Jericho, in present-day Israel, is thought to have been one of the world's first cities and its history dates back to approximately 10,000 years BC. It appears in history for the first time in the Bible, where we see its walls fall at the sound of the trumpets of Joshua's army, an event dated around 1200 BC.
The city of Jericho is a hill (or tell in Arabic) on the western bank of the Jordan River Valley, near the Dead Sea. It is located near Ain Musa, a perpetual spring that is sometimes known as the Fountain of Moses .
When British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon excavated the site in the 1950s, she walked through numerous strata, stacked one on top of the other, each containing the remains of an ancient town or city. In the last of them, at the very bottom, she found a small village that was first occupied nearly 12,000 years ago.
The first inhabitants of Jericho were not true farmers, as they hunted wild animals and gathered grain from the surrounding countryside. However, unlike the early hunter-gatherers, they lived in permanent houses:circular dwellings half buried in the ground and with a single room. It was these houses that created the basis for the first Jericho.
The walls of Jericho
The next oldest settlement dates back 10,000 years . The people who lived in this town already knew agriculture and grew wheat and barley in the very fertile surrounding land. The town housed around 500 people, a very high number for this time. The inhabitants of Jericho also began to work together to build large stone structures.
The most impressive of these structures was an immense wall that surrounded the entire town. It was 5 m high and 3 m wide and required about 10,000 tons (9,070 metric tons) of construction materials to lift it. In front of the wall was a moat 8 m wide. Many canvases of the wall are still preserved today.
As if all these achievements were not enough, the inhabitants of Jericho also built a solid stone tower just inside the wall. The tower stands 11m high and is 9m wide at the base. To reach its flat top, the villagers built a ladder. They built the tower so well that it is still standing 10,000 years later.
Some archaeologists believe that these early farmers built the wall and tower to protect the town against enemy attacks. Others think, on the contrary, that the intention of the wall could have been the protection of the town against the floods, having the tower some type of ritual significance. Whatever their function, these are spectacular examples of early stonework.