Jerusalem. The Biography

2007
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The Temple Mount – Har haBayit in Hebrew, Haram al-Sharif in Arabic, known in the Bible as Mount Moriah – is the centrepiece of Jerusalem. The Western Wall, the holiest shrine of Judaism, is part of Herod’s western supporting wall of the esplanade, the setting for the Islamic shrines, the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa Mosque. To many, these 35 acres remain the centre of the world.

     
In 1994, archaeologists found this stele at Tel Dan on which Hazael, King of Aram-Syria, boasts of his victory over Judaea, the ‘house of David’, thereby confirming David’s existence.

     
The site of Solomon’s temple has been ravaged and rebuilt so often that little remains, except this ivory pomegranate inscribed ‘to the House of Holiness’. It was probably used as the head of a staff during religious processions in the First Temple.

     
In 701 BC , King Hezekiah fortified the city against the approaching Assyrian army. His so-called broad wall can be seen in today’s Jewish Quarter.

     
Meanwhile two teams of his engineers started digging the 533-metre-long Siloam Tunnel to provide water for the city: when they met in the middle, they celebrated with this inscription, which was discovered by a schoolboy in 1891.

     
Before he turned to Jerusalem, Sennacherib, master of the mighty, rapacious Assyrian empire, stormed Hezekiah’s second city Lachish. The bas-reliefs in his Nineveh palace depict the bloody siege and the punishments suffered by its citizens. Here Judaean families are led away by an Assyrian.

     

     
King Darius, seen here in a relief from his Persepolis palace, was the real creator of the Persian Empire that ruled Jerusalem for over two centuries. He allowed the Jewish priests to govern themselves, even issuing this Yehud (Judaea) coin.

     

     

     
After Alexander the Great’s early death, two Greek families vied to control his empire. Ptolemy I Soter hijacked Alexander’s corpse, founded a kingdom in Egypt and stormed Jerusalem. After a century under the Ptolemies, their Seleucid rivals grabbed Jerusalem. The effete, flamboyant King Antiochus IV polluted the Temple and tried to annihilate Judaism, provoking a revolt by Judah the Maccabee , whose family created the new Jewish kingdom that lasted until the arrival of the Romans.

     

     
The Roman strongman of the east, Mark Antony, backed a new ruler, Herod, but his mistress Cleopatra,