TIBERIAS, Israel (AP) – Archaeologists in Israel say they discovered the remains of a primitive 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 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 Muhammad, making it one of the first Muslim houses of worship to be studied by archaeologists.
“We know about many of the first mosques that were founded early in the Islamic period,” said Katia Cytryn-Silverman, a specialist in Islamic archeology at the Hebrew University who heads the excavation. Other mosques dating from the same era, such as the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, the Grand Mosque in Damascus and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, are still in use today and cannot be tampered with by archaeologists.
Cytryn-Silverman said that excavating the Tiberian mosque affords a rare chance to study the architecture of Muslim prayer houses in his childhood and indicates a tolerance for other religions by early Islamic leaders. She announced her findings this month at a virtual conference.
When the mosque was built around 670 AD, Tiberias was a city ruled by Muslims for a few decades. Named after the second emperor of Rome around 20 AD, the city has been an important center of Jewish life and culture for almost five centuries. Before its conquest by the Muslim armies in 635, the Byzantine city housed one of a constellation of sacred Christian sites that dotted the coastline of the Sea of Galilee.
Under Muslim rule, Tiberias became a provincial capital at the beginning of the Islamic empire and grew in prominence. The first caliphs built palaces in their surroundings along the shore 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 was not involved in the excavation, said the discovery helps to resolve an academic debate about when mosques began to standardize their design, geared towards Mecca.
“In archaeological finds, it was very rare to find the first mosques,” he said.
Archaeological excavations around Tiberias took place gradually over the past century. In the past few decades, the ancient city has begun to yield other monumental buildings from its past, including a sizeable Roman theater overlooking the water and a Byzantine church.
Since the beginning of last year, the coronavirus pandemic has halted 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 market, later used as a mosque.
But Cytryn-Silverman’s excavations have deepened underground. Coins and ceramics nested at the base of crudely worked foundations helped to date them around 660-680 AD, just a generation after the capture of the city. The dimensions of the building, the floor plan with pillars and the qiblah, or prayer niche, were very similar to those of other mosques of the period.
Avni said that for a long time, academics were not sure what happened to the cities of the Levant and Mesopotamia conquered by 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 very gradual process, and in Tiberias you see that”.
The first mosque built in the newly conquered city was side by side with the local synagogues and the Byzantine church that dominated the horizon. This early stage of the mosque was “more humble” than a larger, grander structure that replaced it half a century later, said Cytryn-Silverman.
“At least until the monumental mosque was erected in the 8th century, the church remained the main building in Tiberias,” she added.
She says this supports the idea that the first Muslim rulers – who ruled a predominantly non-Muslim population – took a tolerant approach towards other religions, allowing for a “golden age” of coexistence.
“You see that the beginning of Islamic domination here respected the population that was the main population of the city a lot: Christians, Jews, Samaritans,” said Cytryn-Silverman. “They were in no hurry to make their presence known in buildings. They were not destroying the prayer houses of others, but they were actually fitting into the societies of which they were now leaders. ”