Documented: the temple's description in 1 Kings 6-7, the two pillars Jachin and Boaz, the Holy of Holies, and its destruction in 586 BCE are textual record; the Temple Mount's later history, Herod's platform, the Dome of the Rock, is documented stone. Direct archaeological confirmation of Solomon's structure itself is absent, per the standard literature, and the Sol-Om-On etymology is folk philology, Solomon is documented as Hebrew Shlomo, from shalom, peace.
The folk fact: Freemasonry's lodge is explicitly oriented on the temple, the pillars flanking the door, the checkered floor, the east-facing chair, and Masonic ritual's Hiramic legend plays out inside its architecture. Whatever the stones were, the plan is alive, reproduced nightly in lodge rooms, a building transmitted through ritual when it could not be transmitted through strata.
The claim: the temple was always a diagram of the human frame, the pillars as the two channels, the Holy of Holies as the skull's inner chamber, and its non-recovery is the point, you cannot dig up a body-map. The gnostic reading adds: the rebuilt temple of prophecy is the exit architecture, which is why the site stays the most contested square on Earth.
Is the temple a lost building, a memory palace, or a word that outlived the stones?