Jerusalem

Two facts frame everything else. Jerusalem has been dug continuously since Charles Warren sank his shafts for the Palestine Exploration Fund between 1867 and 1870, published with Claude Conder as The Survey of Western Palestine: Jerusalem (1884), which makes this one of the most excavated cities on earth. And the Temple Mount platform itself has never been excavated. It is administered by the Islamic Waqf and no permitted dig has taken place on it. Everything known about the mount comes from Warren's tunnels, from digs alongside it, and from the Temple Mount Sifting Project, run by Gabriel Barkay and Zachi Dvira since 2004 through debris that was removed from the mount and dumped in the late 1990s. Hezekiah's Tunnel runs about 533 metres through rock, carrying the Gihon Spring under the City of David ridge to the Pool of Siloam. In 1880 a Hebrew inscription was found cut into its wall, describing the two teams of tunnellers hearing each other and meeting; Conrad Schick reported it, and it was cut out in 1890 and is now in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. The script is placed by palaeography in the late eighth century BC, which matches 2 Kings 20:20 and 2 Chronicles 32:30. John Rogerson and Philip Davies argued for a much later Hasmonean date in "Was the Siloam Tunnel Built by Hezekiah?", Biblical Archaeologist 59:3 (1996). Amos Frumkin, Aryeh Shimron and Jeff Rosenbaum then dated the tunnel's own plaster and the stalactites growing on it, published in Nature 425 (2003), and returned a date around 700 BC. The radiometric result is the field's majority position now, and both sides are named here because both were argued in print. On the eastern slope of the City of David stands the Stepped Stone Structure, a massive terraced retaining work dug by R.A.S. Macalister and J.G. Duncan between 1923 and 1925, by Kathleen Kenyon from 1961 to 1967, and by Yigal Shiloh from 1978 to 1985. From 2005 Eilat Mazar excavated monumental walls above it and identified them as David's palace of 2 Samuel 5:11, in "Did I Find King David's Palace?", Biblical Archaeology Review 32:1 (2006). Israel Finkelstein, Ze'ev Herzog, Lily Singer-Avitz and David Ussishkin answered her in Tel Aviv 34:2 (2007), arguing that the walls are not demonstrably one building, that the pottery allows later dates, and that the identification outruns the evidence. Amihai Mazar accepts a tenth-century date for parts of the complex while staying cautious about naming the owner. The stones are there and they are monumental. Whose house they were is not settled, and this page does not settle it. For a century Warren's Shaft, the vertical fissure above the Gihon Spring, was offered as the water shaft Joab climbed in 2 Samuel 5:8. Work at the spring by Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron in the 1990s and 2000s showed the shaft to be a natural karstic fissure that probably was not a working water access in David's day, and uncovered instead massive Middle Bronze Age fortifications around the spring itself. Both the old identification and the reason it is now doubted belong on the record, and what the Hebrew of 2 Samuel 5:8 refers to is left open. The same excavators worked the stepped Second Temple period pool exposed by sewer repairs at the southern end of the ridge in 2004, which is the Pool of Siloam of John 9:7. Reich's account of the whole project is Excavating the City of David (Israel Exploration Society, 2011). Nahman Avigad's Jewish Quarter excavations from 1970 produced two of the most direct pieces of evidence on this list. The Broad Wall is a defensive wall roughly seven metres thick, dated to the late eighth century BC and generally read against Nehemiah 3:8 and Isaiah 22:10. The Burnt House is a house destroyed by fire in AD 70, with its ash layer, an iron spearhead and charred beams still in place, and a stone weight inscribed "(of) bar Kathros", the name of a priestly family that the Babylonian Talmud names at Pesahim 57a. Both are published in Avigad, Discovering Jerusalem (Thomas Nelson, 1983). Herod's retaining walls for the enlarged temple platform survive in their lower courses, with ashlars in the western wall running over ten metres long. Edward Robinson identified the springer of the arch that bears his name at the southwest corner in 1838, and Charles Wilson mapped the arch named for him in the Ordnance Survey of 1864. Benjamin Mazar dug along the southern and western walls from 1968 to 1978 and found, among much else, an inscribed stone from the parapet reading "to the place of trumpeting". Reich and Shukron later argued from coins in a ritual bath beneath Robinson's Arch that the western wall's foundation was still being finished after Herod's death, which would fit Josephus's report in Antiquities 20.219 that work on the temple continued under Agrippa II. That is an argument from the coins, not a settled fact, and it is given here as one. Small finds carry names out of the text. Eilat Mazar's City of David and Ophel excavations produced clay seal impressions naming Jehucal son of Shelemiah in 2005 and Gedaliah son of Pashhur in 2008, two men named together in Jeremiah 38:1, and a royal seal impression of Hezekiah published in 2015. Gabriel Barkay's 1979 excavation at Ketef Hinnom recovered two rolled silver amulets carrying the priestly blessing of Numbers 6:24 to 6:26, the oldest known text of Scripture, edited by Barkay, Vaughn, Lundberg and Zuckerman in BASOR 334 (2004). Two objects often mentioned with Jerusalem were found elsewhere and the find-spot matters: the Tel Dan Stele with its Aramaic reference to the "House of David" came from Tel Dan in 1993 under Avraham Biran and Joseph Naveh, and the Pilate Stone naming Pontius Pilate as prefect of Judea came from Caesarea Maritima in 1961 under Antonio Frova. Two sites are offered for the crucifixion and burial and this page names both without choosing. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands on ground that lay outside the city wall in Jesus' day, over an old quarry with rock-cut tombs, and the identification runs back to the fourth century; most archaeologists favour it. The Garden Tomb north of the Damascus Gate was promoted by Charles Gordon in 1883, and Gabriel Barkay's study of it in Biblical Archaeology Review 12:2 (1986) dates the tomb itself to the Iron Age, centuries too early for a new tomb in AD 30. Roman crucifixion is physically attested from this city and nowhere else: in 1968 at Giv'at ha-Mivtar, Vassilios Tzaferis excavated an ossuary holding the heel bone of a man named Yehohanan with an iron nail still driven through it. An ossuary found in 1990 in a burial cave in the Peace Forest, excavated by Zvi Greenhut and published in 'Atiqot 21 (1992), carries a form of the name Caiaphas; whether it held the high priest of the Gospels is debated, largely over the spelling. One more honest note on numbers: this site follows Thiele's chronology and dates the fall of the city to 586 BC, while many scholars date it to 587, and the gap is a matter of how Zedekiah's eleventh year is counted rather than a disagreement about the event.