New Find Sheds Light on Ancient Site in Jerusalem

JERUSALEM (AP) — Newly found coins underneath Jerusalem's Western Wall could change the accepted belief about the construction of one of the world's most sacred sites two millennia ago, Israeli archaeologists said Wednesday.

The man usually credited with building the compound known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary is Herod, a Jewish ruler who died in 4 B.C. Herod's monumental compound replaced and expanded a much older Jewish temple complex on the same site.

But archaeologists with the Israel Antiquities Authority now say diggers have found coins underneath the massive foundation stones of the compound's Western Wall that were stamped by a Roman proconsul 20 years after Herod's death. That indicates that Herod did not build the wall — part of which is venerated as Judaism's holiest prayer site — and that construction was not close to being complete when he died.

"The find changes the way we see the construction, and shows it lasted for longer than we originally thought," said the dig's co-director, Eli Shukron.

The four bronze coins were stamped around 17 A.D. by the Roman official Valerius Gratus. He preceded Pontius Pilate of the New Testament story as Rome's representative in Jerusalem, according to Ronny Reich of Haifa University, one of the two archaeologists in charge of the dig.

The coins were found inside a ritual bath that predated construction of the renovated Temple Mount complex and which was filled in to support the new walls, Reich said.

Josephus also wrote that the end of construction left 18,000 workmen unemployed in Jerusalem. Some historians have linked this to discontent that eventually erupted in the Jewish revolt.

This was from the original story alluded to on this thread. I thought THIS was interesting too. I don't know how true it might be but I tend to forget that history often repeats itself and we aren't a whole lot different from those people 2000 years ago.

A heart of stone
Nadav Shragai
Friday May 2, 2014
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=17255

...Eli Shukron explains it with an interesting theory. “This stone came from the Temple Mount, from the surplus stones that were used in the construction of the Temple itself. Those stones were high-quality, chiseled and smooth, like this unusual one, which was discovered among the Western Wall’s foundations. This stone was intended for the Second Temple, and stones like it were used to build the Temple — but it was left unused. The builders of the Western Wall brought it down here because it was no longer needed up above — and this is how the other stones of the Temple looked,” he says, adding, “Anyone who passes a hand gently over this stone feels a slightly wavy texture, just like the Talmud describes.”...

Two more surprises awaited Shukron’s diggers at the base of the foundations. The first is a stone weighing a beka from First Temple times — a stone that was used to weigh the silver half-shekel and on which the word “beka” was engraved in Canaanite Hebrew script. Weights of this type have already been found in Israel. The beka is mentioned in the Bible as a unit of weight that was used to weigh the half-shekel that was given by those counted in the census as a way to count them. It was also used later on, in the Tabernacle.

The second surprise has to do with the Western Wall itself — or, actually, with its builders: a chisel about 15 centimeters (6 inches) long that was evidently used to carve the stones of the Western Wall. It was found in a pile of rubble at the bottom of the wall. Shukron believes that one of the workers carving the stone dropped it while he was working on scaffolding on an upper foundation of the wall. “It seems that he didn’t bother to go down or that he simply forgot about it,” Shukron says.

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Thanks marshmallow. New Theory on When Western Wall Was Built New Find Sheds Light on Ancient Site in Jerusalem To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.