Ancient Jerusalem has long held a grip on public imagination. Neither the largest of cities nor a major economic or a global political power, its aura stems from the pivotal role it has played in the evolution of the Jewish, then Christian and finally Islamic traditions. Consequently, modern scholars have pinned their attention on two separate periods in the history of the city, associated with the rise and development of these monotheistic religions. The first of these eras stretches from the Iron Age (c. 1000–586 bce) through Greek and early Roman times (332 bce–70 ce), a millennium-long span in which Jerusalem functioned as the political and religious centre of what would become Israel and Judaism. The second is a thousand-year era, from early Byzantine times, from the reign of the emperor Constantine, through the Arab conquest (in 640 ce), to the city's evolution under Medieval Islam and the Crusades.
In between these two foci of history and scholarly attention lies a more modest, 250-year expanse – from 70 to 330 ce –, during which historical circumstances extracted the city almost entirely from the domain of Jews and Christians, and it functioned as a Roman city. At first, after the Romans suppressed the Great Revolt of the Jews (66–73 ce), which included the destruction of Jerusalem and the burning down of its Second Temple, the city remained in ruins for two generations, home only to a military camp of the Roman army's tenth legion. In the 130s the emperor Hadrian established a colony named Aelia Capitolina, adjacent to and occupying some of the territory of old Jerusalem. For the next 200 years the city resembled a typical Roman, municipal establishment in all aspects of physical appearance, demography, religion and culture.
The current volume sets its attention on this neglected chapter of Roman Jerusalem. W.-B. spent the last decade or so excavating inside and around the current Old City of Jerusalem. Some of her digs yielded significant pieces of information that may shed new light on topics that have been disputed for generations. Fragmentary archaeological remains and only scanty references in the literary output from ancient authors made the reconstruction of Aelia Capitolina highly challenging. This has led to numerous disagreements among modern scholars, who diverge on almost every topic regarding the urban layout of the colony – the location of its buildings and institutions, the route of its major streets or the circumference and date of its fortifications. In the current volume W.-B. aims to present these disputes and to re-evaluate them based on more recent findings.
The book is divided into eight chapters. A short introduction discusses chronology, the history of research and the various written sources, but oddly not the topography or the geographical features that informed the colony's evolution, which indeed play a minor and incoherent role in the entire book. Later, W.-B. reveals the rationale behind this neglect with the somewhat perplexing, and to this reviewer baseless, claim that the city planners ‘largely ignored the natural landscape’ (p. 202). Chapter 2 deals with the enigma of the legionary camp, home of the Roman Legion X Fretensis, which resided in Jerusalem for over 200 years, but never left a discernible mark on the architectural remains (unlike the numerous inscriptions, on stone and as stamps on bricks and tiles, that attest to the legion's presence). W.-B. surveys earlier suggestions for the camp's location and then painstakingly collects the smallest of details to support her own proposal to locate the ‘missing camp’ on the south-western hill of the city.
Chapter 3 moves to Aelia Capitolina proper. After a discussion of the colony's foundation date, W.-B. tours the urban landscape. Gates, streets, plazas, temples, public buildings and civic structures as well as private dwellings all feature. The final product resembles earlier scholarly reconstructions of Aelia: the city centre shifted to the north-western hill; its colonnaded central thoroughfares dissected its space into a more or less orthogonal shape; and gates marked its wall-less perimeter. W.-B. skilfully adds substance to this reconstruction and reshapes some of its details based on current excavations, in particular by extending the eastern cardo of the city to the south and even more significantly by claiming to find archaeological evidence to include the ruined enclosure of the old Jewish Second Temple within the urban layout of the Roman colony (see below).
The final five chapters deal more briefly with the city's urban landscape in the fourth century (Chapter 4), the water supply (Chapter 5), cemeteries and burial customs (Chapter 6), the surrounding hinterland, including Roman road milestones, as well as civilian and military settlements (Chapter 7). The book concludes with a short summary regarding the city and its population (Chapter 8), a bibliography of primary and secondary sources, and a short index of places (unfortunately excluding spots in Jerusalem itself) and topics.
W.-B. is at her best when collecting archaeological data, assessing its significance and piecing it together into the wider tapestry of the ancient city's urban texture. Accompanying the text are over a hundred figures – photographs of the highest quality as well as detailed, meticulously crafted maps and diagrams that provide essential orientation to the reader and greatly assist in illuminating the discussion. All this is no small feat.
Unfortunately, the book is also mired by some significant shortcomings. For one, the editing leaves much to be desired. Here are two examples: the detailed presentation of the eastern cardo appears in the book twice, separated only by nine pages (pp. 76 and 85), almost verbatim and yet with different sets of measurements. An even more unsettling example involves the discussion of the arch structure (the so-called ‘Great Causeway’ and the ‘Giant Viaduct’) that runs west from the walls of the Herodian compound (anachronistically referred to throughout the book as ‘the Temple Mount’); W.-B. argues that these arches supported a bridge that connected the legion camp (and later on, the centre of the colony) with the old compound of the now-destroyed Jewish Temple. Here too, W.-B. discusses the details of this construction in two separate places (pp. 35–7, 97–9) and provides incongruent measurements (its length is 80 m in one place, 100 m in the other). But even more frustrating is the lack of any details about this architectural element – how many arches were found? Did they really continue west and intersect with the eastern cardo (as the drawings on pp. 98–9 seem to suggest), or is that an extrapolated conjecture? What and how do we know about the width of this structure, about what was below and above it? The paucity of details here stands in stark contrast to the exhaustive amount of information W.-B. provides throughout the book for other, less important structures. The nice drawings that she includes cannot replace the evidentiary foundation on which they stand.
Another limitation concerns the treatment of the written sources. Due to the space limitations of this review, here are two short examples, out of many: the issue with topos in Cass. Dio 69.12.1 is not ‘the interpretation of the term’ (p. 117), but rather its translation as a prepositional segment (in the accusative) preceded by eis, which does not mean ‘in the place of’ but rather ‘instead’. Secondly, the passage associated with the second- and early third-century Christian writer Hippolytus (whom W.-B. labels with the anachronism ‘Church Father’; p. 137) regarding a statue of Kore that was placed in the ‘shrine of the [Jewish] Temple’ (hekhala in the Aramaic/Syriac, not on the ‘Temple Mount’, as W.-B. mistakenly claims; ibid.) cannot be understood in separation from the centuries-long Judaeo-Christian literary tradition regarding the ‘desolating sacrilege’, in which it operated and with which it engages (a mistake equivalent to understanding an archaeological artefact without looking at the stratigraphy of the findspot). A Coptic textual witness that reads ‘Caesar’ instead of ‘Kore’ goes entirely unnoticed.
Despite my various reservations, there is much to celebrate in this book. W.-B. toiled to compile and lucidly present an exhaustive array of archaeological data about Aelia Capitolina. Her theories and conclusions about the colony's layout and the arrangement of its various physical components deserve attention and will surely ignite further debate and research in the years to come.
