Ellen Morgan (she/her) has written several books for children, including Who Was Jesus? She currently lives in New York.

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.