By ERIC GIBSON

‘Jerusalem is all about water,” says Doron Spielman of the Ir David Foundation, which preserves and maintains the ancient biblical City of David. “If you can conserve, preserve the water, you can live here. And if not, you’re in trouble.”

We are standing 65 feet below ground in the City of David, located just outside the southern wall of Jerusalem’s walled Old City, listening to the rush of water enter via an underground tunnel from a nearby spring. The half-kilometer long tunnel was cut through bedrock in 702 B.C. on orders of the King Hezekiah, who needed to bring water into the ancient city of Jerusalem from the spring outside its walls if it was to survive the impending Assyrian invasion. (It did.)

Hezekiah’s Tunnel, as it is known, superseded an earlier but more militarily vulnerable one dug in 1800 B.C. by the Canaanites—an even more remarkable feat considering that it was cut before the invention of metal tools. It was by attacking through this first tunnel, rather than by overland assault, that the young King David captured the city from the Jebusites in 1000 B.C. and established his capital here.

Three thousand years later, the ancient, buried aqueducts and tunnels of Jerusalem have lost none of their political or strategic significance. Since the city was reunited under Israel’s flag in 1967, efforts by archeologists to uncover Jerusalem’s history have been met by fierce and sometimes violent resistance.

View Full Image

Associated PressThe aqueduct links the western plaza of the Temple Mount to the City of David

That was so during the first intifada in 1988, when Arabs rioted over the opening of an ancient canal; and again in 1996, when 80 people were killed over three days of Arab rioting after Israel opened an ancient tunnel in the Old City; and again in 2007, when Arabs rioted over archeological work that Muslim religious leaders claimed was meant to physically undermine the foundations of the al-Aqsa mosque, a Muslim holy place. Palestinian leaders, including the late Yasser Arafat, have repeatedly insisted that Jewish historical claims to Jerusalem are a fiction (or conspiracy), which in turn plays directly into debates about the ultimate political disposition of the city.

All of this was surely on the mind of Jerusalem’s mayor, former high-tech entrepreneur Nir Barkat, when he announced last Monday that archaeologists had cleared an underground aqueduct dating from the time of Herod in the Second Temple Period (515 B.C.-70 C.E.). The aqueduct links the western plaza of the Temple Mount (the holiest site in Judaism and one of the holiest sites in Islam) to the City of David, thus reaffirming the ancient Jewish presence in Jerusalem. When the entire aqueduct is open it could become a tourist destination attracting some 500,000 visitors annually.

Yet the politics seems far-off as a group of journalists bend, squeeze and shuffle through the underground passage. Beneath the old Herodian road that pilgrims took from their ritual cleansing in the City of David’s Siloam Pool up to the Temple, we trace a route from which some 2,000 Jewish rebels escaped the city in 70 C.E., when the Romans destroyed the city, thus putting an end to Jewish sovereignty in the city for the next 1,897 years.

View Full Image

Walled on either side with heavy stone slabs, the aqueduct is between three and four feet wide at the most, with head clearance of about seven feet—a claustrophobe’s nightmare. The roof slabs are the paving stones of the road above. One is grateful for the fluorescent lighting strung along every few yards, which provide illumination up and down the entire length of the tunnel, a far cry from the guttering tapers the fleeing ancients would have had to rely on as they ran for their lives through darkness.

Later in the tour, we are taken to the site of the current excavation, which sits a few hundred yards southeast of the Dung Gate, the southern entrance to the Old City. Descending some “steps”—really piles of bags filled with archaeological debris ready for removal—we re-enter the aqueduct 30 feet below ground. Our underground stroll takes us some 650 meters, from our present location between the City of David and the Old City, under the southern wall of the Old City and toward the southwest corner of the Temple Mount. We then jog left as the aqueduct swings to avoid the Temple Mount and resumes its northward trajectory.

According to Ronny Reich, Jerusalem’s chief archaeologist and the man responsible for this latest discovery, the aqueduct was built by Herod to drain the western part of the city, a necessity after the Second Temple’s construction. Mr. Reich was himself building on the work of British archeologists from the late 19th century—and on his own work from 20 years ago. What he has now done is link the two stretches of underground tunnel, and he hopes to have it open to tourists in about 18 months.

“Before this we thought that what Warren found there and what Bliss and Dickey found here is connected,” he says, pointing to the British archaeologists’ map. “Today we know.”

But sometimes a tunnel is more than just a tunnel. “For the first time you see a connection from the plaza right outside the Temple Mount with the City of David and the [Siloam] pool underneath,” says Mr. Barkat. “It’s practically the first time that people can connect dots and better understand how people have lived here in the past.” At the same time, he’s quick to insist that the digs not “touch the status quo—no digs under the Temple Mount.”

For now, what the mayor wants the world to focus on is history, not religious or political conflict. “This is a city that was always, for over three and a half billion people of faith, the center of the world and has layers and layers of history, second to practically no other city in the world,” he says. “This is something we need to share with the world, we’ve got to share it and make sure more and more people come and see it with their own eyes like you saw it.”

Mr. Gibson is the Journal’s Leisure & Arts Features editor.

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved