2,000-year-old Pilgrimage Road to Temple Mount opens to public after years of digging |
For Michael Ganeles and his wife, visiting the City of David in Jerusalem was a must when they took their three children to Israel for the first time from West Hempstead, New York, to celebrate their middle daughter’s bat mitzvah.
When the family learned that the site known as the “Pilgrims’ Path” or “Pilgrimage Road,” a roughly 2,000-year-old stepped street that led up to the Temple Mount from the southern part of the city, would open to the public during their stay, they wanted to be part of it.
“We were looking into the City of David, and when we saw they were offering a first tour [of the Pilgrimage Road] we told ourselves that we had to do it,” Ganeles told The Times of Israel last month. “My kids kept on asking when we are getting to see the street.”
On January 20, the Ganeles family was among a group of roughly 30 people to take an inaugural walk up the road. Starting from an area where the archaeologists believe the ancient Siloam pool stood at the entrance of the ancient city, in what is today the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, the largely subterranean road runs underneath modern infrastructure for several hundred meters to the Jerusalem Archaeological Garden adjacent to the Western Wall.
Occupying a slope just to the south of the Old City, the predominantly Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan sits on what archaeologists understand to be the most ancient part of the 3,000-year-old city, much of which is today part of the City of David archaeological park. Over the years, excavations across different areas of the site have uncovered extraordinary finds spanning the history of Jerusalem, including the First Temple Period (1000-586 BCE), when a significant portion of the biblical narratives took place, and the Second Temple Period, which lasted until 70 CE.
The Pilgrimage Road, under excavation for some 20 years by archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority, is believed to have been built in the first years of the common era by either King Herod or Governor Pontius Pilate as the leading artery through which visitors ascended to the Temple from the south.
“This is one of the most magnificent archaeological discoveries in Jerusalem in the last decades,” Amit Re’em, IAA chief archaeologist for the Jerusalem District, told The Times of Israel via telephone ahead of the tour.........