Archaeologica.org

The discovery marks the first time archaeologists have found such massive construction from before the time of Herod, the ruler behind numerous monumental projects in the city 2,000 years ago, and shows that Jerusalem of the Middle Bronze Age had a powerful population capable of complex building projects, said Ronny Reich, director of the excavation and an archaeology professor at the University of Haifa.

Minimalist wrote:That is not the picture that Finkelstein portrays. The north, because of better climate tended to be more populous and powerful.

And those are some pretty good sized rocks just to protect a pathway.

As the life of Jerusalem passed from the Middle Bronze Age of 1800 BCE to the Late Bronze Age of four centuries later, we are offered a tragi-comic glimpse into the life of one Jerusalem's earliest known rulers in an era when the Egyptian Empire dominated a very quarrelsome province known as Canaan. Around 1360 BCE, Jerusalem was ruled by one Abdiheba, a rather hapless soul who swore his loyalty to Egypt while the rulers of neighboring city-states were lining up to overthrow both Abdiheba and the Egyptian yoke.

Abdiheba's boss was none other than the extraordinary Pharaoh Akhenaten, the man who may well have invented the world's first monotheism or one-god religion, Atenism. Akhenaten's passion was to transform the 2,000 year old religious pantheon of over 700 Egyptian deities by replacing them all with an obscure god representing the disk of the sun, the Aten. Abdiheba and Jerusalem were the least of Akhenaten's interests, and this neglect clearly shows in the surviving cuneiform tablet correspondence between them known as the Amarna Archive. In one letter, Abdiheba begs Akhenaten for more Egyptian troops to defend Egyptian interests in the Jerusalem hill country. In another, he asks the Pharaoh to withdraw some Nubian Egyptian archers who broke into Abdiheba's house!