City of Jericho Turns 10,000 Years Old

What if they gave a birthday party for one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world and didn’t tell anyone about it. Everyone on Earth probably knows that Hanoi, Vietnam is celebrating its 1,000th year of history this month. But how many of us knew that for the past three years the city of Jericho, Palestine has been planning its 10,000th birthday?

Frankly, they admit they did a bad job of publicizing the event:

Local residents were sceptical of the government attempts to blame Israel, especially given a recent surge in tourism and the removal of the main Israeli checkpoint on the road from Jerusalem.

“The problem is not Israeli barriers,” says Raed Daraghmeh, 38, the manager of a sprawling restaurant outside the 9,000 year-old ruins of Tel al-Sultan, which predate Egypt’s pyramids by 4,000 years.

“There are tourists here, but this is in spite of the fact that there is no international tourism promotion,” he said.

“There isn’t a shortage of hotels or infrastructure. If they know about the history and the civilisation here they will come and stay in tents.”

He blames the low-key celebration in part on a failure to involve the private sector, describing the planning as a “top-secret mission.”

“I’ve been here, and for the past three years there has not been a single brochure to tell people that there will be an anniversary celebration.”

Tourism minister Khulud Daibes said Jericho residents were divided from the beginning over whether they wanted to have a large celebration or focus on development projects to benefit what remains a poor and arid region.

The selection of October 10, 2010 as the 10,000th birthday of Jericho was of course completely symbolic. No one knows for sure when Jericho was first settled (or even if it grew from a single dwelling or was built by more than one family settling together). We don’t even know if we have found the most ancient foundations that could be associated with today’s Jericho. What if the ancients moved around the map a few times before finally building what we think of as the ancient city?

Some people like to retell the story of human history through reversing the calendaric process. That is, the modern Gregorian calendar (adopted only in the past few hundred years) only counts forward from an (inaccurately) estimated birth year for Jesus (historians believe he was probably born around 7 BCE – 4 BCE, so Gregory’s calendar is off by about 4-7 years). What if we adopted a new calendar, one that set this year as the year 10,000 MC (Modern Calendar) or JY (Jericho Years)?

Would there be a benefit to doing that? After all, we would still document all of prehistory in terms of BMC (or BMY). People are only just now starting to recognize BCE as equivalent to BC (Before Christ) and CE (Common Era) as equivalent to AD (Anno Domini).

Technically, the Earth is considered to be about 4.5 billion years old. Maybe we should just make the jump to marking this as the 4,500,000,000th year and therefore keep all the numbers for our estimated antiquities on the positive side of zero.

Calendar systems are useful because they give us a sense of place within destiny’s timelines. We know we belong to the history that begen with Year 1 (although failing to include a Year 0 in our calendar has caused much confusion over when we entered the 21st century — which was correctly at midnight on December 31, 2000).

If in order to avoid further confusion down the road it would make sense to just unify all calendar systems by declaring a Year 0 at some verifiable point in the past, maybe we should pick the last likely year in which glaciation was a significant factor in the northern hemisphere. According to some estimates, the last Glacial Period ended about 12,500 years ago.

So let’s say that this year is Post-glacial Year 12,500 and that PGY 12,501 begins at midnight on December 31. That will give us another 499 years to adopt the new calendar system before we hit the Fourteenth Millennium. Converting dates for all historical and some prehistorical events will be easy: we just add 10,500 to whatever year number in the Gregorian system we’re accustomed to.

Hence, Jericho was founded (so far as we know) around the year PGY 2,500. Rome was founded around the year PGY 9,750. St. Augustine, Florida — the oldest continually inhabited European community in North America — was founded in PGY 12,065. The United States of American proclaimed its independence from Great Britain in the year PGY 12,276.

Somehow, that doesn’t have quite the ring to it that “1776” does and alas! the year PGY 1776 doesn’t seem to have been very significant in human history. The current interglacial period was almost 2,000 years old at the time but no significant communities that have survived to this time were around, so far as we know.

Celebrating Jericho’s 10,000 or so years of existence should have been a major event around the globe. Kings and presidents should have visited Jericho and paid tribute to mankind’s collective heritage. Unfortunately, for whatever reasons, the word did not get out and now it’s too late to create an opportunity for international dialog arising from our sense of shared collective history.

This weekend’s celebration in Jericho is more than a once-in-a-lifetime event. It is a once-in-history event. We may never see the clock tick down to something of this significance again for hundreds of years.

There is just something so wrong with that picture.