The Temple Mount was once the site of the first and second temples of Judaism, the most sacred place in the Jewish mind. The first temple was destroyed by Babylon, and the second temple was built on the site after the Jews returned to the country. But after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Roman Empire in 70 AD, the Jewish people began their two thousand-year exile, and the Temple on the Temple Mount lived on, leaving only a remnant of the western wall, which we now know as the "crying wall".