Jerusalem's recorded history begins as a Bronze Age Canaanite hill town, mentioned in the fourteenth century BCE Amarna letters, standing on a narrow ridge above the Gihon spring, its one reliable water source. Biblical tradition holds that King David captured the Jebusite stronghold around 1000 BCE and made it his capital, and that his son Solomon built the First Temple on the ridge above it, the Temple Mount, to house the Ark of the Covenant. Babylon destroyed that temple in 586 BCE and deported much of the population; a Second Temple rose after the return from exile and stood, rebuilt on a vastly expanded platform by Herod the Great, until Rome destroyed it in 70 CE while crushing the Jewish revolt the historian Josephus records in detail.
The city was rebuilt as the pagan colony Aelia Capitolina after a further Jewish revolt in 135 CE, then reclaimed as a Christian holy city once Constantine's mother Helena identified the site of the crucifixion and burial around 325 CE, marked ever since by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Muslim armies took the city in 638 CE; the Dome of the Rock, completed in 691 CE on the Temple Mount, marks the traditional site of Muhammad's night journey. Crusaders held Jerusalem from 1099 to 1187, after which Ayyubid, Mamluk and Ottoman rule followed in turn until the British Mandate began in 1917. The 1948 and 1967 wars divided and then reunited the city under Israeli control, an annexation of the eastern half not recognized under international law and still the unresolved center of the city's modern politics, with Montefiore's Jerusalem: The Biography tracing the full arc from Jebusite ridge to contested capital.