Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: archaeology

Showing posts with label archaeology. Show all posts

Friday, January 29, 2021

Ancient cloth with "royal purple" dye mentioned in the Bible discovered

Exodus 25:2-4:

Tell the Israelite people to bring Me gifts; you shall accept gifts for Me from every person whose heart so moves him.

And these are the gifts that you shall accept from them: gold, silver, and copper; blue, purple, and crimson yarns, fine linen, goats’ hair...

This is the first time of many that Hebrew scripture mentions that specific type of purple, known as argaman, clearly an expensive dye that was used in the Mishkan (sanctuary) and the Temple, as well as worn by royalty.

Israeli archaeologists have just announced the discovery of samples of cloth dyed with that specific purple dating to the times of King David and King Solomon.

Researchers from Israel Antiquities Authority, Tel Aviv University, and Bar-Ilan University spent years studying colored woven fibers excavated at Timna in the Negev Desert, the site of King Solomon's famed copper mines. Carbon-14 dating determined that they date from 1,000 BCE, the period in which David and Solomon reigned in Jerusalem. They published their findings on Thursday in the journal PLOS ONE.

The purple color, known as "argaman" in Hebrew and extracted from a type of Mediterranean sea snail at a distance of some 300 km (186 miles) from the Timna Valley in the southern Negev Desert, is mentioned in biblical sources a number of times. However, this is the first time that a Bronze Age woven fiber dyed royal purple has been found in Israel or anywhere else in the region.

The research was carried out by Dr. Naama Sukenik from the Israel Antiquities Authority and Prof. Erez Ben-Yosef, from the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures at Tel Aviv University, in collaboration with Prof. Zohar Amar, Dr. David Iluz and Dr. Alexander Varvak from Bar-Ilan University and Dr. Orit Shamir from the Israel Antiquities Authority.

Sukenik, who curates organic finds at the IAA, described the discovery of the purple cloth fibers as "extremely exciting and important."

"This is the first time that woven material from the time of David and Solomon died in the precious 'argaman' has been discovered. In ancient times, purple clothing was associated with the nobility, the priestly class, and of course, kings. The beautiful color of the argaman, the fact that it does not fade, and the difficulty of producing the dye, which exists in very small quantities in the bodies of the snails, made it the most expensive dye, sometimes costing more than gold.

This discovery has other implications.

One of the researchers was able to reproduce the process needed to create the specific purple dye from three types of Mediterranean snails, each of which only produce one gram of dye. The dye was extraordinarily expensive.

And Haaretz notes that the existence of such expensive clothing in a nomadic area illuminates other Biblical issues:

The good food and elegant clothes found at Timna are all signs of cultural sophistication, that add to the massive size and standardization of the mining operation there and at other copper extraction sites, such as Feynan in nearby Jordan. All of this points to the hand of a strong, centralized kingdom, despite the fact that we don’t have major remains of permanent settlements in the Negev from this period, Ben-Yosef says.

One possible explanation is that by the 11th-10th century B.C.E. the Edomites had managed to create a sophisticated political system and a highly stratified society despite continuing their nomadic or semi-nomadic ways, Ben-Yosef suggests.

The idea that scholars too often dismiss the complexities of ancient nomadic societies because they don’t leave behind massive archaeological remains for us to find is a paradigm that Ben-Yosef has been pushing for a while, including in an article he recently published in Haaretz.

“The use of royal purple is more evidence that nomads could create a strong kingdom with an elite and vast trade ties, contrary to the traditional perception of nomadic societies as simple and isolated,” he says. “They would manifest power and wealth not by building walls and palaces but by obtaining exquisite artifacts that were mobile like they were.”

While archaeological evidence of a sedentary Edomite polity only dates back to around 8th century B.C.E., Ben-Yosef’s theory, if correct, would jive with the Bible’s assertion (Genesis 36:31) that such a kingdom existed already before the time of King David, that is, in the 11th-10th century B.C.E.

The archaeologist has suggested that this paradigm shift should apply not only to the Edomites but also to the Israelites and the longstanding debate among scholars over the historicity of the great united monarchy of Israel and Judah under David and Solomon. Most experts today argue that there is no archaeological evidence in Jerusalem or its environs pointing to the existence of a great, centralized kingdom as described in the Old Testament. Just as for the Edomites, the architectural hallmarks of political grandeur appear only in the subsequent centuries. So, this line of thought argues, David and Solomon would have been at best small local chieftains who were aggrandized by the Bible, which was put in writing centuries after these legendary rulers lived. However, Ben-Yosef counters, we should at least take into account the possibility that David’s kingdom did exist but was based on a still largely nomadic population, just like Edom apparently was, which would inevitably leave behind little tangible evidence.

At the very least, the newly discovered luxurious textiles at Timna show that the biblical descriptions of royal purple being used by the elites of the Israelites and their neighbors already in the time of King David are not an anachronism inserted by later authors projecting their own traditions back into the past, Ben-Yosef notes.

You have to admit, it is a pretty color.

One of the world's most ancient mosques found by an Israeli Jew. (So much for politicizing archaeology.)

It is accepted as a truism among the anti-Israel left that Israel uses archaeology as a political tool, to cement claims of Jews to the Land of Israel and to ignore (or even destroy) anything that shows Muslim ties to the land.

The only problem is that the facts don't support that claim.

Israeli archaeologists not only eagerly find Muslim sites, but Israel preserves them - even when they are near Jewish historic sites.

Here's a new example of one of the world's oldest mosques, just discovered by a Jewish archaeologist from Hebrew University:

When Islam started to spread in the seventh century, mosques were built across the Middle East, and many have endured to this day as holy places and pilgrimage sites; the most famous are in Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, Cairo and Basra. Now it looks like Tiberias in northern Israel may be joining the list – excavations in recent years have uncovered an older layer of the city’s ancient mosque.

Katia Cytryn-Silverman of the Hebrew University, who is overseeing the dig, says this is the oldest mosque in the world that can be excavated; most ancient mosques are still being used for their original purpose.

The Al-Juma (Friday) Mosque is in the south of Tiberias at the foot of Mount Berenice; the city itself is on the shore of the Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee. Before Cytryn-Silverman began excavating there 11 years ago, scholars believed that the structure at the center of the site was a marketplace from the Byzantine period. Cytryn-Silverman discovered that it was a mosque from the eighth century in the early Islamic period.

But findings in recent years have shown that under this structure is an even older mosque, dating to the seventh century. Cytryn-Silverman notes that there aren’t many chances to excavate ancient mosques because, in most cases, other mosques were later built on top of them. Such is the case with the mosque in Fustat, currently part of old Cairo and Egypt's first capital under Muslim rule.

Israelis have found and preserved some of the most important Islamic archaeological sites. And that fat simply doesn't fit the lies of the haters.

(h/t Yoel)

A Chanukah-era Jewish olive oil stamp

In 2006, archaeologists discovered an industrial olive oil press in a cave near Alonei Abba in the north of Israel.

It was dated to between the 4th and1st centuries BCE, which would mean it was about the same time as the Maccabees.

On the floor of the cave they saw a stone seal, with a fairly crudely drawn image of a bird and a branch.

That seal remains a mystery.

A paper written some years later determines that it is likely to be of Jewish origin and portraying a dove and an olive branch, a popular motif and one that is known from the Flood story.

The most likely explanation seems to be that this was meant to be a seal for use in identifying olive oil jugs to be unadulterated - scammers would try to dilute olive oil with vinegar and the seal could be some sort of certification. It doesn't seem likely that this seal would certify that the oil is the pure olive oil for use in the Temple, though.

This seal and the olive oil press shows the importance of olive oil to Jews in Israel thousands of years ago. The Chanukah story itself centers on olive oil, after all.

Palestinians have tried to make it appear that they are the ones who have been harvesting olives for thousands of years. Yet there are plenty of olive oil presses from the Canaanite, Jewish and Byzantine periods that pre-date the Muslim period. And olive oil was no less important to them.

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Metropolitan Museum of Art calls tefillin “an Egyptian amulet”

This is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art webpage showing its collections:

This object is obviously tefillin shel rosh, called “phylacteries” in the New Testament, that Jewish men wear for prayer every day (and in the times of the Talmud, all day.)

It is sort of amazing that tefillin could be categorized in the museum as Islamic era amulet since 1962 with no one recognizing it.

This tefillin shel rosh looks startlingly modern with even the four-branched Shin on the side.

While tefillin shel rosh seem to have been cube shaped since at least the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are conical tefillin shel yad in the Cairo Geniza and cylindrical tefillin shel yad as late as a 1725 engraving by a French/Dutch artist Bernard Picart, as well as tefillin shel yad shaped like an arch in (seemingly) the 19th century.

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz says that the Talmudic prescription that tefillin shel yad must be square only refers to the base, not the box, as is the case with all of these.

Jordan still nervous Jews will take it over - so it denies ANY Jewish history there

Rai al Youm has a paranoid article about how Jews want to take over Jordan.

On Sunday, Jordan struck down a bill that would have theoretically allowed foreigners to purchase land in Petra. Jordanians are deathly scared that Jews will buy land there and somehow transfer it to Israel.

The author, Ahmed Abdul Basit Rajoub, mentions the filming of "Jaber" that was shut down last year because Jirdan found out that the movie implied a Jewish history in Petra. It mentions that Jews visit the mountain said to be the burial site of the biblical Aaron, and how terrible that is.

Rajoub argues that there is no evidence that the Children of Israel were ever in Jordan. In fact, the ancient Jews were nobodies:

Most historians in archaeology and anthropology tend to believe that the ancient Jews in the East are Arab tribes that were Judaized. They were pastoral, and practiced usury and the profession of mercenaries due to their particular social situation. They did not know stability, agriculture, city building, or fortresses. ...

We are facing a wicked enemy. We must pay attention to every movement he makes, not only in the political field that relates to the Palestinian issue, but rather in the religious, cultural, touristic, etc. areas from which he crept to consolidate his allegations, his lies, to implement his plans.

Indeed, Jordan's archaeological sites regularly erase any Jewish connection out of their paranoia and hate.

One of the less traveled tourist sites there is Machaerus, a fortress originally built by the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus around 90 BCE, destroyed but later rebuilt by Herod the Great in 30 BC as a military base.

This is the sort of thing that Jordan doesn't want the world to know.

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Egypt loves Jews - the ones who are long gone, that is

Today, among much pomp, Egypt is opening the restored Eliyahu Hanavi synagogue in Alexandria that fell into disrepair.

The Egyptian government spent some $4 million for the restoration.

No Israeli officials are allowed at today's ceremony, although supposedly they will be allowed to hold a separate ceremony later this year. (Odds are it will be mysteriously canceled for some very valid sounding reason.)

Alexandria once had some 40,000 Jews. Now it has virtually none.

Egyptian archaeologist Dr. Zahi Hawass, who used to be minister for antiquities affairs, said that he is very happy with the work of the restoration of the synagogue in Alexandria, adding that when he took over the responsibility of that department in 2002 Egyptian synagogues were neglected and very damaged "but we repaired them because they are part of the history of this country."

He said that Egyptian Jews are part of the Egyptians, just like the Egyptian Christians and Egyptian Muslims, and stressed that the Jewish temples in Egypt must be preserved, and the Jews' heritage and civilization must be preserved because it is part of the Egyptians who lived there.

What Hawass doesn't mention is how he reacted to the news that some Jews had actually celebrated and worshipped at the re-opening of the Rambam synagogue in Cairo in 2010. He said then that the synagogue will not be handed over to the Jewish community in Egypt in any way, that no Jew will be allowed to pray there, nor will he allow any Israeli to pray there.

For Egypt, the money spent on synagogue restoration is to make Egypt look like a multicultural country and to attract tourists. But to actually allow Jews to pray in these once-bustling synagogues? Not a chance.

Eliyahu Hanavi looks beautiful. It has a rich history back to the 13th century, rebuilt in the 19th. But it is a museum, not a synagogue.

And Egypt likes it that way.

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Tour Egypt with an antisemite!

Time Magazine, and probably plenty others, have been featuring this full page add to take a tour of Egypt with an all star list of guides - including famed Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass.

What they don't mention is that Hawass is an antisemite.

In 2009, he said, "For 18 centuries, [the Jews] were dispersed throughout the world. They went to America and took control of its economy. They have a plan. Although they are few in number, they control the entire world."

He once wrote an article where he wrote, "The concept of killing women, children and elderly people... seems to run in the blood of the Jews of Palestine" and that "the only thing that the Jews have learned from history is methods of tyranny and torment - so much so that they have become artists in this field."

Does his hatred of Jews affect his archaeology? I don't know, but supporting a known antisemite is itself problematic.

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Gaza "scholar" says every single Jewish artifact ever found on the Temple Mount is forged, and claims major museums agree with him

The head of the Department of History and Archaeology at the Islamic University of Gaza, Dr. Ghassan Weshah, has stated that there is no evidence whatsoever of any Jewish presence in the region, ever.

The fact that the Quran itself admits that Jews lived there seems not to bother him.

Weshah says that there is no evidence that there was any building under the Temple Mount, and as evidence he mentions that the Marwani Mosque in the southeast corner, which was built after excavations in the area known as "Solomon's Stables," did not see any evidence of a structure. Of course, the Temple Mount Sifting Project has been going through the many tons of dirt illegally dug out to create that mosque and has found many artifacts of Jewish life in the area.

The most outrageous claim from this academic - who has published a couple of papers about archaeology in Muslim periods in Gaza - is this one:

He pointed out that no matter how the Zionists tried to falsify some of the artifacts and claim that they prove their presence in Palestine, the largest and most famous museums in the world discovered the falsification by the occupation of these pieces and refused to exhibit any artifact coming from the occupation state to display in international museums because they are forged.

This statement alone should be enough to stop any academic journal from ever publishing anything from this fraud.

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Palestinian historian who denies Jewish connection to Jerusalem pretty much admits Palestinian identity didn't exist before 1967

In June, Nazmi Al Jubeh, Associate Professor of History and Archaeology, Birzeit University, told a UN conference in Geneva that there was no scientific evidence linking Jews to Jerusalem.

This is the state of Palestinian academia.

But I found another article of Jubeh's apparently from 2006 where he discusses Palestinian identity, and while he insists it is a real thing, his supporting evidence says otherwise.

Excerpts:

The Palestinian people are not different from other Greater Syrian (Bilad al-Sham) peoples. They are the result of accumulated ethnic, racial, and religious groups, who once lived, conquered, occupied, and passed through this strip of land. Wars and invasions have never totally replaced the local population in any period of history; they rather added to, mixed with and reformulated the local identity. The Palestinian people are the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Jabousites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Aramaeans, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Turks, the Crusaders, and the Kurds, who once settled, conquered, occupied or just passed through Palestine.

The question is whether Palestinians could reflect their identity in a different manner than they do now. I think the answer is yes. The artificial division of Greater Syria was imposed on the people. If there had been no Sykes-Picot Agreement, I am not sure that the Palestinian people would have chosen an independent state as a container of their identity. ...The idea of an independent Palestinian state was raised quite recently; as a matter of fact, the Palestinian national movement continued to market the conflict as an “Arab-Israeli” one and not as a “Palestinian-Israeli” one. The idea of the Palestinian independent state was raised in 1973 in the aftermath of the October War and specific international, regional, and national political developments; in 1974 the idea became the vehicle of the political program of the PLO. Since then and until now (I do not know for how long) Palestinian life has been completely organized according to it.

With the establishment of the PLO and the different resistance organizations, mainly in the 1960s, Palestinian identity went through an intensive politicization process. The PLO exceeded its national and regional importance, reaching wider circles all over the world. With the PLO, the Palestinian identity became “revolutionary” or at least designated as such. The Palestinian became a young man/woman wearing the kufiyya and carrying a machine gun. The PLO faced a complicated challenge, namely how to unify a nation and to develop a shared identity for people(s) living under different political regimes and living in different socio-economic contexts, Jordanian, Egyptian, Israeli, in addition to the regional and international diasporas. The PLO actually implemented different political, cultural, and social programs and worked very hard to strengthen, shape, reshape and develop a national identity, vis-à-vis an Arab identity, with the aim of creating a fighting nation seeking freedom. This, in the mid-sixties, was a dreamed approach, but it led to very tangible results. The shared political aspiration, which was not easy to maintain and to gather people around it, was efficiently used. This aspiration became the major vehicle in forming the current “Palestinian identity”. ...This hard work also led to recognition of the Palestinian people, first by the Arabs and then, slowly, by the rest of the international community.

Even though other parts of his essay claims otherwise, he's pretty much admitting that there was no Palestinian people - either self-identified of externally-recognized - until the 1970s, when the PLO effectively created them. And his description of Palestinian identity before the 1960s does not indicate anything unique or different about them compared to the larger Arab identity of the region. Bu his watered down criteria, Palestinian identity is no more specific than "Delaware identity" would be - a bunch of people who happen to live in a region but share no other unique characteristics.

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Jordanian "experts" recommend demolishing Aaron's shrine because too many Jews are visiting

From Ammon News:

An expert in ecotourism and natural and cultural heritage, Professor Ahmad Al-Malaabeh said in a lecture held by the Al-Hayat Party entitled "Mount Haroun [Aaron], the myth of the alleged tomb and the purpose of building the Mamluk Mosque", said that there is no evidence that Prophet Aaron was buried in it.

He pointed out that there are attempts to Judaize the site through the visit of the Jews to the site, such as the last visit of 320 Jews to the Mamluk Mosque in Mount Haroun.

He pointed to the absence of any archaeological or historical evidence that the Prophet Aaron was buried in the region, especially as the crossing of the Israelites was from Egypt towards the south and not north.

He stressed that no ancient Hebrew inscription in the area dating back to the 16th or 15th century BC has been discovered, and that Jews are trying to falsify history by placing Hebrew coins and newly manufactured copies of the Torah as archaeological artifacts in the region to support their claims and lies.

He cited research carried out by Jewish archaeologists, including the father of the world famous archaeologist Professor Israel Finkelstein, who works at the University of Tel Aviv and five other scientists, in which they denied the relationship of Jews with the region and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and refuted biblical texts claiming that there was any connection.

After losing the Sinai, where one of the shrines they claim belonged to the prophet Aaron, the Jews returned to try to establish their relationship with Wadi Musa and the so-called Aaron shrine.

He explained that the rituals practiced by Jews at the site, including blowing in the horn of the ram was used by Jews historically to declare war and intimidate the tribes.

He warned against Zionist propaganda trying to market Petra and the site of the Mamluk mosque as Jewish sites.

The Secretary-General of the Party of Life, Dr. Abdul Fattah al-Kilani has pointed in his welcoming speech, to the Zionist ambitions that extend from the Euphrates to the Nile.

For his part, Director of Dialogue Zahir Amr pointed to the need to pay attention to archeology by disproving the Zionist narrative and proving the Arab-Islamic narrative.

During the lecture, there was a dialogue in which speakers linked the visit of the last Jewish group to the attempt to impose the deal of the century.

They considered that the demolition of the tomb as the best response to the attempt to Judaize the site.

He is correct that there is little evidence that Aaron is actually buried at the site. And that ancient Hebrews used to blow the shofar before a war.

Everything else is pretty much fiction.

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Al Jazeera archaeologist implies Palestinians have been around for 100,000 years

A couple of weeks ago, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced a major find of an entire city from 9,000 years ago near Jerusalem.

Since the city pre-dates Biblical times, it is obvious that this was not a dig that discovered any Jewish objects.

I made a humorous tweet about how Israel, which according to academic and professional Israel-hater Nadia Abu el-Haj uses archaeology to only pretend to discover ancient Judean and Israelite finds and which ignores all other archaeology, must have made a mistake by publicizing this find.

But...I was told that the Israel Antiquities Authority didn't bother exposing any archaeology that wasn't Jewish! There have been entire books written with that thesis! pic.twitter.com/zWi8c5kbBH
— Elder Of Ziyon ҉ (@elderofziyon) July 16, 2019

Now an Arab site has turned this story around, claiming that Israeli archaeologists are super embarrassed by these findings, which show that people lived in the region before the Jews.

This isn't exactly a revelation to those with a passing knowledge of the Bible.

Archaeologist Abeer Ziad of Al Jazeera looked at the site and - wow - discovered that it was quite old, and she is claiming that the Neolithic people who lived there were, of course, "Palestinians!"

The article says:

She considered this to be evidence that Palestinians had inhabited the area for thousands of years, which refuted Zionist claims that the Jewish people were indigenous.

She explained that there are remnants in Palestine "dating back to a hundred thousand years ago, and this new discovery is evidence of the existence of civilizations and cultures and successive people who preceded the Jewish presence - if proven - by a long time."

Unfortunately for Ziad, those civilizations all disappeared, and the oldest remaining people is indeed the Jews. Which is exactly why Palestinians claim to simultaneously be Arabs and Canaanites or Jebusites when the topic is Jerusalem (not Girgashites or Hittites, for some reason.)

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Saeb Erekat calls archaeology fake and says Jewish history is a lie

From Times of Israel:

A senior Palestinian official Monday condemned the participation of US envoys in the unveiling of an archaeological site in East Jerusalem and scoffed at the “fake” account of Jewish history attributed to the subterranean road.

Saeb Erekat said he believed the tunnel was a project being used by Israeli right-wingers to further Israel’s claim on East Jerusalem and advance settlement growth there.

“It has nothing to do with religion, it is fake,” he told journalists at his office in Ramallah in the West Bank.

He cited reports by two Israeli NGOs questioning the archaeological methods used.

One of the organizations, Peace Now, also says cracks emerged in multiple houses in Silwan after the digging began.

Erekat said: “It’s a settlement project. It’s based on a lie that has nothing to do with history."

This is a person regarded as a "moderate." This is a person that was a lead negotiator for, ahem, "peace."

And this is a person who is actually more reasonable than most other Palestinian leaders!

"Questioning archaeological methods" does not mean that the road discovered that leads up to the Temple Mount is not real. It was clearly used by hundreds of thousands of Jewish pilgrims to visit the Second Temple. No archaeologist in the world denies this.

But Saeb Erekat does.

Which means that (yet again) Erekat is proven to be a liar. You literally cannot believe a word he says.

The Western media, unfortunately, doesn't hold him to the same standards that any Western politician would be held to when they are shown to be knowingly lying. On the contrary, they are eager to interview him. The Forward published an op-ed from this liar just this week (claiming that the US supports "Greater Israel" based on the Bahrain workshop that didn't talk about politics or borders at all.)

A number of years ago, Erekat issued a quote referring to Israel's prime minister, with a saying I never heard and couldn't find anywhere else. Perhaps it is an Arabic saying, but it is clearly Saeb Erakat's personal motto:

“There’s a saying that if you don’t stop a man who is lying after 24 hours, the lies turn into facts."

Who can stop Erekat's lies? Only the media and politicians, but they refuse to. He has been proven a liar too many times to count - claiming a "massacre" in Jenin*, claiming that Israel killed nearly 12,000 civilians in Gaza in 2014, claiming his family was in "Palestine" for 9000 years, on and on.

That's how his lies become facts.

______________
*Electronic Intifada published a letter in the Economist in 2002 claiming that Erekat never used the word "massacre" in describing Jenin. Yet the Irish Times quoted him directly:

"How many civilians must be killed to speak of a massacre?" asked Mr Erakat. "The Israeli massacre in Jenin's refugee camp clearly happened and this is a war crime and crimes against humanity also took place".
Mr Erakat had accused Israel during the battle of killing up to 500 people in Jenin, a figure the UN report dismissed, saying 52 Palestinians and 23 Israeli soldiers died in the fighting.
"The UN should have used the word "massacre" or "war crime", especially because the Jenin's camp is managed by the UN," Erakat said.

He also used that word on CNN.

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Arabs continue to claim that there is no evidence of Jewish history in Jerusalem

One of the more outlandish lies that one sees often in Arab media is the claim that there is no hint of Jewish history in Jerusalem, and the ties between Jews and Jerusalem are all of recent vintage and false.

I've seen many articles, including one today from AlGhad.tv, that say as a fact that Israeli archaeologists have never found a single stone in Jerusalem that testifies to an ancient Jewish city there.

Jewish archaeologists unanimously agree that there is no Jewish impact in Jerusalem, despite the years spent by the Israeli occupation authorities in searching for Jewish monuments in the city, through excavations on the outskirts of the city, to prove their Jewishness....The results of the excavations that took place in Jerusalem since 1964 until today, confirmed the facts that all historical and archaeological sites are of churches, mosques, houses, schools, monasteries...No trace of the reign of David or Solomon or the kings of the children of Israel can be found within the walls of Jerusalem.

This theme has been around for a while. In 2016, in the official Palestinian Authority newspaper, a columnist wrote:

All of their news is a crime or lies... I challenge them daily to bring me one Jewish archaeological remnant from Jerusalem, or to show us a rock from the alleged Temple.

The irony is that they say this in context of Jews fabricating history.

Even Yasir Arafat claimed at Camp David that the Jewish Temples were not in Jerusalem, but in Nablus.

Even the Arabs know they are lying. Plenty of Muslim literature before 1967 freely admits the existence of Jewish Temples in Jerusalem.

There is not a single Israeli archaeologist who doubts that the two Jewish Temples were in Jerusalem, even the ones who say that the Kingdom of David was much smaller than the Bible says. From Haaretz in 2015:

Was there once a great Jewish temple on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount? Yes. Does any scholar genuinely doubt there was? No, say archaeologists who have spent their lives studying Jerusalem. "I feel stupid even having to comment on it," says Dr. Yuval Baruch, a leading Israeli archaeologist who has studied Jerusalem throughout his career. "Demanding proof that the Temples stood on the Mount is like demanding proof that the ancient stone walls surrounding Jerusalem, which stand to this day, were the ancient stone walls surrounding Jerusalem," he adds.

As Prof. Israel Finkelstein, a world-renowned expert on Jerusalem archaeology, spells out in an email to Haaretz, "There is no scholarly school of thought that doubts the existence of the First Temple."
Concrete finds definitively from the Temple exist in abundance, says Bar-Ilan University Prof. Gabriel Barkay, an archaeologist who has spent many years working in Jerusalem, and the area of Temple Mount in particular.

"Two copies of inscriptions prohibiting the entry of nonbelievers to the Temple have been found on Temple Mount, which Josephus wrote about. These inscriptions were on the dividing wall that surrounded the Second Temple, which prevented non-Jews from accessing the interior of the [Temple] courtyard," Barkay says, adding that both were written in ancient Greek. The "warning" stone, which is at the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, warns non-Jews of the perils of entering the sacred Temple. There were additional, similar inscriptions in Latin, he says.

Another inscription in stone, "To the trumpeting place," was found in 1968 at the southwest corner of Temple Mount. "It is known that trumpets were blown at the corners of Temple Mount, to declare the advent of Shabbat and other dates," Barkay explains. Josephus, the ancient historian of ephemeral loyalties, explains that it was customary for a Temple priest to "stand and to give notice, by sound of trumpet, in the afternoon of the approach, and on the following evening of the close, of every seventh day." The stone is now at the Israel Museum.

Further concrete evidence attests to Jerusalem’s uniqueness in religious observance. "The ancient city of Jerusalem at the time of the First Temple was clearly a hub of ritual worship," says Baruch, who heads the Israel Antiquities Authority’s Jerusalem district. "The hundreds of mikvehs [ritual purification baths] found around the Temple Mount compound and Jewish artifacts made of stone found there show that until the Temple's destruction, at least, Jerusalem was an 'ir mikdash' [holy city], where what matters is the house of worship. Athens and Olympia were like that, too."

A relatively recent addition to this lie is the idea that the ancient Jews didn't go to Israel, but to Yemen, which is really the land that they conquered, and that their Jerusalem is there.

It doesn't take an expert psychologist to understand that the Arabs feel they must deny Jewish history in order to deny Jewish rights to Israel. Truth is not important; only the narrative is.

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Fatah proud of a mosque that was built to destroy priceless Jewish artifacts

The Fatah Facebook page published this photo:

It says it is a picture of mosque under southeast of the Temple Mount.

This appears to be part of the Marwani Mosque.

It is clear that the tunnel under the Mount was ancient, but the contents were scooped out in the 1990s by bulldozers, eradicating hundreds of tons of priceless archaeological data that showed a Jewish presence on the Mount that pre-dates Islam by over a thousand years.

The mountains of dirt and debris are still being sifted through to save whatever can be after this crime, the biggest crime against archaeology in history.

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Amazing Biblical archaeological finds in City of David

From Times of Israel:

Two minuscule 2,600-year-old inscriptions recently uncovered in the City of David’s Givati Parking Lot excavation are vastly enlarging the understanding of ancient Jerusalem in the late 8th century.

The two inscriptions, in paleo-Hebrew writing, were found separately in a large First Temple structure within the span of a few weeks by long-term team members Ayyala Rodan and Sveta Pnik.

One is a bluish agate stone seal “(belonging) to Ikkar son of Matanyahu” (LeIkkar Ben Matanyahu). The other is a clay seal impression, “(belonging) to Nathan-Melech, Servant of the King” (LeNathan-Melech Eved HaMelech).

This burnt clay impression is the first archaeological evidence of the biblical name Nathan-Melech.

The inscriptions are “not just another discovery,” said archaeologist Dr. Yiftah Shalev of the Israel Antiquities Authority. Rather, they “paint a much larger picture of the era in Jerusalem.”

According to Shalev, while both discoveries are of immense scholarly value as inscriptions, their primary value is their archaeological context.

“What is importance is not just that they were found in Jerusalem, but [that they were found] inside their true archaeological context,” Shalev told The Times of Israel. Many other seals and seal impressions have been sold on the antiquities market without any thought to provenance.

This in situ find, said Shalev, serves to “connect between the artifact and the actual physical era it was found in” — a large, two-story First Temple structure that dig archaeologists have pegged as an administrative center.\

This video shows much more:

The name of Nathan Melech as a high officer of the kingdom is found in in 2 Kings Chapter 23.

First Temple-era finds that confirm Biblical accounts are rare but not unheard of. Still, Arabs will often pretend that there is no archaeological evidence of an ancient Jewish kingdom in Israel, and the Givati parking lot and City of David finds show that they are not only lying, but know they are lying.

(h/t Yoel)

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Are there secret new discoveries under the Western Wall?

Palestinian news site Al Hadath says that a private WhatsApp message from an Israeli archaeologist was forwarded to them showing pictures of courses of stone underneath the Western Wall that had been hidden for 1670 years:

The WhatsApp message says that these finds are not yet public and are directly beneath the Western Wall plaza we know of today.

This seems likely to be an extension of the excavations under Wilson's Arch revealed last year that uncovered what appeared to be a Roman theater.

It appears that the message was sent to a group of archaeologists and an Arab was a member of the group; he forwarded it to the deputy chairman of the virulently antisemitic Islamic Movement in Israel, Sheikh Kamal al Khatib, who posted it on his Facebook page.

Al-Khatib warned that these excavations endanger the Al Aqsa Mosque.

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Archaeology be damned! Arabs continue to deny any Jewish connection to the land

Yesterday a dramatic archaeological find was announced:

Archaeologists have uncovered the oldest known instance of the word "Jerusalem" spelled out in full, on an ancient stone carving that was once part of an ancient pottery workshop, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, announced today (Oct. 9).

On earlier inscriptions, Jerusalem was spelled "Yerushalem" or "Shalem," rather than "Yerushalayim" (pronounced Yeh-roo-sha-La-yeem), as it is spelled in Hebrew today.

The carving — which was written in Aramaic and says "Hananiah son of Dodalos from Jerusalem" — dates to the first century A.D., making it about 2,000 years old, according to the IAA.

The evidence of a Jewish nation in the area is one of the best documented facts there is, with hundreds of artifacts and many mentions in contemporaneous writings.

But since that fact is inconvenient to Palestinians, they simply deny it.

Last week the Palestinian site Amad had an entire article by Bakr Abu Bakr claiming that the Land of Israel was never in what became known as Palestine.

The article says that "there is no connection between the myths and legends of the Torah - written hundreds of years ago - and the names of cities, villages, valleys and mountains in Palestine."

He says that Israeli archaeologists like Israel Finkelstein and Ze'ev Herzog show that there was no Jewish nation. Of course, they make no such claims - they just say that the Biblical accounts of the nation are not accurate, but they do not deny the existence of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel.

Abu Bakr further pushes the absurd theory that all Biblical events occurred in Yemen, not Israel, quoting several Arab "scientists."

Of course, Abu Bakr also claims that today's Jews have nothing to do with the Jews of history and are Khazars. Besides being debunked by history and genetics, this doesn't explain Jews who lived in Arab lands, but no matter.

The Arab denial of basic history and science is not a small thing. They know that they are not the indigenous people of the land, and Jews are the only people in existence today who can make that claim. The fundamental basis of the people claiming Arabs are indigenous - and building their arguments by comparing them to First Peoples worldwide - is completely opposite the truth, and Zionism is not only not colonialist but is a movement for the indigenous people to reclaim their lands.

This is the message that must be obscured by Arabs and their leftist Western friends at all costs.

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Haaretz claims calling Israel the Jewish homeland is a myth

One of the more idiotic articles in an ever more crowded field of such from Haaretz comes from Ofri Ilany, who claims that his problem with the Nation State law is that it is ahistorical - that Israel was never the homeland of the Jews.

The attempt to determine historical truth by means of laws is ridiculous. But what makes it impertinent as well is that this claim is blatantly incorrect – even according to the Bible. As the scholars of Jewish history Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin note in their article “Israel Has No Motherland”: “The biblical story is not one of birth from the land, but of those who always came to the land from elsewhere.”

According to the Bible, the Promised Land was not the homeland of Abraham (who came from Ur of the Chaldees) or of the Israelites (who came from Egypt). It is impossible both to rely on the divine promise to “inherit” the land, and to talk about it as a “homeland.” The contradiction here is clear. The history we are familiar with shows, in addition, that the actual Jewish people, in the form we know it today, was born in the Diaspora and not in the Land of Israel.

Of course, this means that no one on Earth, except perhaps some Africans, have a homeland, since all of humanity migrated from Africa.

And if Israel isn't the homeland for Jews, it sure as hell isn't the homeland for Palestinians!

This is a typical pattern of Israel haters - they will create a set of rules for Israel in order to damn it, and ignore that applying those rules to everyone else would result in chaos.

But wait, there's more:

It’s important to understand that the scientific study of the history of the Levant in the Iron Age treats the term “ancient Israel” with considerable skepticism. Since the 1990s, many scholars have maintained that it would be best to abandon that term altogether, as it refers to an entity that is meaningless in historical terms. For example, the influential biblical scholar Niels Peter Lemche noted in a 2008 article that the kingdom of David and Solomon “nowadays may be considered a fairy kingdom rather than a historical fact.”...

That view is not accepted by all scholars, but in the view of the minimalist school of thought, to which Lemche and Thompson belong, the only reason that “ancient Israel” is still being referenced scientifically is that the evangelical community in the United States and elsewhere is interested in hearing this story.

It turns out, then, that the claim that “Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people” is at best dubious.

Let's cherry pick the opinion of a minority of scholars, ignore anything that contradicts it, and call that truth.

The massive mines from the time of the Biblical Kings that point to a powerful monarchy? The Tel Dan Inscription that mentions David? Let's not talk about them. It doesn't fit the narrative, so therefore it is best left ignored. That's Haaretz-quality research.

Of course, it doesn’t follow from this that the Jews have no historical association with the country, or that the Palestinians have exclusive rights to it. But it’s worth recalling that throughout the history of this land, a broad range of peoples and groups have lived in it: Christians, Samaritans, Greeks, Canaanites and others. Some of them thrived here for periods that are longer than the whole history of Jewish sovereignty. In the Gaza Strip, for example, a Zeus-Dagon cult existed for 300 years, and in Hebron there was a temple devoted to the androgynous embodiment of Hermes.

Maybe in the near future the pagans and the genderqueers will also demand rights to worship in the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

Because the claims of a new group of people are exactly as important as the claims of a people who have existed for thousands of years.

Which is, in fact, the Palestinian argument in a nutshell.

(h/t Yoel)

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Jerusalem's Mufti charges Israel with wanting to destroy Islamic palaces that Israel discovered and protected to begin with

Jerusalem is, as far as I can tell, the only city in history with a "Grand Mufti."

The current person to hold that political position is Sheikh Muhammad Hussein. He was appointed to that position by Mahmoud Abbas and he often makes statements that go completely against the PA's official positions presented to the West, like his fatwa that all of Israel should "liberated."

His incitement continues, as Hussein is now claiming that Israel's archaeological digs in the vicinity of the Temple Mount are really an attempt to destroy and "Judaize" the Umayyad palaces there.

Yet those Umayyad palaces were discovered by Israeli archaeologists in the 1970s. They have been protected by Israel. The only reason the Mufti even knows those palaces ever existed was because Israel values all archaeology, including that which preserves Muslim heritage.

I once wrote about other Umayyad structures, barely visited by tourists, which are still preserved by Israel a short distance from the Temple Mount. If Israel wanted to destroy Islamic heritage in Jerusalem it could have covered those structures up and built something on top of it, an area that is prime real estate by any definition.

The Mufti called on the Arab and Islamic world, all its countries and governments and UNESCO for urgent action and immediate pressure on Israel to "stop the implementation of these schemes, which are fueling tension in the region as a whole."

The Mufti also warned that any damage from an earthquake would be the result of Israeli excavations, setting the stage just in case there is an earthquake. In the past, Palestinian Muslim officials have charged Israel with working to create artificial earthquakes to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque.

He is the one fueling tension. Israel cares more about Islamic heritage than he does. His only wish is to destroy Israel.

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1000+ Musllims take advantage of last day of Ramadan to destroy archaeological treasures on Temple Mount (video)

From the Temple Mount Sifting Project:

A very serious incident occurred in the last few days on the Temple Mount. In the eastern part of the Temple Mount there are mounds of earth from various illegal excavations carried out by the Waqf on the Temple Mount in the early 2000s. An attempt to remove the mounds from the Temple Mount was made in 2004, in coordination with the police and IAA, was forestalled by a petition to the High Court of Justice filed by Committee for the Prevention of Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount. The court ruled that the earth can only be removed under archaeological supervision and with coordination with the Committee.

It should also be noted that according to an internal report written by the Israel Antiquities Authority in 2016, the excavation permit, given to us to which we sift the earth that was removed from the Temple Mount at the end of 1999 and at the beginning of 2004, also applies to these mounds.

For years, the Israel Police has had some success in preventing work in these piles of dirt. In 2013 there was an attempt to evacuate them by truck and tractor on the false grounds that only park waste was removed, but thanks to the media, we were able to stop the works.

Now, under the auspices of the last days of the month of Ramadan, when the Temple Mount is closed to none-Muslim visitors and the police presence is limited, over than a thousand people carried out excavation work, stone clearance and the creation of terraces in these piles of earth!

This is a clear violation of the High Court’s order and shows – this constitutes decade’s worth of regression in the level of enforcement of the antiquities law on the Temple Mount.

The changes in the earth mounds will greatly disrupt the ability to separate the sources of the debris during their eventual evacuation. During the course of such a manual excavation, many archeological artifacts are routinely discovered, but it is highly doubtful that any such items will reach the hands of archaeologists.

This is a huge archaeological crime. But don't expect, say, UNESCO to say a word. Because their job isn't to protect ancient relics but to protect Arabs destroying ancient relics.

(h/t Yoel)

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