City of David

The great thing about my archaeology class is that the professor apparently doesn't like sitting in class too much. We have a field trip scheduled for almost every week, and today's was to the excavation sites for the City of David.

It's believed that the city stood directly to the south of the current Old City, on the western side of the Kidron Valley, in the time of the Jebusites. King David then extended it up to Mount Moriah (12th century BC, I think), the current Temple Mount, and by the time of Hezekiah, refugees from the Assyrian invasion (around 722 BC) had built homes to the west of the original city, extending as far up as today's Jaffa Gate.

What struck me was that it's really small. By comparison to major US cities, Jerusalem is small, but the area that the City of David supposedly encompassed is only an estimated 15 acres. For some reason, when I imagine the great cities of the past, I never take into account the fact that there'd be a lot fewer people in them, and how closely packed they'd be for better protection.

I didn't get to walk through Hezekiah's Tunnel, but Nari and I will probably go someday soon. This is the tunnel Hezekiah built when he was preparing the city for Assyrian attack, which diverts water from the Gihon spring, located slightly east of the main city, underground and to the Siloam pool on the western side. The Gihon was the main source of water for Jerusalem in this period, and for long after that, so it was important to make sure the Assyrians couldn't poison or cut off the water supply. Today you can still walk through the tunnel, since the water is no more than knee-deep, and some of my friends tell me it's a lot of fun.