Paul Calvert spoke at length with prominent Israeli archaeologist Dr Gabriel Barkay

Gaby Barkay

The Temple Mount, also known in the Bible as Mount Moriah is a religious site in the Old City of Jerusalem. Judaism regards the Temple Mount as the place where God chose the Divine Presence to rest. Among Sunni Muslims, the Mount is widely considered to be the third holiest site in Islam. In light of the dual claims of both Judaism and Islam, it is one of the most contested religious sites in the world.

Dr Gabriel Barkay is a prominent Israeli archaeologist of Hungarian descent, who has played an integral role in the excavation of several major Israeli sites. In 2005, together with archaeologist Zachi Zweig, Barkay established the Temple Mount Antiquities Salvage Operation. Paul Calvert spoke at length with him about the sites history, the damage done to the Temple Mount in the 1990's and present day archaeological finds.

Paul: What is the history of Mount Moriah in Jerusalem?

Dr Barkay: That would be difficult to summarise in a nut shell. The Temple Mount is a high mountain crowning the northern edge of the ancient spur upon which the most ancient part of Jerusalem was built. The ancient core of the city is now outside the Old City of Jerusalem. At the moment the Temple Mount or Mount Moriah has lost its shape as a mountain, so instead of ascending to it we descend to it from most parts of the city. It is also stuck in a corner of the old city of Jerusalem because the nature and outline of the city changed through the generations.

The Temple Mount was the highest peak of the city from the 10th century BC. Approximately 3000 years ago it was the Acropolis of Jerusalem. It had an agglomeration of official structures built by King Solomon. This was crowned by the construction of the temple, built by Solomon and described in the first book of Kings and in the second book of Chronicles in the Bible. That structure of the temple gained increasingly more significance during the time of the Davidic dynasty.

Towards the end of the first temple period, the ideology of the first temple changed. It became the only legitimate place of worship for the Israelites. Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, instead of being the geographical location, it became of theological value. There is no more possibility to be a believer among the Israelites without having Jerusalem; so Jerusalem became a most significant part of Jewish belief from that time on. The Temple Mount was the focus of that belief and is the heart and spirit of the Israelite nation and the Jewish religion.

The first temple stood there approximately 400 years. It was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC; even after its destruction worship went on there as testified by the prophet Jeremiah. In 515, after the Jews were allowed by King Cyrus of Persia to return to their homeland, they re-inaugurated the temple. The second temple was inaugurated on the same spot where the first temple stood. That second building stood there from the 6th Century BC until the 1st century BC, for approximately six centuries. It was then re-built from scratch by King Herod the Great who also changed the Temple Mount and gave it its present day shape. Instead of a mountain we have a flat platform. He put the mountain into a large bottomless shoe box; the walls of the shoe box being retaining walls, behind which there is earth.

The Herodian Temple is referred to more than 20 times in the New Testament and was destroyed in 70 AD by the Romans. Since then Jews are longing for the construction of the third temple and longing for the Temple Mount to occupy its important role again.

Presently the Temple Mount occupies about 1/6th of the area of the Old City of Jerusalem. It's quite a large area; the largest religious compound of the ancient world. It covers an area of 145,000 square meters and is a gigantic area.

The place became a pagan place of worship in the second century when a pagan city by the name of Aelia Capitolina was built in Jerusalem. Then when Christians ruled Jerusalem from the 4th Century it was neglected and all the functions, beliefs and traditions about the Temple Mount were transferred to the Holy Sepulchre. The Holy Sepulchre was built by the Emperor Constantine.

The Temple Mount and Jerusalem were conquered by the Muslims in 638. The army of the Prophet Mohammad, a short time after the prophet's death, was led by Omar Ibn al Khattab. He had some Jewish soldiers in his army who told him about the significance of the place, thus he built a wooden Mosque there. Slightly later after the Orthodox Caliphs of the early Arabic period, we have some of the dynasties of the early Arabic period. Regarding building the Temple Mount, the most important of them was the Ommaya dynasty, which stressed the importance of Jerusalem and they stressed the tradition about Mohammad going up to heaven from Jerusalem. They talked about his night journey from the close mosque in Arabia to the far mosque Al Aqsa. That place was identified with the Temple Mount. At the Temple Mount, Abd al-Malik ibn Mahwan built the Dome of the Rock, which dominates the Temple Mount till this very day. This shows how the temple could dominate Jerusalem.

In antiquity, every picture and map of Jerusalem, every ariel photograph, you are immediately are attracted to the building with a golden dome, which is the Dome of the Rock. The Dome of the Rock was originally built as a replacement of Solomon's temple. The building was not built as a mosque, because the mosque was built by Abd al-Malik's son Al-Walid and that is the Al-Aqsa Mosque standing near by.

Jerusalem was named by the Arabs in the beginning as 'BeT el-MaKDeS', which means place of the temple. Jerusalem's temple was very significant. The literature which is named in praise of Jerusalem focuses on Jerusalem being the place of the temple. The existence of the two major edifices upon the Temple Mount, both the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque has characterised the Temple Mount for Centuries. From the early Arabic period, Ommaya dynasty's time, through the later dynasty's until the Crusaders and even after the Crusaders in the Mamlook, Turkish Ottoman, British, Jordanian and Israeli rule until the 90's.

In the 90's as a result of the deplorable Oslo accords and the negotiations between Israeli authorities and Yasser Arafat, the Temple Mount changed its status. Instead of two edifices, the Muslims on the Temple Mount made changes. The Islamic religious trust, the Waqf, which is in charge of daily matters on the Temple Mount feared that Israeli's may have some claim and sovereignty to the Temple Mount so they began digging like mad and changing the status of the Temple Mount and today instead of two major edifices, we already have four mosques there.