Panoramica
Tell es-Sultan rises from the floor of the Jordan Valley near modern Jericho in the Palestinian West Bank, approximately 250 metres below sea level in the deepest inhabited place on Earth. The mound — tell in Arabic, meaning an artificial hill formed by accumulated occupation debris — stands approximately 10 metres high and covers roughly 2.5 hectares. Its importance lies in its extraordinary depth of stratification: excavations by Kathleen Kenyon in the 1950s and by a joint Italian-Palestinian team since the 1990s have revealed 23 distinct occupation levels spanning from the Natufian hunter-gatherer period (c. 10,500 BCE) through the Ottoman period.
The lowest Natufian level (c. 10,500–9600 BCE) represents a base camp of hunter-gatherers who exploited the abundant resources of the Jordan Valley — wild grain, gazelles, and the perennial springs (the Ein es-Sultan spring, still flowing, gave Jericho its ancient prosperity). This is one of the earliest known permanent or semi-permanent settlements in the world.
Around 9600–9000 BCE, in the early Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) period, the settlement was transformed by the construction of a remarkable structure: the Jericho Tower. This is a stone tower approximately 8 metres in diameter at the base, 8.5 metres tall, built of undressed stones without mortar, with a staircase of 22 steps cut through its interior from top to bottom. It is the oldest known free-standing stone construction in the world. Around its base Kenyon found the skeletal remains of several individuals placed in a deliberate arrangement — suggesting a ritual or funerary function beyond simple watchtower use. The PPNA settlement also had a massive stone wall enclosing approximately one hectare — often called the "world's oldest city wall" — though its defensive or community-demarcation function is debated.
Later Neolithic levels (PPNB, c. 8500–6000 BCE) contain some of the most important evidence for early settled life anywhere in the world: plaster skulls (human skulls with facial features modeled in plaster, almost certainly ancestor portraits or cult objects), mud-brick architecture organized in cellular compounds, and evidence for the earliest cultivated emmer wheat and hulled two-row barley. The mound continued to be occupied through the Chalcolithic, Bronze Age (including a Middle Bronze Age city with impressive earthwork defenses), Iron Age, and Biblical periods before gradual decline.