11th Annual Archaeology Conference
CITY of DAVID Jerusalem, Israel

Wednesday September 1, 2010
From 4:00 pm visit new excavation sites in the City of David
The City of David

18:30  Gather in the City of David, Area E

19:00  Opening Remarks

Ahron Horovitz, Director of the Megalim Institute
Representative of the Israel Antiquities Authority
Guy Alon, Israel Nature and National Parks Authority

19:15
First Session - Chair: Prof. Aaron Demsky
Prof. Jodi Magness
Archaeological Evidence of the Sassanid Persian Invasion of Jerusalem

Prof. Zohar Amar, Dr. David Illouz
The Persimmon in the Land of Israel

Ms. Sara Barnea
The History of the Mapping of the Jewish Cemetery on the Mount of Olives

20:40 Break

21:00
Second Session - Chair: Dr. Hillel Geva

Dr. Doron Ben-Ami, Ms. Yana Tchekhanovets
The Givati Parking Lot – Roman-Period Discoveries and Finds

Eli Shukron, Prof. Ronny Reich|
The excavation between the stepped Shiloah Pool and the interior face
of the damming wall at the southern end of the Tyropoeon Valley,
Jerusalem

Prof. Ronny Reich, Eli Shukron
The Large Fortification Near the Gihon Spring in Jerusalem, and its

Relationship to Wall NB Discovered by Kathleen Kenyon

22:00 Estimated end of conference

Entrance is free, but spaces are limited (there is no advance registration)
It may be cold at night so dress accordingly

Parking is available in the Mount Zion Parking Lot and the Givati
Parking Lot (for a fee)
Public Transportation: Buses 1, 2, 38.

HT: Joe Lauer

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Comptroller Temple Mount report stays behind closed doors

It reminded me of a volunteer who found a camel’s tooth on the Temple Mount dig. She was so excited that she buried it again for another volunteer to find and be excited as well. The Knesset is burying part of this highly sensitive document “for diplomatic and security reasons”.

Israel is a democracy, so this report will eventually be unearthed again and I wonder if the public will be so excited as the second volunteer, when they read it, for “It is not a secret that the Waqf is building on the Temple Mount, that works have been done, and that many archeological findings have been destroyed.”

Source: Joe Lauer

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From these reports I understand that archaeologists found an underground wall and intersecting aqueduct, both built by the Roman 10th Legion a little east of the Jaffa Gate, and drew the conclusion that the Tower of David was not the Hippicus Tower built by Herod the Great:

“The archaeologists’ discoveries had major implications. For one thing, they determined that the current Tower of David was not an extension of Hippicus, but rather of the Phasael tower.”

According to Josephus, these towers were built in the First Wall and not in the Second Wall. They stood at the northwest corner of Jerusalem and protected the city and Herod’s Palace that was built to the immediate south. Hillel Geva has shown conclusively that the Herodian Tower in the Citadel Museum is the Hippicus Tower.

“You have to understand that a 150-year mistake has finally been corrected,” explains Sion, referring to the Hippicus hypothesis. Second, it seems that countless maps and drawings of the so-called second wall suddenly became irrelevant.”

The Second Wall, according to Josephus, began at the Gennath Gate, which had been excavated by Avigad some 400 meters to the east of the Jaffa Gate, and ended at the Antonia Fortress at the northwest corner of the Temple Mount. Some maps still show the Second Wall going north from somewhere near the Citadel (David’s Tower) and then turning east to keep Golgotha outside the city and then going north again in the direction of the Damascus Gate. It will be good to get this “kink” out of the line of the Second Wall, but I am not too optimistic about this as it takes a long time for publishers to catch up with the latest archaeological discoveries. This plan of Jerusalem published in Dan Bahat’s Atlas of Jerusalem still has the kink in it (see red arrow):

The “conceptual revolution about life in the city at the end of the Second Temple and Roman period (63 B.C.E.-324 C.E.)”, which the excavators claim to have made suddenly, however, had already been made by Avigad in the 1980′s, when he discovered the Gennath Gate and the beginning of the Second Wall in the area of the Cardo in the Jewish Quarter. The maps I have drawn for him and all subsequent maps of Jerusalem always showed that the Second Wall began at the Gennath Gate, which is located halfway between the presentday Jaffa Gate and the Temple Mount. The Second wall has been shown correctly, for example, in the New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land (1993):

I don’t quite understand their claim about the Hippicus Tower, which is a solid tower built on the bedrock. The masonry is Herodian and the 10th Legion’s aqueduct and wall in question does not come near the base of this tower. The fact that they acknowledge that an Herodian aqueduct may be located below the Roman aqueduct they found, proves that their claim about the Hippicus Tower still needs to be substantiated.

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The construction will cause generations of weeping over the serious damage to the site, Tsafrir said at the conference on archaeological findings in the Jerusalem area sponsored by the Hebrew University’s Institute of Archaeology and the Antiquities Authority.

As we have seen with the reconstruction and integration of the Byzantine Cardo in the Jewish Quarter, it is possible for preserved remains to be incorporated into modern buildings.

Source: Joe Lauer

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In 1996, Hershel Shanks, Editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, asked me to illustrate an article by John S. Crawford, entitled “Multiculturalism at Sardis” (BAR, Sept/Oct 1996 pp. 38 – 47). This involved drawing up a complex dating from the Byzantine period, which had been excavated in the city (originally mentioned as one of the 7 churches of Revelation). The complex comprised a colonnade of shops, some owned by Jews and some by Christians, an adjacent synagogue and adjoining this, an elaborate bath-gymnasium, with a marble forecourt:

He also requested a detailed drawing of the shops, where symbols carved on the stones revealed the differing religious affiliation of the owners. The whole point of the article, was, as its title implies, to show how Christians and Jews lived in Sardis side by side, in full tolerance of each other. I distinctly remembered drawing the two menorot incised on the doorjamb of the shop identified as belonging to Jacob the dyer. On the drawing, the two menorot are drawn on the outside of the shop, although in reality they are carved on a stone of the inside door jamb:

On our recent visit to the site, however, there was no indication of these evocative symbols, only numbers labelling each shop. Knowing that they must be there, we peered and felt around and it was deeply satisfying to find one and then another lampstand carved into the stone, just as I had drawn them up from original photos, taken by the Harvard-Cornell excavations in the 1960s and 70s. A large menorah can be seen on the right side of the stone, while a smaller one is visible to the left of the same stone:

We were blown away by the richness of Turkey’s Biblical heritage and are astounded at the recent direction taken by the country. Whither the “Other Holy Land?”

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The Palatial Mansion, excavated by Prof. Nahman Avigad in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, may have been the Palace of the High Priest where Jesus stood before Caiaphas, the son-in-law of Annas.

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Although it is not entirely clear from the report where the excavated wall is located, it can only be a continuation of the city wall (or a deepening of the previously excavated area next to it) that was earlier discovered, first in the 1970′s and continued in 1985-7 under the auspices of the late Prof. Benjamin Mazar and his granddaughter Eilat. This city wall is attached to a monumental building and a possible gateway and large tower, which was already explored by Charles Warren in the 1860′s.

The possibility of having found an Iron Age gateway was proposed confidentially to Eilat Mazar by myself, but it was reported to the press before I was given a chance to explore this hypothesis (Jerusalem Post, April 22, 1986). The difficulty of identifying the building that was excavated by the late Prof. Benjamin Mazar with a gateway is that the chambers are constructed very differently from gate chambers of that period.

Whether this “newly” found wall belongs to the Solomonic or a later period in the Iron Age remains to be seen. What is interesting, however, is the construction of the wall. Most of the stones have roughly hewn bosses and irregular margins. The ashlars in the stone courses are laid in a header-and-stretcher construction. The masonry looks, in fact, identical to that of the “Extra Tower” or “Projecting Tower”, as Warren referred to this construction. This area was excavated by the late Dame Kathleen Kenyon (Area SII) in the 1960′s, who dated this tower, based on the archaeological finds, to the eighth century B.C. (Digging Up Jerusalem, p. 115). It appears therefore to be a strengthening of the fortifications in this area during that time. The masonry in the newly reported wall looks identical and therefore may date to the eighth century B.C. as well and may be a reconstruction of an earlier wall section.

Additionally, as I plan to explain in an upcoming article on the Golden Gate, this masonry is identical to the lower courses on either side of this gate in the Eastern Wall of the Temple Mount. I have argued before that the monolithic gate posts inside the Golden Gate belong to the original Shushan Gate, the gate in the Eastern Wall of the Temple Mount of the First Temple period, which was constructed by King Hezekiah in the eighth century B.C.

Despite the lack of clarity in the reporting on the excavation results of this wall, it is nevertheless exciting to have more evidence of the city of Jerusalem during the First Temple period.

UPDATE: “Everything speaks for itself” … is the remark made repeatedly by Eilat Mazar in this video on the Arutz 7 website.
However, all it speaks to me of is … that she dug deeper in previously excavated areas and did not discover anything major that wasn’t known before.
The picture of the wall with the header-and-stretcher construction belongs to the “Projecting or Corner Tower” and not to the “new” city wall, as the first reports appeared to indicate. This tower was already dated by Kenyon to the 8th century B.C., as noted above. More pictures can be seen on the Hebrew University’s Facebook.

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Prof. Galil also notes that the inscription was discovered in a provincial town in Judea. He explains that if there were scribes in the periphery, it can be assumed that those inhabiting the central region and Jerusalem were even more proficient writers. “It can now be maintained that it was highly reasonable that during the 10th century BCE, during the reign of King David, there were scribes in Israel who were able to write literary texts and complex historiographies such as the books of Judges and Samuel.” He adds that the complexity of the text discovered in Khirbet Qeiyafa, along with the impressive fortifications revealed at the site, refute the claims denying the existence of the Kingdom of Israel at that time.

This conformation of the authenticity of the Bible and the existence of David’s kingdom with Jerusalem as its capital does not come as a surprise to Bible students. Some archaeologists have tried to rewrite the history of Israel from the ground up, i.e. based on archaeological evidence only. They now have to rethink their flawed theories, thanks to a humble potsherd.

Source: Joe Lauer

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We then suggested that a small, but beautifully decorated tomb in the area below St. Onuphrius Monastery might have belonged to Annas the High Priest, who condemned Jesus to death, for the Temple Mount could be viewed from this tomb and the architectural decoration of the tomb has been copied from the Temple Mount. There are other decorated tombs in this area. Instead of a burial place for strangers, this area was most likely the cemetery of priestly families.

Entrance to the Tomb of Annas the High Priest

Reconstruction of the Tomb of Annas (© Ritmeyer Archaeological Design)

In June 2000, another tomb was accidentally found, which contained bones and remains of a linen shroud. The tomb is located next to the tomb which we had identified as Tomb of Annas. Carbon-14 dating showed that the shroud dated from the first half of the first century AD. It has been reported that a new analysis has now showed that the man to whom the shroud belonged suffered from leprosy. Leprosy is mentioned in the Bible, but this is the first time that archaeological evidence has proved that it actually existed. Joe Lauer pointed me to an article in the Daily Mail, which has several photographs of the tomb.

It is interesting to note that this shroud doesn’t look at all like the Turin Shroud. The shroud in Jerusalem was made up of several wrappings and there was a separate wrapping for the head. This would, of course, be in harmony with the burial of Jesus, whose body was buried with a separate head cloth (John 20.27).

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