 A casemate wall adjoins the structure from a northerly direction at the upper levels, and may have been the original city wall.Macalister, the first to excavate the structure in the 1920s, called the remains he had found a "ramp" and believed it to be Jebusite.Work continued in the 1960s with Kathleen Kenyon, who dated the structure to the start of Iron Age II (1000–900 BCE).