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The Temple Mount viewed from southeast Map of the Temple Mount; some gates are marked on the map. The Temple Mount, a holy site in the Old City of Jerusalem, also known as the al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf or Al-Aqsa, contains twelve gates. One of the gates, Bab as-Sarai, is currently closed to the public but was open under Ottoman rule.
The sealed historic gates comprise four that are at least partially preserved (the double Golden Gate in the eastern wall, and the Single, Triple, and Double Gates in the southern wall), with several other gates discovered by archaeologists of which only traces remain (the Gate of the Essenes on Mount Zion, the gate of Herod's royal palace ...
The seven gates at the time of Suleiman were, clockwise and by their current name: the Damascus Gate; Herod's Gate; Lions' Gate; Golden Gate; Dung Gate; Zion Gate; and Jaffa Gate. With the re-sealing of the Golden Gate by Suleiman, the number of operational gates was only brought back to seven in 1887, with the addition of the New Gate.
Zion Gate was built in July 1540, west of the location of the medieval gate, which was a direct continuation of the Street of the Jews (also known as the Cardo).Six sentry towers were erected in the southern segment of the wall, four of them situated in the Mount Zion section.
Both sets of gates were set into the Southern Wall of the Temple compound and gave access to the Temple Mount esplanade by means of underground vaulted ramps. [3] Both were walled up in the Middle Ages. [3] The western set is a double-arched gate (the Double Gate), and the eastern is a triple-arched gate (the Triple Gate). [3]
The Temple Mount (Hebrew: הַר הַבַּיִת, romanized: Har haBayīt, lit. 'Temple Mount'), also known as the Noble Sanctuary (Arabic: الحرم الشريف, 'Haram al-Sharif'), and sometimes as Jerusalem's holy esplanade, [2] [3] is a hill in the Old City of Jerusalem that has been venerated as a holy site for thousands of years, including in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
The gate's location is determined by the city's topography. It stands at the point where the valley followed by Jaffa Road meets the city wall at the upper end of the Transversal Valley, which bisects the Old City in a roughly west–east direction, between the northwest ridge and the southwest hill known as Mount Zion.
The area lies in the southwestern sector of the walled city, and stretches from the Zion Gate in the south, along the Armenian Quarter on the west, up to the Street of the Chain in the north and extends to the Western Wall and the Temple Mount in the east. [1] In the early 20th century the Jewish population of the quarter reached 19,000. [2]