The digs at the Mount were carried out between and the past year after the Waqf requested authorization from Israel to perform maintenance work on infrastructure servicing the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock, the main structures situated atop the Temple Mount. Previous Waqf projects carried out on the Temple Mount, such as construction of the Marwani Mosque in the late s, did not involve cooperation with archaeologists and resulted in the destruction of antiquities and severe tensions between Israel and the Islamic authorities.
Excavation of a trench for electric cables in allowed archaeologists the first opportunity to delve below the surface of the contested holy site since Israel captured it in the Six Day War. All work was conducted with police escort due to the sensitivity of the site. Presenting the finds on Thursday after their examination also marked an opportunity for the IAA to rebuff critics who claim the Temple Mount is a scene of archaeological bedlam. While the Temple Mount Sifting Project has rummaged through fill from the holy site excavated during the construction of the Marwani Mosque in the s, these newly described digs were the first archaeological study atop the Temple Mount since the s.
A bronze coin dating to the Great Revolt against the Romans A. Barkay says some discoveries provide tangible evidence of biblical accounts. Fragments of terra-cotta figurines, from between the eighth and sixth centuries B. Other finds challenge long-held beliefs. For example, it is widely accepted that early Christians used the Mount as a garbage dump on the ruins of the Jewish temples.
Barkay and his colleagues have published their main findings in two academic journals in Hebrew, and they plan to eventually publish a book-length account in English. To be sure, the Mount is a flash point in the Middle East conflict. While Israelis saw this as the reunification of their ancient capital, Palestinians still deem East Jerusalem to be occupied Arab land a position also held by the United Nations.
The Temple Mount is precariously balanced between these opposing views. Although Israel claims political sovereignty over the compound, custodianship remains with the Waqf. As such, Israelis and Palestinians cautiously eye each other for any tilt in the status quo. At its core, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict represents rival claims to the same territory—and both sides rely on history to make the case for whose roots in the land run deepest. For the Israelis, that history begins 3, years ago, when the Temple Mount—believed by many biblical scholars to be the mountain in the region of Moriah mentioned in the Book of Genesis—was an irregularly shaped mound rising some 2, feet among the stark Judean Hills.
The summit loomed above a small settlement called Jebus, which clung to a ridge surrounded by ravines. The Old Testament describes how an army led by David, the second king of ancient Israel, breached the walls of Jebus around B. David then built a palace nearby and created his capital, Jerusalem.
At the site of a threshing floor atop the mountain, where farmers had separated grains from chaff, David constructed a sacrificial altar. Scholars, however, have pieced together a tentative portrait of the Beit Hamikdash from descriptions in the Bible and architectural remains of sanctuaries elsewhere in the region built during the same era. It is envisioned as a complex of richly painted and gilded courts, constructed with cedar, fir and sandalwood. The rooms would have been built around an inner sanctum—the Holy of Holies—where the ark of the covenant, an acacia-wood chest covered with gold and containing the original Ten Commandments, was said to have been stored.
Until recently, Palestinians generally acknowledged that the Beit Hamikdash existed. This too is the spot, according to universal belief, on which David built there an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt and peace offerings.
Arafat suggested the site of the Temple Mount might have been in the West Bank town of Nablus, known as Shechem in ancient times. But Natsheh—sipping Arabic coffee in his office at Waqf headquarters, a year-old former Sufi monastery in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City—is dubious.
The ark of the covenant disappeared, possibly hidden from the conquerors. Following the conquest of Jerusalem by the Persians in B. He enclosed the holy site within a foot-high retaining wall constructed of limestone blocks quarried from the Jerusalem Hills and constructed a far more expansive version of the Second Temple.
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They were frequently collected from one Crusader port, including Cyprus, and used by them for construction elsewhere. The Fortress of Apollonia, only 15 kilometres up the coast from Tel Aviv, was built by the Crusaders and part of it still stands today. It contains all sorts of exotic rectangular stones - including greywacke.
It seems very probable that the forgers took one of these stones, or one from another Crusader building, knowing it to be old and weathered, and already cut to a rectangular shape. It was also the right colour, and they may never have realised their error: that the stone they had chosen would not have been found in Israel in Biblical times. Police now suspect that artefacts produced by the same team of forgers may have reached collections and museums all over the world.
The same investigators have found many other objects to be fakes. Some Israeli archaeologists are concerned that the whole archaeological record has been seriously contaminated and distorted by the forgers' activities.
They are now suggesting that everything which came on to the antiquities market in Israel in the last 20 years without a clear and unambiguous provenance should be considered a fake unless proven otherwise. Horizon homepage. Defeating the Curse. The Next Megaquake. The Lost Civilisation of Peru. Who's Afraid of Designer Babies? An Experiment to Save the World. Living with ADHD. Einstein's Unfinished Symphony.
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