Image Details

The Place of the Trumpeting: Many courses of Herodian masonry still stand at the southwest corner of the Temple Mount. Beneath the unexcavated bank of earth abutting the Temple Mount’s western wall, four steps are exposed—the first in a stairway. This stairway once ascended to a narrow street that ran over the rooftops of a row of shops (5) along the Temple Mount’s western wall. Another, major street (6) ran in front of the shops.

On the smooth paving stones of the Herodian street in front of the steps, at the right of the photo, a wooden frame erected by the excavators protects a large stone that fell there in 70 A.D. The eight-foot-long ashlar bears a dramatic, but incomplete, Hebrew inscription, “to the place of trumpeting to [or “for”] … ” See photograph of stone.