Passing through the Dung Gate on the south end of Jerusalem’s Old City walls, visitors walk down a Herodian street built 2,000 years ago and get a breathtaking view of an archaeological park overlooking the Temple Mount, the site of the Second Temple (destroyed in 70 A.D.) where the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosques now stand. The park sits above and around the ruins of four Umayyad palaces built by the city’s Islamic rulers in the 7th and 8th centuries and serves as the home of the Davidson Center, a museum designed by Kimmel Eshkolot Architects that tells the story of the site’s transformations throughout history.
Jerusalem’s role as a holy place for three major religions has made it a battlefield and object of conquest. The city has been built, destroyed, and rebuilt numerous times, and the archaeological artifacts displayed in the Davidson Center bear silent witness to these events. (The museum is named for its main benefactor, Michigan industrialist William Davidson, who until his death four months ago owned Guardian Industries, one of the largest manufacturers of float glass in the world.) In Jerusalem, relics from the Second Temple era (516 B.C.–70 A.D.) reveal the city’s glory days, when King Herod transformed the Temple Mount and its surrounding areas into a lively, social center. Excavations from the Byzantine period (330–638) attest to the early Christian character of the city, then give way to Umayyad rule, from 638 to 750, when the Arab Caliphate constructed a monumental government center at the foot of the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosques.
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