Archaeologists in Israel have made a discovery that adds to the evidence of a Christian presence on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount prior to the Islamic conquest of the Holy City. They unearthed two Byzantine-era coin weights that could pre-date the Islamic takeover in the 7th century. Islam is generally believed to have started in the year 610.
The weights are believed to be official imperial weights required by 6th-century Byzantine law to be present in major churches. Researchers say that may even indicate a church was on the Temple Mount before the Al-Aqsa Mosque was built there between the 7th and and 8th centuries.
The Times Of Israel reports that while Jews and Christians revere the Temple Mount as the site of the First and Second Biblical Temples, the site is managed by the Jordanian Muslim Waqf. This Islamic authority has vehemently opposed Jews from entering the location and has sought to downplay the relevance of the Temple Mount to Christians as well. A UNESCO resolution on “Occupied Palestine” was passed by primarily Muslim countries in 2016 and refers to Jerusalem’s holy sites’ Muslim names only.
The recently discovered weights were found by researchers working on the Temple Mount Sifting Project established in 2004. The project is sifting through tonnes of rubble removed from the Temple Mount by the Muslim Waqf in 1999 in the hopes of discovering ancient historical artifacts.
One of the weights discovered is made of glass, and the other of brass. Each weighs 0.6 grams. The glass weight has “a haloed Imperial bust above a cross-shaped monogram flanked by two smaller busts.” The weights are believed to have been made in a central official workshop in Constantinople between 550 and 650 AD.
While stressing that it is not at all certain there was ever a Byzantine church on the Temple Mount, an Israeli archaeological coin expert writes that: “We have to weigh the simplest explanation as to why the weights are there, and simple is always the best. The idea of official weights inside a Byzantine church has already been established in the Levant.”
