Jewish history’s greatest archaeological crime

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A good read if it wasn't so tragic.

Thousands of years’ worth of fragile and irreplaceable Jewish archaeological antiquities were surreptitiously and violently dug up by Arab bulldozers at Judaism’s holiest site, Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, Thousands of tons of invaluable debris – believed to contain over 1 million artifacts dating back to the First Temple period – were then carted off in dump trunks and discarded like garbage to a nearby landfill in Jerusalem’s Kidron Valley.

Jewish history’s greatest archaeological crime

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Looks like the link is largely Israeli propaganda.

In 1999, thousands of years’ worth of fragile and irreplaceable Jewish archaeological antiquities were surreptitiously and violently dug up by Arab bulldozers at Judaism’s holiest site, Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, to build an entrance to a subterranean mosque.

The article makes it seem like those despicable Arabs carted off 400 truckloads and nobody noticed them.

The article below is less iinflammatory.

What is Beneath the Temple Mount?
As Israeli archaeologists recover artifacts from the religious site, ancient history inflames modern-day political tensions

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/w ... _it&page=1

... Some 300 feet from the Al-Aqsa Mosque, in the southeast corner of the compound, a wide plaza leads to underground vaulted archways that have been known for centuries as Solomon’s Stables—probably because the Templars, an order of knights, are said to have kept their horses there when the Crusaders occupied Jerusalem. In 1996, the Waqf converted the area into a prayer hall, adding floor tiles and electric lighting. The Muslim authorities claimed the new site—named the El-Marwani Mosque—was needed to accommodate additional worshipers during Ramadan and on rain days that prevented the faithful from gathering in the open courtyard of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Three years later, the Waqf, with the approval of the Israeli government, announced plans to create an emergency exit for the El-Marwani Mosque. But Israeli officials later accused the Waqf of exceeding its self-stated mandate. Instead of a small emergency exit, the Waqf excavated two arches, creating a massive vaulted entranceway. In doing so, bulldozers dug a pit more than 131 feet long and nearly 40 feet deep. Trucks carted away hundreds of tons of soil and debris

The article goes on to discuss the various things found at Kidron, I didn't notice King David's calligraphy set mentioned. The nature of the "desecrated" site is that it was probably itself made up of filler from when the crusaders built the stables so moving some of this to Kidron is not that big a deal. Of course, it's not a good thing for this to have happened.

The whole thing seems to be a foul up between Netanyahu's government and the Waqf. The article in the OP suggesting poor innocent Israeli's and scheming lying Arabs is offensive.

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Looks like the link is largely Israeli propaganda.

The article makes it seem like those despicable Arabs carted off 400 truckloads and nobody noticed them.

An Israeli perspective perhaps, but not particularly imbalanced. My brief look around the Internet validates the basic information given.

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Except I didn't see any note about the agreement in the article and it's difficult to hang out at the Western Wall without seeing more than a few people with machine guns, so the "surreptitiously" remark seems weird... It seems like a lie which is better than a damn lie and statistics.

I was wondering if the story had something to do with fund raising during the high holidays.

Maybe opposition to the Iran deal wasn't getting much traction, so this thing that happened about 18 years ago was trotted out. At least 18 sounds Jewish.

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Jerusalem's Temple Mount Flap Volume 53 Number 2, March/April 2000
by Kristin M. Romey

http://archive.archaeology.org/0003/new ... /flap.html

Construction at a mosque within Jerusalem's Temple Mount has sparked a fierce controversy between archaeologists, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), and the Israeli government.

According to Jerusalem District archaeologist Jon Seligman, the Waqf, the Muslim religious trust that oversees public works in the religious complex, determined last autumn that an emergency exit in the Marwani Mosque was necessary. (The New York Times had previously reported that construction of the exit was urged by Israeli police.)

Israeli archaeologists were angered at the Waqf's use of bulldozers to reopen a twelfth-century Crusader entrance for use as an emergency exit for the mosque. "It was clear to the IAA that an emergency exit [at the Marwani Mosque] was necessary, but in the best situation, salvage archaeology would have been performed first," Seligman told Archaeology.

On the other hand, that would probably have taken a long time and put lives at risk.

Here is a peculiar plot twist...

According to Seligman and former Jerusalem District archaeologist Gideon Avni, while the material recovered from the Kidron Valley contained pottery sherds dating from the First Temple to the Crusader (twelfth-thirteenth centuries) periods, it was originally unstratified fill and lacked any serious archaeological value. "It's the normal chronological sequence you encounter all over Israel," says Avni.

Not so, claims Zachi Zweig, an archaeology student at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan. Zweig presented some of the artifacts recovered from the Kidron Valley at a conference held at the university. Following the presentation, the anti-theft unit of the IAA asked Zweig to return material recovered from Kidron and sign an affidavit that he had no more material. During an interview with an anti-theft officer, says Seligman, it "became clear" that Zweig had material from other sites...

Responding to a petition filed with the High Court in December by Yehuda Etzion, however, on February 2 the IAA gave the court a list of recovered artifacts.

Etzion, once jailed for plotting to blow up the Dome of the Rock, is the leader of the Chai Vekayam movement, whose mission, according to its literature, includes "the return of Israel to the Temple Mount." "[T]he Temple Mount stands today as a mini Palestinian State within Israel with the support of the Israeli government and its security forces," he wrote in 1997.

I just don't get it, if that stuff hadn't been dumped at Kidron, the various bitching parties would not have jobs excavating it.

Special Media Release: Rare 3,000-Year-Old Seal Discovered within Earth Discarded from Temple Mount https://templemount.wordpress.com/

I wonder if this inspired the Jerusalem Post article. This is a very small seal, Barkay claims similar ones have been found in other areas of Israel -

The discovery of the seal testifies to the administrative activity which took place upon the Temple Mount during those times. All the parallel seals with similar stylistic designs have been found at sites in Israel, among them Tel Beit Shemesh, Tel Gezer, and Tel Rehov, and were dated to the 11th – 10th centuries BCE.

The above quote follows some anti-minimalist verbiage which seems out of place. It's not that clear whether the artifact came from the temple mount,and I'm not sure how significant it is - judging by Barkay's style, my guess not as important as he says.

http://www.rehov.org/Rehov/publications ... -Seals.pdf is a writeup of finds at Tel Rehov.

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Barkay is most famous for being in the right place when the old example of the Priestly_Blessing was discovered.

Ketef_Hinnom

The scrolls were found in 1979 in Chamber 25 of Cave 24 at Ketef Hinnom, during excavations conducted by a team under the supervision of Gabriel Barkay, who was then professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University.[3] The site appeared to be archaeologically sterile (the tomb had last been used for storing rifles during the Ottoman period), but a chance discovery by a 13-year-old "assistant" revealed that a partial collapse of the ceiling long ago had preserved the contents of Chamber 25.[4]

Barkay initially dated the inscriptions to the late-7th/early-6th centuries BCE, but later revised this date downward to the early 6th century on paleographic grounds (the forms of the delicately incised paleo-Hebrew lettering) and on the evidence of the pottery found in the immediate vicinity. This dating was subsequently questioned by Johannes Renz and Wolfgang Rollig,[6] who argued that the script was in too poor a condition to be dated with certainty and that a 3rd/2nd century BCE provenance could not be excluded, especially as the repository, which had been used as a kind of "rubbish bin" for the burial chamber over many centuries, also contained material from the fourth century BCE.

That's got to be cool to find that. I hadn't realized it's dating was so dubious, having myself used a pre-exilic origin of this in a reply to Professor Mouse.

As the wiki points out, the existance of the blessing doesn't imply that the book of numbers existed at that point, although the opposite opinion was also quoted.

Call me too skeptical, but I wouldn't believe a word of what Dr Barkay says without some kind of neutral corroboration. I can imagine why he wants to get in a few punches on the minimalists. Funny that the Jerusalem Post didn't have those standards.

It's interesting that his big success involved a 13 year old,and that now he credits a 10 year old for finding the mini-seal.