http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/04/news/david.php
King David's fabled palace: Is this it?
By Steven Erlanger The New York Times
FRIDAY, AUGUST 5, 2005
JERUSALEM An Israeli archeologist says she has uncovered in east
Jerusalem what she believes may be the fabled palace of the biblical King
David. Her work has been sponsored by the Shalem Center, a neoconservative
think tank in Jerusalem, and funded by a American Jewish investment banker who
would like to help provide scientific support for the Bible as a reflection of
Jewish history.
Other scholars who have toured the site are skeptical that the foundation
walls Eilat Mazar has discovered are David's palace. But they acknowledge that
what she has uncovered is rare and important - a major public building from
around the 10th century BC with pottery shards that date from the time of David
and Solomon and a government seal of an official mentioned in the book of
Jeremiah.
For nearly 10 years, Mazar thought she knew where the fabled palace built
for King David, as described in the Bible, might be - just outside the walls of
the ancient city of Jerusalem. Now she thinks she's found it, and if she's
right, her discovery will be a new salvo in a major dispute in biblical
archaeology - whether or not the kingdom of David and Samuel was of historical
importance.
For that idea, the Bible is a relatively accurate guide, but some
question whether they were more like small tribal chieftains, reigning over
another dusty hilltop.
Her discovery is also bound to be used in the other major battle over
Jerusalem - whether the Jews have their deepest origins there and thus have
some special hold on the place, or whether, as many Palestinians believe -
including the late Yasser Arafat - that the notion of a Jewish origin in
Jerusalem is a religious myth used to justify occupation and colonialism.
Hani Nur el-Din, a professor of archaeology at Al Quds University, says
that Palestinian archaeologists consider biblical archaeology as an effort by
Israeli archaeologists "to fit historical evidence into a biblical context," he
said. "The link between the historical evidence and the biblical narration,
written much later, is largely missing," he said. "There's a kind of fiction
about the 10th century. They try to link whatever they find to the biblical
narration. They have a button and they want to make a suit out of it."
Other Israeli archaeologists are not so sure that Mazar has found the
palace - the house that Hiram, king of Tyre, built for the victorious king, at
least as Samuel II, Chapter 5, describes it. It may also be the Fortress of
Zion that David conquered from the Jebusites, who ruled Jerusalem before him,
or some other structure about which the Bible is silent.
But Mazar's colleagues know that she's found something extraordinary -
the partial foundations of a sizable public building, constructed in the
Phoenician style, dating from the 10th-9th centuries BC, the time of the united
kingdom of David and Solomon.
"This is a very significant discovery, given that Jerusalem as the
capital of the united kingdom is very much unknown," said Gabriel Barkay, a
renowned archaeologist of Jerusalem from Bar-Ilan University. "Very carefully
we can say that this is one of the first greetings we have from the Jerusalem
of David and Solomon, a period which has played a kind of hide-and-seek with
archaeologists for the last century."
Mazar, 48, is the granddaughter of Benjamin Mazar, a famous archaeologist
with whom she trained. She got her doctorate from Hebrew University, is the
widow of an archaeologist and has worked on and supervised dozens of digs on
her own.
"Archaeology is technical, but you dig with a mind open to historical
sources, and anything can help," she said, as she clambered over massive stones
at bedrock. "I work with the Bible in one hand and the tools of excavation in
the other, and I try to consider everything."
Based on the chapter from Samuel II, but also on the work of a century of
archaeology in this spot, Mazar speculated that the famous stepped-stone
structure excavated previously was part of the fortress David conquered, and
that his palace would have been built just outside the original walls of the
cramped city, to the north, on the way to what his son, Solomon, built as the
Temple Mount.
"When the Philistines came to fight, the Bible said that David went down
from his house to the fortress," she said, her eyes bright. "Maybe it meant
something, maybe not. But I wondered, down from where? Presumably from where he
lived, his palace. So I said, maybe there's something here," and in 1997 wrote
a paper proposing a new excavation in the spot, which is in east Jerusalem.
Mazar is building on the archaeologists who went before her, especially
Robert Macalister in the 1920s, Kathleen Kenyon in the 1960s and Yigal Shilo in
the 1970s and 1980s. Kenyon had found evidence of well-worked stones and
protoaeolic capitals, which decorated the tops of columns, evidence of a large,
decorative building.
David's palace was the topic of a last conversation she had with her
famous grandfather, who died 10 years ago, she said. "He said, 'Kenyon found
the protoaeolic capitals, so go and find where she found them, and start
there."' Five months ago, with special funding and permissions from the Ir
David Foundation, which controls the site (and also supports Jews moving into
east Jerusalem), and academic sponsorhip from Hebrew University, she finally
began to dig - finding evidence of this monumental public building dating from
the time of David and Solomon.
Amihai Mazar, a renowned professor of archaeology at Hebrew University,
and Eilat Mazar's second cousin, calls the find "something of a miracle." He
believes the building may be the Fortress of Zion that David is said to have
conquered, and where he lived for a time, and which he renamed the City of
David. "The interpretation will be debated," he said. "But the achievement is
great. What she found is fascinating whatever it is."
There is a debate among archaeologists "to what extent Jerusalem was an
important city or even a city in the time of David and Samuel," he said. "Some
believe it was tiny and the kingdom unimportant."
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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