We have noted the vulnerability of Jerusalem's spring, the Gihon: an army on the Mt. of Olives, across the narrow Kidron Valley, could make things most unpleasant for anyone going to the spring. How did the first Jerusalemites come to grips with this problem? First, here is an overview of the eastern slope above the spring, as seen from the north.

Note again the vulnerability of the spring. (Silwan on the Mt. of Olives continues outside the picture toward us, so that it is directly opposite the spring.) In the 18th century BC, the Middle Bronze Age, the Jerusalemites built their city wall on the slope above the spring. They also made a water shaft (today called Warren's), which began higher up, inside the wall. We shall now study these things in detail.

Based on the pottery associated with these stones, Kathleen Kenyon dated this wall to the 18th century BC. (Later Yigal Shiloh found more of it in Area E to the south.) The stones are large, such as only a giant can move, one might think. Such construction is therefore called cyclopean, after a famous giant in Homer's Odyssey. One may also see it at Shechem, Hebron and Gezer in structures that also date to this period.

The modern terraces above this wall are recent, built to prevent collapse, but there must have been ancient terraces here as well. One can imagine David on the roof of his palace in or near the citadel above, glancing down and catching sight of Uriah the Hittite's wife. 

We continue, and we begin to notice a difference in the shading of the bedrock on the sides. There is an upper layer of soft white limestone, called Meleke (royal) because of its high quality, and there is a lower layer of harder, darker limestone, called Mizzi, on which we are walking. Only since the most recent excavation by Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron, conducted since 1997, have archaeologists come to realize that the original shaft was dug only through the soft white stone of the upper layer. In other words, when Jerusalemites went to fetch water 3700 years ago, they did not walk where we are walking: they were higher; the top of the darker stone served as their floor. We can see this when we come to what used to be the end, for here we find a ladder. Climbing it, we shall enter a passage which, 3700 years ago, was simply the continuation of Warren's Shaft. The person who took the picture on the right was standing in this passage. It led, we shall see, to a pool that was surrounded by huge "cyclopean" towers, likewise 3700 years old, and fed by the Gihon Spring. (For the story of this discovery, see Reich and Shukron.)

Before we climb the ladder, however, we must answer the question: who deepened the shaft into the harder, darker stone… and why? The answer lay in the passage we shall reach with the ladder. On its floor, Reich and Shukron found a thick deposit of stone chips from the harder Mizzi layer, but none from the soft white Meleke. They also found sherds of oil lamps from the 8th century BC. While digging into the Mizzi stone, the 8th-century Jerusalemites had to carry the chips out in order to dump them in the Kidron Valley. Some of these chips fell from the buckets and formed this deposit.

But why were they digging? Preparing Hezekiah's revolt against Assyria, they probably did not want to rely on the thousand-year-old system of pool and towers. These would have seemed vulnerable in the light of Assyrian military technology, which included a capacity to construct huge ramps and to pick the stones from a wall, as seen in the Lachish reliefs. They would have wanted a seamless tunnel to the spring, without any opening to the valley, as at Gibeon, Gezer, Megiddo and Hazor. In the course of the work, they cut across a karstic opening that descended 40 feet to the water, but they hewed beyond it. Then came word that an alternative project had succeeded: Hezekiah's tunnel, which would lead the spring water to a spot within the city walls on the southern end, at a place protected from Assyrian spears and arrows. Perhaps they then decided to stop the project in the shaft.

(The vertical karstic opening deceived archaeologists, scholars and guides for more than a century. We thought that this had been the goal of the tunneling and that from here the Jerusalemites had lowered buckets to fetch the spring water. [Some of us were also enticed by the idea that Joab had clambered up it to take the Jebusite city by surprise.] Yet it never occurred to any of us to lower a bucket and try. Such a "Ben Franklin" would have quickly learned that the bottom is rather too shallow and that the protrusions on both sides of the opening knock most of the water out as you draw it up. If the 8th-century Jerusalemites had taken so much trouble to reach this vertical opening, wouldn't they have widened it and deepened its bottom? The opening, it turns out, was of no importance to them.)

It was all for the sake of the pool. We emerge beside a sliver of this pool that has been excavated. (People are living over the rest of it, and there was probably another tower to the south.) The pool received water through a channel from the Gihon Spring. Grooves in the side of its northern rock face (almost 30 feet high) suggest that wooden platforms were inserted. People would have stood on them to draw water.

Over the Gihon Spring was another huge tower, the first of the two to be discovered by Reich and Shukron. They had been called to perform what is called a "rescue dig," which is obligatory before one may build in this part of Jerusalem. (The plan had been to erect a Visitors' Center here.) In the course of a routine probe, they discovered the tower's inside corner. Like the "Pool Tower," the surviving walls of this "Spring Tower" are ten feet thick, it was made of cyclopean stones, and it dates to 3700 years ago. One of its huge stones had long been partly visible in the southeast corner of the old entrance to Hezekiah's Tunnel, but none of us had eyes.

Beneath the western wall of the Spring Tower, a conduit was cut into the bedrock. It split into two, one part to the pool, the other to a channel. This channel (once wrongly attributed to Solomon) extended along the edge of the hill and served, apparently to irrigate the fields in the Kidron Valley. It was cut from above; then its opening was filled with stones too big to fall in. Since the Spring Tower was built over its conduit, it must have been dug before that was built, perhaps only shortly before, as part of the whole system.