Quote Originally Posted by Jeff
Quote Originally Posted by DDT
And that is mythology.
Then give the name of a country that had Jerusalem as its capital, other than Israel that is, within say the last 3,500 years, Mr Smartypants.
DDT, you've posted intelligent messages consistently so I'm sure you were just very sleepy when you wrote the above message. Have you been taking cough and cold medicine lately ?

Let me mention (very briefly, so not to fan the flame war any more than necessary to answer your question) some of the archeological, literary and linguistic evidence:

Jerusalem was a Jewish capital for most of the the third millennium before present. Before that and after that till 1948, it wasn't. King David of Judah/Israel captured Jerusalem about 3000 years BP, but large-scale structures exist from no later than about 4300 BP and probably rather earlier.

Jerusalem is mentioned in the Old Testament as the capital of King Melchizedek's realm during the time of Abraham, no later than 3700 BP. (Melchizedek is not a name but a descriptive title, later translated into Semitic. It means 'righteous king.')

Several of the tablets found at Amarna in Egypt (ca. 3350 BP) were sent from a chieftain or king of Jerusalem, one Abdi-Heba (seemingly a Semitic name but not necessarily so—all the letters were written in Akkadian which was not spoken in Canaan).

According to the Old Testament, Joshua besieged the fortified city of Jerusalem about 3300-3400 BP, capturing and killing the city's king. (Joshua and his allies may have been the attacking force that prompted the aforementioned Abdi-Heba to write to Egypt for help that apparently never came.)

As the etymology of 'Jerusalem' is Indo-European, not Semitic, and as Semites reached Canaan no earlier than 3800 BP and then only along the periphery (as Phoenicians and perhaps also as Amalekites and Judahites), it is very likely that Jerusalem was founded by and became a city-state under the leadership of Proto-Indo-Europeans, probably the ancestors of the Hittites (who are known to have lived in Canaan after 3000 BP) or a kindred group. The names of some nearby cities, including Jericho and Hebron, are Indo-European as well.

The likely earliest attestation of the city's name is (Uri-)Shallam (in Akkadian). Shallam (also Shallum) is simply the descendant of the Proto-Indo-European word for 'seat,' 'settlement,' (i.e. 'village,' and later 'capital'):
*sel-/*sed- (root) + *-yo- (noun-forming suffix) + *-m (inflectional suffix, neuter nominative singular).
(Akkadian has 'sh' in many cases where other Semitic languages have 's' and vice versa—this sound shift may have occurred after the word was borrowed. Proto-Indo-European had no 'sh.')
An exact cognate (with the o-grade form of the root) is Latin solium 'throne.'
Near cognates include Vedic/Sanskrit -sad 'settler,' Latin sedere 'to settle' and perhaps Greek hellas 'originally a town, probably in Thessaly; later, Greece.' (Also, Russian село.)
Uri- is the Sumerians' approximation, borrowed into the Akkadian language, of the Proto-Indo-European autonym, which was something like *Hwer or *ʕwer. -i- is an Akkadian inflectional ending.