Jericho-If Only Walls Could Talk

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.

Jericho Walls Wide View
photo courtesy of Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Modern excavations of the walls of Jericho.

Walls of Jericho, courtesy of The Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology
Bryn Mawr College

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 here 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

click here 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.

For more on Gerrit Dou, click here.

for more on Jericho see:
Jericho on Wikipedia
Arther Ferrill’s Neolithic Warfare

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