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Informationen zum Autor Ellen Morgan; Illustrated by Stephen Marchesi Klappentext "In 2005, a group of construction workers in Jerusalem made an incredible discovery. Underneath the parking lot they were digging up lay an ancient city that was built in the tenth century! Three years later, gold coins from an even earlier century were found at the site. The city of Jerusalem is like a layer cake of history-more than five thousand years of complicated history-all of which author Ellen Morgan explains clearly and objectively in this illustrated book"-- Leseprobe Where Is Jerusalem? On December 21, 2008, just outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, a group of people were hard at work. They were looking for clues to Jerusalem’s past. They dug with spades. They carted off dirt in buckets. They brushed away debris. One of the people had come to Jerusalem on vacation. She was helping out at the dig for a month. While she was working by a wall of an old house that had fallen down in the 600s CE, she moved a large rock. Under it was a real-life treasure! She, a tourist, had found 264 gold coins! One side of each coin showed the face of an emperor. The other had a cross. At the time when the coins were made, Jerusalem was under Christian rule. The coins had probably been inside a niche in the wall. After the building fell down, the coins were buried. And there they remained, untouched, for 1,400 years. Only a few years before this find, no one knew the spot of the dig was so special. It was an ordinary parking lot. Kids played soccer there when the lot was empty. In 2005, the city had made plans to replace the parking lot with a large building and an underground garage. Soon after the work started, it came to a stop. While digging the garage, workers found remains of the ancient city. Out went the construction trucks. In came the archaeologists—scientists who learn about the past by digging it up. Jerusalem is one of the oldest cities in the world. That accounts for why discoveries like this happen. Jerusalem is like a giant layer cake of history. The city has been destroyed and rebuilt many times. It was ruled by one empire after another, by Jewish kings, Roman governors, and Muslim leaders. New buildings were built on top of the ruins of old structures. New streets were laid over old ones; new buildings were constructed using stones from older ones. A former parking lot is now the biggest active dig site in Jerusalem. Only fifty feet below where buses once parked are traces of what life was like more than a thousand years ago. One of the layers included a market from the ninth century CE. Another had remains of a mansion that may have belonged to a queen. And below the mansion was a Roman villa from the first century! The ancient city lies under the modern city. Jerusalem’s history lies hidden below where people live and play and eat and walk every day. In Jerusalem, secrets are just waiting for someone to find them. Chapter 1 Old Versus New Besides being one of the oldest cities in the world, Jerusalem is also one of the most important. It’s located in Israel, a small, narrow country in the Middle East. On many old maps of Canaan—the area known today as Israel, Palestine, and Syria—Jerusalem is shown at the crossroads of Africa, Asia, and Europe. This central location made it a city where people mingled, where trades were made, and where cultures collided. Israel’s government meets in Jerusalem. There is a court system, elected representatives, and a president. In the way the president of the United States lives at the White House in Washington, DC, Israel’s president lives at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem. The representatives meet in the Knesset. Jerusalem sits on a hill. Valleys surround it, with more hills climbing above the opposite sides of t...
