Jericho, occupied West Financial institution – Inform es-Sultan has been deemed a World Heritage Web site in Palestine, with the United Nations declaring it the “oldest fortified metropolis on the planet”.
Iyad Hamdan, director normal of the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities in Jericho, instructed Al Jazeera that the choice “strengthens Palestinian identification and worldwide recognition”.
The ruins close to the traditional metropolis of Jericho within the occupied West Financial institution had their particular standing declared on Sunday at a gathering of the UN World Heritage Committee of the UN Academic, Scientific and Cultural Group (UNESCO) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Inform es-Sultan, an oval mound containing proof of prehistoric human exercise relationship again to the ninth millennium BCE with a perennial spring close by, is 10km (6 miles) northwest of the Useless Sea and 1.5km (almost one mile) north of the trendy metropolis of Jericho.
Fortification partitions and trenches, in addition to the stays of palaces, staircases and towers from the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, had been discovered as nicely.
Hamdan stated: “Tel es-Sultan is the oldest fortified agricultural settlement during which the Palestinian particular person moved from searching and gathering to agriculture and animal domestication.”
In the meantime, Hani Noureldin, professor of archaeology at Abu Dis College in Jerusalem, stated the location “confirms the extent of the significance of human civilization in Palestine”.
Tel es-Sultan is an “distinctive case … distinguished by its transitional dimension between the levels of searching and gathering meals, to a secure settlement that possesses the essential parts of pure assets”, Noureldin instructed Al Jazeera.
It “represents the civil growth that characterised the Fertile Crescent area generally, Mesopotamia and the Levant, through the third and second millennium BCE”, he continued.
The creativity of the location’s inhabitants, stated Noureldin, “was mirrored within the burial rituals, which included adorning human skulls with a clean layer of plaster earlier than portray it with pure colors.”
Inform es-Sultan joins three different UN-designated World Heritage Websites in Palestine: the birthplace of Jesus together with the Church of the Nativity and the pilgrimage route in Bethlehem, the previous city of Hebron, and the “cultural panorama” of the village of Battir south of Jerusalem.
