The Southern Wall of Har Habayis, part 1

   The southern wall of Hurdus's expansion of Har Habayis, is 281 m (922 ft) long. This wall is approximately at a ninety-degree angle to the Western Wall. This wall is entirely from Hurdus's time, as can be seen from the style of the stones. This wall extends from Nachal Kidron in the east, to the Tyropoeon valley in the west; the western part of the wall is actually built over the valley. In this wall are two gates, the double gate and the triple gate, which we will Imy"h discus in future posts. 

Andrew Shiva / Wikipedia

xiquinhosilva, CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), via Wikimedia Commons

The corner [Ovedc, CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0), via Wikimedia Commons]

   The southwest corner, like most of the other corners of Har Habayis (besides for the northwest one), has been preserved to a nice height, since huge stones were used for them. These stones were put so that when you looked at one side of the corner, the cornerstones were alternatively long and short, strengthening the wall. this type of construction is called a header-and-stretcher construction. The nine highest surviving courses of this corner are preserved to the south for a distance of 23 m (75 ft), after which there is a vertical break, and these stones stop, and are replaced with stones from a later period. This break also cuts through the pipes that were put on the walls during the Byzantine era, to bring water from the aqueduct by Wilson's arch to buildings to the south. This shows that this break happened a long time after the Churban, and originally, the stones were preserved for a little more. This break probably was done during the Persian conquest of Eretz Yisroel in the year 4374 (614), and the later stones were probably put here when the Arabs built up the Har Habayis.  

reference

Conder, Claude Reignier, and Warren, Charles. The Survey of Western Palestine: Jerusalem. London, 1884.

​Ritmeyer, Leen. The Quest: Revealing the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Israel: Carta, 2006.

Jacobson, David. “Sacred Geometry: Unlocking the Secret of the Temple Mount, Part 1,” Biblical Archaeology Review 25, no. 4 (1999): 42–45, 47–53, 62–63.