According to the Biblical tradition, King David conquered
the city from the Jebusites and established it as the
capital of the united Kingdom of Israel, and his son, King
Solomon, commissioned the building of the First Temple;
there is no archaeological evidence that Solomon’s Temple
existed or any record of it, other than the Bible.[6]
These foundational events, straddling the dawn of the 1st
millennium BCE, assumed central symbolic importance
for the Jewish people.[7] The sobriquet of holy city ( עיר
הקודש , transliterated ‘ir haqodesh) was probably attached
to Jerusalem in post-exilic times.[8][9][10] The holiness of
Jerusalem in Christianity, conserved in the Septuagint[11]
which Christians adopted as their own authority,[12] was
reinforced by the New Testament account of Jesus’s crucifixion
there. In Islam, Jerusalem is the third-holiest
city, after Mecca and Medina.[13][14] In Islamic tradition
in 610 CE it became the first Qibla, the focal point
for Muslim prayer (salat),[15] and Muhammad made his
Night Journey there ten years later, ascending to heaven
where he speaks to God, according to the Quran.[16][17]
As a result, despite having an area of only 0.9 square kilometres
(0.35 sq mi),[18] the Old City is home to many
sites of seminal religious importance, among them the
Temple Mount and its Western Wall, the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre, the Dome of the Rock, the Garden Tomb
and al-Aqsa Mosque.