Jerusalem. The Biography

the last Ptolemaic queen, wanted Jerusalem for herself.

     
Ruthless, murderous and brilliant, Herod the Great, half-Jewish and half-Arab, conquered Jerusalem, rebuilt the Temple (shown here in a model reconstruction) and created the city at its most splendid.

     

     
This ossuary, marked ‘Simon the builder of the Sanctuary’, probably contained the bones of his architect. The inscription in Greek from the Temple warning gentiles not to enter the inner courts on pain of death.

     
Most of the southern and western walls of the Temple Mount, including the shrine, the Wall, are Herodian. The impregnable south-eastern corner was the Pinnacle where Jesus was tempted by Satan. A seam in the wall (just visible on the far right of this picture) seems to show Herod’s giant ashlars to the left and the older, smaller Maccabean stones to the right.

     
Jesus’ Crucifixion, depicted by van Eyck in this painting, was almost certainly a Roman measure, backed by the Temple elite, to destroy any messianic threat to the status quo.

     
Herod the Great’s son Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee, mocked Jesus but refused to judge him.

     
King Herod Agrippa was an urbane, happy-go-lucky adventurer and the most powerful Jew in Roman history. His friendship with the psychotic Emperor Caligula saved Jerusalem, and he later helped raise Claudius to the throne.

     

     

     

     

     
After four years of independence, Titus, the son of the new Roman Emperor Vespasian, arrived to besiege Jerusalem. The city and its Temple were destroyed in the savage fighting: archaeologists have discovered the skeletal arm of young girl trapped in a burned house and the heap of Herodian stones pushed off the Temple Mount by the Roman soldiers as they smashed Herod’s Royal Portico. The Arch of Titus in Rome celebrates his Triumph in which the candelbra, or menorah, symbol of the Maccabees, was displayed, and this coin, inscribed ‘Judaea Capta’, commemorates the victory.

     

     

     
Restless, petulant and talented, Emperor Hadrian banned Judaism and refounded Jerusalem as a Roman town, Aelia Capitolina, which provoked a Jewish rebellion led by Simon Bar Kochba (who issued this coin depicting the restored Temple.

     
This graffiti (Domine Ivimus ‘We go to the Lord’) was discovered by the Armenians beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1978. Possibly dating from around ad 300, does it show that Christian pilgrims prayed beneath Hadrian’s pagan temple?

     
Constantine the Great was no saint – he murdered his wife and son – but he embraced Christianity and transformed Jerusalem, ordering the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which he sent his mother Helena to supervise.

     
Emperor and philosopher Julian overturned Christianity, restored paganism and gave the Temple Mount back to the Jews, before he was killed fighting the Persians.

     

     
The Byzantine emperor Justinian I and his wife Theodora, once a promiscuous showgirl, promoted themselves as universal Christian monarchs and built the colossal Nea Church in Jerusalem.

     

     
The Madaba Map shows the magnificence of Byzantine Jerusalem and ignores the Temple Mount which was kept as the symbolic rubbish-heap of Judaism. After the East fell to the Persians, Emperor Heraclius entered the city in 630 through the Golden Gate, which Jews, Muslims and Christians believe to be the setting for the Apocalypse.

     
Arab conquest: This illustration from Nizami’s poem
Khamza
shows Muhammad’s Night Flight (Isra) to Jerusalem, riding Buraq, his steed with the human face, followed by his Ascension (Miraj) to converse with Jesus, Moses and Abraham.

     
Caliph Abd al-Malik (seen here in one of the last Islamic coins to show human features) was the real formulator of Islam and a visionary statesman – yet it was said that his breath was so vile it could kill flies. In 691 he built the first surviving Muslim shrine, the Dome of the Rock, inscribed with the earliest quotations from the Koran.

     

     
Abd al-Malik’s Dome affirmed the supremacy of Islam and his Umayyad empire, challenged Christianity, outshone the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and emphasized the Muslims as successors to the Jews by building on the Rock, the foundation stone of the Jewish Temple.

     
In 1099, after four hundred years of Islamic rule, the Crusaders stormed Jerusalem with an orgy of killing. The city still stank of putrescent flesh six months later.

     
King of Jerusalem Baldwin I was