The Laughlins

This is my last pre-trip post (I promise). Unfortunately there is some sort of water leak in our building that is right under our apartment, so we have had to leave the apartment the last few days while they jackhammered our tiles out. We are still waiting for it to be fixed, but this is the first time that I have been at home with our regular Internet access in a while. All that to say, I had one more post that I wanted to put up before I started into our recent trip north.

Mark and I had a few Jerusalem daytrips that we have been wanting to take, and we managed to fit one in a few weeks ago. We took a bus just north of the German Colony and started by walking down through the Mishkenot Shaananim neighborhood. I have done a previous post on this area (see July archives on the sidebar) when my ulpan class took a fieldtrip there, so you can read the old post for more "history" information. All in all, it is a quiet, well-kept neighborhood in a more affluent part of Jerusalem that has hints of European flavor, so it is fun to walk through. We stopped at the bottom to look at Solomon's Aqueduct (Lower Aqueduct) and the Sultan's Pool, where they now hold many outdoor concerts in the summer for everyone from Sting to Depeche Mode.
























Our main goal of the day was to walk through the Hinnom Valley looking for Iron Age pottery because there had been a lot of rain recently, and in Mark's archaeology class, his professor had talked about the "truckloads of Iron Age pottery" that could be found in the Hinnom Valley, especially after it rains. To give you some directional orientation, if you are looking at a map of the Old City, the Hinnom Valley runs down the west side of the city wall and follows the southern wall until it converges with the Kidron Valley, which runs down the eastern wall of the Old City.

We wandered south through the Hinnom Valley looking for pottery. You can always find lots of broken pottery pieces on the surface, but most of them are small pieces that aren't noteworthy in any way. The "diagnostic pieces" as they call them in archaeology, are handles, the rim/lip pieces, and the bottom of the pots, jars, etc. We found some of the basic handle pieces that we usually find, but we didn't keep any, because most of them look the same. We walked up part of the Jerusalem trail (stripes marked on the rocks) onto a hilltop where an old Jordanian lookout post remained. We also found a number of old grave shafts that had been quarried away and a huge rock archway (with some more burial caves here and there). The hillside overlooks the Arab village of Abu Tor, and we were just in time to catch the calls to prayer coming from all of the mosques in the area.










We walked back up the Hinnom Valley and up the southern slope of the Old City to Mt. Zion. On the way up, I found a couple of good handle pieces of pottery that were still attached to the "pot" at large, which we hadn't found until that point. Most handle pieces are broken off from the actual pot itself, so it was an exciting find.

We wanted to see Oscar Schindler's grave on Mt. Zion, but the cemetary was closed, so we just got a view from behind the gates. We also stopped by a church which commemorates Peter's denial of Christ (because I needed a restroom) and looked around at their underground remains (Byzantine) while we were there. They also had a map of Byzantine Jerusalem (seen below) and model of Jerusalem.
























Anyways, there is always a lot more history and information that I could put in these posts, but it would take way too long (honestly), so I am leaving that work up to you and your own curiousity. There is a lot of information out there on any number of these places that I have mentioned, so read more on whatever interests you!