Jerusalem: The Biography

* In 1884, a colourful mosaic was found on the floor of a Byzantine church in Madaba (in Jordan), inscribed ‘The Holy City of Jerusalem’, the first Jerusalem map to showthe Byzantine view of the city with its six main gates, churches and the Temple Mount scarcely worth showing at all. Yet the Temple Mount was not completely empty. It has never been excavated by archaeologists, but in the 1940s British engineers, restoring the Islamic holy sites, made shallowprobes and found Byzantine traces. Optimists hoped these might be the foundations of Emperor Julian’s (unbuilt) Jewish Temple. But these may be traces of the only Byzantine shrine on this site – the small Church of the Pinnacle marking Jesus’ temptation by the devil.