Jerusalem Over and Under

This month's National Geographic has a remarkable map showing Jerusalem's buildings and sites throughout its many eras of settlement. The fold out map is best seen on paper in the magazine but here is an image of it from Twitter,

Holy to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, modern Jerusalem has been shaped by 3,000 years of worship, conquest, devastation, and rebuilding. For @NatGeo, we worked on how to visualize this in a graphic. THREAD (1/21). https://t.co/qhwIBdAqNb pic.twitter.com/rhvl5y4AnJ

— Alberto Lucas López (@aLucasLopez) November 26, 2019

and a still frame from the animation above.

The tweet above begins an interesting thread of tweets detailing some of the challenges in creating these graphics. Here is another tweet from that thread showing some of the 3D buildings

Using architectural plans, photographs and text descriptions that included building dimensions, we made detailed 3D models of buildings. Some of the architectural plans were pulled from the website https://t.co/uJJdjp5GEY. Others from the Library of Congress (@librarycongress). pic.twitter.com/xOeoYD6SEh

— Alberto Lucas López (@aLucasLopez) November 26, 2019

One minor issue I have is the size comparison below. While most of us on the east coast of the United States understand this, I'm not sure how meaningful this is to people in other areas of the world.

For bonus content their web page lets you scroll through historical eras to see models of various buildings.