My time as an amateur archaeologist began one morning on the southern slope of Mount Scopus, a hill on the northern outskirts of Jerusalem. Inside a giant greenhouse covered in plastic sheets and marked “Operation Temple Mount Rescue,” a Boston woman named Frankie Snyder, a volunteer who became a member of staff, took me to 3 rows of black plastic buckets, each filled with stones and pebbles, and then pointed to a dozen wooden frame screens fixed on plastic supports. My job, he said, is to empty every bucket on a screen, rinse the soil with water from a lawn hose and then rip off anything that might be important.
It wasn’t as simple as it looked. A piece of what looked like conglomerate rock turned out to be plaster used to line cisterns in the time of Herod the Great, about 2000 years ago. When I threw away a piece of green glass that I think I got from a drinking bottle, Snyder grabbed it. “Look at the bubbles, ” he said, holding them in the light. “This indicates that it is an old glass, because in this period, the furnace temperature has not reached the highest temperature as today.”
Little by little, I got it. I saw the care of an old piece of ceramic, with a notch for the thumb support. I recovered a raw coin minted more than 1,500 years ago with the profile of a Byzantine emperor. I also discovered a glass shard of what might have been just a bottle of Heineken, a reminder that the Temple Mount was also the scene of less historical activities.
The touch-ups I collected are the culmination of one of Israel’s most intriguing archaeological companies: a grain-to-grain investigation of the rubble transported from the Temple Mount, the magnificent construction that has served the faithful as the glory of God for 3,000 years and remains the crossroads of the 3 wonderful monotheistic religions.
Jewish culture holds that this is the place where God accumulated dust to create Adam and where Abraham nearly sacrificed his son Isaac to demonstrate his faith. According to the Bible, King Solomon built the first temple of the Jews on this mountain around 1000 BC, so that it would be demolished 400 years later through troops commanded by King Nebuchadnezzar of Bathroughlon, who sent many Jews into exile. In the 1st century BC, Herod expanded and rebuilt a temple built by Jews who had returned after his banishment. It is here that, according to the Gospel of John, Jesus Christ unleashed himself opposite the money changers (and then was crucified a few hundred yards away). Roman general Titus avenged the Jewish rebels, looting and burning the temple in 70 AD.
Among Muslims, the Temple Mount is called Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Shrine). They think here that the Prophet Muhammad came to the “Divine Presence” on the back of a lay horse: the miraculous night journey, commemorated through one of the architectural triumphs of Islam, the sanctuary of the Dome of the Rock. A territorial prize occupied or conquered through a long succession of peoples: adding jebuseos, Israelites, Bavarians, Greeks, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, first Muslims, crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans and Britons: the Temple Mount has experienced more ancient vital occasions than perhaps any other 35 acres in the world. However, archaeologists have had little opportunity to seek physical evidence to classify through the definition of reality. On the one hand, the site remains an active position of worship. The authority that controls the complex, an Islamic council called Waqf, has long banned archaeological excavations, which it considers desecration. With the exception of some clandestine studies of caves, cisterns and tunnels conducted through European adventurers in the late 19th century, and some minor archaeological paintings made through the British from 1938 to 1942, when the Al-Aqsa mosque is being renovated, the layers of history under the Temple Mount remained out of reach.
Hence the one with those plastic waste buckets I saw on Mount Scopus.
Today, the Temple Mount, a fortified complex in Jerusalem’s Old City, is the site of two magnificent structures: the Dome of the Rock to the north and the Al-Aqsa Mosque to the south. To the southwest is the Western Wall, a remnant of the Second Temple and the holiest site of Judaism. About three hundred meters from the Al-Aqsa mosque, in the southeast corner of the complex, a giant square leads to arched underground arches known for centuries as Solomon’s stables, probably because the Templars, an order of knights, would have kept their horses there when the Crusaders occupied Jerusalem. In 1996, the Waqf remodeled the domain into a prayer room, adding tiles and electric lighting. The Muslim government said the new site, called the El-Marwani Mosque, was necessary to accommodate other worshippers of Ramadan and rainy days that prevented the faithful from meeting in the open courtyard of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Three years later, the Waqf, with the approval of the Israeli government, announced its goal of creating an emergency exit for the El-Marwani Mosque. But Israeli officials then accused the Waqf of exceeding his self-declared mandate. Instead of leaving a small emergency, the Waqf dug two arches, creating a large vaulted entrance. In doing so, the excavators dug a well more than 131 feet long and only 40 feet deep. Trucks were carrying loads of tons of land and debris.
Israeli archaeologists and academics have provoked a protest. Some have said that the Waqf intentionally seeks to erase evidence of Jewish history. Others have led this act to negligence on a monstrous scale.
“This land saturated with the history of Jerusalem,” says Eyal Meiron, a historian at the Ben-Zvi Institute for the examination of Eretz Israel. “A toothbrush would be too big to brush this floor, and they did it with bulldozers.”
Yusuf Natsheh, the chief archaeologist of the Waqf, does not provide in the operation. But he told the Jerusalem Post that other archaeologists had tested the excavated fabrics and discovered nothing significant. The Israelis, he told me, “exaggerated” the price of the uncovered objects. And he erified at the suggestion that the Waqf sought to destroy Jewish history. “Every stone is a Muslim development,” he says. “If something is destroyed, it is Muslim heritage.”
Zachi Zweig, a third-year archaeology student at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, when he heard reports of truck sales carrying the flat from Temple Mount to Kidron Valley. With the help of a classmate, he amassed 15 volunteers to make a stop at the mass sale, where they began reading and collecting samples. A week later, Zweig presented his discoveries, adding ceramic fragments and ceramic tiles, to archaeologists who attended a convention at the university. Zweig’s presentation provoked the ire of officials of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). “There is still nothing a disguised exhibition of research,” Jon Seligman, an archaeologist from the IAA’s Jerusalem region, told the Jerusalem Post. “It’s a corrupt act to take those items without approval or permission.” A short time later, Israeli police questioned Zweig and released him. By then, however, Zweig said, his cause had attracted media attention and his favorite speaker at Bar-Ilan: archaeologist Gaby Barkay.
Zweig suggested to Barkay that he do something about the artifacts. In 2004, Barkay received permission to search for the ground spilled in the Kidron Valley. He and Zweig rented trucks to send from there to Emek Tzurim National Park at the foot of Mount Scopus, collected donations to help the assignment and recruited others to adopt sifting. The sieving assignment of the Temple Mount, as it is called, marks the first time archaeologists have systematically studied the fabrics that were removed from under the sacred enclosure.
Barkay, ten full-time workers and a part-time volunteer corps discovered a multitude of artifacts, ranging from 3 beetles (Egyptian or encouraged through Egyptian design), from the time of the millennium BC to the uniform insignia of an Australian Medical Corps member, who was confined to british General Edmund Allenthrough’s army after defeating the Ottoman Empire in World War I. “Freedom of Zion” Array. A silver coin struck at the time the Crusaders led Jerusalem is stamped with the symbol of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Barkay says some discoveries provide tangible evidence of biblical accounts. Fragments of terracotta figurines, between the 8th and 6th centuries BC, may be the passage in which King Josiah, who ruled in the 7th century, introduced reforms that included a crusade opposed to idolatry. Other discoveries call into question long-standing beliefs. For example, it is widely accepted that early Christians used the mountain as a mass sale in the ruins of Jewish temples. But the abundance of coins, decorative crucifixes and fragments of columns discovered in the Byzantine era of Jerusalem (380-638 A.D.) suggests that some public buildings were built there. Barkay and his colleagues have published their main findings in two educational journals in Hebrew, and plan to publish an account in English.
But Natsheh, Waqf’s leading archaeologist, rejects Barkay’s findings because they were not discovered in situ in their original archaeological layers on the ground. “It has no value,” he said of the sieving project, adding that Barkay reached unwarranted conclusions with the Israeli argument that Jewish ties to the Temple Mount are older and more powerful than those of Palestinians. “All of this serves their politics and agenda,” says Natsheh.
Certainly, the Mount is a flashpoint in the clash in the Middle East. Israel seized East Jerusalem and Jordan’s Old City in 1967. While the Israelis saw the reunification of their former capital, Palestinians still regard East Jerusalem as an occupied Arab land (a position that is also maintained through the United Nations). precariously balanced between those opposing views. Although Israel claims political sovereignty over the complex, the guard remains with the Waqf. As such, Israelis and Palestinians look conscientiously to stumble upon any inclination to prestige quo. A September 2000 stopover on the Temple Mount through Israeli politician Ariel Sharon interpreted through the Palestinians as a provocative confirmation of Israel’s sovereignty and helped bring about the uprising of the intifada, which is estimated to have killed 6,600 people, such as armed riots. Clashes and terrorist attacks broke out in all Palestinian territories and Israel. Basically, the clash between Israelis and Palestinians represents rival claims over the same territory, and either side depends on history to justify the territory’s innermost roots.
For Israelis, this tale begins 3,000 years ago, when the Temple Mount, which many biblical scholars believed to be the mountain of the Moriah region discussed in the Book of Genesis, an irregularly shaped mound that emerges about 2,440 feet between the dark Judea. Hills The summit stood on a small colony called Jebus, which clung to a ridge surrounded by ravines. The Old Testament describes how an army led through David, the moment when the king of ancient Israel, violated the walls of Jebus around 1000 BC. David then built a palace nearby and created his capital, Jerusalem. At the site of a threshing field in the most sensitive part of the mountain, where farmers had separated the grains from the straw, David built an altar of sacrifice. According to the moment ebook of kings and the first ebook of chronicles, David’s son, Solomon, built the first temple (later known as Beit Hamikdash) on this site.
“The Temple Mount, the Parton of the Jews,” Barkay says, describing how the faithful would have climbed a steep ladder to succeed on it. “You’d feel every step of climbing in your limbs and lungs.”
However, “we know nothing about the First Temple, because there is no record of his physical remains,” says Benjamin Kedar, a professor of history at the Hebrew University and chairman of the IAA board of directors. However, the researchers reconstructed a transient portrait of the Beit Hamikdash from descriptions in the Bible and architectural remains of shrines in other parts of the region built at the same time. It is like a complex of richly painted and gilded courtyards, built with cedar, fir and sandalwood. It is said that the corridors were built around an inner sanctum, the Saint of Saints, where the ark of the covenant, a chest of acacia wood covered in gold and containing the original Ten Commandments, would have been stored.
Until recently, Palestinians sometimes identified that The Beit Hamikdash existed. A 1929 publication, A Brief Guide to the Haram al-Sharif, written by historian Waqf Aref al-Aref, states that “the identity of the Mount with the site of Solomon’s temple is indisputable. This is also the place, according to universal belief. , in which David built an altar to the Lord and presented burnt offerings and peace offerings. But in recent decades, amid the growing dispute over East Jerusalem’s sovereignty, a growing number of Palestinian officials and academics have expressed doubts. “I won’t allow it to be written to me that I have Array … He showed the lifestyles of the so-called Temple Under the Mount,” Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat told President Bill Clinton at the Camp David peace talks in 2000. Arafat reported that the site of the temple mount could have been in the West Bank city of Nablus, known as Shechem in ancient times.
Five years after Camp David’s talks, Barkay’s sieving task revealed a piece of black clay with a stamp printed with the name, in ancient Hebrew, “[Gea] lyahu [son of] Immer”. In the book of Jeremiah, A son of Immer, Pashur, is known as the leading administrator of the First Temple. Barkay suggests that the owner of the label may have been Pashur’s brother. If so, it is an “important discovery,” he says, the first Hebrew inscription of the First Temple era that was discovered on the mountain itself.
But Natsheh, having an Arabic coffee in his at the headquarters of Waqf, a 700-year-old former Sufi monastery in the Muslim quarter of the Old City, is doubtful. He says he is also frustrated by Israel’s rejection of Palestinian claims about the sacred compound where, he says, the Muslim presence, with the exception of the Crusader era (1099-1187 AD), “extends for more than 1,400 years.” Natsheh will not say whether he believes in the lifestyles of the First Temple, given the existing political climate. “If I say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ it would be misused, ” he said, agitated. “I wouldn’t need to answer.”
According to new reports, Bathroughlonian’s army destroyed the first temple in 586 BC. The ark of the covenant has disappeared, hidden from the conquerors. After the conquest of Jerusalem through the Persians in 539 BC, the Jews returned from exile and, according to Ezra’s e-book, built a temple on the site.
In the 1st century BC, King Herod undertook a major transformation of the Temple Mount. He filled the slopes around the most sensitive mountain and expanded it to its proper size. He locked the sacred site on a 100-foot-tall retaining wall built with limestone blocks extracted from the hills of Jerusalem and built a much larger edition of the Second Temple. “Herod Array’s attitude” Whatever you can do, I can make it bigger and bigger,” Barkay says. It’s a component of his megalomania. He also sought to compete with God.
Barkay says that he and his colleagues have discovered physical evidence suggesting the greatness of the Second Temple, adding pieces of what appear to be sectile opus floor tiles, elements of a strategy of the era of heroes who used stones of other colors and shapes to create geometric shapes. Patterns. (In describing the temple, the ancient historian Josephus wrote about an outdoor courtyard “covered in stones of all kinds.”) Other discoveries may be offering ideas about devout rituals, adding ivory and bone combs that may have been used to obtain preparing a mikvah ritual, or purifying bath, before entering the sanctified interior of the courts.
On a clear morning, I sign up for the historian Meiron for an excursion to the Temple Mount. We enter the old city through the manure gate and then we reach the position of the Western Wall. When the Romans destroyed herod’s temple in 70 AD, they broke down the retaining wall piece by piece. But the most sensitive stones fell and formed a protective barrier that preserved the diminished portions of the wall. Today, a lot of Orthodox Jews accumulate in devotion to the remains of this wall, a ritual that possibly would have taken a position for the first time in the 4th century A.D. and is frequently practiced since the early 16th century. after the Ottoman conquest of Jerusalem.
During the Ottoman Empire and the British mandate, this domain was a labyrinth of Arab houses, and Jews seeking to pray here had to sneak through a 12-foot-wide corridor in front of the Herodian stones. “My father came here when I was a kid and said, “We used to cross the alleys; We enter through a door; and there the wall above us, ” said Meiron. After Israel claimed sovereignty over East Jerusalem in 1967, it demolished the Arab houses, creating the square.
Meiron and I climbed a “temporary” wooden walkway that leads over the Western Wall to Mughrabi Gate, the only access point to the Temple Mount for non-Muslims, and a symbol of how any attempt to replace the country’s geography can disappoint the sensitive. Status quo. Israel erected the wood design after the cave of an earthly ramp in 2004, after an earthquake and heavy snowfall. In 2007, the IAA approved the design of a permanent bridge that would grow larger from the Old City Gate to the Mughrabi Gate.
But members of the Jewish and Muslim communities opposed the plan. Some Israeli archaeologists have provoked a protest about the proposed direction of the bridge through the Jerusalem Archaeological Park, the site of excavations in the Old City, saying the structure could damage the artifacts. Ehud Netzer, the archaeologist who discovered King Herod’s tomb in 2007, argued that moving the front ramp could cut the link between the Western Wall and the Temple Mount, undermining Israel’s sovereignty claims over the sacred compound. And the Israeli activist organization Peace Now warned that the assignment may alarm Muslims as the new direction and new bridge length (three times the original ramp) would increase non-Muslim traffic to Mount.
Indeed, when Israel began a legally necessary archaeological review of the planned structure site, Palestinians and Israeli Arabs joined a saying of protests. They claimed that Israeli excavations, carried out several meters outdoors on the walls of the sacred complex, threatened the foundations of the Al-Aqsa mosque. Some have even said it was Israel’s secret plan to unearth the remains of the first and moment temples to solidify its ancient mountain claim. For the time being, non-Muslim visitors continue to use the transient wooden bridge that has been in position for seven years.
Such disputes inevitably have repercussions on the foreign community. Jordanian and Turkish governments protested against Israel’s plans for the new bridge. And in November 2010, the Palestinian Authority created a diplomatic uproar by publishing a review that indicated that the Western Wall was by no means a Jewish holy site, but was a component of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The examination stated, “This wall was never a component of the so-called Temple Mount, but Muslim tolerance allowed Jews to stand before him and mourn his destruction,” which the U.S. State Decomposer described as “objectively incorrect, insensitive, and highly provocative.”
Today, the scene is quiet. At the posts in the giant green square, Palestinians gather in examination groups, reading the Koran. We climbed the steps to the magnificent Dome of the Rock, which was built at the same time as the Al-Aqsa Mosque to the south, between 685 and 715 AD. The Dome of the Rock is built on the first stone, which is sacred to Jews and Muslims. According to Jewish tradition, stone is the “navel of the Earth”, the place where creation began and the place where Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac. For Muslims, the stone marks the position where the Prophet Muhammad ascended to the Divine Presence.
In the east aspect of the Temple Mount retaining wall, Meiron shows me the Golden Gate, an elaborate door and door. Its provenance remains a topic of debate among historians, opposing the majority, who claims that the first Muslims built it, those who insist that it is a Byzantine Christian structure.
Historians who claim that the Byzantines did not build the gate involve ancient accounts describing how early Christians turned the mountain into a pile of garbage. The Byzantines, the scholars say, saw the destruction of the Second Temple as a confirmation of Jesus’ prophecy that “there will be no stone left over another” and as a symbol of the fall of Judaism. But other historians claim that the eastern front of the mountain, where the golden gate was built, was vital for the Byzantines because his interpretation of the Gospel of Matthew holds that Jesus entered the Mount of Olive Temple Mount Mount to the east when he joined. his disciples for Easter dinner. And in 614 AD, when the Persian Empire briefly conquered and ruled Jerusalem, they brought to Persia portions of the True Cross (believed to be the cross of the Crucifixion) of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Fifteen years later, after defeating the Persians, Heraclio, a Byzantine emperor, would have brought the True Cross back to the holy city, from the Mount of Olives to the Temple Mount and then to the Holy Sepulchre. “Then you had two triumphant fronts: Jesus and Heraclio, ” said Meiron. “This is enough for the Byzantines to invest in the structure of this door.”
While Barkay is in the camp that believes the Golden Gate is one of the first Muslim designs, Meiron believes that the discovery of the assignment of sifting crosses, coins and decorative columns of the Byzantine era backs up the theory that the gate was built through The Byzantines “Now we are not so sure that the Temple Mount has fallen into disrepair” Says Meiron. In addition, Barkay discovered archived photographs taken at renovations of the Al-Aqsa mosque in the 1930s that appear to reveal Byzantine mosaics under the design, additional evidence that some kind of public construction had been built on the site.
I visited Barkay in his modest apartment in East Talpiot, a Jewish suburb of East Jerusalem. The archaeologist of the gri soda and steaming chain born in Budapest in 1944, the same day the Nazis sent their circle of relatives to the city’s Jewish ghetto. After the war, his father, who had spent a year in a Nazi forced labour camp in Ukraine, established the first Israeli delegation in Budapest and the family circle emigrated to Israel in 1950. Barkay won his Ph.D. Archaeology at Tel Aviv University. In 1979, by exploring a series of ancient burial caves in a Jerusalem domain over the Hinnom Valley, he made a remarkable discovery: two 2,700-year-old silver scrolls delicately engraved with the priestly blessing aaron and his children gave the children. Israel, as discussed in the Book of Numbers. Barkay describes the scrolls, which involve the first known fragments of a biblical text, as “the ultimate life discovery of my life.”
Barkay and I got in my car and headed for Mount Scopus. I ask him about Natsheh’s accusation that the selection task is imbued with a political agenda. He shrugs. “Sneezing in Jerusalem is an incredibly political activity. You can do it on the right, on the left, in the face of an Arab or a Jew. Everything you do or don’t do is political.”
However, some of Barkay’s criticisms do not come from politics, but from skepticism about his methodology. Natsheh is not the only archaeologist to check the price of uncovered artifacts in situ. The land excavated through the Waqf is a massive sale of past eras. Part of this massive sale, Barkay says, comes from the eastern component of the mountain, which the Waqf paved in 2001. But most, he says, were taken in vacant portions of the mountain when a front was blocked from Solomon’s stables, between the reign of the Fatimid and Ayubí dynasties. Collectively, he says, the sale includes artifacts from all periods of the site.
But Israeli archaeologist Danny Bahat told the Jerusalem Post that since the earth was filled, the layers are not a significant chronology. “What they liked was putting the remains in a blender,” Jerusalem archaeologist Seligman said of the Waqf excavations. “All layers are now combined and damaged.” Archaeologist Meir Ben-Dov, a specialist in the old town, expressed doubts about whether all the landfills came here from the Temple Mount. Some, he suggests, brought from the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem.
Barkay, unsurprisingly, rejects this suggestion, presenting the common discoveries of Ottoman glass tile fragments of the Dome of the Rock, dating back to the 16th century, when Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent repaired and decorated the shrine. And, the excavated soil is not in situ, he says that even if the clinical price of the artifacts were reduced by 80%, “we still have 20%, which is much more than zero.”
Barkay identifies and dates artifacts through “typology”: he compares his discoveries with manufacturing articles where a chronology has been firmly established. For example, the pieces of sectatile work that Barkay discovered on the ground were exactly the same, in terms of matter, shape and dimensions, as those used through Herod in the palaces of Jericho, Massada and Herodio.
We arrived at Barkay’s rescue operation and welcomes a handful of employees. Then he paves the way for a painting table and shows me a pattern of a day’s efforts. “Here is a bowl fragment from the First Temple period,” he said. “A Byzantine coin here. An iron cross arrowhead. It is an Asmonean currency of the dynasty that ruled Judah in the 2nd century BC. , who historically oppose archaeological excavations in the Holy Land. “They say that all the evidence is in the [biblical] sources, no physical evidence is wanted. But they are in a position to make an exception, because it is the Temple Mount. “Barkay stops.” If I look at some of the volunteers and see the emotion in their eyes, who can touch the history of Jerusalem with their own fingers, it is irreplaceable.” He admits that the task attracted” very few “Palestinians or Israeli Arabs.
Driving to the outside of the plastic-covered building, Barkay slaps his eyes into sunlight. We can see the Temple Mount in the distance, the sunlight shining in the Dome of the Rock on the golden top. “We’ve been running for six years and we’ve used 20% of the material,” he says, pointing out huge piles of land that fill an olive grove in the store. “We still have 15 to 20 years left.”
Joshua Hammer wrote about the Bamiyan Buddhas in the November 2010 issue. Kate Brooks is an Istanbul-based photojournalist in Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan.
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Joshua Hammer is the contributing editor of Smithsonian magazine and several books, and adds The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And their Race to Save the Most Priceus Manuscripts And The Thief Falcon: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery and the Hunt the Perfect Bird