The Time Has Come: Archeological Digs At The Temple Mount

There is too much being denied the scientific world as well as the religions that rever the site. The Temple Mount should be available for archeologists.

Was the Aksa Mosque built over the remains of a Byzantine church?

The photo archives of a British archeologist who carried out the only archeological excavation ever undertaken at the Temple Mount's Aksa Mosque show a Byzantine mosaic floor underneath the mosque that was likely the remains of a church or a monastery, an Israeli archeologist said on Sunday.

The excavation was carried out in the 1930s by R.W. Hamilton, director of the British Mandate Antiquities Department, in coordination with the Wakf Islamic Trust that administers the compound, following earthquakes that badly damaged the mosque in 1927 and 1937.

...Hamilton also uncovered the Byzantine mosaic floor and beneath it a mikva (ritual bath) from the Second Temple period, which he pointedly did not include in the publication about the mosque, but instead photographed and labeled in a file about the mosque, archeologist Zachi Zweig said on Sunday.

...The Byzantine mosaic floor, which was uncovered under the Umayyad level of the mosque, is "without a doubt" the remains of a public building - likely a church - which predated the mosque, Zweig said in an address at a Bar-Ilan University archeological conference.

...Over the last several years, numerous marble church chancel screens have been uncovered by Zweig and Bar-Ilan University archeologist Dr. Gabriel Barkay from rubble that was dug up during Waqf construction at the site in the last decade and dumped in the Kidron Valley.

The mosaic found on the Temple Mount is dated to the fifth to seventh centuries, said Dr. Rina Talgam, a mosaic expert at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

..."The simple mosaic pictured does not give us a hint that it was certainly part of a church but it very well could have been part of a hostel or some other nondescript structure," she said.

Since the establishment of the state, no archeological excavations have been held on the Temple Mount, in keeping with religious sensitivities of both Muslims and Jews.