Episode Details

The walls surrounding Jerusalem's Old City were built by Suleiman the Magnificent between 1537 and 1541 — yet the original Jerusalem sits outside them, uninhabited since medieval times. This episode traces the city's physical footprint across four millennia: from a twelve-acre Bronze Age ridge with one spring, to a 445-acre peak under Herod Agrippa's Third Wall, to the eleventh-century earthquake that permanently amputated the biblical city from the walled town. Then we follow the nineteenth-century breakout beyond the walls — the legal and social barriers that kept everyone inside, the Touro bequest that funded Mishkenot Sha'ananim, and how the first neighborhoods outside turned a compact walled city into the seed of the sprawling modern one. Episode #042391 — open it directly at myweirdprompts.com/042391