Jericho _ Exploring Tell es-Sultan _ 8300 BC Stone Tower and Solstice Alignment _ Megalithomania

So this is Tell el-Sultan at Jericho. This is one of the most important ancient sites on the planet. It goes back to beyond the pre-pottery Neolithic era, all the way up to the Bronze Age, the Romans, Byzantines, and beyond. There's lots of interesting features like the tower, the walls, there's astronomical alignments here, and cyclopean construction. So let's get in and have a look around. I'm at Jericho on the West Bank in Palestine. I've come through from Jerusalem, drove to Al-Mogh Junction, parked the car there, I've got two taxis to the site. So I'm just in the site now, and I even met Lorenzo Nigro from Italy. He's like the head archeologist actually doing excavations here over the side towards the road. Just below me here is the great Tower of Jericho. This goes back to potentially 11, possibly 12,000 years, and it is a remarkable construction for its time. It just shouldn't exist at all at this era. And there's a huge kind of area here with two layers of massive walls built all the way around the edge. The whole story of Jericho being toppled by the Israelites and Joshua and so forth, using trumpets and some kind of audio-acoustic technology. But this tower here is really interesting. It's very deep down. It's got an entrance at the base and an entrance on top, and the stairwell inside aligns over to that mountain towards the summer solstice sunset. So this is at least, they've recorded this now, 8,300 BC. So it's about 1,000 years after Carahan Tepe, where there's a summer solstice sunset alignment there. And also, obviously, there's a winter solstice sunrise alignment, which myself and JJ discovered. But to find one here as well is quite astonishing. So I'm just blown away to be in it. There's no one else here today. And I'll show you around as much of the site as I can. When it comes to the tower here at Jericho, it's one of the most interesting parts. It's what is called Trench 1. It was first excavated in 1952 by K.M. Kenyon. And they went to a depth of about 15 meters on the north side of the trench. And they found that it dates from 10,500 BC to 9,000 BC, but then up to the pre-pottery Neolithic 8,500 BC and so forth. And even through to the Bronze Age and other eras, this whole site was in use. And so it's quite a remarkable site. It's got biblical connotations. It's mentioned in the Bible. It goes through the Bronze Age, the early Roman, the Byzantine. They had plastered human skulls here as well. We saw some examples in the museum, even in Jerusalem. And the walls around the edge were very, very tall as well. And these are the ones, and they've proven now that they did actually collapse. So this kind of proves the whole biblical story of Joshua blowing the trumpets and the Israelites taking over this site. Around, it would have been in the Bronze Age or Iron Age times there. So that would have been a much later period of the site. So that there is the Tower of Jericho. Massive drywall stone construction. You've got an entrance there at the base. There's a grill on top of it. And that is the kind of orientation where you'd look up through that and you'd see the sunset. But before that, you'd see a shadow form from the peak of the mountain just up there. And then the sun would come either in between the gap, in between them, and would illuminate down there. And it's Ram Bakai who we've been in contact with who actually wrote the paper back in 2008. So the tower itself is about eight or so, eight or nine meters in diameter. It's about the same height. So it's not huge, but the construction of it is remarkable because we're talking about quite sophisticated cyclopean dry stone wall construction. And it's known at the very lower levels of Jericho there are actually megalithic areas. There are very large stones making up the kind of foundations of the outer walls. And there may be even below the tower as well. Here's a Bronze Age segment of the site. This is actually an area near the spring, which goes over in kind of this direction over here. And there are, I was just talking to Lorenzo Nigro and he's telling me there are megaliths here, but they're so deeply buried, you can't really see them. There are nine levels of occupation here at Jericho going all the way back to the Proto-Neolithic period, like before the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, all the way up into the Roman and Byzantine times. We must remember that the walls, the kind of famous Jericho walls, they weren't built here until the early Bronze Age. And so it was then fortified. So it was multiply occupied over and over again, partly because behind me to the east, there was a spring which would actually kind of feed the whole area. And so there's a lot going on here when you start to explore the intricacies of ancient Jericho. So here we have some Neolithic and early Bronze Age layers. You can actually see, there's actually a whole layer in it. It's really hard to see it, but it's actually a whole burnt layer, which has been found all over the site. And biblical scholars have suggested like when the kind of walls came tumbling down with Joshua and the Israelites and so forth, actually set fire to the whole city. And there is a dark layer, and that suggests that this is like kind of been proven that the whole Bible story, or at least something similar certainly happened here at Jericho. So site M, which is the area behind me here where we saw the different layers was opened up by again, by Kathleen Kenyon. This is over on the Western side of the site and they found early Bronze Age from 3000 BC, but they found Proto-Neolithic from 10,000 BC onwards. And so this is very, very interesting. They found these really interesting Pre-Pottery Neolithic mud bricks that almost had like designs on them. And these were burials, also were found beneath the floor where these mud bricks were. And the wall incorporated enormous orthostat slabs, which they think may have been taken from the town wall, which surrounded the whole site, because they know that the foundation stones there were kind of of megalithic size. And they found various other elements here as well. And even this burnt layer, which had this whole suggestion that not only were the walls knocked over, but the whole site was burnt according to the whole biblical story. They also found some human skulls, which were grouped and buried together beneath the houses, testifying to some kind of ancestor cultic practice. And these were found in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B layer, which is 7,500 to 6,000 BC. So that is really interesting in its own right. And it just shows you that, although most of the site after that era was all mud brick, this is why we have this kind of messy, kind of almost like a huge mud lump in the landscape. This is why it looks like this, because most of this is like just decayed mud brick. So I'm now walking towards the northern part of the site. Here they have a couple of the layers of the outer walls still intact, which I really want to look at. So these kind of layers here, these are obviously later layers, probably from the Bronze Age, the sign says. Yeah, it just looks like it's like you're in a desert or something, doesn't it? That's the kind of thing about, the unusual thing about Jericho. There's not that much to see, to be honest with you. I mean, we've got a few giant blocks just sitting around there. You can see some elements of construction. And the archeologists over on the eastern side are actually finding what looks like another tower, but I couldn't really get any photos of that just yet, because they were kind of working away and it's not being published or anything. And you've got this whole section here in the northern end of the site. I mean, it just looks like it's a channel, kind of entrance, one of the entrance ways into the site there. Let's just keep looking around. I want to see these walls. You know, they're the famous walls of Jericho. We'll go back to the tower and talk more about that in a moment. So look, you can see a wall there, which we just walked above. Look, could be one of the inner walls there. There's an outer wall as well. This is the whole, exactly north of where I'm standing, looking south now. And it just looks like, I mean, if you come here, it just looks like it's natural. This is what, for a long time, they thought it was just a natural kind of knoll as part of the mountains that form the background. Over there, towards that direction, we've got the Dead Sea, Qumran, just a few miles away. This would be the inner wall, certainly. And then there's little segments here. You can see, like, rocks sticking out and the kind of mud, really. But yeah, that is actually one section there. Now, it's quite far inside the site, so I'm not sure if that's the actual wall or the outer part of the site, because it was a very big site. There's some kind of grinding pot still in situ there. Look, you can see that. It's interesting. But yeah, I was warned there was not much to see here. There's a lot to see. It's just all covered up. You can see, again, looking towards the north. Now we're looking towards the east and the south. There's segments of wall there. There's some of the reconstructed Bronze Age area, which we're just looking at there. There you go. You can see the tower from the north looking south. You can see it's pretty damn big, actually. You see the little bird up there. It's incredible construction. It's like a Neraji from Sardinia. It's like a Taliat Tower from Menorca. And there are a few of these now. This is actually something that Matt from Ancient Architects pointed out. There are a few of these, a few other sites now in Syria, possibly even in southeast Turkey. But this one is the kind of primary one that's been known about for like, what, 70-odd years. And so it was thought it was unique for a long time. But if you go, I mean, imagine, see how far down that is. That's the original kind of floor, really, of the level of this site, going back to this era. And so, and what we're walking on now is like two or three times the height of that. So that is the Tower of Jericho. Amazing how far down that is, isn't it? Now, I managed to have a little walk down there. Got permission, no problem. The archeologist said it was okay. Couldn't go inside it, it's all locked up. Yeah, fascinating, huh? So just to get the chance to get that close up to something so ancient, so biblical, and so important when it comes to understanding the pre-pottery Neolithic people of this part of the world is a real treat and a real honor. And I really feel really kind of, it feels amazing, actually, and totally honored to be here at Jericho. So we have more kind of Bronze Age areas here. We're now at the south end of the site. And this is the area, not the north, where there's actual kind of walls you can look at. And they're actually down here. And these are early Bronze Age, apparently. You can start to see some of the layers of walls that were placed there in the early Bronze Age on the south end of the site. So just behind me, these are the walls of Jericho, the Cyclopean early Bronze Age walls. So it's highly likely this was the Canaanite area. This was inhabited by the Canaanites. Possibly, we could talk about giants and the Nephilim as well. But I find it really interesting that it's known now that these outer walls, the two layers of them, kind of collapsed. And then there was a burnt layer, just like talked about in the Bible when the Israelites kind of took over the site. So this looks like, look at that. So you can see there is Cyclopean construction here all the way around this edge of the site. It's very, very interesting. So this, the famous walls of Jericho. You can see some of the Cyclopean blocks there, just inside the wall. And then you've got the lower layer down here. Again, Cyclopean construction. So again, this is exactly what you see when you go to other sites, even around Jerusalem, Gilgal Refaim. And this all goes back to a similar era, even slightly, well, the Bronze Age era here is actually the early Bronze Age, slightly earlier than some of these other known sites. It's earlier than the whole Solomon's Temple and other such things. And then you've got, like you can see in there, the difference, like mud bricks. But yeah, and even around here, I think you can actually see it as well. You can just say, I think this has been partly reconstructed actually. Yeah. But down there as well, you can kind of see it. But yeah, fascinating that over on the south end of the site, we do actually have this. And then we get more, more of these megalithic blocks going all the way around the site. Fascinating that there's actually Cyclopean construction here. Now they could be older than the early Bronze Age. I mean, they say that based upon layers, but stone, as we know, can't be dated. And so perhaps even it does go back to an early period, possibly to the pre-Pottery Neolithic, where we know certainly in Southeast Turkey, they were working with stone. So we're just finishing our trip here to Jericho Tell es-Sultan. And it's been an amazing trip. We got to see the tower. We got to see some of the Cyclopean outer walls, had a look at some of the stories and also the history that goes back to the same era, even earlier, in fact, than Gobekli Tepe and Karakhan Tepe in Southeast Turkey. And so remarkable site. We've seen lots of different levels from the pre-Pottery Neolithic, even before that, to the Cyclopean construction of the Bronze Age, to Roman, Byzantine and everything else. And so even though there's archeologists here cleaning the place up, there's actually a strike on during this period, but you can get here. You can get tours from Jerusalem. You can get easily here from Jerusalem. You can park up at the main junction and get taxis up here. And it's a really wonderful day out. So really recommend you make your way to Jericho if you can. So thanks for watching Megalithomaniacs. Please subscribe, please become a patron and we'll see you next time.