There is a Sound Series, the History of Jericho

Shidonna Raven
Jul 3
3 min read

By John F. Guilmartin

Fact-checked by

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Photo Source: Unsplash,

For the next 1,000 years there is little evidence of occupation at Jericho. Only about 5000 BCE did Jericho show the influences of developments that had been taking place in the north, where an ever-increasing number of villages had appeared, still Neolithic but marked by the use of pottery. The first pottery users of Jericho were, however, primitive compared with their predecessors on the site, living in simple huts sunk in the ground. They were probably mainly pastoralists. Over the next 2,000 years, occupation was sparse and possibly intermittent.

At the end of the 4th millennium BCE, an urban culture once more appeared in Jericho, as in the rest of Palestine. Jericho became a walled town again, with its walls many times rebuilt.

About 2300 BCE there was once more a break in urban life. The nomadic newcomers, consisting of a number of different groups, were probably the Amorites. Their successors, about 1900 BCE, were the Canaanites, sharing a culture found the whole length of the Mediterranean littoral. The Canaanites reintroduced town life, and excavations have provided evidence both of their houses and of their domestic furniture, which was found in their tombs as equipment of the dead in the afterlife. These discoveries have indicated the nature of the culture that the Israelites found when they infiltrated into Canaan and that they largely adopted.

Jericho is famous in biblical history as the first town attacked by the Israelites under Joshua after they crossed the Jordan River (Joshua 6). After its destruction by the Israelites it was, according to the biblical account, abandoned until Hiel the Bethelite established himself there in the 9th century BCE (1 Kings 16:34). Jericho is mentioned several other times in the Bible. Herod the Great established a winter residence at Jericho, and he died there in 4 BCE.

Excavations conducted in 1950–51 revealed something of Herodian Jericho: a magnificent façade along the Wadi Al-Qilṭ is probably part of Herod’s palace, and its style illustrates Herod’s devotion to Rome. Traces of other fine buildings can be seen in this area, which became the centre of Roman and New Testament Jericho, approximately 1 mile (1.6 km) south of that of the Old Testament town. Jericho of the Crusader period was on yet a third site, a mile east of the Old Testament site, and it was there that the modern town would later develop.

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