Free God's Gold by Sean Kingsley Page B

chief guard is summoned to referee the stalemate. “If this isn’t a Bible, what is it then?” he challenges. “Well, if you must know,” replies the innocent abroad, “it’s a history book about cannibalism at sea.” The black humor of this ludicrous situation is lost on the guards. All they know is that they must temporarily confiscate Bibles to prevent Christians praying publicly on the Temple Mount and potentially inciting religious conflict.
    I enter the Morocco Gate where, according to Muslim tradition, Mohammed harnessed al-Barak, his trusty horse, when he flew into Jerusalem. To my left, well-manicured gardens conceal the 70,000 Muslim shahid (dead holy warriors) of the twelfth-century Crusades. The Mount today is seemingly completely free of Roman architecture. The smell of strong Turkish coffee wafts through the air from the Old City, home to 15,000 Arabs and 5,000 Jews.
    If you didn’t know the extremely dark history of the Temple Mount, you could be forgiven for judging this place an oasis of peace. In reality, the site has been a production line of hatred, death, and destruction overthe millennia. A spent bullet from the 1967 Six-Day War lies at my feet. Yet tranquillity reigns today. The northern quarter, where Titus finally broke through the mighty Antonia Tower fortress to set alight the cloisters of the Second Jewish Temple, is now a garden of olive and cypress trees and exotic fountains. A teacher shrieks at her pupils along the eastern wall, where hundreds of Arab kids sit within the vaulted classes of the “Al Aqsa Sec. Religious School—1901 Est.”
    But I was not on the Temple Mount for tourism. Instead, I was searching for traces of destruction that would confirm or refute Israel’s claims of an ongoing cultural intifada on the site. Was Israel presenting a balanced case or was Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, chief Muslim administrator of the Mount, correct when he recently stated that “The Temple Mount was never there…. There is not one bit of proof to establish that. We do not recognize that the Jews have any right to the wall or to one inch of the sanctuary…. Jews are greedy to control our mosque…. If they even try to, it will be the end of Israel.” If simple building work can inspire such a tongue lashing, what would be the repercussions of the reappearance of the Temple treasure?
    The signs did not look good for Sheikh Sabri. A bulldozer was parked immediately outside the entrance to the Dome of the Rock mosque. Something unusual was clearly going on. Traces of massive earth-moving activities quickly became obvious. Olive tree gardens had been filled with freshly relocated earth and, on closer examination, revealed a high density of Roman, Islamic, and Crusader pottery, undeniable proof of a first-century BC to first-century AD presence on the Temple Mount.
    No pottery has ever been published from the Temple Mount, yet here was tons of the stuff beneath my feet—an archaeologist’s dream. Sheikh Sabri had been speaking nonsense. With such a collection of potsherds, archaeologists can spin wonders and tease fresh and important historical data from silent soils.
    Nearby, what can only be described as a breaker’s yard had been shoddily assembled. On one side stood piles of ancient stone masonry, and on the other newly cut blocks of stone “repackaged” for reuse inmodern structures on the Mount. While I had no problem with the Waqf developing the site to accommodate growing numbers of Muslim worshippers and wasn’t partisan about the politics involved, the level of destruction coupled with a lack of documentation of this vital site’s ancient remains was seriously disturbing.
    Imagine if developers cut chunks out of Rome’s imperial Forum and threw out the cultural debris without sieving the soils or recording what lay in the exposed trenches. The Eternal City would be in uproar, no doubt the pope would