The place outside the walls of Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified. The name is Aramaic gulgolta, A SKULL, which Matthew and Mark both stop to translate; ‘Calvary’ comes into English from the Vulgate’s Latin calvaria, the same word. ⚠ Why the name, nobody knows: a skull-shaped outcrop, a place of execution, and a burial-ground association have all been proposed, and the tradition that Adam’s skull lay beneath it — the reason a skull appears at the foot of the cross in a great deal of Christian art — is legend rather than evidence. The Gospels place it outside the city and near a garden tomb; the site under the Church of the Holy Sepulchre fits both, since the second wall ran inside it in the first century and the area was a disused quarry with rock-cut tombs, which is as much as archaeology supports. The rival nineteenth-century ‘Garden Tomb’ north of the Damascus Gate is a genuine tomb of the wrong period. ⚠ Note what the texts do NOT say: none of the four Gospels calls it a hill.