WarSclerotic

Archaeologists Restore Second Temple Tiles Desecrated by Waqf, Clarion Project, Elliot Friedland, September 7, 2016

It is motivated by the same contempt for the non-Islamic past that led the Islamic State to destroy so many of Syria and Iraq’s irreplaceable ancient ruins.

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A team of Israeli archaeologists have reconstructed the floor tiles used in the biblical Temple of Herod the Great. The find marks a breakthrough in biblical archaeology, but also shows how the Jordanian Waqf, which controls the site, has been careless at best with the site’s Jewish heritage.

In 1999, the Waqf which controls the Temple Mount (known as the Haram al-Sharif to Muslims), created a new entrance using bulldozers.

“Approximately 400 truckloads saturated with the history of Jerusalem were illicitly removed – barbarically removed – from the Temple Mount by the Islamic Waqf in November 1999 to promote a political agenda,” said Dr. Gabriel Barkay, co-founder of the Temple Mount Sifting Project and professor emeritus of the Hebrew University, speaking to the Jerusalem Post.

“All of that was dug up with bulldozers in a place where even a toothbrush is too large a tool to carry out excavations.”

At the time, Israeli archaeologists charged that the process of building the entrance should have been documented carefully and all debris sorted through during the construction process.

Instead they removed thousands of tons of debris full of archaeological treasures and dumped them at a nearby landfill. A team of Israeli archaeologists has been sifting through the dirt for the last 10 years. They have found thousands of antiquities.

Now the project has been vindicated as it has been able to piece together the floor tiling used by King Herod in his renovations of the Temple, proof that the Waqf’s excavations damaged antiquities from the site. Herod ruled at the time of Jesus of Nazareth, and it is at Herod’s temple that many episodes recorded in the gospels took place.

“This represents the first time that archaeologists have been able to successfully restore an element from the Herodian Second Temple complex,” Zachi Dvira, co-founder and co-director of the Temple Mount Sifting Project announced at an unveiling of the restored tiles. “It enables us to get an idea of the Temple’s incredible splendor.”

Islamist supremacists have long sought to deny Jewish connection to the Temple Mount and to secure it as a site only for Muslims. This is symptomatic of the extremist ideology that brooks no dissent or pluralism and which seeks to eliminate all culture it does not control.

It is motivated by the same contempt for the non-Islamic past that led the Islamic State to destroy so many of Syria and Iraq’s irreplaceable ancient ruins.

And, it is the same drive which leads to attempts to use bodies like UNESCO to erase Jewish history on the Temple Mount and formally declare it a Muslim shrine.

This discovery proves both the non-Islamic connections to the site as well as the damage done to antiquities by the actions of the Jordanian authorities.

This entry was posted on September 7, 2016 at 5:40 PM and is filed under Islamists and Jewish history, Israel, Jerusalem, Jordan, Temple Mount, UNESCO. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Islamists and Jewish history, Israel, Jerusalem, Jordan, Temple Mount, UNESCO