10 Facts About Mount Zion

Mount Zion is a hill in Jerusalem, Israel, located just outside the walls of the Old City.

The term Mount Zion has been used in the Hebrew Bible first for the City of David and later for the Temple Mount, but its meaning has shifted and it is used as the name of ancient Jerusalem's Western Hill.

Name Mount Zion referred successively to three locations, as Jerusalemites preserved the time-honoured name, but shifted the location they venerated as the focal point of biblical Jerusalem to the site considered most appropriate in their own time.

At first, Mount Zion was the name given to the Jebusite fortified city on the lower part of ancient Jerusalem's Eastern Hill, known as the City of David.

Josephus, the first-century CE historian who knew the city as it was before this second catastrophic event, identified Mount Zion as being the Western Hill, separated from the lower, Eastern Hill, by what he calls the "Tyropoeon Valley".

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Mount Zion was a designated no-man's land between Israel and Jordan.

Mount Zion was the closest accessible site to the ancient Jewish Temple.

Important sites on Mount Zion are Dormition Abbey, the Armenian Monastery of St Saviour, King David's Tomb and the Room of the Last Supper.

Mount Zion include a number of prominent individuals from the 19th and 20th centuries.

In 1874, an Englishman, Henry Maudsley, discovered a large segment of rock scarp and numerous ancient dressed stones on Mount Zion that were believed to be the base of Josephus's First Wall.