Inside BAR

“Building C,” her grandfather called it. The modest designation reflected uncertainty about the structure’s function, although Professor Benjamin Mazar, director of the decade-long Jerusalem Temple Mount Excavations, thought that it might be the Beth Millo, the place where King Joash was assassinated (2 Kings 12:21). When archaeologist Eilat Mazar began processing Iron Age finds from her distinguished grandfather’s excavations, Building C intrigued her. It was the only First Temple-period structure (c. ninth century B.C.) to come to light in the nine-acre dig on Jerusalem’s Ophel ridge.

The younger Mazar launched her own investigation and, to everyone’s surprise, discovered that Building C may be a gatehouse leading through the First Temple fortification wall around Jerusalem. In “Royal Gateway to Ancient Jerusalem Uncovered,” Mazar chronicles and illustrates her new discoveries and integrates them with those made earlier by Benjamin Mazar, by the British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon in the 1960s and by the 19th-century British explorer of Jerusalem, Sir Charles Warren.

Currently co-director with Benjamin Mazar of the Temple Mount Excavations, Eilat Mazar also directs the Southern Akhziv Excavation in northern Israel. From 1981 to 1985 she excavated with the late Yigal Shiloh at the City of David, just south of her present Jerusalem site.