Excavations at the Temple Mount
The compound itself has only very rarely been the object of archaeological work, unlike the area surrounding it, which has been quite intensively excavated, especially along the southern and western walls.
[4] During the 1930s, repairs being made to the al-Aqsa mosque enabled Robert Hamilton to examine parts of the structure usually hidden, including below the floor.
[6] Beginning in 1968, Israeli archaeologists began excavations at the foot of the Temple Mount, immediately south of the al-Aqsa Mosque, uncovering Roman, Umayyad and Crusader remains.
Amayreh further claimed that in March 1984, the Archaeological Department of the Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs dug a tunnel near the western portion of the mosque, endangering the Islamic "Majlis" or council building.
Later, Prof. Oleg Grabar of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton replaced Leon Pressouyre as the UNESCO envoy to investigate the Israeli allegations that antiquities are being destroyed by the Waqf on the Temple Mount.
[13] Initially, Grabar was denied access to the buildings by Israel for over a year, allegedly due to the threat of violence resulting from the al-Aqsa Intifada.
After the Six-Day War, the Ministry of Religious Affairs of Israel began the excavations aimed at exposing the continuation of the Western Wall.
The tunnel exposes a total length of 500 m (a third of a mile) of the wall, revealing the methods of construction and the various activities in the vicinity of the Temple Mount.
[17] In 1996 the Waqf began unauthorized construction in the structures known since Crusader times as Solomon's Stables, and in the Eastern Hulda Triple Gate passageway, allowing the area to be (re)opened as a prayer space called the Marwani Musalla, capable of accommodating 7,000 people.
He ordered a halt to the construction, on grounds of archaeological damage, defying an Israeli government decision to allow excavations at the site.
[22][clarification needed] It is believed that on February 14, 2004, days after the earthquake, a winter storm destroyed the stone walkway leading from the Western Wall plaza to the Mughrabi Gate on the Temple Mount.
[23][24] Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) condemned the "excavations carried out by the Israeli occupying authorities under the Aqsa Mosque" which they claimed caused the collapse of the path.
[25] In March 2005, the word "Allah" in foot-tall Arabic script was found newly carved into the ancient stones of the Temple Mount, about thirty feet off the ground.
[26] After a landslide in 2004 left the earthen ramp leading to the politically sensitive access point known as the Mughrabi Gate unsafe and in danger of collapse, the Israel Antiquities Authority started work on the construction of a temporary wooden pedestrian pathway to the Temple Mount.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia called on the international community to stop the dig: "Israel's actions violate the mosque's sacred nature and risk destroying its religious and Islamic features.
"[32] Malaysia condemned Israel for the excavation works around and beneath the Al-Aqsa Mosque and for willfully destroying religious, cultural and heritage sites.
[34] The secretary-general of the 57-member Organisation of the Islamic Conference, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, expressed his anguish and dismay at the world's silence on Israel's "blatant moves to Judaize Jerusalem and change the holy city's historic character."
[37] A March 2007 UNESCO report on the incident[38] cleared the Israeli team of wrongdoing, saying that the excavations "concern areas external to the Western Wall and are limited to the surface of the pathway and its northern side ... [N]o work is being conducted inside the Haram es-Sharif, nor may the nature of the works underway be reported, at this stage, as constituting a threat to the stability of the Western Wall and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
[39][40] In July 2007 the Waqf began digging a 400-metre-long, 1.5-metre-deep trench from the northern side of the Temple Mount compound to the Dome of the Rock[41] in order to replace 40-year-old[42] electric cables in the area.
Israeli Archaeologist Eilat Mazar said: "There is disappointment at the turning of a blind eye and the ongoing contempt for the tremendous archaeological importance of the Temple Mount ...",[41] "...
[44] He maintains that "some man-worked stones have been found in the trench ... as well as remnants of a wall that, according to all our estimations, are from a structure in one of the outer courtyards in the Holy Temple.
"[citation needed] Archaeologist Zachi Zweig said a tractor used to dig the trench damaged the foundation of a 7-yard-wide wall "that might have been a remnant of the Second Temple.
"[42] Yusuf Natsheh of the Islamic Waqf dismissed the claims, saying "the area has been dug many times" and argued that "remains unearthed would be from the 16th or 17th century Ottoman period".
[47] By comparing the photographs to Hamilton's excavation report, Di Cesare determined that they belong to the second phase of mosque construction in the Umayyad period.
[49] Exploration The Temple Mount Sifting Project is an archaeological project started in 2005 with the goal of recovering archaeological artifacts from the 300 truckloads of soil removed by the Islamic Religious Trust (Waqf) from the Temple Mount compound's southeast area (sometimes called Solomon's Stables) during the 1996-1999 construction of the underground el-Marwani Mosque.
These include stone weights for weighing silver and a First Temple period bulla, or seal impression, containing ancient Hebrew writing, which may have belonged to a well-known family of priests mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah.
In 2001, Rafael Lewis explored this tunnel, and which he conjectured was part of the upper aqueduct system that carried water eastward towards the Temple Mount and that it was probably connected to the cisterns that were under Herod's palace in the Citadel area.
