Bishop Hagop Sarkissian is a gentle amateur antiquary who lives in the Armenian quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. His life’s work has been to renovate the medieval chapels of the Old City, and his rooms – off a cloister overhung with pot plants, vines and flowering shrubs – are cluttered with small wooden models of now-lost early Christian churches. The bishop is a small, quiet figure in a lavender-blue cassock who gives off an air of gentle, almost monastic calm. But the last time I was in Jerusalem I dropped in to find my friend uncharacteristically agitated. Leading me straight out of the door, he insisted that I come with him.
It was a cold, drizzly morning in early November. The weather had cleared the streets so that the usually buzzing bazaars of the Old City were all but deserted: in the Via Dolorosa a small party of weeping Evangelicals sang “Cum-ba-ya”, while a pair of damp Orthodox Jewish haredim shuffled off in the direction of the Wailing Wall, plastic carrier bags draped dapperly over their fur hats. Bishop Hagop marched me to the Damascus Gate, past a picket of heavily armed Israeli conscripts, and over the road. There he stopped and asked me what I could see.
“Well,” I ventured, mystified. “A bus shelter?”
“Anything else?”
“A couple of manholes?”
“Exactly. A bus shelter and a set of manholes. But nothing else.”
“No,” I agreed. “So what?”
“That manhole is all that marks the site of what was once the greatest Armenian monastery in the Middle East,” explained the bishop. “Beside it, over by that new filling station, were the monastic buildings of St Stephen’s, the largest Byzantine monastery in Jerusalem. Two other slightly smaller abbeys lay a little to the north. They were all discovered last year when the Israelis were building a road. Their archaeologists excavated the ruins, took our mosaic to West Jerusalem, then backfilled both sites. Now, at least to the casual passer-by, there is no evidence whatsoever that our shrines were ever there . . . We begged the government to preserve the site.”
The bishop explained that the few remaining Palestinian Christians still clinging on in Jerusalem had been outraged by the decision to bulldoze their newly discovered shrines. They had also been furious at the lack of protection afforded to the ruins, which had allowed vandals – ultra-Orthodox Jewish haredim, according to the Jerusalem Post – to pour tar over a superb sixth-century Byzantine mosaic and pile rocks on top of an early Christian funerary crypt. At the same time a small Byzantine burial chapel outside the Jaffa Gate, decorated with mosaics and rare frescoes, had been bulldozed to make way for an underground parking lot. The Israel Antiquities Authority had taken no action to preserve any of the Christian sites.
According to Hagop, beneath the land on which they were trying to build a lasting peace, the Israelis and the Palestinians were still locked in a bitter war over the region’s history and archaeology. Accusations that there was a markedly nationalistic bias in the Israeli archaeological establishment were not new, said the bishop. For while archaeological remains were manipulated for political purposes all over the world – think of the use the late Shah of Iran made of Persepolis or the career Melina Mercouri made out of the Elgin marbles – there was probably nowhere else on earth where the far distant past was so politicised as the Holy Land.
In its 1948 proclamation of independence, Israel referred to “the re-establishment of the Jewish State”, thus firmly basing its historic right to exist on the Biblical precedent of the Israelite kingdom that had thrived in the same area 2,000 years earlier.
Since 1967 the same justification has been advanced for the Israeli colonisation of the West Bank and Golan: many of the new Jewish settlements that were set up, such as Shilo, Givon and Katzrin, were deliberately built on sites identified as having originally been colonised by the ancient Israelites 3,000 years earlier. As one Jewish scholar recently put it, in Israel “digging, like war, has become politics pursued by other means”.
For the Jerusalem Christians, explained Hagop, the bulldozing of their holy sites was the final straw: direct evidence, as they saw it, that in Israel newly discovered Christian and Islamic remains were treated with less respect than Jewish ones. Eventually, the heads of the churches issued a formal joint statement of complaint about Israeli cultural policies, singling out what they had described as Israel’s “depredation” of the Christian archaeological heritage, and threatening to appeal for international protection for their ruins. Despite the unprecedented protests, not one of the sites was preserved for posterity. No concessions were made.
“The Israelis wouldn’t listen,” said Bishop Hagop. “They said their roads were more important than our monasteries.”
“They probably didn’t have the funds to save any more,” I said.
“At exactly the same time as the two monasteries were discovered,” answered the bishop, “builders located the tomb of a 15th-century rabbi in the Palestinian village of Silwan, a mile away from here. Archaeologically, the site is of no great importance. But the site is now beautifully presented. Tourists are taken around the tomb and the impression is deliberately given that Jerusalem has always been a Jewish-dominated city.
“The truth is quite different: for 1,800 years the Jewish community was a very small minority here in Jerusalem. But with the ultimate political destiny of the town still undecided in the peace talks, it is vital for the Israelis that that truth is suppressed, or at least disguised. Jerusalem is meant to be Israel’s eternal capital. These monasteries are evidence of a Christian-dominated Jerusalem. So they were hidden.”
We wandered over the site of the two vanished monasteries, my friend pointing out the approximate position of where the different features had stood: a mosaic here, a hospice there, the abbey church here, monastic buildings over there. As we passed the pumps of a new filling station, the bishop suddenly pointed to a sign in the newly planted garden beside the garage.
“This is new,” he said. “It must have just gone up.”
We walked closer and read the notice, on which was written in Hebrew and English, but not Arabic: “Road Number One. Archaeological Garden: Fragments of the Third Wall.”
“What’s the Third Wall?” I asked.
“It’s the city wall built by Herod Agrippa,” said Hagop. “It’s an important discovery. Scholars have been arguing for years about where this wall ran, so it’s quite legitimate to preserve it. But to keep this when a whole monastic complex has been obliterated in broad daylight, before our eyes, right next door to it: that’s just nationalistic bigotry.”
During the years that followed Israel’s declaration of independence, as the country’s immigrant society slowly began to take root in its new soil, archaeology came to play a pivotal role in providing Israel with a national ideology. In the very process of digging, a direct link was formed between the ancient Israelite past and the modern Israeli present, allowing newly arrived immigrants from 100 different countries to find common historical roots in the remains of the far-distant past. Nowhere else in the world was archaeology quite so important in national self-definition.
The symbols of the new state – the national seal, the medals, even the postage stamps – drew on ancient Jewish history: modern Israeli coins, for example, were faithfully stamped with motifs borrowed from first-century silver shekels. During the famous excavations on Masada throughout the 1960s, the heroic mass suicide of the mountain’s Jewish defenders was consciously turned into a model and prototype of the new state’s struggle for survival against overwhelming odds.
In a situation like this, where contemporary political claims were based on rival interpretations of ancient history, it was almost impossible for archaeologists to remain politically neutral or objective, and there have long been accusations that some Israeli archaeologists have excavated not so much to illuminate the general history of the region as to uncover their own history, in some cases allegedly digging through and discarding as irrelevant the intervening Turkish, Arab and Byzantine layers.
Indeed, to Israel’s great credit, many of the fiercest criticisms of this political bias have come from Israeli liberals incensed about what they regarded as the right-wing nationalistic bias of the Israeli archaeological establishment. In 1992 the Jerusalem-based archaeologist Shulamit Giva accused Israeli archaeology of having “lost its independence as a scientific discipline and become an executive arm of an ideological movement, a nationalist and political instrument which provided ‘roots’ for the new state”.
The peace process has intensified rather than soothed these disagreements. Following the Oslo agreement, the Israelis immediately found themselves at loggerheads with the Palestinians over control of the region’s past as well as its present. Israel said it was prepared to grant the Palestinians control only over “Muslim” and “Arab” archaeological sites on the West Bank; the Palestinians demanded control over all sites, including Jewish ones, and the restitution of all rediscovered artefacts, including the Dead Sea scrolls.
It is Jerusalem that has always been the front line in this struggle over the past.
Only last month, the beleaguered Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, kicked off his re-election campaign by encouraging Jewish settlers to colonise the Palestinian village around the oldest archaeological site in Jerusalem, an area known to Israelis as “the City of David” and to the Palestinians as Silwan.
Yet ironically, at exactly the moment the area has become the focus of the attention of Jewish settler organisations, the archaeological link between the site and King David appears to be more tenuous than ever. After years of intensive investigation there is still an absence of significant finds from the tenth century BC, the period of the biblical kings David and Solomon. Moreover, all the visible remains, such as the walls and waterworks, have recently been shown to predate David by 800 years.
All this has come as something of a blow to the settlers who had drawn up plans to build a visitor centre at the site to illustrate the early Jewish history of Jerusalem. As one Israel Antiquities Authority official commented: “In effect they’ll have to show tourists the Canaanite waterworks that preceded the Israelite conquest – at least, that is what has come out of the excavation.”
The archaeologist I most wanted to meet to discuss all this with was Fr Michele Piccirillo of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum. Piccirillo is an Italian who has lived in Jerusalem since 1960 and has single-handedly rediscovered great chunks of the Byzantine Levant. In a series of remarkable excavations, Piccirillo has uncovered many previously unknown monasteries and villas, dating from the sixth to the eighth centuries, and brought to light a breathtaking treasury of late antique pavements, including some of the finest mosaic work ever discovered in the Middle East: leopards chase stags through swirls of acanthus; personifications of the seasons sit enthroned with crown and sceptre, looking on as shepherds make their way through scrolls of vine branches; satyrs with flutes lead a Bacchic procession while cupids swoop above the orange trees.
On the last day of my stay in Jerusalem, I rang Piccirillo and arranged to visit him. I asked him about the accusations I heard of bias in the Israeli archaeological establishment. He was quite clear in his response.
Whatever the situation in the early years of the state, he replied, current Israeli archaeological methods were thoroughly professional: in his opinion the historical sites of Israel were excavated impartially without regard to religion.
But he was equally adamant about the serious disparity in the presentation of those finds: “The conservation of Christian remains is systematically less good than the treatment accorded to Jewish remains,” he said. “Of course, conservation is a problem everywhere. But here, where it so easily becomes a political issue, the Israelis should be doubly careful. The Holy Land has many communities. Each has its rights and if a state wants respect, it should respect others.”
“How does this neglect show itself?” I asked.
“Synagogues they look after beautifully,” said Piccirillo. “They cover them with shelters and stop people standing on the mosaics. But newly excavated churches or monasteries they can quite easily bulldoze, as they did with those outside the Damascus Gate.”
The friar broke off and searched for words: “A mosaic which is not looked after is like a rosary whose string is cut. Once one tessera goes, the whole mosaic falls apart. In a short time everything – everything – is lost.”
William Dalrymple’s books include “From The Holy Mountain” and “The Age of Kali”. Some of the names in this article, which is based on a Radio 4 talk, have been changed at the request of the interviewees
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