The Levant, the eastern Mediterranean coast and its hinterland, is the single densest and most contested piece of sacred geography in the world, because it is the birthplace of the three great Abrahamic monotheisms and holds sites central to all of them. It was here, in ancient Canaan and Israel, that Judaism emerged, with Jerusalem as the site of the Temple and the focus of Jewish longing and prayer ever since; here that Christianity began, in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, making Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Galilee the Holy Land of Christian pilgrimage; and here that Jerusalem became, as the site of the Prophet Muhammad's Night Journey and Ascension, the third holiest city of Islam after Mecca and Medina. The result is a landscape where the same ground, the Temple Mount / Haram al-Sharif, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Western Wall, the tombs of the patriarchs at Hebron, carries overlapping and competing sacred claims of the deepest kind, a concentration of holiness that has made the region both a place of profound devotion and a focus of enduring conflict.