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the Temple Mount for ten years beginning in 1968, but then passed away in 1995, leaving most of the excavation results unpublished.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 surrounding Jerusalem, was built earlier—by King Solomon.^{a 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 reinforce 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.

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. […]