The Temple Mount and Haram al-Sharif

Non-Muslims reach the compound by a single route: the covered wooden ramp that climbs from the Western Wall plaza to the Mughrabi Gate, called the Moors' Gate on iTravelJerusalem's own page, which states plainly that visitors can only enter through it. Muslim worshippers use the other gates of the Haram, which open directly off the lanes of the Muslim Quarter. Israeli police run the security check at the foot of the ramp, and the queue there is the part of the visit that takes longest.

What opens out at the top surprises people who know the site only from the postcard. It is not a courtyard around a building; it is a large open plateau, paved and planted, with the buildings set well apart on it. The Dome of the Rock stands on a raised inner terrace reached by flights of steps under free-standing arcades. The silver-domed al-Aqsa Mosque is at the southern end, a separate building several minutes' walk away. Discover Islamic Art counts more than 90 commemorative structures across the three levels of the sanctuary: fountains, prayer platforms, domes, minbars and Mamluk schools built into the edges.

The interiors are closed. iTravelJerusalem states that entry to the mosques and buildings on the mountain is prohibited, which means the Dome of the Rock, al-Aqsa and the underground Marwani prayer hall are all seen from outside only. A visit is therefore a walk on an open esplanade, and the Old City's usual advice about a hat and water applies more here than in the covered lanes below.

The hill under the compound was never this shape. Britannica dates Herod's order to rebuild the Temple to 20/19 BCE and says the work took more than a generation. Ritmeyer's reconstruction describes what that involved: the slopes around the summit were filled up and the whole area extended to its present size inside four retaining walls about 15 feet thick, so that a sloping hilltop became a level rectangle. The Smithsonian's account of the site puts the retaining wall at around 100 feet high, built of limestone blocks.

Almost none of that engineering is visible from the top. The walls face outward and downward, and the enormous limestone courses the Smithsonian describes are seen from the streets below, not from the esplanade. It is the reason the sites that explain this platform best are the ones at its foot: the Western Wall, the tunnels behind it and the Jerusalem Archaeological Park under its southern side.

Then it was destroyed. Britannica records that the Temple was reduced to ashes in 70 CE when the Roman commander Titus sent his forces to crush the revolt. Nothing of the Temple itself remains above ground and its exact position on the platform is still argued over. What survived was the box: the walls, the fill, the vaulted substructures at the southern end, and the blocked gates. Everything a visitor now looks at on top of it was put there by later hands.

Two of Herod's gates are still visible in the southern wall from the Jerusalem Archaeological Park below, walled up: the Double Gate and the Triple Gate, by which pilgrims climbed into the precinct. The Western Wall's four gates, known by the names of the nineteenth-century surveyors who found them (Warren, Wilson, Barclay and Robinson), are the same story from the other side.

• Ancient: the four retaining walls, the fill behind them, the vaults beneath the southern end and the blocked Herodian gates
• Umayyad: the Dome of the Rock and the first al-Aqsa, both late seventh or early eighth century
• Later: the tiled skin of the Dome (Ottoman), most of al-Aqsa's fabric (Fatimid onward), the arcades, fountains and Mamluk buildings around the edges
• Gone: the Temple, whose position on the platform has no agreed answer

The Dome of the Rock is the older of the two great buildings and the more original. An inscription inside dates it to 72 AH, 691 or 692 CE, under the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan. Britannica describes an octagonal base under a gilded wooden dome about 20 metres across, raised on a drum above a circle of 16 piers and columns, with a portion of the sacred rock exposed under it behind a railing and a stairway down to a natural cave. Discover Islamic Art gives the inner dome as 20.44 metres in diameter and calls it the oldest wooden structure of its kind still standing.

Its outside is not Umayyad. The original glass mosaic on the exterior did not survive Jerusalem's winters, and Discover Islamic Art records that Sultan Suleiman replaced it with ceramic tiles in AH 952 to 959, 1545 to 1552. The tiles now on the building are twentieth-century replacements following that scheme. So is the gold: the Baltimore Sun reported in April 1994 that the previous restoration in 1964 had used gold-coloured aluminium, and that King Hussein of Jordan sold a villa in London to raise 6.5 million dollars for 24-carat gold leaf. Other accounts put the sum higher, at 8.2 million dollars and 80 kilograms of gold, and the discrepancy has never been resolved in print.

Al-Aqsa has been rebuilt far more often. Discover Islamic Art dates the first mosque to AH 65 to 96, 685 to 715 CE, begun under Abd al-Malik and finished under his son al-Walid, and gives the present building as a rectangle of 50 by 80 metres with seven aisles running north to south and nine entrances. Successive earthquakes brought it down repeatedly; the Fatimid caliph al-Zahir rebuilt it in the 1030s, and the outline standing today is essentially his. The mihrab below the wooden dome is Saladin's, dated AH 583, 1187 CE, the year he took Jerusalem back from the Crusaders.

The most recent loss was deliberate. On 21 August 1969 an Australian, Denis Michael Rohan, set fire to the mosque, destroying the twelfth-century minbar that Nur al-Din had commissioned in Aleppo and Saladin had installed. A replacement was made in Jordan: the Jordanian royal court's own account says the work was ordered in 2002, completed by July 2006 and installed the following year, six metres high and 4.5 metres wide, assembled from 16,500 pieces without glue or nails by the Faculty of Traditional Islamic Arts at Al Balqa University with craftsmen from Egypt, Morocco and Turkey.

The arrangement governing the compound is unwritten and is usually called the status quo. Britannica's account is that after Israel took the Old City in 1967 the defence minister, Moshe Dayan, arranged for the Islamic waqf to continue administering the site, and that this was formalised in Israel's 1994 peace treaty with Jordan. Article 9 of that treaty, whose text is on the Avalon Project at Yale Law School, says that Israel respects the present special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Muslim Holy shrines in Jerusalem and will give high priority to the Jordanian historic role when permanent status is negotiated. Israeli police control entry and security; the Waqf runs the compound day to day.

The rule that follows, as the Religion Media Centre states it, is that Muslims may pray at the compound while non-Muslims, including Jews, may visit during designated hours but are forbidden from praying there. iTravelJerusalem's own page is blunter and lists what that means at the gate: prayer and bowing are forbidden anywhere in the compound, singing is not permitted, and Jewish sacred objects, Israeli flags and musical instruments may not be brought in. Bags are searched.

How firmly the prayer ban is now enforced is genuinely disputed, and this page will not pretend otherwise. The Jerusalem Post reported on 21 January 2026 that 68,429 Jews had ascended the compound during 2025, against 56,057 in 2024, and that police had begun permitting a single printed prayer page prepared in advance, while prayer books and phylacteries stayed barred. That change is written down nowhere as policy, and what happens on a given day is a policing decision rather than a published rule.

There is one further practical consequence. Because the compound is administered by the Waqf and policed by Israel, it closes without notice: on Fridays and Saturdays and Muslim holidays as a matter of course, and at other times whenever there is trouble. A closure is announced at the ramp, not in advance.

No archaeologist digs on the Temple Mount. The Smithsonian's account records that the Waqf has long forbidden archaeological excavation on the platform, regarding it as desecration, with the exception of limited European surveys in the late 1800s and British work between 1938 and 1942. Everything modern archaeology says about the compound is therefore inferred from its outside: the retaining walls, the streets and gates below the southern and western sides, and the literary sources.

The exception arrived as rubble. The Smithsonian reports that in 1996 the Waqf converted the vaults known as Solomon's Stables, at the south-east corner, into the Marwani prayer hall, and that in 1999 work on an emergency exit cut a pit more than 131 feet long and nearly 40 feet deep, with lorries carting away hundreds of tons of soil. In 2004 the archaeologist Gabriel Barkay obtained permission to search the dumped earth, and the Temple Mount Sifting Project has been washing and sorting it ever since.

The project publishes its own running totals: 4,742 of 5,210 tons sifted, 635,378 artefacts recovered and 261,749 people involved in the sifting, which it carries out with volunteers rather than a dig team. Because the material was bulldozed out of context, nothing found in it can be securely dated by where it lay, and the project's results are read accordingly. It is still the only body of material from the platform itself that anyone has studied systematically.

The compound's other contested structure is the sealed Gate of Mercy, the Golden Gate, in the eastern wall facing the Mount of Olives. Its inner chamber had been closed by Israeli order since 2003; in February 2019 the Waqf reopened it for prayer and Israeli police did not stop it, a sequence the Times of Israel covered at the time as a defeat for the Israeli position. Israeli officials have said the works there damaged antiquities. Nobody has been able to check.