What was Jerusalem called before al-Quds?

Jerusalem is the oldest continuously named capital city on earth under any of its own languages, a Jebusite hill town turned Jewish capital around 1000 BCE, renamed by Rome to erase that fact, and renamed again in Arabic with a name that concedes it. No other city on this list carries as many layers of name, ruler, and propaganda, and none has a documented record this deep to answer with.

Shalem / Urusalim (Bronze Age) → Yerushalayim יְרוּשָׁלַיִם (Hebrew, 3,000 years) → Hierosolyma (Greek/Latin) → Aelia Capitolina (Rome, 135 CE) → al-Quds القدس (Arabic)

The name stack

The earliest attestation is Urusalim, in the 14th century BCE Amarna letters, diplomatic clay tablets a Canaanite ruler of the city sent to Egypt’s pharaoh begging for troops, centuries before any Israelite king reigned there. The root is likely Shalem, a Canaanite god of dusk associated with peace, which is why Hebrew tradition reads the name as “foundation of Shalem” and, by folk etymology, “city of peace.” Before David’s conquest the city was a Jebusite stronghold called Yevus in the Bible. Greek rendered the Hebrew as Hierosolyma, Latin kept it, and Rome then discarded it entirely in 135 CE for Aelia Capitolina, a name built from the emperor’s own family name (Aelius) and Jupiter Capitolinus, the first and oldest attempt on this page to erase Jewish Jerusalem by erasing its name. Byzantine Greek reverted partly to Hierosolyma; early Islamic Arabic first called the city Iliya, a direct echo of Aelia, before settling on al-Quds, “the Holy,” itself short for Bayt al-Maqdis, a calque of the Hebrew Beit HaMikdash, the Temple. Even the Arabic name is built on the Jewish Temple’s own Hebrew title.

Founding and archaeology

The oldest occupied part of the city, the City of David, sits on a narrow ridge south of today’s Old City walls beside the Gihon Spring, its only natural water source, and excavations there have exposed Jebusite fortifications, a monumental stepped stone structure, and a water system dated to the Bronze Age. The Bible records David capturing the Jebusite city around 1000 BCE and making it his capital; his son Solomon built the First Temple on the Temple Mount shortly after. That First Temple fell to Babylon in 586 BCE; the rebuilt Second Temple, vastly expanded under Herod, stood until Rome burned it in 70 CE. The Temple Mount Sifting Project, which has spent two decades sorting soil the Islamic Waqf illegally bulldozed off the Mount during unauthorized construction, has recovered First and Second Temple-period artifacts, floor tiles, seals, coins, from the very site whose Jewish past is now publicly denied. The Western Wall is a surviving retaining wall of Herod’s Temple compound; Robinson’s Arch beside it carried the grand staircase that led up to it.

Destroyed and rebuilt, twice

Jerusalem’s Jewish history is a history of destruction and return. Babylon exiled the population in 586 BCE; a generation later, Jews returned and rebuilt the Temple. Rome destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE after crushing the Great Revolt, and after the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132 to 135 CE, Emperor Hadrian went further than any conqueror before or since: he plowed the Temple ruins, banned Jews from entering the city on pain of death, and renamed it Aelia Capitolina specifically to erase the connection between the Jewish people and their capital. It did not work. Jews continued praying toward the city from every place they were scattered, and returned to live there under nearly every subsequent ruler.

Who ruled it, and what happened to its holy sites

Byzantine Christian rule (4th to 7th centuries) built churches and again barred Jewish residence. The Arab conquest of 637 or 638 CE brought the caliph Umar, who by tradition allowed Jews back into the city; the Dome of the Rock was built on the Temple Mount in 691 CE and the al-Aqsa Mosque shortly after. Crusaders took the city in 1099 and massacred its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants together; Ayyubid, Mamluk, and finally Ottoman rule (from 1517) followed, the Ottomans holding the city for exactly four hundred years until the British Mandate began in 1917. Through every one of those regime changes, a Jewish community remained.

Population, era by era

The first reliable census, taken in 1844, already found Jews the largest single group: 7,120 Jews to 5,000 Muslims and 3,390 Christians, a plurality that hardened into an outright majority by the 1860s, decades before the Zionist movement existed. Ottoman and later British Mandate counts through the 1920s and 1930s confirm the same trend as the city grew. That Jewish majority held through the Mandate. In the 1948 war, Jordan’s Arab Legion captured the Old City and expelled every Jew from the ancient Jewish Quarter; over the next nineteen years Jordan destroyed or desecrated 58 synagogues, dynamited the historic Hurva Synagogue, tore up some 38,000 Jewish graves on the Mount of Olives to pave roads and latrines with the headstones, and barred all Jews from the Western Wall, breaking the 1949 armistice’s explicit promise of free access to holy sites. Israel took the Old City in the Six-Day War of 1967, and Jews returned to the Wall for the first time in a generation.

The city today

Jerusalem today holds a Jewish majority, roughly 60 percent, with a large Arab population concentrated mainly in East Jerusalem, governed as one municipality under Israeli law since 1967, though East Jerusalem’s final status remains internationally disputed. It has been the declared capital of the State of Israel since 1950 and is recognized as such by the United States under the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, whose embassy moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018. Jerusalem has never been the capital of any other state in its 3,000-year documented history, a fact examined in full on was Jerusalem ever the capital of any other state.

The propaganda, and the documented answer

Two claims dominate the modern argument over this city, and both fail against the record. The first is Temple denial: the assertion that no Jewish Temple ever stood on the Mount. As recently as 1925, the Waqf’s own official guidebook to the site stated its identity with Solomon’s Temple was “beyond dispute”; today the same denial is voiced by figures like former Grand Mufti Ekrima Sabri, who has claimed there is “not the slightest evidence” of a Jewish temple there, against a mountain of archaeology. See the full case at was Jerusalem always an Arab city, and the Temple Mount always Muslim. The second is the “Al-Aqsa is in danger” libel, nearly a century old: Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini spread it in the 1920s to incite the 1929 riots that killed 133 Jews, and it has triggered violence ever since, even though the one fire that actually gutted the mosque, in 1969, was set by a deranged Australian Christian, not a Jew or the Israeli state. On the one charge that should sting most, that Israel is “Judaizing” or expelling people from Jerusalem, the documented record runs the other way: it was Jordan that ethnically cleansed the Old City of Jews and locked them out of the Wall for nineteen years, and Israel that reopened the city to all faiths and handed day-to-day control of the Temple Mount itself to the Islamic Waqf, a status quo it still honors today.

Was Jerusalem always an Arab city, and the Temple Mount always Muslim · Was Jerusalem ever the capital of any other state · East Jerusalem · Temple Mount · The full Jerusalem case · The cities

Sources

From The cities on the main site.