspicious conversation related to the king's death. He eventually returned to Egypt as an old man after several travels and adventures among the warlike people of Canaan to the north. This is the land of Jericho and history gives us one of our first glimpses.

Life here outside the archaeological record The Egyptians despised foreigners at the best of times and the story of the tendons is no exception to this complaint of the miserable Asians who inhabit the Levantine coast and the interior, although it was thought to be Mostly fiction, the story burned with the reality that Egypt had a great influence on the region; Over time, this would become a stranglehold that would not be completely broken for nearly a thousand years in the following centuries. Inscriptions throughout the region speak of Egyptian victories and conquests and in all It is likely that Jericho was populated in part by Egyptian colonial administrators or by the probably Canaanite hypothesis of pro-Egyptian subjects, which is further evidenced in the Amarna letters and the lack of mention of Jericho in Egyptian curse tablets written to smite enemies during this time.

It is possible that the Amirites, the later founders of the city of Babylon and in part of Assyria, ruled here for a time, as well as the Korean Hyksos and Mitanni, all powerful warring peoples who held sway here for a time between 1700 and 1550 BC. Jericho. Reaching its greatest heights after having largely lost its independence, the city may have become prosperous by switching allegiances when necessary, thus pitting rival powers against each other and ensuring its survival. The rise of Jericho also reflects the growth of a chariot-riding ruling class, perhaps brought to the region by contacts with Indo-Europeans in Anatolia and higher levels of urbanization in the region in general, what goes up, however, must come down and in some time apparently in the 16th century BC.

C. the city was destroyed for a century or more and no longer served as an urban center. However, the wall supposedly destroyed by the Israelites Joshua was disappointingly non-existent at the site when Kenyon excavated it, although curiously in later excavations there appear to have been faint traces of habitation until around 1400 BC. C., a date traditionally associated with the wars waged by the Israelites. The Israelite tribes were perhaps later half-remembered and recorded in the Old Testament, but erosion and destruction from earlier excavations inadvertently erased significant parts of this layer, meaning it is unlikely we will ever know the truth.

It was not long before Jericho was reoccupied once again by Virtually all the powers that would dominate the region for the next three and a half thousand years. Today, Jericho remains famous for its supposedly biblical walls that attract thousands of tourists each year, although in reality the real wonder of the site is the Neolithic Tower that lies out there waiting to be discovered to reveal its 12,000-year-old secrets. beyond you.