Archeologists in Israel said that they have discovered the remnants of an early mosque — believed to date to about 670 — during an excavation in Tiberias.
This mosque’s foundations, excavated just south of the Sea of Galilee by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, point to its construction roughly a generation after the death of the Prophet Mohammed, making it one of the earliest Muslim houses of worship to be studied by archeologists.
“We know about many early mosques that were founded right in the beginning of the Islamic period,” said Katia Cytryn-Silverman, a specialist in Islamic archeology at Hebrew University who heads the dig.
Photo: AP
Other mosques dating from about the same time, such as the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, the Great Mosque of Damascus and Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque, are still in use today and cannot be tampered with by archeologists.
Cytryn-Silverman said that excavating the Tiberian mosque allows a rare chance to study the architecture of Muslim prayer houses in their infancy and indicates a tolerance for other faiths by early Islamic leaders.
She announced the findings this month in a virtual conference.
TIBERIAS’ HISTORY
When the mosque was built, Tiberias had been a Muslim-ruled city for a few decades. Named after Rome’s second emperor in about 20, the city was a major center of Jewish life and scholarship for nearly five centuries. Before its conquest by Muslim armies in 635, the Byzantine city was home to one of a constellation of Christian sites dotting the Sea of Galilee’s shoreline.
Under Muslim rule, Tiberias became a provincial capital in the early Islamic empire and grew in prominence. Early caliphs built palaces on its outskirts along the lake shore.
However, until recently, little was known about the city’s early Muslim past.
Gideon Avni, chief archeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority, who was not involved in the excavation, said that the discovery helps resolve an academic debate about when mosques began standardizing their design, facing toward Mecca.
‘RARE FIND’
“In the archeological finds, it was very rare to find early mosques,” Avni said.
Archeological digs near Tiberias have proceeded in fits and starts for the past century. In recent decades the ancient city has started yielding other monumental buildings from its past, including a sizeable Roman theater overlooking the water and a Byzantine church.
Since early last year, the COVID-19 pandemic halted excavations, and lush Galilean grasses, herbs and weeds have grown over the ruins.
Hebrew University and its partner, the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology, plan to restart the dig next month.
Initial excavations of the site in the 1950s led academics to believe that the building was a Byzantine marketplace later used as a mosque.
However, Cytryn-Silverman’s excavations delved deeper beneath the floor.
Coins and ceramics nestled among at the base of the crudely crafted foundations helped date them to 660 to 680, barely a generation after the city’s capture.
The building’s dimensions, pillared floor-plan and qiblah, or prayer niche, closely paralleled other mosques from the period.
MYSTERY
Avni said that for a long time, academics were not sure what happened to cities in the Levant and Mesopotamia conquered by the Muslims in the early seventh century.
“Earlier opinions said that there was a process of conquest, destruction and devastation,” he said.
Today, archeologists understand that there was a “fairly gradual process, and in Tiberias you see that,” he said.
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