Archaeologists in Israel say they discovered the remains of a primitive mosque believed to date from the early decades of Islam, during an excavation in the northern city of Tiberias.
The mosque’s foundations, 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 time, 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 the excavation of the Tiberian mosque offers a rare chance to study the architecture of Muslim prayer houses in his childhood, and the findings indicate a tolerance on the part of early Islamic leaders for other religions. She announced her findings this month at a virtual conference.
When the mosque was built around 670 AD, Tiberias had been a city ruled by Muslims for some decades. Named after the second emperor of Rome around AD 20, 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, the chief archaeologist at the Israel Antiquities Authority, who was not involved in the excavation, said the discovery helped 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.
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 at the German Protestant Institute of Archeology plan to restart the excavation next month.
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 AD 660-680, just a generation after the capture of the city. The dimensions of the building, floor plan in pillars and qiblah, or prayer niche, reminded a lot of other mosques of the period.
Avni said that for a long time academics were not sure what had happened to the cities of the Levant and Mesopotamia conquered by Muslims in the early seventh century. “Previous opinions said there was a process of conquest, destruction and devastation,” he said.
Today archaeologists understood that there was a “very gradual process, and in Tiberias you see that,” he said
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 said that this supported 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. ”