Who ruled Jericho?

Jericho lies in the Jordan Valley in the West Bank, between the Jordan River and Jerusalem. Fed by plentiful springs, it is among the oldest inhabited places on earth: archaeologists have found the remains of more than twenty successive settlements, the first about 11,000 years old. In 2023 its ancient mound, Tell es-Sultan, joined the UNESCO World Heritage list under the State of Palestine, with UNESCO calling it the world's oldest fortified city.

Natufian hunter-gatherers were building structures beside the spring of Ein es-Sultan before 9000 BCE, and the first permanent village of round mud-brick houses followed. Around 8000 BCE its people raised a stone wall and a stone tower with an internal staircase; carbon dates suggest the tower was built about 8300 BCE and used until about 7800 BCE. The wall may have held back floodwater rather than enemies, and the tower may have had a ceremonial purpose. Estimates of the population range from a few hundred to two or three thousand.

The site was then abandoned for several centuries. A new settlement of rectangular mud-brick houses was founded around 6800 BCE, and among its finds are human skulls covered in plaster and painted to recreate the faces of the dead.

In the Early Bronze Age Jericho became a walled town, reaching its greatest extent of that era around 2600 BCE. It flourished again as a Canaanite city in the Middle Bronze Age, with strong defences and rich tombs that may reflect the rise of local kings, and was largest between about 1700 and 1550 BCE. Radiocarbon dates place its destruction in the sixteenth century BCE. A smaller town, governed by vassals of Egypt, revived during the Late Bronze Age.

The Hebrew Bible makes Jericho the first Canaanite city taken by the Israelites under Joshua. Scholars do not generally accept the story as history; the archaeologist Lorenzo Nigro has suggested that it drew on local memories of the city's earlier destructions. Settlement resumed in the eleventh century BCE, the town was fortified again in the tenth and had grown large by the seventh, and it was laid waste when Babylon conquered Judah.

In the later second century BCE Jericho became part of the Hasmonean kingdom of Judea. Its kings built winter palaces with pools and aqueducts at Tulul Abu el-'Alayiq beside Wadi Qelt, surrounded by a garden city of date palms and balsam. Herod the Great, granted full control of Jericho by Octavian after 30 BCE, added palaces, aqueducts and a hippodrome-theatre, and the historian Josephus praised the district as the most fertile in Judea. The Gospels place Jesus' healing of blind beggars and his meeting with the tax collector Zacchaeus here. After Roman troops crushed the Jewish revolt and took Jerusalem in 70 CE, Jericho declined to a small garrison settlement.

In the Byzantine period a new Jericho grew up about 1.6 kilometres east of the old mound, where the modern town stands, and monasteries such as St George of Choziba were founded nearby. A synagogue with a mosaic reading "Peace upon Israel" was built in the late Byzantine or early Islamic period. An earthquake destroyed the town in 659, and under the Umayyad Caliphate a palace complex, long attributed to the caliph Hisham, was begun at Khirbet al-Mafjar just to the north. The Crusaders turned local sugar production into a large industry until Saladin's victory at Hattin in 1187 drove them out.

Jericho passed to the Ottoman Empire in 1517 and shrank to a village; a tax register of 1596 lists 51 households, and nineteenth-century travellers counted a few dozen huts. Excavations began in the late 1860s, and since the late 1990s Italian and Palestinian archaeologists have worked at the site. Under the British Mandate the population rose from 1,029 in 1922 to about 3,000 in 1945. After the 1948 war Jericho was held by Jordan, and Jordan annexed the West Bank in 1950.

Israel occupied Jericho in the Six-Day War of 1967. Under the Oslo Accords it became, in 1994, the first city handed over to the Palestinian Authority, though the surrounding land remains under full Israeli military control. Israeli troops re-entered the city during the Second Intifada. The capital of a governorate of Palestine, Jericho had 20,907 inhabitants in 2017.