Urban Development of Early Byzantine Jerusalem as an Effective Means of Shaping Christian Collective Memory: The Archaeological Perspective

In late antiquity and the Middle Ages, memory was often depicted and interpreted as a spatial metaphor. But could the reverse also be true? Was the urban landscape of early Byzantine Jerusalem (fourth–seventh centuries CE) intentionally designed as a “mental map,” integrating topography, visibility, material surroundings, and bodily experience to shape collective Christian memory? This lecture examines how the city’s network of streets and built environment functioned as a system to guide pilgrims through a curated spatial narrative. It investigates how streets, churches, and liturgical processions interlinked to reinforce messages conveyed by the Jerusalem Church—such as identifying Jerusalem's southwestern hill (known today as Mount Zion) as both Biblical and Christian Zion. Drawing on archaeological data and methods of spatial analysis that focus on the relationship between spaces and structures in their urban context, as well as considering literary sources and insights from social memory studies, the lecture demonstrates how the urban environment of Jerusalem’s southwestern hill was designed to embody and broadcast central messages of the Jerusalem Church. First, the supremacy of the Jerusalem Church, “Mother of All Churches,” was evident through the topographical-architectural dialogue between the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the centre of the city and the Holy Zion Church built atop the highest elevation inside the Byzantine city walls. Second, Christian appropriation of the ancient local Jewish heritage was reflected in the striking contrast between the flourishing Christian Zion to which all roads led and the Jewish Temple Mount—ruined and desolate, yet still a dominant topographic feature within the Christian cityscape. The Jewish past in the Christian city was thus confined to a single (though large) space on the Temple Mount, while other areas of the city were appropriated and redefined as integral to Christian tradition, visibly manifesting Christian triumph over the past.