David Harris

When Solomon built the First Temple, the king imported his masons, his materials and even the style of his sanctuary from the Phoenicians, the preeminent builders in the eastern Mediterranean world in the second and early first millennium B.C.E. A thousand years later, when Herod the Great sought to restore the Temple to its former glory, he followed Solomon’s lead in using styles and techniques from the dominant power in the Near East at the time—Imperial Rome. Although nothing survives of the Second Temple and only fragments of the surrounding structures atop the Temple Mount have been found, it is possible to reconstruct what the building looked like—as in the model shown, from the Holy Land Hotel in Jerusalem.