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183 where the port city of el-Tor still exists. It also led. we believe, to the establishment of the world's oldest town: Jericho, which was dedicated to Sin (Yeriho in Hebrew) and his celestial symbol, the Moon. The age of Jericho has been an enigma that has continuously baf- fled the scholars. They broadly divide man's advancement (which spread from the Near East) into the Mesolithic ("Middle Stone") Age, which saw the introduction of agriculture and animal domes- tication circa 11,000 B.C.; a Neolithic ("New Stone") Age 3,600 years later, bringing with it villages and pottery: and then, finally. Sumer's urban civilization, again 3,600 years later. Yet here was Jericho: an urban site occupied and built by unknowns sometime circa 8500 B.C.. when man had not yet learned to lead even a vil- lage life... . The puzzles posed by Jericho pertain not only to its age, but also to what the archaeologists have found there: houses, built on stone foundations, had doors equipped with wooden jambs: the walls were carefully plastered and painted red, pink, and other colors— sometimes even covered with murals. Neat hearths and_ basins were sunk in whitewashed plaster floors, floors that were often lecorated with patterns. Below the floors the dead were sometimes buried—buried but not forgotten: at least ten skulls were found which were filled with plaster to recreate the features of the de- ceased (Fig. 56). The features they reveal were by all opinions more advanced and finer than those of the usual Mediterranean wellers of the time. All this was protected by a massive wall that surrounded the town (millennia before Joshua!). It was raised in the middle of a ditch nearly thirty feet wide and seven feet deep, lug out of the rock "without the help of picks and hoes" (James Mellaart. Earliest Civilizations of the Near East). It was "an explosive development ... a spectacular development whose causes." Mellaart says, "are still unknown to us." The enigma of prehistoric Jericho is compounded by the evi- lence of its round grain silos, one of which was found still partly standing. In a hot depression near the Dead Sea. 825 feet below sea level, in an inhospitable place unsuitable for grain cultivation, there was found evidence of ample supplies and continued storage of wheat and barley. Who could have built this advanced town that early, who had come to live in such a place, and whom did it serve as a fortified store city? The solution to this enigma lies, in our opinion, in the chronol- ogy of the "gods," not of men. It lies in the fact that the incredible Peace on Earth