The Key to It All - Archaeology in Jerusalem

Here is a key:

It is a symbol:

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict...[includes]...the so-called "right of return" for Palestinian refugees...at the 7th Berlin Biennale....one of the pieces on view at the exhibition – a one-ton, nine-meter-long Palestinian "key of return" – was dismounted from its home at a Bethlehem refugee camp in March and flown across thousands of miles to be installed in Germany.

The piece called "Key of Return" was crafted in 2008 by residents of the Aida Refugee Camp near Bethlehem...Palestinian refugees who left or were forced out of their homes in what is present-day Israel took their keys with them, believing they would return. However, 60 years later the fate of those refugees and their families have become one of the hot-button issues between Israelis and Palestinians. "The keys have been passed on from generation to generation as a keepsake — as a memory of their lost homes and as lasting symbols of their desired 'right of return,'" the biennale website says.

Palestinians insist they have the right to return to their homes, while Israel views such a mass return as the end of the Jewish state.

The Pal. logo, we know

...features keys, a symbol of Palestinian claims to property within [pre-67] Israel,

So, do the Jews have a key?

Well, we can now look at this key:

Photographic credit: Clara Amit, courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority

Where is it from?  Who made it?  When?

Read on:-

An Enormous Quarry Dating to the Second Temple Period was Exposed in Jerusalem's Ramat Shlomo Neighborhood
 
A 2,000 year old key, pick axes, severance wedges etc are also among the artifacts uncovered during the course of the excavation.

According to Irina Zilberbod, excavation director on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, “The quarrying phenomenon created a spectacular sight of bedrock columns and steps and craters of sorts that were the result of the rock-cuttings. What remained are rock masses in various stages of quarrying, and there were those that were found in a preliminary stage of rock-cutting prior to detachment. Some of the stones that were quarried are more than 2 meters long. The giant stones were probably hewn for the sake of the construction of the city’s magnificent public buildings”.

Zilberbod explains, “The pick axes were used to cut the severance channels around the stone block in the bedrock surface and the arrowhead-shaped detachment wedge, which is solid iron, was designed to detach the base of the stone from the bedrock by means of striking it with a hammer. The key that was found, and which was probably used to open a door some 2,000 years ago, is curved and has teeth. What was it doing there? We can only surmise that it might have fallen from the pocket of one of the quarrymen”.

The enormous quarries that were exposed – totaling a 1,000 square meters in area – join other quarries that were previously documented and studied by the Israel Antiquities Authority. Research has shown that the northern neighborhoods of modern Jerusalem are situated on Jerusalem’s “city of quarries” from the Second Temple period.

The Jews are the indigenous people of this land.

The Jews have some 3,000 years of historical connection to this land.

The Jews had prophets and priests, princes and politicians, institutions of  religion, of public administration, agriculture and industry, commerce and transportation and much more.

That's why this is our homeland and that's why archaeology is so important.

The key to it all.

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