TIBERIAS, Israel (AP) – Israeli archaeologists say they discovered the remains of an early mosque, believed to date from 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, point to its construction about a generation after the death of the Prophet Mohammad, making it one of the first houses of worship. Muslims that archaeologists studied.
“We know of many early mosques that were founded at the beginning of the Islamic period,” said Katia Cytryn-Silverman, a specialist in Islamic archeology at the Hebrew University who leads the excavation. Other mosques dating from the same period, such as the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, the Great Mosque in Damascus, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, are still in use today and cannot be manipulated by archaeologists.
Cytryn-Silverman said the excavation of the Tiber Mosque allows for a rare opportunity to study the architecture of Muslim prayer houses in her childhood and indicates that early Islamic leaders tolerated other religions. He announced the findings this month at a virtual conference.
When the mosque was built around 670 AD, Tiberias had been a Muslim-ruled city for a few decades. Named after the second emperor of Rome around 20 AD, the city was an important center of Jewish and scholarly life for nearly five centuries. Prior to its conquest by Muslim armies in 635, the Byzantine city was home to one of the constellations of Christian holy sites that dotted the shores of the Sea of Galilee.
Under Muslim rule, Tiberias became a provincial capital in the first Islamic empire and grew in prominence. The first caliphs built palaces on the outskirts of the lake. But until recently, little was known about the city’s Muslim past.
Gideon Avni, chief archaeologist at the Israel Antiquities Authority, who did not participate in the excavation, said the discovery helps resolve an academic debate about when mosques began standardizing their design, looking at to Mecca.
“In archaeological finds, it was very rare to find early mosques,” he said.
Archaeological excavations around Tiberias have taken place during the last century. In recent decades, the ancient city has begun to produce other monumental buildings from its past, including a sizable Roman theater overlooking the water and a Byzantine church.
Since the beginning of last year, the coronavirus pandemic has stopped excavations and the lush grasses, weeds and weeds of Galilee have grown on the ruins. The Hebrew University and its partners, the German Protestant Institute of Archeology, plan to restart the excavation in February.
Early 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 the Cytryn-Silverman excavations sank underground. The coins and pottery at the base of the raw foundations helped date them to 660-680 AD, barely a generation after the capture of the city. The dimensions of the building, the pillar floor and the qiblah, or prayer niche, were in parallel with other mosques of the time.
Avni said that for a long time scholars were unsure of 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 you see Tiberias.”
The first mosque built in the newly conquered city was in the hands of local synagogues and the Byzantine church that dominated the horizon. This first 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 continued to be the main building of Tiberias,” he added.
She claims that this supports the idea that the early Muslim rulers – who ruled an overwhelming non-Muslim population – took a tolerant approach to other denominations, allowing for a “golden age” of coexistence.
“He sees that the beginning of the Islamic government here greatly respected the population that was the main population of the city: Christians, Jews, Samaritans,” Cytryn-Silverman said. “They were in no hurry for their presence to be expressed in the buildings. They did not destroy other people’s houses of prayer, but they did adapt to the societies in which they were now the leaders.