The foundations of the mosque, excavated just south of the Sea of Galilee by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, point to its construction roughly a generation after the death of the prophet Muhammad, making it one of the earliest Muslim houses of worship to be studied by archaeologists. 1 Cytryn-Silverman said excavating the Tiberian mosque provided a rare chance to study the architecture of Muslim prayer houses in their infancy, and the findings indicated a tolerance for other faiths by early Islamic leaders. She announced the findings this month in a virtual conference.
When the mosque was built around AD670, Tiberias had been a Muslim-ruled city for a few decades. Named after Rome’s second emperor in about AD20, the city was a major centre of Jewish life and scholarship for nearly five centuries. Before its conquest by Muslim armies in 635, the Byzantine city was home to one of a constellation of Christian holy sites dotting the Sea of Galilee’s shoreline.
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Gideon Avni, the chief archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority, who was not involved in the excavation, said the discovery helped resolve a scholarly debate about when mosques began standardising their design, facing towards Mecca. “In the archaeological finds, it was very rare to find early mosques,” he said.
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- 1. “We know about many early mosques that were founded right in the beginning of the Islamic period,” said Katia Cytryn-Silverman, a specialist in Islamic archaeology at Hebrew University who heads the dig. Other mosques dating from around the same time, such as the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, the Great Mosque of Damascus, and Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque, are still in use today and cannot be tampered with by archaeologists.