Ancient Jericho (Tell es-Sultan)

Tell es-Sultan rises only about fifteen metres above the floor of the Jordan Valley, a modest-looking mound that gives no hint of what lies inside it. Yet it contains one of the longest continuous archaeological sequences on earth, with deposits spanning roughly ten thousand years from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period around 9500 BCE down to the Byzantine era. The site was excavated by the British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon in the 1950s, whose trench cuts through the mound like a wound, revealing strata that document the entire history of urbanisation in this corner of the Levant.

The most striking finds are the Neolithic ones. Around 8000 BCE, the inhabitants of what was then a small agricultural settlement built a tower of undressed limestone blocks, approximately 8.5 metres high, with an internal staircase of twenty-two steps. The tower was constructed before the invention of pottery, in a period when humanity was still learning to live in permanent settlements, and it required a degree of organisation and shared purpose that archaeologists still find difficult to explain. Nearby are the remnants of a massive defensive wall, 1.8 metres thick, surrounding an area of about 0.4 hectares — evidence of communal fortification at a date that precedes the development of agriculture in most other regions of the world.

The landscape around Tell es-Sultan reinforces the strangeness of these early achievements. Jericho sits below sea level, in a depression that makes it one of the lowest inhabited places on earth, and the surrounding hills are parched desert except where the Ein es-Sultan spring creates a green fringe of date palms and banana groves. The spring has drawn human settlement to this exact spot for ten thousand years, and the name Jericho may derive from a Canaanite word for 'moon', reflecting the moon's appearance over the perennial water in an otherwise arid landscape. From the mound you can see the outline of the Mount of Temptation, where Jesus is said to have fasted for forty days, its cliffs rising abruptly from the valley floor.

The Canaanite layers brought Jericho into the biblical narrative, though archaeologists continue to debate the relationship between the archaeological record and the Joshua conquest account. The city was certainly occupied during the Late Bronze Age, when it was a Canaanite city-state on the trade route between Egypt and Mesopotamia, and it appears in the Amarna letters as a buffer between Egyptian influence and the kingdoms to the north. The Israelite period saw Jericho as a convenient crossing point on the Jordan, and the Hasmoneans and Herod the Great both developed it as a winter palace city, taking advantage of the warm climate and the spring's fertility to grow dates and balsam.

What survives today is the mound itself and the visible remnants of its excavation: the exposed stratigraphy in Kenyon's trench, the reconstructed sections of the Neolithic walls, and the view from the top across the Jordan Valley. The site is unfenced and free to visit, with no visitor centre, which means that the encounter with the archaeology is direct but requires some imagination to reconstruct the sequences that Kenyon's diagrams make clear. The silence of the desert around the mound, broken only by wind and the sound of the spring palms, makes the experience feel appropriately ancient.

Tell es-Sultan contains the world's oldest known freestanding stone tower and a defensive wall system dated to approximately 8000 BCE — older than pottery, older than most agriculture — that forces a fundamental rethinking of when and how complex societies emerged.

The archaeological sequence at Jericho spans ten thousand years of continuous habitation, making it one of the most complete urban histories in the world.

The contrast between the modest physical scale of the mound and the extraordinary depth of its history creates a uniquely compelling encounter with deep time.