display
Presumably the city of Tiberias had already voluntarily opened its gates to the conquerors before the decision was made on the battlefield.
That would explain a spectacular discovery that archaeologists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have now made on the Sea of Galilee.
In the city on the western bank of the lake, they uncovered the foundations of a mosque from the early days of Islam.
The amazing thing about the building is that it is apparently not a converted church (which could be expected in the event of a violent occupation), but that it was built from the ground up as an Islamic house of worship.
During previous excavations in the 1950s, the scientists assumed that the Muslims had rededicated a Byzantine market.
The head of the current campaign, Katia Cytryn-Silverman, went one layer deeper and came across coins and clay pots dated between 660 and 680.
That would mean that the entire structure was built under Arab rule.
Aerial photo of the excavation site in Tiberias from 2013
Source: AP
A few years after the death of the Prophet Mohammed 632, the Muslim armies left the Arabian Peninsula and advanced into Palestine and Syria.
In August 636 the Byzantine emperor Herakleios tried with a large army to stop the invaders.
At Jarmuk, which flows from the east not far from the southern end of the Sea of Galilee into the Jordan, a battle broke out that ended with a devastating defeat for the Eastern Romans.
The Levant became part of the Arab Empire.
display
It is quite possible that Tiberias had previously been taken by the Arabs without a fight.
Founded shortly after the birth of Christ, the city was for a long time the capital of Galilee;
the final editing of the Palestinian Talmud was prepared here.
Even after the occupation, Christians and Jews formed the majority of the population.
Historians even assume that most of the residents hardly noticed the change in power over the world.
Only the language, habitus and religion of the tax collectors had changed.
The Arabs probably didn't want to set an example either.
“They did not destroy other people's houses of prayer, but rather they fitted into the societies of which they were now leaders,” says Katia Cytryn-Silverman.
At least until a larger mosque was built in the 8th century, a Byzantine church remained the main building in Tiberias.
A forced conversion did not take place, not least because non-Muslims were obliged to pay the jizya, a poll tax with which the armies were rewarded.
“The Byzantine coins remained in circulation and administrative documents continued to be written in Greek,” writes the American ancient historian Glen W. Bowersock.
This is how the foundations of the mosque are currently presented to the viewer
Source: AP
display
For the prayers of the Muslim administrators and garrison a simple building was erected, with which the new masters by no means combined representational purposes.
The dimensions of the building, floor plan and given direction for prayer were similar to those of other mosques from this early period.
As a rule, they were spacious rectangles bounded by an outer wall and in which a roof, which often rested on reused columns, offered the believers protection from the sun.
The sparsely furnished mosque that Mohammed installed in Medina is cited as a model in ancient texts.
Other well-known mosques from early Islamic times, such as the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and the Prophet's Mosque in Medina, are still used today as places of worship and can therefore not be examined in a comparable way by archaeologists.
Therefore, the find in Tiberias offers archaeologists the rare opportunity to study the architecture of one of the first Muslim houses of prayer, says Katia Cytryn-Silverman.
You can also find “World History” on Facebook.
We look forward to a like.