July 6 (Bloomberg) -- A 2,000-year-old stone quarry, likely used by Herod the Great to build the Second Temple, was uncovered in a Jerusalem neighborhood outside the walled Old City, the Israel Antiquities Authority said today.

“The dimensions of the stones that were produced in the quarry that was revealed are suitable for the Temple walls,” Ofer Sion, excavation director, said in an e-mailed statement. He said the quarry was a section of a series spread across a slope.

“Today, with the exposure of this quarry, the intensity of the building projects as described in the historical sources can be proven: Flavius Josephus wrote that before Herod built the Temple he prepared infrastructure for it by quarrying the stones for eight whole years,” Sion said. Josephus was a Jewish historian born in 37 A.D.

The Second Temple, built by Herod, king of Judea from 37 to 4 B.C., was destroyed in 70 A.D. The last remaining part of the structure, the Western Wall, is Judaism’s holiest site.

Sion said the quarry find showed that “Herod began quarrying closest to the Temple and worked away from it.”

Among artifacts discovered at the excavation site were metal plates used to sever stones from the bedrock and coins and shards dating back to the end of the Second Temple period, the Antiquities Authority statement said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Gwen Ackerman in Jerusalem at gackerman@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: July 6, 2009 06:29 EDT