1. Middle Paleolithic Jericho (c. 200,000–50,000 BCE)
Essay: Jericho as a Hunter’s Oasis
Long before Jericho became a city, it was a spring in the desert. The spring of ʿAin es-Sultan, gushing from beneath limestone hills, made this corner of the Jordan Valley one of the few reliable water sources in an otherwise harsh and arid land. Middle Paleolithic hunters — Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens — likely returned here season after season, drawn by the abundance of game. Stone tools found in the area, shaped with Mousterian technique, testify to a human presence stretching back hundreds of thousands of years.
This was not yet “Jericho” but a place of convergence: water, animals, plants, and humans meeting in a micro-ecology. To imagine this period is to picture nomadic bands moving across vast steppe-like landscapes, carrying fire and flint, following migrations of gazelle or wild cattle, and pausing where the spring gave life. These temporary encampments, ephemeral as the season, planted the seeds for the continuity that would one day make Jericho the oldest continually occupied site on Earth.
Middle Paleolithic (c. 200,000–50,000 BCE)
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Who: Early humans (Neanderthals and later Homo sapiens).
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Evidence: Flint tools and Mousterian-type artifacts found in the Jericho oasis region.
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Lifestyle: Nomadic hunter-gatherers, temporary camps near the spring of ʿAin es-Sultan.
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Significance: Establishes Jericho’s oasis as a recurring stop in human migration.
2. Upper Paleolithic Jericho (c. 50,000–20,000 BCE)
Essay: Memory in the Landscape
By the Upper Paleolithic, humans in the Levant had developed greater symbolic capacity. Microliths and fine blades suggest precision in hunting and tool-making, while ornaments and pigments hint at ritual expression. The oasis at Jericho, already familiar to generations, became part of a cultural map — a remembered place where water, animals, and plants converged.
Though still nomadic, these groups may have begun to leave traces of memory in the landscape: hearths where fire burned repeatedly, paths worn by feet returning each year, perhaps even stories tied to the spring itself. In this way, Jericho began to carry continuity across generations. It was not yet a village, but it was already a place of belonging. In the imaginations of its visitors, Jericho was more than geography: it was a remembered refuge in the long Ice Age journey of humanity.
Upper Paleolithic (c. 50,000–20,000 BCE)
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Who: Homo sapiens with advanced tools and symbolic practices.
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Evidence: More sophisticated flint blades and microliths.
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Lifestyle: Seasonal hunting camps; use of wild plants and animals.
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Significance: Prelude to semi-sedentary living, though still mobile groups.
3. Epipaleolithic / Natufian Jericho (c. 12,500–9,500 BCE)
Essay: The First Huts of Memory
The Natufians mark a turning point in human history. At Jericho, they built small circular huts with stone foundations — the first true architecture of the site. For the first time, people were not merely camping but staying put. They harvested wild cereals from the valley, ground seeds into flour, and stored food in pits. They buried their dead near their dwellings, adorning them with shells and beads, linking the living to the ancestors.
Jericho under the Natufians was a semi-sedentary community, balancing mobility with permanence. Here we glimpse the emotional weight of place: huts as homes, graves as memory anchors, the spring as a lifeline. What had been seasonal became enduring. The Natufians made Jericho into a proto-village, one of humanity’s first experiments in rooted life.
Epipaleolithic / Natufian Culture (c. 12,500–9,500 BCE)
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Who: Natufians — semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers.
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Evidence: Stone-founded huts, ground stone tools, ornamental burials.
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Lifestyle: Beginnings of permanent settlement, harvesting of wild cereals.
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Significance: The immediate foundation for Jericho as a proto-village.
4. Pre-Pottery Neolithic A Jericho (c. 9,600–8,500 BCE)
Essay: The First City Walls
With the end of the Ice Age, Jericho blossomed. The community expanded into a true proto-city of perhaps 2,000 people. Mud-brick houses rose, circular at first, then increasingly complex. Farming replaced foraging as domesticated barley and wheat grew in nearby fields. Hunting continued, but the community now lived on surplus food — a revolution.
Most astonishing was the construction of Jericho’s stone wall and tower. Rising nearly 30 feet, these were the earliest monumental structures in the world. Did they protect against enemies? Against flooding? Or did they mark sacred space, a statement of human unity? Whatever their purpose, they represented collective labor and communal vision. Humanity at Jericho had crossed a threshold: no longer small, scattered bands, but a society organized to shape its world.
Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA, c. 9,600–8,500 BCE)
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Who: Early agriculturalists.
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Evidence: Round mud-brick houses, storage pits, earliest city wall and stone tower (28 ft tall).
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Lifestyle: Farming and hunting combined; permanent village of 1,000–2,000 people.
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Significance: Jericho often called the world’s first “city.”
5. Pre-Pottery Neolithic B Jericho (c. 8,500–7,000 BCE)
Essay: Ancestors in the House
Jericho’s houses became rectangular, signaling a new order: geometry imposed upon domestic life, rooms for storage, work, and family. Agriculture expanded, with goats, sheep, and pigs domesticated. The population grew. Yet the most haunting discovery comes from within these homes: plastered skulls.
Jericho’s people buried bodies, then exhumed skulls, covering them with plaster to recreate faces. These were kept in houses, perhaps as ancestral guardians, perhaps as objects of ritual communion. In these faces we glimpse a society that sought to preserve memory tangibly, refusing to let the dead vanish. The home was both dwelling and shrine, a place where life and death intertwined.
Jericho of the PPNB was not only materially advanced but spiritually complex — a society whose roots in the soil were matched by roots in the ancestral past.
Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB, c. 8,500–7,000 BCE)
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Who: Expanded Neolithic community.
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Evidence: Rectangular houses, plastered skulls (ancestor veneration), domesticated goats and sheep.
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Lifestyle: Farming, animal husbandry, organized communal religion/ritual.
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Significance: Cultural and technological flowering of early urban life.
6. Chalcolithic & Bronze Age Jericho (c. 4,000–1,200 BCE)
Essay: From Oasis to City-State
By the Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages, Jericho had become a fortified urban center, with walls, gates, temples, and trade. Its position near the Jordan River made it a hub of exchange. Pottery flourished, metallurgy emerged, and Canaanite religion added a new layer to the city’s identity.
This was the Jericho remembered in the biblical story of Joshua — a walled city of Canaan, strategically vital and symbolically powerful. While archaeology complicates the biblical timeline, the cultural truth remains: Jericho was long remembered as a threshold city, a place whose walls defined both its security and its destiny.
Where once nomads gathered around a spring, now kings ruled and armies fought. Yet the ancient memory of Jericho as an oasis of life endured, shaping its role in myth, scripture, and history.
Chalcolithic & Bronze Age (c. 4,000–1,200 BCE)
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Who: Urbanized Canaanite city-state.
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Evidence: Large fortifications, temples, pottery, trade networks.
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Lifestyle: Complex society with kingship, economy, and religion.
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Significance: Jericho enters the historical record — later remembered in the biblical story of Joshua.
Closing Reflection
Jericho as a Palimpsest of Human Becoming
Jericho’s history is not a single narrative but a layered testimony to the human journey. Across more than ten millennia, it has been shaped by water, stone, memory, and imagination. Each epoch, from the Paleolithic hunters who camped by its spring to the Bronze Age kings who ruled from its fortified walls, reveals not only a new stage of settlement but a new expression of what it means to be human.
At its deepest levels, Jericho is defined by continuity of place. The oasis of ʿAin es-Sultan drew people again and again, long before there were cities, agriculture, or even permanent dwellings. The spring was an anchor of survival in the desert, a reminder that life could flourish in unexpected places. This continuity transformed Jericho into a memory landscape, where generations built upon the presence of those who came before.
As centuries passed, Jericho became a crucible of change. Here, hunter-gatherers became farmers, nomads became villagers, villagers became builders of towers and walls, and families became ancestors remembered in plastered skulls. Each layer marks a threshold of becoming, a moment when human imagination reached further: to cultivate the earth, to shape architecture, to bind the living and the dead in ritual, to construct boundaries that signaled both fear and belonging.
Jericho is thus a palimpsest — a manuscript overwritten but never erased. Beneath each new city lies the faint trace of older ones, reminding us that civilization itself is an accumulation of memory, labor, and hope. To study Jericho is to glimpse humanity’s restless desire to settle, to secure, to remember, and to transcend.
And yet Jericho also embodies fragility. Its walls fell more than once. Its people abandoned it in times of drought or conquest. What endures is not the permanence of its structures but the resilience of its location — the spring that called humanity back time after time. Jericho teaches us that civilization is never absolute, only provisional, always in process.
To call Jericho the “oldest city in the world” is to miss its deeper truth. Jericho is not just old — it is alive in layers, an unfolding story of human adaptation and imagination. It is the story of our species learning to belong to a place, to transform necessity into community, and to weave survival into meaning. In Jericho we find the origins of city, ritual, and memory — but more than that, we find the enduring process of becoming human.
Summary Visual (Deep → Historic Layers)
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🌊 Natural Oasis (200,000+ BCE onward) → human attraction to spring.
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🪨 Stone Tool Camps (200,000–20,000 BCE) → Paleolithic presence.
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🏚 Natufian Huts (12,500–9,500 BCE) → semi-sedentary life.
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🧱 Neolithic Jericho (9,600–7,000 BCE) → walls, tower, farming, ancestor cult.
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🏰 Bronze Age Jericho (4,000–1,200 BCE) → fortified city of Canaan.
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| Area of the Fertile Crescent, c. 7500 BC, with main sites. Jericho was a foremost site of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period. The area of Mesopotamia proper was not yet settled by humans. |
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| RiddleMaps.com |
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| Jericho is one of the earliest continuous settlements in the world |
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| A 3D reconstruction of Jericho |
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| BAR - Three Discoveries at Jericho |
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| The biblical Battle of Jericho |
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| Wikipedia - The Walls of Jericho |
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