Maze of tunnels reveals remains of ancient Jerusalem
Maze of tunnels reveals remains of ancient Jerusalem I’m struggling to keep up with the Israeli archaeologist as he slips his thin frame easily through the twisting and narrow tunnel studded with protruding rock. With only the light of our smartphones to guide us, I bend low to prevent my battered yellow hard hat from scraping the stone overhead. Then he stops abruptly. “I’m going to show you something cool.” The cramped passage lies beneath a rocky spur of land jutting south from Jerusalem’s Old City. The narrow ridge, the site of early Jerusalem and today packed with houses occupied mostly by I follow Uziel into a recently excavated space that’s the size and height of a comfortable suburban living room. His light picks out a stubby, pale cylinder. “It’s a Byzantine column,” he explains, crouching down to pull back a lumpy sandbag, revealing a smooth white surface. “And this is a portion of the marble floor.” We are standing in a fifth-century church built to commemorate the site where Jesus is said to have cured a blind man near the Pool of Siloam. The For Uziel the church is more than cool. It’s also the latest complication in one of the world’s most expensive and controversial archaeological projects. His mission is to unearth a 2,000-year-old, 2,000-foot-long street that once conveyed pilgrims, merchants, and other visitors to one of the wonders of ancient Palestine: the Jewish Temple. Choked with debris during the fiery destruction of the city by Roman forces in A.D. 70, this monumental path disappeared from view. “Because of the church, we have to change direction,” says Uziel. “You never know what you are going to hit.” He When the British excavators burrowed their way into the church, tunneling was common. Today, except under special circumstances, it is seen as both dangerous and unscientific. Here, however, excavating from the surface down is impractical, given that people live just yards above. Instead, an army of engineers and construction workers, toiling 16 hours a day in two shifts, is boring a horizontal shaft under the spine of the ridge. As they move forward, Uziel and his team laboriously dig out earth from the top of each newly exposed section to the bottom, retrieving pottery, coins, and Tunnel workers battle unstable soil that has led to cave-ins, while residents living above complain of damage to their homes. The ambitious project, funded largely by a Jewish settler organization, is in a particularly sensitive spot in East Jerusalem, the area of the city annexed by Israel in 1967 that much of the world considers occupied territory. (Most excavation in such territory is illegal under international law.) Called Wadi Hilweh by Palestinians, for Jews this is the City of David, the place where King David created the first Israelite capital. Uziel leads me back The path proved short-lived. Unearthed coins suggest that a notorious gentile oversaw construction of the monumental staircase around A.D. 30, a Roman “Truth shall spring out of the earth,” say the Psalms, but whose truth is the question that haunts Jerusalem. In a city central to the three great monotheistic faiths, putting a spade into the ground can have immediate and far-reaching consequences. In few places on Earth can an archaeological excavation so quickly spark a riot, threaten a regional war, or set the entire world on edge. After the Israeli government opened a new exit to an underground passage along a part of the Western Wall in the Old City’s Muslim Quarter in 1996, some 120 people across the region died during violent protests. Subsequent squabbling over who should control what lies “Archaeology in Jerusalem is so sensitive that it touches not just the research community but politicians and the general public,” acknowledges Yuval Baruch of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). Baruch is chief of the IAA’s busy Jerusalem office, and he’s proud of his unofficial title as the mayor of underground Jerusalem. Under his reign the city has become one of the world’s busiest archaeological sites, with around a hundred excavations a year. Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas has complained that the constant digging is part of a campaign to overwhelm 1,400 years of Muslim heritage with Jewish finds. “Here archaeology is not merely about scientific knowledge—it is a political science,” adds Yusuf Natsheh, director of Islamic archaeology for the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, the religious foundation that oversees Jerusalem’s Muslim holy sites. Baruch hotly denies any bias in what’s excavated. Whether Canaanite or crusader, each era gets its scientific due, he insists. There is no doubt that Israeli archaeologists are among the best trained in the world. Yet there’s also no doubt that archaeology is wielded as a political weapon in the Arab-Israeli conflict, with Israelis having the edge since they Politics, religion, and archaeology have long been deeply entwined here. Around A.D. 327, Empress Helena presided over the demolition of a Roman temple. “She opened up the earth, scattered the dust, and found three crosses in disarray,” according to a nearly contemporary source. The elderly mother of Constantine the Great, she declared one to be the piece of wood on which Jesus was crucified. What was hailed as the True Cross, the most famous of Christian Some 1,500 years later, a French scholar and politician named Louis-Félicien Joseph Caignart de Saulcy launched the city’s first archaeological excavation and sparked another craze. In 1863 he dug out a complex of elaborate tombs, enraging local Jews who filled in at night what his workers exposed in the day. Undeterred, de Saulcy hauled to the Louvre an ancient sarcophagus containing the remains of what he claimed was an early Jewish queen. Other European explorers arrived to seek their own biblical treasures. In 1867 the British dispatched a young Welshman to probe Jerusalem’s underground terrain. Charles Warren hired local A century later, when Israel captured East Jerusalem, including the Old City, from Arab forces during the 1967 Six Day War, Jewish archaeologists launched major scientific excavations that became a centerpiece of the young country’s efforts to prove and celebrate its ancient roots. They unearthed first-century villas of the Jewish elite filled with elegant Some excavations, however, were overtly religious. Only a few segments of the Western Wall—a remnant of Herod the Great’s Temple platform and Judaism’s most sacred site where Jews can pray—are aboveground, so after the Six Day War, the Ministry of Religion began an effort to expose its entire length by digging tunnels. Longer than the Empire State Building is tall, the wall is covered by later buildings along more than half its length. For almost two decades there was little archaeological supervision of the tunnel work, and untold data were lost, says One summer morning in 1981, just after Raiders of the Lost Ark opened in theaters, those suspicions were confirmed. Guards from the waqf encountered a prominent rabbi knocking down a crusader-era wall that sealed an ancient subterranean gate beneath the sacred platform. The rabbi believed the lost ark was secreted beneath the Dome of the Rock, one of Islam’s oldest and holiest shrines. An underground scuffle ensued, and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin quickly ordered the gate sealed before the conflict could morph into a full-fledged international crisis. Fifteen years later, it was the turn of Israeli Jews to express outrage. In 1996 the waqf turned one of Jerusalem’s most impressive underground spaces, an enormous columned hall beneath the southeastern end of the platform known as Solomon’s Stables, from a dusty storeroom into the large Al Marwani Mosque. Three years later, the Israeli prime minister’s office granted a waqf request to open a new exit to ensure crowd safety—Israel controls security on the platform—but without informing the IAA. Heavy machinery quickly scooped out a vast pit without formal archaeological supervision. “By the time we got wind of it and stopped the work, a huge amount of damage had been done,” recalls the IAA’s Jon Seligman, then in charge of Jerusalem Israeli police later hauled the resulting tons of earth away. In 2004 a privately funded sifting project started sorting through the dirt and has so far recovered more than half a million artifacts. When I visit the project’s lab, archaeologist Gabriel Barkay pulls out cardboard boxes containing chunks of colored marble he believes came from courtyards surrounding the Jewish Temple. Seligman and many of his colleagues, however, dismiss the finds as having little value, since they were On a drizzly winter morning I make my way to the entrance of the Western Wall tunnels, just off the plaza dense with men in black hats and coats. Inside is a jumble of underground reception halls, prayer areas, and archaeological excavations. Down the hall from a glass-and-steel synagogue cantilevered within a medieval Islamic religious school are Roman latrines and a recently unearthed small theater—the first found in ancient Jerusalem—built as part of the second-century revival of the city as Aelia Capitolina. At a plywood door “We are standing in the western triclinium”—a Roman term for a dining area with couches—“and the eastern hall is just beyond that passage,” she says while keeping an eye on the gently swaying rock. According to her research, the elegant compound was built in the first century B.C. to wine and Weksler-Bdolah excuses herself when an engineer in a white helmet calls out from above. They have a long and heated discussion over a section of yellow plaster that he wants to remove to accommodate a metal stairway for tourists. “This is Roman-era plaster and very unusual,” she says to me in an aside. These are the sort of debates that echo regularly beneath the streets of Jerusalem: What should remain, and what should be sacrificed? A century and a half of discoveries under Jerusalem have upset old beliefs and dashed cherished myths. Many archaeologists today dismiss the biblical vision of King Solomon’s glittering Yet the digs have unearthed clay seal impressions bearing the names of biblical courtiers, lending credibility to their existence. Archaeological work also backs Empress Helena’s assertion that Jesus was crucified and buried on land that is within what is now the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. And archaeologist Eilat Mazar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem even claims to have found the palace of King David, the first Israelite ruler of Jerusalem. One quiet Saturday morning, the Jewish Sabbath, I run into Mazar as she wanders through the otherwise deserted City of David park. On the northeastern edge of the narrow ridge, she excavated a building with thick walls next to an impressive stepped stone structure that braces the steep slope. Based on the pottery she found, Mazar dates the building to around 1000 B.C.—the traditional date assigned to the Israelite takeover of Jebusite Jerusalem. She is so deep in thought that I have to call her name twice to bring her out of her reverie. “I like to come here when it is quiet to think,” she explains. She invites me down steps that lead to a metal catwalk above her famous excavation. She leans over the rail and points at the rubble below. Her 2005 discovery made headlines around the world, but colleagues remain mostly unconvinced. She relies heavily on pottery for dating, rather than more modern methods such as radiocarbon, and her literal reading of the Bible is seen by many archaeologists as flawed. Even the sign on the catwalk adds a question mark to the identification of the site: “The remains of King David’s palace?” “I rely on facts,” she says, a touch of irritation in her Mazar is eager to dig just to the north, where she believes the famous palace of David’s son, Solomon, lies hidden. “I am sure it is there,” she says with a sudden fierceness. “We need to excavate this!” She’s preparing a request for permission to dig the site. Whether the IAA will approve her further excavation is in question. “Today, if you dig, you need solid data—not just coins or pottery, but results using physics and biology,” says the IAA’s Baruch. “Eilat Mazar is not playing in this game.” Across the street from Mazar’s putative palace of David, Yuval Gadot epitomizes this new game. The tall and affable Tel Aviv University archaeologist once opposed Israeli digs in this overwhelmingly Palestinian neighborhood, but the opportunity to lead the city’s largest recent excavation proved too tempting to refuse. What once was a dusty parking lot is now an enormous pit open to the sky, encompassing much of the city’s past 2,600 years, from early Islamic workshops and a Roman villa to impressive Iron Age buildings predating the Babylonian destruction of 586 B.C. Much of the work takes place in off-site labs, where specialists analyze everything from ancient parasites in Islamic cesspits to intricate gold jewlery from the days of Greek rule. Soon the excavation will open to the public, beneath a large new visitors center to accommodate the increasing hordes of tourists. Gadot, Mazar, and Uziel have helped turn this quiet Arab village into one of Israel’s most popular attractions in a city rated among the world’s fastest growing tourist destinations. At night their archaeological sites serve as dramatic backdrops for laser light shows. “Here it began, and here it continues,” thunders the narrator amid colored lights and swelling music. “The return to Zion!” The organization behind this effort is the City of David Foundation. Created by former Israeli military commander David Be’eri in the 1980s to establish a strong Jewish presence, it When I meet with the foundation’s vice president, Doron Spielman, he is bullish about the future. “If the next 10 years are like the last 10 years, this will be the number one archaeological spot in the world,” says the Jewish native of the Detroit suburbs. Spielman expects the visitor tally to nearly quadruple to two In his telling, the development helps everyone. “People buy their Popsicles and drinks from Arab stores,” he says. “And there is a lot of security that benefits both Arabs and Jews.” He is also optimistic about the impact of Jewish residents, who now number about one in 10 and who live largely in gated compounds patrolled by armed guards. “You will see this as a model of coexistence. People will be living together within an active archaeology site with a lot of opportunity.” That’s not how Abd Just up the street, I pay a visit to Sahar Abbasi, an English teacher who also works as deputy director at the Wadi Hilweh Information Center, a Palestinian organization housed in a modest storefront. “The excavations pose many challenges,” she says. “Our homes are being damaged and destroyed.” She estimates that 40 houses have been affected, half of them severely, “If they can’t control us from above, they start to control us from below,” Abbasi adds. One morning, off a narrow alley above Uziel’s tunnel, Arafat Hamad welcomes me into his courtyard studded with lemon trees. A retired barber, Hamad has short silver hair and a fast smile that fades quickly. “I built this house in 1964 with a thick concrete foundation, but look what has happened in the past couple of years,” he says, pointing to wide cracks that creep up to just below the first-floor windows. Taking me around to the side of the house, Hamad points to piles of rubble. “One evening last August we were sitting on the porch when the house began to Across the street, Hamad’s neighbor, an older woman named Miriam Bashir, doesn’t seem happy to see me. “I’m fed up with journalists,” she says. “I just want to be left alone. We are lost. We don’t know what to do!” After a few minutes she relents and agrees to show me the damage to her interior walls. “The cracks began three years ago, but they became more obvious in the past year and a When I spoke with Spielman, he dismissed the concerns of Arab residents. “Yes, we are working under people’s homes, which is not an issue if it is engineered well, which it is.” Three days after my visit to the Palestinians, Spielman sent a chilly email warning me against providing a stage for “the claims of politically motivated, anti-Israel, special interest groups.” He requested that I supply in writing the details of any “nefarious claims” before publication. My What lies beneath Jerusalem reveals that the city’s history is too rich and complicated to fit any single narrative, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. Helena failed to wipe away its pagan past, just as the Romans fell short of annihilating the rebellious Judaean capital and Muslims couldn’t remove all traces of the hated crusader occupation. No matter who is in charge of this most contested of places, evidence from the past inevitably will surface, challenging any story tailored to a narrow “Everyone who ruled Jerusalem did the same thing: built his tower and hoisted his flag,” says Weksler-Bdolah with a laugh, taking the long view demanded by this venerable and violent place. “But I think it is stronger than all those who try to control it. No one can completely erase what came before.”
Written by : Andrew Lawler
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