Ancient Near East

   JERICHO 

By 7000 BCE, AGRICULTURE WAS WELL ESTABLISHED FROM Anatolia to  ancient Plaestine and Iran. Its advanced state by this date presupposes a long deevelopment. Indeed, the very  existance of a major settlement such as jericho gives strong support to this assumption.The site of jericho a plateau in the jordan River vally with a spring that provided a constant water supply  was occupied by asmall village as early as the ninth millennium BCE. The viilage  underwent spectacular development around 8000 BCE, when the inhabitants built anew Neolithic settlement covering about 10 actes. Its mud bricks houses sat on round or ovel stone foundations and had roofs of branches covered with earth.

Great stone tower built into the settlement wall, jericho ca8000-7000 BCE

Neolithic jericho was protected by 5 foot-thick walls and at least one stone tower 30 feet and 33feet in diameter –an outstanding achievement that marks the beginning of monumental architecture.

As jericho’s wealth grew, the need for protection against marauding nomads resulted in the first knewn premanent stone fortifications.By approximatly 7500 BCE, a wide rock-cut ditch and a 5-foot- thick wall surrounded the town, estimated to have had a population of more then 2,000 people. Into the circuit wall, which has been preseverdto a height  of almost 13 feet, was built a great circular tower of roughly shaped stones laid without mortar and originally about 30 feet high. Almost 33 feet in diameter at the base, the tower has as inner stairway leading to its summit. ( today , a greats covers the entrance to the stairway). Not enough of the site has been excavated to detemine whether this tower was solitary or one of several similar towers sthat formed a complete defanse system.In either case, a structure as large as this was a tremendous technological achievement and a testimony to the builders ability to organize a signifiacnt workforce. The wall and tower  of jericho mark the beginning of the long history of monumental architecture.

Human figure from Ain Ghazal, jordan ca 6750-6250 BCE plater painted and inlaid with bituman .3’5” high louvre Paris

AIN GHAZAL 

Near Amman, jordan the construction of a highway in 1974 revealed another important Neolithic settlement in ancient Palestine at the site of Ain Gazal occupied from ca 7200 to 5000 BCE The  inhabitants builte houses of irregularly shaped stone but carefully plasterred and then painted their floors and walls red. The most striking finds at Ain Ghazal however are two caches containing three dozan plasterstatuettes and busts some with two heads, dateable to ca 6500 BCE .The  sculpture appear to have been ritually buried,. The figures were fashioned of white plaster which was built up over a core of reeds and twine. The sculptors used black bituman, a tarlike substance, to delineate the pupils of the eyes. One some of the later figurs painters added clothing. Only rarely did the artists indicate the gender of the figures. Whatever their purpose, by their size (as much as tree feet tall) and sophisticated technique, the Ain Ghazal statuettes and busts are distinguished from Paleolithic figurines such as the tiny venus of Willendrof and even the foot-tall Hohlenstein-stadel ivory statuettes.They mark the beginning of mounumental sculpture in the ancient Near East.