Inside BAR

On the eighth day of the Hebrew month of Elul (August 18, 1983), the Israeli authorities opened to the public a building that had been closed for 1,913 years to the day. The building, in ancient Jerusalem’s Upper City, was a workshop that was stormed by Roman soldiers on the eighth of Elul, 70 A.D., the year the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and burned the Jewish Temple. Now,.after ten years of digging in the Upper City, the eminent Israeli archaeologist Nahman Avigad, who directed the excavations that uncovered the workshop, has published his dramatic and often heart-rending finds of the human and material toll the Romans took on that day.Discovering Jerusalem: Recent Archaeological Excavations in the Upper City (Thomas Nelson, 1983), reviewed by Philip J. King, illuminates the life of the city, its people, shops and residences at the time of the Roman destruction and also spans the city’s settlement from its earliest occupation in the eighth century B.C. through the Crusader period. Most of the material is based on his own excavations (see Books in Brief).