The wider world
How Jericho fits in.
Jericho lies far to the south in the Levant, not in the Taş Tepeler region — but as a contemporary of these sites it shows the Neolithic world was stirring across the whole Near East at once.
Jordan Valley · Palestine
One of the world's oldest towns, in the Jordan Valley, famous for a great Neolithic stone tower and wall — a Levantine counterpart that shows the same age was building in more than one corner of the ancient Near East.
Jericho in context
Jericho, in the Jordan Valley, is among the longest-occupied places on Earth. Its Pre-Pottery Neolithic phases, from around 9000 BCE, produced a massive stone tower and a surrounding wall — some of the earliest monumental communal architecture anywhere — and, later, human skulls remodelled in plaster with shell inlaid for eyes. Kathleen Kenyon's excavations in the 1950s established much of what we know.
Jericho's plastered skulls belong to the same deep Near Eastern preoccupation with the human head that appears at Göbekli Tepe, where skulls were deliberately cut and incised. Separated by hundreds of kilometres, both point to a widely shared set of ideas about the dead — one of the reasons the Taş Tepeler sites are read as part of a broad regional world, not an isolated one.
The wider world
Jericho lies far to the south in the Levant, not in the Taş Tepeler region — but as a contemporary of these sites it shows the Neolithic world was stirring across the whole Near East at once.
Visit
Small-group and private tours across the Taş Tepeler landscape, led by people who know the ground.
Full bibliography: the Taş Tepeler reference library →
Last reviewed 21 July 2026. Something wrong?
Last reviewed 21 July 2026. Something wrong?
Last reviewed 21 July 2026. Something wrong?
Last reviewed 21 July 2026. Something wrong?
Last reviewed 26 July 2026. Something wrong?
Last reviewed 26 July 2026. Something wrong?
Last reviewed 26 July 2026. Something wrong?
Last reviewed 26 July 2026. Something wrong?
Last reviewed 26 July 2026. Something wrong?
Last reviewed 26 July 2026. Something wrong?
Last reviewed 26 July 2026. Something wrong?
Last reviewed 26 July 2026. Something wrong?
