for more than 150 years archaeologists are seeken a northern fortification line of Jerusalem something that will explain size of Jerusalem during ancient time and here at the excavation at givati parking lot and the City of David National Park we believe that we have solved this problem for the first time I'm standing at givati paring not excavation a core project conducted by the Israel Antiquity Authority and T Aviv University and behind me you can see this tall vertical Cliff part of what we believe is a massive fortification Mo the moat a massive row cut channel is more than 30 m wide 9 M tall and at least 70 M long in attempt to understand the meaning of this dramatic Discovery we went back to the result of previous excavation apparently kin Canyon a British archaeologist who dug here more than 50 years ago was Excavating inside the same mod but she was Excavating in a small and narrow area and did not understand what exactly is this trench now we can take the two excavations together and realize that there is a trench that begins here and ends something like 70 M away from us on the other side of the city of David Ridge looking at the cliff behind me we can realize that the cutting of the trench was done by a ruling Elite that able to bring in all the effort and the energy in order to cut a such a deep and long and wide defending trench to Jerusalem we do not know when the trench was cut but we do know that it was inuse during the 9th century BC 20900 years ago the time of the first Judean Kings at that time we can see that the trench was dividing between the older core the area to the south of us where the step Stone structure is located and the area that we call now the Acropolis Temple Mount where the temple was standing and palaces that were built around the temple if it was cut earlier than the 9th century BC the Bronze Age something like 4,000 years ago then it means that we are standing at the northern border of the city where the city defended itself from attacks that may have come from the north the scale of this trench that completely changes the natural Topography of Jerusalem tells us that it's time to go back to biblical text and re-evaluate references to the old geography of the city