Jerusalem Roundup

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Jerusalem is the epicenter of Biblical archaeology. As BAR readers know, almost every time someone digs in the Holy City, some new and exciting clue about the world of ancient Israel or the origins of Judaism and Christianity is revealed.

In this roundup of recent discoveries from Jerusalem, we highlight the dramatic new finds that are reshaping our understanding of the city’s ancient history, including its earliest inscription and the monumental walls that protected its people during the time of King Solomon. We also explore compelling new evidence for where Solomon built his palace on the Temple Mount. But our story begins with an update on the Temple Mount Sifting Project and its expanding efforts to recover ancient artifacts from the city’s most revered and contested location.

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The Temple Mount Sifting Project

Gaby Barkay and Zachi Zweig have gone into business. Bring your excavated dirt to them for “wet sifting” and they will take care of it for you. Business is good.

Gaby (actually Gabriel) is one of the most prominent archaeologists in Jerusalem. Zachi, now his colleague, was his student at Bar-Ilan University.

It all started when the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) had Zachi arrested. The Muslim religious authority known as the Waqf, which controls the Temple Mount, had dug an enormous hole on the Temple platform to create a monumental staircase leading down to the area known as Solomon’s Stables in order to turn it into a mosque. During this operation, the Waqf dumped hundreds of truckloads of unscientifically (and illegally) excavated earth into the adjacent Kidron Valley. Zachi was caught rummaging around in this mound of earth to see if it contained anything archaeologically valuable. According to the IAA, he was illegally excavating without a permit.

Zachi was soon released, and his teacher Gaby obtained a permit from the IAA to “excavate” this artificial mound of earth that had been simply dumped there.

Thus was born the “sifting project.”^a Gaby and Zachi obtained a site on the slope of Mt. Scopus in view of the golden Dome of the Rock, put up a tent, began trucking bags of earth from the Kidron Valley to their site and started to sift. They and their staff and volunteers have been enormously successful, having found thousands of artifacts dating from the Middle and Late Bronze Ages to modern times in this archaeologically rich dirt. In addition to millions of pottery sherds and thousands of bone fragments, the finds include Egyptian scarabs, Israelite seals, countless coins from the Second Temple period and numerous architectural fragments from Herod’s Temple Mount complex.

Since its rather humble beginnings in 2004, when Gaby and Zachi were simply trying to sift as much of the Temple Mount debris as they could with a limited staff and an even more limited budget, the sifting operation has grown exponentially. With increased publicity and financial support, as many as 20,000 volunteers a year participate in the project, and the number of visitors is even larger. To handle that many volunteers, and the resulting flow of sifted material, the project has expanded by setting up several rows of sifting stations and building new facilities, including a processing lab and training and storage rooms. They also have a trained staff that oversees the work of the scores of volunteers that come to the site every day to sift the ancient soil from the Temple Mount.

Through its success, the project has confirmed the value of sifting, which has long been practiced on professional digs, but even more so of wet sifting, which has been used much more rarely. In wet sifting, excavated buckets of rubble, debris and soil are first soaked in water to loosen and dissolve the dirt that tends to encrust buried archaeological material. After soaking, the murky mixture is then dumped into sieving screens where pressurized water hoses are used to wash off and drain any dirt that may still cling to objects in the sift. Once the dirt has been washed away, important archaeological artifacts such as bones, coins and inscriptions can be more easily distinguished.

The operation has been working so 037well that Gaby and Zachi decided to offer their services to other excavations in and around Jerusalem. They can do the sifting less expensively, more efficiently and more thoroughly than archaeologists working in the field, with the added assurance that all material would be handled and sifted not by volunteers, but by the project’s trained, professional staff. Loads of bagged dirt could simply be trucked to their site from nearby professional excavations, just as they had done with the dirt from the Temple Mount dumped in the Kidron Valley.

This was the obvious solution for archaeologist Eilat Mazar, another prominent Jerusalem archaeologist, who was excavating just south of the Temple Mount. She works in a very sensitive area and in a confined location where there is no room for a sifting operation. “Contracting out” the sifting of the soil seemed like the perfect solution. So she began shipping large bags of dirt about a mile up the hill to Mt. Scopus. It worked well, and one of her last bags of excavated dirt produced one of the more dramatic finds to be discovered in 038Jerusalem in recent years.

But before we get to Eilat Mazar’s new find, you should know a little more about her exciting dig south of the Temple Mount and the dirt she had shipped to Gaby and Zachi for sifting. Mazar contends that her excavations have exposed a city wall and fortified gate complex originally constructed by none other than King Solomon.

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Wall of Solomon’s Royal City Identified

Mazar’s excavation is actually part of a larger excavation that had been directed by her grand-father Benjamin Mazar, once president of the Hebrew University and a leading Biblical scholar, historian and archaeologist. He excavated south of the southern wall of the Temple Mount for ten years beginning in 1968, but then passed away in 1995, leaving most of the excavation results unpublished.

Eilat Mazar, herself an experienced archaeologist on the university staff, was appointed as her grandfather’s literary executor, charged with completing the publication of the dig led by her grandfather. She has already published several volumes of excavation reports. In addition, in 1986–1987 she undertook some excavations of her own to clarify and confirm certain aspects of the earlier excavation.

Near the southeast corner of the Temple Mount, with a striking view dominating the Kidron Valley, are impressive remains of a gate complex, elements of which were first identified in 1867 by the great English explorer and engineer Charles Warren. Tunneling underground, which was his method of excavation, Warren identified two towers. The larger one, preserved to a height of 40 feet, he called the “Great Tower,” and the smaller adjacent one he called the “Corner Turret.” These are now largely underneath the modern road that rings the southern wall of the Temple Mount. However, Eilat Mazar’s excavations in the 1980s exposed part of this gate complex closer to the Temple Mount wall. They also exposed a small part of Warren’s Corner Turret north of the modern road.

In the 1960s, British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon opened a single, now-famous excavation square known as “SII” (pronounced “S2”) outside and adjacent to the Corner Turret. Based on pottery sherds from the fill, Kenyon dated the complex to the eighth century B.C.E.,¹ probably to King Hezekiah, who presumably would have built this defensive complex as part of his preparations for the Assyrian siege that came with devastating force in 701 B.C.E.

In 1986, Eilat Mazar reexcavated Kenyon’s SII square, as well as a small area on the other side of the Corner Turret wall and adjacent structures and gates that were part of this critical First Temple period gate and fortification complex. Here, “immediately below a foundation stone,” Eilat Mazar found a black juglet that “appears to be characteristic of the tenth century B.C.E.,” the time of King Solomon. On this basis, she tentatively suggested that the fortification complex, which was part of a wall 040surrounding Jerusalem, was built earlier—by King Solomon.^{b 2}

This, she says, tends to confirm the historicity of the Biblical reference to Solomon’s building activities, which included “the wall of Jerusalem” (1 Kings 9:15).

Mazar’s conclusion has been vigorously attacked by, among others, Tel Aviv University archaeologist David Ussishkin, who says that Solomonic Jerusalem was “not protected by a city wall”; the fortification complex “uncovered near the southeast corner of the Haram esh-Sharif [the Arabic name of the Temple Mount] dates to the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E. and not earlier.”³ As for Eilat Mazar’s pottery evidence, Ussishkin says, “Only a few pottery pieces earlier than the eighth century B.C.E. were recovered here [and these] were out of stratigraphical context.”

But that’s not the end of the story. Eilat Mazar kept digging. Now, she says, she has found more tenth-century B.C.E. pottery below the complex’s foundation stones, buttressing her contention that the wall is Solomonic. In her latest report, Mazar says that these “excavations revealed a section of the city wall 70 m[eters] [more than 200 feet] long and preserved 6 m[eters] [approximately 20 feet] high, dated to the Iron Age IIA [the time of David and Solomon].”⁴

Warren’s Great Tower was built on a “massive construction fill … needed to 041reinforce its stability,” Mazar explains. This fill, she continues, was “most probably” brought from the City of David just south of the gate complex. The latest potsherds in the fill dated to the time of David and Solomon.

Mazar has not yet published this new pottery, however. That will come, she says. Other Jerusalem archaeologists who have seen the pottery confirm Mazar’s dating.

Which brings us back to the bags of excavated dirt Mazar sent to Gaby Barkay for wet sifting. The wet sifting increased by 95 percent the number of small finds from Mazar’s excavation and included beads, amulets, ivory figurines, bullae, scarabs, olive pits and fauna (including fish bones).

Much of this dirt came from the fill described above. While the latest pottery fragments from the fill date to Iron Age IIA, the fill also included an array of finds dating from the Early Bronze Age (c. 3300–2300 B.C.E.) to the tenth century B.C.E.

As 27-year-old Ephrat Greenwald, a longtime archaeology enthusiast and veteran sifter, poured the contents of a bag onto the sieve and meticulously sifted through its contents, she came across a tiny piece of fired clay, no larger than the size of a postage stamp. As she carefully inspected the piece, Ephrat noticed strange wedge-shaped markings, markings that would prove upon further analysis to be cuneiform signs—the earliest evidence of writing ever found in Jerusalem.

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Sifting Project Reveals City’s Earliest Writing

The small piece of inscribed clay has now been studied by leading Assyriologists Wayne Horowitz and Takayoshi Oshima, who report that it is a fragment of a 14th-century B.C.E. tablet, making it the oldest writing ever discovered in Jerusalem, predating the previous contender, the famous Siloam Tunnel inscription, by at least 600 years!⁵

The fragment preserves only traces of nine lines, five on one side and four on the other. It was originally part of a larger tablet written in the Akkadian language (the diplomatic lingua franca of the time), but this is all that has survived. The preserved signs include “you,” “you were,” “to do” and “they.” With so little to work with, the scholars admit, they cannot restore even a single full phrase with any certainty. The fragment is thought to be part of an archived copy of an official letter written from a Canaanite king of Jerusalem to a pharaoh of Egypt. Although the fragment does not preserve any names or titles, the scholars believe its finely formed wedge-shaped characters could have been produced only by someone with considerable scribal training in cuneiform and knowledge of Akkadian: 043“The scribe of the Jerusalem fragment seems capable of producing high-quality international-standard scribal work,” the scholars note.

As analyzed by Tel Aviv University clay petrologist Yuval Goren, the clay from which the tablet was made came from Jerusalem, not a far-off city in Egypt or Mesopotamia.

This indicates that the letter was written in Jerusalem, most likely by a royal scribe, perhaps even one of the personal scribes of Abdi-Heba, the king of Jerusalem whose pleading letters to the pharaoh Akhenaten are famously preserved in the 14th-century B.C.E. archive found at el-Amarna in Egypt.^c In fact, given the close similarity between the cuneiform signs from the new fragment and those of Abdi-Heba’s letters, and the fact that the new fragment was found so close to Jerusalem’s Late Bronze Age citadel, the scholars believe the fragment may be part of a copy of one of Abdi-Heba’s letters to Pharaoh that was stored in the Jerusalem king’s archive.

This tiny, fragmentary inscription from which we cannot really extract any literal meaning nevertheless has a broader significance. It confirms evidence from the Amarna letters that Jerusalem was a thriving city in the Late Bronze Age, with scribes capable of writing cuneiform and with the governmental organization to employ them. This must be our conclusion despite the fact that archaeologists have found little of surviving structures from this period.

This is similar to the situation in the tenth century B.C.E. when David and Solomon ruled. Little from this time has been archaeologically recovered. But, as the Amarna letters suggest and this little cuneiform inscription confirms, Jerusalem could have been an important city at that time, even though structurally little has survived.

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Where Was Solomon’s Palace?

We know where King David’s city was. It was on the little 10–12-acre ridge south of the Temple Mount, just outside the Old City walls. On this all are agreed. This little ridge is still called the City of David.

Then King Solomon extended the city northward to the Temple Mount, where he built the Temple.

We know he had a palace—or at least a royal residence. As Israel Finkelstein has noted in BAR, “When you have a dynasty ruling in the capital of a territorial entity, you always have a palace and a royal shrine near the palace.”^d And, for what it’s worth (pace, Israel F.), the Bible also indicates Solomon had a palace. It is described in some detail in 1 Kings 7:1–12. It took 13 years to build. Cedar from Lebanon was used throughout. The foundations were of costly stone. The structure was 30 cubits high with three tiers of windows facing each other. One portico of the building was known as the Hall of Judgment, where the king pronounced his decisions, also called the Throne Room. The whole place was surrounded with courtyards, including the Great Courtyard. Behind 045one of these courtyards was the king’s private residence.

But where was this palace?

Until now, the universal answer to this question has been that Solomon’s palace was located between the northern edge of the City of David and the Temple—perhaps on the southern end of the Temple Mount itself.

This seems to be confirmed by the Bible. As you go from the City of David northward to the Temple Mount, you ascend nearly 200 feet to a height of 2,415 feet above sea level. From the Temple Mount, you look down on the City of David. The Bible tells us that when King Josiah sent his scribe (presumably from the palace) to the high priest in the Temple, Josiah tells him to “go up” (aleh) to the House of the Lord (2 Kings 22:3–4). When some court officials visit the Temple gate for a meeting, the Bible records that “they went up from the king’s palace to the House of the Lord” (Jeremiah 26:10).

Tel Aviv University archaeologist David Ussishkin concedes that “All scholars reconstruct the royal palace to the south of the Temple.” But he has a different answer. Ussishkin agrees that Solomon’s palace was on the Temple Mount, but argues that it was north, not south, of the Temple.⁶

For Ussishkin, this makes much more sense. To the north of the Temple was an area spacious enough to accommodate a large palatial complex. Equally important, placing the palace south of the Temple would mean everyone approaching the Temple from the City of David would have to pass by or through the palace complex, hardly the most secure or private location. Placing the palace north of the Temple would provide isolation and security.

Ussishkin also supports his argument with additional topographical and archaeological considerations.

Northwest of the Temple Mount is a hill that is connected to the Temple Mount by a rock saddle. Topographically, this is Jerusalem’s weakest point of defense. At the time, the other sides of the ancient city were (and still are) protected by steep slopes. Ussishkin postulates that a deep moat was cut across the rock saddle to protect the palace, the Temple and the city below from attack across this vulnerable path.

Ussishkin is not the first to suggest the existence of a moat in this saddle, if only to protect the Temple. Others have also suggested this, beginning with Charles Wilson and Charles Warren in 1871. They, too, said that a deep ditch must have been cut across this rock saddle. Other more recent scholars have continued to support this suggestion. One wonders why, with modern tools like ground-penetrating radar, this supposition cannot be tested.

Ussishkin’s unique contribution, however, is to call our attention to archaeological examples of such ancient moats cut into hard rock. Ussishkin has found a rock-cut moat at Jezreel, a site in northern Israel that he excavated.^e Additional examples come from Anatolia—at the central fortress of the kings of Urartu, as well as at a site called Cavustepe.

Ussishkin also weighs in on the shape of the Solomonic Temple Mount. All agree that Solomon’s Temple Mount would have been considerably smaller than the Herodian (Second) Temple Mount that we see today. Nahman Avigad, the revered archaeological scholar of Jerusalem, reconstructed the Solomonic Temple Mount with curved walls.⁷ Ussishkin disagrees. He believes the earlier Temple Mount, though smaller than the later one, was nevertheless rectangular, with straight walls. In this he agrees with two other prominent Jerusalem archaeologists, Kathleen Kenyon⁸ and Leen Ritmeyer.⁹

Right or wrong, Ussishkin’s ideas are always provocative.

From Jerusalem’s earliest inscription to the discovery of Solomon’s fortifications, the city has been abuzz with archaeological activity. Our up-tothe-minute report puts the spotlight on these exciting new finds, as well as the projects and scholars who have brought them to light.