Tell es-Sultan
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. How many people have stood at a site or want to go will be shown once enough people use the app.
Seals, your want-to-go list and the year you stood here are kept in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
Tell es-Sultan is an oval mound about 2 km north of the centre of Jericho in Palestine, beside the perennial spring of Ain es-Sultan. People lived there from the 10th millennium BCE, when Natufian hunter-gatherers began to settle near the spring. According to UNESCO, by the 9th to 8th millennium BCE it was already a sizeable permanent settlement with a wall, a ditch and a tower.
Radiocarbon dating places the building of the stone tower around 8300 BCE and its use until about 7800 BCE. The later Pre-Pottery Neolithic B settlement yielded ten human skulls with faces modelled in plaster. In the Middle Bronze Age it was a large Canaanite city-state behind defensive walls, destroyed in the 16th century BCE. After the Babylonians destroyed it in 587/586 BCE it was rebuilt in the Persian period, and not long afterwards it was abandoned as a place of settlement.
Charles Warren made the first excavations in 1868, followed by Ernst Sellin and Carl Watzinger in 1907–1909 and 1911 and John Garstang in 1930–1936. Kathleen Kenyon's excavations of 1952–1958 showed that the tower and wall dated back to the Neolithic. Since 2009 an Italian-Palestinian expedition of Sapienza University of Rome and the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities has continued the work, and the site was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2023.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).