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Cities of David

Chapter 3 explores the search, during the 1920s, for the origins of David’s city and a monotheistic Jerusalem. It recovers international, metropolitan, and local mandate initiatives for verifying the location of Jerusalem’s oldest part, Mount Ophel, known as the City of David, by considering the activities of the Anglo-American press, organizations such as the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), and Palestine’s antiquities administration. It also considers the effect of the excavations on the mount on local landholders and owners. The chapter relates the excavations to mandate policies in regard to town planning (which reached its vogue during the interwar period), and to the visions of British urban planners and designers, like William McLean, Charles Robert Ashbee, and Patrick Geddes, administrators such as Ronald Storrs, Jerusalem’s military governor, and archaeologists. It examines how they sought to integrate the city’s antiquities and archaeological remains and their notion of a walled city into a vision of its modernization. The chapter recoups the early limited attempts to excavate the Davidic city and discusses the complex negotiation over access to Ophel and other historical monuments, between the mandate authorities, archaeologists and their institutions, and local landholders who cultivated the excavation sites. The negotiation and disputes about who owned land were also clashes over the worth and value of antiquity.