God's Gold by Sean Kingsley

protest, and the collective archaeological community would denounce these sacrilegious activities. In historical terms, the Temple Mount is without doubt more important than Rome’s Forum. But this is Jerusalem, where passions run high and politics pervade. Very few outsiders are willing to stick their neck out and be seen to be anti-Islamic. To me, however, this is not just a political matter but, actually, an ethical debate about protecting the past.
    If the Waqf had nothing to hide, I couldn’t help wonder why it had off-loaded three hundred truckloads of soil and debris under cover of night. Why had important ceramic remains been concealed under olive groves and, most grievously, how could it explain and justify the recutting of ancient masonry without specialist archaeological supervision? Ancient inscriptions may well have been erased.
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    G reat destruction had without any doubt already been perpetrated on the Temple Mount. To discuss the scale of the problem, and the political fallout, I had arranged to meet Dr. Eilat Mazar of the Hebrew University, a very high-profile, outspoken critic of the Waqf’s building activities. On the way to the City of David, where she was currently excavating Iron Age remains, I exited the Temple Mount by the northern Katemin Gate, desperate for a refreshing drink. But all I could find along the shadowy market alleyway approaching the holiest site on earth was a bewildering array of children’s toys. Not dolls and action men, as you might naively expect—appropriate for kids of all faiths—but a vast armory of plastic guns and weapons: imitations of “Swat Police,” “Power,” “Space,” and “Tommy” pistols; curved scimitars and straight-edged Crusader plastic swords; even sets of guns, face masks, and mustaches. In this way new generations of religious hatred are born a hairbreadth away from the holiest place on earth.
    As crowds of Muslims pushed their way onto their Haram al-Sharif, a Hasidic Jew stopped in the narrow entrance to the ancient Temple Mount and started to pray, bending sharply at the waist. Had the world gone crazy? Were both Muslims and Jews hell-bent on stoking up further bloodshed and hatred? An Arab boy looked at me, pointed, and smirked. I asked him whether the Hasids do this a lot. “Yeah,” he replied, “they’re head cases.”
    Clambering down the Ophel hillside, I found Dr. Mazar sorting ancient pottery in her laboratory on the edge of the City of David. The vast pit of her excavation was hidden from prying eyes by a tall screen, security guards, and a fearsome Alsatian dog. Only back in London would I discover why such secrecy shrouded her dig: Dr. Mazar claimed to have discovered the biblical palace of King David, no less.
    Eilat Mazar has both a professional and an emotional vested interest in the problems of the Temple Mount. Her grandfather, Professor Benjamin Mazar, excavated at the southern foot of the site for ten years, and from him she inherited the digging bug and also the far more serious responsibility of his publication backlog. To her credit, both scientific and popular articles and books have now started to flow. When complete, her work will comprise the most important body of scientific information about the history and archaeology of the Mount.
    An outspoken critic of the Islamic Waqf’s clearance operations and the Israel Antiquities Authority’s weakness over the scandal, she is nevertheless a balanced archaeologist. Rather than ignore all cultural evidence other than the Jewish remains from the periods of King Solomon and Herod, her books, such as The Complete Guide to the Temple Mount Excavations , cover all antiquity from the tenth century BC to the Ottoman period, with equal balance and without historical bias.
    As the Muslims were called to prayer from a nearby minaret, Dr. Mazar emphasized that the Waqf’s development work breaks the lawbecause the