What was most interesting about the park was the accessibility of the ruins. Features such as inscribed stones, mosaic tile floors, ancient plaster walls, and ritual baths are all out in the open to be walked across and touched.
Near the base of the Temple Mount (the other side of which is the Western Wall), there is a carved and inscribed stone that ostensibly had fallen from the top southwest corner of the Temple Mount. The inscription indicates (in either Hebrew or Aramaic; it's hard to tell from the letters) that this is where the trumpet-blower would have stood; the part that remains says, "to the place of trumpeting." Priests would signal the start of the Sabbath by blowing the shofar from this point. It's amazing to be able to touch the warm stone and run my fingers along the ancient inscription.
The inscription runs across the top piece of this fallen trumpet-blower's perch.
The trumpet stone would have been placed on the top corner of the Mount seen here, upper right.
A second interesting incription appears in Hebrew on the wall itself, although it's hard to see in photographs. In the photograph, you can make out the letters in the upper right hand area of the center block. I am especially fond of this inscription: "and you shall see and your heart shall rejoice, and their bones like grass shall . . ." Scroll up to the title of this blog and you will understand why. I'm very taken with the mystery of how this particular text came to be inscribed on a stone placed high on the wall of the Temple Mount.
It was required that all people be ritually clean before entering the Temple. As a result, there are many mikvaot (ritual baths) around the periphery of the Temple area. The baths have stairways to descend into sometimes-covered areas, one path to go down and another to go up so that the ritually pure do not have to make contact with the impure folks heading down to the water.
Entrance to a mikvah. Note the post that divides those entering from those exiting the ritual bath. There are ruins of mikvaot all around the base of the Temple.
The ruins of another mikvah.
These would have been the steps of the Hulda Gates leading up to the Temple. They are alternately short and wide steps, making a continuous walk up extremely difficult. There are fifteen long steps, and some scholars suggest that this is where pilgrims stopped to sing each of the fifteen Psalms of Ascent (120-34) as they approached the Temple for worship.
In the doorway of a third- or fourth-century dwelling. The floors in these structures are elaborate mosaic tile, some with Greek texts dating them to the Christian period. Many of the floors were dusty and hard to decipher. I was walking around with a biblical history student from Hebrew University and the two of us emptied our water supply onto one open-air floor trying to clear away the debris and read the letters. We found some brilliant colors, but the Greek was an odd style and difficult to understand.
