Temple Mount Research Articles

Rome's Holy Mountain: The Capitoline Hill in Late Antiquity by Jason Moralee

Reviewed by: Rome's Holy Mountain: The Capitoline Hill in Late Antiquity by Jason Moralee Raymond Van Dam Jason Moralee. Rome's Holy Mountain: The Capitoline Hill in Late Antiquity. Oxford Studies in Late Antiquity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xxv, 278. $74.00. ISBN 978-0-19-049227-4. The symbolic high point of ancient Rome was the Capitoline Hill, crowned with the great Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. In Vergil's Aeneid the hero had been granted a glimpse of the glorious future of the site, "once bristling with woodland thickets, but now golden." For centuries the hill and the temple would represent the power and the eternity of the Roman empire. Then, after the collapse of empire, the challenge of Christianity, and the incessant conflicts among medieval states, it became difficult to conjure up that shiny past. In the fifteenth century the antiquarian Poggio Bracciolini mourned the reversal of fortune for the hill and its monuments, "once golden, but now returned to thickets and brambles." In the past the hill had been a caput, the head of the empire; now, Poggio lamented, it had become, literally, the bottom, spattered with poop (12). Jason Moralee's book about the "Temple Mount" of Rome is another sterling contribution to the recent interest in memory studies among classicists and ancient historians. The coverage of his book stretches from the early Roman Republic to the Renaissance, with an emphasis on late antiquity. Part of his narrative is the physical transformation of the Capitoline Hill, with the construction and deconstruction of buildings, monuments, administrative offices, and residential neighborhoods. But his primary concern is the accompanying cognitive transformation. The hill was not simply a place, but also a hermeneutics, "a way of representing and critiquing the exercise of social power, the morality of rulers, the authority of divine forces, and the failures of the state" (121). The discussion of so many topics and themes is often split among various chapters and therefore sometimes a bit jumbled. One important topic is the significance of processions. In the Republic and the early empire, ascending the hill to sacrifice at the Temple of Jupiter was the culmination of triumphal parades and [End Page 371] ceremonies of investiture: for a moment the victorious emperors were kings of the mountain. By the early fourth century, however, emperors stopped climbing the hill, and in the culture wars between Christians and pagans Constantine would be denounced for abandoning the Capitol. When Christian emperors visited, the routes of their public processions instead included the Church of St. Peter. Another important topic is the transition from temples to churches. In Moralee's evocative summation, "the old temples of the Roman world were like decommissioned nuclear power reactors: they were systematically closed, cleaned up of contaminants, and eventually demolished" (62). Christian apologists were only too happy to classify the earlier destructions of the Temple of Jupiter as examples of "the Christian God's righteous anger" (183). In late antiquity the agents of that divine wrath were barbarians and Greeks. In the mid-fifth century the king of the Vandals sailed away with half of the gilded roof tiles from the temple; in the later sixth century the first church was established on the hill, whose founder Moralee argues to have been Narses, Justinian's general in Italy. By then the Capitoline Hill was becoming a Christian heritage site (102). It was also incorporated into "a new Christian history of the Roman people" (140). According to this alternative perspective, for centuries the ancient gods had been asleep or ineffective. In 390 b.c. only the honking of a goose had saved the hill from being captured by the Gauls; in 410 a.d. the Goths had sacked the city. These disasters confirmed that the most reliable sanctuaries were now the shrines of the apostles Peter and Paul. In this "triumphalist Christian memory culture" (139) the only triumphs worth celebrating on the hill commemorated the victories of saints and martyrs. Already in antiquity remembering the Capitoline Hill and the Temple of Jupiter was a powerful way of rewriting history, and Moralee's book is itself a splendid evocation of this Capitole imaginaire. Another...

The Temple Mount Excavations in Jerusalem, 1968–1978, Directed by Benjamin Mazar, Final Reports, Vol. V: Herodian Architectural Decoration and King Herod’s Royal Portico, written by Orit Peleg-Barkat

The Temple Mount Excavations in Jerusalem, 1968–1978, Directed by Benjamin Mazar, Final Reports, Vol. V: Herodian Architectural Decoration and King Herod’s Royal Portico, written by Orit Peleg-Barkat

Fundacja sanktuarium Kubbat As-Sachra wyrazem pobożności lub polityki kalifa ABD AL-MALIKA IBN MARWANA

At the end of the seventh century Caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan built the sanctuary Qubbat as-Sachra on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It is difficult to explain the reasons for this foundation. Perhaps he wanted to make it a place of hajj. During this time, Mecca was under the occupation of the anti-caliph Ibn Zubair. Another reason could be the desire to commemorate the night journey of the Prophet Muhammad. Available written sources do not clearly explain any of these hypotheses. The location, architecture and decoration suggest that the Caliph built a magnificent monument to the power and glory of Islam.

Temple Mount pilgrimage in the name of human rights: the use of piety practice and liberal discourse to carry out proxy-state conquest

ABSTRACTSince 2010, Jewish pilgrimage to the Temple Mount/Haram ash-Sharif compound has become an increasingly popular practice within Israeli society. On the Temple Mount, pilgrimage guides and their Jewish participants subjectively perform Israeli state sovereignty, carrying out a proxy-state attempt at land annexation through the format of a piety ritual. During pilgrimages, Temple Mount tour guides filter down a new discursive regime to participants, helping them to frame their act of conquest in the language of the liberal state, claiming that Jewish access to the Temple Mount is matter of ‘human rights’ and ‘religious freedom’. Today, Temple Mount pilgrimage is becoming a public ritual of liberal-settler colonial comportment, where Jewish pilgrims act on behalf of the state, laying claim to the Temple Mount by constituting themselves as human rights victims, and strategically inverting the relationship between settler and native. On the Temple Mount, religious piety and liberal ideologies conjoin, supporting forms of settler colonial domination in Israel/Palestine.

A Decade of Archaeological Exploration on the Temple Mount

Recent inspection by the Israel Antiquities Authority has shed light on several issues related to the history of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem:important data has been gathered regarding the character of the rock at the summit of the hill; knowledge of the drainage systems and the cisterns that have served the Temple Mount has been augmented; in several places ancient structures buried beneath layers of soil have been recorded; and several previously concealed architectural elements probably associated with the Second Temple period have been detected.

Subversive Pilgrimages: Barsauma in Jerusalem

In the rich and well-researched annals of late ancient pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the pilgrimage record of Barsauma, a monk who rose to prominence in the middle of the fifth century, revealed a strikingly different model. Barsauma embarked on four pilgrimages, the first undertaken when he was reputedly a child. Barsauma’s road to Jerusalem was paved not with pious activities, but with destruction of non-Christian sanctuaries. Above all, in Jerusalem Barsauma embarked on two prone campaign, one aimed at Eudocia, then resident of the Holy City, the other aimed at uprooting the Jewish past from the most important site associated with Judaism, the Temple Mount. My study provides analytical contextualization of these events against the background of the struggle between Chalcedonian and Monophysite camps.

The Temple Mount in the Teachings of Rabbi Shlomo Goren

Rabbi Shlomo Goren was regarded as a prominent Halachic authority in his time, with a Zionist point of view. Rabbi Goren took an active part in the Six Day War and accompanied the fighting forces to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. The picture of him blowing a shofar by the Western Wall, during the war was published worldwide and is considered one of the central symbols of the war. After the war, Rabbi Goren was a strong advocate of changing the traditional halachic practice of forbidding Jews to ascend to the Temple Mount. He was active in various political and rabbinic activities to that end for the rest of his life.

Gender and the (In)divisibility of Contested Sacred Places: The Case of Women for the Temple

Abstract Contested sacred sites, over which different religious groups assert claims to exclusivity, have drawn scholarly attention to the spatial interaction between religion and politics. However, the gendered dimensions of inter-communal religious-political disputes over sacred space, and women's roles in these site-specific conflicts, have been largely neglected. Using a case study of Orthodox Jewish women's activism for access to Temple Mount al-Haram al-Sharif, this article demonstrates how attention to gender and to women's engagement in inter-communal conflict over sacred places can illuminate unique intra-communal processes that aim to make a contested sacred site increasingly indivisible for parties to the conflict.

Guiding the ‘real’ Temple: The construction of authenticity in heritage sites in a state of absence and distance

This paper discusses the ways in which heritage sites that deal with the memory of the Temple of Jerusalem claim authenticity despite the absence of the Temple and the distance between the location of the site and the original location of the Temple. The paper compares three sites adjacent to the Temple Mount: the Western Wall Heritage Tunnels, the Temple Institute, and the Davidson Center. Each of the sites forms a unique claim of authenticity that is supported by adjusted guided tour performance. The existing literature discusses authenticity as based on emotions or objects that cannot be replaced. This research expands this literature by introducing the concept of potential-based authenticity, authenticity based on future events and authentic objects that can be remade.

The Temple Mount: Israel's Commitment to Preserve the Status Quo

In October 2015, violent clashes erupted on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem among Palestinians, Israeli Arabs, and Jews. United States Secretary of State John Kerry mediated between the parties and c...

The Faunal Evidence from Early Roman Jerusalem: The People behind the Garbage

This is a study of the animal remains from the Early Roman period landfill in the “City of David” ridge, the largest assemblage of fauna published from Jerusalem. The research includes both a zooarchaeological and taphonomical study and has a twofold objective: first, to understand landfill site formation processes and the activities related to it; and second, to examine the social and religious identity of the inhabitants of the different sectors of Jerusalem’s ‘Lower City’. The results are assessed in light of previously investigated contemporaneous faunal assemblages that originated in other parts of the city, as well as from the northern part of the same landfill, which is closer to the Temple Mount. The study demonstrates that garbage was dispatched to the city dump in an organized manner. It identifies the producers of the waste as Jewish. It also establishes that the portion of landfill excavated and published here includes garbage from daily secular activities rather than from cultic endeavours, to differ from previously excavated assemblages from the same landfill, which is composed of refuse originating from ritual pursuits.

Seeing through the Wall

Seeing through the Wall

The Temple Mount in the Teachings of Rabbi Shlomo Goren

Rabbi Shlomo Goren was regarded as a prominent Halachic authority in his time, with a Zionist point of view. Rabbi Goren took an active part in the Six Day War and accompanied the fighting forces to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. The picture of him blowing a shofar by the Western Wall, during the war was published worldwide and is considered one of the central symbols of the war. After the war, Rabbi Goren was a strong advocate of changing the traditional halachic practice of forbidding Jews to ascend to the Temple Mount. He was active in various political and rabbinic activities to that end for the rest of his life.

Williams, Brian Glyn The Crimean Tatars: From Soviet Genocide to Putin's Conquest (review)

SEER, 94, 4, October 2016 764 Williams, Brian Glyn. The Crimean Tatars: From Soviet Genocide to Putin’s Conquest. Hurst & Company, London, 2015. xviii + 217 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £20.00 (paperback). This is a timely book, given the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and subsequent campaign against Crimean Tatar rights. The Kremlin has been promoting the rival idea that ‘Crimea is as sacred to Russia as Jerusalem’s Temple Mount is to Judaism and Islam’, in which the Crimean Tatars may play some role as a ‘native’ people, but only alongside now marginal groups like the Pontic Greeks. Nevertheless, Glyn Williams is not afraid to make bold claims. The first is that the Crimean Tatar Khanate before Russian annexation was an essentially dynastic, even imperial polity. In the nineteenth century there were still substantial differences between three key groups: coastal Yaliboyu, mountain TatsandsteppeNogai.Thereweretwenty-twodialects(p.52).Themodernsense of Crimean Tatar national unity was created by four factors: the homogenizing effects of national activism before 1917 and Soviet rule from 1921 to 1944, the trauma of the Deportation (Sürgünlik) of May 1944 and the experience of exile in Central Asia. The second major claim is just how important Soviet rule was in this process. The national movement had done much of the work before 1917, when both the pan-Turkic ideas of Ismail Gasprinsky and the Young Tatars’ (Genc Tatarlari) idea of ‘island Crimea’ as a natural homeland were widespread. But, as elsewhere in the USSR, Soviet rule developed much of the ideology. Institutions mattered. ‘While the Crimean ASSR [Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic] was not officially an ethnically-based republic on paper […] it had all the hallmarks of a national republic. For all intents and purposes, the Crimea ASSR was, from 1921–1945, established as an unofficial Crimean Tatar republic and the Crimean Tatars were the state-sponsored “native people” (korennoi narod) of this autonomy’ (pp. 59–60), like Dagestan, Nakichevan and NagornoKarabakh . Soviet Crimean Tatar intellectuals helped create ‘a common Crimean Tatar grammar and language based on the central mountain dialect, which was a hybrid Nogai (Kipchak), Tat (Oghuz) language known as the Orta Yolak (Middle Road)’ (p. 75). Paradoxically, given its crucial importance to modern Crimean Tatar nationalism, they also developed the idea that the Crimean Tatars’ ‘roots (koreny) could be traced back’ beyond the thirteenth century Mongol conquest’ (p. 75) to groups like the Kipchaks, Scythians and even the Huns. Glyn Williams goes on to attribute the fall of the ‘national Communist’ Crimean Tatar leader Veli Ibraimov in 1928 to his opposition to the plan to REVIEWS 765 move Soviet Jews to the Crimean steppe and his preference for shifting local Crimean Tatars there instead (p. 82), backed up by ‘“the gradual repartition of Crimean Turks from abroad”’ (p. 79, quoting Edige Kirimal). The third major claim is that, despite this new-found unity, ‘Crimean Tatars are still aware of their original sub ethnic-geographic origins and all can tell you whether they are a Yaila Tat, Yaliboyu Tat or Nogai, their contemporary identities are more profoundly shaped by their exile experiences. Those who lived in Tashkent, for example, consider themselves to be cosmopolitan and talk of this great Central Asian city’s restaurants, efficient subway system, museums and so forth. Those from Samarkand have a certain nostalgia for that city’s chaihanas (traditional tea shops), and longing for the soil which grew “Uzbekistan’s best grapes”’ (p. 150). The Russian occupying authorities have sought to play divide-and-rule; but there is little evidence to date that they have been able to exploit these underlying divisions. The leaders of the mainstream Mejlis have been exiled to ‘continental’ Ukraine. Pro-Russian groups like Qirim (‘Crimea’) and Qirim Birligi (‘Crimea Union’) seem largely to have been created by money, political technology and pressure on vulnerable groups like the few surviving Crimean Tatar businesses to conform. Kyiv has belatedly recognized both the Mejlis and the Crimean Tatars’ ‘rooted’ status after years of relative neglect. The seventieth anniversary of the Deportation in May 2014 was a mooted affair. The troubled history of the Crimean Tatars continues. UCL SSEES Andrew Wilson Clark, Roland. Holy Legionary...

Sura 2: Many Qiblas? The Qibla in the Koran, Abu Lahab, and the Birth of Islam

This paper sets out to investigate the relevant passages in sura 2 of the Koran and to ask whether there might be a reason as to why orientations of mosques changed inside a city’s walls or with additions to mosques. The discoveries in this paper demonstrate that orientations of mosques provide ample archaeological evidence for the evolution of Islam. They have fundamental consequences for the approach to the history of the beginnings of Islam, the Koran, and beyond. Some of the discoveries are as following: 1) The Koran speaks of two qibla changes. 2) The Koran neither commands a change from Jerusalem, nor to Mecca, but instead to Al-Haram in present day Israel (as confirmed with orientations from various mosques). 3) Babylonian Pharisee qiblas show a consistent prayer orientation to the location of the Exilarch (not to the Temple in Jerusalem). 4) The pattern of directing places of worship toward the Exilarch continues through all three mosques of Medina and beyond. 5) For the first time, the Ethiopian kernel of the early Muslim story can be confirmed with archaeology. There may indeed have been two ‘Muslim’ stations in that country: With surprising accuracy and with conversion points from multiple directions, – the Quba Mosque in Medina is precisely oriented toward Axum – the Mosque of the Prophet is precisely oriented toward the Imam Mesgid in Negash. 6) Levite-Sadducee qiblas show a consistent prayer orientation to the location of the Nasi (also not to the Temple Mount). 7) There are many qibla changes that can be attributed to ‘Muslim’ structures. The pattern follows the dynastic paraclete leadership from which follows that each town can reveal its individual story about dynastic expansions and contractions through the archaeology of the mosques. Similar to changes in dynastic territories, the stories told through mosques in multiple towns are interlinked and overlap. 8) Since none of the early structures point to Mecca, the Muslims have arrived there much later than is assumed in the traditional accounts. Even after the first appearance in the historical record, the practice of orienting places of worship toward the dynastic leadership would persist for centuries. 9) Jacob of Edessa’s comment that the Jews were praying toward Jerusalem implies that the Exilarch or the Nasi was occupying the Temple Mount at that time. 10) The Al-Askari Shrine and mosque in Samarra was built by Seljuks over one and a half century after the disappearance of the Mahdi, and it would be expanded by Ismailis thereafter. 11) Abu Lahab in Sura 111 is identified as the Babylonian Exilarch Abu-Lu’lu’ah.

Temple Mount: The History of Confrontation and Opportunities for Interfaith Dialogue

The Temple Mount is one of the central factors that causes the exacerbation and continuation of the Arab-Israeli conflict, namely, its religious plane. The study of the history of confrontation around the Temple Mount should help to deepen the understanding of the conflict and in the future bring new ways to resolve it.

The Temple Mount of Fredrika—Translocality and Fractured Transnationalism of a Visionary Thai Buddhist Retreat Centre

On a mountain hill outside Fredrika, a small village in the rural north of Sweden, a standing Buddha statue and the seated statue of Luang Pho Thuat invoke reverence from visiting Buddhists. The plans of a large-scale temple and meditation centre have also invoked hope of religious tourism and economic growth in an area highly affected by depopulation. The Temple Mount, as it is referred to locally, has, on the one hand, become a source of religious power, not only for Thai Buddhist pilgrims, but also for other religious networks that has established themselves in the area. On the other hand, Fredrika has also become a contested religious space. The article discusses the background of the Temple Mount as well as contrasting examples of usual establishment patterns of Thai Buddhist temples in Sweden, highlighting translocal religious activity at Fredrika, showing how diaspora Thai Buddhism becomes intertwined with other religious networks.

Adomnán, Arculf and the mosque on the Temple Mount

Adomnán, Arculf and the mosque on the Temple Mount

Adomnán, Arculf and the mosque on the Temple Mount

Adomnán, Arculf and the mosque on the Temple Mount

The Role of the Temple Mount / Al-Haram Al-Sharif in the Deterioration of Muslim–Jewish Relations

For both Jews and Muslims the Temple Mount and the Old City of Jerusalem constitute highly important religious, cultural, political and national centres. For centuries Jews in the diaspora prayed in the direction of Jerusalem, vowed never to forget it (‘If I forget thee Jerusalem, may my right arm wither’); and blessed one another ‘Next year in Jerusalem’. The Zionist-Jewish movement (since the 1880s) – although predominantly secular – has considered Jerusalem (Zion) as the political and cultural centre of the Jewish people.By comparison, the Palestinian-Arab national movement has, since the 1920s established its national and political-cultural centre in East Jerusalem, while the Haram al Sharif, particularly the Al-Aqsa Mosque, has continued to be a top religious shrine for Muslims. They termed it Awla Al-Qiblatayn (the first prayer direction before Mecca); Thani Masjidayn (the second mosque after Mecca); a place where Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven (Isra’ and Mi’raj).This article will examine the changes in Muslim–Jewish mutual relations, especially since 1967, at both government and public levels. Special attention will be given to the development of both Islamic Judeophobia and Jewish Islamophobia, which have been associated with the dispute over the Temple Mount and East Jerusalem.