Old Jewish Quarter

Master Listing

Old Roman Cardo

The Broad Wall
3 March 2009

Overview

On 3 March 2009, Carol and John visited Jerusalem. We were part of a Grand Circle Tours group that visited, Israel, Egypt and Jordan. The following photos were taken during that visit with a Canon G.10 PowerShot 14.7 megapixel camera. Behind the majority of the thumbnail photos shown below is a full-size (4,416 × 2,480 pixel) 16:9 HD formatted photo (see sample). Although copyrighted © by Skytamer Images, none of the photos contain messy copyright notices. They all look like they came straight out of your camera. Skytamer Archive Subscribers may download all of these photos for their personal use. If you are not currently a subscriber to the Skytamer Archive, click here, or the "Subscribe" button for details. This is a great opportunity for you to augment your own travel photos with a few shots that you may have missed.

Discovery

The Broad Wall is an ancient defensive city wall in Jerusalem dating from the reign of King Hezekiah (late eighth century BCE.) The wall was discovered by archaeologist Nahman Avigad in the 1970s. This is a massive defensive structure, seven meters thick. The unbroken length of wall uncovered by Avigad's dig runs 65 meters (71.1 yd) long and is preserved in places to a height of 3.3 meters (3.6 yd).

History

The wall and its discovery were part of a revision of the history of the city. It had long been believed that the city in this period was confined to the fortified, narrow hill running to the south of the Temple Mount known as the City of David. Avigad's dig demonstrated that by the late eighth century the city had expanded to include the hill to the west of the Temple Mount, the site of the modern "Old City" of Jerusalem inside the walls built by Suleiman the Magnificent. The motivation for building the walls was the expected invasion of Judea by Sennacherib. The wall is referred to in Nehemiah 3:8 and Isaiah 22:9-10.

Reconstruction work following the 1967 war allowed archaeologists to excavate various areas in the Jewish Quarter. One of the most significant finds from the OT period was the Broad Wall. Built by Hezekiah in the days before the 701 B.C. invasion by the Assyrian king Sennacherib, the Broad Wall enclosed the Western Hill and increased the walled area of Jerusalem five-fold.

As we continued on past the Broad Wall, we entered a "High-End" condo complex in Jerusalem's Jewish Quarter. The playground was directly adjacent to the old Broad Wall.

The Skytamer Archive

This concludes our visit to The Broad Wall located in Jerusalem, Israel. To learn more about the Mount of Olives, visit the Wikipedia site noted below. If you like what we have done, please consider subscribing to the Skytamer Archive. When you subscribe, you will have access to thousands of travel and aviation photos for your personal use. Although copyrighted by Skytamer images, our photos do not have any messy copyright notices defacing the photos. All of our photos look like they came straight from your camera ... click here, or the "Subscribe" button for details.

References and Credits

• Shupek, John, "Skytamer Images Photo Archive"
• Google Earth, "Satellite Image"
• Wikipedia, The Broad Wall, Jerusalem