300 metres of Jerusalem's Hasmonean Lower Aqueduct exposed ahead of new housing

Salvage excavations south of Kibbutz Ramat Rachel have uncovered a 300-metre stretch of the Lower Aqueduct that brought spring water into ancient Jerusalem. The Israel Antiquities Authority announced the find on 11 October; the Israel Land Authority paid for the dig before building a new neighbourhood on the land.

The stretch shows two phases. Water first ran in a plastered, masonry-built channel. About 500 years ago, under the Ottomans, ceramic pipes were set inside it, and the wall's outer face was plastered and studded with small stones pressed in while the plaster was wet.

The whole line, some 21 km long, carried water by gravity from Solomon's Pools, below Bethlehem, to the Temple Mount, falling about one metre per kilometre over most of its length. Its excavation directors, Dr. Benyamin Storchan, Gil Freid and Rotem Cohen, attribute it, probably, to the Hellenistic Hasmonean kings, and say it stayed in intermittent use until about a century ago.

The section will be displayed at the main entrance of the new neighbourhood. The team was to present it, with new research on the aqueduct, at the annual "New Studies in the Archaeology of Jerusalem and Its Region" conference in the week of the announcement.

In Cyprus, Roman and Late Antique Salamis, in the north, occupied since the 1974 Turkish invasion, drew its water from the spring of Kephalovryse at Kythrea (ancient Chytroi); inscriptions record a rebuilding of that aqueduct with new arches under Heraclius (610–641).