Hezekiah's Tunnel

The Hezekiah tunnel is located in the city of Jerusalem, he leads the waters of the Gihon Spring in the city in the so-called Shiloah pond.

History

The Hezekiah Tunnel was BC on behalf of King Hezekiah 701 ( reign 727-698 BC) built. The king of Judah had to protect military in the face of the second half of the 8th century always continue through Syria and Palestine to Egypt Assyrian army invading the city of Jerusalem. Given the many refugees from the northern kingdom of Israel, whose capital was Samaria had been captured in 722 BC by Assyria, walled Hezekiah the grown significantly to the west and south city new and secured with the tunnel named after him, the fresh water supply from outside the city at that time. The attack on Jerusalem and the siege took place in 701 BC under the Assyrian king Sennacherib -.

Location and construction

The tunnel starts from the Gihon Spring (also Gichonquelle ) in Jerusalem. It is the only year-round source of the city. It is an intermittent source that originates underground in a cave at the foot of the eastern slope of the City of David in the Kidron Valley at about 630 m above sea level. The tunnel uses initially in a westerly direction the old Jebusite feed to the vertical shaft ( often equated with the biblical ' Sinnor ', invaded by Joab on behalf of David in the city, here are the Canaanite Jebusites water have drawn inside the protected walls of range of their city ). Then the water tunnel runs in large loops towards SSW through the ridge of the City of David and culminated in the Shiloah pond. This place was located in the protected inner part of the city. However, the well-known pond dates from the Byzantine period. Recent excavations in recent years, currently expose an older, somewhat further south and deeper located basin of the pond.

In the Iron Age II (1000 - 520 BC), multiple complex systems for the safe supply of fresh water were built in Israelite and Judean cities in Palestine, such as at Megiddo, Hazor, Tell es - Seba and other places. One may therefore argue whether the tunnel for that time was an architectural masterpiece. To this day (despite always re -discussed the same theories ) unexplained, why not have a ( nearly) the direct path between Gihon Spring and Siloam pond, but a much longer, unmotivated meandering path was chosen. Maybe because he anknüpfte to older buildings. However, a major project with a huge challenge of engineering was the building anyway. Two construction crews dug through the rock, the one at the source, the other starting at the mouth. The troops were perhaps guided by knocking. Shortly before the meeting (at about 30 m distance ), the troops were able to hear each other and worked, albeit with some corrections direction, towards each other. From this past tunnel construction phase, there is a partially preserved inscription that had been installed near the south end of the tunnel on a smooth surface on the wall.

Inscription

The Siloam inscription tells of the work just before the tunnel breakthrough and is interesting in archaeological terms. It was found in 1880 near the southern tunnel entrance. Once you had tried in the Ottoman period to steal them and the thief was caught, she was taken to Istanbul, where it is also still preserved today in the Museum of Ancient Art:

"... The piercing. This is the story of piercing. As still [ ... ] ax (s) [ .... ] everyone was his vehicle back, and than they were to pierce three cubits, [ ... ] the voice of a man who called out to the other, because there a gap on the right side [ ... ] and on the day of the opening met the workers, man against man, against hoe hoe, and the water flowed from the source to the pond, 1200 cubits wide and 100 cubits was the thickness of the rock over the heads of the workers. "

Tourism

The entire area of the Gihon Spring and the tunnel, and the Shiloah pond today is a unique archaeological site that can be visited. With a flashlight and about 450 meters of tunnel can be committed. This wading through the knee- deep (up to 70 cm) cold spring water. The tunnel is located in the old town, beneath the Temple Mount and the Ma'ale HaShalom.