Eleven building phases in one patch of hillside, from the working limestone quarry of the eighth century BC to the church you can walk into today. Each phase is a reconstructed model of what actually stood on the ground, drawn in a common set of coordinates so that the phases sit on top of one another exactly as the archaeology does — and each is paired with an essay written to be read straight through rather than consulted.
The point of building it this way is that no photograph of the Holy Sepulchre can show what the site is. Standing under the Rotunda dome you are looking at eleven sites at once, stacked: a quarry face, a hillside of tombs, a garden, a Roman platform, Constantine’s courtyard, a ruin, a Crusader church, and four centuries of repair. A model you can turn, fade, ghost against another age, and lay over the present-day aerial photograph can show that. A picture cannot.
The plan is redrawn from published excavation reports: Virgilio Corbo’s survey of 1961–81, Charles Coüasnon’s drawings from the restoration campaigns, Martin Biddle’s study of the Edicule, and the reports of the Sapienza University of Rome excavations begun in 2022. Horizontal positions are approximate; heights, roofing and vaulting are reconstruction throughout, and anything drawn with a dashed outline is reconstructed or disputed. Most of the site lies under a working church that cannot be dug, so large areas are inference from small soundings — the northern and western edges of the Constantinian complex are the most conjectural things here. Every element carries a confidence mark, and those marks are the honest part of the drawing.
The aerial overlay is not supplied with the tool: you drop in your own image and align it on two landmarks you choose, so the fit is one you can check yourself rather than one you have to take on trust. The nudge, rotate and scale controls are there for exactly that.
Plans are schematic reconstructions in a common coordinate frame, not survey drawings; the model is a teaching aid, not a measured record. Corrections welcome — this is a Beta.
Everything here is controlled from two places: the timeline along the bottom of the drawing, and the panel on the left. Nothing is hidden in a menu.
Drag the slider under the drawing, or click any of the eleven numbered stops. The plan, the heading and the whole essay on the right change together, so the words you are reading always describe the drawing in front of you. Read straight down the essay before moving on; the phases build on one another.
Plan looks straight down and is the view to measure things in. 2.5D lifts the same drawing into an axonometric model with real heights: quarry cuts sink into the rock, domes and towers stand above it, and the rock surface falls about eleven metres from north-west down to the valley on the east. Drag the drawing to swing round the site and raise or lower the eye; the Rotate and Eye height sliders do the same thing precisely. Height exaggeration stretches the vertical only — useful for reading the quarry, misleading if you leave it high.
Under Overlays, tick any period to ghost it over the one on screen as a coloured tracing, and set how strong the tracing is. This is the single most useful thing in the tool: put the present-day church over the Roman quarry and you can see why the tomb sits where it does. Present-day church outline draws today’s walls on every phase as a fixed reference. Modern city map adds the streets, souqs, convents and minarets of the Christian Quarter at true scale, at any transparency from nothing to solid.
Drag an image file onto the satellite panel, or click it to choose one. Then fit it: Fit by landmarks asks you to click two points on the photo that match two ringed markers on the plan, and works out scale and rotation from the pair. Fit by numbers lets you type how many metres across the photo covers instead. After that, nudge, rotate in half-degree steps, flip, stretch, and desaturate until the built lines agree with the plan. Your photograph and its alignment are remembered in this browser.
Scroll or use the buttons at the lower right to zoom from 60% to 800%; drag to pan; click the percentage to fit the drawing back into the frame. The three frame buttons — Whole site, Church, Tomb — jump to standard framings so you can compare the same crop across phases. The scale bar in the corner always shows a round number of metres for the zoom you are at.
Every element is marked SECURE (excavated, surveyed, or standing today), PROBABLE (strong indirect evidence), or RECONSTRUCTED (from texts, pilgrim accounts, or comparable buildings elsewhere). Hover or tap any element to see its mark and a one-line note in the bar under the drawing. The Key in the left panel explains the fills and line types; Where scholars disagree at the foot of each essay names the open questions for that phase.
If you are teaching from this: pick one phase, one overlay, and one question. The tool will happily show you forty things at once, and forty things at once teach nothing.
Taylor Halverson is a scholar of scripture and a teacher of learners — an entrepreneurship professor in the BYU Marriott School of Business who spends his working life helping people find and act on the best ideas and tools available to them.
He is the author and editor of more than fifty books and nearly a thousand articles and blog posts, and a builder of scripture study resources: the ScripturePlus app with Scripture Central, whose scripture YouTube channel he co-hosted to more than fifty million views, and BYU’s Virtual Scripture Group, whose team spent more than five years reconstructing New Testament Jerusalem in three dimensions. This atlas of the Holy Sepulchre belongs to that same body of work — tools made so that ordinary readers can see what specialists see.
He leads tours to Israel and the Middle East, China, India, Central America, Europe, and the national parks of the American West, where he unfolds how geology, geography, civilization, and scriptural texts created our beautiful present day.
Two doctorates in two separate fields — the ancient world, and the design of learning. Both of them are in this tool.