Eleven millennia of tell layers by a desert spring
Jericho, Arabic Arīḥā, sits in the Jordan Valley between river and Jerusalem as capital of the Jericho Governorate. Archaeologists count more than twenty successive settlements—the earliest about 11,000 years old, near 9000 BCE—fed by perennial springs. In 2023 UNESCO listed Tell es-Sultan as the “oldest fortified city in the world.”
Names may track Canaanite rēḥ, “fragrant,” or a moon-deity link to Yarikh; Arabic Arīḥā also means fragrant. Digs began with Charles Warren in 1868; Kathleen Kenyon’s 1952–58 seasons made the tell the type site for Pre-Pottery Neolithic A and B. Natufian hunter-gatherers camped at Ein es-Sultan before 9000 BCE, leaving crescent microliths. After the Younger Dryas cold ended around 9600 BCE, stays lengthened into year-round village life.
PPNA settlers between about 9500 and 9000 BCE built circular sun-dried brick houses roughly five metres across. By around 8000 BCE a stone wall over 3.6 metres high and 1.8 metres thick enclosed some 40,000 square metres, with a tower over 8.5 metres tall—twenty-two internal steps—among the oldest towers known. Carbon dates put tower use near 8300–7800 BCE. Population estimates swing from a few hundred to two or three thousand; emmer, barley, and pulses were already domesticated.
After a roughly five-century hiatus, PPNB people raised rectilinear mudbrick rooms on stone foundations and curated plastered skulls with shell eyes—portraiture or household cult. Kenyon even flagged a possible shrine niche that may have held a volcanic stone pillar. Middle Bronze Jericho peaked about 1700–1550 BCE with heavy defences before a City-IV destruction dated around 1617–1530 BCE. Italian–Palestinian teams since the 1990s have added finds such as Tower A1 and Palace G above Ain es-Sultan. The modern town counted 20,907 residents in 2017. Palm-tree biblical imagery still fits a spring oasis that taught the Holocene how to stay put.
Source: Jericho
