Israeli physicists and archaeologists have used cosmic-ray muon tomography to peer through the rock above “Jeremiah’s cistern,” the water installation mentioned in Jeremiah 38:6 beneath Jerusalem’s City of David. The work—described in a preprint titled “First Demonstration of Underground Muon Imaging at an Archaeological Site in Ancient Jerusalem,” posted to the arXiv repository on April 7, 2025—marks the first underground use of the technique at any archaeological site in Jerusalem.
The Tel Aviv University team, led by Dr. Yossi Benhammou of the School of Physics and Astronomy, lowered a four-layer plastic-scintillator telescope into the six-metre-deep, bell-shaped cistern. Over ten days the detector recorded the angles of thousands of naturally occurring muons and compared the flux with simulated expectations to create a density map of the overburden.
A pronounced muon-flux enhancement pinpointed the cistern’s narrow ventilation shaft, confirming the device can identify concealed cavities without excavation. Additional variations in “angular ground depth” suggest further subsurface gaps awaiting archaeological verification.
The cistern lies beside massive First-Temple-period structures—including what some researchers interpret as King David’s palace—making a non-destructive survey especially valuable, wrote co-author Dr. Yuval Gadot of Tel Aviv University’s Institute of Archaeology.
Instrument triggers initially limited usable muon events to about one-fifth of the total, but the authors report that revised settings are already boosting efficiency ahead of a planned second campaign beneath the nearby Gihon Spring. They also intend to deploy multiple detectors for full three-dimensional reconstruction of buried architecture.
The study concludes that muon imaging “successfully demonstrated” its archaeological potential and provides a roadmap for mapping additional biblical-period features without disturbing the ancient landscape.
Produced with the assistance of a news-analysis system.