City of David

The City of David (, "Ir David"), called in , Wadi Hilweh, a neighborhood of Silwan, is a Palestinian Arab village intertwined with an Israeli settlement, and the archaeological site which is speculated to constitute the original settlement core of Bronze and Iron Age Jerusalem.
The City of David is highly controversial in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; it is located in the area of the West Bank that was annexed to Israel following the 1967 Six-Day War and 1980 Jerusalem Law. The international community regards Israeli settlements illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.
Archaeologically it is best known for its Canaanite infrastructure dated to the Middle Bronze Age, and its newer structures from the Iron Age, built by Judean kings.
Organised as an Israeli national park, its management was taken over in 1997 by the Ir David Foundation.
Name.
There is a tendency by the Elad organisation and its associates to expand the name "City of David" to adjacent areas. Still, the "Ophel" and the Givati Parking Lot dig are generally treated separately.
Wadi Hilweh; Ophel section.
The area is known as the Arab neighborhood of Wadi Hilweh, part of the village of Silwan, and extends down from the southern city walls of Jerusalem's Old City. The saddle between the city walls and Wadi Hilweh was given the name "Ophel" by its 1968-78 excavator, Benjamin Mazar, a name still used by archaeologists. The exact meaning and location of the biblical Ophel, however, is contested.
City of David.
The name "City of David" originates in the biblical narrative, where King David is described as the Israelite leader who conquers the fortified city of Jebus and renames it after himself. This was described in chapter 5 of the "Second Book of Samuel", which states (verses 7–9):
Nevertheless, David captured the fortress of Zion (that is, the City of David). On that day he said, “Whoever attacks the Jebusites must use the water shaft to reach the lame and blind who are despised by David. That is why it is said, “The blind and the lame will never enter the palace.” So David took up residence in the fortress and called it the City of David. He built it up all the way around, from the supporting terraces inward.
In his "Antiquities of the Jews" Jewish-Roman historian Josephus repeated the story.
First suggested in 1920 for this particular area, the term "City of David" was used officially from the 1970s onward, following the capture of East Jerusalem by Israel, but today the name with its biblical and political connotations is questioned by some in the archaeological academic community.
Modern history.
Late Ottoman period.
The area immediately outside the walls of Jerusalem was undeveloped for most of early modern history, with the exception of the village of Silwan. Modern settlement outside of the walls began in the late 19th century. A few small buildings are visible on the hill facing the houses of Silwan in the Illés Relief, built between 1864 and 1873. In 1873–1874 a member of the notable Jewish Meyuchas family moved to a house on the towards the bottom of the hill. During the early 20th century, Baron de Rothschild acquired some land in the same area for the purposes of archaeological excavation. The Meyuchas family left in the 1930s; no other Jewish families are known to have settled in the area during the period.
Settlement in Mandatory Palestine.
During the later stages of the Mandate era the houses of the nearby Arab village of Silwan expanded across the Kidron Valley and up the ridge of what became Wadi Hilweh.
Jordanian period.
After the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the whole area fell on the eastern side of the Green Line under Jordanian control.
Post 1967 and Israeli settlement.
Arab families continued to live on the ridge and to build houses there after 1967.
From 1968 to 1977 the Israel Exploration Society started the first excavations at the Ophel, north of the City of David proper, headed by Benjamin Mazar and Eilat Mazar.
In October 2014, Uri Ariel, politician from The Jewish Home party and at that time Israeli Minister of Housing and Construction, caused controversy when he suggested he was considering taking up residence in the area.
The ElAd Foundation is planning the construction of a 16,000 m2 structure on the opposite side of the Wadi Hilweh Street, at the former Givati parking lot, the "Kedem Compound", which was approved in April 2014, a project that was denounced by UNESCO in October 2016.
Archaeological outline.
Overview.
The area is one of the most intensively excavated sites in the Holy Land. Archaeological practice at the site has been criticized for its practitioners not acknowledging political and corporate motivations, questionable field practice and overtly skewed interpretations.
Location and topography.
It is on a narrow ridge running south from the Temple Mount. The site has a good defensive position, as it is almost surrounded by the Central or Tyropoeon Valley to its west, by the Hinnom Valley to the south, and the Kidron Valley on the east.
The ridge is currently inside the predominantly Arab neighborhood of Wadi Hilweh, which is part of Silwan, an East Jerusalem suburb.
Bronze and Iron Age.
It is thought to have been the site of a walled city from the Bronze Age, which enjoyed the defensive advantages of its position. In the pre-Israelite period, the area is thought to have been separated from the site of the later Temple Mount by the Ophel, an uninhabited area which became the seat of government under Israelite rule.
In 2014, excavations at the Givati parking lot showed there had been no 10th-century city wall, meaning: no fortified settlement in the City of David during the Iron IIA (c. 1000–925 BCE), the time span usually proposed by biblical scholars for the reigns of David, Solomon and Rehoboam.
During the reign of Hezekiah (reign c. 716–697/687 BCE), the walls of Jerusalem were expanded westward, across the Central Valley from the City of David and the Temple Mount, enclosing a previously unwalled suburb in the area known today as the Western Hill of the Old City.
Identification.
The debate within biblical archaeology on whether this site on the hill southeast of the Old City could be identified with what the Hebrew Bible calls Jebus and later the City of David, began in the late 19th century with the excavations of Charles Warren and Hermann Guthe. The 1909–11 work of Louis-Hugues Vincent and Montagu Brownlow Parker identified the earliest known settlement traces in the Jerusalem region, suggesting the area was an ancient core of settlement in Jerusalem dating back to the Bronze Age.
Exploration.
Archaeological exploration of the area began in the nineteenth century, with excavations undertaken by Charles Warren in 1867. Warren was sent by the Palestine Exploration Fund. Warren conducted an excavation of the area south of the Temple Mount and recovered a massive fortification. The finding led him to conduct more excavations at the area south of the Temple Mount. There he revealed a vertical shaft descending from a slanted tunnel to an apparent water source. He suggested that the shaft was used to supply water to the city, which he believed was the old biblical city of David. Today this shaft is called after its discoverer "Warren's shaft", but his interpretation has been proven wrong, as the shaft is not man-made and had not yet been discovered by Jerusalem's inhabitants in the 10th century BCE.
There have been numerous excavations since and several digs are currently underway. Complete chronological lists of the digs are available at the website of the Israel Antiquities Authority, dating to following periods:
In 2010, an archaeological survey of the City of David was conducted by Rina Avner, Eliahu Shukron and Ronny Reich, on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). In 2012–2013, two teams of archaeologists conducted surveys of the area on behalf of the IAA; one led by Joseph (Joe) Uzziel, and the other by Yuval Gadot. Archaeological surveys in the City of David continued in 2014, led by Uzziel, and Nahshon Szanton.
Political dispute.
The right to control both the archaeological and the residential aspects of the City of David is hotly contested by Israelis and Palestinians. There is a proposal to turn most of the area into an archaeological park, and to transform a part of the Kidron Valley currently inhabited by Arabs into a park to be called the King's Garden.
Israeli archaeology at the site has been criticized; Tel Aviv University Professor Rafi Greenberg stated that archaeological practice at the site is "completely subsumed to political and corporate motivations that are, however, largely unacknowledged by its "neutral" practitioners, leading to questionable field practice and overtly skewed interpretations of the past".
Archaeological sites.
The remains at the site include several water tunnels, one of which was built by King Hezekiah and still carries water, several pools including the Pool of Siloam known from the Old and New Testaments, and in its vicinity scholars expect to find, or claim to have found, the remains of the Acra, a fortress built by Antiochus Epiphanes to subdue those Jerusalemites who were opposed to Hellenisation. City of David archaeologist Eilat Mazar believes that a so-called Large Stone Structure she has discovered at the upper area of the site and tentatively dated to the tenth to ninth century BC, may be the palace of King David. Not far from that excavation area a number of bullae (seal impressions) were unearthed, bearing the names of Yehucal son of Shelemiah and Gedaliah son of Pashhur, two officials mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah.
The ancient water systems connected to the Gihon Spring include natural, masonry-built, and rock-cut structures, such as
Other built structures, spread over excavated sections known as Area A, B, C, ... include
An adjacent and related excavation site is known as the
Finds by period.
Chalcolithic (4500–3500 BCE).
Chalcolithic remains include bits of pottery found in clefts in the bedrock by Macalister and Duncan. The expedition also discovered a number of places where the bedrock had been cut in various ways. These included areas where the rock had been smoothed and others where it had been cut to form flow channels. There were also several groups of small basins, sometimes called cup marks, cut into the bedrock. These are assumed to have been used for some form of agricultural processing. Macalister and Duncan speculated that they were used in olive oil processing.
Edwin C. M. van den Brink, who notes that similar carved basins have been found at Beit Shemesh and near Modi'in-Maccabim-Re'ut, speculates that they may have been created by repeated grinding and crushing activity, such as the grinding of grain or the crushing of olives. Eilat Mazar speculates that they were used to collect rainwater.
Early Bronze Age (3500–2350 BCE).
Pieces of pottery have been found.
Middle Bronze Age (2000–1550 BCE).
Middle Bronze Age Jerusalem is mentioned several times in Egyptian texts from the 19th–18th centuries BCE.
Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 BCE).
Pottery and bronze arrowheads dating form this period have been found.
In 2010, a fragment of a clay tablet dating from the 14th century BCE was uncovered, making it the oldest written document yet uncovered in Jerusalem. It is dated by the writing it bears, in an ancient Akkadian cuneiform script. The text was deciphered by graduate student Takayoshi Oshima working under professor Wayne Horowitz. According to Horowitz, the quality of the writing indicates that this was a royal inscription, apparently a letter from the king of Jerusalem to the pharaoh in Egypt. Professor Christopher Rollston points out that there is no mention of any personal names or titles and no place names in the document. He notes that the quality of the script is good but that this does not show that it is "international royal correspondence." He also suggests that caution should be taken before positing a definite date as it is not a stratified find, having been discovered after excavation in a "wet sieving" process.
Iron Age IIa (1000–925/900 BCE).
The period of the tenth and ninth centuries BCE has been the subject of an intense scholarly dispute, as well as of ongoing archaeological investigations.
The 2005 discovery by archaeologist Eilat Mazar of a Large Stone Structure, which she dated to the tenth century BCE, would be evidence of buildings in Jerusalem of a size appropriate to the capital of a centralized kingdom at that time. Others, most notably Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University, argue that the structure could, for the most part, be from the much later Hasmonean period. However, new evidence continues to emerge from the dig. Mazar's date is supported by 10th century imported luxury goods found within the Large Stone Structure, including two Phoenician-style ivory inlays once attached to iron objects. Comparable objects found in a Phoenician tomb at Achziv suggest that they may have decorated a sword handle. A quantity of luxury round, carinated bowls with red slip and hand burnishing support both the tenth century date and a sophisticated, urban lifestyle. A bone has been radiocarbon dated by Elisabetta Boaretto at the Weizmann Institute, showing a probable date between 1050 and 780 BCE. A large section of a "delicate and elegant" black-on-red jug, also found in the structure, is of a kind dated to the second half of the tenth century BCE.
In 2010 Mazar announced the discovery of what she believed to be a 10th-century BCE city wall. According to Mazar, "It's the most significant construction we have from First Temple days in Israel," and "It means that at that time, the 10th century, in Jerusalem there was a regime capable of carrying out such construction." Aren Maeir, an archaeology professor at Bar Ilan University, said he has yet to see evidence that the fortifications are as old as Mazar claims.
Doron Ben-Ami wrote in 2014 that, on the basis of his own excavations in the Givati parking lot area bordering on the "City of David" from the north-west, there was apparently no 10th-century city wall: "Had a fortified settlement existed in the City of David, then the course of the city wall on the west would have had to pass through the Givati excavation area. No such city wall has thus far been found. This means that the Iron IIA settlement [c. 1000–925 BCE] was not fortified."
Iron Age IIb (c. 925-720 BCE).
Ben-Ami goes on saying that his Givati findings indicate that "the fortified city of the Iron IIB, which encompassed both the City of David and the Western Hill, had no need for a fortification line between these two sectors of the city."
The related necropolis (9th-7th centuries BCE).
The elaborate rock-cut tombs of the Israelite period, forming what is known as the Silwan necropolis and dating from the 9th to the 7th centuries BCE, are found outside Wadi Hilweh/the City of David, on the ridge on the opposite, eastern side of the Kidron Valley in and under the Arab village of Silwan. These are large, elaborate tombs of skilfully cut into the stone face of the eastern slope, such as could only have been built by the highest-ranking members of a wealthy society. According to David Ussishkin, "here ministers, nobles and notables of the kingdom of Judah were buried."
The architecture of the tombs and the manner of burial is different "from anything known from contemporary Palestine. Elements such as entrances located high above the surface, gabled ceilings, straight ceilings with a cornice,13 trough-shaped resting-places with pillows, above-ground tombs, and inscriptions engraved on the facade appear only here." However, the stone benches were carved with headrests in a style borrowed from the Egyptian Hathor wig. Ussishkin believes that the architectural similarity to building styles of the Phoenician cities validates the biblical description of Phoenician influence on the Israelite kingdoms, but speculates that some or all of the tombs may have been built by Phoenician aristocrats living in Jerusalem.
Although only three partial inscriptions survive, the paleography makes the dating certain and they suffice for most archaeologists to identify one tomb with the Biblical Shebna, steward and treasurer of King Hezekiah.
Iron Age IIIb (8th century – 586 BCE).
This is the period that corresponds to the biblical Kings Hezekiah through Josiah and the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah by Nebuchadnezzar II.
King Hezekiah secured the city's water supply against siege by digging the Siloam Tunnel through bedrock and covering over all signs of the Gihon Spring and the fortifications that had surrounded it in earlier periods. He built the Pool of Siloam as a water reservoir. Hezekiah then surrounded the new reservoir and the city's burgeoning western suburbs with a new city wall.
Bullae with the names of Yehucal son of Shelemiah and Gedaliah son of Pashhur, two officials mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah, have been found.
Babylonian and Persian periods (586–322 BCE).
Two bullae in the Neo-Babylonian style, one showing a priest standing beside an altar to the gods Marduk and Nabu. A polished, black, scaraboid stone seal showing a "Babylonian cultic scene" of two bearded men standing on each side of an altar dedicated to the Babylonian moon god Sin. The scaraboid is understood to have been produced in Babylonia, with space left below that altar for a personal name. In that space are Hebrew letters that Peter van der Veen has read as the name "Shelomit".
Hasmoneans, Herodians and Roman governors (167 BCE – 70 CE).
Major archaeological finds include the Pool of Siloam, the monumental stepped road built by Pilate drained by an impressive channel, the palace of Queen Helena of Adiabene. Active Roman-era excavations are also underway at the Givati Parking Lot dig site.
Byzantine period (324–628 CE).
Byzantine-period mansion called the "House of Eusebius."
During the excavation of the area adjacent to the west, the so-called Givati Parking Lot dig, a hoard of 264 gold coins was found, dating to the time of Emperor Heraclius (7th century CE).
Tourism.
The entire site, including the Gihon Spring and the two Pools of Siloam, is incorporated in an archaeological park open to the public. Visitors can wade through the Siloam Tunnel, through which the waters of the ancient spring still flow, although the change in the water table in recent times mean that the once intermittent karstic spring is now artificially maintained through pumping.
The City of David/Wadi Hilweh is highly controversial in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In 2018, a leaked report by the European Economic Community cited the area as one being developed for tourism to justify settlements and insist on Jewish heritage at the expense of its Palestinian context.
See also.
Sites adjacent to the City of David:
Other related topics: