Joe Uziel - Böcker

The Temple Mount compound (known in Arabic as the Haram aš-Šarīf), situated on the east side of the Old City of urban Jerusalem, is a majestic and holy site that has been venerated by millions for more than two thousand years. The compound’s interior has been out of bounds to Western archaeologists for over a century, and modern researchers have therefore concentrated their efforts on the massive ancient stone walls that surround it.The third volume in the Ancient Jerusalem Publication series, The Southern Wall of the Temple Mount and Its Corners: Past, Present and Future concentrates on the southern retaining wall of the Herodian Temple Mount in Jerusalem, its two corners, and Robinson’s Arch on the southern edge of the Western Wall. It presents the final reports of three excavations carried out adjacent to the wall and one under Robinson’s Arch. Among the many new interpretations, the excavators present intriguing theories regarding the engineering of an ancient ramp for herding sacrificial animals up to the Temple Mount and a new reading of an Isaiah 66:14 graffito. The volume devotes a large section to conservation projects carried out in order to understand the problems causing the deterioration of the stones in the southern part of the Western Wall and find solutions to protect and preserve them. The volume also presents details of a major ground penetrating radar examination of this stretch of the Western Wall.

Some 170 years have passed since the Swiss doctor Titus Tobler published the first scientific mention of a stone arch built over a large, plastered pool west of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It was the arch that supported the path leading from the Old City market to the Chain Gate, one of the passages to the Temple Mount that, years later, scholars began to refer to as Wilson’s Arch. Early exploration focused on when it had been built, and it soon became clear that it was the last link in the chain of arches that bolstered the path leading to one of the main entrances to the holy compound of the Temple Mount/Haram aš-Šarīf, which for centuries had served as the religious center of the city of Jerusalem.Wilson’s Arch has been one of the most debated architectural elements in Jerusalem’s landscape. Despite its importance for reconstructing the history of Jerusalem and particularly for understanding the entrances onto the Temple Mount, major excavations beneath the arch did not begin until 2015. Beneath Wilson’s Arch tells the story of the arch, of current and past excavations, of its amazing artifacts and subterranean chambers, of its place in the chronicles of Roman Jerusalem and the mysteries hidden in the Walls of the Temple Mount. Now, after years of full-scale scientific excavation, archaeologists Joe Uziel, Tehillah Lieberman and Avi Solomon reveal and analyze what has for so long been hidden in and beneath the ruins of this massive ancient structure.

This volume is an excavation report on the important Bronze and Iron Age site, Tel Nagila. The site was excavated in the 1960s but the report was never published. Tel Nagila was an important Middle Bronze Age site and a Judahite site during Iron Age II. This report includes chapters by experts discussing the finds, including tombs, pottery and flint artifacts, as well as a spatial analysis and explorations of the cultic nature of the site.