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Few places in the world feel as out-of-time as the Old City in Jerusalem, where the antiquity suffusing every sun-bleached stone makes it easy to believe that you tread the same ground as the kings and heroes of the ancient Biblical past.

Of course, that's not entirely true. At the dawn of the Israelite kingdom of David and Solomon (at around 1000 BCE, according to tradition), the geography of Jerusalem was quite a bit different. The majority of the area now constituting the Old City was simply empty land. Today's Western Wall plaza and the eastern edge of the Jewish Quarter sit atop what was once a deep valley plunging downward from the western slopes of Mount Moriah, filled in by centuries of debris. The valleys of Kidron and Hinnom, also much deeper 3000 years ago, formed the eastern and southern boundaries of the city. The picture that emerges of ancient Jerusalem is a city of hilltop "islands" separated by vales: Mount Moriah, the Mount of Olives, Mount Zion and a certain ridge overlooking both the Kidron Valley and the Gihon Spring.

That ridge, called the Ophel, is the location of the true heart of ancient Jerusalem - outside the Old City's walls. Located a few meters southeast of the Old City's Dung Gate, the Ophel's attraction to the Canaanites who built to the first fortified city of Jerusalem is apparent: it is easily defensible, offers a commanding view of the surrounding area, and provides underground access to the Gihon, source of Jerusalem's water, through a series of underground tunnels (these tunnels, which can be visited today, proved ironically to be Canaanites' undoing in the Israelite invasion - according to the Bible, David's army discovered the endpoint of the tunnel at the spring and used it to sneak into the fortress). Excavations on the Ophel have uncovered the remnants of buildings dating back to Jebusite and Israelite Jerusalem in the tenth century BCE, which have been dubbed the City of David. This was the seat of civil authority in ancient Israel, the center of the Bible's many tales of royal intrigue and foreign conquest.

Excavations are constant in the City of David, which has proven to be a treasure trove of artifacts dating back to the First Temple period. Of course, an archaeologist's playground can be a little dry for the average unguided visitor, and while the fortifications unearthed at the site are massively significant, they often amount to little more than piles of rock to the untrained eye. Still, the City of David is evocative: a ghostly reminder of an even more ancient Jerusalem, the remnants of a city that makes the Old City look new. Visitors who embark on tiring, multi-hour guided tours through the ruins (bring proper gear if you intend to trod through the refreshing waters of Hezekiah's Tunnel), almost unanimously find the experience extremely rewarding.

Images courtesy of Anita363, unodavide, ePublicist, superk8nyc, Randall Niles, Brian Negin, RahelSharon, and Ian W Scott from Flickr under a Creative Commons license, and from Flash90 for GoJerusalem.com.