Beneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem lies a network of underground chambers that has been mapped, entered, and sealed multiple times over the past 150 years. No comprehensive archaeological excavation of the interior of the platform has ever been conducted.

Between 1867 and 1981, four men entered parts of the underground system, and each produced plans or accounts that have never fully aligned. One survey counted 34 chambers, another 49. The maps drawn by these men disagree on basic details, including which rooms connect to one another. Because access to the site is restricted by religious and political sensitivity, their discrepancies have never been resolved.

The first detailed survey was carried out by Charles Warren, a 27-year-old British royal engineer, in 1867. Prohibited from digging inside the compound, Warren sank shafts along the outer walls and worked through the water system by candlelight. He published his measurements with a clear caveat: his bearings were taken with a pocket compass, often while standing in cold water, and he noted the results could not be considered exact. He also tested an earlier survey by the Italian engineer Ermete Pierotti and found that several connections Pierotti had drawn between chambers did not exist. Both surveys from that period remain in circulation, and they still contradict each other.

In 1911, the English aristocrat Montague Parker led an expedition to find the Ark of the Covenant, funded by investors and based on a claimed cipher in biblical texts. After two years of digging at the Gihon Spring, Parker’s team secretly entered the Dome of the Rock at night and excavated beneath it. They were discovered during a religious festival, and Parker fled the country by yacht. The Ottoman government announced that nothing had been taken. An Ottoman investigator’s report, which surfaced at auction in 2018, claimed that 46 boxes of antiquities had been shipped out before the escape. That report remains untested.

In 1938, an earthquake damaged the mosque at the southern end of the platform, requiring the floor to be lifted. Robert Hamilton, the director of antiquities for the British Mandate, conducted the only real excavation ever carried out beneath that structure. He found mosaic floors and a damaged Roman relief, but neither appeared in his published report, which appeared in 1949. Photographs of the Roman slab surfaced decades later, and scholars have disputed whether Hamilton omitted the findings for reasons of religious diplomacy or because the mosaics were destroyed during the work.

In 1999, the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf used heavy machinery to excavate a large pit on the platform to build an emergency exit. Roughly 9,000 tons of soil were removed to the Kidron Valley. An archaeology student, Zachi Dvira, examined the discarded soil and recovered artifacts. He was briefly detained by the Israel Antiquities Authority on suspicion of robbing antiquities, but the charges were dismissed. Dvira later co-founded the Temple Mount Sifting Project, which has processed the spoil since then.

All existing plans of the underground chambers descend from the work of these men and from later tunnel surveys along the Western Wall. Because the drawings use different measurements and cover different areas, they cannot be overlaid directly. However, when the chambers and passages from the four surveys are registered as a network, the lines converge at one point: the western edge of the platform, at a location known as Warren’s Gate.

Warren’s Gate was a functioning entrance into the Temple compound during the Second Temple period. After the Arab conquest, the passage behind it was used as a synagogue. In 1099, Crusaders destroyed the synagogue, and the space was converted into a water cistern, cataloged as Cistern 30 in Warren’s survey. Notes from that period record that the floor of the chamber was not reached, with the phrase “rock was not found there.”

In July 1981, Rabbi Yehuda Meir Getz, who served as rabbi of the Western Wall, organized an unauthorized dig at Warren’s Gate. Workers broke through the wall from a tunnel along the Western Wall and entered a passage behind it. Descriptions of the passage vary, but it was reportedly cut into rock and ran eastward toward the center of the platform. No photographs, surveys, or measurements from the dig were ever released.

The dig remained secret for about seven weeks before being reported by Israeli radio. When the news broke, Waqf officials entered the tunnel system through manholes on the platform and attempted to seal the opening from their side. Jewish diggers were still inside, and a confrontation followed. Police intervened, and no one was seriously hurt. The government then ordered the opening sealed with concrete, an action attributed to several senior officials. The space has not been reopened since.

The published account at the time described the breach as an accident: workers cutting a niche for a Torah ark reportedly broke through unexpectedly. Years later, two members of a government committee that investigated the affair said that account was a cover story. Raphael Eitan, a former intelligence officer who had been briefed on the project, stated that the opening was planned deliberately, cut below floor level to remain concealed, and aimed eastward. According to Eitan, the circle that knew about the dig included Chief Rabbis Shlomo Goren and Ovadia Yosef, the director general of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, two government ministers, Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, and Deputy Prime Minister and archaeologist Yigael Yadin. The dig is said to have continued with this knowledge and was sealed only after becoming public. Getz died in 1995 without disclosing what he saw inside the passage.

Beneath the Dome of the Rock, there is a cave accessible by a short staircase, known in English as the Well of Souls. It has never been archaeologically examined. One account from Pierotti, the 19th-century engineer, describes entering a lower chamber beneath that cave, but this has never been confirmed or refuted.

A possible method for examining the platform without excavation exists. Cosmic-ray imaging was used to detect a void inside the Great Pyramid and has been tested once underground in Jerusalem by a Tel Aviv University team. It has not been approved for use on the Temple Mount. The physicist who led that test has said it is his team’s dream to use the technique to search for tunnels leading to the platform.

More than 45 years after the concrete seal was poured, the room behind it remains unexamined. The question of whether the passage contains anything significant remains unresolved, and the reasons for the continued reluctance to reopen the space have not been fully explained.