 Jewish historian Flavius Josephus mentions in "Antiquities of the Jews" that the valley in the area of the King's Gardens was blocked up by landslide rubble during Uzziah's earthquake.Israeli geologists Wachs and Levitte identified the remnant of a large landslide on the Mount of Olives directly adjacent to this area.Based on geographic and linguistic evidence, Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau, a 19th-century linguist and archeologist in Palestine, theorized that the valley directly adjacent to this landslide is Azal.