The partially excavated Tower of Jericho is, for its age, a peculiar structure. It was discovered by Kathleen Kenyon over her 1950s digs at the Jericho site. Following her own devising of pre-ceramic or pre-pottery phases, she dated the structure to around 8000 BCE. The cylindrical tower stands over 8 metres high and has been compared to castle structures of medieval Europe. Why the tower was erected and the purpose it had remain obscure.
The slightly conical structure which has been called the world’s first skyscraper encloses a staircase of 22 steps. It was not a tomb although Kenyon reported 12 human skeletons buried about its entrance and noted a niche resembling an altar space along the stairwell. Former ideas about it serving as a fortification against enemies, flood defence or as a “power tower” to bully erstwhile hunter folk into the curmudgeon of agriculture have faded depending on where you look. An interesting interpretation grounding the structure in its own symbolic landscape came in 2008 by Barkai & Liran from Tel Aviv University who suggested the tower was built facing the summer solstice sunset and that its west-facing wall captured shadows from this event as the sun fell behind Mt. Quruntul.
Here the tower’s orientation, determined by where a person alighted from the inner staircase, was west to the solstice sunset behind Quruntul. A previous idea had been that its thicker, west-facing wall defended against evil spirits where the sun died daily. Today detritus covers much of the tower’s west-side.
A prominent landscape feature and water source making Jericho a settlement since the Natufian, it’s likely that Quruntul represented a cosmic hill upon which the tower was modelled. Although there’s nothing like Jericho’s tower known from its time anywhere its interaction with the summer solstice as an observation platform and bulwark against dangers present in darkness meets imagery potentially acknowledging the same at Göbekli Tepe’s Pillar 43. Here the ensemble of dangerous summer creatures simultaneously depicts midsummer constellations. Although Pillar 43 is earlier, Jericho emerged as a settlement when GT was still in use.
Where climate environments were stable and synchronised, solstice meanings in belief systems corresponded: winter solstice and spring equinox marking times of growth, increasing light; summer solstice forewarning shorter days, growing darkness, death and depletion, especially concerning animal cycles.
It would therefore seem likely that Quruntul’s dying sun and Pillar 43’s celestial imagery signalled closeness to the land of the dead and associated underworld festivals at the summer solstice.