Last year, the 45th session of the World Heritage Committee approved the inscription of the Gujericho-Tarsultan site on the World Heritage List as a World Heritage Site of Palestine. Obviously, Palestine certainly welcomes it, and Israel certainly strongly opposes it.
The so-called "Ancient Jericho", also known as the city of Jericho, is considered to be the oldest city in the world, with a history of more than 9,000 years. According to the Western historical narrative, organized communities (towns with a population of 2,000-3,000) were formed in this area 10,000 years ago, after which the inhabitants shifted from hunting to farming, forming the earliest agriculture in the West, such as the cultivation of barley, wheat, and so on.
The problem is that since the formation of an ancient city with a large number of populations and the staple food of agricultural products, then a question arises here, that is, what to use as a container? In ancient times, the ancients could live by water and solve the problem of cooked food by barbecuing, but after forming a city settlement and taking agricultural products as the main food, it is natural to need containers that can hold water, steam, etc., especially water containers, which are indispensable, otherwise how to live in daily life.
The best material for ancient vessels must have been pottery, because it was the least expensive and the most widely applicable, but the pottery used in daily life in the Western Hemisphere appeared later, later than the time when Jericho was founded.
In 1925, in the Nizhny Vestnice region of the Czech Republic, Western archaeology found many pottery statues, one of which was a female ceramic statue, known as the "Venus of Nizhny Vestnice", which was dated to 27,000-31,000 years ago. Note that it's not just pottery, it's a ceramic statue, which is one level higher than the mature pottery technology, and it's shocking when it debuts!
In 2012, in the Vila Sbila Cave on the island of Korčula, Croatia, archaeological discoveries found that the earliest pottery in southeastern Europe is basically some animal-shaped fragments, with a history of 15,000-17,500 years.
The two pottery sites have two things in common, namely: they are both exquisite pottery works of art, and there is no daily pottery; after the appearance of the above two pottery, there is a blank space for nearly 10,000 years, and there are no pottery remains, just like ancient Egypt, Sumer, and ancient Greece.
More interestingly, about the pottery vessels unearthed from the site of the Wannian Xianren Cave in Jiangxi Province, about 20,000 years old, one of the project participants, archaeologist at Harvard University, Offer Barr Joseph, asserted: "This is the earliest pottery in the world." This means that pottery from an earlier age may have been found in southern China. How can this be understood, does this Western scholar not recognize the authenticity of Czech ceramic statues?
In fact, it was not until more than 8,000 years ago that daily pottery began to appear, and most of them belonged to low-temperature pottery, which was not durable and could not even be used to hold water.
Scholar Han Jianye once clearly pointed out in "On the Road of Painted Pottery Before the Silk Road" that "the earliest pottery in West Asia only appeared around 6900 BC". Western pottery spread westward after pottery, and pottery from southeastern and central Europe appeared about 7,000 years ago. In other words, after 15,000-17,500 years of pottery in Croatia, it took another 10,000 years for pottery to reappear in Europe.
In this regard, many Chinese and foreign scholars believe that later pottery in the Western Hemisphere originated in East Asia, and then gradually spread westward along the forest-steppe zone in the northern part of Eurasia.
Therefore, when the city of Jericho appeared, there were no pottery vessels in the West at that time. In this case, as a city dweller of the city of Jericho, how to cook wheat, how to carry water, and even some irrigation needs? Making containers from wood or stone tools does not seem to be suitable for urban life where agricultural products are the staple food! Moreover, processing wood into containers was obviously very expensive in the era when there was no metal, at least it was difficult to popularize it at that time, and it was almost impossible to make stone vessels on a large scale.
More importantly, Western archaeology suggests that pottery was not used until around 6,000 years ago in the city of Jericho. In other words, from the "organized community" of about 3,000 people 10,000 years ago, to 3,000 years after the construction of Jericho, pottery vessels were used here!
For more than 4,000 years, there was no pottery for daily use, and a large number of people gathered, how did the city of Jericho live daily and meet some agricultural irrigation needs?
Unlike the West, China first mastered the art of pottery, and at first made pottery for daily use, and then after thousands of years, agriculture appeared, and then there were relatively large gathering areas, and it was not until more than 7,000 years ago that ancient cities appeared.
For example, pottery appeared 20,000 years ago, artificial rice appeared 14,000 years ago, large-scale rice planting appeared 10,000 years ago (Zhejiang Shangshan site, unearthed evidence of a complete industrial chain of rice planting, harvesting and processing), and more than 7,000 years ago the ancient city ruins of Chengtou Mountain. Therefore, after the advent of life-production pottery, China had agriculture, cities, etc., and the West was the opposite.
At the same time, because of the development of pottery, China gradually developed sintered bricks, and the evolution sequence is roughly rammed earth, plate building, red clay, red clay house, special red clay blocks, and relatively stereotyped sintered bricks. But there is no such evolution process in the West, for example, the city of Jericho has had mature bricks since the beginning, and other sites in the West are also like this, and some of them do not know whether they have been restored in their original state in modern times, or if they were originally like this.
Because many things in ancient Greek civilization appeared suddenly and matured suddenly, which is contrary to the logic of the normal development of human society, but the West believes that "ancient Greece is the pure childhood of Europe" and naturally cannot be tarnished, so the West interprets ancient Greece as a "special civilization".
Perhaps, the word "special" can also be used to explain ancient cities such as the city of Jericho, which has no daily pottery but a large population.