Tower of Jericho

It doesn’t look like much now, but this is one of the oldest stone buildings in all of history. It is the Tower of Jericho. It stands on the West Bank of Palestine, and it is 11,000 years old.

Now it is dwarfed by the layers of earth that have built up around it in the following millennia. And although the archaeologically minded media refer to it as “the world’s oldest skyscraper,” it only ever stood about 28 feet. Context, as always, shows why this building was important.

Archaeologists have determined that the Tower of Jericho wasn’t built by city dwellers, because cities weren’t around then. Rather, ancient people harnessed enormous amounts of labor to raise this structure on the eve of their agricultural revolution — these people were transitioning from hunter-gathering nomads to some of the first farmers.

In 2011 two excavators of the Tower (Roy Liran and Ran Barkai) figured out that the cosmological focus of the building’s position had profound significance. On the summer solstice, the Tower, perched on a hill above the local settlement, was dramatically thrown into shade from a nearby hill, and soon after the encampments of the nearby populace were similarly engulfed in dusk.

Liran and Barkai argue that it is possible that these Neolithic peoples’ fears were being manipulated, and that the Tower of Jerico was a way to symbolize a concern about ending a nomadic way of life, because the villagers couldn’t just pick up and leave when their environment got shady.

This idea is of course a conjecture, but the transition to farming that happened when the Tower was built did lead to massive changes in social structure, and not all of them positive: humans manipulating the environment rather than moulding to it, the appearance of social hierarchies, and the formation of patriarchy all followed in the wake of the agricultural revolution.