TIBERIA, Israel (AP) – Israeli archaeologists say they discovered the remains of an early mosque – believed to date back to the first 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 Mohammad, making it one of the oldest Muslim places of worship studied by archaeologists.
“We know of many early mosques that were founded right at the beginning of the Islamic period,” said Katia Cytryn-Silverman, a specialist in Islamic archeology at the Hebrew University who leads the screed. Other mosques dating back to the same time, such as the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, the Great Mosque in Damascus and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, are still in use and cannot be manipulated by archaeologists.
Cytryn-Silverman said excavating the Tiberian mosque allows for a rare chance to study the architecture of Muslim prayer houses since childhood and indicates a tolerance for other beliefs by early Islamic leaders. She announced the findings this month in a virtual conference.
When the mosque was built around 670 AD, Tiberias was a Muslim-ruled city for several decades. Named after the second emperor of Rome around 20 AD, the city was a major center of Jewish life and scholarship for nearly five centuries. Before its conquest by the Muslim armies in 635, the Byzantine city housed one of the constellations of Christian holy places that placed on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.
Under Muslim rule, Tiberias became a provincial capital in the early Islamic empire and grew in importance. Early caliphs built palaces on its outskirts along the lake shore. But until recently, little was known about the city’s early Muslim past.
Gideon Avni, chief archaeologist at the Israel Antiquities Authority, who was not involved in the excavations, said the discovery helps resolve a scientific debate about when mosques began standardizing their project, facing Mecca.
“In archaeological discoveries, it was very rare to find early mosques,” he said.
Archaeological excavations around Tiberias have begun in the past centuries. In recent decades, the ancient city has begun to produce other monumental buildings from its past, including an important Roman theater overlooking the water and a Byzantine church.
Since the beginning of last year, the coronavirus pandemic has stopped digging and lush Galilean grasses, plants and weeds have grown over the ruins. The Jewish University and its partners, the German Protestant Institute of Archeology, plan to restart the excavation in February.
The site’s initial excavations in the 1950s led scholars to believe that the building was a Byzantine square later used as a mosque.
But Cytryn-Silverman’s excavations went deeper under the floor. The coins and pottery placed at the base of the roughly worked foundations helped to date them around 660-680 AD, only a generation after the capture of the city. The size of the building, the plan with pillars and qiblah, or the niche of prayer, were in parallel with other mosques of the time.
Avni said that for a long time, academics were not sure what happened to the Muslim-conquered cities of the Levant and Mesopotamia in the early seventh century.
“Previous 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 this.”
The first mosque built in the newly conquered city remained in the picture with the local synagogues and the Byzantine church that dominated the horizon. This first phase of the mosque was “more humble” than a larger, larger structure that replaced it half a century later, Cytryn-Silverman said.
“At least until the monumental mosque was built in the 8th century, the church continued to be the main building in Tiberias,” she added.
She says this supports the idea that the first Muslim leaders – who ruled an overwhelming non-Muslim population – took a tolerant approach to other beliefs, allowing for a “golden age” of coexistence.
“You see that the beginning of the Islamic rule here greatly respected the population that was the main population of the city: Christians, Jews, Samaritans,” said Cytryn-Silverman. “They were in no hurry to express their presence in the buildings. They did not destroy the houses of prayer of others, but they were in fact part of the societies in which they were now leaders. ”