Was the Aqsa Mosque built over the remains of a Byzantine
church?
by Etgar Lefkovits
Jerusalem Post, Nov 16, 2008
The photo archives of a British archaeologist who carried out the only
archaeological excavation ever undertaken at the Temple Mount's Aqsa Mosque
show a Byzantine mosaic floor underneath the mosque that was likely the
remains of a church or a monastery, an Israeli archaeologist said on Sunday.
The excavation was carried out in the 1930s by R.W. Hamilton, director
of the British Mandate Antiquities Department, in co-ordination with the
Wakf Islamic Trust that administers the compound, following earthquakes
that badly damaged the mosque in 1927 and 1937.
In conjunction with the Wakf's construction and repair work carried out
between 1938 and 1942, Hamilton excavated under the mosque's piers, and
documented all his work related to the mosque in The Structural History
of the Aqsa Mosque.
Hamilton also uncovered the Byzantine mosaic floor and beneath it a mikva
(Jewish ritual bath) from the Second Temple period, which he pointedly
did not include in the publication about the mosque, but instead photographed
and labelled in a file about the mosque, archaeologist Zachi Zweig said
on Sunday.
Zweig uncovered the photographs in the British archaeological archives
that are kept at the Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem.
The Byzantine mosaic floor, which was uncovered under the Umayyad level
of the mosque, is "without a doubt" the remains of a public
building - likely a church - which predated the mosque, Zweig said in
an address at a Bar-Ilan University archaeological conference. A similar
mosaic can be found at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, he said.
"The existence of a public building from the Byzantine period on
the Temple Mount is very surprising in light of the fact that we do not
have records of such constructions in historical texts," Zweig said.
Over the last several years, numerous marble church chancel screens have
been uncovered by Zweig and Bar-Ilan University archaeologist Dr. Gabriel
Barkay from rubble that was dug up during Waqf construction at the site
in the last decade and dumped in the Kidron Valley.
The mosaic found on the Temple Mount is dated to the fifth to seventh
centuries AD, said Dr. Rina Talgam, a mosaic expert at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem. "We were very surprised by the discovery of such a
mosaic on the Temple Mount," Talgam said, noting that it contradicted
the testimony of pilgrims who described the site as deserted in the Byzantine
period, and was also unlikely to have been part of the earliest mosque
at the site, in the Early Islamic period, since that structure was made
of wood.
"The simple mosaic pictured does not give us a hint that it was certainly
part of a church but it very well could have been part of a hostel or
some other nondescript structure," she said.
Since the establishment of the state, no archeological excavations have
been held on the Temple Mount, in keeping with religious sensitivities
of both Muslims and Jews.
"It is hard to establish with certainty that this was indeed the
site of a church, but without a doubt it served as a public building and
was likely either a church or a monastery," Barkay said. He called
the discovery of the photographs in the British archives both a sensational
and an important find. "This changes the whole history of the Temple
Mount during the Byzantine period as we knew it”.
Photo: Courtesy of Israel Antiquities Authority.
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