From the 1st century BCE until the 20th CE, one of Jerusalemites’ major sources of water was the so-called Low-Level Aqueduct, which ran through what is now the Armon Hanatsiv neighborhood in the southern part of the city. Amanda Borschel-Dan describes archaeologists’ ongoing efforts to understand it better:
Used until the British Mandate, when it was discarded for new electric-pump technology, the newly uncovered segment of the Hasmonean-era water line—currently some 40 meters—will be conserved and integrated into a neighborhood park in cooperation with the Jerusalem Municipality and the Moriah Jerusalem Development Corporation.
It was used and maintained (or not) by a succession of rulers, said Yaakov Billig, [an expert in ancient aqueducts]—including those from the three major monotheistic religions—through the end of the Ottoman empire, when it increasingly began to crack and decay.
Billig said that the new excavations are not being conducting merely for the sake of nostalgia, however. Rather, researchers are still amazed and even somewhat mystified by the precision technology constructed in antiquity without the aid of GPS or modern computation methods.
The Low-Level Aqueduct dates to circa 100 BCE, said Billig, and was used for public needs specifically at the Temple Mount. It was at the outer limits of the contemporary technology, he said.
More about: Ancient Israel, Archaeology, Jerusalem