Jerusalem Dig and the Seleucid Akra Fortress: What Was Found

Archaeologists digging in the Givati Parking Lot, just south of Jerusalem's Old City walls, believe they have found the Akra (also spelled Acra), the fortress the Seleucid Greek kings planted in the city in the 160s BC. The Israel Antiquities Authority announced the discovery on 3 November 2015: a massive wall, the base of a tower and a sloping stone rampart, together with weapons and coins from the right decades. If the identification holds, it solves one of the oldest puzzles of Jerusalem's topography. Not every scholar is convinced, though, and the dig itself sits in one of the most contested neighbourhoods on earth.

Here is what was found, why it matters for the story behind Hanukkah, and where the debate stands.

Why a lost fortress mattered so much

After Alexander the Great died in 323 BC, his generals carved up his empire. Judea sat on the border between two of the successor kingdoms: the Ptolemies, ruling from Egypt, and the Seleucids, ruling from Syria and Mesopotamia. Around 200 BC the Seleucid king Antiochus III won control of the region, and Jerusalem's leaders backed him against the Egyptian garrison. In return he confirmed the Jews' right to live by their ancestral laws.

For several generations Greek language, dress and ideas spread among Jerusalem's elite, and the city split between those who embraced Hellenistic culture and those who saw it as a threat to their faith. The tension exploded under Antiochus IV Epiphanes. After he plundered the city in 168 BC, he outlawed traditional Jewish worship, set up pagan cults in the Temple and, according to the ancient sources, built a fortified stronghold to hold the city down.

That stronghold was the Akra, from a Greek word meaning a high, fortified place. The garrison and its supporters inside it were a constant threat to the Temple, and the fortress became the symbol of foreign control.

From the Maccabean revolt to the fall of the Akra

The revolt led by the priestly family later called the Maccabees broke out in 167 BC. In 164 BC Judah Maccabee's fighters took back the Temple and rededicated it, the event Jews still celebrate as Hanukkah. Yet the Akra did not fall with the Temple. Its defenders held out for more than twenty years, a foreign island in the middle of a city that was slowly winning its independence.

Only in 141 BC did Simon, Judah's brother, starve the garrison into surrender and expel it. That victory is one of the milestones on the road to the Hasmonean kingdom, the independent Jewish state that lasted until the Roman conquest in 63 BC.

Two ancient accounts that disagree

What happened to the fortress next is where the trouble begins. The book of 1 Maccabees, written within a few decades of the events, says the Seleucids fortified the City of David, the oldest part of Jerusalem on the ridge south of the Temple, and that Simon later strengthened the place and lived there. The historian Flavius Josephus, writing more than two centuries later, tells a different story: the Akra stood on a hill high enough to overlook the Temple, and Simon's people spent three years cutting the hill down so that nothing would tower over the sanctuary again.

The two accounts are hard to reconcile, because the City of David ridge sits well below the Temple Mount. For more than a century scholars proposed one location after another: north of the Temple near the later Antonia fortress, on the Ophel just south of the Temple Mount, at its southeastern corner, or on the western hill where today's Jewish Quarter stands. None came with convincing physical evidence.

What the Givati Parking Lot excavation found

The Givati Parking Lot lies on the City of David ridge, between the southern wall of the Old City and the Palestinian neighbourhood of Silwan. A planned visitor centre on the site led the Israel Antiquities Authority to begin a large salvage excavation in 2007, directed by Doron Ben-Ami with Yana Tchekhanovets and Salome Cohen.

Over the years the team cut down through a remarkable sequence of Jerusalem's past: an early Islamic commercial area, Byzantine remains including a hoard of 264 seventh-century gold coins, a large Roman-period building and a Jewish ritual bath from the first century. Below houses dated by pottery and coins to the last centuries BC, they reached what first looked like loose fill.

It turned out to be a glacis: a carefully built slope of stones and earth laid against the foot of a fortification wall to keep attackers and siege engines away. The layers were deliberate, set at a gentler angle at the bottom and a steeper one higher up. Ben-Ami put it simply to National Geographic: "This wasn't a building that collapsed; this was put here on purpose."

Alongside the glacis the team exposed a section of massive wall and the base of a tower measuring roughly 4 by 20 metres. The finds around them fit a Seleucid garrison:

• bronze arrowheads, lead sling bullets and stone ballista balls, some stamped with a trident, the emblem associated with Antiochus IV;
• coins running from the reign of Antiochus IV to that of Antiochus VII, the king on the throne when the Akra surrendered;
• stamped handles from wine jars imported from Rhodes and the Aegean, a hint that the people stationed here were foreigners or people who did not keep strict Jewish food laws.

Just as interesting is what the excavators did not find. There was no sign that the fortress was torn down in a single campaign or that the hill was lowered, as Josephus claims. Instead, later Hasmonean builders seem to have cut into the glacis and reused its stones, and Roman-era builders did the same, so the fortress was eaten away over time rather than demolished at once.

Speaking to National Geographic in 2016, Ben-Ami was confident: "We now have massive evidence that this is part of the fortress called the Acra."

Supporters of the identification

Some historians had argued for this spot long before the dig. Bezalel Bar-Kochva, an emeritus historian at Tel Aviv University, proposed in a 1980 study that the Akra stood in the middle of the old City of David, a few hundred metres south of the Temple Mount, close to where Ben-Ami excavated. He explains Josephus's dramatic story of a levelled hill as an attempt to make sense of a landscape that had changed by the first century AD, when the City of David had become a low-lying district and Jerusalem had spread west and north.

Other archaeologists not involved in the dig, including Oren Tal of Tel Aviv University, called the Givati remains the strongest candidate found so far. If the identification is right, the site also shows that a foreign-controlled, Greek-speaking enclave remained a real physical presence in Jerusalem for longer, and on a larger scale, than many had assumed.

Why some scholars still disagree

The identification is persuasive but not settled. The archaeological architect Leen Ritmeyer, who has spent decades reconstructing the Temple Mount, points out that 1 Maccabees describes fortifications around the whole City of David, so the Givati walls could belong to that wider defensive line rather than to a separate citadel. Josephus, by contrast, describes a stronghold that overlooked the Temple. Ritmeyer calculates that a fortress at Givati would have needed to rise more than 400 feet to do that, which seems implausible.

Others note that dating fortification walls from the coins and pottery around them always leaves room for argument. The fair summary is that archaeologists have found a substantial Seleucid-period fortification in exactly the area the earliest written source points to, and that many, though not all, specialists think it is the Akra itself. The debate is likely to continue as the finds are fully published.

Archaeology and politics in Silwan

The excavation is not only an academic story. The site is funded in part by the Ir David Foundation (known as Elad), an Israeli organisation that runs the City of David park and supports Jewish settlement in Silwan, a mostly Palestinian neighbourhood in East Jerusalem. Israeli archaeologist Yonathan Mizrachi of the organisation Emek Shaveh welcomed the find scientifically but opposed the planned visitor complex, arguing it would damage the remains and that local residents had not been consulted. An Israeli planning body ordered the project scaled back.

Palestinian residents have reported cracks in nearby houses that they link to the digging, and many see the project as part of a wider effort to change the neighbourhood's character. Jawad Siam, director of the Madaa community centre in Silwan, told National Geographic: "This excavation is not searching for history." Ben-Ami, for his part, said his expertise was archaeology, not politics.

For visitors and readers, the lesson is that Jerusalem's past is never only about the past. The same trench can illuminate the world of the Maccabees and Hanukkah while raising hard questions about who controls the present-day city, and both stories deserve to be told honestly.

Sources: Original reporting by National Geographic (April 2016), also republished by Pappas Post; Biblical Archaeology Society, "The Seleucid Akra" (November 2015); Wikipedia, Acra (fortress). Photos via National Geographic and the Israel Antiquities Authority excavation.

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