Old City

In a tradition that may have begun with an 1840s British map of the city, the Old City is divided into four uneven quarters: the Muslim Quarter, the Christian Quarter, the Armenian Quarter, and the Jewish Quarter. A fifth area is the Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound or Al-Masjid Al-Aqsa (Temple Mount hill) and home to the monumental Dome of the Rock, the Qibli (Al-Aqsa) Mosque, and was once the site of the Jewish Temple.

The Old City's current walls and city gates were built by the Ottoman Empire from 1535 to 1542 under Suleiman the Magnificent. The Old City is home to several sites of key importance and holiness to the three major Abrahamic religions: the Temple Mount area and the Western Wall for Judaism, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for Christianity, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound including its Dome of the Rock and Qibli Mosque for Islam. The Old City, along with its walls, was added to the World Heritage Site list of UNESCO in 1981.

In spite of its name, the Old City of Jerusalem's current layout is different from that of ancient times. Most archeologists believe that the City of David, an archaeological site on a rocky spur south of the Temple Mount, was the original settlement core of Jerusalem during the Bronze and Iron Ages.