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Thursday, July 13, 2023

The Jerusalem Pilgrimage Road excavation

ARCHAEOLOGY: A new excavation of an ancient Jerusalem road expected to draw modern-day pilgrims. Inside City of David’s excavation of the ancient Pilgrimage Road, which once led directly to the Second Temple (Gabby Deutch, JewishInsider).
Known as the “stepped street,” or the “Pilgrimage Road,” the wide stone slabs that make up this pedestrian street were believed to be built by the Romans. The road was rediscovered by the Israel Antiquities Authority in 2004, after a sewage pipe burst. Archaeologists expect visitors to be able to walk the length of the road in two years, following the completion of an intricate excavation process.

For more than a decade now, archaeologists have overseen an underground excavation of the road, using heavy iron beams to prop up the above-ground infrastructure while they hollow out everything that has accumulated on top of the road over the past two millennia. Historians and archaeologists assert that the road connected the Pool of Siloam, a Roman-era pool used by Jewish pilgrims as a ritual bath, to the Second Temple.

PaleoJudaica posts on the Pilgrimage Road excavation and its discoveries are here (and links), here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and links.

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