The Umayyad caliphs understood stone. When they decided to make Jerusalem into a showpiece of the new empire - a city that would outshine Byzantine Caesarea and Sasanian Ctesiphon in the minds of every pilgrim who crossed the Jordan - they began at the top. The Temple Mount, empty of its Temple for six centuries, was where they built. The Dome of the Rock went up first, completed under Abd al-Malik in 691 CE. The al-Aqsa Mosque, at the southern end of the platform, was finished under his son al-Walid I around 715 CE. Together they remade the summit of the hill as an Islamic sacred precinct of extraordinary ambition.
For the Jews of Jerusalem - and there were Jews of Jerusalem, resettled in the city after the Arab conquest of 638 CE reversed the Byzantine ban on Jewish residence - this transformation of the most sacred site on earth was something to watch from below and to interpret across generations. The ground the caliphs built on was not merely religiously important to the tribe. It was the place toward which every synagogue faced, to which every prayer ended, and around which much of the liturgy of loss had been organised for six hundred years. The Umayyads were not unaware of this. They built knowing precisely what they were building on, which is one reason why the Dome of the Rock inscription, running around the inner arcade, engages directly with the theological claims of both Christianity and Judaism.
The record
Archaeological evidence for the Umayyad building programme around the Temple Mount was substantially recovered in excavations led by Benjamin Mazar and Meir Ben-Dov south and south-west of the Mount between 1968 and 1978. Those excavations uncovered the foundations of large Umayyad palatial complexes - conventionally labelled Buildings I through IV - extending across the area now known as the Archaeological Garden. The structures are dated by ceramic and numismatic evidence to the late seventh and early eighth centuries CE, consistent with the reigns of Abd al-Malik and al-Walid I. The finds are held at the Israel Antiquities Authority and are discussed in detail in Mazar's published reports, including his 1975 volume The Mountain of the Lord (Doubleday).
What the Arab conquest of 638 CE had given back, the Umayyad building programme consolidated in a different register. The Rashidun caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, on entering Jerusalem, had permitted Jews to return and pray at the ruins of the Temple - Byzantine law had forbidden them from the city entirely. For the community that came back, the hill above was now capped by someone else's monuments; the city beneath those monuments was, for the first time in generations, theirs again to inhabit. That mixture - of repatriation and displacement, of returning home to a home that had become something else - is one of the shaping tensions of medieval Jewish Jerusalem. The Geniza documents, recovered from Cairo a millennium later, contain letters from the Jerusalem community that speak of the city with a plainness and pride that no amount of theological complication managed to muffle.
The Umayyad investment in Jerusalem was also brief. After the dynasty fell to the Abbasids in 750 CE, the caliphal capital shifted to Baghdad and Jerusalem reverted to provincial status. The great palaces south of the Mount fell into disrepair. Al-Aqsa survived, rebuilt and rebuilt again after earthquakes. The Jewish community survived too, small, tenacious and never quite dislodged from the city it could not stop calling home.
The record
The Cairo Geniza, a cache of documents recovered from the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat (Old Cairo) and first studied by Solomon Schechter from 1896 onward, includes letters and community records from the Jerusalem Jewish community (known as the yeshiva of Jerusalem) dating from the ninth to the eleventh centuries CE. These documents - now divided principally between Cambridge University Library and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America - show an organised community with a recognised leadership, conducting correspondence with diaspora communities across the Mediterranean and maintaining a continuous presence in the city. S.D. Goitein's analysis of the Geniza materials in A Mediterranean Society (University of California Press, 1967-1993) remains the standard scholarly treatment.
The Umayyad mosque on the Mount is still there - rebuilt after damage, extended by subsequent rulers, argued over by scholars who debate which parts of the current structure go back to al-Walid. The palaces are archaeology. The Jewish community's letters are in libraries in Cambridge and New York. The mountain itself is still the mountain. Some contests do not resolve. They just continue, with different centuries wearing different faces, and the ground underneath remaining exactly what it was.
The record
The foundation inscription of the Dome of the Rock, completed 691 CE under Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, runs around the inner face of the octagonal arcade in mosaic Kufic script. It is the oldest datable Quranic inscription in existence. Robert Hillenbrand and Oleg Grabar's analyses of the inscriptions and mosaics - especially Grabar's The Dome of the Rock (Belknap Press, 2006) - establish that the text engages deliberately with Christian and Jewish theological claims about Jesus and prophethood, positioning the monument as an argument in stone addressed to the city's existing religious communities. The original mosaics of the exterior arcade survive fragmentarily; the dome itself has been restored and re-gilded at various periods, most recently in 1993.
Empires declare themselves in buildings. The Umayyads built on the most contested ground in the world and produced one of the most beautiful structures ever assembled. That a Jewish community was living in the city below at the time, and continued to live there for three centuries more, sending letters home about the price of olive oil and the health of their children, is the part the buildings do not tell you. The stone record and the letter record are both necessary. Neither is complete without the other.
