JERICHO
Jericho, the world's first city, was built in the Stone Age sometime between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago. The wild grasses its inhabitants gathered were later domesticated. That is, they were genetically engineered via selective breeding to produce ever fatter seeds. We know the results today as wheat and barley.
photo courtesy of Israel Ministry of Foreign
Affairs
Modern excavations of the walls of Jericho.
The innkeepers of early Jericho served their guests--and their own families--the meat of an animal seldom seen on the menus of today. The town's steaks and chops came from gazelles.
Photo of Jericho's walls courtesy of the
Jericho Excavation Fund
click
photo for Encyclopedia Britannica article on Jericho
Lorenzo Ghiberti's 15th Century visualization
of the Hebrews' attack on the walls of Jericho.
Photo
courtesy of Georgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, online version
click
photo for life of Lorenzo Ghiberti
The most prominent literary record of Jericho's existence appears in The Old Testament. In its pages Joshua's priests blow seven trumpets on seven days to bring the walls of the city down. By the time this could have taken place, Jericho was an old city, a very old one. During its previous 7,000 years, its walls had crumbled many a time. Some collapses had been caused by earthquake. Others had apparently been the result of military assault. Little do those who read of Jericho in the Bible suspect that the real importance of the place lays not in its appearance in a holy book, but in its status as the world's first metropolis and in its role, as Global Brain shows, as a catalyst which would change the nature of human identity.
Gerrit Dou. Old Woman Reading a Bible c.
1630.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Photo
courtesy Web Gallery of Art.
For
more on Gerrit Dou, click this line.
for
more on Jericho see:
World
History Chronology
Arther
Ferrill's Neolithic Warfare
The
History of the Ancient Near East Electronic Compendium
The
Old Testament and the Ancient Near East
for Jericho's contribution to the modern mind, click here and order
Global
Brain
The Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang
to
the 21st Century
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