Ancient Jerico/Tell es-Sultan is located northwest of present-day Jericho in the Jordan Valley in Palestine, the property is an oval-shaped Tell, or mound, that contains the prehistorical deposits of human activity, and includes the adjacent perennial spring of ‘Ain es-Sultan. By the 9th to 8th millennium BC, Neolithic Ancient Jericho/Tell es-Sultan was already a sizeable permanent settlement, as expressed by surviving monumental architectural attributes such as a wall with a ditch and a tower. It reflects the developments of the period, which include the shifting of humanity to a sedentary communal lifestyle and the related transition to new subsistence economies, as well as changes in social organisation and the development of religious practices, testified by skulls and statues found. The Early Bronze Age archaeological material on the site provides insights into urban planning, while vestiges from the Middle Bronze Age reveal the presence of a large Canaanite city-state, equipped with an urban centre and technologically innovative rampart fortifications, occupied by a socially complex population.

Brief synthesis Located northwest of present-day Jericho in the Jordan Valley in Palestine, Ancient Jericho/Tell es-Sultan consists of an oval-shaped tell, or mound, that contains archaeological deposits of human activity dating back to about 10,500 BC, and the adjacent perennial spring of ‘Ain es-Sultan, which for millennia has been an important source of water for the inhabitants of this area. The stratigraphy of this archaeological site shows twenty-nine phases of occupation and testifies to two historical-cultural contexts, namely the Neolithisation of the Fertile Crescent and the phenomenon of urbanism in southern Levant during the Bronze Age. By the 9th to 8th millennium BC, Neolithic Ancient Jericho/Tell es-Sultan was already a sizeable permanent settlement, as expressed by surviving monumental architectural features such as a wall with a ditch and a tower. It reflects the developments of the period, which include the shifting of humanity to a sedentary communal lifestyle and the related transition to new subsistence economies, as well as changes in social organisation and the development of religious practices. The Early Bronze Age archaeological material on the site provides insights into urban planning, while vestiges from the Middle Bronze Age reveal the presence of a large Canaanite city-state, equipped with an urban centre and technologically innovative rampart fortifications, occupied by a socially complex population. Criterion (iii): Ancient Jericho/Tell es-Sultan testifies in an exceptional way to developments that took place across the Near East in the Neolithic, characterised by the shifting of humanity to a new sedentary lifestyle and the related transition to new subsistence strategies. It demonstrates how people learned to live in larger, more permanent settlements and develop new social and ritual methods of communal living. Monumental features of the property, the presence of shared structures, and the evidence of post-mortem treatment of…