Jericho
The map shows the locations of Jericho and Gobeckli Tepe, the two oldest man made structures in the world. Both date back to 9500 BCE, though Jericho has evidence of human occupation that date back tp 10,000 BCE
Both sites are in the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of civilization.
Gobekli Tepe is still a mystery, not so much with Jericho. Over the centuries Jericho has been occupied by many groups and nations, starting out as a camping ground for hunter-gatherers around 10,000 BCE. They extended their stay to a year round settlement c 9600 BCE. This was a pre-pottery period.
Wikipedia has much information about Jericho https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho
Middle Bronze Age
For the Biblical battle, see Battle of Jericho.
Jericho was continually occupied into the Middle Bronze Age; it was destroyed in the Late Bronze Age, after which it no longer served as an urban centre. The city was surrounded by extensive defensive walls strengthened with rectangular towers, and possessed an extensive cemetery with vertical shaft-tombs and underground burial chambers; the elaborate funeral offerings in some of these may reflect the emergence of local kings.[37]
During the Middle Bronze Age, Jericho was a small prominent city of the Canaan region, reaching its greatest Bronze Age extent in the period from 1700 to 1550 BCE. It seems to have reflected the greater urbanization in the area at that time, and has been linked to the rise of the Maryannu, a class of chariot-using aristocrats linked to the rise of the Mitannite state to the north. Kathleen Kenyon reported "the Middle Bronze Age is perhaps the most prosperous in the whole history of Kna'an. ... The defenses ... belong to a fairly advanced date in that period" and there was "a massive stone revetment ... part of a complex system" of defenses.[38] Bronze Age Jericho fell in the 16th century at the end of the Middle Bronze Age, the calibrated carbon remains from its City-IV destruction layer dating to 1617–1530 BCE. Carbon dating c. 1573 BCE confirmed the accuracy of the stratigraphical dating c. 1550.
Excavations at Tell es-Sultan
In 1868, Charles Warren identified Tell es-Sultan as the site of biblical Jericho.[6] Ernst Sellin and Carl Watzinger excavated the site between 1907–1909 and in 1911, finding the remains of two walls which they initially suggested supported the biblical account of the Battle of Jericho. They later revised this conclusion and dated their finds to the Middle Bronze Age (1950-1550 BCE).[7] In 1930–1936, John Garstang conducted excavations there and discovered the remains of a network of collapsed walls which he dated to about 1400 BCE. Kathleen Kenyon re-excavated the site over 1952–1958 and demonstrated that the destruction occurred at an earlier time, during a well-attested Egyptian campaign against the Hyksos of that period, and that Jericho had been deserted throughout the mid-late 13th century BCE, the supposed time of Joshua's battle.[8] Sources differ as to what date Kenyon instead proposed; either c. 1500 BCE [8] or c. 1580 BCE.[9] Kenyon's work was corroborated in 1995 by radiocarbon tests which dated the destruction level to the late 17th or 16th centuries BCE.[9] A small unwalled settlement was rebuilt in the 15th century BCE, but it has been agreed that the tell was unoccupied from the late 15th century until the 10th/9th centuries BCE.[3]
More recently, Lorenzo Nigro from the Italian-Palestinian Expedition to Tell es-Sultan has argued that there was some sort of settlement at the site during the 14th and 13th centuries BCE.[10] He states that the expedition has detected Late Bronze II layers in several parts of the tell, although its top layers were heavily cut by levelling operations during the Iron Age, which explains the scarcity of 13th century materials.[11] Nigro rejects the idea that these discoveries give credence to the biblical narrative about the conquest of Canaan by Joshua.[12]
Historicity
Although Ann Killebrew made the claim that scholars agree almost unanimously that the Book of Joshua holds little historical value,[13] the sample size in her citation was only five scholars, eighty per cent of whom agreed on this. Furthermore, although her bibliography includes Bryant G. Wood, who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Canaanite pottery of the Late Bronze Age, she does not list him along with Kitchen as a scholar who supports the historicity of the account in Joshua--as did Garstang, the archaeologist who commissioned Kenyon to follow up on his research.[2] This majority of her small sampling believes that Joshua's origin lies in a time far removed from the times that it depicts,[14] and that its intention is primarily theological in detailing how Israel and her leaders are judged by their obedience to the teachings and laws (the covenant) set down in the Book of Deuteronomy.[15] Adherents to this view claim that the story of Jericho and the rest of the conquest represents the nationalist propaganda of the Kingdom of Judah and their claims to the territory of the Kingdom of Israel after 722 BCE,[4]and that those chapters were later incorporated into an early form of Joshua likely written late in the reign of King Josiah, the book not having been revised and completed until after the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586, or possibly not until after the return from the Babylonian exile in 538
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