Jericho: the World's Oldest City — Ten Thousand Years of Continuous Human Civilization

Few places on earth carry the weight of human history the way Jericho does. Situated in the sun-baked Jordan Valley of the West Bank, this ancient oasis city has been continuously inhabited for approximately eleven thousand years, making it the oldest known permanently settled community on the planet. When the first farmers and proto-urban dwellers were erecting their round stone houses on the mound now called Tell es-Sultan sometime around 9000 BCE, the pyramids of Egypt were still eight thousand years in the future. The written word would not be invented for another six millennia. Virtually every civilization that has shaped the ancient Near East — the Natufians, the Canaanites, the Israelites, the Persians, the Macedonians, the Romans, the Byzantines, the early Arabs, the Crusaders, the Ottomans, and finally the modern Palestinians — has in one way or another passed through this remarkable city or built upon its soil.

Jericho's longevity is inseparable from its geography. Perched at one of the lowest points on the surface of the earth, approximately 258 meters below sea level, and nurtured by the Ain es-Sultan spring — a powerful natural fountain that flows at roughly 1,000 cubic meters per hour — the city has always been an oasis in a harsh desert landscape. In a region where rainfall is desperately scarce, the spring made permanent settlement not only possible but almost inevitable. People have been drawn to this spot, generation after generation, for the same fundamental reasons: fresh water, fertile soil, and a strategic position at the junction of important ancient trade and travel routes.

For those searching for the world's oldest city still inhabited today, or exploring the history of the first human settlements in the ancient Levant, Jericho stands apart from any other candidate. Its story is not simply the story of one place, but the story of humanity itself learning to stop wandering and to build a home.

Geography and Physical Setting: the Lowest City on Earth

Jericho occupies one of the most dramatic natural settings of any city in the world. It lies in the Jordan Rift Valley, the northernmost extension of the Great Rift Valley system that runs all the way from northern Syria down through East Africa. This rift is a geological depression formed by the separation of tectonic plates, and it has been sinking for millions of years. The result is a landscape of extraordinary extremes: the nearby Dead Sea, just fifteen kilometers to the south, lies at 430 meters below sea level — the lowest exposed point on the surface of the earth — while the Judean Hills to the west rise steeply to over 800 meters above sea level within a horizontal distance of only a few dozen kilometers.

Jericho itself sits at roughly 258 meters below sea level, a figure that makes it the lowest city on earth in terms of altitude. This low elevation has profound climatic consequences. The city enjoys a warm desert climate, with temperatures that regularly reach 40 degrees Celsius in summer. But this same warmth that makes summer brutal makes winter mild, even subtropical. While Jerusalem, sitting high on the Judean plateau less than thirty kilometers to the west, can experience snow and freezing temperatures, Jericho remains pleasant throughout the winter months — a quality that made it a beloved winter retreat for the wealthy and powerful in antiquity, from Herod the Great to the Umayyad caliphs.

The Ain es-Sultan spring — sometimes called Elisha's Spring after the biblical prophet said to have purified its waters — is the hydrological heart around which the entire history of Jericho revolves. This spring has flowed continuously for thousands of years, providing a reliable source of fresh water in a region where the annual rainfall averages only 150 millimeters per year. The spring feeds a network of irrigation channels that have allowed agriculture to flourish in the surrounding alluvial soil. The combination of warm temperatures, abundant sunshine, rich soil, and reliable irrigation has made Jericho's agricultural output extraordinary by the standards of the ancient Near East.

The mound of Tell es-Sultan rises about twenty-one meters above the surrounding plain. A "tell" in archaeological terminology is an artificial hill formed by the successive accumulation of human occupation layers — each generation builds on the ruins of the last, and over thousands of years the ground level rises. At Tell es-Sultan, those accumulated layers represent approximately eleven thousand years of more or less continuous human presence. Excavating the tell is, in effect, reading the entire history of human civilization in one place.

The Natufian Prelude: Hunter-Gatherers on the Edge of Revolution

Before Jericho became a city — before it had walls, towers, or permanent houses — it was a campsite for a remarkable people called the Natufians. The Natufian culture, named after the Wadi al-Natuf in the Judean Hills where it was first identified, flourished across the Levant from approximately 12,500 to 9,500 BCE. These were not yet farmers. They were hunter-gatherers who had, however, begun to exhibit some of the behaviors we associate with settled life.

The Natufians at the site that would become Jericho were drawn, as later inhabitants would be, by the spring. The evidence suggests they camped near the Ain es-Sultan regularly, harvesting wild emmer wheat and wild barley from the surrounding grasslands, hunting gazelle and other game, and supplementing their diet with fish and shellfish from the Jordan River. What distinguishes the Natufians from earlier hunter-gatherer cultures is the presence of small, semi-permanent structures — circular pit dwellings lined with stones — and an elaborate material culture that includes ground stone tools, sickle blades with the characteristic sheen of cereal processing, and sophisticated jewelry made from bone and shell.

The Natufian period in the Levant corresponds with the Younger Dryas climatic event, a sudden cold and dry spell that lasted from roughly 10,800 to 9,700 BCE and disrupted the relatively lush conditions of the preceding millennia. The Younger Dryas put enormous pressure on human populations, forcing them to intensify their food procurement strategies, to manage plant and animal resources more actively, and — in some cases — to begin the deliberate cultivation of the wild plants they had been harvesting. The transition from harvesting wild cereals to deliberately planting and tending crops is one of the most consequential events in all of human history, and Tell es-Sultan sits at the very heart of the region where this transition first occurred.

Pre-Pottery Neolithic A: When Jericho Became the World's First City

The Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period, known to archaeologists as PPNA, spans roughly from 9500 to 8500 BCE. It is during this period that Jericho transitions from a seasonal camp or semi-permanent settlement into something that begins to look genuinely urban — a permanent, year-round community of several hundred people with monumental architecture, communal organization, and the beginnings of agriculture.

The PPNA community at Tell es-Sultan built circular, semi-subterranean houses of handmade mudbrick — oval structures roughly five to six meters in diameter, with beaten clay floors, timber post supports, and reed-thatched roofs. The inhabitants kept goats and possibly pigs in addition to cultivating emmer wheat and einkorn barley. The precise moment when deliberate cultivation crossed the line into what we would recognize as agriculture is debated, but the plant remains recovered from PPNA Jericho show clear evidence of domesticated strains of cereals — grains that had been selectively harvested and replanted over many generations until they could no longer reproduce without human assistance.

But the most astonishing feature of PPNA Jericho is not its houses or its agriculture. It is the tower.

The Neolithic Tower: the Oldest Known Monumental Structure in the World

The Neolithic Tower of Jericho is, quite possibly, the oldest free-standing stone structure ever built by human hands. Dating to approximately 8000 BCE, it predates the famous megalithic monuments of Europe — Stonehenge, Newgrange, the standing stones of Carnac — by four to five thousand years. It predates the pyramids of Egypt by five thousand years. It predates writing by three thousand years. It was built at a time when most of the world's human population was still living as nomadic hunter-gatherers.

The tower was discovered during Kathleen Kenyon's landmark excavations at Tell es-Sultan between 1952 and 1958. It is a massive stone cylinder, 8.5 meters in diameter at its base and originally standing at least 8.5 meters tall, with walls up to 1.5 meters thick. A staircase of 22 stone steps runs through the interior of the tower, spiraling upward from a small doorway at ground level. The tower is built against the inner face of a massive stone wall, at least 1.8 meters wide and still standing to a height of almost four meters in some sections, that surrounded the entire settlement.

The construction of this tower and its associated wall required an enormous investment of communal labor. Archaeologists have estimated that building the tower and wall required approximately 11,000 person-days of labor — meaning that the entire community of perhaps 400 to 1,000 people would have needed to dedicate significant collective effort over an extended period to complete the project. This level of social organization — the ability to plan, coordinate, and execute a major construction project — implies a level of social complexity and possibly political authority that is extraordinary for this period in human history.

The purpose of the tower has been debated intensely since its discovery. The initial interpretation was defensive: the tower was a watchtower or fortified structure designed to protect the settlement and its agricultural resources from raiders or competing communities. This interpretation fits well with the presence of the surrounding stone wall, which also has defensive implications.

However, more recent research has complicated this picture considerably. Israeli archaeologist Ran Barkai and his colleagues have proposed, based on detailed analysis of the tower's orientation and shadow patterns, that the tower may have had a ritual or ceremonial function connected to the summer solstice. The tower is positioned such that at the summer solstice, the shadow cast by the nearby hillside aligns precisely with the tower just before sunset, suggesting that the structure was deliberately designed to mark this astronomical event. On this interpretation, the tower was a monument to mark the passage of time and the cycles of the agricultural year — a calendar in stone.

A third possibility, not necessarily incompatible with either of the above, is that the tower served as a visible symbol of community power and identity — a statement to the world (or at least to neighboring communities) that the people of Jericho were organized, powerful, and capable of great things. Monumental architecture throughout human history has served this function, from the pyramids of Egypt to the cathedrals of medieval Europe.

Whatever its original purpose, the Neolithic Tower stands today as a haunting and profound testament to human ambition and organizational capacity at the very dawn of civilization. It is the oldest thing built by human hands that still stands, at least in partial form, anywhere on earth.

Pre-Pottery Neolithic B: the Plastered Skulls and the Flowering of Neolithic Culture

The Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period (PPNB) at Jericho spans roughly from 8500 to 6000 BCE and represents the next great phase in the city's long history. During this period, the community grew significantly — the settlement may have expanded to cover as much as four hectares, with a population that some estimates place at several thousand individuals. The round houses of the PPNA gave way to rectangular multi-room structures of mudbrick, often with plastered floors polished to a smooth finish and sometimes painted with geometric designs in red pigment.

Agriculture became firmly established during the PPNB. The community cultivated emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, barley, lentils, field peas, and flax, and kept herds of goat and cattle. The combination of crop cultivation and animal husbandry created a food surplus capable of supporting a community far larger than any hunting and gathering economy could sustain. It is this surplus — the ability to produce more food than is immediately needed — that makes civilization possible, because it frees some members of the community from the constant necessity of food procurement and allows them to specialize in other tasks: toolmaking, construction, trade, ritual, and social organization.

But the most extraordinary and haunting discovery from PPNB Jericho is not its rectangular houses or its agricultural innovations. It is the plastered human skulls.

Beginning in the late PPNA and flourishing through the PPNB period, the people of Jericho engaged in a remarkable funerary practice: they would bury the dead beneath the floors of their houses, as was common in Neolithic communities across the Levant, but then — some time after burial, once the flesh had decomposed — they would exhume the skull, coat it carefully with wet plaster, and model it to recreate the features of the face. They would set shells — often cowrie shells, or shells with a horizontal slit that mimics the appearance of a half-open eye — into the eye sockets. They would paint the plaster in some cases with geometric designs or red ochre. The result was a remarkably lifelike portrait, a face rebuilt from the skull of the dead.

At least fifty of these plastered skulls have been recovered from Jericho and nearby sites, spread across several centuries of the PPNB period. The care and skill involved in their creation — the fine modeling of cheekbones and chin, the attention to individual facial features — suggests that these were not generic representations but attempts to preserve the actual appearance of specific individuals. Most of the skulls recovered are adults, and many appear to be male, though women and children are also represented.

What were these skulls for? The most widely accepted interpretation is that they represent a form of ancestor veneration or ancestor cult — a practice of maintaining a relationship between the living and their honored dead. In a community organized around extended family groups, the memory and presence of revered ancestors — founders of lineages, successful hunters or farmers, community leaders, people of exceptional qualities — would have carried enormous social weight. By keeping the skulls of the ancestors in the home, modeled to look like the living person, the family maintained a symbolic link to their origins and their identity.

This interpretation is supported by the placement of the skulls in domestic contexts — in houses, often in groups, sometimes arranged as if the skulls were still present as part of the household. In at least one case, a cache of seven skulls was found arranged together. The practice was not secret or hidden; these were objects meant to be seen and engaged with, perhaps consulted during important decisions or displayed during seasonal ceremonies.

The plastered skulls of Jericho are now considered among the most important and evocative artifacts in prehistoric archaeology. They tell us that the people of Neolithic Jericho were not simple brutes scratching a subsistence living from the soil. They were emotionally complex, spiritually sophisticated people with elaborate beliefs about death, identity, and the relationship between the living and the dead — people, in short, not entirely unlike ourselves.

The Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age: Growing Complexity

Following the PPNB, Jericho's archaeological record shows periods of reduced occupation, possibly due to climatic fluctuations or social disruption, before the city re-emerges with renewed vitality in the Chalcolithic period (roughly 4500–3300 BCE) and the Early Bronze Age (3300–2000 BCE).

The Chalcolithic period — the Copper Age, the transitional era between the Stone Age and the Bronze Age — saw the emergence of more complex social structures, long-distance trade networks, and the beginnings of social stratification. At Jericho, Chalcolithic remains are present but less well-preserved than those of the Neolithic period. The community continued to exploit the resources of the oasis and the spring, and the evidence suggests continued agricultural activity and animal husbandry.

The Early Bronze Age represents a major intensification of urban activity at Jericho. The city was enclosed by a succession of mudbrick walls — the archaeological record shows at least seventeen distinct building phases of walls during the Early Bronze Age alone — suggesting either repeated rebuilding after destructions (possibly by earthquake, a constant hazard in the seismically active Jordan Valley), or a tradition of periodic wall renewal. The Early Bronze Age city of Jericho may have had a population of several thousand people and shows evidence of a relatively complex and organized community with storage facilities, communal buildings, and differentiated economic activities.

The Early Bronze Age at Jericho corresponds with the period of Egypt's Old Kingdom and Mesopotamia's early city-states. Jericho was not isolated from the broader currents of ancient Near Eastern civilization; it participated in trade networks that linked the Jordan Valley with the Mediterranean coast, the Negev, and Egypt.

Around 2300 BCE, the Early Bronze Age city was abandoned, probably due to a combination of climate change — a prolonged drought that devastated agricultural communities across the ancient Near East during the 22nd century BCE — and the disruptions associated with the movements of pastoral nomadic peoples across the region. Jericho would eventually be reoccupied, but the gap in occupation is a reminder that even the world's oldest city is not immune to the forces of history.

The Middle Bronze Age: Jericho Reborn

After a gap of several centuries, Jericho was reoccupied in the Middle Bronze Age (roughly 2000–1550 BCE). The Middle Bronze Age city is one of the most archaeologically rich periods at Tell es-Sultan, and the remains uncovered by Kathleen Kenyon and her predecessors — the German scholar Ernst Sellin and Austrian Carl Watzinger had excavated parts of the site in the early twentieth century — give us a vivid picture of a prosperous and well-organized urban community.

The Middle Bronze Age city was protected by a massive earthen rampart — a sloping embankment of packed earth and stone that gave the entire mound a steep, virtually unclimbable outer face. At the top of the rampart stood a mudbrick wall. This type of defensive construction, known as a glacis, was widespread in Middle Bronze Age cities throughout Canaan and reflects the sophisticated military engineering of the period. The glacis at Jericho was one of the most impressive defensive systems of its time.

Within the city, Kenyon's excavations revealed a prosperous town with well-built houses, storage facilities, and a rich assemblage of pottery, bronze tools and weapons, and imports from Egypt and the Levantine coast. The Middle Bronze Age city of Jericho maintained active trade connections with the wider ancient Near Eastern world and was evidently a place of some wealth and commercial importance.

The tombs of Middle Bronze Age Jericho, excavated extensively by Kenyon and her team, have yielded some of the most remarkable finds from the site. Cut into the bedrock surrounding the tell, these shaft tombs were used by extended family groups over generations, and many contained remarkably well-preserved organic remains — wooden furniture, basketry, textiles, and even food offerings — preserved by the dry conditions of the Jordan Valley. The skeletal remains in these tombs give physical reality to the people who lived and died in Middle Bronze Age Jericho: men and women of average height for the period, showing signs of hard physical labor, occasional violent injury, and the dental wear of a cereal-based diet.

The Middle Bronze Age city came to an end around 1550 BCE, when Jericho was destroyed — probably, most scholars believe, by the Hyksos expulsion from Egypt and the resulting military campaigns of the early New Kingdom pharaohs who pursued the Hyksos into Canaan. The destruction of Middle Bronze Age Jericho was violent and total, and the city was abandoned for an extended period.

The Late Bronze Age and the Biblical Conquest: History, Myth, and Archaeology

It is during the Late Bronze Age that Jericho enters the narrative of the Hebrew Bible, and it is here that the relationship between archaeology and scripture becomes most complex, most contentious, and most fascinating.

The biblical account of the Israelite conquest of Jericho is told in the Book of Joshua, chapter six, and it is one of the most dramatic stories in the entire Hebrew Bible. According to the text, the Israelites, led by Joshua after the death of Moses, approached Jericho as the first major obstacle in their conquest of Canaan — the Promised Land. God commanded Joshua to march the entire Israelite army around the walls of the city once each day for six days, with seven priests carrying rams' horns (shofarot) and the Ark of the Covenant preceding the army. On the seventh day, the army was to march around the city seven times, the priests were to blow their horns, and the people were to shout. When they did so, the walls of Jericho fell flat, and the Israelites rushed in and destroyed the city and everything in it, sparing only the family of the prostitute Rahab, who had hidden the Israelite spies.

This story has been one of the most influential biblical narratives in Western cultural history, generating countless paintings, sculptures, musical compositions, spiritual metaphors, and cultural references. The phrase "walls of Jericho" has entered the English language as a metaphor for any seemingly impenetrable barrier that falls before overwhelming force or divine intervention.

But what does the archaeology say?

This is where the story becomes genuinely complicated. The biblical account, if taken at face value, places the conquest of Jericho sometime in the Late Bronze Age — probably the 13th or possibly the 15th century BCE, depending on which chronology of the Exodus one accepts. When Kathleen Kenyon excavated Tell es-Sultan in the 1950s with the specific aim of finding the walls described in Joshua 6, she made a discovery that surprised the archaeological world and generated a controversy that continues to this day.

Kenyon found that Jericho in the Late Bronze Age was, to put it plainly, barely there. After the destruction of the Middle Bronze Age city around 1550 BCE, the site was reoccupied only minimally. The Late Bronze Age occupation, which corresponds to the period when the biblical conquest supposedly took place, consisted of little more than a few buildings and a modest population. Most critically, there were no massive defensive walls standing in the Late Bronze Age. The walls that had once surrounded Middle Bronze Age Jericho had eroded away over the centuries of abandonment, and no new fortification walls of Late Bronze Age date were found.

Kenyon's conclusion was stark: the Jericho of Joshua's conquest, as described in the Bible, simply did not exist in the archaeological record. There were no walls to fall, because there were no walls. The site was largely unoccupied at the very period when the Israelites were supposed to have conquered it.

This finding sparked an ongoing and at times fierce debate in biblical archaeology. Several positions have been staked out over the subsequent decades.

The minimalist position, associated with scholars like Niels Peter Lemche and Thomas Thompson, holds that the conquest narrative is essentially mythological — a story created or elaborated during the later Israelite monarchy or even the post-exilic period to provide theological legitimacy to Israelite occupation of Canaan. On this view, there was no historical Exodus and no military conquest; the Israelites emerged from within Canaan itself, through a gradual process of social differentiation from the existing Canaanite population.

A second position holds that the conventional dating of the Exodus and conquest is simply wrong, and that if we place the Exodus in an earlier period — the 15th century rather than the 13th century BCE — then the destruction of Middle Bronze Age Jericho, which was clearly real and massive, could correspond to the biblical account. Proponents of this view, including scholars like John Bimson and later Bryant Wood, have argued that the ceramic evidence from the destruction layer of Late Middle Bronze Age Jericho is compatible with a 15th-century date, and that the eroded mudbrick that Kenyon interpreted as the remnants of Middle Bronze Age walls could be the very walls described in Joshua.

Bryant Wood, who published a detailed re-analysis of Kenyon's pottery finds in the 1980s and 1990s, argued that the destruction of Late Middle Bronze Age Jericho showed evidence of a military assault followed by fire, with grain stored in the houses suggesting the destruction happened in spring (consistent with the biblical account of the Israelites crossing the Jordan in the first month) and that the grain had not been looted (consistent with the biblical ban on taking the spoils of Jericho). Wood's analysis was contested by other archaeologists, and the debate has continued with contributions from Israeli, Palestinian, American, and European scholars.

A third, moderate position accepts that the narrative has a historical core — that there was Israelite activity in the region of Jericho and that memories of earlier destructions were incorporated into the story — but holds that the narrative as we have it in the Book of Joshua is a theological dramatization rather than a straightforward historical account.

The debate over the walls of Jericho is not merely an academic exercise. It touches on questions about the nature of biblical literature, the relationship between faith and history, and the use of archaeology in the study of ancient texts that matter deeply to billions of people. Jericho, the world's oldest city, is also one of the world's most contested archaeological sites.

Jericho in the Israelite and Judean Periods

After the Bronze Age disruptions, Jericho re-emerges in the archaeological and textual record in the Iron Age, associated with Israelite settlement of Canaan. The Book of Joshua (6:26) records a curse pronounced by Joshua against anyone who would rebuild Jericho, a curse that the First Book of Kings (16:34) says was fulfilled when a man named Hiel of Bethel rebuilt the city during the reign of Ahab (9th century BCE) and lost his firstborn and youngest sons in the process — a narrative that may reflect a memory of human sacrifice at the foundation of a new city, a practice attested elsewhere in the ancient Near East.

Jericho appears several times in the prophetic narratives associated with Elijah and Elisha. The Second Book of Kings (2:4–22) describes Elijah and Elisha passing through Jericho on Elijah's final journey before his translation to heaven in a whirlwind. After Elijah's departure, a community of prophets at Jericho asked Elisha to purify the water of Ain es-Sultan, which they said was bad and was causing the land to miscarry. Elisha cast salt into the spring and declared it healed — an act that tradition has associated with the spring ever since, which is still sometimes called Ain Elisha or the Spring of Elisha.

The city of Jericho that existed in the Iron Age II period (roughly 1000–587 BCE) was a modest town compared to its Bronze Age predecessors, but it was a real and functioning community. It appears in administrative lists and is mentioned in the context of Babylonian conquest — Jericho was in the path of the Babylonian campaigns that destroyed Jerusalem in 587/586 BCE and sent the Judean population into exile in Babylon.

The community at Jericho recovered after the Babylonian exile. The Book of Nehemiah (3:2) mentions the men of Jericho as participating in the rebuilding of Jerusalem's walls in the Persian period, and a contingent of Jerichoans returned from Babylon with Zerubbabel (Nehemiah 7:36). The Persian period (539–332 BCE) and the subsequent Hellenistic period saw Jericho continue as a functioning town in the Jordan Valley.

The Hasmonean and Herodian Jericho: a Winter Paradise for the Powerful

The Hellenistic period brought new masters to Jericho — first the Ptolemies of Egypt, then the Seleucids of Syria — and with them a new urban dynamism. But it was the Hasmonean dynasty, the Jewish priest-kings who ruled an independent Judea from 140 to 37 BCE following the Maccabean revolt against Seleucid rule, who first turned Jericho into a royal winter resort.

The Hasmoneans recognized what everyone who has spent a winter in Jerusalem knows: that the Judean hills are cold, damp, and unpleasant between November and March, while Jericho, thirty kilometers to the east and over a thousand meters lower in elevation, is warm and sunny. They built a palace complex on the banks of the Wadi Qelt, the seasonal stream that descends from the Judean hills and flows past Jericho toward the Jordan River. The Hasmonean palaces at Jericho included a twin-palace complex with a swimming pool — one of the earliest known private swimming pools in the world — gardens, and reception halls. The site served as both a winter retreat and an administrative center for the Jordan Valley region.

It was in the Hasmonean Jericho that one of the most dramatic events in the final years of the dynasty took place. The young Aristobulus, last surviving male member of the Hasmonean royal line and a political rival to Herod the Great's ambitions, was drowned — almost certainly murdered on Herod's orders — in the swimming pool at the Hasmonean palace complex, his death disguised as an accident. The story is told by the Jewish historian Josephus in his Antiquities of the Jews and is a characteristic example of the brutal dynastic politics of the period.

Herod the Great, who ruled Judea as a client king of Rome from 37 to 4 BCE, was one of the greatest builders of the ancient world. He expanded and transformed the Temple Mount in Jerusalem beyond all recognition, built the magnificent harbor city of Caesarea Maritima on the Mediterranean coast, fortified the desert fortress of Masada, and constructed palaces and public buildings throughout his kingdom. Jericho was one of his favorite projects.

The Herodian palace complex at Jericho, partially excavated by the Israeli archaeologists Ehud Netzer and his colleagues beginning in the 1970s, is one of the most impressive archaeological sites in the entire region. Herod built a series of palaces on both banks of the Wadi Qelt — the winter stream that provides a natural water source and a visually dramatic setting. The complex included a massive Roman-style reception hall (triclinium) large enough to host several hundred guests, two large swimming pools surrounded by garden areas, a Roman bath complex with the characteristic sequence of frigidarium (cold room), tepidarium (warm room), and caldarium (hot room), private apartments with exquisitely decorated stucco walls and mosaic floors, and a sophisticated hydraulic system that channeled water from the Wadi Qelt through aqueducts to fill the pools and supply the baths.

The garden areas of the Herodian palace were planted with date palms, exotic plants, and ornamental trees, creating a lush oasis that contrasted dramatically with the barren hills surrounding the Jordan Valley. Jericho was famous in antiquity for its balsam groves — a fragrant resinous plant (possibly Commiphora gileadensis or a related species) whose sap was valued as a perfume, a medicine, and a luxury commodity of considerable commercial value. The balsam of Jericho was, along with dates and other agricultural products of the oasis, one of the primary sources of the city's wealth. Herod, who controlled the balsam groves as a royal monopoly, derived significant income from their exploitation.

Herod died at Jericho in 4 BCE, his final days marked by an agonizing illness — described in clinical detail by Josephus and sometimes diagnosed by modern physicians as a combination of chronic kidney disease, gangrene, and other conditions. His body was carried from Jericho to his mountain fortress of Herodium for burial, and his kingdom was divided among his sons.

Jericho in the New Testament: Zacchaeus, Bartimaeus, and the Road to Jerusalem

Jericho occupies a significant place in the New Testament, appearing in several important episodes in the life of Jesus of Nazareth and serving as the setting for one of Jesus's most famous parables.

The Gospel of Luke (10:25–37) places the setting for the Parable of the Good Samaritan on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho — a steep, winding path through the Judean wilderness that was notoriously dangerous and frequented by bandits. In the parable, a man traveling down this road is attacked by robbers, beaten, stripped, and left for dead. A priest and a Levite pass by without helping; only a Samaritan — a member of a group despised by many Jews of the period — stops to care for the wounded man, carrying him to an inn and paying for his care. The parable, one of the most beloved and cited moral teachings in Western literature, uses the Jerusalem-to-Jericho road as its geographical backdrop, which would have been immediately familiar to Jesus's audience.

Both the Gospels of Mark (10:46–52) and Luke (18:35–43) record that Jesus healed a blind man named Bartimaeus at or near Jericho as he was making his final journey from Galilee to Jerusalem for the Passover that would culminate in his crucifixion. In Mark's account, Bartimaeus cries out from the roadside as Jesus passes, addressing him as "Son of David" — a messianic title — and refusing to be silenced by the crowd. Jesus calls him forward, and upon learning that Bartimaeus wishes to see, restores his sight.

But perhaps the most theologically rich episode set in Jericho in the New Testament is the story of Zacchaeus, told only in the Gospel of Luke (19:1–10). Zacchaeus was the chief tax collector at Jericho — a position of considerable wealth but considerable social stigma, since tax collectors in the Roman period were widely regarded as collaborators with the occupying power and as extortionists who enriched themselves at their neighbors' expense. Being short of stature and unable to see over the crowd that had gathered to watch Jesus pass through Jericho, Zacchaeus climbed a sycamore tree. Jesus saw him, called him by name, and invited himself to stay at Zacchaeus's house — a gesture that scandalized those who considered Zacchaeus a sinner unworthy of such attention. Moved by this unexpected acceptance, Zacchaeus promised to give half his possessions to the poor and to repay fourfold anyone he had defrauded. Jesus's response — "Today salvation has come to this house" — is one of the most concise statements of the theology of grace in the entire New Testament.

The sycamore tree under which Zacchaeus climbed is a species (Ficus sycomorus) that still grows in Jericho today, and local tradition points to a particular ancient specimen near the center of modern Jericho as the very tree of the story. Whether or not this identification is accurate, the tree and its associated story remain among the most visited attractions in the city for Christian pilgrims.

The Byzantine Period: Mosaics and Monasteries

Following the Roman period, Jericho entered the Byzantine era under the Christian Roman Empire from the 4th to the 7th centuries CE. This period saw a significant transformation of the city's religious and cultural landscape, as Christianity became the dominant faith and pilgrimage to the holy sites of the Jordan Valley became an important phenomenon.

Byzantine Jericho was a moderately sized town with a significant Christian population and several churches. The Jordan River, just east of Jericho, was venerated as the site of Jesus's baptism by John the Baptist, and pilgrims traveling to and from Jerusalem regularly passed through Jericho. The community of monks who settled in the Wadi Qelt — the dramatic ravine that cuts through the Judean hills west of Jericho — were among the most austere and celebrated ascetics in the entire Eastern Christian world.

The Wadi Qelt monasteries, carved into the sheer cliff faces of the ravine, included what would eventually become the Monastery of St. George of Koziba, founded in the 5th century CE and associated with the hermit George of Koziba who lived in the wadi during the 6th century. The monastery clings dramatically to the northern wall of the ravine, its stone buildings seemingly growing from the cliff face, connected by precarious walkways and bridges over the gorge below. It remains one of the most visually spectacular monastic sites in the entire Middle East, still home to a small community of Greek Orthodox monks.

The Mount of Temptation — the mountain that tradition identifies as the site where Jesus fasted for forty days and was tempted by the devil following his baptism in the Jordan (Matthew 4:1–11, Luke 4:1–13) — rises steeply from the edge of Jericho to the northwest. A monastery, the Monastery of the Temptation (Deir al-Quruntal in Arabic), clings to the mountainside at a height of 350 meters above the valley floor. The monastery is built around and into the cave where, according to tradition, Jesus spent his forty days of fasting. A Greek Orthodox community has maintained a presence on the mountain since at least the Byzantine period, and the current monastery dates largely to the 19th and early 20th centuries, though it incorporates earlier Byzantine remains.

Hisham's Palace: the Umayyad Jewel of the Jordan Valley

Three kilometers north of the center of Jericho lies one of the most spectacular and underappreciated architectural sites in the entire ancient Near East: Hisham's Palace, known in Arabic as Khirbet al-Mafjar. This magnificent Umayyad-period complex, built in the first half of the 8th century CE, was a winter retreat for the caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty — the first great Muslim imperial dynasty, which ruled from Damascus and presided over the rapid expansion of Islam across the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and Iberia.

The palace is traditionally attributed to Caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik (r. 724–743 CE), one of the longest-reigning and most capable of the Umayyad caliphs, though some scholars believe that significant parts of the complex may have been built by his nephew and successor al-Walid II (r. 743–744 CE), who was notorious for his love of luxury and pleasure. The attribution to Hisham may be somewhat simplified; the complex was probably a multi-generational project.

Whatever its precise patronage, Hisham's Palace was an extraordinary achievement of early Islamic art and architecture. The complex covered an area of approximately six hectares and included a large residential palace building, a mosque, a bathhouse, courtyards, gardens, and service areas. The architecture combined elements of the Byzantine, Sassanid Persian, and early Islamic traditions in a synthesis that exemplifies the cosmopolitan character of early Umayyad culture.

The bathhouse at Hisham's Palace is arguably the finest example of Umayyad secular architecture anywhere in the world. Its interior was decorated with an extraordinary profusion of carved stucco — ornamental panels, friezes, and statuary of extraordinary quality and variety. The stucco carving found at the site includes human figures, animals, geometric patterns, and complex vegetal scrollwork of breathtaking intricacy. Some of the stucco figures are remarkably naturalistic for an early Islamic context, and the human faces among them are among the finest sculptural portraits from the early Islamic world.

But the crown jewel of Hisham's Palace — the object that has made this site famous among art historians and archaeologists worldwide — is the mosaic floor of the bathhouse's reception room, known as the Tree of Life mosaic. This extraordinary pavement mosaic, measuring approximately 8.3 by 5.4 meters, depicts a single massive tree at its center — a stylized but powerfully vital tree with a thick trunk, spreading branches, and lush foliage rendered in dozens of shades of stone tesserae. On one side of the tree, two gazelles graze peacefully in the tree's shade. On the other side, a lion leaps upon a gazelle, pulling it down in a scene of violent predation. The contrast between the two sides of the composition — peace and violence, life and death, the idyllic and the brutal — gives the mosaic an almost philosophical dimension that has fascinated viewers for centuries.

The Tree of Life mosaic is widely regarded as one of the finest mosaic floors in the entire Islamic world and one of the masterpieces of early Islamic art. Its symbolic program draws on ancient Near Eastern imagery of the cosmic tree that stands at the center of the world, connecting heaven and earth, and on the contrast between peace and violence that runs through so much of the artistic and literary production of the ancient and medieval periods.

Hisham's Palace was destroyed by the devastating earthquake of 749 CE, which struck the entire Jordan Valley and caused widespread destruction across the region. The palace had apparently not yet been fully completed at the time of the earthquake, and it was never rebuilt. It remained buried under the alluvial soil of the Jordan Valley for over a thousand years, until excavations beginning in the 1930s under Dmitri Baramki and continued by subsequent archaeologists revealed its extraordinary treasures.

Jericho Under Islamic and Ottoman Rule

The Arab conquest of Palestine in 636–638 CE, following the decisive Battle of Yarmouk, brought Jericho under Islamic rule. The city remained an inhabited community throughout the early Islamic period, as the presence of Hisham's Palace attests, though it declined in size and importance relative to the great urban centers of the new Islamic world.

The Crusader period (1099–1187 and again 1191–1244 CE) saw Jericho occupied by the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Crusaders built a few structures in and around the city, but Jericho was never a major center of Crusader activity; it was an agricultural town on the road to the Jordan River crossing and the pilgrimage site at the traditional baptism site of Jesus.

Jericho fell to Saladin after the Battle of Hattin in 1187 CE and passed definitively out of Christian control. The Mamluk period (1250–1517 CE) and the subsequent Ottoman period (1517–1917 CE) saw Jericho continue as a modest agricultural community. The Ottoman Empire administered the Jordan Valley as part of the Damascus vilayet (province), and Jericho's warm winters and agricultural productivity continued to attract both year-round residents and seasonal visitors.

The late Ottoman period saw the beginnings of modern archaeological exploration of Jericho. Charles Warren visited the site in 1867 on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund, and Ernst Sellin and Carl Watzinger undertook the first systematic excavation of Tell es-Sultan between 1907 and 1909, followed by John Garstang's excavations in the 1930s.

Modern Jericho: the Oldest City in the Youngest State

The modern history of Jericho is inseparable from the broader political transformations of the 20th century in the Middle East. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War One, Palestine came under British Mandatory administration. The city of Jericho was a small agricultural town of a few thousand inhabitants, surrounded by date palm groves and banana plantations.

The 1948 Arab-Israeli War resulted in the annexation of the West Bank, including Jericho, by Jordan. The city experienced significant growth during this period, as Palestinian refugees displaced from areas that became Israel settled in and around Jericho. The UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) established refugee camps in the area that continue to exist today.

The Six-Day War of June 1967 brought the West Bank, including Jericho, under Israeli military occupation. Following the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1994, Jericho became the first Palestinian city to be transferred to Palestinian self-rule under the newly established Palestinian Authority. In May 1994, Israeli forces withdrew from Jericho, and the city came under the governance of the Palestinian Authority — a historic moment that was celebrated as the beginning of Palestinian statehood, however partial and qualified.

Jericho today is administered as part of Area A of the West Bank — territory under full Palestinian civil and security control under the Oslo framework. The city has a population of approximately twenty-five thousand inhabitants in the urban area, with a significantly larger number in the surrounding refugee camps and agricultural communities. It is governed by the Palestinian Authority and has developed considerable infrastructure — hotels, restaurants, a casino (now closed), museums, and tourist facilities — aimed at capitalizing on its extraordinary historical significance.

The city's economy rests on three pillars: agriculture, tourism, and public sector employment through the Palestinian Authority. The warm winter climate and the abundant spring water continue to make Jericho's agricultural output exceptional, with the Jordan Valley producing a significant proportion of the Palestinian Authority's fresh produce. Date palms — possibly the oldest cultivated variety in the world, descended from trees grown in the same oasis for thousands of years — are a major crop, along with bananas, citrus fruits, mangoes, and winter vegetables that would be impossible to grow on the cold Judean plateau at this time of year.

Tourism is potentially Jericho's greatest economic asset. Thousands of Christian pilgrims visit annually to see the sites associated with Jesus's life and ministry. The Tell es-Sultan archaeological park draws visitors interested in prehistoric and ancient history. The cable car to the Mount of Temptation monastery offers one of the most dramatic views in the entire region: from the monastery's terrace on the mountainside, the entire Jordan Valley spreads out below — the green oasis of Jericho, the silver thread of the Jordan River, the waters of the Dead Sea, and the mountains of Jordan on the eastern horizon.

The Monastery of the Temptation itself, clinging to the cliff face, is a remarkable sight. Founded on the site where tradition locates Jesus's forty-day fast, it houses a community of Greek Orthodox monks who maintain a continuous prayer life in one of the most dramatic natural settings in the Holy Land. Visitors reach it either by cable car from the valley floor or by a steep footpath that winds up the mountainside.

Tell Es-Sultan: from Excavation to Unesco World Heritage

The archaeological site of Tell es-Sultan, located at the northern edge of the modern city of Jericho adjacent to the Ain es-Sultan spring, is now recognized as one of the most important prehistoric sites in the world. The long history of archaeological excavation at the site — from the pioneering work of Sellin and Watzinger in the early 20th century, through Garstang's excavations in the 1930s, to the definitive campaigns of Kathleen Kenyon in the 1950s and subsequent work by Palestinian, Italian, and other international teams — has produced a stratigraphic record that spans the entire range of human settlement from the Natufian period to the present.

Kathleen Kenyon's contribution to the understanding of Tell es-Sultan cannot be overstated. Working with a meticulous stratigraphic methodology that she refined and popularized at Jericho, Kenyon was able to distinguish the successive occupation layers with a precision that earlier excavations had lacked. Her identification of the PPNA and PPNB periods as distinct and highly significant phases of prehistoric settlement, her discovery and documentation of the plastered skulls, and her careful analysis of the Neolithic Tower fundamentally transformed our understanding of the origins of human civilization.

The site of Tell es-Sultan was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in September 2023, a recognition that had been sought by the Palestinian Authority for many years. The UNESCO listing acknowledges Tell es-Sultan as "the oldest town in the world" and recognizes its "outstanding universal value" as a site of exceptional importance for understanding the origins of human civilization. The inscription process was complicated by the political status of Jericho as part of the Palestinian territories — a political reality that adds a layer of contemporary significance to the ancient site's international recognition.

Ongoing archaeological work at Tell es-Sultan, conducted by a joint Italian-Palestinian mission from the University of Bologna and the Palestinian Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage, continues to refine our understanding of the site. New excavation techniques, including ground-penetrating radar and LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) surveys, are revealing features beneath the surface of the mound that earlier excavators could not detect, and laboratory analysis of ancient plant remains, animal bones, and human skeletal material is providing new insights into the daily life of Jericho's earliest inhabitants.

Conservation of the site is an ongoing challenge. The mudbrick architecture of the prehistoric periods is extremely fragile and vulnerable to erosion by the rare but intense rainstorms that do occur in the Jordan Valley. The site has received international support for conservation measures, including protective shelters over the most vulnerable exposed areas, and there are ongoing discussions about how to present the site to visitors in a way that conveys its extraordinary significance while protecting its physical integrity.

Conclusion: the Enduring Significance of the World's Oldest City

Jericho's extraordinary longevity as a human settlement — from the first Natufian camps around the Ain es-Sultan spring eleven thousand years ago to the bustling Palestinian city of today — is a testament to the enduring power of geography. The spring, the fertile soil, the warm winters, the strategic position: these fundamental advantages have drawn human beings to this spot in the Jordan Valley across the entire span of recorded history and far beyond.

But Jericho is more than an accident of geography. It is a monument to human ambition, ingenuity, and resilience. The builders of the Neolithic Tower were the first people anywhere on earth to undertake a monumental construction project — to organize labor, plan a structure, and execute it on a scale that dwarfed anything built before. The people who modeled their dead relatives' skulls in plaster were the first people we know of to create portraits — to grapple with the meaning of individual human identity and the mystery of death. The farmers of PPNA Jericho were among the first people anywhere to make the revolutionary shift from hunting and gathering to the cultivation of crops and the herding of animals.

Whether one is drawn to Jericho by its prehistoric significance, its role in the narratives of three great world religions, its extraordinary Islamic art at Hisham's Palace, or its contemporary meaning as a symbol of Palestinian cultural heritage and political aspirations, this ancient oasis city rewards attention and reflection. Standing at Tell es-Sultan and looking out over the Jordan Valley — the same view that Natufian hunter-gatherers, Neolithic farmers, Bronze Age traders, Israelite conquerors, Herodian courtiers, early Christian monks, Umayyad caliphs, and countless other human beings have contemplated over eleven thousand years — one feels, more strongly than at almost any other place on earth, the weight and the continuity of human history.

Jericho, the oldest city on earth, is still very much alive.

Sources

Hashtags