![]() ![]() The city-dwellers were, in fact, almost indistinguishable from their nomadic cousins wandering through the valley below, looking up in awe at the wall. As Barkai and Liran also note, both wall and city predate the adoption of a fully agrarian lifestyle by the people living inside it - the citizens remained primarily hunter-gatherers until well after the wall’s construction. It would be natural to assume that if the people of Jericho were advertising something, it must have been some new kind of social and economic order, presumably of the farming-and-barter variety that usually forms the basis of city life. While this “beacon” theory has made some headway in archaeological circles, it still leaves unexplained why exactly such a beacon should arise where it did, when it did. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter ![]() They were built to impress them, and to invite them in. Seen from the proper perspective, the tower would appear as a representation of the peak of the Quruntul - the highest point in the Judean Mountains, later renowned as the site of Christ’s temptation - while the rest of the wall “could symbolize the ridge from which the Quruntul emerges.” They were not, the scholars concluded, built to keep anyone out. Tracking the astrological and topographical relationship of the wall, the tower, and the landscape, the pair made a startling discovery: The tower was exactly placed so that when the sun set on the longest day of the year, the hills behind it made it appear as though the tower were casting a shadow precisely over the settlement, spreading from the tip of the lofty pinnacle to every house and hut in Jericho. Perhaps, Bar-Yosef speculated, it might have been meant as some kind of temple? In 2008, Tel Aviv‒based researchers Ran Barkai and Roy Liran took this notion further, suggesting still broader “ideological reasons” for the city’s mysterious armatures. Nondefensive explanations for the city wall began to circulate in the 1980s, after anthropologist and archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef observed that the wall’s pinnacle-like tower, a 28-foot structure located on the western flank of the original fortifications, was located behind the wall, not in front of it. From this seeming paradox has arisen the theory that - contrary to the city’s celebrated place in biblical lore - the original Jericho was something very different from an unwelcoming stronghold. Excavations of burial sites from the period of the original wall’s construction have shown that male longevity rates were comparatively high at the time, pointing to a period of relative peace. Not only is there no evidence of fighting in the area during the biblical period, there is also nothing to indicate any intense conflict in the ninth millennium BCE either. ![]() It would seem intuitive that warfare, or something like it, must provide the spur to their construction yet Jericho demonstrates precisely the opposite. Not only the oldest city wall known to us, the ninth-millennium site is also by most estimates the oldest city, full stop.įreestanding walls do not, however, spring organically out of the rocks and hills. The proof is at Jericho - the real Jericho, not the storied place of the Bible but the historical site, known today as Tell es-Sultan (Hill of the Sultan), located in the modern-day West Bank. ![]()
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