Jerusalem - Jewish Quarter
- from Chat GPT 5, 1 November 2025
During the First Temple period, this area formed part of the urban expansion on the southwestern hill, containing residential buildings, administrative structures, and fortifications. After the Babylonian destruction in 586 BCE, the quarter was reoccupied during the Second Temple period, when it became densely settled by Jerusalem’s Jewish population. Remains of monumental stepped streets, domestic quarters, and ritual baths ( mikva’ot) testify to the area’s vibrancy in the late Second Temple age.
Roman and Byzantine levels include fine mosaics, street paving, and architectural fragments from public buildings and churches, reflecting Jerusalem’s transformation into Aelia Capitolina. Later, early Islamic occupation continued without major interruption, and Umayyad-period ceramics and domestic remains attest to a thriving neighborhood.
Modern excavations following 1967—particularly in the Avigad Excavations—uncovered the broad wall of Hezekiah, Byzantine streets, and a wealth of archaeoseismic evidence from Late Antique earthquakes. The quarter’s archaeology thus provides a microcosm of Jerusalem’s evolution—political, religious, and architectural—over three millennia.
The excavations directed by N. Avigad from 1969 to 1982 in the modern-day Jewish Quarter within the Old City are usually a rich source for reconstructing Jerusalem's history and archaeology. However, no explicit hints suggest an impact of the AD 749 earthquake on the Jewish Quarter. In many areas, the remains from the eighth century AD onwards, even until the Ottoman period are combined into one stratum.49 This is likely the result of modern building activity there, which may have destroyed many of the remains that date later than the Byzantine period.50
Nevertheless, the modern Jewish Quarter excavations also revealed the Roman-Byzantine Cardo as the main thoroughfare during that time. The areas including the western Cardo (area X), do not seem to record any structures between the sixth to the thirteenth centuries AD.51 The same can be said about the pottery deriving from the fills above the Cardo — only a few examples of the pottery shards can be dated to the Early Islamic period, whereas most of the pottery can be dated to later periods.52 In contrast, a few coins from the Umayyad and Abbasid periods nevertheless suggest a use throughout these periods.53 Moreover, the excavations carried out in Jerusalem's eastern Cardo did not reveal any earthquake damage. It is described that the eastern Cardo was partially overbuilt by a new building which also dismantled parts of the Cardo.54
It can be assumed that any possible damage caused by the earthquake in those areas was simply rebuilt in the same way as before, and therefore no destroyed architecture was found. But according to the reports, no repair layers were observed in the architectural remains that could support such a rebuilding.
49 See for area A: Geva and Reich 2000, 43; area W: Geva and
Avigad 2000, 135; area E: no strata later than the Byzantine
period are recorded at all (Geva 2006, 11, 70); area B: the
last stratum combines remains from the Byzantine period
to the Mamluk period (Geva 2010, 10); area Q also does not
distinguish between any different strata during the Early
Islamic period — it ranges from the eighth to thirteenth
centuries AD (Geva 2017a, 8, 33); in area H the majority of
the archaeological remains later than the Early Roman period
were destroyed by building activity of the modern Jewish
Quarter buildings (Geva 2017b, 156). Severe damage from
the building activity seems to have occurred in areas F-2, P,
and P-2, since the last stratum covers all the remains from
the Late Roman until the Ottoman period (Geva 2021, 12).
50 See for instance Geva 2010, 10; 2017a, 8, 33.
51 Gutfeld 2012a, 27, 29, 41, 84.
52 Avissar 2012, 312.
53 Bijovsky and Berman 2012, 346–49.
54 Weksler-Bdolah and Onn 2019, 55. It seems very likely that
this phenomenon can be seen in the light of the “usual”
urban change in that period which includes encroachment
of colonnaded streets.
Zimni, J. (2023) 'Urbanism in Jerusalem from the Iron Age to the Medieval Period at the Example of the DEI Excavations on Mount Zion'
(unpublished doctoral thesis, Bergische Universitic Wuppertal)
Zimni-Gitler, J. (2025) Chapter 10. Traces of the AD 749 Earthquake in Jerusalem: New Archaeological Evidence from Mount Zion
, in Lichtenberger, A. and Raja, R. (2025) Jerash, the Decapolis, and the Earthquake of AD 749,
Brepolis