During different periods, the city walls followed different outlines and had a varying number of gates. During the era of the crusaderKingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1291), Jerusalem had four gates, one on each side.[citation needed]
The current walls of the Old City of Jerusalem were built between 1533 and 1540 on orders of OttomanSultanSuleiman the Magnificent, who provided them with seven gates: six new gates were built, and the older and previously sealed Golden Gate was reopened (only to be re-sealed again after a few years). The seven gates at the time of Suleiman were, clockwise and by their current name: the Damascus Gate; Herod's Gate; Lions' Gate; Golden Gate; Dung Gate; Zion Gate; and Jaffa Gate.
With the re-sealing of the Golden Gate by Suleiman, the number of operational gates was only brought back to seven in 1887, with the addition of the New Gate.
Until 1887,[citation needed] each gate was closed before sunset and opened at sunrise.
A smaller entrance, popularly known as the Tanners' Gate,[citation needed] has been opened for visitors after being discovered and unsealed during excavations in the 1990s.[citation needed]
Sealed historic gates, other than the Golden Gate, comprise three that are at least partially preserved (the Single, Triple, and Double Gates in the southern wall),[citation needed] with several other gates discovered by archaeologists of which only traces remain (the so-called Gate of the Essenes on Mount Zion, the gate of Herod's royal palace south of the citadel, and the vague remains of what 19th-century explorers identified as the Gate of the Funerals (Bab al-Jana'iz) or of al-Buraq (Bab al-Buraq) south of the Golden Gate).[1]
Excavation Gate. (Eastern gate of the main Umayyad palace, attributed to CaliphAl-Walid I (705–715). Destroyed by an earthquake around 749, walled up when the Ottoman wall was built (1537–41), reopened and rebuilt by archaeologists led by Benjamin Mazar and Meir Ben-Dov in 1968.)[2][3]
^Meir Ben-Dov (1987). The Excavation Gate (18). Jerusalem: East Jerusalem Development Ltd. p. 20. Thus for all intents and purposes, a ninth gate has been opened in the walls of Jerusalem.{{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)