How Many?
How many archaeological excavations have been undertaken in Jerusalem?
Answer: 1,263
Since the excavation of the Tomb of the Kings (actually the tomb of Queen Helena of Adiabene) by Louis-Félicien de Saulcy in 1863, the archives of the Israel Antiquities Authority list 1,263 entries for excavations conducted in and around Jerusalem. The actual number, however, is probably much higher if we count “unofficial” and clandestine excavations. Including excavations of this kind, archaeologists Gideon Avni of the Israel Antiquities Authority and Katharina Galor of Brown University estimate the number as close to 1,850.1
MLA Citation
Endnotes
For the bulk of these, see Nahman Avigad, Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals, revised and completed by Benjamin Sass (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1997); Nahman Avigad, Michael Heltzer and André Lemaire, West Semitic Seals: Eighth–Sixth Centuries B.C.E. (Haifa: University of Haifa, 2000); Robert Deutsch and André Lemaire, Biblical Period Personal Seals in the Shlomo Moussaeiff Collection (Tel Aviv: Archaeological Center Publications, 2000).