pedalsandpanniers

Saturday

With not much in the Jewish Quarter of the Old city open because it is the Jewish Sabbath we visited those sites that were. The Tower of David is a large fortress with portions remaining that were built by the Romans and much of the balance built by King Suloman in the 1500’s.  The walls are massive and the ramparts and the towers afford  a panoramic  of the Old cities and the new city which has grown up around it. 

We visited the site where it is thought that King David is buried.  We also visited the the room which is thought  to be the site of the “Last Supper.”

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and the Domiton Abbey where the Virgin Mary is said to be in repose. We were treated to religious chanting and singing by a church group from the Ivory Coast who voices resonated beautifully in the sanctuary.

Sunday

Despite the fact that Sunday was the Jewish holiday of Shuvot celebrating the delivery of the Torah to Moses at Mt. Sinai and also the first harvest of the year the Israel Museum which is best known for its Dead Sea Scrolls was open.  The scrolls are kept in a building designed to represent the covers from the pots in which the scrolls were found

Fragments are on display all of the time.  They  have various passages of the bible. They were discovered in clay pots by a Bedouin boy in the vicinity of the Dead Sea.

The Israel Museum also has a scale (1:50) model of Jerusalem as it existed in 86 A.D. The time and effort to create this masterpiece must have been huge.

Other notable exhibits include the history and artifacts of the land that is now Israel from 12,000 B.C to  (?). We ran out of steam when we got to the Roman period. The ticket to this fantastic museum covers 2 days since it is so big.  All of Israel is an archiologist’s parodise with layer on layer of different civilizations destroyed or covered in sand giving rise to the next civilizations.  Also notable were interiors from 4 synagogues’  in India, Germany, Italy and Siranname.  After almost 5 hours we called it a day.