One of the many intriguing issues regarding Jerusalem’s archaeology and history is its fate after the Roman destruction of the city in general and of the Temple Mount as part of Aelia Capitolina in particular. The questionable existence of a Roman temple erected by Hadrian upon the ruins of the Jewish one has aroused many reactions, mainly because of the scanty information linking the writings of Cassius Dio and archaeological remains. The poor remains are, of course, partly due to the difficulty in conducting a full archaeological investigation of the Temple Mount. The whole issue is well presented in Yaron Eliav’s recently published God’s Mountain: The Temple Mount in Time, Place and Memory.

The paper presented here focuses on the question of the existence or, rather, non-existence of a Roman Temple on the Temple Mount based on architectural material. A brief picture will be drawn of the essential architectural components and sculptural decoration needed for a Roman temple. Parallels will be made to such remains at other sites of Roman Palestine. After reviewing the few sculptural remains discovered in Jerusalem in general and those of the Temple Mount area in particular, the large quantity of column capitals found in archaeological excavations around the Mount, and mainly in John Wilkinson’s 1989 survey of the capitals reused or deposited in the Temple Mount, will be examined. The findings of this investigation add a chronological factor to the issue, namely, that out of hundreds of architectural elements, a large part is of pre-Roman provenance and an even greater part bears a Late Roman and Islamic date, but only four items could be attributed to the second or third century CE. Thus, an archaeological find such as a column capital, which hitherto has been neglected for drawing historical conclusions, now becomes a crucial tool for reexamining this disputed issue.