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1867. JAFFA. A MULE TRAIN HEADING TOWARD JERUSALEM . . .

On the afternoon of February 15, a team of British excavators landed at the pier despite the convulsions of the waters of the Mediterranean. After unpacking various crates filled with spades, handspikes, crowbars, theodolites, and sextants, they headed east on the dirt road to Jerusalem at 4 a.m. to the accompaniment of a piercing cold wind that at times was forceful enough to blow over the laden mules. Corporals Birtles, Phillips, and Hancock, together with Captains Warren and Wilson, were seasoned to such inclement weather. What they were not prepared for was the creeping pace of their party, which accomplished the 33-mile journey in an unreasonable thirteen hours.

Upon finally reaching Jerusalem, Captain Wilson presented himself to the British consul, and together they called on Governor Izzet Pacha, who regretted to inform the captain that a necessary letter had not arrived, and that pending its appearance he would be happy to grant Wilson authority to dig anywhere except inside al-Haram ash-Sharif—the Noble Sanctuary, the Dome of the Rock. The Moslems were jittery about the engineers digging on Temple Mount to begin with, especially es Sakhra (Sacred Rock), for it was tradition that beneath this foundation stone all the rivers of the earth’s energy sprang, and prying into this holy site could bring calamity upon the country. The world, even.

Digging beneath Jerusalem.

Nevertheless, the letter requesting archaeological approval finally arrived, asking that the men be afforded “the necessary facilities in respect of the object of the mission, and permission and all possible facilities to dig and inspect places after satisfying the owners . . . with the exception of the Noble Sanctuary and the various Moslem and Christian shrines.”¹

The digging was slow, cumbersome, uncomfortable, and dragged on for years. It consisted mostly of square shafts sunk into runny shingle and hard limestone and layers of debris of ancient cities piled one on top of the other. Sometimes the Royal Engineers encountered ancient sewage that would fester any blister on the digger’s hands. The working trenches were sometimes no more than two feet wide and in soil so loose it would widen into holes large enough to swallow an ox.

Warren and his team found encouragement whenever they broke through unexpected galleries and chambers. And there were many. Some had formed by the natural force of water acting on the porous limestone, yet others were clearly shaped by men from a bygone era. Who had been deranged enough to dig tunnels under Temple Mount in air so vitiated that even candles found it difficult to breathe?

Their tenacity was rewarded as they came across halls and vaults and archways flanking the subterranean foundations bearing the sanctuary’s walls. Arches were supported by more arches beneath, creating a labyrinth of chambers. This was easily the oldest masonry in Jerusalem, or under it, some overlaid with later Saracenic architecture.

One chamber above all stood out from the rest and merited Warren to be lowered by rope into its rectangular form, thirty feet by twenty-three, the walls built of square stones and joined without mortar, each corner marked with a pillar topped by a capital; in the center arose a column. One such room adjacent to the Temple of Solomon itself was once described in the Talmud as a secret chamber reserved for special ceremonies.

Then the engineers came across tunnels cut centuries earlier in which were found artifacts belonging to the Knights Templar: a cross and sword as well as a spur and remnants of a lance.

The artifacts made their way to a Templar archivist in Edinburgh, the grandson of a friend of Captain Parker, one of the Royal Engineers who’d assisted Warren in the digs; he was also given a letter written by Parker explaining that during one of the excavations beneath Herod’s Temple he discovered a secret room beneath Temple Mount with a passageway leading to a wall. When he broke through the stonework he found himself briefly inside the Mosque of Omar, in the south courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. His astonishment was curt, however, as he was immediately chased by an angry mob of devout Muslims praying inside the mosque.²

Among the many findings by the Royal Engineers was one of the shafts sunk by the Templars beneath Temple Mount, eighty feet in depth through solid rock before branching out horizontally in a series of laborious radial tunnels. Like the British, the Templars before them had obviously dug surreptitiously to avoid a confrontation with the Muslims, who continued to be granted access to their sacred sites even after their defeat in 1100.

Almost a century elapsed before the next significant excavations were conducted by a group of Israeli archaeologists, who also stumbled upon a tunnel dug by the Knights Templar:

The tunnel leads inward for a distance of about thirty metres from the southern wall before being blocked by pieces of stone and debris. We know that it continues further, but we had made it a hard-and-fast rule not to excavate within the bounds of the Temple Mount, which is currently under Moslem jurisdiction, without first acquiring the permission of the appropriate Moslem authorities. In this case they permitted us only to measure and photograph the exposed section of the tunnel, not to conduct an excavation of any kind. Upon concluding this work . . . we sealed up the tunnel’s exit with stones.³

Tunnels beneath Temple Mount.

Without question, the Templars had dug their way to the most sacred parts of Jerusalem—the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the es Sakhra of the Muslims, the Shetiyya of the Jews—the very foundation stone of the sacred mount where Solomon’s Temple had once stood. But what specifically had they been looking for, and how had the Templars known where to dig?