Jericho and its Setting in Near Eastern History

Extract

The credit for the discovery of the great antiquity of Jericho belongs to Professor John Garstang, who excavated there between 1930 and 1936. In those days our picture of man's emergence from Palaeolithic and Mesolithic savagery through Neolithic barbarism to the civilization of the metal ages was a neat and tidv one. The nomadic hunters of the first stage discovered agricultuer and stock-breedkg and were thus assured of enough subsistence to become settled villagers, self-sufficient and unprogressive, but at least no longer savages. After long years of this unprogressiveness the eventual discovery of the uses of metal led to trade, specialization, the need for surplus food to feed the traders and specialists, the growth in importance of favoured areas such as the great river valleys and the development of the villages there into towns through the accumulation of surpluses and the consequent need for organized rule to control them. The theory was reasonable, and what was then known about the early village settlements in Western Asia and the rise of towns and states in the river valleys of Egypt and Mesopotamia seemed to fit the facts. A chronology of early villages in the later fifth millennium and the growth of towns in the later fourth, leading to states in the third, seemed to cover what was known.