The quarry that produced the enormous limestone ashlars for Herod the Great’s massive Temple Mount enclosure wall has been discovered in Jerusalem, about 2 miles northwest of the site. The 1.25-acre site was uncovered in September 2007 during a salvage excavation to prepare for the construction of a girls’ elementary school in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood.
The quarry was identified as Herodian based on the high-quality limestone, the large size of the stones (up to 26 feet long!) and the recovery of coins and pottery that date the site’s use to the first century A.D.
The quarrying process required first carving deep vertical channels around four sides of each block. Then, iron cleaving stakes were hammered into the bottom of the block to create a crack at the base (one such stake was found during the excavation). According to one theory, workers placed timbers tightly in the channels and poured water over them, causing them to expand; the increasing pressure eventually forced the blocks to break from the bedrock below, separating cleanly along the fissure that had been created at the base.
Herodian ashlars are well known for their outstanding size and beauty. The blocks were carefully finished—many with elegant margins and flat bosses on the outer face—and weighed several tons. In the so-called “Master Course” of the western wall of the Temple Mount, four stones measuring 11 feet high cover a length of more than 100 feet. The largest block is over 42 feet long and weighs nearly 600 tons.c That’s 1,200,000 pounds! Compare that to the largest monolith at Stonehenge, which weighs 40 tons, or the 15-ton blocks of the Great Pyramids. Even without the use of mortar or cement, not even a knife blade can be inserted in the joints between the Temple Mount blocks.
How these massive blocks were transported from the quarry to the Temple Mount remains unclear. They couldn’t have been pushed or pulled over rolling logs (as scholars believe the pyramids’ stones may have been) because the sheer weight of the stones would have crushed the timbers. One scholar has argued that some stones were actually quarried as round columns and rolled to the Temple Mount, where they were squared-off into blocks.d With the announcement of the recent quarry discovery, the Israel Antiquities Authority suggests that the huge rectangular blocks were simply dragged by oxen from the quarry to the Temple Mount via the main northern road to Jerusalem, a journey that slopes downward about 260 feet from start to finish.
Half of the exposed site has been allotted for the continued construction of the school, while the other half has been designated as an archaeological site. It is uncertain, however, if the site will be developed for tourism or perhaps backfilled to protect it.—D.D.R.
The quarry that produced the enormous limestone ashlars for Herod the Great’s massive Temple Mount enclosure wall has been discovered in Jerusalem, about 2 miles northwest of the site. The 1.25-acre site was uncovered in September 2007 during a salvage excavation to prepare for the construction of a girls’ elementary school in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood. The quarry was identified as Herodian based on the high-quality limestone, the large size of the stones (up to 26 feet long!) and the recovery of coins and pottery that date the site’s use to the first century A.D. The quarrying process required […]
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