Jerusalem’s Population in Antiquity: A Minimalist View

Abstract

Past estimates of ancient Jerusalem’s population have for the most part been excessively high, influenced by numbers reported in literary sources or by researchers’ subjective attitudes to the holy city. In the case of Jerusalem, utilization of a density coefficient is inadvisable due to the city’s unique religious and political history. The author deals with Jerusalem’s demography in antiquity by assessing the nature and urban composition of the different neighbourhoods of the city and concludes that the population of Jerusalem from the Bronze Age through to the Early Islamic period was considerably smaller than previously estimated.