During the Byzantine period in Palestine (c. 4th–early 7th centuries), a church dedicated to St Mamilla was established on the same site and it appears to have been used for burials at this time as well. An account of the aftermath of the Persian capture of Jerusalem in 614 by Strategius, a monk of Mar Saba, says that the bodies of thousands of Christians killed by the Persian forces of the Sassanid Empire – 4,518 according to Gregorian translations of the lost Greek original, and 24,518 according to Arabic translations of the same – were found in the Mamilla Pool and buried in caves in and around it.