The Holy House, with its courts, was not in the centre of the enclosure, but had a position north-west of the centre. The altar court was at a lower level than the Holy House; and lower still, by successive descents, were the court of Israel, the court of the women, and the court of the Gentiles. The courts being in terraces one above another, and the Holy House at the summit, the temple was a far more conspicuous object than is the Dome of the Rock at the present day. The Talmud describes the Temple area as 500 cubits square. The prophet Ezekiel says “it had a wall round about, the length five hundred and the breadth five hundred, to make a separation between that which was holy and that which was common” (xlii. 20). Then we are told by Maimonides, the learned Jewish writer, that “the men who built the second temple, when they built it in the days of Ezra, they built it like Solomon’s, and in some things according to the explanation in Ezekiel.” Taking then the centre of the Sakhrah as the centre of the Holy of Holies, and allowing ourselves to be guided by the Talmud measurements, which are given with great exactitude, we shall not be far wrong if we draw the boundaries as follows:--On the north, the northern limit of the present platform, the line of which if continued eastward would cut the east wall of the Haram a little north of the Golden Gate. The platform is raised 12 feet above the present general surface of the Haram enclosure. One day when the rain had loosened a stone near the north-eastern corner of the platform and revealed the existence of vaults, Warren went down and took measurements; and it appears that the northern end of the platform consists of rock which has been scarped away perpendicularly. On the south the boundary would come to within a few feet of the entrance of El Aksa mosque, and would fall short of the south wall of the Haram by 300 feet. On the east and west the boundaries would fall a little way within the present walls of the Haram. We may reasonably conclude that the present east and west walls of the Haram either represent walls of the Temple enclosure, or else were built a little without them, as retaining walls for gradually accumulating _debris_.