LEONARDO GURVITZ/CITY OF DAVID ARCHIVES
Using radiocarbon dating techniques on more than a hundred organic samples from four different excavation sites in the City of David, scientists have developed a comprehensive “absolute chronology” for Jerusalem from about 1200 BCE until its destruction by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. Their research illuminates many longstanding questions experts have asked about the ancient city’s history.
For instance, it was long thought that the city’s westward growth occurred primarily during the time of Hezekiah, after the fall of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BCE, when refugees from the north flooded into Jerusalem. But thanks to this new evidence, it is possible to link the city’s expansion to the time of King Jehoash, about a century earlier. “The new research teaches that the expansion of Jerusalem is a result of internal-Judean demographic growth and the establishment of political and economic systems,” said archaeologist Yuval Gadot of Tel Aviv University.
Likewise, the new data are challenging long-held assumptions about the early development of Iron Age Jerusalem. The city is widely assumed to have been little more than a small town at the dawn of the Iron Age, between 1200 and 1000 BCE. But nearly 20 percent of the radiocarbon samples come from this period, clearly indicating there was widespread occupation of the City of David prior to the tenth century BCE when Jerusalem became the capital of the kingdom of Judah.
Using radiocarbon dating techniques on more than a hundred organic samples from four different excavation sites in the City of David, scientists have developed a comprehensive “absolute chronology” for Jerusalem from about 1200 BCE until its destruction by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. Their research illuminates many longstanding questions experts have asked about the ancient city’s history. For instance, it was long thought that the city’s westward growth occurred primarily during the time of Hezekiah, after the fall of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BCE, when refugees from the north flooded into Jerusalem. But thanks to this new evidence, it […]
