aris2chat
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- Feb 17, 2012
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Muslims should not be destroying history. The past is valuable for all faiths.
Temple Mount archaeological project yields treasure, unearths conflict
timesofisrael.com/temple-mount-project-yields-treasure-but-unearths-conflict/
By Ilan Ben Zion
For three of the worlds faiths, the Temple Mount bears special sanctity and significance. For archaeologists, the 3,000-year-old holy site is both an El Dorado and a Holy Grail, for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict precludes a scientists pick and shovel ever breaking its ground. But an improbable turn of events has allowed historians a glimpse into the monuments mighty bowels.
On the slopes below the Hebrew Universitys campus on Mount Scopus, archaeologists and volunteers sieve through heaps of earth that were removed from the Temple Mount in the 1990s, and seek to extract bits and pieces of Jerusalems long history. The soil they sift through is fill from the Temple Mount truckloads of earth and detritus that, until the late 1990s, was packed into the gigantic 35-acre box on which the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque stand and Herods Temple once stood.
At the far end of a fabric-roofed Quonset hut, home of the Temple Mount Sifting Project, Professor Gabriel Barkay rummaged through a small heap of tiny potsherds set on a low table. He removed his glasses and stared at a tiny piece of brown clay one of thousands plucked from the soil and wiped some dirt from its surface. Hes a grandfatherly sort, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a gravelly voice tinged with an Old World accent in English. Barkay, currently with Bar-Ilan University, got his start in archaeology on a salvage dig on Mount Zion when a road was paved for Pope Paul VI in 1964.
What we do here is the result of certain political developments, Barkay explained as we sat in the shade.
The Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, the institution overseeing the al-Aqsa Mosque compound, carried out excavations on the Temple Mount between 1996 and 1999 as part of the construction of a subterranean mosque in an area known as Solomons Stables. Tens of thousands of tons of dirt roughly 400 truckloads were excavated by heavy machinery, without the supervision of archaeologists, and were dumped outside the Old City.....................
Temple Mount archaeological project yields treasure, unearths conflict
timesofisrael.com/temple-mount-project-yields-treasure-but-unearths-conflict/
By Ilan Ben Zion
For three of the worlds faiths, the Temple Mount bears special sanctity and significance. For archaeologists, the 3,000-year-old holy site is both an El Dorado and a Holy Grail, for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict precludes a scientists pick and shovel ever breaking its ground. But an improbable turn of events has allowed historians a glimpse into the monuments mighty bowels.
On the slopes below the Hebrew Universitys campus on Mount Scopus, archaeologists and volunteers sieve through heaps of earth that were removed from the Temple Mount in the 1990s, and seek to extract bits and pieces of Jerusalems long history. The soil they sift through is fill from the Temple Mount truckloads of earth and detritus that, until the late 1990s, was packed into the gigantic 35-acre box on which the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque stand and Herods Temple once stood.
At the far end of a fabric-roofed Quonset hut, home of the Temple Mount Sifting Project, Professor Gabriel Barkay rummaged through a small heap of tiny potsherds set on a low table. He removed his glasses and stared at a tiny piece of brown clay one of thousands plucked from the soil and wiped some dirt from its surface. Hes a grandfatherly sort, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a gravelly voice tinged with an Old World accent in English. Barkay, currently with Bar-Ilan University, got his start in archaeology on a salvage dig on Mount Zion when a road was paved for Pope Paul VI in 1964.
What we do here is the result of certain political developments, Barkay explained as we sat in the shade.
The Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, the institution overseeing the al-Aqsa Mosque compound, carried out excavations on the Temple Mount between 1996 and 1999 as part of the construction of a subterranean mosque in an area known as Solomons Stables. Tens of thousands of tons of dirt roughly 400 truckloads were excavated by heavy machinery, without the supervision of archaeologists, and were dumped outside the Old City.....................
