Tower of Jericho: The Neolithic Walls of an Ancient Town

The Tower of Jericho is a solid stone tower about 8.5 metres high, built around 8000 BC at Tell es-Sultan, the ancient mound of Jericho in the Jordan Valley. Together with a stone wall and a rock-cut ditch, it is one of the oldest known monumental structures built by a settled community. Uncovered by Kathleen Kenyon in the 1950s, it transformed ideas about what the first farming villages could achieve, and Jericho later added another remarkable find: human skulls remodelled in plaster.

Background: an oasis below sea level

Jericho lies in the lower Jordan Valley, a few kilometres north-west of the Dead Sea, at about 250 metres below sea level. The climate is hot and dry, but a powerful perennial spring, known today as Ein es-Sultan, created a green oasis that has attracted people for more than 11,000 years.

The first traces of activity at the spring belong to the Natufian culture, hunter-gatherers who began living in more permanent settlements in the Levant from around 12,000 BC. At Jericho they left remains dated to roughly 10,000 BC or a little earlier.

After the end of the last Ice Age, around 9700 BC, the settlement grew rapidly. This period, known as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA, about 9500–8500 BC in calibrated dates), saw people cultivating early cereals and pulses while still hunting gazelle and other wild animals. It was part of the wider Neolithic Revolution in the Fertile Crescent, when farming first took hold.

The Neolithic settlement

PPNA Jericho consisted of round or oval houses with stone foundations and walls of hand-shaped mud bricks, which were flat on one side and rounded on the other. Floors were often sunk below ground level and reached by steps.

Estimates of the population have changed over time. Kenyon and others once suggested 2,000–3,000 people, but many archaeologists now think the figure was considerably lower, perhaps a few hundred to around a thousand. Even so, Jericho was one of the largest settlements of its time in the Levant.

The inhabitants grew early forms of barley and wheat, along with lentils and other pulses, and collected wild plants. Obsidian from Anatolia and shells from the Mediterranean and Red Sea show that Jericho was linked to long-distance exchange networks.

The tower

The tower stands on the western side of the excavated area, against the inner face of the stone wall. It is built of undressed stones set in mud mortar and is solid except for a narrow internal passage and staircase.

Size and construction

The tower survives to a height of about 8.5 metres. It measures about 9 metres across at the base and narrows slightly towards the top. A doorway at the bottom on its eastern side leads into a passage and a steep staircase of 22 stone steps, which climbs through the interior to the top.

Building it required a large, coordinated workforce. Archaeologists have estimated that construction took many thousands of working days, implying organised labour by a community that had no metal tools, no draught animals and no writing.

Date

Radiocarbon dates place the tower in the PPNA, around 8000 BC. Depending on calibration, some estimates put its construction a few centuries earlier. It remained in use for a long time, was repaired and modified, and eventually became buried as the settlement grew around it.

What was it for?

Kathleen Kenyon, who discovered the tower, believed it was part of a defensive system with the wall and ditch, perhaps a watchtower or strongpoint. This view made Jericho famous as the earliest fortified town.

In 1986 the archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef challenged this interpretation. He pointed out that the tower stood inside the wall rather than outside it, where a defensive tower would be more useful, and that there was little evidence of warfare in the region at the time. He suggested instead that the wall protected the settlement against floods and mudflows from the nearby wadi, and that the tower had a communal or ritual role.

In 2011 the researchers Roy Liran and Ran Barkai proposed that the tower was linked to the sun. They calculated that, on the evening of the summer solstice, the shadow of the nearby hills, including the mount known as Jebel Quruntul, first falls on the tower before covering the settlement. They argued that the tower was a symbolic monument meant to impress and unite the community. These ideas remain debated.

The wall and ditch

The tower was attached to a stone wall that ran around at least the western part of the settlement. The wall survives to a height of about 3.6 metres and was roughly 1.8 metres thick at the base.

In front of it, the builders cut a ditch into the bedrock, about 8 metres wide and nearly 3 metres deep. Digging this ditch without metal tools was a major undertaking in its own right.

How far the wall extended is uncertain, because only parts of the mound have been excavated. Some archaeologists think it encircled the whole settlement, while others see it as a series of retaining or terrace walls on the western side.

Plastered skulls of the PPNB

After a break in occupation, Jericho was resettled in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period (PPNB, roughly 8500–7000 BC). The new inhabitants built rectangular houses with thick lime-plaster floors, often painted red and burnished.

In 1953 Kenyon’s team found a group of seven human skulls buried together beneath a house floor. The faces had been rebuilt with plaster, modelling the nose, mouth and cheeks, and cowrie shells were set into the eye sockets. Other plastered skulls have since been found at PPNB sites such as Ain Ghazal in Jordan and Tell Ramad in Syria.

Most archaeologists interpret the skulls as part of ancestor veneration, keeping the dead present among the living. The bodies were usually buried beneath house floors, while the skulls were removed later and treated separately. Examples from Jericho are held in museums including the British Museum in London and the Jordan Archaeological Museum in Amman.

Excavations at Tell es-Sultan

The mound has attracted archaeologists since the 19th century, largely because of the biblical story of Jericho’s walls falling to Joshua.

• Charles Warren made the first soundings in 1868.
• The German-Austrian scholars Ernst Sellin and Carl Watzinger excavated in 1907–1909 and 1911.
• The British archaeologist John Garstang dug in 1930–1936 and claimed to have found walls destroyed in Joshua’s time.
• Kathleen Kenyon excavated from 1952 to 1958 with improved stratigraphic methods. She showed that Garstang’s walls were much older, uncovered the Neolithic tower and wall, and published her findings for a wide audience in Digging Up Jericho (1957).
• Since 1997 an Italian-Palestinian expedition led by Sapienza University of Rome and the Palestinian Department of Antiquities has continued work at the site.

In 2023 UNESCO inscribed “Ancient Jericho/Tell es-Sultan” on the World Heritage List.

Myths and facts

Myth: The Neolithic walls are the walls of Joshua. The tower and wall are about 6,000 years older than the Late Bronze Age, when the biblical conquest is usually set. Kenyon found little evidence of occupation at Jericho in that later period.

Myth: Jericho is the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city. Jericho has a very long history, but there were gaps in occupation, and Neolithic Jericho was a village or small town, not a city in the later Mesopotamian sense.

Myth: Jericho proves early warfare. The wall and tower were once seen as defences, but their purpose is now disputed, and evidence for organised conflict in the PPNA Levant is limited.

Timeline

• c. 10,000 BC: Natufian hunter-gatherers are active at the spring of Jericho.
• c. 9500–8500 BC: The Pre-Pottery Neolithic A settlement grows into one of the largest in the Levant.
• c. 8000 BC: The stone tower, wall and rock-cut ditch are built.
• c. 8500–7000 BC: In the PPNB, rectangular plastered houses replace round ones; plastered skulls are made.
• 1868: Charles Warren carries out the first excavations at Tell es-Sultan.
• 1930–1936: John Garstang excavates and links walls to the biblical Joshua.
• 1952–1958: Kathleen Kenyon uncovers the Neolithic tower and wall.
• 1953: Kenyon’s team finds seven plastered skulls.
• 1986: Ofer Bar-Yosef proposes that the wall protected against floods rather than enemies.
• 2023: Tell es-Sultan is inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Legacy

The Tower of Jericho overturned the assumption that monumental architecture began with cities, kings and writing. It showed that early farming communities could organise large projects thousands of years before the first civilisations of Mesopotamia and Egypt.

Later discoveries, such as Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, have shown that large-scale building began even earlier and sometimes among people who still lived mainly by hunting and gathering. Jericho remains a key site for understanding how such projects moved into the heart of settled village life, alongside other Neolithic communities such as Çatalhöyük.

Why it matters

Jericho’s tower and wall are among the earliest known examples of people working together on a large, permanent structure in a settled community. Whether built for defence, flood control or ritual, they show the growing social organisation of the first farmers, and the plastered skulls reveal how these communities honoured their dead.