TIBERIAS, Israel (AP) – Archaeologists in Israel say they discovered the remains of an early mosque – presumably dating from the earliest decades of Islam – during an excavation in the northern city of Tiberias.
The foundations of this mosque, excavated just south of the Sea of Galilee by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, indicate its construction about a generation after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, making it one of the earliest Muslim houses of worship. studied by archaeologists.
“We know of many early mosques established in the early Islamic period,” said Katia Cytryn-Silverman, a specialist in Islamic archeology at the Hebrew University. Other mosques dating from about the same time, such as the Prophet Mosque in Medina, the Grand Mosque of Damascus and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, are still used today and cannot be tampered with by archaeologists.
Cytryn-Silverman said the excavation of the Tiberian mosque offers a rare opportunity to study the architecture of Muslim houses of worship in their infancy and indicates a tolerance for other faiths by early Islamic leaders. She unveiled the findings in a virtual conference this month.
When the mosque was built around 670 AD, Tiberias had been a Muslim-run city for several decades. The city was named after Rome’s second emperor around 20 AD and was an important center of Jewish life and learning for almost five centuries. Before the conquest by the Muslim armies in 635, the Byzantine city was home to one of a constellation of Christian holy sites that dotted the coastline of the Sea of Galilee.
Under Muslim rule, Tiberias became a provincial capital in the early Islamic empire and became prominent. Early caliphs built palaces on the outskirts of the lake. But until recently, little was known about the city’s early Muslim past.
Gideon Avni, chief archaeologist of the Israeli Antiquities Authority, who was not involved in the excavation, said the discovery helped resolve a scientific debate over the solution of mosques’ standardization towards Mecca.
“In the archaeological finds, it was very rare to find early mosques,” he said.
Archaeological excavations around Tiberias have begun in pace over the past century. In recent decades, the ancient city has begun to produce other monumental buildings from its past, including a substantial Roman theater overlooking the water and a Byzantine church.
Since early last year, the coronavirus pandemic has halted excavations and lush Galilean grasses, herbs and weeds have grown over the ruins. The Hebrew University and its partners, the German Protestant Institute of Archeology, plan to resume excavations in February.
Initial excavations of the site in the 1950s led scholars to believe that the building was a Byzantine market that was later used as a mosque.
But Cytryn-Silverman’s excavations have sunk deeper under the floor. Coins and ceramics located at the foot of the finely crafted foundations helped this until about 660-680 AD, barely a generation after the city’s conquest. The dimensions of the building, pillar floor plan and qiblah, or prayer, corresponded with other mosques from the period.
Avni said that academics were far from sure what happened to cities in the Levant and Mesopotamia that were conquered by the Muslims in the early 7th century.
“Earlier opinions said there was a process of conquest, destruction and devastation,” he said. Today, he said, archaeologists understand that there was a “fairly gradual process, and in Tiberias you see it.”
The first mosque built in the newly conquered city stood cheek of anger with the local synagogues and the Byzantine church dominating the skyline. The earliest phase of the mosque was ‘humbler’ than a larger, larger structure that replaced it half a century later, Cytryn-Silverman said.
“At least until the monumental mosque was erected in the 8th century, the church was still the main building in Tiberias,” she added.
She says this supports the idea that the early Muslim rulers – who ruled an overwhelming non-Muslim population – applied a tolerant approach to other religions, which made possible a ‘golden era’ of coexistence.
“You see that the beginning of Islamic rule here greatly respects the population of the largest population of the city: Christians, Jews, Samaritans,” Cytryn-Silverman said. ‘They were not in a hurry to express their presence in buildings. They did not destroy others’ houses of worship, but actually fit into the societies of which they were now the leaders. ‘