Below the Temple Mount in Jerusalem

by Shimon Gibson, David M. Jacobson

One of the splendours of the Augustan age, the great temple at Jerusalem occupied an area four times larger than the Acropolis. Even before this period the site had already seen much building. Here the authors have created a sourcebook on the cisterns, subterranean chambers and conduits of the Haram al-Sharif. Public and archival sources have been gathered together and original plans and drawings were re-examined, in order to enable other scholars to make use of this rich resource.

301 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1996

About the author

Shimon Gibson is a British-born archaeologist working in Jerusalem, where he is currently a Senior Associate Fellow at the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research. He has an appointment as adjunct Professor of Archaeology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Gibson undertook his academic studies at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, where he also completed his PhD on Landscape Archaeology in the southern Levant.

During the past 20 years, Gibson has conducted numerous excavations and field surveys in different parts of Israel. Between 1989 and 1995 he undertook research and cataloguing in the archives of the Palestine Exploration Fund in London. He was the head of the Research and Scientific Reports Department of the Israel Antiquities Authority from 1995 to 1999. Since then, he has dedicated himself to a number of major excavation projects, notably at Suba and Mount Zion.

Gibson is the author of more than 100 research articles on a variety of subjects, and for more than two decades served as the chief editor of the archaeological journal Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society, published in London. He was also one of the divisional editors of the new edition of the Encyclopedia Judaica published in 2007. He is the coauthor of two scientific monographs on the antiquities of Jerusalem (on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and on the Temple Mount ), and has edited the Archaeological Encyclopedia of the Holy Land (2000) and The Illustrated Dictionary and Concordance of the Bible (2005). His book of 19th-century photographs of Jerusalem (Jerusalem in Original Photographs) was published in 2003. A book on his archaeological work at Suba, entitled The Cave of John the Baptist, was published in 2004. He also published a book entitled Flights into Biblical Archaeology (2007).