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When archaeology student Zachi Zweig started to sift through the mountains of dirt that had been dumped into the Kidron Valley by Muslim authorities in charge of the unsupervised excavation of a new entrance to an underground mosque on the Temple Mount, he was detained by the police. He did not have a permit to look through the dumped dirt, said the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA).
Undeterred, Zweig enlisted the help of his former teacher, veteran Jerusalem archaeologist Gabriel Barkay.
Whether they would find anything significant in this dump was uncertain. But for many, this was holy soil. Not since the Muslims built the Dome of the Rock in the seventh century C.E. had such a large-scale excavation been conducted on the Temple Mount. To modern Israeli archaeologists, it was forbidden territory.
After the Six Day War in 1967, when Israel regained control of Jerusalem’s Old City, administration of the Temple Mount was voluntarily ceded to the Muslim religious trust, known as the Waqf. As Israel’s Supreme Court has found, over the years the Waqf has committed more than 35 violations of Israel’s antiquities laws on the Temple Mount—without interference from Israeli antiquities authorities. But never before was any of this on so grand a scale as for the imposing new entrance to the underground mosque in the area known as Solomon’s Stables. The Waqf excavated and dumped over 70 truckloads of dirt into the adjacent valley. This was the material that Zweig wanted to sift through to ensure that whatever ancient remains might be there would not be lost to history. With Barkay’s help and prestige, an excavation permit was obtained from the IAA.
Barkay and Zweig have been at it since November 2004, using volunteers as workers. The Waqf had already removed easily identifiable objects. And the IAA, too, had found some architectural pieces in the dumps, the most important of which was a jamb from a gate of the Second Temple period (the period just before the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E.) Barkay and Zweig are still systematically sifting the residue since a vast number of smaller artifacts remain to be uncovered.
Working under a minimal budget, Barkay and Zweig first removed the dumped material to a site on the slopes of Mount Scopus so that their camp and the material could be more easily protected. There they set up large tents to protect the workers from the sun and rain.
I asked Barkay what motivated the volunteers. “Mostly religious reasons,” he replied. “After all, this is soil from the Temple Mount.”
“And what drives you?” I asked.
“I do it for strictly archaeological 015reasons. I want to learn what there is to be learned. But still, I am a Jew. I am a Zionist. I am a Jerusalemite.”
Mechanical sifters separate the material into piles of differently sized debris. Rubble from the different piles is placed in buckets to which water is added to loosen the dirt. (Encrusted dirt often hides small objects.) After soaking, the wet mixture is dumped into sieving screens set up in the tents in rows of sifting stations. High-pressure water hoses are then directed at the mixtures until the dirt falls through the screen and the remaining material can be examined by hand.
So far Barkay, Zweig and their team have found over a hundred ancient coins; heaps of pottery sherds; jewelry fragments of gold, silver, bronze and bone; beads; mosaic tesserae; arrowheads; animal bones and even a 2-foot-long piece of a marble column streaked with purple veins and white spots. Among the many clay oil lamps are several decorated with the Menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum from the Temple.
Between 10 and 20 percent of the finds come from the First Temple period—between the tenth century B.C.E. and the destruction of the Solomonic Temple in 586 B.C.E. by the Babylonians. The pottery sherds include hand-burnished, red-slipped pottery characteristic of the tenth century B.C.E., when King Solomon lived. The excavators note that pottery from the Temple Mount has never been published before.
More finds come from the Second Temple period. One of the first coins the expedition found dates from the time of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome and is inscribed “For the Freedom of Jerusalem.”
A few small inscriptions have also been found, one from the First Temple period with three Hebrew letters on it. A Scytho-Iranian arrowhead similar to those found elsewhere in Jerusalem in a legal excavation suggests that it, too, was part of the Babylonian assault on the Temple in 586 B.C.E. A stamp impression from the Hellenistic period features a five-pointed star with Hebrew letters spelling “Jerusalem” between the points.
Even though the material has no stratigraphy by which it can be dated, Barkay and Zweig hope to perform quantitative analyses on material dated by other means that may yield insights on relative activity on the Mount in different periods. Other studies will be done on the animal bones to determine the likelihood that they come from Temple sacrifices—or, possibly, from pigs consumed during the Crusader period!
When archaeology student Zachi Zweig started to sift through the mountains of dirt that had been dumped into the Kidron Valley by Muslim authorities in charge of the unsupervised excavation of a new entrance to an underground mosque on the Temple Mount, he was detained by the police. He did not have a permit to look through the dumped dirt, said the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). Undeterred, Zweig enlisted the help of his former teacher, veteran Jerusalem archaeologist Gabriel Barkay. Whether they would find anything significant in this dump was uncertain. But for many, this was holy soil. […]
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