The walls of Jericho

The story

A hill at the lowest point on Earth

Jericho lies in the valley of the River Jordan, about 250 metres below sea level: it is one of the lowest cities in the world. The climate is hot and dry, almost unbearable in summer, but there is a precious gift: a spring that still gushes today, called Ain es-Sultan, the “Sultan's Spring”, which makes an oasis of palms and orchards grow in the desert. That is why, for more than ten thousand years, people have stopped here. The ancient site is an artificial hill, about twenty metres high and made of layers of houses on top of one another, called Tell es-Sultan.

A hill like this is called a “tell” in Arabic and forms when a village of mud bricks is abandoned, collapses, and other inhabitants rebuild on top. Over the millennia, layer after layer, the level rises. By digging into such a hill, archaeologists read history from top to bottom: the recent ages on top, the oldest at the bottom.

A century of excavations

The first person to dig at Jericho, in the nineteenth century, was the Englishman Charles Warren. At the start of the twentieth century two Germans arrived, Ernst Sellin and Carl Watzinger; then, in the 1930s, the Englishman John Garstang. Garstang believed he had found the collapsed walls of the city conquered by Joshua, of which the Bible speaks. But the decisive answer came from the British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, who dug at Jericho between 1952 and 1958 with much more precise methods, layer by layer. Kenyon showed that the walls Garstang had found were much older than Joshua, by about a thousand years; and that by the time of the Bible, around 1400 BC, the hill was largely eroded or destroyed. The debate about that story is still alive, but between the two events there are thousands of years.

Beneath the Bronze Age walls, however, Kenyon discovered something even older and unexpected: the remains of a Neolithic village.

The wall and the tower

Around 8000 BC, so about 10,000 years ago, the inhabitants of Jericho built a stone wall, about 1.8 metres thick and more than three metres high, with a ditch cut into the rock in front of it. Inside the wall, on the west side, a round stone tower was raised, about eight and a half metres high and nine metres wide, with an inner staircase of twenty-two steps cut into the blocks. Building all this took thousands of days of work, and there were still no metals, no wheels and no draught animals: only stone, baskets and arms.

The purpose is not clear. Kenyon thought of a defence system against enemies, with the tower as a lookout post. Other scholars, such as the Israeli archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef, think the wall served to protect the village from floods and mudslides that came down the slopes in heavy rain. Still others think it had a symbolic value, to show the prestige and strength of the community. Perhaps all three things were true at once.

Who lived at Jericho?

The inhabitants lived in round mud-brick houses, a few metres across, with roofs of branches. They were still largely hunter-gatherers, but they already grew a few plants, such as barley and wheat, and made use of the spring water. How many they were is uncertain: Kenyon estimated two to three thousand inhabitants, but today the most cautious estimates say a few hundred, perhaps a thousand. In any case it was a very large village for those times.

A little later, about 9,000 years ago, a strange custom appeared at Jericho: the dead were buried under the floors of the houses, but the skull was detached, covered with plaster modelled like a face and decorated with shells in place of the eyes. These are the famous “plastered skulls”, which perhaps served to remember the ancestors. Some of these skulls are on show today in the museums of Amman and London.

A site still alive

Since 1997 an Italian–Palestinian mission has worked at Jericho, led by archaeologists from the Sapienza University of Rome and the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. The site, called Tell es-Sultan, was added in 2023 to the UNESCO World Heritage List. Visitors today can see the stone tower, protected by a cover, and the ditch that ran round it.