Tower of David Museum

The citadel as it stands is medieval and Ottoman. The Mamluk Sultanate destroyed the earlier fortress in 1260, and in 1310 the sultan al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qalawun rebuilt it, giving the complex much of its present shape. Suleiman the Magnificent expanded it between 1537 and 1541, his architects designing the large entrance with a cannon emplacement behind it, and for four hundred years the place was a garrison for Ottoman troops. The city wall running away from it on both sides is the same programme of work: Britannica dates Suleiman's circuit to 1538 to 1540, built largely on Crusader, Byzantine, Herodian and in places Hasmonean foundations.

The genuinely ancient piece is small and easy to walk past. Herod added three towers to the fortifications at this vulnerable north-west corner of the Western Hill between 37 and 34 BCE: Phasael, the tallest at 44 metres, named for the brother who killed himself in captivity; Mariamne, for the wife he had executed; and Hippicus, for a friend. Only the base of one of the three survives. Some sixteen courses of Herodian ashlars still rise from ground level, partly hidden behind a later glacis, with smaller stones of a later period piled back on top of the stump.

Which tower it is has been argued over for a century and a half. Hillel Geva, who excavated the citadel, made the case in the Israel Exploration Journal in 1981 for Hippicus, an identification the nineteenth-century scholars Edward Robinson and James Turner Barclay had already proposed. James Fergusson, Thomas Lewin, Conrad Schick, George Adam Smith, Charles Warren and Claude Conder held out for Phasael, on the strength of its size. The museum's own signage does not settle it, and neither does anything found so far.

Excavation keeps moving the later dates too. Amit Re'em, directing work in the citadel, found in the foundations of the western fortification a dated Arabic inscription naming al-Mu'azzam Isa, Saladin's nephew, who pulled Jerusalem's defences down in about 1212 in expectation of a Crusader attack that never came and cut his name into every tower. Because that stone was reused in the foundation of the wall above it, a fortification long read as twelfth-century Crusader work is in fact thirteenth-century Ayyubid. The same campaign carbon-dated mortar with the Weizmann Institute and recorded the standing structure by photogrammetry.

• Hasmonean: the Western Hill first settled around 150 BCE, behind what Josephus called the First Wall
• Herodian: three towers of 37–34 BCE, one base surviving, about sixteen courses of it above ground
• Ayyubid: the western fortification redated to about 1212 by an inscription of al-Mu'azzam Isa
• Mamluk: rebuilt in 1310 under al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qalawun, which is most of what is standing
• Ottoman: expanded 1537 to 1541, minaret added 1635 to 1655, Kishle barracks added 1837

Byzantine Christians settled the name. Mistaking the Western Hill for Mount Zion, they took the surviving Herodian tower for the palace of David and from the fifth century called it the Tower of David, borrowing the phrase from the Song of Songs: "Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men." The identification was wrong when it was made and has never been right since.

In the nineteenth century the name slid across the courtyard. It attached itself to the conspicuous Ottoman minaret at the south-west corner, erected between 1635 and 1655, and since 1967 it has officially covered the entire citadel. The object photographed and captioned as the Tower of David is therefore a mosque minaret roughly a century younger than the city wall around it, and about sixteen and a half centuries younger than the tower the name was invented for.

In Arabic the site was al-Qal'a, simply the Citadel, for close to a thousand years, and part of it was known in the early Muslim and Ayyubid periods as Mihrab Dawud. Mahmoud Hawari, writing in the journal Present Pasts in 2010, reads the renaming and the museum together as an appropriation. He notes that C.N. Johns's British Mandate excavations of the 1930s and 1940s exposed what he calls a remarkable example of Islamic and medieval military architecture, and argues that the museum built here in the 1980s presents a continuity running from David's conquest to Israeli statehood, with Palestinian input excluded from the planning and the implementation.

That was written of the display that stood before 2023, and one of its specific charges, that the place was a museum without objects leaning on reproductions and reconstructions, is partly answered by the new galleries, which put excavated finds and ancient objects on show. The wider argument about whose story the citadel is made to tell is not settled by adding objects to it. Visitors are better off knowing the argument exists than discovering it later.

The museum reopened on 1 June 2023 after six years of work that the Times of Israel put at 50 million dollars, paid for by a long list of funders including Dame Vivien Duffield through the Clore Israel Foundation, the Jerusalem municipality, the ministries of Jerusalem and Jewish Tradition, Heritage and Tourism, the Patrick and Lina Drahi Foundation, Keren Hayesod, the Jerusalem Foundation and American Friends of Museums in Israel.

The most obvious change is the way in. A covered entrance pavilion now stands directly opposite Jaffa Gate with the ticket office and a café in it, and the museum is entered from David Garden, the western entrance at the end of Mamilla Boulevard, rather than through the old gate off David Street. The Times of Israel gives the exhibition space after the rebuild as 20,000 square metres. Fresh excavation was carried out through the citadel under Israel Antiquities Authority supervision while the building work went on.

Inside are ten permanent galleries, arranged so the chronology can be walked rather than read. The Sands of Time timeline runs across twelve interactive screens; a model of Jerusalem made for the Vienna World Fair of 1873 has been restored and put back on show; animated sequences were made by Ari Folman and David Polonsky. Eilat Lieber has directed the museum since 2012, and the display designer Tal Roih de Lange kept the technology out of sight, down to the absence of visible cabling.

One admission ticket covers a good deal: the permanent display, guided tours around the museum, the moat and the Kishle, the climb to the Phasael tower and the citadel courtyard, with an audio guide and disposable headphones handed out at the entrance. The evening shows are sold separately and are not covered by it.

The Kishle is the long building against the Old City wall just south of the citadel, and it is Ottoman: a prison and barracks put up in 1837, later used as a detention centre under the British Mandate. The Jerusalem Foundation, which has funded work here since 1977, records that the museum wanted to turn it into an education centre and that excavation got in first. It is now included in the admission ticket, along with the trench complex, and iTravelJerusalem describes it as open for independent visits for the first time.

Underneath it is the reason it matters. The Antiquities Authority excavated the Kishle in 1999, and from 2002 the Jerusalem Foundation supported the excavation of what it calls what is believed to be the palace compound of Herod the Great, built around 23 BCE. That hedge is the right level of confidence to carry into the room: the identification rests on walls, levels and location rather than on an inscription naming anybody. The route through also presents a stretch of wall attributed to Hezekiah in the First Temple period, a medieval Jewish workshop, the Ottoman fortification and the Mandate-era cells.

The citadel courtyard above is itself an archaeological garden. The Elias Sourasky Archaeological Garden grew out of Foundation-funded excavation, and the remains standing open to the sky in the courtyard run back some 2,700 years. Among the models set out along the courtyard route is a large and detailed model of nineteenth-century Jerusalem, displayed inside a cistern about 1,500 years old.

The admission ticket includes the climb to the Phasael tower, which the city's tourism service describes as a 360 degree view of Jerusalem. It is the payoff of the visit for most people: from up there the Old City stops being a maze of lanes and becomes a plan, with the Holy Sepulchre's domes, the Dome of the Rock, the walls and the Mount of Olives all placed in relation to each other in a way no street-level walk manages.

The accessibility answer is honest but it has a limit, and the limit is the roof. Two lifts opened in December 2022: a glass lift in the inner courtyard that carries visitors up from the main exhibition level without touching the ancient stonework, and an interior lift near the main entrance serving the upper galleries. Both were designed by Kimmel Eshkolot Architects under Yotam Cohen-Sagi and approved by an Antiquities Authority that the museum's director described as very conservative about how any intervention looks. With them the museum calls itself almost completely accessible.

A third lift, which would have reached the citadel's highest viewpoint, was not approved. The last stretch to the tower roof is therefore stairs, and the museum commissioned a 360 degree viewing tool for visitors who cannot climb them. Worth knowing as context: historic sites are exempt from Israel's accessibility law, so none of this work was legally required. Anyone with a specific access question is better off ringing the published accessibility line before booking than finding out at the foot of the steps.