Pilgrimage Road

Also called Stepped Street

Six hundred metres of paved, stepped street running uphill from the Pool of Siloam to the Temple — the road pilgrims actually walked, dated by the coins sealed beneath its slabs.

Object: Paved stepped street about 600 m long and 8 m wide, with drainage channels and shops beneath and beside it
Found at: From the Pool of Siloam to the southern Temple Mount, beneath the Silwan neighbourhood, Jerusalem
Found in: Sections seen from the 1880s onward; systematically excavated from the 2000s through the 2020s
Found by: Israel Antiquities Authority, across several directorships — R. Reich and E. Shukron, then Y. Billig, J. Uziel, N. Szanton, M. Hagbi and A. Levy
Dates from: Completed no earlier than AD 31, by the latest coins sealed beneath the paving; construction thought to have begun around AD 20
Now held at: In situ beneath Silwan, Jerusalem; sections open to visitors

Dug Sideways, Under a Living Neighbourhood

Sections of a monumental Herodian street had been glimpsed for well over a century — C. Warren in the 1880s, F. Bliss and A. Dickey in the 1890s, K. Kenyon in the 1960s — and each time reburied. The systematic excavation of its full run began under the Israel Antiquities Authority in the 2000s and continued through the 2010s and into the 2020s, with R. Reich, E. Shukron, Y. Billig, J. Uziel, N. Szanton, M. Hagbi and A. Levy among the directors across its phases.

The street is about 600 metres long and about eight metres wide, paved with large flagstones and rising in a repeated rhythm of two steps and a long landing, two steps and a landing — the profile of a road built for crowds moving uphill rather than for carts. It runs from the Pool of Siloam, at the bottom of the City of David ridge, to the southern end of the Temple Mount. Drainage channels run beneath it, and shops opened onto it.

It could not be excavated from above. The modern neighbourhood of Silwan sits directly over it, so the dig proceeded horizontally, tunnelling along the line of the road under the houses, shoring the ceiling with steel and concrete as it went. That method is why the road exists to be walked today and is also the substance of the argument about it, which the last section takes up.

The Road in the Gospels' Background

Nothing in the New Testament names this street, and it should not be presented as though something did. What it supplies is the physical setting of a great deal that the Gospels take for granted. Luke 2:41-42 has Jesus's family going up to Jerusalem every year for Passover; John 5:1 and repeatedly elsewhere has him going up for a feast; the Songs of Ascents in Psalms 122 are pilgrimage songs about arriving at the gates. Pilgrims arriving from the south reached the city at the pool, washed, and climbed. This is the climb.

The connection to John 9 is more direct. The man born blind is sent to wash in the pool of Siloam and comes back seeing; the pool is at the foot of this road, and the way back into the city from it is this pavement.

One object found on this same ridge belongs beside the street. The Theodotus Inscription, recovered from a cistern in the City of David, records a priest who built a synagogue for the reading of the Law together with a guest house and water installations for visitors from abroad. That is the other half of what a pilgrimage city needed: a road to arrive on, and somewhere to sleep at the end of it.

The dating is the other thing the excavation supplies, and it is unusually tight. More than a hundred coins were recovered from the sealed fills directly beneath the paving. N. Szanton, M. Hagbi, J. Uziel and D. Ariel published the analysis in Tel Aviv in 2019: the latest coins under the slabs are of the year 30/31 AD, struck under Pontius Pilate, and none later appears. Since a coin cannot get under a stone laid before it was minted, the street cannot have been finished before about AD 31 — placing its completion inside Pilate's prefecture, which is to say within a few years of the ministry of Jesus.

What the Coins Prove, and What the Tunnel Costs

Two claims travel with this find, and they need separating. The first is the one the coins support: the street was completed no earlier than about AD 31. That is a hard result and a valuable one. The second is the headline the first became — "Pontius Pilate built the Pilgrimage Road" — and it goes further than the evidence. Coins sealed under a pavement give the earliest date the pavement can have been laid; they do not name a builder, do not show that construction was a single campaign, and do not rule out that most of the work was done earlier and the last slabs laid late. The excavators themselves describe a project begun around AD 20 and completed under Pilate. Pilate is the prefect in whose term the road was finished; calling him its builder is an inference, and one that has been printed far more confidently than it was argued.

The method is disputed by serious people. J. Magness has objected that horizontal excavation divorces remains from what lies above and around them, which is the information stratigraphy exists to preserve; Y. Mizrachi, of the organisation Emek Shaveh, has argued that the technique "cannot provide us enough data to understand what we find and the dating of the structures", and his organisation's own statement adds a second objection, that the horizontal method together with "the paucity of scientific publications" leaves it impossible to establish with certainty when the road was built and how it fitted into the layout of the city. The excavators answer that the tunnelling is conducted stratigraphically, section by section, and documented in three dimensions as it proceeds; A. Maeir, who directs an unrelated excavation, has publicly described the IAA team's work here as properly stratigraphic. A reader is entitled to know that this is an open methodological argument among archaeologists rather than a settled point.

There is a further dispute that is not archaeological and that this article does not adjudicate. The excavation runs beneath an inhabited Palestinian neighbourhood, within a national park operated by Elad, a private organisation that also promotes Jewish settlement in Silwan, and residents and several NGOs oppose it. Those objections are about property, planning and politics rather than about pottery, and they are a real part of this site's story even though they bear on the dating of the road not at all.

Scripture references

John 9:6-7 — Sent to wash at the pool at the foot of this road
Luke 2:41-42 — Going up to Jerusalem for Passover, every year
Psalms 122:1-4 — A Song of Ascents — the tribes going up
John 5:1 — Jesus goes up to Jerusalem for a feast
Luke 13:4 — "The tower in Siloam" — the same corner of the city in Jesus's speech

Sources

ScholarshipN. Szanton, M. Hagbi, J. Uziel and D. Ariel, "Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem: The Monumental Street from the Siloam Pool to the Temple Mount" — Nahshon Szanton, Moran Hagbi, Joe Uziel and Donald T. Ariel · Tel Aviv 46:2 (2019), 147-166, doi:10.1080/03344355.2019.1650491. The coin analysis that dates the pavement. Publisher paywall; bibliographic record confirmed through Crossref · paywalledSupports: The AD 31 terminus and the number of coins
Holding institutionIsrael Antiquities Authority — the Pilgrimage Road excavation — Israel Antiquities Authority · The licensing and excavating body for the road from the 2000s onward. The Authority's own site refused automated retrieval, so no URL is given rather than an unchecked oneSupports: Who is excavating, and under what authority
ReferenceThe Times of Israel: "On an ancient road to the Temple, archaeological innovation, mystery and dispute" — The Times of Israel · Read in full. It carries J. Magness and Y. Mizrachi against the method and A. Levy and A. Maeir for it, and it is the source of Mizrachi's own sentence quoted here. It says nothing about the pace of publication; that objection belongs to his organisation's statement, cited separately belowSupports: The methodological dispute, stated on both sides
ReferenceEmek Shaveh: "The Pilgrimage Road Dedication Ceremony" — Emek Shaveh, an Israeli archaeological organisation · The organisation's own unsigned statement, read in full, and the source of its second objection to the excavation: that the site is presented as part of the first-century pilgrimage route "in spite of the fact that the horizontal excavation method and the paucity of scientific publications does not enable us to establish with certainty when the road was built and how it fit into the layout of the city of Jerusalem". It is cited separately from the Times of Israel report because that objection is the organisation's and not a sentence of Y. Mizrachi's, and the rest of the statement is about Israeli policy in Jerusalem rather than about methodSupports: Emek Shaveh's published objection to the excavation method and to the pace of publication
EncyclopediaWikipedia: Stepped street (Jerusalem)

Reflect

Pilgrims sang the Songs of Ascents on a climb that took real effort, at the end of a long journey. What in your own life is worth arriving at slowly?