“Under Jerusalem is a brilliant, highly innovative history of the most contested city on the planet. Andrew Lawler uses these untold stories of archeological digs near and under Jerusalem’s sacred sites to convey all the colorful and violent and contentious history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is an astounding achievement—and a compulsive read.”

—Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and author of The Outlier and The Good Spy

“What lies beneath? Lawler knows. Evoking the sights, sounds, and smells of ancient and modern Jerusalem, he introduces the reader to a myriad of archaeologists and other colorful characters, all concerned with unearthing the ancient remains of the city, frequently while grappling with thorny modern political, ideological, and theological issues. A must read for anyone interested in either the history or archaeology of Jerusalem.”

—Eric H. Cline, bestselling author of 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“Every review of Andrew Lawler’s book about the wild archaeological history of Jerusalem will mention Indiana Jones. This is not because the characters he describes are much like Jones—they’re much more obsessed, more bonkers, or more mendacious—but because the Indiana Jones stories are among the few examples we have of stories about archaeology that are pure fun. Well, now there is another one, just as swashbuckling as the Spielberg movies, but with the added advantage of being all true.”

—Charles C. Mann, New York Times bestselling author of 1491 and The Wizard and the Prophet

Yehuda Amichai, Israel’s most celebrated poet, wrote often about Jerusalem with language and imagery that ricochets off the ancient stone walls and into a reader’s heart. Jerusalem was where Amichai lived after escaping Nazi Germany; it is where he died in 2000; it is where his accessible, imaginative, descriptive style transformed him into a sort of poetic prophet.

His long, gorgeous poem “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Why Jerusalem?” has a haunting refrain. “Why, of all places, Jerusalem?” he asks repeatedly. Why not New York, Athens, Egypt, Mexico, India, Burma? Why not Babylon, Petersburg, Mecca, Rome?

What is it about this city, where ordinary life rubs up against parading pilgrims, where bombs and crucifixions commingle with church bells and the muezzin’s call, where the ground is heavy with history — in Amichai’s words, “submerged and sunken” — that draws adventurers, scholars and ideologues like a magnet?

That question propels the narrative of Andrew Lawler’s new book, “Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City,” a sweeping tale of archaeological exploits and their cultural and political consequences told with a historian’s penchant for detail and a journalist’s flair for narration.

Beginning when Abraham Lincoln was in the White House, and going up until the raucous headlines of today, Lawler introduces us to an array of men and women drawn to explore the hidden tunnels, broken cisterns, collapsing walls and sewage pits that lie under a small plot of land sacred to the world’s Jews, Muslims and Christians.

“Under Jerusalem” is one of several new books chasing this Indiana Jones of a tale. And it’s easy to sense the allure. The archaeologists and adventurers who came to excavate the past and claim its treasures were seeking scientific knowledge, professional glory and tangible proof of their connection to the ancient biblical text. At times, their eagerness led them to burrow and bulldoze through sacred space, even if, in so doing, they disrupted centuries of civilization and rocked the foundation — physically and spiritually — of Western faith traditions.

Today, controversy over excavations in the Old City is too often framed as simply a conflict between Jews seeking to legitimize their connection to Jerusalem and Muslims resistant to those claims. But in this “city of political hypervigilance,” as Lawler calls it, the real story is far more complicated.

From the beginning, and for many decades following, it was in fact Christians — first from France, then from Britain, mostly Protestants — who swooped into the Holy Land and made a holy mess. In 1863, Louis-Félicien Joseph Caignart de Saulcy of France was the first to conduct an archaeological dig in the city, fueled by the conviction that “Jerusalem’s ancient heritage belonged not to those who lived in and ruled there, but to foreigners like himself,” Lawler writes.

Despite angering local Jews and Muslims and infuriating Ottoman authorities, de Saulcy managed to extract a sarcophagus from the Tomb of Kings that he believed was a consort of a Judean ruler from the 7th century B.C., take it to France and eventually display it in the Louvre. Never mind that experts questioned its true identification and significance. The discovery, Lawler writes, “opened the possibility that archaeology could yield concrete proof of scripture’s accuracy at a moment when advances in geology and biology had put Christianity on the defensive.”

This theme — that science can be used to verify religious beliefs and national claims — courses through this narrative like the streams flowing beneath the Old City. So does the political tumult that de Saulcy’s discovery ignited. Fearful of France’s influence, Britain very quickly launched its own archaeological strike force. Russia also sponsored digs, while Western philanthropists poured money underground — and still do.

One can see how Jerusalem natives, particularly the Muslims who retain authority over sections of the Old City, became so hostile to outside interference in the name of science. Their homes were damaged; their businesses disrupted; their autonomy questioned; their sacred space violated.

There is another, deeper reason for this antipathy, writes Lawler: “Excavating a cistern or searching for treasure might make sense to Jerusalem’s Arabs, but excavating to find your heritage did not. You were your heritage, and there was no need to find that which you had not lost. This profound cultural divide between Westerners and Arabs — and, later, between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs — would grow wider in generations to come, with devastating consequences for all those involved.”

Would that Lawler had delved more deeply into this fascinating cultural divide and the questions raised. What lies behind the compulsion to locate Jesus’s tomb or King David’s palace or Solomon’s temple? How do we balance the drive to uncover the past with reverence for the present? There is endless detail in this book about each excavation, contextualized with discussion of the ethical dimensions and methodological advances in the expanding field of archaeology. But there were times when I wished Lawler had stepped back to explore those larger, motivational questions more fully.

That said, he displays remarkable evenhandedness in cataloguing the politicization of archaeology today, especially considering that so many characters in this book believed that God — or Adonai, or Allah, or Jesus — was on their side. Lawler also carefully narrates the dramatic and consequential rifts between the increasingly powerful Orthodox Jewish rabbinate in Jerusalem and its largely secular, scholarly counterparts.

Tragically, we see positions harden and compromise made more difficult, whether it is in Yasser Arafat’s refusal to acknowledge the Jewish historical claim to the Old City or in the growing influence exerted by the fundamentalist City of David Foundation, widely known by its Hebrew acronym Elad. Sadly, too, we hear in this story echoes of broader troubling trends, as the neutral pursuit of science slams into ideology, greed, nationalism and faith.

Why, of all places, Jerusalem? Amichai offers a partial, poetic answer: “In Jerusalem,” he writes, “everything is a symbol.” Lawler’s timely book builds on that insight, showing how and why ordinary men and women, and great empires alike, continue to seek meaning in the dirt and debris beneath this magnetic, confounding city.

Briefly Noted

What Happens When Everyone Is Writing the Same Book You Are?

By Olivia Parker

Oct. 31, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET

It was as if the story were floating in the air, waiting to be rediscovered. And by coincidence, a handful of writers came across it at the same time.

The story was true: In the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, a British expedition set out for Jerusalem to find the ark of the covenant, only to fail, spectacularly, in 1911, in an eruption of political turmoil and religious animosity.

The leader of this failed treasure hunt was a tall, slim British man named Montagu Brownlow Parker. Known as “Monty,” he was my great-great-uncle.

Monty died in 1962, years before I was born. He was a bachelor who lived well, traveled far, spent freely and left the contents of his will to a married woman: That was nearly everything I knew of him. All my family had left of his adventure in Jerusalem was a black box of papers telling a captivating tale.

The expedition grew out of an encounter between Monty and an eccentric Finnish scholar, Valter Juvelius, who claimed he had identified ciphers in the Old Testament that showed where the ark was hidden in Jerusalem. He wanted to go and find it; Monty, a veteran of the Boer War and a son of a wealthy politician, had the connections and credibility to make it happen.

It was late 1908, and that summer’s Young Turk Revolution had injected a new spirit of liberalization across the Ottoman Empire, which controlled much of what was then Palestine. Monty gathered investors, permissions and a team, and in 1909 the “Parker expedition” started digging in Jerusalem for the ark, a holy relic whose value — immeasurable — Monty promised to split with the Ottoman government.After two years, finding little, the team grew impatient. Monty bribed officials for access to a more promising location: the Haram al-Sharif, or Temple Mount, a site sacred in Islam, Judaism and Christianity. There, the team started to excavate secretly at night, opening up a tunnel that led right underneath the Dome of the Rock.

A mosque attendant, appalled, caught the diggers in action and rumors began to fly, scandalizing members of the city’s various faiths. Monty’s group raced from Jerusalem amid riots and headlines screaming that the explorers had stolen the Temple Mount’s treasures, narrowly escaping on their yacht.

That a relative of mine was part of this was mind-blowing. In 2019, I started to research the story, not knowing that my explorations made me a member of a curious, modern-day venture that paralleled its historical counterpart: the Parker expedition writers.

Scraps of the tale — a short account in Simon Sebag Montefiore’s 2011 book “Jerusalem”; a mention of an “archaeological dig” in the Ottoman archives — had turned at least six others like me onto it. We were all tracking down sources and shaping our notes into book proposals at around the same time.

When we learned of one another’s existence, it felt a little awkward.

The person to tell us was Nirit Shalev-Khalifa, a curator at the Yad Ben Zvi Institute in Jerusalem, who had recognized the story’s power years before any of us had. In 1995, Nirit, then early in her career but with characteristic resolve, tracked down a box of glass negatives from the expedition, enlisted a student to locate the great-grandson of Valter Juvelius in Finland and reached out to my grandfather in England. My grandfather gave her a few photos and documents, and in 1996 she staged an exhibition on the Parker expedition, her paper on it making her a key contact for everyone who came to the story later, looking for sources.

This could have been an annoying position for Nirit to find herself in, but she occupied it with relish. She welcomed each of us who wrote to her as though she were our party host, passing on news of our fellow expedition explorers and enjoying the coincidence that these books were all happening at once.

It seemed less thrilling to me. I felt my loose connection to Great-Great-Uncle Monty shift into possessiveness: Who were these people writing about what I felt, unjustly, to be my story?

They were a diverse group, Nirit explained, and erudite: Louis Fishman, a professor of history at Brooklyn College, who found a dossier on the dig in the Ottoman archives; Timo Stewart, a Finnish researcher whose book focuses on Juvelius; Graham Addison, a retired British businessman turned history writer; and Andrew Lawler, an American journalist studying underground Jerusalem.

Eleven days after telling me about these men, Nirit emailed with a smiling emoji about “the new guy in town”: Brad Ricca, an author in Cleveland who writes books that blend fact and fiction. And four months after that, my dad was sitting down for dinner one evening when Nirit rang to introduce him to Lior Hanani, a young Israeli software developer who chose the expedition as the basis for his debut novel.

Nirit envisaged a conference that would explore our collective research, and decided to introduce us to one another on Zoom. Some of us admitted to feeling nervous, even competitive. But Nirit’s enthusiasm was a diffusing force. There was enough room in the world for each of our approaches — journalistic, novelistic and academic — she insisted.

Afterward, we kept in touch, from homes as far apart as New York, Helsinki and Hong Kong, swapping notes on the pandemic, on Monty, on writing. The friendly tone set by Nirit prevailed.

Brad offered me an early version of his book to read, along with his agent’s contact information. Graham shared a scoop he’d found in the British archives: Monty had a diagnosis of neurasthenia, what we’d now call PTSD.

The present intruded into our reflections on the past, a reminder of the expedition’s lasting relevance. Before Lior and I discussed his novel, we talked about the Hamas rockets that had crashed in front of his house in Israel, during a recent outbreak of fighting that had been inflamed by a raid on the Aqsa Mosque, inside the Haram al-Sharif. “Everything is related,” Lior said, smiling.

It was as though we had formed a Parker expedition think tank and, together, were uncovering the event’s significance.

As Louis writes in a chapter in his book, the events of the expedition’s aftermath — including the revelation, shocking to Jerusalem’s Muslim residents, that corrupt Ottoman officials were aiding the British explorers — add depth to our understanding of the factors influencing the emergence of Palestinian nationalism. The expedition may have had an impact on British foreign policy in the region, Andrew said when we talked, and it helped spawn the world’s ongoing fascination with the ark of the covenant (and Indiana Jones). It illustrates how people at the time viewed the Bible, science and chronology, Timo explained over Zoom, and why secret ciphers might have made sense to them.

Five books about the expedition have now been published; one more comes out in November. I hope a bookshop will display them all together — one story told six different ways.

That leaves my own version, which remains theoretical, at least for now. I’m still turning over my thoughts on my maverick great-great-uncle. I believe there are still parts of his story left to crack.

Olivia Parker is an editor on the international edition of The Times, based in Hong Kong. Story Link

Starred Review: Under Jerusalem

Journalist Lawler (The Secret Token) explores in this sweeping account the complicated history of archaeological digs in Jerusalem. Ranging from imperialistic expeditions in the 19th century, when explorers competed in a “race to stake a claim to Jerusalem’s past,” to allegations that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government used archaeology “as a legitimizer for the state,” Lawler’s colorful narrative includes aristocrats, scientists, charlatans, and clerics who searched for the “authentic place of Jesus’s death and resurrection,” sought to uncover the remnants of the ancient City of David, and tried to find the Ark of the Covenant, among other archaeological treasures. He vividly describes early explorers navigating mud- and sewage-laden tunnels to “recover the biblical secrets locked beneath the Holy City,” and incisively untangles the contentious geopolitical dimensions of ancient history as modern-day Israelis and Palestinians use archaeological analysis to bolster their political viewpoints and territorial claims. Richly detailed, sensitively argued, and entertainingly written, this immersive history casts Jerusalem in a new light and reveals the tensions that meet at the intersection of science, politics, religion, and history. This fascinating, evenhanded chronicle is a treasure. Agent: Ethan Bassoff, Ross Yoon Agency. (Nov.)

Interview: Publisher’s Weekly Talks with Andrew Lawler

Journalist Lawler’s Under Jerusalem (Doubleday, Nov.) examines the history and politics of archaeology in the Holy City.

This was the big surprise for me. To discover that archaeology, which began in the 1860s, was actually part of the colonial race to control Jerusalem, because it was part of the Ottoman Empire, which was coming apart at the seams. Christian Europe had always looked at Jerusalem as its own—during the Crusades, it had actually captured Jerusalem—and the people who went there were generally deeply religious, and were seeking to corroborate the Bible in the face of the onslaught of doubt and new science that was coming to the fore, particularly in Europe, during the early and mid-19th century. To do that, they had to look beyond the old, medieval, largely Arab-speaking city for the mythical Jerusalem, which they’d heard about from the pulpit for so many years.

Who was the most memorable explorer you came across in your research?

It would have to be Capt. Montagu Brownlow Parker, an English aristocrat who came to Jerusalem right before WWI to seek the Ark of the Covenant. He raised the equivalent of $2.4 million from English aristocrats and American industrialists, who believed they would get several billion dollars on the art market if they found it. Of course, they didn’t find the treasure, and instead they began to dig on the Temple Mount, which Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary, and caused riots, nearly caused the fall of the Ottoman government, and nearly sparked a revolt by Muslim subjects of the British empire, who were outraged by this English aristocrat attacking Islam’s third-holiest shrine. Now it’s considered a comic opera, but I discovered that Parker, in inflaming Muslim opinion against the English and against archaeology, and against treasure hunters, turned the Noble Sanctuary into a center of what became Palestinian nationalism.

How is archaeology politicized in modern-day Jerusalem?

Archaeology is used by politicians on all sides to prove that Jerusalem belongs to them—whether it’s the Christians, the Jews, or the Muslims. It’s become a weapon in the war to control the city. But I have what may be a naive belief that science can actually show that Jerusalem belongs to neither the Christians nor the Jews nor the Muslims. In fact, it is an accretion of all of these traditions, which over the centuries have created something quite unique. If there can be a recognition that the science shows this complexity, and the beauty of the diversity of cultures that have come together in Jerusalem, it might someday, perhaps, form some basis for Jerusalem to become the city of peace that it has been heralded as for so many centuries.

Publishers Weekly Names Under Jerusalem in Top Ten of Fall 2021 releases

–David Adams

Read on publishersweekly.com

Top 10

The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773–1783

Joseph J. Ellis. Liveright, Sept. 21 ($30, ISBN 978-1-63149-898-5)
Ellis’s latest focuses on the brutality of the Revolutionary War and how the founders dealt with the issue of slavery.

Conquering the Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery

Andrés Reséndez. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Sept. 14 ($28, ISBN 978-1-328-51597-1)
National Book Award–finalist Reséndez recovers the lost history of the 16th-century Black mariner who navigated an easterly course across the Pacific Ocean from the Orient to the New World.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

David Graeber and David Wengrow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Oct. 19 ($35, ISBN 978-0-374-15735-7)
Anthropologist Graeber, who died in 2020, and archaeologist Wengrow cast doubt on the assumption that civilization could only be achieved by taming humanity’s baser instincts.

Girly Drinks: A Women’s History of Drinking

Mallory O’Meara. Hanover Square, Oct. 19 ($27.99, ISBN 978-1-335-28240-8)
This feminist history features a Sumerian beer goddess and Savoy Hotel bartender Ada Coleman.

The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes

Zoë Playdon. Scribner, Nov. 2 ($27, ISBN 978-1-9821-3946-9)
Medical historian Playdon recounts the life of an aristocratic Scottish trans man whose victory in a 1968 civil case could have protected trans rights—if it hadn’t been kept secret.

Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

Caroline Elkins. Knopf, Jan. 25 ($30, ISBN 978-0-307-27242-3)
Pulitzer-winner Elkins returns 17 years after Imperial Reckoning to examine how the use of systematic, racialized violence both enabled the British Empire and brought about its downfall.

The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece

Kevin Birmingham. Penguin Press, Nov. 9 ($30, ISBN 978-1-59420-630-6)
Birmingham examines a famous French killer’s influence on Crime and Punishment.

The Taking of Jemima Boone: Colonial Settlers, Tribal Nations, and the Kidnap That Shaped a Nation

Matthew Pearl. Harper, Oct. 5 ($27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-293778-0)
In his first work of nonfiction, novelist Pearl (The Dante Club) recounts the 1776 kidnapping of Daniel Boone’s daughter by a Cherokee-Shawnee raiding party.

Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City

Andrew Lawler. Doubleday, Nov. 2 ($32.50, ISBN 978-0-385-54685-0)
Journalist Lawler details how archaeological digs in Jerusalem have fueled religious conflicts, shed light on the ancient world, and helped shape the modern city.

Watching Darkness Fall: FDR, His Ambassadors, and the Rise of Adolf Hitler

David McKean. St. Martin’s, Nov. 2 ($29.99, ISBN 978-1-250-20696-1)
The former U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg examines how FDR’s ambassadors in Europe responded to the Nazi threat and shaped the president’s view of it.

Review: Uncovering the layers of history and politics in Andrew Lawler’s “Under Jerusalem”

Science and archeology journalist, Andrew Lawler, has made a name for himself writing unique and compelling books on somewhat unconventional subjects. His first book, Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?, explored the cultural history of the domesticated chicken and how it spread across the globe. His second title, The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke, examined the known history and many theories of what happened to the residents of that early English colony in the New World.

Lawler’s latest, Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City, is an impressively absorbing, admirably executed exploration of the labyrinthine layers of history, politics, religion, and science buried beneath one of the most religiously significant and politically volatile cities on Earth. Painterly descriptions, engaging storytelling, and meticulous research turn what could be a yawning tale of endless bureaucratic permit wrangling and religious and political machinations into a surprisingly exciting page-turner.

Lawler takes readers on a journey through the archaeological discoveries, political tensions, and cultural conflicts that have shaped Jerusalem’s dense and layered underground landscape. Our story begins in the 1860s as French and English explorers/proto-archeologists, motivated by Biblical accounts of King David, Solomon’s Temple, and holy treasures like the Ark of the Covenant, set their sights on the Holy City. It continues up to the present day, where that golden age remains largely unverified and ever-alluring to the world’s archeologists, treasure seekers, and the world’s Judaeo-Christians.

Through ancient tunnels, cisterns, and sewers of the city’s layered past, carved in soft limestone, Lawler shows how Jerusalem’s subterranean realm has been both a source of mystery and wonder and the site of seismic scientific, historical, and religious contention. Along the way, he introduces readers to a colorful cast of characters, including archaeologists, Biblical zealots, treasure-hunters, politicians, and religious leaders, each with their own motivations and perspectives in dealing with the city’s buried past.

Some of the stories of discovery in Under Jerusalem detail events that are almost too jaw-dropping to believe:

A Muslim business owner of a leather menswear company hears early morning sounds in what he knows to be the crawlspace beneath his factory. He lifts the hatch to the space to find a “dozen drunken black-bearded Egyptian Coptic priests in robes” and the formerly shallow and dank crawlspace now transformed into “a forest of stone columns and arches extending into the shadowy distance.” It turns out the priests had discovered another entrance into this Crusader-era space–long filled to the ceiling with centuries of muck and garbage–and had been secretly digging it out during the day, their sounds masked by the factory machines clanking away overhead. Their work completed, the priests had celebrated their efforts, gotten drunk, and were subsequently discovered in the morning hours by the owner. This incident would lead to a 20-year legal battle over ownership of the space below and to the discovery of an even larger Crusader-era space beside it. (As Lawler points out in the interview below, that factory space is now a convenience store and the hatch to that ancient underworld is in the middle of the potato chip aisle.)

Then there was the shocking and brazen 1999 bulldozing on the Temple Mount when Muslim authorities approved a cover-of-darkness hauling away of thirty dump trucks worth of dirt. This was done in an effort to open up archways along “Solomon’s Stables,” another Crusader-era structure they wanted to turn into a prayer space for upcoming Ramadan worshipers. They insisted there were no items of archeological significance in the dirt they trucked to the dump. A later sifting project of this dirt, organized by a young Jewish archeologist, would reveal over half a million artifacts, items from every period of Jerusalem’s history.

Or, how about the shop opener in the Muslim Quarter who began digging behind a curtain in his 5′ deep convenience store and 30 years later(!) his efforts would reveal an elegant, arched room held up by stone pillars. He would turn this space into “an atmospheric café popular with foreigners.” He would also find another large space beneath that one and a cistern below that, along with a series of tunnels that lead to various important sites around Jerusalem.

While Lawler focuses primarily on the physical and historical aspects of Jerusalem’s underground, he deftly handles the spiritual and symbolic resonances that these spaces hold for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. By exploring the complex interplay of religion, politics, and culture that defines this city, Under Jerusalem offers an illuminating and thought-provoking picture of one of the world’s most fascinating and complicated places.

Under Jerusalem is an engrossing, eye-opening read that should appeal to history buffs, armchair archaeologists, and anyone interested in the complex web of religion and culture that’s shaped this ancient and enigmatic city. Weeks after finishing it, I keep thinking back to it, wishing that it wasn’t over. You really can’t ask for more from a book.

Science Magazine, Volume 374, No. 6573

Interpreting Jerusalem

Thomas E. Levy

Science • 9 Dec 2021 • Vol 374, Issue 6573 • p. 1330 • DOI: 10.1126/science.abn0362

Shortly after the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and a coalition of its Arab neighbors, the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai visited the newly unified city of Jerusalem, later describing it as “a port city on the shore of eternity” (1). The poem pays tribute to the metaphorical role played by the landlocked city, referencing its deep-time history and its intersectionality with the God of the three monotheistic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Jerusalem and its history are closely linked to how people—ranging from scientists to religious practitioners to atheists—have imagined this mountain settlement over time. In his new book, Under Jerusalem, journalist Andrew Lawler seeks to unpack how the story of the city of Jerusalem, with its amazing underground world of ancient tunnels, roads, buildings, sewage works, and buried artifacts, is told in relation to the people who have populated it for longer than 5000 years. This ambitious book traces more than 150 years of continuous archaeological investigation of the world’s most excavated city.

In Lawler’s view, the social identity of Jerusalem’s storytellers—that is, whether they see themselves primarily as archaeologists, historians, theologians, university professors, activists, or politicians—largely determines how they confront the city’s buried past. He therefore pays careful attention to the nationality, ethnicity, political leanings, and socioeconomic standing of the individuals who appear in his account.

Lawler begins his story in 1863 with the earliest systematic investigation of the city, conducted by French senator Louis-Félicien Joseph Caignart de Saulcy. While excavating a large burial complex known as the Tomb of the Kings, the amateur archaeologist mistakenly concluded that he had found the final burial site of the Israelite King David and his son Solomon, setting the stage for a series of competing digs conducted by researchers from France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. These endeavors, often firmly rooted in Christian perspectives of the Holy Land, brought renewed interest to Palestine, a forgotten corner of the dying Ottoman Empire.

Contemporary standard practices for exploring archaeological sites focus on careful surface-down excavations. However, in the 1860s, in an effort to locate the remains of King David’s palace, two young British military men, Charles Wilson and Charles Warren, used tunneling methods to explore Jerusalem’s labyrinth of underground passages, channels, and buildings. A number of subsequent excavators, most of them Israeli, eventually followed suit.

Lawler interrogates the complex ideological motivations that compel the region’s two Indigenous peoples, Jews and Arabs, to explore and alter the city. Jewish investigators are often motivated by a desire to explore clues to their heritage that lurk underground. Their efforts are frequently deeply interwoven with ideas about Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem today. For Arab interpreters, it is the aboveground Islamic monuments that most often resonate with their identity and spur their investigations.

Under Jerusalem highlights the numerous archaeological atrocities that have been carried out in this contested city. These include the Jordanian destruction of the Jewish Quarter and its 27 synagogues in the 1948 war, the Israeli bulldozing of the Mugrabi Quarter adjacent to the Western Wall of the Temple Mount shortly after the 1967 war, and the currently occupied houses that have been undermined by archaeological tunneling. Some of these incidents reflect the evolution of archaeological practice, others the religion and politics of the actors—but all reflect a desire to use Jerusalem for the perceived good of the groups to which the investigators belong.

Lawler hints that a commitment to science-based archaeology by a new generation of Israeli researchers, coupled with innovative underground excavation techniques, may herald a more objective telling of the history of the world’s most contested city. This offers a distinctive opportunity for archaeologists to write a new narrative of the “city of peace” from the ground up.

Reviewed by:  Marissa Moss

“A comprehensive, even-handed, clear-headed story about one of the most argued over pieces of land on earth.”

Andrew Lawler has tackled big subjects before—the lost colony of Roanoke most recently. But he takes on a particularly complicated one in Under Jerusalem. Fortunately, he’s up to the task, delivering a story of not one excavation but several, not one culture or historical event but many. Just as Jerusalem is itself layered, so is this book:

“Like the marine organisms that created the limestone, succeeding generations created new strata. But Jerusalem is not like the abandoned towns, such as nearby ancient Jericho, dotting the Middle East that left behind high mounds resembling layer cakes, with the old neatly stacked beneath the more recent. Constant human activities jumbled the past; a Roman column might be repurposed for a Byzantine church, and stones cut by Jewish masons two thousand years ago could adorn a medieval mosque. Jerusalem is an old puzzle that reassembles itself in fresh ways, like the faiths that grew from it.”

What’s exceptional about this book, besides delivering fascinating characters and vivid excavation stories, is the way Lawler is acutely aware of the effect the past has on the present. The cultural, religious, and political tug-of-war between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam informs how he describes events. He is careful to show the motivations behind the different powers (from the Ottoman Turks to the French to the British), each with their own reasons to want to claim the holy city. He is equally careful to make clear the claims each religion has on the city, stressing the long-ago peaceful coexistence between Jews and Muslim Arabs, a balance that was changed by the influx of European or Ashkenazi Jews fleeing pogroms and the Holocaust in the late 19th and mid 20th century.

Though the book isn’t one story but several, each excavation serves to illuminate some aspect of archeology, history, or essential character of the city. The scope, however, is broad, allowing the reader to understand the different motivations behind the archeology. Science and historical understanding were rarely in the forefront. Treasure hunting and building reputations took a more prominent role. And politics was never far behind:

“The British empire in the early 1890s was nearing its global zenith, covering a quarter of the globe and dominating a quarter of the world’s population. The threat posed by Russia had faded as Czar Alexander III sought to avoid major international conflicts while grappling with growing domestic challenges. Britain’s purchase of the Suez Canal, meanwhile, had undermined French influence in the Middle East. Egypt was now out of the Ottoman orbit and under British sway.”

This kind of broad view and depth of knowledge undergirds every chapter in the book. Lawler has clearly done his research, and he pulls together all the elements into a fascinating story that presents the city of Jerusalem in all of its facets, much like a kaleidoscope offering us many different views of the same object. It’s hard to imagine a definitive book being written about such a complicated subject, but this one is as close as it gets. Lawler gives a comprehensive, even-handed, clear-headed story about one of the most argued over pieces of land on the earth. But this is no dry treatise. It’s more of an adventure story with the main characters being archeologists and treasure seekers. Lovers of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark won’t be disappointed.

Marissa Moss is a staff reviewer at New York Journal of Books.

The first official excavations in Jerusalem—a city sacred to three of the world’s major religions—began in the mid-1800s, when a French senator received an official permit from the sultan of the Ottoman Empire. In the century-and-a-half that followed, Jerusalem and its honeycomb of underground structures developed into a hotbed of political and scholarly controversy. Generations of Jerusalem archaeologists have insisted that their work is purely scientific and not political. But this entertaining and carefully argued book shows that the archaeology of this ancient city cannot be divorced from the complex knot of its politics. Journalist Lawler is evenhanded in his treatment of the thorny issues of religion, jurisdiction, and cultural heritage in Jerusalem; his care to credit the Arab workers from Silwan who long performed much of the archaeological grunt work is particularly notable in a book that necessarily focuses on the overwhelmingly Christian and Jewish archaeologists. At its heart, Under Jerusalem is a terrific story, bursting at the seams with dubiously legal digs and eccentric personalities.

— Jenny Hamilton

Book Review | Beneath the City of God

Lawler introduces a split in Jerusalem’s personality: the city above ground, which drags the past into the present and sometimes the future; and its buried history.

Some of those digging were determined to prove or disprove passages from the Bible or to locate the key paraphernalia from the destroyed Temple, whether they meant Solomon’s Temple, torched by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, or the Second Temple amplified by Herod and burned to the ground by the Romans in 70 CE. Sought-after objects included the “shew tables” that held Temple offerings, the menorah, the curtain hanging before the Holy of Holies, and the Ark of the Covenant with or without its stone tablets. Some sought the sepulcher of Christ; others engaged in a new crusade to wrest the Temple Mount—Noble Sanctuary, in Arabic—from the minds of the Muslims; others simply hoped to establish a definitive material chronology of civilizations that had held hegemony over Jerusalem.

Part I of Lawler’s narrative follows the vertical digging and horizontal tunneling, boldly by day or stealthily by night, of the intrepid explorers who burrowed within Jerusalem’s belly for a century, ranging from the French Louis-Felicien Joseph de Saulcy (1807-1880) to the British Kathleen Kenyon (1906-1978). From the 1860s to the 1960s, these and many other individuals pushed their Sisyphean ambitions uphill as humanity expanded and imploded—experiencing industrial and scientific greatness, fin de siècle malaise and a horrifying taste for increasingly brutal wars. Meanwhile, the old walled city of Jerusalem itself moved from Ottoman to British to Jordanian to Israeli political control.

Lawler’s fast-paced adventure-story account of what they did, what they found—and, more often, what they failed to find—yields to more recent stories of equally colorful characters. Israeli archaeologists, right-wing Israeli politicians and American entrepreneurs are among those who have broadened and
deepened—pun intended—the topographical parameters of this enterprise.

Complications included the more-than-occasional crises that arose from interaction with the local Muslim-Arab population, fearful and suspicious since 1863 as to what exactly these outsiders are really up to down there, digging around, potentially tunneling under the vast platform of the Noble Sanctuary. Part II, accordingly, takes up the politics of religion and the religion of politics, the topography of history and the history of topography, and another, even longer list of professional and amateur archaeologists.

After the Six-Day War in 1967, the former Temple platform and what lies beneath its surface became central to the larger discussion of Israel’s relations with its Arab neighbors, in particular the Palestinians. Lawler recounts how at one point—as negotiators after the 1993 Oslo Accords struggled to push past the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin and to birth a positive conclusion before the Clinton presidency ended—Dennis Ross, the lead U.S. negotiator, floated a proposal to offer the PLO authority for the surface structures on the Temple Mount/Noble Sanctuary (most notably, the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque) while granting Israelis authority beneath its surface, so that further archaeological exploration might proceed. (Alas, this suggestion yielded no result.)

The life-and-death struggle for a lasting peace for earthbound Jerusalem (and its extended environs) transpires against the backdrop of persistent underground transformation. The Israelis extend the tunnel along the Western Wall of the Temple platform to exit along the Via Dolorosa; the Palestinians semi-clandestinely reshape “Solomon’s Stables” near the southeast corner of the platform as a mosque. Most notably, the murkily funded Elad organization sponsors the digging of a complex south of the platform—deep into areas thought to include the site of David’s small capital city and of the Siloam Pool, where Jesus supposedly healed a blind
man—transforming it into an underground biblical Disneyland.

Throughout the book, public dramas intertwine with the private ones for which Jerusalem is renowned. An owner casually excavates the basement in his house or the back wall of his shop, which then yields some unpredictable archaeological, religious, legal or political complication—most often, all four. Lawler sees a deeper layer of meaning in another feature for which aboveground Jerusalem is renowned: “Jerusalem syndrome,” the local form of madness, in which an individual, usually a tourist, imagines himself a biblical prophet. The syndrome increased in frequency as the millennium approached; Lawler puts the surge into context, locating it within the larger madness of 160 years of lusting to possess and redirect the rivers of history flowing through this small hill town. Whatever their aim, seekers must wrestle with gravel and sludge, finding the occasional gold coins and the inevitable sewage.

I do have two minor complaints. One: In an otherwise nuanced and even-handed narrative, I think that the appropriately painful account of the destruction by the Israelis of the Mughrabi Quarter after 1967 should be preceded by a more than merely passing reference to the wholesale destruction of synagogues in the Jewish quarter by the Jordanians in 1949-67. Two: Given an Author’s Note in which Lawler demonstrates his awareness of language and its importance, it is distressing that he is not more careful to distinguish “Israelite” from “Judaean” from “Jew(ish)” and “Arab” from “Muslim”—both of which failures help perpetuate misconceptions regarding history and religion. But these complaints are minor compared to the overall power of his narrative. This is a spellbinding book—and a reminder that, just when one might have imagined that nothing new could be written about Jerusalem, there is still more to be found beneath its surface.

Ori Z. Soltes teaches across disciplines in the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University. He is the author of Untangling the Middle East: A Guide to the Past, Present and Future of the World’s Most Chaotic Region and teaches a course on “Jerusalem: City and Symbol.”

A leisurely, entertaining walk through the ages with a pleasant, knowledgeable guide.

An archaeological journey through the millennia in the Holy Land underscores the tensions between the biblical narrative and the historical record.

Lawler, a contributing writer for Science and contributing editor for Archaeology, delves into the stubborn attempts to square religion and science through layers of excavation under the ancient “gateway to heaven” for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Jerusalem, contested by the three major monotheist religions, does not give up its secrets easily, especially as each successive invasion and conquest has tended to bury—or appropriate the construction material of—the one before. In the mid-19th century, the first European treasure hunter (archaeology was not yet a scientific discipline), Louis-Félicien Joseph Caignart de Saulcy, with the Ottoman pasha’s approval, began digging for artifacts under the once-great city, which had since fallen into decrepitude. He sought traces of King David’s legendary conquest of the Jebusites circa 950 B.C.E., the Ark of the Covenant he brought and installed in a beautifully appointed temple, and the temple’s destruction by the Babylonians and reconstruction in 516 B.C.E. under the Persians. The Frenchman unearthed the so-called Tomb of the Kings—but which kings (or queens)? After David’s son Solomon’s glorious rule and Roman conquest, the Byzantine conversion to Christianity, and invasions by Muslims, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, and the British, there have been countless rulers of Jerusalem. On this note, Lawler quotes an Israeli archaeologist: “Everyone who ruled Jerusalem did the same thing: built his tower and hoisted his flag.” Subsequent mapping and discoveries—from Charles Warren to Montagu Brownlow Parker to Eilat Mazar—have not actually found the City of David, but intriguing artifacts and tunnels continue to feed public curiosity as well as rage by the various Jewish and Arab factions over what is deemed desecration. Lawler’s narrative is easy to follow, the timeline is helpful, and the maps are excellent.

A leisurely, entertaining walk through the ages with a pleasant, knowledgeable guide.

kirkusreviews.com

Link to Review 

Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the

World’s Most Contested City

by A. Lawler, New York, Doubleday, 2021, 426 pp., ISBN 978-0-38554-685-0,

£25.

This book deals with the thorny issue of how archaeology has been and is conducted in Jerusalem, home to the religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and the monuments sacred to them, and the city at the heart of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. It explores the motivations of those doing the excavating, the effects their actions have had, both intentional and unintentional, and the effects on our understanding of Jerusalem’s past. It also explores how cultural heritage has been hijacked and manipulated by various political and ideological factions, each wanting to control Jerusalem’s narrative, and how the inhabitants of the city have been excluded from participating in the discovery of the history and heritage of their home. It is an extremely important book, and I am very glad it was written by someone who knows how to write and who has a wide readership.

The book begins with a schematic map of the Middle East, with an insert close-up of the southern Levant. After a brief Author’s Note comes the Introduction, which is announced with a map of the Old City of Jerusalem, the platform of the Haram ash-Sharif / Temple Mount / Har HaBayit and its environs, with the main sites of interest marked. This is a very necessary and detailed introduction in which Lawler sets out his stall, and describes the conventions he has settled on for place and site names. He also explains that for the greater part of the book, because of an enduring historical imbalance in representation, the vast majority of voices are those of outsiders—British, French, Ottoman, as well as European and American immigrants to the region, rather than the voices of the Jewish, Armenian, or Arab residents of Jerusalem and its environs.

The book is then divided into three parts, covering the last 160 or so years of exploration in Jerusalem. The first part deals with the largest time span, beginning in the Ottoman period in 1850 and ending with the Six Day War in 1967. It opens with the French senator Louis-Félicien Joseph Caignart de Saulcy’s exploration of the Tombs of the Kings outside the Old City, before exploring in some detail Charles Warren’s work for the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) around the Haram ash-Sharif and the Ophel Ridge, Bliss and Dickie’s continuation of that exploration in the 1890s, and the notorious Parker expedition of 1909–1911, which trespassed within the walls of the Haram itself and nearly caused a war. Lawler then looks at archaeology during the British Mandate period from 1919 to 1948 and examines in particular the professional structures and organisations that emerged to control archaeological exploration and to encourage scholarship in the region. These include the establishment of the Department of Antiquities, the Rockefeller Museum, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the British School of Archaeology at Jerusalem. Kathleen Kenyon and Père de Vaux’s excavations in and around the Old City are a particular focus.

Parts 2 and 3 investigate archaeology in the city under Israeli control, starting with the destruction of the historic Maghrebi Quarter to open up the Western Wall Plaza, and Benjamin Mazar’s excavations around the Temple Mount, and continuing to include the Tunnel Project along the Western Wall, the City of David and Givati Parking Lot excavations run by ELAD in Silwan south of the Old City, the Waqf’s controversial rehabilitation of the Marwani prayer space within Solomon’s Stables on the Haram ash-Sharif, and the subsequent controversial Sifting Project that arose out of it. As the story progresses, the entanglement

PALESTINE EXPLORATION QUARTERLY with politics and ideologies grows ever greater. The three parts are further subdivided into several chapters, each of which explores a particular project, or sites of investigation, and is furnished with a map of the Old City, showing the location of the sites in question. These recurring maps are one of my favourite features of the book. They help to orientate the reader and keep them focused on the particular story the chapter concerns itself with.

Familiar names to the student of the history of Jerusalem’s exploration appear throughout: de Saulcy, Charles Warren, Conrad Schick, the Palestine Exploration Fund, the École Biblique, Père Vincent, Kathleen Kenyon, and Israeli archaeologists such as Benjamin and Eilat Mazar, Gabriel Barkay, Dan Bahat, Israel Finkelstein, Ronnie Reich, and Rafi Greenberg.

Then there are religious leaders like Rabbis Getz, Yosef, and Goren, and the members of the Waqf, the custodians of the Haram ash-Sharif and the Islamic holy places contained within. And of course, there are political figures such as Yitzak Rabin, Yasser Arafat, Bill Clinton, Ariel Sharon and Binyamin Netanyahu. What is significant is the way that Lawler tells these stories together, demonstrating how the actions, beliefs and opinions of the early explorers have influenced later practitioners, to create an enduring narrative which, never mind what really lies beneath, has been manipulated and exploited for various goals.

Palestinian and Arab voices are rare, not by design but because of the imbalance the author describes in the introduction. As time progresses, they play an increasingly important role, and we hear not just from the Waqf and the PLO, but from Palestinian archaeologists Namzi Jubeh, Ehab Jallab, and Hani Nur el-Din, as well as residents including Abdek Salam Hirbawi, (whose cellar near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City was the cause of a major argument between his family and the monks of the Church in the 1980s), and Miriam Bashir, whose house in Silwan is, like so many others, slowly becoming uninhabitable due to subsidence.

Jerusalem’s story is immensely complex, but Lawler deftly weaves the numerous threads together to present us with a very comprehensive tapestry. What he reveals is that despite the momentous changes which have taken place over the last 160 or so years covered here, there is a surprising continuity of several themes which reveal themselves as the book progresses. Altogether, these themes present an unflattering portrait of archaeological practice in Jerusalem from the early work of former colonial powers, the French, Ottomans, and the British up to 1914, through the new era of colonial rule of the British Mandate (1918– 1948), and finally into the modern era of Israeli control and the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Tunnelling is a method of revealing Jerusalem’s past out of sight of its residents. Introduced by Warren in the 19th century, it has been continued by successive excavators ever since. It is not regarded today as good archaeological practice, and would not be countenanced elsewhere. But in Jerusalem, the desire to reveal its biblical past at any cost and by any means overrides other concerns. The same could be said of the use of bulldozers—not the most delicate item in the archaeologist’s toolbox, but apparently fine in Jerusalem, if used with care (pp. 142–46).

Religious belief has been a huge feature of most activities from the outset. All of the various agencies have, to varying degrees, favoured biblical eras over those earlier and, especially, later, an imbalance which exists even now. It has undoubtedly resulted in the destruction of a huge amount of Late Antiquity and Medieval archaeology. These religious beliefs have also been harnessed by political agendas, whether Christian colonialist, or Jewish Zionist.

Both are linked, and both have resulted in the local population having been side-lined from the exploration and explanation of Jerusalem’s past, in favour of producing a particular narrative that supports a political or ideological interpretation.

This is perhaps the saddest theme that Lawler draws out. In all periods, the local population has been systematically ignored and cut out of the archaeological conversation happening on its doorstep. This has resulted in and enduring mistrust of archaeology and archaeologists, and a flourishing illicit antiquities trade, which today the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), through its lax antiquities laws, cannot hope to effectively control. This exclusive approach began as a feature of a colonial world view, where local residents were seen as a source of labour, and as facilitators, but as little else. Here, de Saulcy, Warren, and others are guilty as charged. Despite the political changes of the 20th century this approach has been sustained, and continues today, with Arab labour supplying much of the muscle for the excavations taking place around and beneath Jerusalem. Whilst this model offers employment and involvement, it is not agency, and these workers and residents have little say in the interpretation, or the narrative produced, or indeed in the economic benefits of the tourism resulting from the archaeology. Hopefully, with the emergence of professional Palestinian archaeologists in recent years, and archaeological courses gaining traction at universities such as Al Quds and Birzeit, this will change to some extent at least.

Lawler investigates the fissures in the various Christian and Jewish communities that have a bearing on the archaeology of Jerusalem, which the outsider may be less aware of. He skilfully brings out some of the profound differences of opinion that have existed within different sectors of Jewish and Israeli communities: fears that archaeology might ‘uncover the truth’ and demolish religion-based claims to Jerusalem, fears that archaeologists might, through their work, desecrate Jewish graves, as well as a secular Zionist desire to use archaeology to uncover proof of the city’s ‘Jewish past’.

As the book approaches the near past and present, Lawler plots the growing power of extreme right-wing Zionism characterised by Ariel Sharon and Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, which began to ‘flex its muscles’ in the 1990s, just as an attempt at bringing about peace was made with the Oslo Accords. With the right-wing taking charge in Israel, settler organisations such as ELAD, with funding support from outside Israel, also began to take a far more active—and controversial—role in the politics and the archaeology of Jerusalem whereby archaeology is used to change the city’s demographic and to control the narrative of its past. This can be seen particularly clearly in ELAD’s City of David project, which presents the visitor with a clear and compelling, but ultimately fictitious, vision of a Jerusalem where Judaism is the primary cultural influence of significance, and dominates, unfettered with the complex realities of a multi-religious and multi-ethnic past and present.

At the same time, Arab leaders have sought to counteract a ‘Jewish identity’ in Jerusalem by claiming that—despite very compelling evidence to the contrary—the Temple was not where the Haram ash-Sharif now stands, but was located elsewhere, perhaps even outside Jerusalem altogether. Whilst this idea has not attracted as much traction in the wider world as the agenda of the settler movement, it is important to realise that propaganda is not the exclusive tool of one side or the other.

Under numerous international laws and rules (the Hague Convention and its two protocols; 1970 UNESCO; 1995 UNIDROIT), it is considered illegal to excavate in any territory that is in dispute. Archaeological projects did not, however, stop in 1967: if anything, they have increased in frequency and ambition. Because of the hectic pace of activity, and the increasing involvement of the Israel Antiquities Authority, even in areas it would have previously steered clear of, it is easy to forget that all this work, where it takes place in areas under occupation, remains illegal under International Law. These are laws and conventions that the State of Israel does not recognise, and instead it sees the jurisdiction of the IAA as sovereign throughout, except on the Haram ash-Sharif itself where the Waqf is in control. It is important to understand that this does not mean that these laws do not exist; they are just continually broken in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

This issue of International Law as applied to excavation in occupied territories is brought up only once in the book. Perhaps the author felt it should be handled with a light touch, but personally, I feel it could have been given more weight, as it is so pertinent, if not critical to the subject.

The power of Lawler’s account increases as we get closer to the present day. He is a journalist, and his talent for journalism is on display, especially in the latter part of the book. His text is full of first-hand accounts from those involved—the archaeologists, sometimes those connected with the political power-players in Jerusalem and in Washington, and occasionally those who are directly affected by the archaeology and the politics being carried out both above and below them. These first-hand accounts give the book an immediacy and honesty which is quite gripping. Lawler has spent a great deal of time cultivating relationships with those people who are central to the story, and the book is all the better for it.

The book is not without its flaws: there is very little mention of the American, French and German interests in Jerusalem in the Ottoman period, beyond occasional references to the wider political jostling of the so-called ‘Great Game’, and whilst we occasionally hear of the involvement of the École Biblique, there is hardly mention beyond acknowledgement of the American Schools of Oriental Research which exist today as the Albright Institute in Sheikh Jarrah, north of the Old City. Granted, their involvement in the archaeology of Jerusalem has not been so direct, but they were, and remain, a part of the archaeological community resident in the city.

There are also errors in the characterisation of some organisations, such as the American Colony of the Spafford family, which Lawler describes as a group of missionaries, whereas, in reality, the family had not come to Jerusalem to proselytise, but rather to heal through work in the aftermath of terrible tragedies. The PEF is almost a character in its own right in Lawler’s book and is portrayed as an organisation, the committee and membership of which were entirely motivated and driven by an exclusive interest in the Bible, through which it might serve colonial interests. It is true that biblical concerns featured heavily in the PEF’s early days; yet, it seems this was much more to do with how the founders understood the means by which they could attract funding and support than anything else. The PEF’s interests were far broader, as a look at the pages of the PEF Quarterly Statement (today’s PEQ) will show, and it always walked something of a tightrope between balancing its own, broad, scholarship-driven agenda with the expectations of its membership, which, by and large, was more biblically orientated than its core committee. At the PEF’s inaugural meeting in June 1865, the Rev. H. B. Tristram (very much a Darwinian) was at pains to promote the study of the region’s natural history for its own sake, because it was interesting (Proceedings and Notes of the Palestine Exploration Fund 1865, p. 15), and G. Gilbert Scott Esq., R.A., included the architecture of Classical, Byzantine and Islamic periods in his discussion, and called for excavators to take account of the debris in which the architecture was embedded (Proceedings and Notes, p. 22). The PEF also employed William Flinders Petrie to excavate on its behalf Tell el-Hesi in the 1890s which Lawler refers to, and at which Palestine’s pre-classical past was first given some structure. Indeed, it was the scientific methodology employed by Petrie at Hesi that laid the stratigraphic foundations for all subsequent, competent excavation work in Palestine and beyond.

When, later, the British School of Archaeology (BSAJ) was founded at the beginning of the British Mandate in 1919, Lawler describes it thus: ‘Unlike the Palestinian [sic] Exploration Fund, the organisation [the BSAJ] would seek more than biblical remains’ (p. 120–21). Then, he goes on to list its interest in ‘Canaanite, Graeco-Roman, Byzantine, Arab, and Medieval periods’ and its characteristic as a non-religious and non-political body. However, he could almost be quoting, in slightly modernised language, from the 1865 prospectus of the PEF! This of course makes perfect sense, as the PEF was very much behind the establishment of the BSAJ in Jerusalem. Both organisations seem to have been unrealistically naïve about steering clear of controversy and politics and their academic motivations were very similar. At the time of its establishment, the only difference was that the BSAJ had no covert colonial role because, at this point, Britain had colonised Palestine. The BSAJ did not need to keep its supporters interested with biblical material because it was funded directly by the British government. Lawler’s representation of the PEF through this narrow, ‘biblically infected’ viewfinder is irritating, but does it matter? Well, yes, because the PEF plays such a large part in the narrative of the book particularly in the first part, but throughout as its influence endures.

The challenge to the biblical interpretation of Jerusalem’s past, and in particular the period relating to the ‘United Monarchy’ of David and Solomon is discussed. In Lawler’s account, the main challenge is laid down by Israel Finkelstein. It is inaccurate to suggest that it was Finkelstein alone who made others question the chronology based on the biblical narratives. There have been many who have, more generally, questioned the relationship between biblical history and archaeological reality. To mention just two: Kenyon’s excavations at Jericho in the 1950s made a new scepticism possible, as did the publication of Thomas Thompson’s Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives in the 1970s. I think the significant point is that Finkelstein was the first Israeli archaeologist to openly question biblical chronology, and by so doing made it harder for the inconsistencies to be ignored by Israeli archaeology.

Finally, right at the beginning of the book, in the introduction, Lawler makes a distinction between the archaeology of an inhabited city like Jerusalem and abandoned tells like that of Jericho. He is right, of course. Excavating any currently inhabited site comes with added complexity, and Jerusalem is as complex as it gets, but to describe Middle Eastern tells as ‘high mounds resembling layer cakes, with the old neatly stacked beneath the more recent’ (p. xxvi) is over-simplifying to say the least. I can almost hear a collective sharp intake of breath from the excavators of such sites.

These criticisms aside, Andrew Lawler has written an extremely powerful, honest, and important book. With great clarity and skill, he takes the reader on a tour through Jerusalem’s labyrinthine subterranean world, and amazingly, despite the almost unbelievable complexities of the story, he never loses his way. This book should be read by every person interested in the cultural heritage of Jerusalem and the region, its past, present, and future.

References

Kenyon, K., & Holland, T. A., 1960–1983. Excavations at Jericho 1952–58, Vols. 1–5. BSAJ.

Palestine Exploration Fund, 1865. Proceedings and Notes of the Palestine Exploration Fund, Vol. 1. Thompson, T. L., 1975. The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives. De Gruyter.

Felicity Cobbing

Palestine Exploration Fund

execsec@pef.org.uk

© 2022 Felicity Cobbing

https://doi.org/10.1080/00310328.2022.2070247

BOOK REVIEW 5

Link to review

New books from Israel for this month of Yom Ha’atzmaut

Our roundtable is a bit less well-rounded as we say farewell to our colleague and friend, Irene Afek, who has co-written this column with us, sharing her insights and knowledge. We wish Irene all the best, and we know that she will continue to be held in high regard by everyone who has the good fortune to know her!

This month brings us the important Israeli holidays of Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israel Independence Day) and Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day). Several new books, both fiction and non-fiction, are especially appropriate as we celebrate Israel.

AMY: We’ll begin with Israeli non-fiction. The first archaeological dig in Jerusalem was conducted in 1863, and since then, archaeologists and adventurers of many religions and nationalities have searched beneath the holy city seeking treasure, fame, and proof of the events chronicled in religious texts. “Under Jerusalem” by Andrew Lawler tells the history of efforts to dig up secrets buried beneath the city. The author delves into thorny political and religious controversies created when people dig into the many layers under Jerusalem. Extensive notes, maps, and other materials underscore the scholarly nature of Lawler’s work, yet the book reads like an exciting adventure story.

AMY: “The Israeli Century: How the Zionist Revolution Changed History and Reinvented Judaism” by Yossi Shain is sure to spark discussion. Shain’s premise is that the Diaspora is shrinking in size and influence, and in the future, Israel will define Jewish identity and life. The author explains the historical developments, as far back as ancient times, that have led to this conclusion, focusing on the development of Reform Judaism in Europe and America, and the tension between Reform and Zionism.

MINNA: Matti Friedman’s newest book, “Who By Fire,” subtitled “Leonard Cohen in the Sinai,” brings together the traumatic events of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 with the musician suffering a career crisis. Partly based on a 45-page manuscript Leonard Cohen wrote shortly after the war that the author used with the permission of Cohen’s estate, Friedman expands upon that with his own investigative journalism to describe the weeks Cohen spent giving concerts in the Sinai to small groups of soldiers and to analyze what that meant for both Leonard Cohen’s subsequent life and career and the country of Israel.

AMY: Let’s turn now to Israeli fiction. Fans of mysteries may well be familiar with Jonathan Dunsky’s Adam Lapid series. This series is set in the early days of the State of Israel, and Adam is a Holocaust survivor as well as a private detective. The newest series entry is “A Death in Jerusalem,” set at a time when the Israeli government was considering negotiating with Germany for Holocaust reparations and many viewed such negotiations as an abomination. On January 7, 1952, protestors stormed the Knesset after an anti-reparations demonstration, and Dunsky uses consequences of this actual historic moment to bring a wealthy industrialist into the novel; this man wants Adam to solve the mystery surrounding his daughter’s suicide. Plot turns and twists keep readers turning the pages.

MINNA: A debut collection of 11 short stories by a young Israeli author now living in New York, “The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land” by Omer Friedlander is whimsical and imaginative, with most stories set in Israel both past and present. The various stories take place in diverse locations from Jerusalem to the Negev to Tsfat. The title story, for example, is about a father and daughter who sell bottles of “holy air” to tourists on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv. The author himself grew up in Tel Aviv, although he spent two childhood years living in Princeton,

New Jersey, and holds degrees from Cambridge and Boston University. Friedlander is currently at work on his first full-length novel.

MINNA: “Jerusalem Beach” by Iddo Gefen is another debut collection of 13 short stories, this one written in Hebrew and translated into English by Daniella Zamir. These stories, set in contemporary Israel, combine humor with an interest in technology and the brain, relating to the author’s background in neurocognitive research. The title story concerns a woman with Alzheimer’s who has a “memory” of snow on the beach in Jerusalem. Rights to several of the stories have already been sold to TV and film production companies in Hollywood. Gefen’s debut novel will be published next year.

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CH@T: Author’s book digs into what’s below new book, ‘Under Jerusalem’

Dig into Jerusalem’s subterranean history with new nonfiction and graphic novel

Review: A journey beneath Jerusalem

By J. KEMPER CAMPBELL

Jerusalem is considered a holy city by Christians, Jews and Muslims. Millions of pilgrims visit the city each year to view the areas described in the Bible, the Torah, and the Qur’an and celebrated on the Holy Days of each religion.

“Under Jerusalem” by Andrew Lawler provides a meticulously researched record of the archeological activity, attempting to document the historic events which have occurred in the ancient city. Lawler, who has written for National Geographic, Smithsonian and Archeology magazines, has managed to coherently summarize the complicated history of the venerable city while detailing the myriad attempts of archeologists to provide physical evidence supporting the holy texts of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. His book provides a framework for Jerusalem’s chaotic and violent three millennia of existence.

Jerusalem was originally built by the Judean King David. His son, King Solomon, erected a mighty temple on the site which was destroyed by a Babylonian army six centuries before the birth of Christ. The city was subsequently conquered by Persians, Greeks and Romans before another Judean king, Herod, rebuilt the magnificent temple, which was again destroyed by a Roman army in 70 A.D.

Muslims erected the present-day Dome of the Rock on the spot from which the prophet Muhammed ascended to heaven. Empress Helen, the mother of Emperor Constantine, had already identified and marked the sites of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial cave in 327 A.D. All of these venerated structures are found on the area known as the Noble Sanctuary in the “Old City” section of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem was ruled by the Knights Templar of the medieval Crusades and the Ottoman Turks before falling to the British forces during World War I. Following the Allied victory in World War II, in response to the Zionist movement the country of Israel was created as a permanent homeland for Jews. Originally partitioned between Jewish settlers and Palestinian Muslims, twentieth century wars have resulted in the return of the entire city of Jerusalem to the state of modern Israel.

Archeological exploration of the porous limestone beneath the city began during the American Civil War. Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln both desired to visit the historic sites within the city but only Twain got the opportunity.

The book details the exploits of a colorful mélange of French, British and Israeli explorers of the nether regions beneath the surface for relics of the City of David, the hidden riches of King Solomon and the missing Ark of the Covenant sought by Indiana Jones.

Since wooden building materials are nonexistent in the region, each century’s new construction was built upon the previous century’s debris. Thus, the ground underneath present-day Jerusalem is a blueprint of the past. Unfortunately, any excavation risks disturbing the structures and people living above, so much of the exploration was completed surreptitiously.

Strife between orthodox and more secular Jews and Muslims over the vast domed spaces, stairways and edifices beneath the city has resulted in bloody confrontations and nearly resulted in derailing the peace accords overseen by President Clinton in 2000.

Author Lawler has sifted through the muddle of religious dogma, nationalistic fervor and commercial interests to uncover the nuggets of truth surrounding today’s Jerusalem. Readers electing to accompany him on his search will be rewarded for their persistence.

Review: A journey beneath Jerusalem

By J. KEMPER CAMPBELL

Jerusalem is considered a holy city by Christians, Jews and Muslims. Millions of pilgrims visit the city each year to view the areas described in the Bible, the Torah, and the Qur’an and celebrated on the Holy Days of each religion.

“Under Jerusalem” by Andrew Lawler provides a meticulously researched record of the archeological activity, attempting to document the historic events which have occurred in the ancient city. Lawler, who has written for National Geographic, Smithsonian and Archeology magazines, has managed to coherently summarize the complicated history of the venerable city while detailing the myriad attempts of archeologists to provide physical evidence supporting the holy texts of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. His book provides a framework for Jerusalem’s chaotic and violent three millennia of existence.

Jerusalem was originally built by the Judean King David. His son, King Solomon, erected a mighty temple on the site which was destroyed by a Babylonian army six centuries before the birth of Christ. The city was subsequently conquered by Persians, Greeks and Romans before another Judean king, Herod, rebuilt the magnificent temple, which was again destroyed by a Roman army in 70 A.D.

Muslims erected the present-day Dome of the Rock on the spot from which the prophet Muhammed ascended to heaven. Empress Helen, the mother of Emperor Constantine, had already identified and marked the sites of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial cave in 327 A.D. All of these venerated structures are found on the area known as the Noble Sanctuary in the “Old City” section of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem was ruled by the Knights Templar of the medieval Crusades and the Ottoman Turks before falling to the British forces during World War I. Following the Allied victory in World War II, in response to the Zionist movement the country of Israel was created as a permanent homeland for Jews. Originally partitioned between Jewish settlers and Palestinian Muslims, twentieth century wars have resulted in the return of the entire city of Jerusalem to the state of modern Israel.

Archeological exploration of the porous limestone beneath the city began during the American Civil War. Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln both desired to visit the historic sites within the city but only Twain got the opportunity.

The book details the exploits of a colorful mélange of French, British and Israeli explorers of the nether regions beneath the surface for relics of the City of David, the hidden riches of King Solomon and the missing Ark of the Covenant sought by Indiana Jones.

Since wooden building materials are nonexistent in the region, each century’s new construction was built upon the previous century’s debris. Thus, the ground underneath present-day Jerusalem is a blueprint of the past. Unfortunately, any excavation risks disturbing the structures and people living above, so much of the exploration was completed surreptitiously.

Strife between orthodox and more secular Jews and Muslims over the vast domed spaces, stairways and edifices beneath the city has resulted in bloody confrontations and nearly resulted in derailing the peace accords overseen by President Clinton in 2000.

Author Lawler has sifted through the muddle of religious dogma, nationalistic fervor and commercial interests to uncover the nuggets of truth surrounding today’s Jerusalem. Readers electing to accompany him on his search will be rewarded for their persistence.

New & Upcoming Books from North Carolina Authors

UNDER JERUSALEM The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City

By RANDY ROSENTHAL Published: DECEMBER 30, 2021 19:59

150 years of excavating Jerusalem: A rich layer cake

For the uninitiated, Jerusalem’s Old City is a labyrinth of narrow streets, hidden stairways, secret courtyards, and dead-end alleys. Yet the deeper mystery lies underneath the Holy City, where ancient cisterns, tombs, tunnels, column-filled caverns, and forgotten prayer rooms have been layered on top of each other over the course of Jerusalem’s vast and varied 4,000-year history.

In Under Jerusalem, American author Andrew Lawler tells the story behind a century and a half of excavating the world’s most contested city, paying as much attention to the aboveground politics as to the subterranean discoveries. Part history, part journalism and part adventure story, the book is nearly as fun to read as exploring the underground passages it describes.

The first people to dig up Ottoman-occupied Jerusalem were not the Palestinian Muslims, Sephardic Jews, or handful of Eastern Orthodox Christians who lived there, but Western Protestants who felt that the “real city of Jerusalem” was underground – and belonged to them. For these foreigners, the bustling markets, crowded buildings, and sacred shrines covering the surface of actual Jerusalem didn’t reflect the biblical city of their imagination. Rather than the medieval Arab town of dusty streets reeking of trash and sewage, they wanted to see Jerusalem as it was during the glory days of Solomon and Jesus. And so the foreigners dug – ironically to find that the ancient subterranean spaces were also filled with trash and sewage.

Though the American Edward Robinson began identifying remnants of places mentioned in the Bible in the 1830s, the first official dig permit was issued in December 1863 to the French senator Félix de Saulcy, who excavated the famed (and misnamed) Tomb of Kings and found sarcophagi he smuggled to the Louvre. The next was the British captain Charles Wilson, of the eponymous arch, who in 1864 described the ground beneath the Temple Mount to be “perfectly honeycombed with passages and cisterns.” It was this allure of a honeycombed underworld that led so many Westerners to try and find what lay within those secret passages – the Ark of the Covenant and treasures of Solomon being the most sought after of all. While such mythical treasures have yet to be found, the digs resulted in some of Jerusalem’s most visited tourist attractions today, such as the controversial Western Wall Tunnel and the dramatically lit passages and caves beneath the City of David.

In addition to the Indiana Jones-style treasure hunt stories and tense political showdowns, what makes Under Jerusalem a compelling read is Lawler’s style of ending each section with an alluring foreshadow of what’s to come. For instance, after de Saulcy left the “city’s domes and spires” above him, Lawler explains that “from that moment until the present, excavations would be an essential component in that effort to control the city, and the threat of protests, violence, and even war would haunt each dig.”

CONTROL OF the city came to mean control of the narrative of the city’s history, which became the point of many excavations after the 1917 Balfour Declaration and its validation of Zionism. As “excavating a cistern or searching for treasure might make sense to Jerusalem’s Arabs, but excavating to find your heritage did not,” Lawler writes that these heritage-seeking digs would later create “devastating consequences for all those involved.” He isn’t being melodramatic – in 1996, the mere opening of the Western Wall Tunnel into the Muslim Quarter sparked 104 days of violence.

Yet after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and more so after the Six Day War of 1967 – when the Old City came under Jewish control – the conflict was increasing not between Jews and Muslims, but between Israeli scientists and rabbis. As the state determined that sanctity trumped science, digs came to be controlled not by secular archaeologists but by religious groups who wanted evidence to prove Jerusalem belonged to the Jews – mainly to counter those like Yasser Arafat who claimed that there never was a Temple in Jerusalem, and that “the idea of a Jewish origin in Jerusalem is a myth used to justify conquest and occupation.”

The results of this tension were often mixed. For instance, with the discovery of the City of David and it’s palace, archaeologists confirmed the existence of a historical David, but also that the Jerusalem of the so-called Golden Age around 900 BCE was simply a small town, not a major city. In terms of population and prosperity, excavators conclude that Jerusalem reached its most magnificent during the Byzantine era – when the city was neither Jewish nor Muslim.

Rather that contradictory, however, the interests of scientists and rabbis should have been recognized as complementary. As the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle noted, “to explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.” For example, Robinson’s Arch was initially thought to be part of a massive bridge connecting the Temple Mount with the main part of the city, but later archaeologists determined “it was an enormous pedestrian interchange that was a wonder of the ancient world.”

In this way, modern scientists confirmed the boast found in the Babylonian Talmud: “Whoever has not seen Jerusalem in its splendor has never seen a fine city.” As Lawler writes, “Orthodox believers had long repeated the phrase, but it was secular Israeli archaeologists who made that splendor tangible.”

In the book ‘Under Jerusalem,’ the history of archaeology meets today’s struggles

By Erica J. Smith | The Virginian-Pilot | Jan 02, 2022 at 7:00 AM

From the mysteries of the Lost Colony to the global impact of the lowly chicken, Norfolk native Andrew Lawler long has made archaeology, history and science his pursuit as a writer. His latest book digs into the history and impact of archaeology in Jerusalem: “Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City” (Doubleday, 464 pp.).

French and British Christians took archaeology there, seeking the biblical past. In 1863, a French senator started a dig just outside the Old City, wrote a Wall Street Journal reviewer. Louis-Félicien de Saulcy broke into an ancient tomb and “abducted an attractive sarcophagus,” enraging rabbis and making off-target claims about the remains’ identity. “De Saulcy set the tone of most subsequent efforts: wild ambition, wild exaggeration, wild protests — and hardheaded chauvinism.”

Offshoots included religious, scientific, historical and political strife, and war. Lawler “incisively untangles the contentious geopolitical dimensions of ancient history as modern-day Israelis and Palestinians use archaeological analysis to bolster their political viewpoints and territorial claims,” Publishers Weekly wrote in a starred review. But, Lawler says on his website, the archaeological pursuit “could provide a map for two peoples and three faiths to peacefully coexist.”

Lawler, now an Asheville resident, writes for National Geographic, Smithsonian and other major outlets. His other books: “The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke” and “Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?: The Epic Saga of the Bird that Powers Civilization.”

– Reviewed by Jane Eisner, who is director of academic affairs at the Columbia Journalism School. She is writing a book about Carole King.

Yehuda Amichai, Israel’s most celebrated poet, wrote often about Jerusalem with language and imagery that ricochets off the ancient stone walls and into a reader’s heart. Jerusalem was where Amichai lived after escaping Nazi Germany; it is where he died in 2000; and it is where his accessible, imaginative and descriptive style transformed him into a sort of poetic prophet.

His long, gorgeous poem “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Why Jerusalem?” has a haunting refrain. “Why, of all places, Jerusalem?” he asks repeatedly. Why not New York, Athens, Egypt, Mexico, India, Burma? Why not Babylon, Petersburg, Mecca, Rome?

What is it about this city, where ordinary life rubs up against parading pilgrims, where bombs and crucifixions commingle with church bells and the muezzin’s call, where the ground is heavy with history – in Amichai’s words, “submerged and sunken” – that draws adventurers, scholars and ideologues like a magnet?

That question propels the narrative of Andrew Lawler’s new book, “Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City,” a sweeping tale of archaeological exploits and their cultural and political consequences told with a historian’s penchant for detail and a journalist’s flair for narration.

Beginning when Abraham Lincoln was in the White House, and going up until the raucous headlines of today, Lawler introduces us to an array of men and women drawn to explore the hidden tunnels, broken cisterns, collapsing walls and sewage pits that lie under a small plot of land sacred to the world’s Jews, Muslims and Christians.

“Under Jerusalem” is one of several new books chasing this Indiana Jones of a tale. And it’s easy to sense the allure. The archaeologists and adventurers who came to excavate the past and claim its treasures were seeking scientific knowledge, professional glory and tangible proof of their connection to the ancient biblical text. At times, their eagerness led them to burrow and bulldoze through sacred space, even if, in so doing, they disrupted centuries of civilization and rocked the foundation – physically and spiritually – of Western faith traditions.

Today, controversy over excavations in the Old City is too often framed as simply a conflict between Jews seeking to legitimize their connection to Jerusalem and Muslims resistant to those claims. But in this “city of political hypervigilance,” as Lawler calls it, the real story is far more complicated.

From the beginning, and for many decades following, it was in fact Christians – first from France, then from Britain, mostly Protestants – who swooped into the Holy Land and made a holy mess. In 1863, Louis-Félicien Joseph Caignart de Saulcy of France was the first to conduct an archaeological dig in the city, fueled by the conviction that “Jerusalem’s ancient heritage belonged not to those who lived in and ruled there, but to foreigners like himself,” Lawler writes.

Despite angering local Jews and Muslims and infuriating Ottoman authorities, de Saulcy managed to extract a sarcophagus from the Tomb of Kings that he believed was a consort of a Judean ruler from the 7th century B.C., take it to France and eventually display it in the Louvre. Never mind that experts questioned its true identification and significance. The discovery, Lawler writes, “opened the possibility that archaeology could yield concrete proof of scripture’s accuracy at a moment when advances in geology and biology had put Christianity on the defensive.”

This theme – that science can be used to verify religious beliefs and national claims – courses through this narrative like the streams flowing beneath the Old City. So does the political tumult that de Saulcy’s discovery ignited. Fearful of France’s influence, Britain very quickly launched its own archaeological strike force. Russia also sponsored digs, while Western philanthropists poured money underground – and still do.

One can see how Jerusalem natives, particularly the Muslims who retain authority over sections of the Old City, became so hostile to outside interference in the name of science. Their homes were damaged; their businesses disrupted; their autonomy questioned; their sacred space violated.

There is another, deeper reason for this antipathy, writes Lawler: “Excavating a cistern or searching for treasure might make sense to Jerusalem’s Arabs, but excavating to find your heritage did not. You were your heritage, and there was no need to find that which you had not lost. This profound cultural divide between Westerners and Arabs – and, later, between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs – would grow wider in generations to come, with devastating consequences for all those involved.”

Would that Lawler had delved more deeply into this fascinating cultural divide and the questions raised. What lies behind the compulsion to locate Jesus’ tomb or King David’s palace or Solomon’s temple? How do we balance the drive to uncover the past with reverence for the present? There is endless detail in this book about each excavation, contextualized with discussion of the ethical dimensions and methodological advances in the expanding field of archaeology. But there were times when I wished Lawler had stepped back to explore those larger, motivational questions more fully.

That said, he displays remarkable evenhandedness in cataloguing the politicization of archaeology today, especially considering that so many characters in this book believed that God – or Adonai, or Allah, or Jesus – was on their side. Lawler also carefully narrates the dramatic and consequential rifts between the increasingly powerful Orthodox Jewish rabbinate in Jerusalem and its largely secular, scholarly counterparts.

Tragically, we see positions harden and compromise made more difficult, whether it is in Yasser Arafat’s refusal to acknowledge the Jewish historical claim to the Old City or in the growing influence exerted by the fundamentalist City of David Foundation, widely known by its Hebrew acronym Elad. Sadly, too, we hear in this story echoes of broader troubling trends, as the neutral pursuit of science slams into ideology, greed, nationalism and faith.

Why, of all places, Jerusalem?

Amichai offers a partial, poetic answer: “In Jerusalem,” he writes, “everything is a symbol.”

Lawler’s timely book builds on that insight, showing how and why ordinary men and women, and great empires alike, continue to seek meaning in the dirt and debris beneath this magnetic, confounding city.

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Summary and Review: Under Jerusalem, The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City by Andrew Lawler

By Chandler Collins

Lawler’s book shows how archaeology has affected the landscape of a contested city. The detailed narrative is a fun and engaging read but assumes the framing it claims to critique.

Andrew Lawler’s highly touted book1 Under Jerusalem is an engaging and accessible account of select excavations in Jerusalem from the 1860s to the present day. The work is broken into three parts: part one focuses on early exploration of Jerusalem from the 1860s through 1967 when the Israelis captured East Jerusalem; part two covers the years 1967-2001 when peace talks collapsed; and part three extends from 2001 to today. Maps of Jerusalem at the beginning of each chapter highlight the location of key discussion points in the pages following.

Lawler’s narrative chronicles how the exploration of Jerusalem’s underground has had powerful effects on the city above. He contends that archaeologists who dig in the city have some responsibility to mitigate the ideological intents of their donors and wield influence over the way their excavations will inevitably affect changes in the city’s landscape. He even believes that archaeology is powerful enough to pave a path to peace.

Readers will benefit from Under Jerusalem in several ways. The book contains detailed narratives about more obscure (at least to me) archaeological ventures in Jerusalem such as Ron Wyatt’s search for the ark of the covenant on the grounds of the Garden Tomb, a two-decade lawsuit between a group of Coptic priests and an Arab shop owner into whose basement they burrowed (with the unofficial help of the IAA), Yehuda Getz’s attempt to break through Warren’s Gate and into the Noble Sanctuary’s underground, and others. Particularly interesting were the chapters that discussed the political ramifications of opening a new exit from the Western Wall Tunnels onto the Via Dolorosa. Even the well-known stories Lawler recounts are loaded with tantalizing details, many connected with the broader context in which the excavations occurred.

The book also includes material from Lawler’s personal interviews with archaeologists and locals, some of whom share information which may be unfamiliar to the reader. One of the most scandalous revelations in the book comes from Lawler’s interview with Meir Ben-Dov who relays that Yigal Yadin advised him to bulldoze the Umayyad palaces he had uncovered south of the Noble Sanctuary rather than reveal them to the public (144, 146). Thankfully Ben-Dov did not indulge Yadin.

Another strength of the book is that it gives a glimpse into the thorny context relating to archaeology in Jerusalem, especially in the chapters focused from the 1970s onward. Readers will learn how in general the religious-secular divide in Israel has contributed to very different orientations toward archeology in each community (especially in his discussion of Yigal Shiloh’s excavations on the Southeastern Hill). Lawler also discusses the historical reasons for different attitudes toward archaeology among Israelis and Palestinians. Additionally, the book highlights key players in Jerusalem, both individuals and organizations, and discusses them in relationship to each other, such as the IAA, Elad, the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, the Waqf, the Ecole Biblique, various ecclesiastical communities and educational institutions, invested politicians, donors, and others. Although it is by no means exhaustive, the web of information Lawler paints helps to bring some clarity to the knotty context in which Jerusalem’s excavations occur.

The cast of characters

Under Jerusalem focuses instead on the city’s most notorious, controversial, and ideologically driven excavations (probably in most cases better termed “digging activity”). More well-known figures in Jerusalem’s excavation history are one-dimensionalized to fit the narrative of the book: Edward Robinson is a “devout and conservative scholar” who used “the tools of science to counter religious skepticism” (xxxi); Charles Warren is a Freemason with “closely guarded spiritual reasons” for excavating in Jerusalem (40); Flinders-Petrie is “self-taught” (85); Vincent is an academic opportunist (111; see also 349); Kenyon is a “pious Anglican” searching for the City of David (130). This framing reflects Lawler’s view that Jerusalem’s archaeologists are best understood as biblical apologists or treasure-hunters (xxxi).

The book makes much of the fact that Vincent published a scientific report detailing the controversial and bizarre Parker Expedition. Lawler implies that Vincent did so for financial gain and in the process “turned a blind eye” to the chaos caused by Parker’s nocturnal escapades on the Noble Sanctuary “for the sake of immediate scientific gain” (111). It is interesting that Lawler does not apply the same standard to his own book which happily makes use of the Parker Expedition to support its own narrative.

The excavations of Kathleen Kenyon, taking place over seven seasons and the most extensive the city had ever seen, are afforded only one page in the book. Here is part of the section:

“Confident that she could use this [new trenching] approach to find the still-missing City of David, she set to work with a team of Silwan workers on the slopes of the ridge extending south of the Noble Sanctuary. Jerusalem’s subterranean scramble, however, frustrated even the savvy Kenyon. Like Parker and Vincent, she found plenty of walls and fortifications dating to the millennium before the Israelite arrival. But Kenyon uncovered nothing clearly tied to the days of David and Solomon” (130).

The length of the section given to Kenyon reflects a common approach that minimizes her role in the excavation history of Jerusalem. Strangely, it also presents her as a kind of biblical apologist. As is well known, Kenyon had just come from Jericho where she refuted Garstang’s popular claim to have uncovered the wall of Joshua. In a similar way, her excavations in Jerusalem demonstrated that the structures Macalister had unearthed on the Southeastern Hill and dated to the time of the Jebusites and King David in fact came from the Hellenistic Period—about a thousand years later.

Kenyon brought her rigorous archaeological method to Jerusalem and inaugurated a new era of scientific excavations in the city, the significance of which is not emphasized in the book. Her team excavated throughout East Jerusalem and pursued a variety of research goals related to several different historical periods. While some of her conclusions about Jerusalem’s history were controversial and later proved incorrect, Kenyon was no fundamentalist or treasure hunter as the book paints her.

Echoing the past

This framing is important for the book since it aims to draw a similarity between the early imperial archaeologists and later Israeli excavators. However, the attempt to mark a solid line from one to the other is not very compelling. Taking the above example, although Parker’s dig had massive political ramifications, one does not need to understand that context in order to grasp why Getz’s probe into the side of the Noble Sanctuary caused a huge controversy. We should also not imagine that knowledge of Parker’s 1911 dig on top of the platform hung around in the ether of Jerusalem (as implied on pg. 189) and somehow informed the response of the Waqf to Getz in 1981. Understanding the dynamics of the city and the fact that the Noble Sanctuary is sacred space provides enough context.

Misleading information and imagined controversies

The book is dotted with some misleading information. For example, Lawler repeats the idea that Charles Warren believed the shaft he climbed up in 1867 “must be the passage mentioned in the Bible that King David’s soldiers used to infiltrate and conquer Jebusite Jerusalem” (46; see also 87 and 210). In fact, it is not clear that Warren believed the shaft he discovered was the sinnor mentioned in II Samuel 5. The mistaken idea was only overtly applied to Warren’s Shaft later and not by Warren.2

In another place, Lawler writes that the Greek inscription discovered by Charles Clermont-Ganneau warning gentiles from passing beyond the stone balustrade and approaching the temple is “one of the few undisputed pieces of physical evidence from within the complex renovated under Herod the Great and destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE” (70). This is a strange statement considering that more than 500 pieces originating from the Royal Stoa built on the southern side of the Herodian Temple Mount and described in detail by Josephus have been recovered and published.3

Concerning the Nea Church uncovered in Nachman Avigad’s excavations, Lawler writes:

“…a church in the midst of the Jewish Quarter was anathema to many Orthodox Jews, and its vaults and apses were later locked behind gates and doors inaccessible to the public” (158; emphasis mine).

His overall point about the Nea Church is well-taken, namely that it is purposefully neglected. Even the informed visitor to the city will have difficulty in locating it, and it is near impossible to gain access to the key that unlocks the church vaults. However, the southern apse is hardly locked away. It sits in broad daylight visible to anyone willing to look for it. Apparently Lawler has not or was willing to exaggerate the point anyway.

Lawler also contends that rather than dig from the top down as is common practice, Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron opted to revive the old tunneling method of 19th-century archaeologists in their excavations near Jerusalem’s spring (211). While true enough that part of their excavations took place within ancient rock-cut tunnels, in all other places they employed the usual top-down excavation technique.

Under Jerusalem also presents some imagined controversies that stoke the fire of its narrative. From the time of Charles Warren, Lawler argues that there was a controversy of competing theories over the location of the City of David (70, 86, 88). Warren is said to be looking for the City of David in his excavations (46). However, the far and away majority view at the time still placed the City of David on the Western Hill (as Lawler mentions later). Despite some earlier suggestive breadcrumbs, it was not until closer to 1900—after the excavations of Bliss and Dickie—that the Southeastern Hill of Jerusalem came to be accepted as the ancient core. Lawler mentions this archaeological revolution but still uses an anachronistic controversy to hype Warren’s digs.

In an other instance he mentions the “…nagging question of the temples’ location, hotly debated among biblical scholars since Robinson’s day” (190; see also 258ff.). I would like to know what biblical scholars he has in mind. The overwhelming majority view in scholarship has been that all iterations of the temple building proper stood over the limestone bedrock under the Dome of the Rock. It is true that this remains a hypothetical conjecture, but there is a large amount of supporting evidence, especially geographical. The other scholarly views that I am aware of shift the temple’s location only a bit to the west (an older view that makes the Foundation Stone the location of the altar of burnt offerings) or to the north (near the Dome of the Spirits, setting the temple in line with the Golden Gate).4

There are more of these kinds of issues in the text. While any one of them is not a major problem by itself, together they obscure a number of facts in order the smooth the book’s narrative. Knowing the background to these problems, I find myself less confident in accepting other information in the book that relates to events with which I am less familiar.

Perpetuating old ideas

Lawler importantly mentions that Jerusalem’s four-quarter system is the synthetic creation of western outsiders (22, 353-354). However, readers of the book are still presented with a city marked by conflict:

“Ever since Abraham Lincoln was in the White House, when a French explorer broke into an ancient Jewish tomb, [Jerusalem’s] subterranean realm has sparked riots, threatened to trigger regional war, and set the entire world on edge” (xxvii).

This conflict is not just regional or between western archaeologist and city residents. Lawler writes that during De Saulcy’s expedition to the Tomb of the Kings in 1863, the governor of Jerusalem’s primary task was “to keep the peace in a city split among its three main religious communities, and in particular to maintain comity among the unruly Christian sects” (10). More of these kinds of statements appear in other places.5 An atmosphere of perpetual conflict in Jerusalem is the assumption underlying the book’s discussion of 19th and early-20th century digs, as well as those after 1967.

Western narratives that describe the city as a filthy and neglected place are presented as the impetus for the visitors to look underground for the “real” Jerusalem instead (xxxii-xxxiii). But the fact that Jerusalem was filthy and neglected or riddled in conflict is not questioned in the book.

These stereotypes of Late Ottoman Jerusalem were built mainly on the assumption that the writings of western visitors to the city should be taken at face value.6 Over the last several decades, scholars have pointed instead to Jerusalem’s rapid modernization in the second half of the 19th century and early 20th century which included a number of innovations.7 They have also suggested that the divisions wrought by the conflict of World War I and later British Mandate policies were much less pronounced in the earlier period Lawler writes about.

Lawler mentions the common disappointment of westerner travelers who arrived in Jerusalem. The city they encountered—most coming from some of the world’s largest urban centers at the heart of expanding global empires—did not meet their imagined expectations. However, the book does not discuss to what degree their observations about Jerusalem (such as Warren’s or Mark Twain’s) can be used as a fair window into the reality of the city they experienced. Native sources, such as the memoirs of Wasif Jawhariyyeh, paint Jerusalem in an entirely different light.

Conclusion

Lawler joins a host of authors who have written linear narratives about Jerusalem’s excavation history. Partway through the book I found myself wondering what its contribution would be. Considering that it focuses so heavily on the controversy created by archaeology in Jerusalem, I was surprised to read that Lawler believes archaeology could also serve as the seed for future peace. His rationale for this is not only because Jerusalem’s underground attests to the long presence of all three monotheistic religions but also because the archaeological process has revealed surprises that upended exclusive understandings of the city’s history.

The notorious Pontius Pilate was recently credited with building a massive street leading to the Herodian temple; elaborate Umayyad palaces near the Noble Sanctuary suggest a significant investment in Jerusalem beyond religious concerns very early in Islam’s history; the lack of monumental remains from the tenth century BCE has raised questions about how to understand the kingdoms of David and Solomon.

Lawler hopes that readers will accept his interpretation of the archaeological material, much of which is informed by minimalist views and tropes about the Bible, and set aside their differences. I suspect that those who are deeply invested in Jerusalem will not find this approach compelling.

Under Jerusalem is an engaging and page-turning read with important chapters, sources, and data points. But in the end, the book cannot escape from the same point of view that it claims to critique. Its fixation on the spectacle of archaeological stories throughout is summarized in its final words asserting that Jerusalem’s “abiding power remains bound up in its underworld” (344). I agree with Michael Press that this view attributes too much potency to the city’s subterranean realm. It also echoes the same framework of Jerusalem’s early explorers who looked past the living city in efforts to find the real and powerful one hidden below.

Few who are paying attention will question Lawler’s assertion that archaeology has become a tool of control in a contested city. Readers will have to judge how well this book can serve as a guide to this and other issues related to Jerusalem’s archaeological past.

Link to The Daily Beast Story

‘Indiana Jones’ Rabbi Thought He Found the Ark of the Covenant and Nearly Started a War

One month after “Raiders of the Lost Ark” premiered in the United States, a real-life version of Indiana Jones’ adventure unfolded beneath the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem.

At 1 p.m. on July 22, 1981, the rabbi in charge of Judaism’s most sacred place of worship received a phone call from his construction manager.

“He told me about an amazing discovery of a big hall behind the Western Wall,” wrote Rabbi Yehuda Getz in his diary. Excited, Getz rushed from his office by the Western Wall Plaza to a nearby metal door. Unlocking the gate, he walked briskly through ancient, vaulted rooms originally excavated by British archaeologist Charles Warren more than a century before. Then he entered the well-lit but perpetually damp passage leading north. Begun in secret by Israeli rabbis after the Six Day War in 1967, the tunnel was intended to expose the foundations of the massive wall that lay concealed beneath the city’s Muslim Quarter.

The passage was, on average, five feet wide and seven feet high, bored through the stone of medieval foundations and floored with wooden boards that covered yawning cisterns. The lower courses of the Western Wall were on his right. Beyond them, to the east, lay the honeycombed interior beneath what Jews call the Temple Mount, the site of the Jewish temple destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. For Muslims, it is the Noble Sanctuary, a platform supporting the Dome of the Rock marking the spot where the prophet Mohammad was said to have embarked on a mystical journey to heaven.

Near the tunnel’s end, Getz reached an ancient gate uncovered by Warren that once led into the interior of the sacred platform but had been walled up centuries before. There he found what he later said was a two-foot-wide hole puncturing the long-sealed entrance leading into the sacred platform’s bowels. Under the prevailing status quo, no one was permitted to broach this border. The rabbi’s diary does not explain who made the opening or why.

“A long hour I sat there, helpless, with boiling-hot tears running down from my eyes,” wrote Getz. “Eventually, I gathered courage and with awe and compassion I entered.” The rabbi seated himself on the stairs leading into the chamber and said the Tikkun Chatzot, the midnight prayer expressing mourning for the destruction of the temple.

Then he stood. A set of stone stairs led down from the inside of the gate into a vaulted hall. Twenty-six feet wide, thirty-three feet high, and nearly one hundred feet long, it was partially submerged in the typical underground Jerusalem cocktail of water, mud, and sewage.

Getz suspected the passageway was used by priests to access the Jewish temple before it had been blocked on both the eastern and western ends to create the cistern. He consulted with his excavation engineer. The two agreed that the first step was to remove the water and muck. Then he ordered the hole to be temporarily sealed “for security reasons” and called Israel’s chief rabbis: Shlomo Goren, the leader of the faith’s Ashkenazim, and Ovadia Yosef, the leader of the Sephardim. Getz also called the minister of religions, Aharon Abuhatzira, nephew to a famous Kabbalah sage from Morocco.

By 6 p.m., the four men were examining the interior of the cistern. Goren chanted a few Psalms—somewhat theatrically, according to Getz—and assured him that no one would stop his excavation team. He walked Getz to his Jewish Quarter home, saying mysteriously, “Now we will know the whole truth. I’m blessed that I got that privilege.”

The next morning, Getz ordered the project electrician to install lights in a corner of the cistern. The water pump, however, proved ineffective at draining the cistern. The following day, he called the director of Jerusalem’s fire department, who agreed to provide a more efficient electric pump and suggested sending a crew of Arab workers to help. “We refused, of course,” the rabbi wrote.

On the afternoon of July 30, Rabbi Yosef and several rabbinical judges arrived to discuss turning the drained cistern into a synagogue. Entering the Noble Sanctuary was a Jewish religious taboo. Since the location of the Holy of Holies—the innermost part of the vanished temple–was not known, it might be tread upon by accident. The rabbis, however, believed that it was acceptable to worship beneath the Temple Mount.

But word of the rabbinic discovery leaked. At 8:00 a.m. on August 27, the hourly bulletin on Israel National Radio opened with a report on the tunnel. Early that same afternoon, Arab workers sent by administrators of the waqf, the Islamic charitable trust charged with managing the Noble Sanctuary, entered the cistern from two manholes in the ceiling and began carrying building materials into the space to seal up the wall. Alerted to the news, Getz rushed from his home in the nearby Jewish Quarter. His alarmed wife followed and was shaken to find him standing in the cistern, now filled with Arabs holding tools. She ran out of the tunnel to the plaza and called on worshippers to protect the rabbi from what she thought was certain death.

“I stood alone in front of them,” he said later. “I was not about to go down quietly.” He shone a bright construction light on the workers to intimidate them, and then left to call Goren on a nearby phone to beg for help.

Getz went back to the cistern to face the Muslims by himself. “I found that the Arabs had entered the synagogue intending to block the entry and allow their men to build a wall,” he wrote in his diary. “Backed alone in the corner, I could not stop them.” One report had him pulling a gun on the Arabs. When Goren arrived at the Western Wall, he saw what he described as “hundreds” of police, including the chief of police, and hurried to the opened underground gate. He claimed there were also “hundreds of Arabs” in the cistern “coming in from all sides—and crying and shouting.” Goren said he called for help from students from a nearby yeshiva, a Jewish religious school, “and a few hundred came with weapons.”

Isam Awwad, the waqf’s chief architect, told a less dramatic tale. He and his colleagues had been closely monitoring the Israeli incursion and decided it was time to stop the invaders. “We sent ten of our Arab workers into the cistern with bricks and mortar to seal up the wall,” he said in an interview. “I was there inside with them.”

Whatever the precise numbers, Jewish worshippers broke into the space and began to fight with the Arab workers, one of whom was injured by a broken bottle. “A border policeman had to be restrained from opening fire with an M-16 automatic rifle, and the two sides were persuaded to withdraw,” according to the Guardian. Two people were slightly injured in the brief scuffle, and the police arrested several Jews and at least one Arab. A bloodbath was narrowly prevented. The waqf’s decision to quickly seal the gate and an immediate Israeli government denial of any role in the penetration of the sacred platform prevented what might have sparked a regional war.

That night, before going to sleep, Getz wrote bitterly, “I have never felt the humiliation of Jews like today—and in our own sovereign state!” Police later questioned the rabbi, noting that witnesses claimed he “gave orders to kill Arabs,” which he dismissed as a lie. He was never charged with any crime and maintained his important position until his death in 1995.

In his diaries, Rabbi Getz comes across as a deeply pious man, one who simply wanted to create a prayer space as close to the Holy of Holies as possible. Yet his writings don’t tell the full story. What exactly was the mysterious “inheritance” that he longed for on the night of September 4, as he stood beside the now-sealed gate? And what was “the whole truth” that Goren had alluded to?

It was only much later that the true goal of Getz, and the secret participation of senior Israeli government officials in the effort, came to light. They had been seeking the Ark of the Covenant, the sacred box that the Hebrew Bible said contained the Ten Commandments and which had sat in the Holy of Holies in the temple built by King Solomon. They were guided in part by Maimonides, the twelfth-century Jewish philosopher—known by some as the Ark of God—who wrote that Solomon anticipated the temple’s destruction and “built a structure in which to hide the Ark, down below in deep and twisting concealed places.” That belief persisted.

Getz’s daughter, Lily Horowitz, confirmed the quest. “Dad was striving to find the Ark of the Covenant buried beneath the Temple Mount by King Josiah of Judah,” she said. “He wanted to find the Ark of the Covenant to bring salvation closer. Because of its sacredness, my father was willing to risk his life. This was part of the redemption that comes with resurrection.”

One of the rabbi’s grandsons, Adiel Getz, added that his grandfather had long been convinced that the cistern “could lead to the chamber where the Ark is concealed, and above it, on ground level, to the place of the altar.” Another grandson, Yiftach Getz, said that “the dig for him had a messianic meaning. With the discovery of the place of the altar, he hoped, the righteous Messiah could reveal himself. He wanted to find the Ark of the Covenant. He hoped it would be found in the tunnels.”

Decades later, a more detailed version of Getz’s incursion implicated one of Israel’s most notorious intelligence agents in the operation’s planning and execution. That man was Rafi Eitan, best known for leading the team that captured Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who helped devise the Holocaust. In 1960, Eitan brought him from Argentina for trial in Jerusalem, where Eichmann was hanged.

“As the excavation of the tunnels progressed, I met with Rabbi Getz almost daily,” he told author Hila Volberstein. “Together with him, I studied the structure of the Holy Temple and its dimensions. We drew conclusions as to the location of the Holy Temple and the Holy of Holies.” He was eager to explore beyond Warren’s Gate, which they both believed had been used by the temple priests to access the sanctuary. “We assumed that if we made an opening in the wall to the east, we could move forward and eventually reach the Holy of Holies.” This was where they expected to find the ark, along with other valuable temple treasures. “But we waited for the right time to make the opening.”

Eitan was not the only senior official aware of the search for the Ark. The incident alarmed the U.S. ambassador to Israel, who was already fuming at the country’s recent bombing of an Iraqi nuclear facility and an attack on Beirut that killed hundreds of civilians. Under pressure from the Americans, the Israeli government set up a panel to investigate the Temple Mount penetration. The committee determined that the hole made in the gate was no accident, and that Defense Minister Ariel Sharon had personally given the green light. A surviving member of the panel, Israeli archaeologist Meir Ben-Dov, later said that the minister of religious affairs ordered that conclusion stricken, and the blame instead put on a botched attempt to fix a water leak. “How could we otherwise show our faces to the Americans?” Ben-Dov recalls him saying.

Until shortly before his death, Getz remained publicly silent on the true goal of the excavators. In the early 1990s, however, he insisted that he had seen the Ark with his own eyes before being foiled in his effort to recover the sacred artifact. “I can confirm to you that we know the exact location of the Ark,” he wrote in response to a 1993 query. It is a claim that archaeologists consider to be as fantastical as the Harrison Ford movie. Yet Muslim officials on the Noble Sanctuary remain on alert. Twice a day, their guards measure the water levels in the many cisterns beneath the platform, to see if the Israelis have drained water to access the subterranean world beneath their feet. Forty years later, Ark fever still exerts a grip on the imagination—and a threat to world peace.

Link to the Smithsonian Story

The Secret Excavation of Jerusalem

A British aristocrat looking for the Ark of the Covenant launched history’s most peculiar archaeological dig—and set off a crisis in the Middle East

A new book by journalist Andrew Lawler chronicles an illicit 1909–1911 excavation in Israel’s Holy City. Pictured here: a replica of the Ark of Covenant in front of an early 20th-century map of Jerusalem.

In the annals of archaeology, it ranks as the most bizarre excavation team. Led by a handsome British aristocrat, its members included a Swiss psychic, a Finnish poet, an English cricket champion and a mustachioed Swede who once piloted a steamboat on the Congo River. None had any training in the field.

Nor was the object of their search ordinary. This motley assemblage arrived in Jerusalem in 1909, when the Holy City was still under the authority of the Ottoman Empire, ruled from Istanbul. They sought nothing less than the famed Ark of the Covenant, along with treasures gathered by King Solomon 3,000 years ago that, according to legend, were later hidden.

Long before Raiders of the Lost Ark was a box-office smash, this band of unlikely explorers launched a secret dig that blew up into an international scandal that shook the Middle East, with consequences still felt today.

A sweeping history of the hidden world below the Holy City—a saga of biblical treasures, intrepid explorers and political upheaval

It all began when an obscure Scandinavian scholar suggested that he had unraveled a secret biblical code that pinpointed the site of the buried sacred treasure. The surviving notes of Valter Juvelius are a mass of scribbled numbers, obscure phrases and references to scripture, so exactly which cipher he claimed to have decoded is unclear. But he was convinced the sacred objects rested in a Jerusalem tunnel. Juvelius traveled across Europe, fruitlessly seeking a patron until he secured an introduction to Captain Montagu Brownlow Parker, the 30-year-old brother of an English earl.

A Boer War veteran and feckless London socialite, Parker was intrigued. He agreed to serve as the expedition leader and set up a syndicate to sell 60,000 one-pound shares in the venture. His status, charm and dashing looks proved irresistible to an array of investors, from Chicago meatpacker J. Ogden Armour to the duchess of Marlborough. They ponied up the equivalent of $2.4 million today to cover expenses.

Parker’s winning argument was that this paltry sum would recover not only the world’s most famous sacred artifact, but also an enormous fortune. He estimated that the Ark, along with the many gold and silver platters and bowls and other precious objects mentioned in the biblical text, would net $200 million on the art market—some $5.7 billion today. Searching for the Ark was not simply a spiritual quest; it would be an immensely profitable one as well.

There is a hint that Parker’s interest in the treasure was neither pious nor greedy, but ultimately romantic. One American newspaper later claimed that he agreed to lead the venture in order to obtain the hand of a wealthy divorcée. “Well, bring back the Ark of the Covenant and I will talk to you again,” she is alleged to have said.

The Ark is described in the Book of Exodus as a rectangular wooden chest made of acacia wood, covered in gold leaf and topped with statues of two cherubim on its gold lid. Scripture maintains it was built to hold the two tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments soon after the Israelites departed Egypt. “There, above the cover between the two cherubim that are over the Ark of the Covenant law, I will meet with you and give you all my commands for the Israelites,” God tells Moses, while providing detailed instructions on the design of the portable box that could be carried with two wooden staves.

Such shrines were common in the ancient Near East. A similarly sized wooden chest was discovered in King Tut’s tomb, while others in Egypt have been found topped with statues of deities and used as sarcophagi. Some were ceremonial boats carried by priests on poles. The cherubim from the Bible were likely derived from Babylonian tradition.

What set the Ark apart from its Near Eastern cousins was the biblical claim that it served as a powerful spiritual weapon, capable of parting the Jordan River, bringing down the walls of Jericho and generally routing any enemy of the Israelites. King David was said to have brought it to Jerusalem; he danced ecstatically before the sacred object as it entered the city. Eventually, it came to rest on the city’s Temple Mount in Solomon’s temple, within the chamber known as the Holy of Holies—the central sanctuary accessible only to the high priest, and then only once a year. Its presence would have given the mountain town a new and powerful religious might, yet it is never again mentioned in the Bible.

In 586 B.C.E., the Babylonian army attacked Jerusalem and “carried to Babylon all the articles from the temple of God, both large and small, and the treasures of the Lord’s temple and the treasures of the king and his officials,” as reported in the biblical Book of Chronicles. It’s unclear whether the Ark itself was among these objects; the invaders were, in any case, the third army mentioned in the Bible that had looted the sanctuary. Whether taken, hidden or destroyed, the Ark’s fate has spawned innumerable legends, hundreds of books and one Steven Spielberg blockbuster.

Candidate locations for the lost Ark include an Ethiopian church, an Irish bog, a Vatican basement, an Egyptian temple, a Jordanian mountaintop and a Dead Sea cave. Some Jewish traditions insist that priests hid the Ark and other treasures under or near the Temple Mount, where they allegedly remained even after the Roman destruction of the last Jewish sanctuary in 70 C.E.

Nineteen centuries later, the golden Dome of the Rock and the sprawling al-Aqsa Mosque rose above the parks and fountains of Islam’s third holiest site. Excavating on what Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary was strictly forbidden by the Istanbul-based sultan, who was caretaker of Islam’s most sacred places. Juvelius, though, believed that “his rendering of the Hebrew text denoted that the Ark of the Covenant could be found by working up the hill through underground passages,” as one expedition member later wrote.

These passages lay under a rocky ridge extending south of the acropolis, which archaeologists had recently determined was the site of the ancient city conquered by King David sometime after 1000 B.C.E. Outside the Old City’s walls, this spur of land was largely pasture and at a safe distance from the Noble Sanctuary. It was just a matter of penetrating the ridge to find the tunnel that led uphill to Solomon’s treasure.

Parker traveled from London to Istanbul and secured an excavation permit in exchange for 500 British pounds—about $80,000 today—along with a secret deal to share half the loot with Ottoman officials. In the summer of 1909, the bulk of the team arrived at the Palestinian port city of Jaffa, though their disembarking was delayed by an outbreak of bubonic plague. Once in Jerusalem, the group rented a luxurious villa outfitted with Persian rugs and long-hosed hookahs, with one room dedicated to the valuable finds they were certain they would soon collect.

“They were certainly the oddest archaeologists to visit Jerusalem,” remarked Bertha Spafford Vester, an American missionary who grew up in the city. “We heard of gay dinners given by the Englishmen, once with the Turkish Pasha as guest, and of their using oranges for target practice.”

Vester’s amusement turned to anger when she learned that the team intended to dig on the historic slope south of the Noble Sanctuary. She was appalled by “their complete lack of archaeological knowledge.” This was no exaggeration; one of the expedition members insisted that the Ark must be found on Mount Ararat, apparently having confused Noah’s Ark with that of King David. Under pressure from local expats, Parker agreed to grant access to a French monk who was also an archaeologist to record their finds—though the object of their search was kept strictly confidential.

The dig itself was difficult to keep secret, since it was the largest in Jerusalem’s history to date. Nearly 200 workers burrowed four-and-half-feet-high passages beneath the ridge, with air supplied by mechanical pumps. “We lived underground nearly the whole time it was daylight,” the French monk later reported. “The work went on at nightfall without stopping, by the light of torches and to the sound of songs chanted by the workmen.” They encountered numerous ancient passages-—“dark mysterious tunnels which seemed to stretch endlessly into the very entrails of the rock.” But the monk said that the only artifacts they found were “some old Jewish flat lamps made of baked clay, some red pottery jars [and] a few metal sling balls.”

There was no sign of gold or silver, much less the Ark. Soon, the weather turned bitterly cold and damp; at one point, the workers went on strike. That fall, Parker and his team packed up and left until the following summer. When they returned, it was with the chief engineer of London’s revolutionary subway system, known as the “tube.” By then, Juvelius had fallen ill with malaria and grown disillusioned with the search. He sailed home as Ottoman officials monitoring the dig grew impatient with the delays. The diminished team worked through the next winter with no better luck.

By the spring of 1911, with only a few months left before the permit expired, Parker concocted a foolhardy and dangerous plan. He bribed the Muslim sheikh in charge of the Noble Sanctuary and had him send the guards to an Islamic festival taking place outside of town. For the first time since the Crusades, the revered site was vulnerable to foreign trespassers. For nine subsequent nights, Parker and his men shoveled away at various places on the platform, but to no avail.

Finally, with time running out before the festival ended, Parker made an even rasher decision. On the tenth night, he and a small team entered the shallow cave beneath the Dome of the Rock—known to Westerners as the Mosque of Omar—close to the very place where Mohammad was said to have ascended into heaven. The aristocrat was convinced that this was the obvious resting place of the Ark, since it was rumored to mark the spot of Solomon’s long-lost Holy of Holies.  It was also a spot surpassed only by Mecca and Medina in sanctity among Muslims.

The particulars of what took place on the night of April 12, 1911, are fuzzy. Either a sleepless resident stumbled onto the workers as they hacked away at the rock or a caretaker not in on the secret heard the noise and raised the alarm. What is beyond dispute is that the Muslim residents of Jerusalem quickly filled the streets, infuriated at the news that their holy site was under Christian attack. Fearing for their lives, Parker and his friends fled, quickly jumping on the train to Jaffa. They coolly had tea in the harbor town before offering to fête Ottoman immigration officials on their yacht. Parker and his colleagues rowed to the boat to prepare for their guests—and then promptly sailed away.

Rumors swirled around the globe that the foreigners had made off with the staff of Moses, the tablets of the Ten Commandments or any number of possible other relics. “Gone with the Treasure that was Solomon’s” read the May 4 banner headline in the New York Times, over the subheading: “English Party Vanishes on Yacht after Digging under the Mosque of Omar.” Three days later, the same newspaper published a long feature titled “Have Englishmen found the Ark of the Covenant?” The Times reported: “It is believed that the explorers found Solomon’s crown, his sword and his ring, and an ancient manuscript of the Bible.”

They were certainly the oddest archaeologists to visit Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, some 2,000 demonstrators took to the city’s streets demanding justice. “There was an awful row, which required both battalions of Turkish Infantry, quartered in Jerusalem, to quell,” one expedition member wrote. The Noble Sanctuary’s sheikh and the city’s governor were arrested, but that did little to tamp down the public fury. “Moslems in a Rage” in a “Recent Sensation from Jerusalem,” read the headline of Washington, D.C.’s Evening Star.

News reports in the European press even suggested that Parker’s debacle might lead to the overthrow of the government in Istanbul. On May 8, the Ottoman parliament met in a contentious special session. Arab lawmakers presented evidence that the Jerusalem pasha and local military commander had been bribed by Parker. “The government covers everything up,” concluded a scandalized representative from the Black Sea region. One government minister drew hoots when he insisted that their share of Parker’s treasure would have been enough to have pay off nearly the entire national debt. In the end, all senior officials were cleared of wrongdoing, though the governor of Jerusalem lost his job.

One American newspaper warned that the treasure hunt by the Christian adventurers “might have provoked a holy war throughout the world.” This was no exaggeration: The events in the Holy City drew condemnation from Islamic leaders around the globe, including in British India. A commission of Indian Muslims investigated the incident and eventually concluded that nothing had been looted. Officials in London breathed a sigh of relief.

Parker returned to Britain without having grasped the consequences of his actions. Nor did the British Foreign Office appear to rein in the rogue aristocrat. Astonishingly, he went back in September of that same year for a second try at the alleged treasure. Advised by Ottoman friends not to land where he had previously anchored at Jaffa, Parker boldly sailed instead to Istanbul. But war had broken out between the empire and Italy, and no bribe could win him a new permit; the war took precedence over digging for gold. Parker never returned to Jerusalem, and the incident of 1911, if remembered at all, was dismissed in the West as a minor comic opera.

Yet this improbable expedition did more than inspire others to seek the Ark. It quietly seeded an intense distrust for archaeology among Palestinian Muslims while laying the foundation for Palestinian nationalism. According to Brooklyn College historian Louis Fishman, the incident demonstrated to local Arabs that the Ottomans could not be trusted to protect the Noble Sanctuary; it was up to the Palestinians to ensure its sanctity. The Dome of the Rock and the sacred platform soon emerged as a central symbol of rising Palestinian nationalism. This put Jerusalem’s Muslims on a direct collision course with the rising tide of Jewish immigrants, who crowded along the nearby Wailing Wall to pray.

The British went on to occupy Jerusalem and administer Palestine in the wake of World War I, while Parker served in the British army in France and then stepped out of the spotlight. On the death of his brother in 1951, he became the Fifth Earl of Morley and resided at an elegant Georgian mansion outside of Plymouth. So far as is known, he never spoke or wrote about his Jerusalem misadventure again. Needless to say, he never won the hand of the socialite, instead dying a bachelor in 1962.

Link to the Politico Story

No Way Out: How the Opening of a Tunnel Blocked the Path to Peace in Jerusalem

Photo by Patrick Durand/Sygma via Getty Images

A decision a quarter-century ago sparked an international crisis with ongoing ramifications. What lay beneath the surface of that incident?

Last May, rocks and rubber bullets flew as Palestinian protesters battled Israeli security forces in Jerusalem, leaving nearly 100 people hospitalized. The conflict quickly spread as Hamas in the Gaza Strip launched a barrage of rockets into Israel while Israeli Jews and Arabs rioted in the streets of other cities. The proximate cause of the sudden turmoil was an Israeli plan to evict Arab residents in a neighborhood close to the walled Old City, and Jerusalem today remains on edge.

The roots of this unrest, however, can be traced to a largely forgotten incident that took place 25 years ago last month, when a new Israeli prime minister named Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the removal of a few inches of rock in a tunnel beneath Jerusalem, opening up a convenient exit for tourists exploring the city’s subterranean history. What might sound like a minor decision instead sparked a bloody uprising, precipitated an international crisis, and ultimately unraveled talks designed to secure Israel, create a Palestinian state and end decades of violence. The story behind the tunnel’s opening sheds important light on the periodic upheavals in Jerusalem, as well as the difficulty of resolving one of the world’s most intractable political challenges.

The trouble began hours after the Jewish fast of Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, ended at sunset on Monday, Sept. 23, 1996. At midnight, a group of workers, led by an Israeli archaeologist and protected by armed Israeli soldiers, gathered in the silent alley of Jerusalem’s Via Dolorosa, deep in the Old City’s Muslim Quarter. Standing on the path that Christians believe Jesus trod on his way to execution, the men hammered away at a rock wall opposite a Franciscan monastery. Working quickly, they created an opening large enough to walk through.

On Sept. 25, 1996, an ultra-orthodox Jewish man walks the newly opened tunnel linking the Western Wall to the Via Dolorosa, deep in the Old City’s Muslim Quarter. | Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty Images

Beyond them lay a 1,000-foot-long underground tunnel hugging the base of the famous Western Wall. This structure of mammoth stones enclosed one side of the sacred acropolis known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary — Haram al-Sharif or al-Aqsa in Arabic. Islamic tradition holds that from here Muhammad embarked on a mystical night journey into heaven. Jews call it the Temple Mount, and they honor it as the site of the ancient Jewish temples destroyed in antiquity. The revered real estate is one of the most contested sites in the world, and now a tunnel, previously only accessible from its southern end in the Jewish Quarter, was opened on its northern end in the heart of the Muslim Quarter.

The next morning, senior Israeli politicians and Jewish religious leaders gathered at the same spot along with television crews. Mayor Ehud Olmert, who later would serve as Israel’s prime minister, told the crowd that the opening in the wall marked a new era for Israeli tourism, as well as an answer to Palestinians who questioned the Jewish claim to the Holy City.

With cameras whirring, the mayor hefted a sledgehammer, breaking open a faux wall the workers had added after making the opening the night before. The assembled dignitaries then chanted psalms in Hebrew in praise of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert, left, stands with Irving Moskowitz, a property developer from the United States, during the opening of the tunnel in Jerusalem’s Old City in Sept. 1996. | STR/AFP via Getty Images

One prominent spectator of the proceedings was the city’s Grand Mufti, Ekrima Said Sabir. “He pulled out his phone and called Arafat,” recalled Yisrael Hasson, then the Jerusalem chief of Israel’s security agency, Shin Bet, who later would direct the Israeli Antiquities Authority, referring to Yasser Arafat, the new president of the Palestinian Authority. “I heard it with my own ears. He told Arafat that the Jews were digging under the Temple Mount.” When Sabir hung up, Hasson said, Hasson himself quickly dialed Arafat, whom he knew well. “I said the tunnel does not go under the Temple Mount. But there was no talking to him.”

Less than an hour later, hundreds of Arab residents were marching through the streets of the Old City. Israeli police fired rubber bullets to prevent them from reaching the new exit. After the noon Muslim prayers, the crowds thickened.

“They started to shout from the minarets that Jews were penetrating the Temple Mount,” said Dan Bahat, the Israeli archaeologist who had overseen the work the night before. “That was enough.” While the tunnel paralleled the ancient acropolis, rather than running directly beneath it, its precise location was less important to Palestinians than the fact that Israelis had opened an exit to a Jewish sacred site in the heart of the Muslim Quarter. Now locals faced the prospect of Jewish tourists spilling out into the heart of their neighborhood, close to an important entrance into the Haram al-Sharif.

A truck and a car were set ablaze outside the Old City, sending a column of smoke into the early autumn sky. Dozens of young Muslim demonstrators began to throw rocks from the top of the acropolis onto Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall Plaza, more than sixty feet below. Police briefly sealed off the plaza that marked the southern end of the tunnel, as well as the Haram itself. The closure, however brief, of two of the world’s most sacred sites shocked people around the world.

“Why did they put it in their minds to open it now?” a distraught Muslim cleric said to a Los Angeles Times reporter of the controversial exit. “It means the peace is over.”

Work on the tunnel that would turn into a flashpoint in Israeli-Palestinian politics began in 1867, when an intrepid British officer named Charles Warren used an army of men and kegs of gunpowder to expose an underground labyrinth he called “a chaos of ruin upon ruin.” News of ancient chambers and passages deep beneath Jerusalem was greeted with excitement in the Christian West, which was hungry for material evidence of biblical times.

Violence erupts between Palestinian protestors, angry over the policies of Prime Minister Netanyahu and the opening of a tourist tunnel near Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, and Israeli soldiers, Sept. 27, 1996, on the West Bank. | Scott Peterson/Liaison

Locals felt differently. The rumble of Warren’s explosives, next to the platform that supported the Dome of the Rock and al Aqsa Mosque, two of the world’s oldest Islamic shrines, unsettled residents of all faiths in the Holy City. Directly above the dig was the city’s courthouse.

Rumors swirled that the British officer was part of a Christian plot to destroy Islam’s third holiest site, which was also revered by Jews. Warren soothed Jewish anxieties by taking leading rabbis on an underground tour. They emerged enthusiastic after seeing remains from the era of Herod the Great, who began renovations of the Jewish temple complex shortly before the birth of Jesus. The city council, made up of Arab Christians and Muslims, sent their own delegation. They were horrified by what they found: In its tunneling, Warren’s team had replaced sturdy stone arches with rotting timber.

“There is danger of great injury occurring there to the places above, which neither the Almighty nor his Majesty the Sultan would sanction,” the team concluded in an 1868 letter to the Ottoman governor, Nazif Pasha. The men feared the Western Wall might collapse, and with it, some of Islam’s most sacred places of worship. “We recommend that your Excellency be pleased to take measures to prevent them from doing this.”

The governor, wary of offending either the British or leading Arab notables, waited until Warren was away on a surveying expedition before having the entrance sealed with heavy stones.

For precisely a century, this subterranean world lay in darkness, slowly filling with sewage from the densely populated neighborhood that lay above. Ottoman control of Jerusalem eventually yielded to the British, who withdrew in 1948. The subsequent war between the nascent Jewish state and its Arab neighbors left the Old City, an area of less than a square mile and surrounded by Ottoman walls, in Jordanian hands.

All the while, the passage remained sealed. In 1965, one American archaeologist noted, the “wall is still there, waiting to be removed by a yet greater diplomat than Charles Warren.”

But it would be rabbis rather than diplomats who removed the governor’s stones. In June 1967, Israeli forces seized the historic core of Jerusalem. Many religious Jews were furious when General Moshe Dayan agreed to leave the Noble Sanctuary in Muslim hands (though under the watchful eye of Israeli security). To defuse Jewish resentment, Israel’s religions minister approved a secret plan, known only to a few senior officials, in the summer of 1968: They would reopen and extend Warren’s tunnel.

The project was as technically ambitious as it was diplomatically fraught. The goal was to expose the entire length of the buried base of the Western Wall. This would provide a vast new prayer space for Jewish worship beyond the relatively small section of exposed Western Wall at the plaza, and thereby reduce pressure on the rabbis — and Israeli politicians — to expand Jewish access to the Temple Mount itself.

Longer than the Empire State Building is tall, most of the 2,000-year-old rampart lay hidden beneath some of Jerusalem’s oldest and most revered Islamic buildings, as well as the dwellings of Muslim residents. The result would be a massive underground Jewish prayer space safely removed from the volatile Temple Mount.

But in Jerusalem, a city that has been rebuilt atop its own ruins for 5,000 years, attempting to solve one problem can create an altogether new one.

Yehuda Getz, appointed to the new post of rabbi of the Western Wall, led the clandestine effort. Soon homeowners and shopkeepers above began to complain about cracks in their walls. In 1970, the Jordanian government claimed that the digging — now an open secret — had damaged an important medieval Islamic school.

King Juan Carlos of Spain, center, is given a book by Rabbi Yehuda Getz during a visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem in 1993. | AP Photo/Nati Harnik

The Israeli government shrugged off the complaints, claiming the problems were the result of work on a desperately needed new sewage system. Workers, meanwhile, continued to bore through thick foundations and past cisterns filled with reeking wastewater. So long as they didn’t penetrate beyond the wall, and therefore under the acropolis itself, Muslim opposition would remain muted.

The détente lasted until the summer of 1981. Just as Americans were flocking to see the newly released Raiders of the Lost Ark, Getz decided it was time to unblock a door the team had encountered, one that would lead them beneath the sacred platform itself. Like the fictitious Indiana Jones then appearing on American screens (the movie hadn’t yet arrived in Israel), Getz sought nothing less than the Ark of the Covenant, the gilded box that the Bible said contained the Ten Commandments, and which Getz believed lay directly under the 1300-year-old Dome of the Rock.

Before the rabbi could explore extensively, however, news of his dig leaked. An underground scuffle between Arab workers and Jewish yeshiva students nearly turned into a bloodbath, and the door was quickly sealed up again.

While the Israeli government dismissed the incident as the work of a rogue rabbi, the Jordanian foreign minister decried the act as “part of the Zionist effort to seize the holy sanctuary” that threatened “world peace and security.” If parts of the Noble Sanctuary were to collapse, he warned that it “would be nothing less than a cultural, political and spiritual genocide.”

A 36-year-old Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary Rodham paid their first visit to Jerusalem on a church tour a few months later, when the city was still on edge. “It was the beginning of an obsession to see all the children of Abraham reconciled on the holy ground in which our three faiths came to life,” the ex-governor of Arkansas wrote. “That trip left a lasting mark on me.” In its aftermath, Clinton decided to run for governor again and succeeded in regaining the office, before ultimately heading to the White House.

Hillary Clinton, then first lady of the U.S., inside the Western Wall Tunnel during a visit to Jerusalem, on Oct. 27, 1994, as Rabbi Yehuda Getz’s wife Aidel looks on. | Barbara Kenney/AFP via Getty Images

The Western Wall Tunnel, meanwhile, had quietly emerged as a latent source of contention between Jewish and Muslim people, as potentially explosive as the kegs of gunpowder used a century before by Warren.

It was only after more than two decades of digging, in 1990, that the 1,000-foot-long passage along the buried wall was opened, partially, to pilgrims and tourists. Accessible though it may have been, it wasn’t exactly convenient. At the end of a 15-minute trudge along a narrow space strung with bare bulbs, visitors were made to double back to where they began, at the Western Wall Plaza.

“There were nonstop collisions,” recalled Dan Bahat, the archaeologist and a self-proclaimed “radical secularist” who had been tasked by the Israeli government with bringing some semblance of science to what had long been primarily a religious endeavor. Bahat had a northern exit prepared to allow visitors a one-way journey ending at the tunnel’s far end in the Via Dolorosa. But he left a few judicious inches of rock between the tunnel’s terminus and the street. The decision to open the portal would have to lie with Israeli politicians, since the move was sure to spark outrage among Muslims.

The thin rock barrier remained for several more years. A succession of Israeli prime ministers refused repeated requests by the Ministry of Religious Affairs to create an exit that would benefit visitors but risked sparking unrest. That reluctance only deepened after Jan. 20, 1993, when Israelis and Palestinians held their first secret talks in Oslo aimed at resolving their decades-long territorial conflict. That was also the day that Clinton was inaugurated as president in Washington.

Three years later, everything changed. A brash, 46-year-old conservative politician campaigned to halt the peace process and to ensure that all of Jerusalem remained under Israeli control. This approach gained Netanyahu his first term as prime minister starting in June 1996. Three months later, at the urging of Mayor Olmert, a fellow Likud Party member, Netanyahu gave Western Wall Tunnel managers approval to finish the exit.

Israeli intelligence officials were alarmed. Friday sermons and Palestinian Authority rumblings suggested this move would elicit violence. “I was against the opening,” said Hasson, the Jerusalem security chief. He begged officials in the prime minister’s office to wait. “Just give me three months,” he recalled saying, “and I will find a way to open it peacefully.” His plea was refused.

One week after Netanyahu gave the green light, just hours after the end of Yom Kippur, Bahat and his workers completed the project that had begun 28 years before. They cut through the last few inches of rock to open the northern exit.

Protests and then riots broke out within hours. Arafat, who had from the first insisted the Israeli decision was endangering the Haram al-Sharif’s sanctity, called the move “a big crime against our religion and our holy places” and demanded that the United Nations Security Council intervene. Arab leaders around the world denounced the opening as a threat to Islam. Demonstrators took to the streets across the Arab world. “The violence seemed to have a life of its own,” recalled American diplomat Dennis Ross. Netanyahu came under intense criticism but staunchly defended his action as a simple courtesy to tourists.

By the end of the week, the Israeli prime minister was accusing Palestinians of giving in to religious fanaticism, while he simultaneously praised the tunnel as “the bedrock of our existence.” Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority’s leader in Jerusalem, Faisal al-Husseini, was injured when he joined protesters attempting to reach the heavily guarded exit. “I told them this tunnel would lead to this,” he said to a New York Times reporter from his hospital bed.

“Can we get Netanyahu to close the tunnel?” asked Clinton, according to Ross’s account. “Probably not,” the diplomat responded.

Netanyahu rebuffed the American president’s calls for calm and requests to at least temporarily close the tunnel exit. “I do not regret that we opened the Western Wall Tunnel, which has no effect on the Temple Mount, and expresses our sovereignty over Jerusalem,” the defiant Israeli leader said. In retaliation, Clinton ordered the United States to abstain rather than veto a United Nations Security Council vote that obliquely criticized Israel for igniting the conflict.

Four days of violence left 74 Palestinians and 16 Israeli soldiers dead, and more than 1,000 Palestinians and 58 Israelis wounded. The crisis was enough to prod Netanyahu and Arafat to take part in an emergency meeting at the White House with the president and Jordan’s King Hussein. In the short term, the talks produced an Israeli-Palestinian pact for the holy city of Hebron that optimists hoped would serve as a template for a Jerusalem agreement. But the fury stirred on both sides by the bloodshed made a final deal elusive as Clinton’s final term ticked away.

President Bill Clinton, flanked by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, left, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, concludes a White House news conference on Oct. 2, 1996, where he discussed the situation in the Middle East, saying that the two officials had failed to settle their explosive differences but would continue peace talks. | AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee

Just before Christmas in 2000, with only three weeks left in office, the American president made a final desperate effort. Clinton proposed Palestinian sovereignty over the Noble Sanctuary and Israeli sovereignty over “the Western Wall and the Holy of Holies of which it is a part.”

Ehud Barak, who had campaigned on his desire to bring peace to the region, had beaten Netanyahu to become Israel’s prime minister and the Israeli cabinet proved open to a deal, but the Palestinians were spooked by the mention of the Holy of Holies, a spot that many Jews believed — as had Rabbi Getz — was located under the Dome of the Rock. Would that mean the Western Wall Tunnel, already a sticking point in the negotiations, could be expanded to include a Jewish synagogue or even a new temple beneath their shrine? The details that mattered were missing from Clinton’s proposal. Arafat balked, saying that agreeing to any such vague arrangement would risk his own assassination at the hands of furious Muslims.

The talks collapsed, and with the inauguration of George W. Bush and the election of conservative Ariel Sharon as Israel’s prime minister soon after, the peace process ground to a halt. The Western Wall Tunnel went on to become one of Jerusalem’s most popular tourist venues, and visitors today can conveniently exit on the Via Dolorosa rather than doubling back to the entrance. The site also has emerged as a popular place for Jewish prayer second only to the Western Wall Plaza, even as archaeologists continue to explore its many passages and chambers.

Had the Ottoman governor’s wall remained sealed, Israel might have conceded the Temple Mount in exchange for Palestinian recognition of Jewish control of the plaza facing the ancient stones. But the opening of a tunnel, begun as a Christian dig to expose the remains of biblical times, has become an entrenched religious barrier to any future resolution. As writer Colin Thubron once said of the city of Jerusalem, it has become “a rock in the path of peace.”

Link to the National Geographic Story

These archaeological findings unlocked the stories of our ancestors.

Two centuries of excavations on six continents have given voice to a past that previously lay mostly hidden. Now breakthroughs in technology promise even more revelations.

Digging for treasure is as old as the first plundered grave.

The urge to uncover buried wealth has obsessed countless searchers, enriching a few and driving others to the brink of madness.

“There are certain men who spend nearly all their lives in seeking for—kanûz—hidden treasures,” wrote the British traveler Mary Eliza Rogers after she visited Palestine in the middle of the 19th century. “Some of them become maniacs, desert their families, and though they are often so poor that they beg their way from door to door, and from village to village, they believe themselves to be rich.”

PAINTING BY KADIR NELSON

The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world, has supported scienc…

Not all the fortune hunters whom Rogers came across were desperate vagabonds. She also encountered sahiri, roughly translated as necromancers, “who are believed to have the power of seeing objects concealed in the earth.” These esteemed clairvoyants, often women, entered a trance that Rogers said allowed them to describe in minute detail the hiding places of valuable goods.

Archaeology transformed those “objects concealed in the earth” from simple treasures into powerful tools that allow us to glimpse the hidden past.

At first, the fledgling science emerging in Rogers’s day differed little from old-fashioned plundering, as European colonialists competed to fill their display cabinets with ancient statues and jewelry from faraway lands. But the new discipline also ushered in an unprecedented era of discovery that revolutionized the understanding of our species’ rich diversity, as well as our common humanity.

If this seems an exaggeration, imagine a world without archaeology. No luxurious Pompeii. No breathtaking Thracian gold. No Maya cities looming out of dense jungle. A Chinese emperor’s terra-cotta army would still be hidden beneath the dark soil of a farmer’s field.

TERRA-COTTA WARRIORS, 210 B.C. Buried to accompany China’s first emperor in the afterlife, life-size statues of soldiers and servants were discovered by farmers in 1974. Since then, archaeologists have unearthed some 8,000 warriors, as well as horses, chariots. Photograph by O. LOUIS MAZZATENTA

Without archaeology, we would know little about the world’s earliest civilizations. Lacking a Rosetta stone, we would still puzzle over the enigmatic symbols on the walls of Egyptian tombs and temples. The world’s first literate and urban society, which flourished in Mesopotamia, would be known only dimly through the Bible. And the largest and most populous of these early cultures, clustered around the Indus River on the Indian subcontinent, would never have been revealed at all.

Without the systematic study of sites and artifacts, history would be held hostage by those few texts and monumental buildings that survived the vagaries of time. The immense Pacific of our past would be broken only by scattered atolls: a battered scroll here, a pyramid there.

Two centuries of excavations on six continents have given voice to a past that previously lay mostly submerged. Through recovered sites and objects, our distant ancestors—many of whom we didn’t know existed—can tell their stories.

TOMB OF A TEENAGE PHARAOH, 1322 B.C. After archaeologist Howard Carter opened King Tut’s treasure-filled tomb in Egypt in 1922, the young pharaoh became a global celebrity. His gold funerary mask, a star attraction at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Photograph by KENNETH GARRETT

At least as far back as the last king of Babylon, more than 2,500 years ago, rulers and the rich have collected antiquities to bask in the reflected beauty and glory of previous times. Roman emperors transported at least eight Egyptian obelisks across the Mediterranean to embellish their capital. During the Renaissance, one of these pagan monuments was raised in the heart of St. Peter’s Square.

In 1710, a French aristocrat paid workers to tunnel through Herculaneum, a town near Pompeii that had lain largely undisturbed since the deadly explosion of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. The unearthed marble statues sparked a craze that spread across Europe for digging up ancient sites. In the New World, Thomas Jefferson had trenches cut through a Native American burial mound not to find lucrative grave goods but to assess who built it and why.

LAST MOMENTS OF POMPEII AND HERCULANEUM, A.D. 79 Touring Pompeii in 1981, a group studies victims of the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius that entombed two wealthy Roman towns. “Suddenly we are faced with human beings out of the dim past. Photograph by DAVID HISER

By Mary Eliza Rogers’s day, European excavators were fanning out across the globe. Few were dedicated scholars. More often than not, they were diplomats, military officers, spies, or wealthy businessmen (and they were, with very few exceptions, men) intimately tied to colonial expansion. They used their influence and power abroad to both study and steal, as they filled their notebooks and carted off Egyptian mummies, Assyrian statues, and Greek friezes for their national museums or private collections.

Fast-forward to the Roaring Twenties. The spectacular bling found in the tomb of the Egyptian king Tut and the Royal Graves of Ur captured headlines and altered the course of art, architecture, and fashion. By then, however, educated professionals had begun to grasp that the most valuable material from trenches lay not in the gold retrieved but in the data locked within broken pottery and discarded bones.

New methods of recording fine layers of soil provided novel ways to reconstruct day-to-day life. And starting in the 1950s, measuring the radioactive decay of organic matter gave researchers their first reliable clock to date artifacts.

In our own century, archaeology increasingly is done less in the trench than in the lab. What once had little obvious worth—burnt seeds, human feces, the residue at the bottom of a pot—is the new treasure. Through careful analysis, these humble remains can reveal what people ate, with whom they traded, and even where they grew up.

Advanced techniques are even capable of dating rock art, providing insight into cultures such as those of the early Aboriginal peoples of Australia, who left behind little durable evidence. And the sea is no longer the impenetrable barrier that it had been from time immemorial, as divers gain access to shipwrecks ranging from a Bronze Age merchant vessel to the most legendary of all ocean disasters, the Titanic.

The single most revolutionary development of recent decades is our ability to extract genetic material from old bones. Ancient DNA has given us an intimate glimpse into how our ancestors interacted with Neanderthals. It has also led to the discovery of our long-lost cousins the Denisovans, as well as the extraordinarily small people of the Indonesian island of Flores.

A host of new approaches, from satellite images to x-ray fluorescence, allow scientists to probe sites and artifacts without putting a spade into soil or cutting a sample from a valued museum object. This means that we are less likely to inadvertently wipe out data that we don’t recognize but that later generations might yet recover.

ANGKOR WAT, A.D. 802-1431 At its height in the 13th century, the capital of the Khmer Empire was the most extensive urban site in the world. As archaeologists search for clues to the city’s downfall, the temple complex in Cambodia endures as a revered religious shrine. Photograph by KIKE CALVO

Archaeology’s often unsavory past nevertheless continues to cast a long shadow. Not until the past decade has a movement to repatriate ill-gotten foreign artifacts, from the Elgin Marbles to the Benin Bronzes, gained political traction. For centuries, American and European reluctance to train or promote Indigenous archaeologists meant that when the colonial empires crumbled, there were few homegrown researchers with the experience to carry on the work. Those who struggle to do so often are hindered by war, a lack of resources, and development pressures. One of Central Asia’s great ancient Buddhist centers, Mes Aynak in Afghanistan, has been threatened by looters, rocket attacks, and a government plan to mine the site, which sits atop a vast reserve of copper. In August it fell under Taliban control.

The past is a nonrenewable resource, and every ancient site bulldozed or ransacked is a global loss. It is common wisdom today that local communities are an essential part of maintaining the health and well-being of natural ecosystems such as parks and wildlife preserves. The same applies to what our ancestors left behind.

The destruction that has afflicted sites across the Middle East and Central Asia is all the more terrible because impoverished villagers often have little stake in protecting them. Threats to this heritage include idol-smashing groups such as al Qaeda and the Taliban, as well as the buyers and sellers of looted artifacts. Peace and prosperity also pose dangers, when new construction destroys ancient remains.

Despite daunting setbacks, there is good reason to believe that a second golden age of archaeology—one largely shorn of its colonialist trappings and racist assumptions—has begun.

An influx of women and Indigenous researchers is revitalizing the field, while archaeologists (often an insular bunch) are now working more closely with their colleagues in other disciplines. They are charting global change through the ages with the help of climatologists, collaborating with chemists to trace the ancient spread of drugs such as marijuana and opium, and investigating more precise dating methods with physicists.

Recent finds, meanwhile, show the power of archaeology to radically reshape the way we relate to our past. Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, the world’s oldest known temple, dating back some 12,000 years, suggests that our urge to practice communal religious rites may have spurred us to settle down and plant crops, not the other way around. Egypt’s pyramid builders were not enslaved people but skilled workers who earned decent wages and drank good beer. And ancient DNA paints a jumbled and complicated tale of our ancestors’ journey across the planet that can’t be contained within race theories and national myths.

But archaeology’s real power remains rooted in its capacity to transcend intellectual knowledge and the creeds of the moment. Uncovering what has long been hidden connects us viscerally to our vanished ancestors. In that moment when an excavator brushes away the dirt to reveal an ancient coin or gingerly removes caked soil from a votive statue’s delicately chiseled face, the immense distances of time, culture, language, and beliefs can fall away.

Even if we are just gazing through the glass of a museum case or at the pages of a magazine, we can find ourselves closely linked to the person who shaped a pot, secured a dazzling brooch, or carried a finely wrought sword into battle. There is a haunting poignancy to those 3.7-million-year-old footprints left one rainy day on the Tanzanian savanna, as if we are present at the dawn of our own creation.

The task of archaeologists is not to find buried treasure but to resurrect the long dead, turning them back into individuals who, like us, struggled and loved, created and destroyed, and who, in the end, left behind something of themselves.