Israeli archaeologists said on Thursday they had found the first tiny artifacts unearthed in situ on the Temple Mount that can be conclusively dated to the time of the First Temple, over 2,600 years ago. The discoveries came out of limited scientific excavations carried out atop the contested holy site in the past decade, work done with minimum publicity, police escort, and cooperation from the Islamic Waqf, which manages the site.
Who Controlled the Dig
The digs were conducted between 2007 and the past year after the Waqf requested authorization from Israel to perform maintenance work on infrastructure servicing the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock, the main structures situated atop the Temple Mount. The excavation of a trench for electric cables in 2007 gave archaeologists the first opportunity to delve below the surface of the site since Israel captured it in the 1967 Six Day War. All work was conducted with police escort because of the sensitivity of the site.
Yuval Baruch, the head of the Israel Antiquities Authority Jerusalem region, said, “It’s the first time that we’ve found artifacts from this period in situ on the Temple Mount.” He added, “As far as the biblical period is concerned, the Temple Mount is a tabula rasa, nobody knows anything.” Baruch, who headed the archaeological work, said the finds were still “very limited,” but that the tiny fragments of clay and bone were at least something: “It exists.”
The artifacts excavated from the mount, detailed in a paper and presentations at a conference at Hebrew University, are said to include olive pits, animal bones and pottery fragments dating to the time of the First Temple, between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE. Baruch, Ronny Reich and Deborah Sandhaus, authors of the accompanying paper on the discoveries, wrote: “This layer included pottery fragments characterized in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, as well as animal bones and charred olive pits.” They added: “Carbon 14 dating of the olives yielded dates from the 6th to 8th centuries BCE. This date is confirmed by the dates of the pottery.”
What Was Found, and Where
Among the most significant finds, dug up during the laying of the power cable approximately 400 feet southeast of the Dome of the Rock, was a jumble of remains dating to the First Temple period. Another segment of the same trench turned up a Roman coin dating to 383 CE, and iron arrowheads, which the authors said could be “rare evidence of activity in the Roman period in the courtyard between the raised part of the Temple Mount and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.”
Archaeologists have previously found a limited number of artifacts from First-Temple-period Jerusalem, but none of those finds were uncovered atop the mount itself. Rather, they were recovered from the Ophel excavations to the south of the Mount, and from the Temple Mount Sifting Project, which examines rubble credibly believed to have been removed from the holy site and dumped in the nearby Kidron Valley. While the Temple Mount Sifting Project has rummaged through fill from the holy site excavated during the construction of the Marwani Mosque in the late 1990s, these newly described digs were the first archaeological study atop the Temple Mount since the 1930s.
The finds on the Temple Mount itself range from a previously undocumented monumental structure believed to be from the 11th and 12th centuries — the period preceding and including the Crusades — to artifacts from Roman times and, unprecedentedly in situ, finds from as far back as the First Temple period. Additional findings from the work carried out on the Temple Mount by the Israel Antiquities Authority have yet to be published, Baruch said, including conservation work conducted in Solomon’s Stables, a subterranean vault beneath the Temple Mount’s platform, in the past year.
Authority, Criticism, and the Paper Trail
Although the Waqf received permission from the Israel Police and Electric Corporation to lay the power cable, some archaeologists at the time criticized the operation, saying it was not conducted with “professional and careful archaeological supervision involving meticulous documentation.” Presenting the finds after their examination also marked an opportunity for the Israel Antiquities Authority to rebut critics who claim the Temple Mount is a scene of archaeological bedlam.
The Israel Antiquities Authority had made limited announcements in the past about its activity on the Mount, releasing brief details of First Temple finds, but the conference marked the most detailed presentation of the near-decade of work, the finds and their significance. Baruch said the publication pointed to the fact that, despite all the statements and such, “we’re on the Temple Mount and working, overseeing, and business is done under the authority of the IAA.”
It’s not an excavation that you go to a place and dig, Baruch said of the work on the Mount. “It’s more inspection, and in that framework finds are discovered.” That description fits the whole operation: tightly managed, heavily policed, and carried out under the authority of the Israel Antiquities Authority, with the Islamic Waqf requesting permission and the police standing by while the apparatus decides what can be seen, recorded, and published.