{"id":10632,"date":"2025-03-19T01:34:43","date_gmt":"2025-03-19T07:34:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theway.davisinterests.com\/wp\/?p=10632"},"modified":"2025-03-19T15:48:33","modified_gmt":"2025-03-19T21:48:33","slug":"jericho","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theway.davisinterests.com\/wp\/jericho\/","title":{"rendered":"Jericho"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The italicised paragraphs below are from <a href=\"https:\/\/time.com\/5597069\/jericho-history\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Why Do People Build Walls? The Real Story of Jericho Offers a Surprising Answer<\/a> by <a href=\"https:\/\/time.com\/author\/ian-volner\/\">Ian Volner<\/a> May 30, 2019. The reformatting into a bullet list is by this web guy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><em>The initial wall of circa 8300 BCE, built shortly after the regular settlement was established, was nearly 12 feet high and 6 feet wide at the base. <\/em><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The town encircled by the wall, <\/em>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><em>housing perhaps fewer than a thousand inhabitants, <\/em><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>occupied about six acres in an ovular plan, with <\/em><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>most of the dwellings built of loaf-shaped mud bricks \u2014 the indentations of bricklayers\u2019 thumbs are still visible on their tops. <\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The wall, from its earliest incarnation, was already entirely of stone, brought to the site more or less as found in the surrounding hills and set up against an internal earthen bank with a flat top. <\/em>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><em>Winnowing slightly in width at the upper end to lessen the vertical load, the wall was sloped back slightly, but other than that it did not sport any crenellations or other features that would enhance its defensive strength. <\/em><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>It could not have been terribly effective as a barrier, not even against the occasional alluvial washes descending from the uplands, which appear to have progressively eroded it and required it to be periodically reinforced.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>After several centuries of habitation, the community that had built the first wall disappeared from the area. Subsequent generations would return to the man-made hill and settle there again, building different types of houses and rebuilding the wall along different lines, blocking off the entrance to the old tower and its 22 internal steps. As each successive age built on the last, the city steadily rose into the man-made plateau one sees today; eventually the tower was subsumed altogether, and against its flanks the citizens buried their dead. Over six thousand years and more, different civilizations made different uses of the wall, suiting it to their own needs and culture. Finally, around 1500 BCE, the age of the Israelites arrived, and the wall of Jericho began its slow metamorphosis from a thing of stone and earth into an object of pure myth. A remarkable victory, it might be said, given that the Israelites probably never conquered Jericho at all.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Nondefensive explanations for the city wall began to circulate in the 1980s, after anthropologist and archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef observed that <strong>the wall\u2019s pinnacle-like tower, a 28-foot structure<\/strong> located on the western flank of the original fortifications, was located\u00a0behind\u00a0the wall, not in front of it. Perhaps, Bar-Yosef speculated, it might have been meant as some kind of temple? In 2008, Tel Aviv\u2012based researchers Ran Barkai and Roy Liran took this notion further, suggesting still broader \u201cideological reasons\u201d for the city\u2019s mysterious armatures. Tracking the astrological and topographical relationship of the wall, the tower, and the landscape, the pair made a startling discovery: The tower was exactly placed so that when the sun set on the longest day of the year, the hills behind it made it appear as though the tower were casting a shadow precisely over the settlement, spreading from the tip of the lofty pinnacle to every house and hut in Jericho. Seen from the proper perspective, the tower would appear as a representation of the peak of the Quruntul \u2014 the highest point in the Judean Mountains, later renowned as the site of Christ\u2019s temptation \u2014 while the rest of the wall \u201ccould symbolize the ridge from which the Quruntul emerges.\u201d They were not, the scholars concluded, built to keep anyone out. They were built to impress them, and to invite them in.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The italicised paragraphs below are from Why Do People Build Walls? The Real Story of Jericho Offers a Surprising Answer by Ian Volner May 30, 2019. The reformatting into a bullet list is by this web guy. After several centuries of habitation, the community that had built the first wall disappeared from the area. Subsequent [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[128,187],"tags":[229],"class_list":["post-10632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archeology","category-historical","tag-jericho"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theway.davisinterests.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theway.davisinterests.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theway.davisinterests.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theway.davisinterests.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theway.davisinterests.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10632"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/theway.davisinterests.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10640,"href":"https:\/\/theway.davisinterests.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10632\/revisions\/10640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theway.davisinterests.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theway.davisinterests.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theway.davisinterests.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}