Tell es-Sultan, ancient Jericho — the 10-metre occupation mound in the Jordan Valley, Palestine

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Continent Record

Oldest Settlement in Asia

集落UNESCO

Tell es-Sultan

Q: Tell es-Sultanの年代はいつ頃ですか？

Tell es-Sultanはおよそ紀元前10500年–西暦600年のものとされています。

Seyfi Cem Baskin

تل السلطان10500 紀元前 – 600 西暦

The world's oldest walled settlement — a 10-metre earthen mound in the Jordan Valley preserving over 10,000 years of continuous occupation, including a Pre-Pottery Neolithic stone tower built around 8300 BCE that is the oldest known free-standing stone structure, and the Natufian base camp that may represent the world's first permanent village.

Prehistoric Neolithic Chalcolithic+1Canaanite Pre-Pottery Neolithic

関心 56

所在地

Palestine

31.87°N · 35.45°E · アジア

地図全体と詳細 →Googleマップで開く ↗

Occupation span

c. 10,500 BCE to c. 600 CE — over 11,000 years of continuous habitation

Jericho Tower

c. 8300 BCE — oldest known free-standing stone structure; 8.5 m tall, interior staircase

Plaster skulls

PPNB period (~7000 BCE): plastered human skulls used as ancestor portraits/cult objects

Excavators

Kathleen Kenyon (1952–58); Italian-Palestinian teams (1997–present)

UNESCO

Inscribed 2023 as "Jericho and Tell Es-Sultan"

Location

~250 m below sea level — lowest permanently inhabited place on Earth

Graphite pencil sketch banner of Tell es-Sultan

“Tell es-Sultan is one of the most important archaeological sites in the world for understanding the origins of settled human life.”

所在地

概要

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.

重要性

Tell es-Sultan is one of the most important archaeological sites in the world for understanding the origins of settled human life. The Jericho Tower — built some 4,000 years before the Egyptian pyramids and 3,000 years before Stonehenge — demonstrates that the capacity for organized communal construction existed well before agriculture was fully established. The PPNB plaster skulls are among the most evocative objects from the Neolithic world, suggesting ancestor veneration and a concept of personal identity persisting after death. The site's role in the Biblical tradition (the walls of Jericho falling to Joshua's trumpets) adds a dimension of religious and cultural significance that makes it one of the most visited archaeological sites in the Middle East. Tell es-Sultan and Jericho were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2023.

証拠と解釈

確立された事実と議論が続く事柄を区別する。

確立された事実

The Jericho Tower is dated by radiocarbon to c. 8300 BCE (PPNA period). It is 8 metres in diameter at base, 8.5 metres tall, with a functional interior staircase of 22 steps. Human remains found at its base in a deliberate arrangement suggest a ritual or funerary function in addition to whatever practical purpose it served.
PPNB plaster skulls (c. 7000 BCE) — human skulls with facial features modeled in lime plaster, shells set in the eye sockets, and in one case painted ochre — have been found at Jericho and other Levantine sites. They represent the earliest known three-dimensional portraiture and the most direct evidence for ancestor veneration in the Neolithic world.
Kathleen Kenyon's stratigraphic excavations (1952–58) established the sequence of 23 occupation levels, from Natufian through Byzantine. The sequence remains the reference stratigraphy for the southern Levant Neolithic and has been refined but not fundamentally revised by subsequent excavations.

議論のある解釈

The "city wall" of the PPNA period — a massive stone wall enclosing the settlement, associated with the Tower — is debated in function. Kenyon interpreted it as a defensive wall. Later scholars have proposed it was a flood-control barrier (the Jordan Valley was subject to periodic inundation), a community boundary marker, or simply a retaining wall for the mound. No consensus exists.
The Biblical account of Joshua's conquest of Jericho (Joshua 6) describes walls that fell to the sound of trumpets. Kenyon's excavations found no Bronze Age city wall corresponding to the period of the Israelite conquest (c. 1400–1200 BCE) — the relevant Late Bronze Age levels were either eroded away or never existed. The relationship between the Tell es-Sultan archaeological record and the Biblical narrative remains unresolved.

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Atlas Anatolia. (10500). Tell es-Sultan. Atlas Anatolia. https://atlasanatolia.com/ja/site/tell-es-sultan

コンテンツはCC BY-SA 4.0ライセンスの下で提供されています — 再利用の際は出典表示が必要です。

出典

Digging Up Jericho — Kenyon, Kathleen M. (1957)
The PPNA in the Levant — An Overview — Bar-Yosef, Ofer (1986)
Tell es-Sultan in the Early Bronze Age IV: A Sacred Area and the Princely Tombs — Nigro, Lorenzo (2014)

よくある質問

Tell es-Sultanはどこにありますか？

Tell es-SultanはPalestineに位置しています。

Tell es-Sultanの年代はいつ頃ですか？

Tell es-Sultanはおよそ10500 紀元前 – 600 西暦のものとされています。

Tell es-Sultanはどの文明に関連していますか？

Tell es-SultanはCanaanite, Pre-Pottery Neolithic文明に関連しています。

Tell es-Sultanが重要な理由は何ですか？

Tell es-Sultan is one of the most important archaeological sites in the world for understanding the origins of settled human life.

Tell es-Sultanはユネスコ世界遺産ですか？

はい — Tell es-Sultanはユネスコ世界遺産に登録されています。

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