Ancient Escape Tunnel Discovered in Jerusalem
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An ancient tunnel was recently discovered in Jerusalem that Jewish residents used to flee the Romans 2,000 years ago, beneath the debris of a monument that depicted scenes of the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 A.D. They would flock into the underground drainage channel where they’d take cover and later escape the pandemonium above through Jerusalem’s southern end.
An archeologist walks along a the recently discovered ancient drainage channel in the City of David next to Jerusalem’s Old City, Sunday Sept. 9, 2007.
AP Photo Emilio Morenatti
Archaeologists Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa and Eli Shukron of the Israel Antiquities Authority, the dig’s directors, said on Sunday that the channel was dug beneath the future main road of Jerusalem. Shukron said excavators looking for the road stumbled across a small drainage channel while looking for the road, which revealed the massive tunnel two weeks ago.
“We were looking for the road and suddenly we discovered it.” Shukron said. “And the first thing we said was, ‘Wow.’”
He said the tunnel reaches a height of 10 feet in some places. The walls are made of ashlar stones 3 feet deep, and covered by heavy stone slabs that were the road’s paving stones. Several manholes are visible, and portions of the original plaster still remain reports The News Tribune
“Pottery shards, vessel fragments and coins from the end of the Second Temple period were also discovered inside the channel, attesting to its age.” Reich said. “The discovery of the drainage channel was momentous in itself, a sign of how the city’s rulers looked out for the welfare of their citizens by developing an infrastructure that drained the rainfall and prevented flooding.”
Photo made available by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem shows an archaeologist next to an opening of one of the ancient beehives found in excavations in Tel Rehov in northern Israel. Amihai Mazar, Hebrew University of Jerusalem AP Photo
Amihai Mazar, Hebrew University of Jerusalem AP Photo
The discovery “shows you planning on a grand scale, unlike other cities in the ancient Near East,” said Joe Zias, an expert in the Second Temple period who was not involved in the dig.
The dig’s directors said what makes the channel so significant is its role as an escape hatch for Jews desperate to flee the conquering Romans.
The Second Temple — King Herod’s most renowned construction development — was the Jewish worship center during the second Jewish Commonwealth, which endured for 6 centuries preceding the Roman conquest of Jerusalem.
Historian Josephus Flavius wrote in “The War of the Jews” that many people took shelter in the drainage channel and lived inside it until they fled Jerusalem through its southern end as Jerusalem was being conquered by the Romans in 70 A.D.
“It was a place where people hid and fled to from burning, destroyed Jerusalem.” Shukron said. “Tens of thousands of people lived in Jerusalem at the time, but it is not clear how many used the channel to escape.”
So far, 100 yards of the channel have been unearthed. Reich believes its total length will stretch more than half a mile, reaching north from Shiloah Pool at Jerusalem’s southern end to the holy shrine known to Jews as Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Al Aqsa Mosque compound. The shrine is the site of the 2 biblical Jewish temples.
Archeologists believe the tunnel leads to the Kidron River which drains into the Dead Sea.
Related stories:
King Herod’s Ancient Tomb Found
Jerusalem Present for Eternity towards the bottom of the post
this is an amazing discovery Deborah….
and to think that I was in Israel in the ’80’s…..
I would have loved to have seen this
It’s an exciting find Kim. I’d love to see it myself
Nice find, I love that kinda man-made ancient stuff, it’s so cool to see in what various ways they used to go around and how in essence we still use the same techniques today as well.
I find the methods and their applications to be very intribuing Slevi. Much like the ancient pyramids, not as a comparison, but by what mankind has created that’s endured to this day.
A fascinating article, but what it fails to mention is that the escape tunnel discovery strikingly confirms University of Chicago historian Norman Golb’s theory, now supported by an entire series of Israeli archaeologists, that the Dead Sea Scrolls are the remains of Jerusalem libraries, smuggled out of the city for hiding during the Roman siege of 70 A.D. In his books and articles, Golb has specifically argued that Jews used tunnels to get the scrolls out and took them down to the Dead Sea region through various wadis including the Kidron, which is precisely where this tunnel is thought to exit. The famous Copper Scroll found in the caves near Qumran describes a deposit of silver as being hidden near the “dam at the mouth of the Kidron gorge.”
This also puts a spotlight on a current controversy involving a major exhibition of the Scrolls taking place in San Diego. Pursuant to an agreement that clearly violates the norms of institutional neutrality, the San Diego Natural History Museum has excluded all of the researchers who have rejected the “Qumran-Essene” theory of scroll origins from participating in its lecture series and, in the exhibit itself, has intentionally misinformed the public concerning the grounds supporting the Jerusalem theory.
For further information on the controversy surrounding this exhibit, see the posting entitled “Chronology of Dead Sea Scrolls controversy in San Diego” on Wordpress, and the articles by Charles Gadda on the Nowpublic site, in particular the one entitled “Christian fundamentalism and the Dead Sea Scrolls in San Diego.”
Follow Gadda’s links for his other articles too, they expose a truly outrageous scandal.
Thanks for your in-depth information Sarah! I’ll definitely check out the information you provided, much appreciated
Golb has posted an article about this on the Oriental Institute website, with a list of passages from Josephus. Apparently, not only did the archaeologists blunder in stating that Josephus described refugees hiding in this particular tunnel, but they also were not aware that several similarly gigantic tunnels were unearthed in Jerusalem during the 19th century (Golb reproduces four illustrations from a book published in 1876 entitled Underground Jerusalem). It’s really somewhat amazing how the public always ends up being misinformed by amateurishly erroneous declarations coming from archaeologists who simply cannot get their act together and do their homework. The link to Golb’s article is:
http://oi.uchicago.edu/pdf/jerusalem_tunnel_sept2007.pdf
Thanks for the info and link Paul. For the benefit of others to read this easily, I’m going to quote from the following, but will omit the observations that clearly state it covers this particular report from this post:
Norman Golb — The University of Chicago, September 17 2007
Observations on the Ancient Tunnel Recently Discovered in Jerusalem
While no statement in Josephus’s Jewish War describes a specific tunnel or refuge, leading to the Siloam pool, by which refugees were able to flee Jerusalem at the time of the Roman siege of 70 A.D., Josephus does indeed refer to underground passages used by them. Quoting Thackeray’s translation (Cambridge, Mass. and London, vol. III, 1968), we may cite the following:
vi.370 (p. 483), “A last and cherished hope of the tyrants and their brigand comrades lay in the underground passages…;”
vi.393 (p. 489), “Of the rebels, some… retired … to the Acra, others slunk down into the mines;”
vi.401 (p.493), “Having abandoned these [three main towers] … they found immediate refuge in the ravine below Siloam;”
vi.429 (p. 499), “…the victors instituted a search for those in the mines, and, tearing up the ground, slew all whom they met;”
vi.432-433 (p. 501),“ … many precious objects were found in these passages, and lucre legalized every expedient …. John [of Gischala], perishing of hunger with his brethren in the mines, implored from the Romans that protection which he had so often spurned…;”
vii.26 (p. 513), “Simon [son of Gioras] … accompanied by his most faithful friends, along with some stone-cutters … let himself down with all his party into one of the secret passages. So far as the old excavation extended, they followed it…;”
vii.215 (p. 567), Judas son of Ari “secretly escaped through some of the underground passages.”
(I have discussed some of the implications of these statements of Josephus in my Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? (New York, 1995/1996, pp. 143 ff.)
Putting the various statements of the archaeologists and of Josephus together, we have the following picture:
The archaeologists have discovered a Jerusalem tunnel which could accommodate many individuals and which led, at the least, from the Temple Mount to the Siloam Pool situated in the southern extremity of the ancient city. The pool in turn led directly to the Nahal Qidron, which, as the news reports indicate, led eastward down to the Dead Sea.
While no description in Josephus’s Jewish War actually makes mention of a particular locus, he does indeed state that various inhabitants of Jerusalem hid in the city’s underground passages (plural), while at one point he describes an important group of rebels whom he calls “the tyrants” as having secured temporary refuge in “the ravine below Siloam,” by which he undoubtedly means the opening gorges of the Nahal Qidron.
It is thus a fair inference or assumption on the part of the archaeologists that the tunnel they uncovered was one of those used by Jerusalem’s inhabitants to hide and flee from the Romans. However, if we follow Josephus, not only one but several escape routes could be and were used by the refugees. No available indications appear to confirm the archaeologists’ suggestion that the drain-tunnel discovered by them is a particular one uniquely referred to by Josephus.
Tunnels of this type, moreover, were discovered by explorers of Jerusalem’s past in the 19th century; see particularly the accounts given by Charles Warren in his
Underground Jerusalem (London, 1876), pp. 318 ff., 348 ff., and the four illustrations ibid. pp. 320, 418, 529, and 533 (reproduced in reduced form below).
Warren’s findings, together with the discovery of Reich and Shukron described in the recent news reports, fully support Josephus’s statements relating to the tunnels beneath Jerusalem and the use to which they were put during the Roman siege of 70 A.D.
These underground passages enabled many inhabitants of Jerusalem to exit the city and flee both south to Masada and, via Nahal Qidron and other wadis heading from Jerusalem eastward toward the Dead Sea, to the Machaerus fort lying just east of that sea, and which was actually closer to Jerusalem than was Masada. (Josephus describes the large number of refugees who gathered at Machaerus.)
The circumstances as now known leave little doubt that, quite likely beginning even before the siege had begun, groups engaged in hiding the Temple treasures, the books and other items listed in the Copper Scroll — as
well as those ancient writings of the Palestinian Jews known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were found centuries later in caves near the wadis leading out of Jerusalem.
A shorter version of the Golb article (without the quotes from Josephus but with the illustrations from Charles Warren’s book) is now on the Forward site, at http://www.forward.com/articles/11873/
Thanks for the info Paul
Amazing that people lived in there while in hiding from the Romans and then escaped.
It is indeed, Jeffry.