Been interested in the vast numbers of ancient underground tunnel systems... and subterranean cities for quite a while... It's amazing how many they are.....and how well they were built compared to some of today's architecture.... you can't imagine any of our highrises... or building complexes lasting hundreds of years... much less thousands.....


http://www.sff.net/people/laresnick/Excerpts/Dispatch8.htm

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King David (ca. 1000 BC) realized he could take the fortified city of Shalem by separating the Jebusites on this hill from the water supply outside their walls. Some three centuries later, King Hezekiah of Judah (ca. 700 BC) realized that what had occurred to David might also occur to those darned Assyrians. So he commanded the digging of underground tunnels (or, more likely, the expansion of Jebusite tunnels, which were probably, in turn, a prehistoric expansion of a natural underground watercourse) to bring water from the Gihon Spring to the Siloam Pool, which was protected by the city walls.


On the other side of the Temple Mount is one of the most extensive archaeology projects ever undertaken. Known as the Western Wall tunnels, these underground digs are still taking place beneath the massive medieval stone arches on which Moslem rulers built their new Jerusalem, many centuries ago, to ensure that dwellings were at a convenient height to the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque.


........ Jerusalem's underground fascinating, so I tried to visit a few more beneath-the-streets sites. Unfortunately, though, two sites under the Arab quarters are no longer open to the public. The Roman museum, including remains of mosaic floors below street level, is abandoned, closed down, and hidden by weeds beneath the Damascus Gate now. Zedekiah's Caves, between the Damascus and Herod Gates, is also abandoned and closed down. The ticket seller's booth has broken glass and is covered in thick dust. Sometimes also billed as "King Solomon's Mines," it's believed these underground tunnels were probably quarries for the Second Temple building projects.

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http://www.itsgila.com/headlinerswarren.htm
Holy Land Headliners

Underground in Jerusalem with Charles Warren

It all started on a hot summer’s day in 1865. British Baroness Angela Burdett Coutts, on a pilgrimage to the holy city, was thirsty. When Mahmoud, her guide, drew up a bucket of stinking water from a courtyard cistern, Coutts thought to herself, would Jesus have drunk such smelly water? And what about King David?

When she returned to England, Coutts donated 500 pounds sterling to help establish the Palestine Exploration Fund. She convinced her friend and neighbor Vicky to be a sponsor of the new organization. (Vicky, by the way, was none other than Queen Victoria.) The goal of the P.E.F. was to promote research into the archaeology and history, manners and customs, culture, topography, geology and natural sciences of biblical Palestine and the Near East.

Two years later, the P.E.F. sent 27-year-old Lieutenant (later Captain) Charles Warren of the British Royal Engineering Corps to Jerusalem. His instructions were to investigate the site of the Temple, the line of fortifications, the City of David, and the authenticity of the traditional Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Warren had previously made a name for himself by perilously scaling and charting the Rock of Gibraltar.

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Warren’s greatest contribution was his suggestion that Jerusalem D.C. (David’s Capital) lay outside the medieval walls of the Old City. At that time, everyone believed that the “Old City” was the old city, meaning fortifications from the days of David were located somewhere below the present city walls. However, at the bottom of one of Warren’s shafts outside the south-eastern corner of the Temple Mount, Warren found the remains of a massive city wall that was leading southwards, away from the walls of the Old City......


(Today, the 1750 foot walk through Hezekiah’s Tunnel http://www.itsgila.com/tipsadventure.htm )

The “water system” discovered by Warren, today called “Warren’s Shaft” in his memory, seems to be a natural karstic limestone sinkhole and not man-made, as it was thought for over a hundred years. Excavations in the area, pioneered by Warren, are ongoing and the last word remains to be said.
......Although Warren could not excavate within the Haram compound itself, his good relations with the guards enabled him to make a thorough examination of the structure of the Dome of the Rock and the network of cisterns within the area. He counted some 34 rock-hewn reservoirs of different shapes and sizes, the largest of them 43 feet deep with a capacity of over two million gallons. As far as we know, Charles Warren was the first and last to survey beneath the Temple Mount.

http://www.itsgila.com/asktemplemount.htm
“The Temple Mount,” says Dr. Barkay, “is terra incognita. It is amazing. To this day not one shard has been published from the Temple Mount. There has never been a controlled, normal scientific dig within the Temple Mount. We have controlled Jerusalem for more than 30 years, but we do not even have an archaeological
survey of surface data. No one ever bothered, from the start of the researching
of Jerusalem, to collect potsherds inside the mount."
http://www.itsgila.com/headlinerswarren.htm
Charles Warren dug in Jerusalem for only three years. In 1870 a new firman arrived from Constantinople forbidding all excavation. Warren packed his bags and returned to England at the age of 30. He died in 1927 at the age of 67. He had an illustrious career which included walking from the Indian to the Atlantic Ocean, marking out the border between South Africa and Zimbabwe and walking from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, marking out the border between Canada and the U.S. There is a Warren, Michigan and a Warren Minnesota, to celebrate this feat. His last job was Commissioner of the London Police. At one point Sherlock Holmes asks Dr. Watson, “Should we ask Commissioner Warren?” However, as Commissioner, he did not succeed in catching Jack the Ripper.

On tour in Jerusalem, we tell colorful tales of Captain Charles Warren before we splash through Hezekiah’s Tunnel, as we descend Warren’s Shaft and when we visit the Western Wall Tunnel’s “Masonic Hall’ discovered and named by Charles Warren who was a Freemason.

http://www.haaretzhatova.info/blog/_archives/2007/3/21/2821389.html

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http://www.haaretzhatova.info/

Tourists like Krewson pay $25 to spend the day working in ancient tunnels in Israel's Bet Guvrin National Park, about 20 miles southwest of Jerusalem.

Participants do the dirty work, digging and sifting through the ruins, while their fees underwrite the more difficult parts of archaeological work: washing pottery shards, logging finds, and publishing papers in academic journals.

Ian Stern, director of Archaeological Seminars, which is licensed by the Israeli government to do the dig, said it's a "Tom Sawyer-ish, paint-the-fence-white kind of a situation."

About 30,000 to 50,000 people pay to do the dig each year, raising about $1 million, he said. He says hundreds of thousands of people have participated in the experience since the project started 25 years ago.

What intrigues me is reading about how in Jesus's early years.. he and Mary were reputed to have hid... or lived in some ancient caves....

it would be interesting to find further evidence of this......

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http://www.universalhealingnetwork.com/articles/holygrail2.htm

Mary was also accompanied on her journey west by Jesus’ aunts, Mary Jacobi ... known as the Emerald Cave, is supposedly linked by tunnels to caverns inside..

Hi,

Well, the Jerusalem tunnels is generally a very intersting topic. But once again, in order to really study it, we have to separate the really pertinent information, and not pile everything together into a jumble that's hard to grasp. In this case, every one of the links you bring above, refers to a different subterranean location.

Generally, the soft limestone which forms the most extant rock base in Palestine is very easy to carve, and local residents through millennia have built deep underground structures, tunnels and dwelings nearly in the entire region. There are caves and old underground complexes nearly everywhere you go in Israel today, and in many places like Akko and Jerusalem there's a whole "city under a city".

Down south in the Negev Desert there are vast subterranean cities consisting of many rooms and structures, to serve as an excellent protection against the scorching sun where no trees grow. They are a real wonder to behold, because you see almost nothing of it above the ground except a few run-down terraces.

Further north there are several underground settlements carved from the rock to serve as hiding places during the days of the rebellions against the Greeks and later the Romans, where entire communities lived for months. One of these towns is the Bet Guvrin complex mentioned in one of the links above. Tel Lachish near Kiryat Gat (that I don't find a quick link for) is another amazing place, with about fifty different sized rooms going three or four levels undergrouns, connected by narrow tunnels that one wonders how people lived in. There's also the Luzit cave complex, where whole villages hid.

Up north in the Galillee there are also some very interesting stalactite-stalagmite caves complete with underground lakes that require some snappling and caving experience. It's nothing like the huge French cave systems, but fun for a small outing.

The Jerusalem Tunnels themselves are a whole different subject though. The most famous of these is the Hezekiah Tunnel also linked above, through which the Gihon spring was made to flow to provide water for Jerusalem in times of siege. This is a very interesting cavity, but it's not connected with the other vast caverns underneath the old city.

The real "underground mystery" in Jerusalem is the famed Zedekiah caves, also discovered by Charles Warren during his stay in Palestine. According to legend, this is where the stone was quarried for Solomon's temple, which is why the Freemasons liked to hold their ceremonies there for the First Palestine Lodge.

To grasp the vastness of the subterranean space, here is a painting made by one of Warren's companions around 1873:




Another legend says that King Zedekiah fled through here from the Babylonian siege, and was later captured about twenty miles away near Jericho. So the story today among the "conspiracy crowd" in Jerusalem (which is pretty much everybody there), is that the tunnels branch out from Zedekiah's caves for many miles, towards Beth Lehem and to Herod's old city of Herodion near the Dead Sea. However, as that whole area is a hotly contested war-zone, nobody will be exploring those passages any time soon.

The incredible Zedekiah's Cave itself has been closed to the public for over fifty years (although there have been news reports of big plans to finally turn it into the tourist attraction that it deserves to be.) And in the area of Solomon's Stables there are also vast subterranean complexes which the Islamic Waqf authorities have been excavating for years, but we are unlikely to learn what was really there - as there are no known archeologists working on that site, just construction crews. That "Templar cross" I wrote about last year was found there and thrown with the rest of the rubble in the Kidron Valley.

And that's pretty much the story of the Jerusalem Tunnels.

Cheers,
Sol