Ericho - The First City on Earth? // Ancient History Documentary

6,000 years before the present, the colossal city of Uruk, by far the largest in the world, dominated the southern Mesopotamian plains of modern-day Iraq. With a population of at least 50,000 people, Uruk wouldn't be surpassed in size or in numbers for an astonishing 3,000 years to come, until well into the Classical Age. The legendary homeland of Gilgamesh, a colossal mud-brick wall said to have been erected by the great hero-king himself, once enclosed the city's impressive 6km radius. Yet, impressive as it was, Uruk didn't exist in a vacuum. The city was simply the latest, albeit most successful, in a long line of similar experiments in living, dating all the way back to the Stone Age. More than 5,000 years before the founding of Uruk, other, smaller, though no less impressive settlements had began to coalesce and form in this region of the world. The very first known examples of static, communal living in history. In other words, though the exact definition varies, the first cities on Earth. The most well-known of these settlements, perhaps due to its often-cited links to the biblical walls of Jericho of the Old Testament, remains arguably the most impressive of all. Jericho is a place of firsts. Here, 5,000 years before Uruk, can be found the first known settlement in history to be surrounded by walls. Some of the earliest evidence of cooperation between a group larger than a single clan or kinship. The first significant evidence of large-scale communal labour. And when it was first discovered, the first tower, complete with walled steps, in history. What makes this especially striking is that besides a scattering of mysterious pictographic symbols, writing wouldn't develop for thousands of years to come. Even pottery didn't exist yet, though nevertheless, these people still came together here all those millennia ago and achieved something astonishing. We don't know where they came from, we don't know their ethnicity, we don't know who their gods were, but we do know this may be one of the first places on Earth where animals were domesticated and agriculture experimented with on a wide scale. All of this was achieved an astonishing 11,000 years before the present, just a few centuries after the end of the last Ice Age, a time when woolly mammoths still walked the Earth. What makes Jericho all the more fascinating is that unlike other sites such as Uruk, which always rested upon fragile ecological roots and altering river courses, the spring here has never dried up, meaning people still live here today. This is the story of Jericho, one of the oldest cities on Earth. This video is sponsored by Magellan TV, a brand new educational streaming service with over 2,000 documentaries to watch on all manner of different subjects. 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Head on over and get yourself some free knowledge. In January 1951, an airplane touched down in the Middle East. On board sat one of the rising stars of archaeology, an academic discipline then undergoing a renaissance of new scientific methods, pioneered by such scholars as the Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, as well as a revolution in scholarship ushered in by the implementation of radiocarbon dating, a technique which allowed researchers to accurately date their findings for the first time. Unlike archaeologists of the previous generation, perhaps best exemplified by Heinrich Schliemann, the swashbuckling discoverer of Troy, whose methods essentially amounted to bulldozing through ancient cities in search of information, much of which was discovered, though untold more lost forever, this new core of scholars sought to meticulously uncover sites from the top down whilst causing as little damage as possible. That archaeologist was Kathleen Kenyon, a student of the famous Sir Mortimer Wheeler and daughter of the director of the British Museum. Kenyon had been called in to the shores of the wasn't the first time the city of Jericho had been excavated. 20 years earlier, fellow British archaeologist John Garstang had undertaken a six-year investigation of the site, eventually surmising it to be the site of the famed walls from the Old Testament, destroyed by the Israelite Joshua with a trumpet. Though still associated with this story today, Garstang's conclusions received fairly heavy criticism, and finally by 1951, with the chaos of the Second World War somewhat subsided, Kenyon had been called in to make her own conclusions. Unlike other archaeological sites throughout the region, often sited out in the desert due to changing river courses, or even underwater due to rising sea levels, the geography of Jericho has changed little since the last ice age. Sitting comfortably between two mountain ranges and the Dead Sea, it not only rests in a naturally defensible location, but underground water supplies have fed the oasis here for as long as humans have lived in the region. A thriving town, modern Jericho stretches over an area of some 15 kilometres, encompassing lush fields and orchards in a seemingly barren landscape due to the abundant underground water supplies. The actual work however, was to be done at a solitary mound rising up over the settlement on one edge of town, known today as Tell es-Sultan. On first glance, Tell es-Sultan might have appeared to be a naturally occurring hill, especially before archaeological work had been carried out. Yet, in actuality, it is so much more. The hill itself is far from natural. Like all Tells, it is actually the result of thousands of years of collapsed mud-brick architecture. A mountain of the debris of previous cities, which collapsed, were levelled and eventually built over by successive generations down over the long millennia. As she approached the site, Kenyon knew that it was old. But just how old? She, nor anyone else, had any idea. The techniques Kenyon and her colleagues used are known as stratigraphic excavation, meticulously noting soil layers as they dug, in order to date the various layers of habitation and get an accurate sequence of events. After some initial digging work and a re-evaluation of Garstang's conclusions, Kenyon decided there simply wasn't enough evidence to conclusively make the biblical connection. As often happens with archaeology, more digging was needed, and Kenyon called in for backup. In the next year, a small army of labourers arrived at the site and work began. They wouldn't be finished until 1958, some six years later. By which time, Jericho had become one of the most famous archaeological sites in history. John Garstang had initially dated the earliest settlements on the site to the 4th millennium BC. As far as most scholars at the time were concerned, the widespread domestication of agriculture and animals had only occurred around 1,000 years or so earlier. What Kenyon and her team found would change everything. Habitation had in fact continued at the site for an astonishing 8,000 years, between around 9,400 and 1580 BC, with the potential for even earlier habitation too. Though this end date was later amended to around 1400 BC and is still debated by scholars today, it doesn't change the overall implications of Kenyon's findings. Perhaps the most astonishing and iconic of the buildings discovered turned out not to be Garstang's walls, but a Neolithic tower which was built so much earlier, around 10,000 years ago. At the time, the earliest ever known on Earth. Today, more than half of the world's population live in cities, but there was once a time when this was far from the case. Up until around 11,000 years ago, the Earth had been locked into a seemingly endless ice age for eons. 25,000 years ago, reaching the coldest point of the last ice age, known as the Last Glacial Maximum. From then on however, a steady and gradual melt kicked in. Finally, after a brief return to cold conditions, known as the Younger Dryas, which may have in part helped kickstart agriculture out of necessity due to the difficult conditions it ushered in, the entire world returned to its pre-ice age warm period, and humans could finally flourish once more. Bands of humans, often called affluent hunter-gatherers in this period, who previously had huddled together for warmth, or simply lived much further south than they do today, found themselves living in a land of plenty. They hunted game, collected wild plants and grasses, and travelled from region to region, living a nomadic existence. By around 9,500 BC, groups of these people began to coalesce at natural springs, oases, and particularly abundant rivers, in the wide arc of the Middle East, we know today as the Fertile Crescent, due to its abundant food supplies, to either voluntarily or involuntarily, due to environmental pressures, begin a new experiment in human living. Helped along their way by the uniqueness of the grasses and seeds in this area, some of which could be cultivated and replanted by human hands, rather than simply gathered, and thus give a near inexhaustible food source for the future. Still semi-migratory at first, in time, as wild grasses began to be changed and made more edible by human hands, their descendants would settle down for good, ever experimenting with plants and animals in order to feed their families, a necessity which in time, due to overpopulation and overuse of natural resources, made their domestication both possible and necessary. One such site was Jericho, then a large oasis in the Jordan Valley. Underground tributaries perpetually flow from that river into the central mountains to the west, making life not only possible here, but incredibly fertile due to the unique low geography of the region, making it closer to the underground water surface. Home to an abundance of wild animals and plants, agriculture may have been harnessed here earlier than most other places on the planet. Though of course, Jericho didn't exist in isolation. From its earliest days, the oasis lay at the heart of a thriving system of trading communities scattered throughout the fertile crescent. Though our evidence suggests Jericho was one of the largest of these, if not the largest, it almost certainly wasn't the earliest, nor the originator of the pre-pottery Neolithic culture which would come to dominate the site, nor farming or pastoralism, for these began elsewhere. In the 1990s, an archaeological discovery was made in modern-day southeastern Turkey that sent shockwaves through multiple academic disciplines. Famous the world over as Göbekli Tepe, perhaps the first religious centre on earth. This site is actually thought to have been built and used by numerous bands of affluent hunter-gatherers, perhaps sharing a common religion and culture. The strange animal figures all over the pillars here, and even on other neighbouring sites throughout the region, may even be pictographs, a form of primitive hieroglyphics, though their message is yet to be uncovered. As well as fuelling the idea that religion, not agriculture, had in fact been the catalyst for the birth of civilisation, the site also left tantalising clues as to the origins of agriculture, for the very oldest known wild relative of wheat is found not too far away. It's not too much of a stretch to think that some of those at Jericho may have had some sort of connection with Göbekli Tepe. Professor Stephen Mithun even thinks it possible that after the ceremonies undertaken here, travellers would go back to their respective tribes with seeds, and the secret of how to grow them. Work is still going on at Göbekli Tepe, and we learn more every year. Unfortunately however, the similarly ancient and fascinating site of Cörf el Akmar, perhaps a similar ceremonial centre for hunter-gatherers, and contemporary with the earliest stages of settlement at Jericho, now lies under a lake, having been flooded in the 20th century to make way for a reservoir. This begs the question whether religion in fact was the prime mover in forming the first cities, perhaps at first beginning as a ceremonial centre like Göbekli Tepe, and eventually over time as people gathered, they began to settle down and build a community. It may even be possible that some of the earliest farmers on Earth brought the secrets of their technology, grain, to the shrine here, before passing their secrets on during the festivities to other curious groups of hunter-gatherers, presumably in return for some other resource. In turn, they then could have brought the seed back with them to their homeland, along with other resources, such as obsidian in Jericho's case. Maybe the grain even had a ritualised religious quality about it. We may never know for sure, but what we do know is that by around 9000 BC, vast changes in stone technology and a whole new way of life came to the fertile crescent, for this was the Neolithic Revolution, the moment when people first adopted farming, raising animals and communal living. The Tower of Jericho, often known simply as the Watchtower, is one of the most extraordinary buildings in human history. Not because of its intricate architecture, but simply because of how old it is. Nothing on its scale or size is found again for thousands upon thousands of years. At around 30 feet in diameter and 28 feet tall, it's estimated to have taken around 11,000 days of labour to build the tower, and that doesn't include planning or the quarrying of resources. When Kenyon first uncovered the tower, it was thought to be the first example of communal architecture on the planet, built around 8000 BC, a time when the vast majority of humans still lived a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence. Its architecture, including walls 5 feet thick and an interior staircase leading up to the roof, seemed to be completely unprecedented in both scale and design. A significant portion of labour in the community must have been dedicated to its construction, implying a highly organised and motivated society. But what was the purpose of the tower? The settlement it stood at the heart of, part of the culture we know today as the pre-pottery Neolithic A, thrived from around 8500 to 7370 BC. It isn't the only settlement in the region, similar sites existing at places such as Zad and Daraa. Yet, with an area of around 425,000 feet, Jericho is by far the largest we know of. Researchers have come up with all sorts of conclusions as to the purpose of the tower. Perhaps it was a giant grain holder, a defence against external enemies, an early form of castle, or even all of the above. One of the most convincing arguments however, and one which links back to the ceremonial site at Gobekli Tepe, is that the tower served a religious function. The religion of the pre-pottery Neolithic people is still heavily debated, and though we'll probably never know exactly how it worked, we can find parallels with other contemporary, earlier and later sites. Scholars such as Maria Gimbutas see a cult of the mother goddess holding sway over the fertile crescent, interpreted in sculptures and artwork all over the region. Even arguing that this inspired the leap to agriculture. Yet this remains a controversial idea, and others argue for male animalistic deities, often depicted with phalluses on sites such as Gobekli Tepe. Perhaps the horns of wild cattle buried underneath houses at pre-pottery Neolithic Jericho could be related to this animal cult. The tower itself contains tantalisingly little evidence. There is no pottery here, no bones or burials underneath it, and it is not linked to the other fortifications or buildings at the site. Yet, what else but religion, the very worldview of these people, could have motivated a construction such as this? Perhaps the tower facilitated accurate observations of the sky. Both stars and the sun, or even their worship, doubling up as an observatory and temple. We know that in later ages, shrines and sanctuaries of deities would often be built on raised platforms, in order to get closer to the heavens. This happened throughout the Americas, and even in the Greek and Roman world, with augurs on the Capitoline Hill looking to the birds to find their destinies. This tradition even survived into early Christianity, with late classical aesthetics living atop giant pillars to commune with God. Could the tower at Jericho be an early example of this tradition? And if so, who exactly was doing the communing, taking on the role of intermediary between the community below and the gods above? At the similar, but slightly later site of Çatalhöyük, priest-kings are thought to have controlled city life, a tradition certainly utilised by later Sumerian cities such as Uruk and Eridu, places with extremely prominent sky-gods in their Perhaps here at Jericho, 10,000 years ago, shamanistic priest-kings directed rituals from the top of the tower, being closer to the other world by doing so. A leftover that their cultural descendants would continue to utilise for ten millennia to come. As far as most people were concerned, that was that. Jericho had the oldest tower on Earth. Then, in 1999, without even particularly looking for it, a joint Polish-Syrian team found something astonishing. Not too far from the modern city of Aleppo, once again, history would be rewritten, pushing the dates back by thousands of years. For, at Tell Karamel in modern-day Syria, the team found not just one similar tower to Jericho, but five of them, possibly dating to an astonishing 2,000 years earlier, perhaps as early as 10,000 BC, making the site roughly contemporary with the ritual centre at Göbekli Tepe. Is tower building a long-lost tradition that once held sway all over the region, only surviving now in two places? Why did Tell Karamel have an astonishing five towers rather than one? Were they used for the same functions? And did more of them exist at other yet undiscovered or already demolished or built-over sites? So far, as of 2019, only around 2% of Tell Karamel has been uncovered. Unfortunately, with the outbreak of war in 2007, excavations were put on a near-permanent suspension. Only the future can tell what other secrets lie hidden underneath the earth, just waiting to be rediscovered. A city is usually defined as a place containing both living quarters as well as religious and civic buildings. The tower at Jericho may have been both of the latter, sharing a religious as well as societal function by binding together the people of the region with a common cause. When first discovered, the tower had almost immediately been associated with the biblical story of Joshua, the early Israelite warlord said to have torn down the walls of the city using only trumpets and prayer, before launching of course into the customary sacking and mass death associated with that period of history. If you want to hear the biblical account of Jericho's destruction in its entirety, you can do so here, over on our second channel, Voices of the Past, and don't forget to subscribe for more historical content. Yet, of course, the tower is far too early to be connected in any way to the Bible, and interestingly, seems even unconnected to the defensive works surrounding the Yet, these works themselves may have been built not as a defence against external enemies, but to defend against natural flash floods which regularly beset the region. If you live in a mud house, flooding and the natural world are as much your enemy as outsiders, perhaps more so, especially during this time when settlements of Jericho's size were near unheard of. The similarly ancient city of Çatalhöyük for example, in modern day Turkey, which reached its height slightly later than Jericho, has rather unorthodox architecture, having no streets and the houses only being accessible via ladders onto the roofs. Settled life here may have began in part to protect against the attacks of wild animals. The natural world was of course still at the forefront of life at these early settlements. Though some animals may have been on the road to domestication, the main source of meat still seems to have been wild gazelle. The people here were domesticating, but not on a huge scale yet, still living a mostly hunter-gatherer lifestyle from a sedentary position. The remains of gazelle, cattle, boar, sheep and goat are found at Jericho, some of which may have been domesticated, though evidence is scarce and it remains difficult to differentiate between wild and domesticated animals in the archaeological record. Maybe wild animals were being trapped and kept as food. A wild animal can be kept in a cage and fed before being eaten, it doesn't have to be domesticated. That takes a long time and many generations. The other major food source for these people was of course agricultural produce, including wheat, barley, peas and beans, all of which had been gradually adapted from wild ancestors. The people at Jericho lived in round houses, around 14 feet in diameter, with sunken mud-plaster floors. Each dwelling seems to have been pretty much identical, each with their own grain storage area, suggesting that every household had control of their own food, quite possibly being independent in terms of food production. This is very different to later Sumerian cities such as Uruk, where the priestly class held a deliberate monopoly over food production, and society itself was very socially stratified. Also, the houses at Jericho seem to be scattered at random throughout the site, each perhaps lived in by a distinct family or kinship group. Perhaps each of them descended from the tribes who had first come to the city to work together, all those centuries before. Rather than being grouped by profession and class like in later Sumerian cities, people seem to have been grouped around tribal houses, suggesting little social distinction and differentiation between the lowest and highest levels of society. It's thought by many scholars that Jericho began rather spontaneously with no central organisational structure, perhaps being built from the ground up by hunter-gatherer groups, rather than deliberately built by priest-kings like the later Sumerian cities. After all, writing the key to Uruk's success doesn't appear for some four or five millennia to come, and pottery even wasn't invented yet. Once thought to have been something of an anomaly, in recent years other similar settlements have been discovered in the West Bank region, all sharing a similar culture, often called Natufian, with the only major difference between these sites being Jericho's massive size, sprawling over a 10-acre area. Could these be outlying settlements of Jericho, or simply related sites, separated only by geography, but linked up in a shared economic and cultural area? We know from archaeological finds that Jericho enjoyed widespread trade links with various other sites throughout the Fertile Crescent, with obsidian, an especially sharp volcanic rock from Asia Minor, useful to make sharp blades, being a particularly prized material. During this ancient time, Jericho was almost certainly the focal point of this entire region. Its oasis was simply far more abundant than its neighbours, yet with great prosperity always comes a price. Pre-pottery Neolithic Age Jericho lasted until somewhere around 7,300 to 7,000 BC, at which time the Tell appears to have been abandoned. Much of the town wall collapsed and the top of the tower eroded away. We don't know what ended the first city at Jericho, and all manner of conclusions have been drawn from the evidence. Earthquake, pestilence, outside invasion, decline in soil fertility, or all of the above have been suggested as possible causes. Yet within just a couple of lifetimes, in a situation that would eventually become endemic over the long eons, a new city would arise on top of the old. One of the most iconic finds at Jericho dates not to the pre-pottery Neolithic A period of the Watchtower, but to the next settlement to arise in the city's long history. A new culture that seems to have taken over the entire region, perhaps after a brief period of decline and abandonment. Whether the pre-pottery Neolithic B culture arose as the result of internal change or an external invasion, we can't be sure. But we know more about their material culture than their predecessors, for these were the adherents of the Skull Cult. Perhaps one of the earliest known examples of ancestor worship. Kathleen Kenyon, living through an age of war and chaos, saw the pre-pottery Neolithic B culture as a hostile, conquering people, who drove out their predecessors through fire and bloodshed. Though in actuality, this isn't at all clear, and could have been a natural progression from the previous people, perhaps after environmental devastation. We know that this new group were probably more populous than their predecessors, perhaps growing to a settlement of around 2,000 people, all defended by a new substantial wall. The round houses of the previous city were replaced by rectangular, sometimes two-storied buildings, suggesting a definitive cultural shift. Like their predecessors, houses here were still made of mud brick, but were organised around rectangular courtyards, with chipsum floors and plastered walls, often painted red with ochre. We know these dwellings were furnished with reed mats, and perhaps paintings, such as those at the contemporary city of Catalhoyuk, once adorned the walls, though evidence for this is scant. Though people still continued to hunt here, gazelles making up nearly half of the bones found in the archaeological record. Animals had definitely been domesticated too, with auroch, pigs and goats showing up in significant numbers. There is also evidence at other sites too, of round houses being replaced by rectangular ones around this time, with a phase of fire destruction in between, perhaps most notably at Baedha in modern-day Jordan, near the Nabataean city of Petra. Interestingly, two rooms were discovered here that may have been used for ceremonial purposes, along with two small figurines, thought by some to represent fertility deities. Also found throughout the region are animal and human-like figures, perhaps representing ancestors or spirits. Perhaps the most striking feature of pre-pottery Neolithic bee Jericho, however, was the practice of plastering skulls, a tradition that seems to have been especially long-lasting and widespread. Upon death, the skull would be removed from the body, perhaps after being left outside to be picked clean by animals, or after a period on show for the community. It would then be filled with clay and external features moulded onto it with plaster, with shells often representing the eyes, and perhaps paint representing facial features. It seems that the body would then be buried underneath the household, with the skull seemingly left on display, though this is a matter of debate, with some seeming to be hidden away under the house. Evidence of similar practices has been found at neighbouring contemporary sites, such as Sheikh Ali, south of the Sea of Galilee, Tel Ramad near Damascus, Beda near Petra, and Catalhoyuk in Turkey. But what was the purpose of dressing skulls like this? A minority of scholars view these as trophies taken from defeated foes, akin to later headhunting traditions found as far afield as Polynesia and Celtic Europe. Others see them as talismans to ward off evil spirits or ghosts of the deceased. The most likely answer, however, is that they are an example of a religious tradition found all over the world throughout history, particularly in early farming communities, such as those later found in Britain during the Neolithic period. Veneration of the Ancestors Ancestor worship takes a wide range of different forms, and is carried out for a number of different reasons. It demonstrated continuity between past and present generations, perhaps preserving the wisdom of the generations that came before. It may also have been an early form of property claim, with household ownership being demonstrated through ancestral display. They may also have been simply some of the earliest portraits in human history. Looked on to remember dearly missed loved ones. The pre-pottery Neolithic bee settlement at Jericho was an extremely long-lived society, probably existing in much the same state over a period of around a thousand years. A span of time from the present back to the time of King Canute. Longer than the entire history of the Western Roman Empire. Yet nothing lasts forever, and just as Mesopotamia to the east saw the very first inklings of the greatness of Uruk to come. By around 6000 BC, a period of great decline in Palestine was about to set in. A catastrophe so devastating that some scholars see the region as remaining largely depopulated until the 5th millennium BC, well over a thousand years later. Jericho would never be a regional centre again. The lengthy period of two and a half millennia which separates the pre-pottery Neolithic bee settlement from the Chalcolithic or Copper Age isn't easy to account for. According to Kenyan, the site was abandoned entirely by around 6000 BC, perhaps due to environmental degradation, coupled with overpopulation and poor weather conditions. There are tiny hints of similarly devastating conditions at other sites in the Fertile Crescent during this time, sparking fringe scholars to suggest that if there had been some kind of a genuine apocalyptic flood, half remembered in various later traditions, it may have been during this era that it happened. At Jericho, there may have been some form of continuation, but nothing as impressive as those that had come before. Nothing significant enough to leave a trace that we can find today. Perhaps people reverted back to a nomadic, pastoralist existence, as we know happened at other sites. Gradually getting more food from their domesticated animals than anything else, and needing to travel to fairer pastures to get the best food for them. Perhaps, to a certain extent, this had happened even earlier, during the hiatus between the pre-pottery Neolithic settlements. Nevertheless, during this mysterious epoch of wandering tribes, huge changes began to occur. The adoption of pottery proving to be a huge societal bonus in increasing the population size of groups. Now, food could be kept safe from vermin and stored away for leaner times. Towards around 4000 BC, another huge improvement arrived too. Perhaps initially brought south from Anatolia, as obsidian had been in previous generations. That technology was of course, metallurgy, and soon it would change everything. During the Copper Age, often called the Chalcolithic, from around 4000 BC, Jericho seems to have become gradually occupied on a permanent basis once more. Though it remained a peripheral power, a material culture known as the Gasulian reigned over much of the region, but little evidence has been found at Jericho, despite one of their main settlements existing just a few kilometres away. This has led many scholars to surmise that Jericho wasn't settled again permanently on a significant basis until around 3000 BC. For the most part, in the vicinity of Jericho, this wasn't a time of cities or even large towns. Rather, it was an age of wanderers, small communities and villages. Yet, as the third millennium dawned, with Uruk booming to the east, all that was to change. For the Bronze Age had begun. By around 3000 BC, though astonishingly little is known about it, Jericho was once more definitively occupied, this time by a regional power wielding a cutting-edge new technology. Bronzeworking. This was a period of writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt, though apparently not yet in Palestine, although walled cities with solid defences and ramparts did become increasingly common. Jericho was no exception, and before long defensive ramparts were built, and presumably some sort of an army maintained. By around 2600 BC, Jericho's population had reached heights never before seen, and 200 years later, an impressive palace complex was built. There was nothing particularly remarkable about Bronze Age Jericho, which in truth had always been much better off when its neighbouring powers weren't as powerful, allowing it to flourish as This, of course, wasn't always the case, and by around 2300 BC, city life collapsed, perhaps in part due to warlike neighbours, but no doubt the old enemy of environmental catastrophe also having a part to play. Until around 2000 BC, the people at Jericho may have lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle once again, yet soon enough a second Bronze Age Jericho would arise, the greatest yet seen. Significant archaeological data exists for Middle Bronze Age Jericho, including a vast cemetery containing vertical shaft tombs and underground burial chambers, the elaborate funerary offerings contained within perhaps reflecting the emergence of local kings. The city itself was surrounded by an extensive defensive wall, complete with rectangular towers and ditches. It's likely that these fortifications, the same seemingly destroyed by around 1500 BC, are the ones talked of in the Bible, allegedly in connection with Joshua and the Israelites. Yet nevertheless, all that grandeur was about to be overshadowed. Not from Mesopotamia, where the great city of Uruk, long since having dwindled in size, now finding itself overpowered by its descendants, but from another cradle of civilisation, this one to the south and the west. By around 1900 BC, an epic tale was put to papyrus in Imperial Egypt, Land of the Pharaohs. Compared to Shakespeare by some, the tale of Sinu is widely considered one of the finest works of ancient Egyptian literature. Set during the 20th century BC, close to 4,000 years ago, Sinu is an Egyptian official who flees from the imperial court after overhearing a suspect conversation connected to the death of the king, eventually getting back to Egypt as an old man after various travels and adventures amongst the warlike people of Canaan to the north. This is the land of Jericho, and the story provides us with one of our earliest glimpses into life here, outside of the archaeological record. Egyptians held contempt for foreigners at the best of times, and the tale of Sinu is no exception to this, complaining of wretched Asiatics inhabiting the Levantine coast and the hinterlands. Though thought to be mostly fiction, the tale belays the reality that Egypt had a huge amount of influence on the region. In time, this would become a stranglehold, one that wouldn't fully be broken for close to a thousand years. In the centuries to follow, inscriptions all over the region talk of Egyptian victories and conquests, and in all likelihood, Jericho was either populated in part by Egyptian colonial administrators or by pro-Egyptian subject peoples, probably Canaanites. A hypothesis that is further evidenced by the Amarna letters and the lack of mention of Jericho in the Egyptian curse tablets, written to smite enemies during this time. It also remains possible that Amorites, the later founders of the city of Babylon, and in part Assyria, ruled here for a time too. As well as the Hyksos, Hurrians and Mitanni, all powerful warlike people that held sway here for a time. Between around 1700 to 1550 BC, Jericho reached its greatest heights. Having mostly lost its independence, the city may have become prosperous by changing allegiances whenever necessary, thus playing off rival powers against one another and securing its survival. Jericho's rise also reflects the growth of a chariot-riding ruling class, perhaps brought into the region by contacts with Indo-Europeans in Anatolia. And greater levels of urbanisation in the region in general. What goes up, however, must come down, and at some point, apparently in the 16th century BC, the city was destroyed, for a century or more no longer serving as an urban centre. However, the wall supposedly destroyed by the Israelite Joshua, was disappointingly non-existent at the site when excavated by Kenyon. Though interestingly, in later excavations, there does seem to have been slight marks of habitation until around 1400 BC, the date traditionally associated with the wars fought by the Israelite tribes, perhaps later half-remembered and recorded in the Old Testament. Yet erosion and destruction from previous excavations inadvertently erased significant parts of this layer, meaning it's unlikely we'll ever know the truth. It didn't take long for Jericho to be reoccupied once more, by practically every power to hold sway in the region over the next three and a half thousand years to come. Today, Jericho is still famous for its allegedly biblical walls, attracting thousands of tourists every year. Though in truth, the real wonder of the site is the Neolithic Tower. What others lie out there just waiting to be discovered, to give up their secrets of 12,000 years past.