Wall of Solomon’s Royal City Identified

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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the Temple Mount for ten years beginning in 1968, but then passed away in 1995, leaving most of the excavation results unpublished.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. […]

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Footnotes

Eilat Mazar, “Royal Gateway to Jerusalem Uncovered,” BAR 15:03.

Endnotes

However, she believes there was a Solomonic wall here: “The date of these earliest walls [SII], on the basis of the deposits against them, is, on the field estimate of the pottery, eighth century B.C. or earlier [emphasis supplied]. The interesting point is that these walls were constructed of re-used stones of the character identified as Phoenician at Samaria … Solomon’s use of Phoenician masons is undoubted and it is a reasonable inference that, close at hand, there was a wall of the time of Solomon, from which the builders of the eighth century B.C. derived their stones. The combined evidence of the various sites therefore indicates that on the east side Solomon joined the town to which he succeeded to the platform of his new Temple by a wall along the eastern crest of the eastern ridge.” Kathleen M. Kenyon, Digging Up Jerusalem (New York: Praeger, 1975), pp. 115–116. For a photograph of the wall Kenyon excavated in SII, see plate 38.

Eilat Mazar, “The Solomonic Wall in Jerusalem,” in Aren M. Maeir and P. de Mroschedji, eds., “I Will Speak the Riddles of Ancient Times,” vol. 2 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006), p. 775. See also Eilat Mazar, The Complete Guide to the Temple Mount Excavations (Jerusalem: Shoham Academic Research and Publication, 2002), p. 5.

David Ussishkin, “The Temple Mount in Jerusalem During the First Temple Period: An Archaeologist’s View,” in J. David Schloen, ed., Exploring the Longue Durée (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2009), p. 480.

In Eilat Mazar, Wayne Horowitz, Takayoshi Oshima and Yuval Goren, “A Cuneiform Tablet from the Ophel in Jerusalem,” Israel Exploration Journal 60 (2010), p. 5.