The hill has been inhabited since the 4th millennium BCE, and an amulet bearing the cartouche of Pharaoh Thutmose III, dating to the 15th century BCE, was discovered here by the Temple Mount Sifting Project in 2012. For the Israelites, this was the royal acropolis of the Kingdom of Judah, where Solomon built the First Temple as part of a larger complex that included a royal palace, a Hall of Pillars, and the House of the Lebanon Forest. That temple stood until 587 BCE, when Nebuchadnezzar II and the Neo-Babylonian Empire destroyed it. Construction of the Second Temple began under Cyrus around 538 BCE, and it was completed in 516 BCE on the original foundations. Around 19 BCE, Herod the Great embarked on an expansion that more than doubled the platform to roughly 36 acres, employing 10,000 workers and building the largest temenos in the ancient world. Roman legions under Titus destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, and the massive stone collapses from the upper walls, some burned at temperatures reaching 800 degrees Celsius, were found laying over the Herodian street below.

Judaism regards the Foundation Stone beneath the Dome of the Rock as the spot from which God created the world. Islam venerates the entire plaza as al-Aqsa Mosque, the place from which Muhammad, riding the miraculous steed Buraq, was taken on his Night Journey; the Quran describes the journey to "the furthest place of prayer," and by the early Muslim period, this had been identified with Jerusalem. Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock in 691 CE, and his successor al-Walid I completed the Al-Aqsa Mosque by 715 CE. For Christians, Herod's Temple was the setting for pivotal moments in the life of Jesus, though after 70 CE, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre gradually replaced the mount as Christianity's focal point in Jerusalem. The Crusaders seized the compound in 1099, converting the Dome of the Rock into a church and al-Aqsa into a royal palace. Saladin reclaimed it in 1187 and restored it to Islamic worship.

After Emperor Hadrian built Aelia Capitolina over Jerusalem's ruins in 130 CE, Jews were forbidden to enter the city on pain of death. When Constantine Christianized the empire, they were permitted to visit once a year, on Tisha B'Av, to mourn at the site. Emperor Julian briefly authorized a Jewish rebuilding effort in 363, but an earthquake and what church historians described as fire springing from the earth ended the attempt. Arab conquest in 637 CE brought a new era: Caliph Umar reportedly cleaned the long-neglected mount with his own cloak and established a prayer site. The Ottoman period, beginning in 1516, prohibited non-Muslim access until the early 19th century. Under the British Mandate, all were initially permitted entry, but the 1929 Palestine riots led the Supreme Muslim Council to ban Jewish visitors. Jordan's control from 1948 to 1967 barred Jews entirely.

Israel captured the Old City during the Six-Day War on June 7, 1967, and over 200,000 Jews flocked to the adjacent Western Wall in the first mass pilgrimage near the mount since the Second Temple's destruction. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan quickly met with Muslim authorities and established a framework: Jews could visit the Temple Mount freely, but prayer there was forbidden, and the Islamic Waqf would retain religious authority over the compound. That arrangement, modified but never fully overturned, persists today. Non-Muslim visitors enter only through the Mughrabi Gate, on limited schedules. The site has been a flashpoint repeatedly: an Australian set fire to al-Aqsa in 1969, a Jewish gunman killed two Palestinians inside the Dome of the Rock in 1982, and the 1990 unrest over a planned cornerstone ceremony left 22 dead. Each incident has reinforced the compound's status as one of the most sensitive pieces of real estate on the planet.

Today the Temple Mount remains under Israeli sovereignty with day-to-day administration by the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf. The Dome of the Rock's gold-covered dome, paid for personally by King Hussein of Jordan in the 1990s at a cost of eight million dollars, dominates the Jerusalem skyline. Beneath the surface, archaeological layers extend back millennia: Iron Age quarries, Herodian drainage tunnels, Crusader vaults, Mamluk madrasas. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation calls for Arab sovereignty. Religious Zionist groups advocate for Jewish prayer rights. Most Haredi rabbis prohibit Jews from setting foot on the mount at all, citing the impossibility of ritual purification without the ashes of a red heifer. The competing claims are irreconcilable in any conventional sense, yet the mount endures, as it has for four thousand years, holding the weight of three civilizations that refuse to let it go.