Palestine · A closer look
c. 3000 BCE
Canaan
Jericho has been lived in for around ten thousand years, which makes it one of the oldest towns on earth. Through the Bronze Age the land between the sea and the river was Canaan: walled city-states such as Megiddo, Hazor, Gezer and Jerusalem, trading olive oil, wine and grain with Egypt and Mesopotamia. The olive terraces were already being built.
Before the city-states
The date on the timeline marks the Bronze Age, not the beginning of settlement. At Tell es-Sultan, beside the spring near modern Jericho, people were building a permanent community thousands of years earlier. Neolithic walls and a tower belong to a different phase from the later Canaanite town. The archaeological mound records successive settlements, so its history should not be read as a single city unchanged through time.
A land of connected towns
Canaan was a region of city-states rather than a unified country with modern borders. Fortified centres controlled surrounding farmland and exchanged goods with neighbouring regions. In the second millennium BCE, the southern Levant lay within networks linking Egypt, Syria and the Mediterranean. Pottery, imported objects and written records reveal connections that extended well beyond any one town, while local rulers negotiated with much larger powers.
Source: The Met: The Eastern Mediterranean and Syria, 2000–1000 BCE
Change at the end of the Bronze Age
Egyptian power shaped the Late Bronze Age, but around the end of the second millennium BCE the region's political order changed. Some urban centres were destroyed or abandoned, and new settlement patterns emerged. Scholars debate how warfare, migration and other pressures combined. The transition into the Iron Age brought the Philistines and the development of Israelite communities into a landscape that already had a long and varied history.
Source: The Met: The Eastern Mediterranean and Syria, 2000–1000 BCE