Archaeologists in Israel say that during an excavation in the northern city of Tiberias, they discovered the remains of an early mosque that presumably dates from the earliest decades of Islam.
The foundations of the 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 the study. 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 Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque, 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 the findings suggest 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 AD670, Tiberias had been a Muslim-run city for several decades. The city was named after Rome’s second emperor in about 20 AD. The city 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, the chief archaeologist of the Israeli Antiquities Authority, who was not involved in the excavation, said the discovery helped resolve a scientific debate about the beginnings of standardizing mosques towards Mecca. “In the archaeological finds, it was very rare to find early mosques,” he said.
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 at the German Protestant Institute of Archeology plan to resume excavations next month.
Initial excavations of the site in the 1950s taught that scholars 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 base of the finely crafted foundations helped date them to about AD660-680, barely a generation after the city’s takeover. The building’s dimensions, pillar floor plan and qiblah, or prayer, looks a lot like other mosques from the period.
Avni said academics were far from sure what happened to the cities in the Levant and Mesopotamia that were conquered by the Muslims in the early seventh century. “Earlier opinions said there was a process of conquest, destruction and devastation,” he said.
Archaeologists today understood that there was a “fairly gradual process, and in Tiberias you see it”, he said
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 eighth century, the church was still the main building in Tiberias.”
She said it supported the idea that the early Muslim rulers who ruled an overwhelming non-Muslim population adopted a tolerant approach to other religions and enabled 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 in which they were now the leaders. ”