April 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 69villages, wells and streams in the region around Jerusalem to bib-
lical texts to demonstrate the geographical accuracy of scripture.
This marriage of data with faith proved irresistible to Western
Christians. The book that he published in 1841 with his collabora-
tor Eli Smith, bearing the weighty title of Biblical Researches in
Palestine and the Adjacent Regions, proved an unlikely best seller
on both sides of the Atlantic. With it, the men laid the foundation
for “an entire new scholarly, religious, and political enterprise in
the Holy Land,” writes historian Neil Asher Silberman.
It was an enterprise that would reshape the Middle East. In
1863 the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul, who controlled Jerusalem
and the surrounding region of Palestine, granted the city’s first
official dig permit to a French explorer and senator. The sultan
was interested in neither the Bible nor science but in good rela-
tions with the senator’s powerful confidante, Emperor Napo-
leon III. Soon, British, German and Russian teams gained their
own permits and set out to measure, dig and analyze ancient sites
across Palestine. This was not just pious poking into the past. The
Ottoman Empire covered an immense swath of territory stretch-
ing from Eastern Europe to the Horn of Africa, and European
powers competed fiercely to influence and dominate it. With its
important Christian shrines, Jerusalem provided an easy access
point for Europeans eager to gather intelligence and expand their
sway within the empire. Diplomats, military officers and spies
accompanied the biblical scholars, and many were eager to find
treasure as well as expose the past.
Although Jerusalem has existed for 5,000 years, Westerners
were focused on what might be called the city’s biblical millennium,
the era between the arrival of the Israelites after 1000 b.c.e. and
the Roman destruction of c.e. 70, a period encompassing much of
the action that takes place in both the Old and New Testaments.
They were particularly drawn to the first centuries of Judean con-
trol of the city. Overwhelmingly Protestant, these explorers had
grown up hearing about David’s palace and Solomon’s temple,
as well as sacred and valuable objects associated with Judaism.
These included the Ark of the Covenant, a gilded box said to hold
the Ten Commandments brought down from Mount Sinai by
Israelite leader Moses and reputed to have magical powers. In
Jerusalem, the desires for knowledge, wealth and sanctity were
hard to untangle.
From the start, excavators faced a unique set of challenges.
Unlike many other ancient Middle Eastern sites, Jerusalem is not
a layer cake of a mound, with the old remains below and the new
above. Instead it was built on and from limestone, the product of
a vast shallow sea that covered the region during the age of the
dinosaurs. An ideal building material, Jerusalem’s particular vari-
ety of limestone is relatively soft when quarried, then hardens and
turns golden when left to weather. But complicating matters for
archaeologists, a single stone hewn for an ancient Judean dwelling
may have been reused by Romans for a temple, collected by Arabs
to complete an arch and robbed by Crusaders to build a church.
Given the dearth of wood and other organic materials used in con-
struction, modern dating methods such as dendrochronology and
radiocarbon, which rely on such materials, can be of limited use for
determining when any given structure was built—and by whom.
The unstable nature of the ground itself poses further difficul-AN OPEN RESERVOIR built in the first century
b.c.e., the Struthion Pool was later covered under
the rule of Roman Emperor Hadrian and now sits
below a Christian convent.