TIBERIAS, Israel (AP) – Archaeologists in Israel say they discovered the remains of an early mosque during an excavation in the northern city of Tiberias – believed to date back to the earliest decades of Islam.
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 Muhammad, making it one of the earliest Muslim places of worship established by archaeologists have been studied.
“We know of many early mosques that were founded in the early Islamic period,” said Katia Cytryn-Silverman, a specialist in Islamic archeology at the Hebrew University who is leading the excavation. Other mosques dating back to the same time, such as the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, the Great Mosque of Damascus, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, are still in use and cannot be tampered with by archaeologists.
Cytryn-Silverman said the excavation of the Tiberian mosque presents a rare opportunity to study the architecture of Muslim places of worship in their infancy and indicates a tolerance for other religions by early Muslim leaders. She announced the findings in a virtual conference this month.
When the mosque was built around AD 670, Tiberias was a Muslim-ruled city for a few decades. Named after Rome’s second emperor around AD 20, the city was an important center of Jewish life and science for nearly five centuries. Before its conquest by Muslim armies in 635, the Byzantine city was home to one of the many Christian holy sites along the coastline of the Sea of Galilee.
Under Muslim rule, Tiberias became a provincial capital in the early Islamic Empire and grew in prominence. Early caliphs built palaces on the edge of the lake shore. But until recently, little was known about the city’s early Muslim past.
Gideon Avni, chief archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority who was not involved in the excavation, said the discovery helps resolve a scientific debate about when mosques started to standardize their design, facing Mecca.
“Among the archaeological finds, it was very rare to find early mosques,” he said.
Archaeological excavations around Tiberias have gone in fits and starts over the past century. Over the decades, the old town has yielded other monumental buildings from the past, including a large Roman theater overlooking the water and a Byzantine church.
Since early last year, the coronavirus pandemic has stopped excavations and lush Galilean grasses, herbs and weeds have grown over the ruins. The Hebrew University and its partners, the German Protestant Institute of Archeology, plan to restart the excavation in February.
Initial excavations of the site in the 1950s led scholars to believe that the building was a Byzantine marketplace that was later used as a mosque.
But the Cytryn-Silverman excavations went deeper below the floor. Coins and ceramics nestled among the bases of the roughly worked foundations helped date them to around AD 660-680, barely a generation after the city’s conquest. The dimensions of the building, the pillared floor plan and the qiblah, or prayer niche, closely paralleled other mosques of the period.
Avni said academics were long unsure of what happened to cities in the Levant and Mesopotamia conquered by the Muslims in the early 7th 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 that.”
The first mosque to be built in the newly conquered city stood cheek to jaw with the local synagogues and the Byzantine church dominating the skyline. This earliest phase of the mosque was “more humble” than a larger, grander 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 remained the main building in Tiberias, she added.
She says this supports the idea that the early Muslim rulers – who ruled a predominantly non-Muslim population – took a tolerant attitude towards other religions, allowing for a “golden age” of coexistence.
“You see, the beginning of Muslim rule here had a great deal of respect for the population that was the main population of the city: Christians, Jews, Samaritans,” Cytryn-Silverman said. “They were in no hurry to make their presence felt in buildings. They did not destroy the places of worship of others, but they actually adapted themselves into the societies of which they were now leaders. “