Here's what Daniel sent us this week. He wants us to trace the physical footprint of Jerusalem across its whole history. Where the earliest city actually was, how big it was, what geography boxed it in. How it grew during the First and Second Temple periods, and how the boundaries shifted under the Romans, the Byzantines, the Islamic dynasties, the Crusaders, the Ottomans. And he flags one thing he thinks gets overlooked: today's Old City walls do not define ancient Jerusalem. He wants us to explain when those walls were actually built, and how the earlier city relates to what we now call the Old City.
Which is a much bigger correction than it sounds.
Then the second half. The nineteenth century, when Jerusalem finally broke out past the walls. He wants the story of Mishkenot Sha'ananim specifically. Why it was built, who was behind it, why living outside the walls seemed dangerous, what daily life was like for the first people who moved there. And then how the first neighborhoods outside the walls turned a compact walled city into the seed of the sprawling modern one.
And the frame he puts on the whole thing.
Right. He says the goal is to understand Jerusalem almost as a living organism. A city that keeps expanding, contracting, shifting its center of gravity, leaving successive versions of itself layered on top of and alongside each other. So let's start at the beginning. Literally the dirt. Where was the first Jerusalem?
The first Jerusalem is a narrow spur south of the Temple Mount. Today we call it the City of David. And the geography there is the whole story. You've got the Kidron Valley dropping away steeply on the east, the Tyropoeon Valley on the west, and one water source, the Gihon Spring, down in the Kidron.
That's a defended ridge with a spring. Which is the entire checklist for a Bronze Age settlement.
It's the checklist. And that's what you find. The earliest permanent building remains are Early Bronze Age, third millennium BCE, rectangular structures with benches built into the walls. Standard Canaanite urban forms. By the Middle Bronze Age, as early as the eighteenth century BCE, there's a massive wall around the place. A thirty-meter stretch of it was exposed above the Kidron.
How big is the whole thing at that point?
Small. Hillel Geva's study in Tel Aviv in 2014 is the minimalist position, and he puts the pre-Israelite city from the eighteenth to the eleventh century BCE at eleven to twelve acres. Population five hundred to seven hundred at most.
Five hundred people.
That's the city. That's Jerusalem.
I want to sit on that for a second, because we throw the word around like it means something enormous, and the original is smaller than a suburban shopping center.
And it stays that size for a long time. Then there's the moat.
The moat is the part I want people to hear.
Announced in December 2023. A rock-cut moat separating the City of David ridge from the Temple Mount and the Ophel to the north. Nearly a hundred feet wide. At least twenty feet deep. Quarrying it meant removing something on the order of half a million cubic feet of stone.
With iron tools.
With iron tools, and it's in use by at least the ninth century BCE. That's not a ditch. That's a statement of institutional capacity.
You don't dig that unless somebody can organize labor and feed it for years.
Which is why it complicates the picture of Jerusalem as a backwater. Something up there had the authority to commission that.
So when does it actually start growing?
David's city doesn't change the earlier borders. Solomon expands north to include the Temple Mount, and that takes the city to about forty acres. Then in the mid-eighth century BCE the Western Hill gets added, more than a hundred acres. By the end of the First Temple period, destroyed in 586 BCE, the walled city is a hundred and sixty acres, with settlement spilling north outside the walls. Peak population around eight thousand.
And the standard explanation for that jump has always been refugees.
The Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom in 721 BCE, people fleeing south, Jerusalem absorbs them. That's the textbook version. And a 2024 radiocarbon study in PNAS complicates it hard.
This is the one with the hundred-plus dates.
Over a hundred radiocarbon dates from four excavation areas in the City of David. And the argument is that the growth starts under King Jehoash, around 836 to 796 BCE. That's a century before Assyria falls on the north. So the expansion isn't primarily a refugee story. It's internal Judean demographic growth, plus political and economic consolidation.
Yuval Gadot's line on this.
He says most researchers linked Jerusalem's growth to the west to the period of King Hezekiah, and the new research teaches that the expansion is a result of internal Judean demographic growth and the establishment of political and economic systems. And the same study re-dates the eastern-slope wall to around 750 BCE, under Uzziah, not Hezekiah.
Which quietly relocates a piece of the biblical narrative. Not demolishes it. Relocates it.
It shifts who gets credit for the wall. And it shifts the mechanism from crisis absorption to ordinary growth.
Then the Babylonians arrive.
586 BCE. And the city contracts violently. The Persian-period city is confined back to the spur, roughly forty acres. Geva puts the population around a thousand. Finkelstein puts it at four hundred to five hundred.
Back to the Bronze Age footprint, basically.
Nearly. It takes the Hasmoneans, 150 to 50 BCE, to get renewal and expansion going again, and the population back to about eight thousand. Then Herod and his successors, and this is where Jerusalem hits its ceiling.
Josephus's three walls.
The First Wall is Hasmonean. The Second Wall is Herod's, running between today's Jaffa Gate and the Temple Mount. The Third Wall is begun by Herod Agrippa, who rules 41 to 44 CE, and it's completed at the outbreak of the First Jewish-Roman War. And the GIS work Joseph Spiezer published in 2023 shows the Third Wall brings Jerusalem to its peak historical footprint. About eighteen hundred dunams. Roughly four hundred and forty-five acres.
Four hundred and forty-five acres is the high-water mark. Ever.
Ever. And here's the detail I love. The Third Wall encloses the Bezetha quarter, which is sparsely built. It's an agricultural zone, a place where festival pilgrims camp. They walled in the camping ground.
They walled in the overflow parking.
And then in 70 CE the Romans take it apart. The walls come down, the city lies in ruins for about sixty years, and it's without walls for more than two centuries.
So the walled city is not a permanent condition. It's an on-and-off thing.
Hadrian refounds it after 130 CE as Aelia Capitolina, a pagan city, and at first it has no wall at all. A new wall goes up probably under Diocletian, 289 to around 300, and then it's extensively renewed by the Empress Aelia Eudocia, 443 to 460. And Aelia is laid out mostly within the lines of what later becomes the Ottoman walls.
Which is where the confusion starts, I think. People hear Aelia and Ottoman and assume continuity.
There's continuity of line, not of stone. Then the Byzantine period, Christian Jerusalem peaks under Justinian in the sixth century, the Nea Church, the Cardo. Geva estimates the population around fifteen thousand. And then 1033 CE.
The earthquake.
The earthquake destroys Eudocia's walls. The Fatimids rebuild them, but they leave out the southernmost parts. Mount Zion and the City of David are outside the new line. And that southern line survives to this day.
Say that again, because that's the hinge of the whole episode.
The Fatimid rebuild after 1033 draws the southern wall north of Mount Zion and the City of David. Everything south of that line is outside the city from then on. The biblical city is on the wrong side of the wall permanently.
So the original Jerusalem gets amputated in the eleventh century and never reattached.
Never. Then 1099, the Crusader siege. 1187, Saladin takes it back. 1202 to 1212, al-Mu'azzam Isa rebuilds the walls. And then in 1219 he tears them down himself, because he's afraid the Crusaders will benefit from them if they come back.
He demolished his own fortifications.
And the city has no walls for roughly three centuries. Think about that. Jerusalem, the walled city, is wall-less for longer than the United States has existed.
What finally puts them back?
Suleiman the Magnificent. 1537 to 1541. And those are the walls standing today. Four thousand and eighteen meters long, averaging twelve meters high, two and a half meters thick, thirty-four watchtowers, seven main gates. They enclose about one square kilometer.
One square kilometer, against a peak footprint of four hundred and forty-five acres.
The Ottoman walls enclose a fraction of what the Third Wall enclosed. And they exclude the City of David entirely. The original Jerusalem sits outside them, and it stays uninhabited from medieval times onward.
So the "Old City" is not old Jerusalem. The Old City is a sixteenth-century enclosure that happens to contain some very old things.
That's the correction Daniel wanted made. The walls are Ottoman. They're four and a half centuries old. They are not the walls of David or Solomon or Herod.
Which raises the question of why the mistake is so sticky.
Because the walls are the most visually dominant thing in the city. You stand on the Mount of Olives and the walls are the city. Everything inside them feels like the ancient core, everything outside feels modern. And the actual ancient core is outside, down the slope, and it looks like a hillside.
It looks like dirt.
It looks like dirt with some excavation squares in it. That's the whole problem. The oldest part of Jerusalem doesn't announce itself.
So that's the ancient footprint. Now jump forward. Nineteenth century. Until 1860, almost everyone in Jerusalem lives inside the Old City.
By mid-century you've got roughly fifteen thousand Jews, Muslims and Christians crowded inside the walls. Tiny, dilapidated houses, garbage, poverty. The city is compact, overcrowded, and completely confined.
And the confinement isn't just physical. It's legal and it's social.
There's a Turkish law forbidding building near the walls. Beyond the gates, which close at sunset and open at sunrise, you've got Bedouin marauders, thieves, wild animals. And if you move out you cut yourself off from your synagogue, your school, your market. Everything that makes life work is inside.
So the first move outward is not a real-estate decision. It's closer to an expedition.
Which is why the person who does it is Moses Montefiore. British-Jewish banker, philanthropist, 1784 to 1885. In 1855 he buys about ten acres for a thousand pounds from the Jerusalem governor, Ahmed Aga Dizdar.
And the money isn't his.
The money comes from the estate of Judah Touro of New Orleans. A bequest reported variously as fifty or sixty thousand dollars, with Gershom Kursheedt as executor. The original plan is a hospital. Then the Rothschilds build a hospital, so Montefiore and Kursheedt pivot to an almshouse. A hospice for the poor.
The governor's line when he sells the land.
From Montefiore's diaries. He says, you are my friend, my brother, the apple of my eye. Take possession of it at once. I would not sell it to any person for thousands of pounds, but to you I give it without any money.
That's a land transfer with a hug in the middle of it.
And there's a practical reason it's cheap. Nobody wants it. It's outside the wall.
What actually gets built?
1859 to 1860. Designed by William A. Smith of Ramsgate. Sixteen apartments, two rooms and a kitchen each. An Ashkenazi synagogue and a Sephardi synagogue. A mikveh. A hand-pump well shipped from England. Garden plots. And the Montefiore Windmill, built in 1857 to bring down the price of flour. Total cost, six thousand pounds sterling.
A windmill, two synagogues, and a well from England.
And a stone perimeter wall with iron gates locked at night. Iron bars on the doors and windows.
So the first thing built outside the walls is a smaller set of walls.
That's the part people miss. The leap beyond the walls is not a leap into openness. It's a compound. It's a fortified village with better plumbing.
And people didn't want to live in it.
They had to be paid to move in. That's the inversion. The first residents of the new Jerusalem had to be bribed to leave the safety of the old one. And even then, in the early years, a lot of them lived there during the day and walked back into the Old City at night.
They commuted to their own house.
And the danger wasn't theoretical. One resident was murdered on the road from the Old City. Another was killed chasing marauders.
The guard.
January 1873. Aaron Hershler, a guard at the compound, was shot twelve times defending his family's home from raiders out of Silwan. He died on the fifth of January. The IDF later recognized him as the first national martyr of the Jewish-Arab conflict.
Twelve times and he was still defending the house.
And the compound stays isolated for more than three decades. In 1875 they finally make a small opening in the city walls so sick people can be brought to the Old City hospital at night. In 1898 the gates are kept open day and night for the first time.
What breaks the deadlock?
An epidemic in 1866. It breaks out in the Old City and doesn't reach Mishkenot. After that the buildings are fully occupied.
That's the whole argument for suburbs in one event. The place outside the wall was the place that didn't get sick.
And it's worth saying the philanthropists were disappointed. They expected the residents to become economically independent quickly and they didn't. The original tenants refused to leave, and their descendants were still living there in 1948. The utopian planning met human stubbornness and lost.
Which is the more interesting outcome.
Then the neighborhoods come thick and fast. And the first structures outside the walls aren't Jewish at all. They're foreign, semi-autonomous walled compounds. Kerem Avraham, the British consul James Finn, 1855. The Bishop Gobat School on Mount Zion, 1853. The Schneller Orphanage, 1855 to 1861. The Russian Compound, 1860 to 1864.
So the first wave out is consulates and missions.
Then Jewish neighborhoods. Mahane Israel in 1867, built by and for Maghrebi Jews. Nahalat Shiv'a in 1869, a cooperative of seven families, and Yosef Rivlin won the right to build first. Mea Shearim, 1874 to 1875, planned by Conrad Schick, gates locked nightly, and the first quarter in Jerusalem with street lights. Three hundred homes by 1900.
Street lights before plumbing, presumably.
Almost certainly. Then the Nachlaot cluster, Mishkenot Yisrael in 1875, Mazkeret Moshe and Ohel Moshe in 1882. The German Colony, the Templers, 1873. The Bukharan Quarter in 1891, laid out with wide European-style streets. Yemin Moshe, 1892 to 1894, right next to Mishkenot.
And the Arab families?
The affluent Muslim families, the Husseinis, Nashashibis, Nusseibehs, Dajanis, are the first Arabs to build outside the walls. The al-Husseini villa, built 1865 to 1876, later becomes the American Colony Hotel.
So by the 1890s everyone with money is moving out.
And then the railway. The Jaffa-Jerusalem line opens on the twenty-sixth of September, 1892. It cuts the journey from three days to three hours.
Three days to three hours. That's the moment the city stops being a point and starts being a region.
By World War I, dozens of neighborhoods exist, mostly strung along Jaffa Road. The compact walled city has become the seed of a sprawling modern metropolis.
And two quotes that capture the mood. Edwin Sherman Wallace, the American consul, in 1898.
He writes, thus the new Jerusalem grows by accessions from every part of the globe.
And Herzl, same year.
Herzl visits in 1898 and writes, all that is not holy I shall clear away and I shall erect homes for the workers outside the city. The Old City with its Holy Places, I would enclose as in a box.
Enclose the Old City as in a box. That's the nineteenth-century imagination in one sentence. The old thing becomes an exhibit and the living city goes outside.
Hilbert: How many of them were there?
Sorry?
Hilbert: The compounds. The walled ones outside the walls. Late eighties, I did six months as a night watchman at one of them. Not Mishkenot. One of the others, an almshouse, same vintage, same idea. And the thing I kept wondering, walking the perimeter with a flashlight, was how many of them there actually were.
At the start, four or five. The Russian Compound, the Schneller place, Kerem Avraham, Gobat.
Hilbert: That's what I thought. Then you start counting the ones that came after and the number gets away from you. Because every one of them had iron gates and somebody had to lock them.
You were the somebody.
Hilbert: I was the somebody. Two rounds a night, check the gates, check the pump house. The pump was the problem. Hand pump, shipped in from England, and it broke constantly. Nobody tells you that part. Everyone wants to talk about the idealism and the romance of the first settlers. The actual job was keeping a pump running and a gate locked.
That's the honest version of it.
Hilbert: The residents. People say they were pioneers. Some of them were. A lot of them were paid to be there, and they stayed because leaving would have meant admitting it hadn't worked. That's not ideology. That's stubbornness. My grandmother's cousin was a guard at one of those compounds. Family still has the key.
You have a key?
Hilbert: I have a key. Heavy thing. Rusted through. Iron, from a gate like that one. I don't know which compound. I've had it for decades. It's the kind of thing you hold onto when you've spent nights on the other side of a wall.
Does it open anything?
Hilbert: Not that I've found.
You're carrying around a key to a gate you can't identify.
Hilbert: It's a good key. Anyway. I'm late for an appointment. I have to go.
The thing that made those places work wasn't the ideology. It was that the gates got locked every night and someone was responsible for them. That's a job, not a movement.
Which is the least romantic and most accurate account of how a city leaves its walls. Somebody has to be on the night shift.
There's one more thing worth flagging, because it cuts against everything we've said. Where the earliest city actually stood is not settled.
The City of David identification.
The Biblical Archaeology Society states it plainly. It remains unclear where exactly ancient Jerusalem was located. And in 2023 the Washington Post reported a find near the Temple Mount suggesting the City of David may have been a suburb of ancient Jerusalem rather than the whole city. Which directly contradicts the traditional identification.
The ridge we started the episode on might not be the whole story either.
It might be the edge of something bigger. The dirt hasn't finished talking.
The city keeps doing what it's always done. Expanding, contracting, moving its center of gravity. The Bronze Age ridge, the First Temple walls, the Second Temple peak, the Ottoman enclosure, the nineteenth-century neighborhoods. All of it still there, layered, underneath and alongside the modern city.
Still growing. Still layering.
That's the episode. Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing. This has been My Weird Prompts, the human-AI collaboration podcast. If you enjoyed it, leave us a review and subscribe. You can find every episode at my weird prompts dot com.
We'll be back soon.
See you tomorrow.
