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Was the Aksa Mosque built over the remains of a Byzantine church?

JPost.com
Nov 16, 2008 23:34 | Updated Nov 17, 2008 10:40
The photo archives of a British archeologist who carried out the only archeological excavation ever undertaken at the Temple Mount's Aksa Mosque show a Byzantine mosaic floor underneath the mosque that was likely the remains of a church or a monastery, an Israeli archeologist said on Sunday.

The Byzantine mosaic floor, which was uncovered under the Umayyad
level of the mosque, is "without a doubt" the remains of a public
building - likely a church - which predated the mosque, [Zachi Zweig]
said in an address at a Bar-Ilan University archeological conference.

"The
existence of a public building from the Byzantine period on the Temple
Mount is very surprising in light of the fact that we do not have
records of such constructions in historical texts," Zweig said.

"We
were very surprised by the discovery of such a mosaic on the Temple
Mount," Talgam said, noting that it contradicted the testimony of
pilgrims who described the site as deserted in the Byzantine period and
was also unlikely to have been part of the earliest mosque at the site,
in the Early Islamic period, since that structure was made of wood.

The excavation was carried out in the 1930s by R.W. Hamilton, director of the British Mandate Antiquities Department, in coordination with the Wakf Islamic Trust that administers the compound, following earthquakes that badly damaged the mosque in 1927 and 1937.
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