City of David

Ancient Jerusalem was small. The whole Iron Age city sat on this one ridge between the Kidron Valley on the east and the Tyropoeon on the west, and the Temple Mount platform that dominates every photograph of the Old City is a later extension north of it. The practical consequence for a visitor is that the site is steep. Everything of interest is below the ticket desk, and the way out at the bottom, at the Pool of Siloam, is a long way down.

The Nature and Parks Authority lists the main points of interest as the Gihon Spring and its fortifications, Warren's Shaft, Hezekiah's Tunnel, the Pool of Siloam, the central drainage channel of the late Second Temple period, Area G on the eastern slope, and sections of city wall from both the Canaanite period and the Kingdom of Judah. Area G is where Kathleen Kenyon dug in the 1960s and Yigal Shiloh from 1978 to 1985, and where the building known as the House of Ahiel was found, named after a potsherd carrying that name.

The operator sells the ground floor of all this as a self-guided visit of about an hour and a half. That covers the lookout, the Mazar excavations, the underground water system, one of the two tunnels and the Pool of Siloam. The guided version runs three hours. Neither includes the Jerusalem Archaeological Park at the Davidson Center, which is a separate ticket unless it is bought as part of the Pilgrimage Road route.

• Visitor centre and lookout, at the top by Dung Gate
• Area G and the Mazar excavations, on the eastern slope
• The Gihon Spring, Warren's Shaft and the Canaanite pool
• Hezekiah's Tunnel (wet) or the Canaanite channel (dry)
• The Pool of Siloam, at the bottom, and the shuttle or the climb back

Hezekiah's Tunnel is the reason most people buy a ticket. The Nature and Parks Authority gives it as 533 metres long against a straight-line distance of 320 metres, cut to carry the Gihon Spring's water from the Kidron Valley outside the city walls to the Pool of Siloam inside them. It is the engineering that impresses rather than the scale: two teams cut towards each other from opposite ends, through solid rock, and met.

That much is not inference. An inscription found in the tunnel in 1880 by Jacob Eliyahu, a teenage student of the German missionary and architect Conrad Schick, records the moment the two crews broke through, describing the stone-cutters striking towards each other axe against axe. The stone was chiselled out of the tunnel wall in July 1890 and broke into several pieces in the process. It has been in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum ever since, and Turkey has refused Israeli requests for its return. What is on the wall today is not it.

The date is genuinely open. The traditional attribution rests on 2 Kings 20:20 and 2 Chronicles 32:30, which credit Hezekiah with bringing the Gihon's water into the city, and radiometric work by Amos Frumkin, Aryeh Shimron and Jeff Rosenbaum, published in Nature in September 2003, supported a date around 700 BCE using radiocarbon from plaster and uranium-thorium dating of speleothems. Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron argued in Tel Aviv in 2011 for a date several decades earlier, in the late ninth or early eighth century BCE. Both readings are live in the literature.

Warren's Shaft, higher up the same system, has had its interpretation overturned outright. It was found by Charles Warren in 1867 and long explained as the way besieged Canaanites reached the spring in safety. The Nature and Parks Authority now states that since the 1995 excavations the accepted view is that the shaft was cut only in the period of the Kingdom of Judah, and that the Canaanites drew their water instead from a large rock-cut pool inside the fortifications. The Authority gives the shaft's height as 30 metres; the English Wikipedia entry describes the vertical shaft itself as about 13 metres, which suggests the two are measuring different things.

Dating Iron Age Jerusalem is unusually hard: the ridge is dense, still inhabited, and the radiocarbon calibration curve flattens across part of the relevant centuries. In April 2024 a team led by Johanna Regev and Elisabetta Boaretto, with Yuval Gadot and Joe Uziel among the authors, published 103 radiocarbon dates from five excavation areas on this ridge in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, backed by 100 single-ring measurements between 624 and 572 BCE.

Their results give settlement here in the twelfth to tenth centuries BCE, and show that the city had already begun expanding westwards in the ninth century, earlier than had been assumed, with extensive building across the ridge in that period and a monumental structure they label Building 100 dated to roughly 900 to 850 BCE. They place the mid-eighth century earthquake at 766 to 750 BCE, and find the city rebuilt, heavily fortified and flourishing after it, until the Babylonian destruction of 586 BCE.

None of that resolves the site's loudest argument. The Stepped Stone Structure, the tall curved retaining mass on the eastern slope first dug by R. A. S. Macalister in the 1920s and re-excavated by Kenyon and Shiloh, has been dated to the start of Iron Age II by Kenyon, to the twelfth century BCE by Jodi Magness, and, in its upper part, to the Hasmonean period by Israel Finkelstein and colleagues. Eilat Mazar's Large Stone Structure above it, which she announced in 2005 and read as a tenth-century royal palace, drew a direct rebuttal from Finkelstein, Lily Singer-Avitz, Ze'ev Herzog and David Ussishkin in Tel Aviv in 2007, under the title "Has King David's Palace in Jerusalem been Found?".

The fortifications around the Gihon Spring are contested the same way. The Nature and Parks Authority dates the Spring Tower, whose walls are about seven metres thick, to the Canaanite period in the eighteenth century BCE. Radiocarbon samples taken from sediment sealed beneath its foundation stones, published by Regev, Uziel, Szanton and Boaretto in Radiocarbon in 2017, produced dates whose latest fall in the terminal ninth century BCE. Reich replied in Tel Aviv the following year defending the Middle Bronze date. A visitor will hear one of these on the tour.

The Pilgrimage Road is the newest thing here and the reason the site is in the news. It is the monumental stepped street that climbed from the Pool of Siloam towards the Temple Mount in the first century CE, about 600 metres of it now walkable, with an original roadway around eight metres wide. Excavation ran for roughly two decades, directed on the Israel Antiquities Authority side by Amit Re'em, the Authority's chief archaeologist for the Jerusalem district, who called it one of the most magnificent archaeological discoveries in Jerusalem in recent decades.

Its date is tighter than almost anything else on the ridge. Nahshon Szanton, Moran Hagbi, Joe Uziel and Donald Ariel published the coin evidence in Tel Aviv in 2019 under the title "Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem: The Monumental Street from the Siloam Pool to the Temple Mount", placing construction in the years of the Roman prefect rather than of Herod. The paving is well preserved partly because the street went out of use so completely after 70 CE.

How it was dug is the objection. Because the street runs beneath the built-up Palestinian neighbourhood of Silwan, the excavation proceeded as a tunnel, shored as it went, under houses whose residents said the work was damaging their buildings. The archaeologists and the site's operators reject that. Alon Arad of Emek Shaveh, an Israeli organisation of archaeologists critical of the use of archaeology in the conflict, told the Guardian in September 2025 that excavating in tunnels under people's houses without their permission is bad archaeology on its own terms, because a tunnel gives the excavator a very narrow view of what is around it.

The public opening was preceded by two ceremonies. In 2019 the American ambassador David Friedman broke through a wall with a sledgehammer to open a section. On 15 September 2025 Benjamin Netanyahu had the American secretary of state, Marco Rubio, inaugurate the route, which Rubio called perhaps one of the most important archaeological sites on the planet. The road opened to ordinary ticket holders on 20 January 2026. The guided route ends at the Davidson Center, and that admission is included in the ticket.

The land is a national park, Jerusalem Walls and City of David, and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority publishes its fee table and its opening hours. Day-to-day operation, the tours, the ticketing and much of the excavation funding come from the Ir David Foundation, usually called Elad, founded in 1986 by David Be'eri. Elad describes its purpose as strengthening the Jewish connection to Jerusalem and renewing Jewish presence in the City of David area of Silwan; it also buys property in the neighbourhood, which is why the arrangement is disputed rather than merely unusual.

The arrangement has been through the courts. The state sued Elad in 1997 over damage to archaeological remains, and a proposed 1998 contract was rejected by the Israel Antiquities Authority before a revised agreement was approved in 2002. In 2010 campaigning organisations petitioned Israel's High Court over transfers of authority to Elad that had not been made public, and the court required changes, after which a new three-year contract was signed. Criticism has come from inside the discipline as well: Eilat Mazar, who excavated here, publicly protested in 2011 at what she described as a lack of commitment to scientific archaeological work.

Visitor numbers grew with the operation. Figures compiled for the foundation give 25,000 visitors in 2001, 250,000 in 2006, 350,000 in 2007 and 450,000 in 2011. Leaked FinCEN documents indicated that companies linked to Roman Abramovich donated in the region of 100 million dollars to Elad between 2003 and 2018.

For a visitor this is not an abstraction. The guiding is the operator's, the narrative it presents is the one the UN commission of inquiry criticised in 2024 for focusing only on the site's Jewish history and disregarding other periods and cultures, and the neighbourhood the path runs through is somebody's home. Going is a defensible choice. Going without knowing any of this is not really a visit to the place.