Jerusalem: History of a Global City

PRAISE FOR Jerusalem

What else can be said about the history of Jerusalem? . . . What could be added to the monumental biography of the city written by the British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore? Many things, [the authors of this book] enthusiastically reply. . . . On the basis of little- or unexploited sources, . . . [they endeavor to] shed new light on a past too often reduced to the clash of religions, civilizations, and imperialisms. . . . Don’t be mistaken: in this long history, . . . battles and conquests are of course central. . . . But in the shadow of these dramas, it is the daily cohabitation of the three monotheisms in a common melting pot to which the authors devote some of their most surprising pages.

—Le Figaro

Calmly and in accessible language, this book traces the [city’s] long and complex history. . . . This unprecedented initiative of . . . Vincent Lemire and his colleagues . . . certainly deserves to be saluted, as it will be of great service to the many pilgrims, tourists, diplomats, and volunteers who visit Jerusalem.

—La Croix

Jerusalem

HISTORY OF A GLOBAL CITY

Under the direction of Vincent Lemire, with Katell Berthelot, Julien Loiseau, and Yann Potin

Translated by Juliana Froggatt

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2022 by the Regents of the University of California

Originally published as Jérusalem: Histoire d’une ville-monde © 2016 by Flammarion

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lemire, Vincent, 1973– editor. | Berthelot, Katell, contributor. | Loiseau, Julien, contributor. | Potin, Yann, contributor. | Froggatt, Juliana, 1981– translator.

Title: Jerusalem : history of a global city / under the direction of Vincent Lemire ; with Katell Berthelot, Julien Loiseau, and Yann Potin ; translated by Juliana Froggatt.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2022] | Originally published as Jérusalem: histoire d’une ville-monde ©2016 by Flammarion—Title page verso. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021042865 (print) | LCCN 2021042866 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520299900 (hardback) | ISBN 9780520971523 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Jerusalem—History.

Classification: LCC DS109.9 .J4574513 (print) | LCC DS109.9 (ebook) | DDC 956.94/42—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021042865

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021042866

Manufactured in the United States of America

31   30   29   28   27   26   25   24   23   22

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

Publication supported by a grant from The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven as part of the Urban Haven Project.

Contents

List of Maps

Introduction. Spirits of Places, Fractures in Time: Toward a New History of Jerusalem

1. The Birth of a Holy City: 4000 BCE to Second Century CE

2. Roman Pantheon, Christian Reliquary, and Jewish Traditions: Second to Seventh Centuries

3. In the Empire of the Caliphs: Seventh to Eleventh Centuries

4. Jerusalem, Capital of the Frankish Kingdom: 1099–1187

5. From Saladin to Süleyman: The Islamization of the Holy City, 1187–1566

6. The Peace of the Ottomans: Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

7. The Impossible Capital? Jerusalem in the Twentieth Century

Conclusion. The Memory of the Dead, the History of the Living

Chronology

Notes

Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

Maps

1. Topography of Jerusalem

2. Biblical Jerusalem

3. Hasmonean and Herodian epochs (second century BCE to 70 CE)

4. Aelia Capitolina (c. 130–325)

5. Byzantine Jerusalem (325–638)

6. From Temple Mount to Haram al-Sharif

7. Jerusalem in the Frankish period (1099–1244)

8. Ottoman Jerusalem (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries)

9. Jerusalem outside the walls (1850–1948)

10. From division to annexation (since 1948)

Introduction

SPIRITS OF PLACES, FRACTURES IN TIME: TOWARD A NEW HISTORY OF JERUSALEM

Jerusalem, historical comet whose history is reduced almost to a long burning wake, placed on its scorched hill like a rocket on its launchpad—so much fury of eternity in such a small body—Pythian city, epileptic city, gasping ceaselessly at the trance of the future.

Julien Gracq, Lettrines, March 1967

How to write the history of an epileptic city? How to calmly tell the story of a city crushed by memories, exhausted by identities, compacted under the pressure of projections and projects, ground down by speeches and strategies, dismembered by claims and appropriations? Jerusalem doesn’t belong to itself, Jerusalem isn’t in Jerusalem, Jerusalem is a global city, a city where the whole world meets periodically, to face up to, to confront, to size up each other.

The shared cradle of three monotheistic narratives, Jerusalem is observed by the whole world as the laboratory of living together or of civil war, of urbanity or of hatred of the other. In recent years, at the mercy of the combats and confrontations that periodically run through the city, Jerusalem has become the favored stage on which to project dangerous fantasies of evildoers forging a clash of civilizations.

Julien Gracq, in March 1967, perfectly translated the overwhelming impression that grabs every reasonable historian in approaching Jerusalem as one approaches a molten crater: historical comet, long burning wake, prophetic or Pythian city, which exhausts itself in preserving the most ancient past and auguring the most distant future, held under pressure in an almost infinite chronological arc, from Genesis to the Apocalypse. In these conditions, how to offer a new history of Jerusalem, how to construct a renewed history of a city recounted a thousand times, overexposed, worn out by the conjunction of reputedly incompatible narratives and by the weave of superimposed identities?

We say it straightaway: the four authors assembled here refuse to consider Jerusalem the coatrack of false identities; they oppose head-on the nebulous doctrine of the clash of civilizations; they wager that the history of Jerusalem can be told without resorting to anachronistic reductions that make all of its inhabitants into passive puppets, bearers despite themselves of crude identities that today carry the simplistic names of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. A ground-level history, respectful of ambivalences and ambiguities, closer to the fractures of time and the spirits of places: that, on the contrary, is what is offered in the following pages.

To meet this challenge, we must start first of all with this surprising paradox: Jerusalem is a city without history. Heritage is omnipresent, archaeological remains are everywhere, memories are thundering, identities are deafening, but history, in the middle of this crazy cacophony, is absent. History as a human and social science, as a scientific discipline, as an attempt to confront the sources and the association of points of view. . . . History is absent from Jerusalem, or rather it has absented itself and let itself be buried under the pile of memories. Rigorous historians work, of course, they do their best, but they are inaudible, invisible, confined among their peers in scholarly meetings and specialized academic exchanges, because this pointillistic approach is less risky for them, but also because the dominant political and social demand is for something else: Jerusalem is a store of memory, not a place of history. Universal black box, world conservatory of ancient traditions—we turn toward it to search for lost memories of a forgetful West, to reinforce the leached identities of our modern disenchantment, but rarely to truly know its history.

Is it a coincidence that up to now there has been no History of Jerusalem from Its Origins to the Present Day available on the book market, in either French or English? This simple fact is in itself disconcerting: although the Holy City fascinates the whole world, no serious synthesis has been offered to the public until now that attempts a global understanding of the history of this city, which is always called extraordinary or exceptional, the better to exclude it from any rational approach.¹

A city without history, therefore, asphyxiated by memories that short-circuit and scramble its chronology: in the logic of memory, time is compacted, compressed, folded in on itself. As in a César Baldaccini Compression, the very structure of passing time, the succession of epochs and sequences of events disappears to give place to eternal identities, to perpetual conflicts, and to immutable communities. One encounters so many expressions in all the pages of the books devoted to the Holy City and offered to the general public. To counter this indigestible salmagundi, to make Jerusalem a true object of history, we will thus commence by respecting its chronology—we will attempt to identify distinct historical sequences of events to show that Jerusalem is not a city more eternal than any other and that each of its epochs tells a singular story. Of course, moving back and forth in the chronology and overlap between chapters aren’t forbidden in the pages you will read, but we will abstain from too much ruffling of calendar pages, because the succession of generations, of regimes, and of contexts is an essential safeguard against the illusion of identity permanence. At the end of this volume, a new time line gives the public, for the first time, a chronological synthesis of reference, complete and detailed.

Second paradox, perhaps less noticeable to nonspecialists: Jerusalem is a city without geography. Geopolitics is summoned all the time there to explain everything, borders seem to stripe its territory in every direction, maps are systematically exhibited to illustrate the great episodes of its military history, but geography as attention to topography, to elevation, to the constraints of site and the potentials of location, to climate and soils, to the layout of urban districts, to their peopling, to their activities and interactions . . . geography is absent, masked by the omnipresence of geopolitical analysis. The history of Jerusalem is generally recounted without the places (streets, monuments, hills, valleys, springs, rocks, caves, walls, cemeteries) having to be anything other than a map of a general staff or a simple setting for folkloric or patrimonial use.

In this logic, the history of Jerusalem generally ends up disembodied, as if evaporated, developing at several meters from the urban area, simple layout of ideas and actors moving in an abstract and inarticulate space. The altitude of the city, perched at almost eight hundred meters (half a mile) at the summit of a narrow crest line; its severe climate, at once Mediterranean and mountainous; its dominant hills and deep ravines, which have forever oriented its main axes of circulation (see map 1); its position on the threshold between the rich coastal plains that border the Mediterranean to the west and the desert that plunges toward the Jordan Rift Valley and the stifling banks of the Dead Sea to the east—all of these basic facts are generally passed over in silence, as if geography had little weight in explaining the history of the Holy City. To offer a history that is incarnate, concrete, and situated in Jerusalem, we will therefore respect its geography—we will try to always refer to the places that order and shape this history, that give it their potentialities and constraints. To illustrate and accompany this geographical requirement, ten original maps over the course of the book will permit readers to not lose sight of the terrain and to not get lost themselves.

Map 1. Topography of Jerusalem

To construct a new history of Jerusalem, we have thus chosen to rely on the most proved methods and to renew the marriage of two old academic disciplines, history and geography, whose long complicity is one of the happy original features of French universities. Starting from these two solid bases, it is possible to construct a history at once contextualized and situated, diachronic and geographic.

To escape from the abstract developments of immutable identities that pollute most of the accounts consecrated to the Holy City, a third and final principle has guided the writing of this new history of Jerusalem: starting from the observation that the Holy City is the site of the emergence and meeting of the three monotheisms, we have not wanted to consider the boundaries between these three traditions as impassable limits that have remained immobile over the centuries. Quite on the contrary, the porousness, the movements, the exchanges, and the hybridizations between these traditions have been the subject of very particular attention. Not from a fetishism of multiculturalism, but because Jerusalem itself imposes this approach: because the thrice-holy city magnetizes the foundational monotheistic traditions and concentrates them within a restricted perimeter and on a few recurrent focal points, its history is precisely that of the intense interaction among these traditions, giving rise to a large number of exchanges and transfers.

By focusing our attention on the emblematic segments that structure the urban space—on the Temple Mount / Haram al-Sharif (also called the Esplanade of the Mosques), on the walls that have often moved but whose topographical structure has remained almost unchanged, on the gates and the axes of circulation that order the city and set it in motion, on the valleys that surround Jerusalem and each preserve a particular bundle of religious traditions—we can show that the spirit of these places traverses ruptures in time and preestablished identity categories by effecting surprising transfers of sacredness. Finally, the attention paid to Jerusalem’s religious places and geography makes it possible to restore the coherence and dynamics of this world city’s urban history, a history at once organic and connected, local and global, anchored in its territory and open to the four winds, because Jerusalem rightfully deserves, perhaps more than any other city on the planet, to benefit from these new horizons of history.

1

The Birth of a Holy City

4000 BCE TO SECOND CENTURY CE

The paradox of Jerusalem can be summed up in a few words: a town of no major strategic importance, lacking desirable natural resources, has become the nerve center of a regional conflict with global repercussions, and its name, today pronounced by millions of people in their weekly liturgical assemblies, symbolizes a universal eschatological hope.

Jerusalem’s setting has, however, many handicaps (see map 1 in the introduction). At the heart of a mountainous zone, it is away from the region’s major trade routes; the main road linking Transjordan to the coastal plain passes north of Jerusalem. The first urban cluster entirely covered a rocky spur at the site today called the City of David. This hill is situated below a rise that slightly dominates it—the Temple Mount, to the north, the current Esplanade of the Mosques—which was further raised later to create a vast platform capable of containing the whole cult complex erected by that great builder King Herod. Between the Temple Mount and the rocky spur with the first urban cluster, we can moreover distinguish an intermediary space, the Ophel, which housed a specific quarter during the city’s development in biblical times. The hills to the west (the current Mount Zion) and to the east (the Mount of Olives) also overlook the rocky spur.

This spur nevertheless dominates three valleys: the Kidron Valley to the east (which crosses the Judaean Desert to the Dead Sea), the Valley of Hinnom (or Gehenna) to the west, and that of Tyropoeon, which passes through approximately the middle of the present Old City from north to south. The curious word Tyropoeon comes from The Jewish War by the first-century historian Flavius Josephus¹ and literally means Cheesemakers, but it must in fact be a corrupted form of a lost original Semitic name. Whatever the case, since at least the first century BCE, this third valley has divided the city into eastern and western parts before joining the Kidron Valley at the current Pool of Siloam, a bit north of the latter valley’s junction with the Valley of Hinnom. Still another valley, less known and named Beth Zetha, runs almost in parallel with the Kidron Valley; its starting point is at the famous American Colony Hotel north of the present Old City, and it joins the Kidron Valley at the foot of the northeast end of the Temple’s esplanade. It quite naturally formed the north edge of the esplanade and of the city itself in the Israelite period. This valley carries abundant water in winter, hence the presence in this area of basins like the Pool of Bethesda and the Pool of Israel (Birket Israel). Finally, the western part of the current Old City is divided by the Transverse Valley—also called the Cross Valley—the only one with a clear east-west orientation. It starts from the Citadel (near the Jaffa Gate) and joins the Tyropoeon to the north of the Western Wall (or Wailing Wall). This valley corresponded to the northern limit of the city in the Hasmonean period (see map 3). Some of these valleys are no longer visible today, as they have been partly filled in over time, but the height differences of the past have been measured during archeological digs.²

The main reason for the settlement of a human group on Jerusalem’s site in the Bronze Age doubtless lies in the presence of a fountainhead, known as the Gihon Spring, below the rocky spur. This permitted the development of farming on the valley floor from the earliest era, despite very steep slopes and a very dry climate, in a region at the crossroads of two climatic zones, the Judaean Desert and the Mediterranean coast. The rainfall pattern, typical of a mountainous region, did not guarantee regular showers throughout the year; the rains, often violent and sudden, were concentrated from November to April. Additionally, precipitation was quite unequal from one year to the next, resulting in serious water-supply problems, even though the median rainfall (500 millimeters, or 20 inches, per year) is comparable to that of certain European areas (580 millimeters, or 23 inches, per year in London, for example). Another constraint of the site, the steep slope of the rocky spur with the first settlement area, forced the inhabitants, from the beginning, to build terraces and embankments, on which successive urban constructions were piled atop each other (see map 2). This led to the continuous reuse of materials and foundations of preceding eras and partly explains why it is difficult to find traces of certain strata and thus of certain periods—a recurrent problem for those who wish to write the city’s history.

Map 2. Biblical Jerusalem

The history of ancient Jerusalem, for a long time essentially dependent on biblical sources, has nevertheless been profoundly revised by the archaeological excavations that have been conducted there since the nineteenth century, but also by those at other Middle Eastern sites, which have helped to put into our hands evidence (Moabite or Assyrian, for example) invalidating or confirming certain elements of biblical tales.³ Indeed, at the heart of the historiography of Jerusalem and of ancient Israel in general resides the problem of the historical accuracy of biblical information and of its often conflicting dialogue with the material remains unearthed by archaeological digs.⁴ This methodological problem arises equally for the postbiblical period—Flavius Josephus’s testimony must similarly be corrected in the light of archaeological data on Judaea in the Hellenistic and Roman eras, for example—but it is particularly acute for the biblical era, in view of the sacred character of the text in the eyes of Jews and Christians, as well as the contemporary political issues around the State of Israel. Modern Israel’s founding fathers indeed considered the biblical tales of the ancient Kingdoms of Israel and Judah as one of the pillars of the new state’s legitimacy, and today the Bible still remains the great founding story of Israeli national identity—hence the particular intensity of the debate on the reigns of David and Solomon, from whom the Israelite and Judaean monarchies ensued. Yet, as we will see, from the point of view of Jerusalem’s urban history, David’s reign seems not to have represented a real break but is, rather, in keeping with the Canaanite occupation of the site. Without necessarily rejecting the testimony of the biblical sources, which can contain useful information if read critically, the historian must be freed from the theological interpretation of history that characterizes the Deuteronomistic corpus, all the biblical books called historical, from Joshua to Second Kings.

In antiquity, as in later periods, politics and religion were closely mingled. Without artificially disassociating what should be thought of jointly, we must nevertheless emphasize the strictly political, geostrategic, urban, economic, and social aspects of this history. It is furthermore necessary to grasp the fundamental role, at once social, political, and religious, of the Temple of Jerusalem, a role that escalated from around the tenth century BCE until its destruction in 70 CE (in spite of its destruction and reconstruction during the sixth century BCE) and conferred on the city, little by little, its specificity and its greatness. Alongside the chronology based on the empires that successively dominated the Middle East (Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Hellenistic kingdoms, Rome) appears a Jewish chronology which for its part describes a period of the First Temple (tenth century–586 BCE) and a period of the Second Temple (c. 539 BCE–70 CE), interrupted by the Babylonian interval—that is, a chronology centered on the construction and destruction of sanctuaries.

In a manner altogether ordinary for antiquity, Jerusalem’s history is, in fact, punctuated by wars, destruction, and reconstruction: the Assyrian siege of 701 BCE, Babylonian destruction of 586 BCE, punitive expedition and profanation of the Temple by Antiochus IV in 167 BCE, capture by Antiochus VII in 134–133 BCE, capture by Pompey in 63 BCE, capture by Herod in 37 BCE, and destruction by the Romans in 70 CE, to mention only the most prominent events of the city’s ancient history. Constantly, in the sources relating to these episodes, the question of the sanctuary menaced, profaned, or saved in extremis appears in the foreground. The alternation of destructions and reconstructions concerns above all the walls of the city, indispensable protection and guarantee of independence. Once again, looking past the episodes of destruction, we observe throughout the first millennium BCE a crescendo, up to the apogee represented by the construction of the third wall by Herod Agrippa I in the first century CE, followed by the radical destruction in 70 (see map 3). As we will see, the defeat in 70 followed by the foundation of the Roman colony Aelia Capitolina in the second century CE represents the deepest and most enduring rupture that ancient Jerusalem experienced. But we must first of all return to the modest beginnings of the little urban cluster that would become the thrice-holy city.

THE BRONZE AGE: A FORTRESS AROUND A SPRING

The very first proof of the presence of even slightly sedentary humans, dating back to the end of the fourth millennium BCE, is hardly impressive: it was at best an unfortified farming village, situated near the Gihon Spring. Graves began to appear at that time on the southwest slope of the Mount of Olives, the eastern slope of the Kidron Valley (see map 2). They continued to be used, it appears, during the phase when the site was abandoned in the middle of the third millennium BCE. This abandonment isn’t unique to Jerusalem, as the surface excavations conducted in the West Bank by Israel Finkelstein, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University, revealed the existence of recurrent cycles of occupation in the highlands (Judaea-Samaria, the current West Bank) from the fourth millennium until the beginning of the Iron Age, in the twelfth century. According to the archaeologist’s observations, the same sites were inhabited, abandoned, and then reoccupied on three occasions: around 3000, around 1800, and finally around 1200.⁵ Jerusalem fits well in this general pattern, but during the second occupation cycle, in the Middle Bronze Age, it had already emerged as a regional power, despite its unusual character. Indeed, the remains of a fortress with imposing walls, dating to the eighteenth century BCE, have been uncovered, notably near the Gihon Spring; the perimeter wall must have been around three meters (ten feet) wide. Comparable fortifications have been identified at Tel Rumeida, now part of Hebron, and at Tell Balata, ancient Shechem (modern-day Nablus).

Jerusalem thus very probably represented one of the principal city-states that developed during the second urbanization phase in Canaan. This hypothesis is corroborated by the mention of Jerusalem in an execration text (that is, a text consisting of a curse) discovered on a nineteenth-century BCE Egyptian figurine, as well as in eighteenth-century BCE Egyptian documents. Jerusalem is designated in these as R-Sh-L-M-M, which should perhaps be pronounced as Rushalimum, and two names of chiefs are associated with it, Shas’an and Y’qar’am. The statuette is broken, which symbolically represents the desire to break the city’s political resistance in the face of Egyptian power, in the framework of a quasi-magical performative rite.

The hydraulic system might equally constitute a sign of Jerusalem’s development at this period. According to the archaeologist Ronny Reich, who brought to light the existence of a tower next to the Gihon Spring, the water-supply structure known as Warren’s Shaft (named for the archaeologist who discovered it in the nineteenth century) dates at least in part to this era, and not to the tenth century BCE, as presumed by Yigal Shiloh, who excavated the City of David in the 1980s (see map 2). Also according to Reich, there was a similar water-supply structure inside Gezer, an important city-state on the coastal plain, in the same period. The importance of these constructions indirectly testifies to the demographic importance of the city, because these projects required the ability to draw on a substantial workforce. Finally, one last indication of Jerusalem’s development in the eighteenth century BCE lies in the presence of decorated bone plaques, probably from finely worked furniture or boxes.⁶

Following biblical chronology, and provided that one equates the Salem of Genesis 14:18 with Jerusalem, the latter was governed in the eighteenth century BCE by a king named Melchizedek (King of righteousness or My king is justice), a priest of God Most High, to whom Abraham gave one-tenth of everything.⁷ Genesis was likely redacted very late (sixth century BCE or after), and its historicity is strongly subject to caution, but it remains significant that this text depicts a king at Jerusalem at such an early stage. Perhaps this is the echo of an earlier period, in the fourteenth century BCE, when we know from a reliable source, thanks to Egyptian evidence, that a king reigned at Jerusalem.

But between the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries BCE, we observe first and foremost a phase of decline, again characteristic of the region’s highlands as a whole throughout the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 BCE). The settlements near Jerusalem were depopulated, and Jerusalem itself also seems to have declined. Moreover, we know that at the end of the sixteenth century BCE, Canaan fell into the orbit of the Egyptian Empire. The Canaanite city-states, governed by kinglets, retained a limited autonomy under strict Egyptian control, exercised through governors installed at Gaza and Bet She’an. This was the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty.

FOURTEENTH CENTURY BCE: THE CAPITAL OF KING ABDI-HEBA, UNDER EGYPTIAN CONTROL

A chance archaeological discovery in Egypt, at El Amarna (the capital of the pharaoh Akhenaton, considered a precursor of monotheistic religions), brought to light evidence unexpectedly related to fourteenth-century BCE Jerusalem, while excavations in that city itself have found hardly any vestiges of the era besides a few shards. There was nothing from Jerusalem itself, therefore, to suggest that it was the residence of a local governor or kinglet. However, the diplomatic correspondence found at El Amarna is definite: of the 382 inventoried letters, six or even seven tablets were sent by the king of Jerusalem Abdi-Heba (or Abdi-Hepa), Servant of Heba (a Hurrian goddess); two other tablets, sent by a sovereign named Shuwardata, in turn invoke Jerusalem, called Urushalim, The city founded by Shalim, a Canaanite divinity.

The content of these letters, written in Akkadian by a scribe of Syrian origin, reveals that Abdi-Heba must have been educated at the Egyptian court, where, like other Canaanite princes, he was likely sent as a hostage. It was the pharaoh himself who named Abdi-Heba the king of Jerusalem, which seems to have been a city of modest size then. An Egyptian garrison of probably fifty men was stationed there, meant to protect the city against attacks by the Habiru (or ‘Apiru), more or less nomadic groups that sometimes allowed themselves to be recruited as mercenaries and sometimes gave themselves up to pillaging herds (let us recall in passing that the theory of an assimilation between the Habiru and the ancient Hebrews is now largely abandoned). But, in fact, the Egyptian garrison posed a problem for Abdi-Heba, perhaps because he was not able to pay the salary he owed it, in the form of food, drink, and so forth. The garrison ended up leaving the city, and the Canaanite king then sent repeated appeals to the pharaoh for new troops. During this period, Abdi-Heba was struggling with the kings of the Shephelah (the coastal plain), alongside the sovereign of Akko (now Acre) and Shuwardata, who probably governed what later became southern Judaea. Later evidence shows that the political configuration subsequently changed: Abdi-Heba then allied with Milk-ilu, the king of Gezer, and fought Shuwardata, whom he opposed in a territorial dispute.

Two letters mention the territory of Jerusalem, which apparently extended from the Idumean hills in the south and from the area of Gezer in the southwest to an undetermined point in the direction of Shechem to the north.⁸ Does this mean Jerusalem was fortified at that time? Seemingly no, as we have found no vestige of this in the field, but it is difficult to imagine that the imposing walls of the eighteenth-century BCE fortress had completely disappeared. Perhaps part of these fortifications remained in use.

In any event, a continuity can be observed in burial places: we find tombs from the fourteenth century BCE on the western slope of the Mount of Olives, just like those of an earlier age. In the western part of modern Jerusalem, a Canaanite tomb from that period has also been discovered, which contained vases imported from Cyprus and Mycenaean Greece. But considering the distance that separates this site from the City of David, its link with Abdi-Heba’s city remains uncertain (see map 2).

Fourteenth-century Jerusalem has not left significant archaeological traces, with the exception of a discovery made in July 2010 that throws further light on this period. The excavations conducted by Eilat Mazar in the Ophel area unearthed a small fragment (2.8 by 2 centimeters, or 1.1 by 0.79 inches) of a clay tablet inscribed in Akkadian and dating to the fourteenth century. This is the most ancient written document ever found in Jerusalem, almost six centuries older than the inscription in what is known as Hezekiah’s Tunnel. Analysis of its clay seems to indicate that this tablet was made in Jerusalem. Although only a few words can be deciphered, the quality of the writing is so remarkable that it must be the work of an experienced scribe. According to Wayne Horowitz, an Assyriologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, this tablet alone confirms the existence of a royal court where scribes were charged with writing diplomatic letters and administrative documents requiring advanced skills.⁹ In 2013, a second fragment of cuneiform tablet was found in the Ophel area, but it has only a few letters. It is from a different tablet than fragment 1: it might be slightly older and Egyptian in origin.¹⁰

We wish to emphasize the fact that if the chance discovery in Egypt had not put into our hands the above-described correspondence in Akkadian (to which we must now add the two tablet fragments found in Jerusalem itself), we could have thought that fourteenth-century BCE Jerusalem was deserted or at most barely more than a hamlet. Although the absence of archaeological traces is a problem for the historian, it does not therefore permit definitive conclusions, particularly concerning a site where continuous erosion and occupation have played a large role in the effacement of remains. It will be useful to remember this in evaluating current debates about tenth-century BCE Jerusalem, the time when, according to the Bible, David and then Solomon reigned over Jerusalem: the gap between relatively abundant textual documentation and lacunary archaeological evidence is still the principal source of debate among historians today.

TWELFTH TO ELEVENTH CENTURIES BCE: A JEBUSITE, HITTITE, OR CANAANITE CITY?

The biblical texts make no secret of Jerusalem’s existence prior to the emergence of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, which formed between the tenth and ninth centuries BCE. The book of Joshua, which records the conquest of the promised land by the children of Israel, supposed to have taken place from the end of the thirteenth through the twelfth century BCE, presents Jerusalem as a city of the Jebusites, one of the peoples whom the Bible describes as settled in Canaan at that time.

These Jebusites are known only through the biblical tradition. According to the archaeologist Benjamin Mazar and the Bible scholar Moshe Weinfeld, who both taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, one from the 1940s to the 1970s and the other from the 1970s to the 1990s, the Jebusites were one of the peoples who migrated south after the collapse of the Hittite Empire at the end of the thirteenth century BCE. The Hittites, whose territory stretched from Anatolia (in modern-day Turkey) to northern Syria and Mesopotamia, are counted among the great kingdoms of the Bronze Age, alongside Egypt, Mycenae, and Assyria, the last then a rising power. The Jebusites might have formed a subgroup within the Hittites. A biblical text such as Ezekiel 16:3 (or 16:45), where God tells Jerusalem, Your father was an Amorite, and your mother a Hittite, might contain, according to Weinfeld, the echo of a distant historical reality, relating to the Canaanite and Hittite origin of the city’s non-Israelite population. The question of the connection between the Anatolian Hittites and the Hittites mentioned in the Bible among the seven peoples of Canaan is still debated, but Weinfeld has pointed out that Hittite documents have rites very similar to those of the Bible’s priestly code: for example, after giving birth, a woman must be purified by the sacrifice of a lamb and a pigeon or turtledove, as in Leviticus 12:6.¹¹ These similarities seem to corroborate the theory of real contacts between the Hittite Empire and the southern Levant. For other archaeologists and historians, however, the Jebusites cannot be distinguished from the Canaanites. The arguments drawn from biblical texts, of uncertain date, are indeed tenuous, to say the least.

According to Joshua 10, Jerusalem was governed by a king named Adoni-zedek, My lord is justice, a name which cannot fail to recall that of Melchizedek, My king is justice, in Genesis 14. This sovereign was placed at the head of a coalition of Canaanite city-states, all of which Joshua defeated. However, while the book of Joshua evokes a total and brilliant conquest of the country of Canaan—which archaeologists today agree has almost no historical truth—Jerusalem itself is presented as remaining in the hands of its Canaanite inhabitants (Jo 15:63). The book of Judges, which immediately follows Joshua, relays a contradictory narrative: according to Judges 1:8, Jerusalem was taken and burned by the Tribe of Judah, but a few verses later (Jgs 1:21), the text reproduces the book of Joshua’s version. In fact, most biblical accounts instead argue that David took the city some two centuries after the supposed time of the conquest, when, according to the second book of Samuel (5:1–10), he had already been king at Hebron for seven years.

Outside the Bible, Jerusalem’s history between the fourteenth century and the start of the period called Israelite, in the tenth or even ninth century, is documented only by archaeological vestiges whose interpretation is fiercely disputed. Thus, the famous Stepped Stone Structure on the east side of the City of David, consisting of terraces abutting a main retaining wall (the most monumental part of the current archaeological park), goes back a priori to the twelfth or eleventh century—that is, the period of Jebusite or Canaanite occupation (see map 2). Although of small extent, the city already would have constituted a substantial urban conglomeration, probably fortified, and endowed, as in earlier times, with a water-supply system accessible from inside the walls. Numerous questions remain, like that of the possible relations that Jerusalem maintained with the hinterland and the new villages that multiplied in the twelfth and eleventh centuries in the highlands, villages that are agreed, on account of several centuries of continuous occupation, to qualify as proto-Israelite.

FROM JEBUS TO ZION, THE CITY OF DAVID: RUPTURE OR CONTINUITY?

According to the Bible, at the very end of the eleventh and the start of the tenth century BCE began the period of the so-called United Monarchy, David and his son Solomon reigning from Jerusalem over a kingdom that certain biblical passages describe as extending from Egypt to the Euphrates. For many years, the reality and scope of the rupture represented by David’s era in the history of Jerusalem has been one of the most heated historiographical debates in ancient Middle East archaeology. This debate, moreover, relates to another controversy, concerning the low or high (also called conventional and then modified conventional, following some revision) chronology that must be applied to the sites of ancient Israel. Without entering into the technical details of this quarrel between specialists, let us simply remember that proponents of the low chronology tend to shift the dating of archaeological vestiges forward forty to seventy years, thus situating at the end of the tenth