BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Ramat Gan’s Early Islamic Past

1,300-year-old complex discovered

A road found at Ramat Gan with rooms, warehouses, industrial installations, and pottery kilns uncovered around. Photo by Emil Aladjem, Israel Antiquities Authority.

Archaeologists have uncovered a planned commercial and industrial complex dating to roughly 1,300 years ago in Ramat Gan, Israel. The site contains straight, intersecting streets, rooms that may have functioned as shops or warehouses, pottery kilns, plastered industrial installations, and large quantities of artifacts. The combination of deliberately arranged streets and buildings leads the Israel Antiquities Authority to suggest that, during periods of Muslim rule, this complex was purpose-built by engineers, likely at the commission of regional authorities.

Ahead of a modern construction project, the archaeologists recovered pottery and glass vessels (imported and local), as well as coins, oil lamps, bronze tableware, cosmetic tools, iron tools, and other objects. These small finds provide evidence for manufacturing, trade, consumption, and everyday life at the site, which was near a major route connecting Jaffa, Ramla, and Jerusalem. It seems that the streets and buildings may have formed a trade and industrial station, or perhaps belonged to a larger but as yet undiscovered settlement.

Small finds from Ramat Gan, dated to more than 1,000 years ago. Photo by Emil Aladjem, Courtesy Israel Antiquities Authority.

The site’s earliest phase attests to a time of much political turnover in this larger region, which Roman authorities called Palaestina. Before 614, it was Byzantine territory, i.e., part of the Eastern Roman Empire. In 614, the Sassanian/Persian king Khosrow II invaded and captured Jerusalem, occupying the region until 628, when the Byzantine emperor Heraclius restored imperial rule. Beginning in the 630s, Muslim armies conquered the region, ending Byzantine rule and ushering in the early Islamic period under the Umayyad and the Abbasid caliphates.

The early, planned phase of the site dates to the seventh or eighth century, spanning the transition from Umayyad to Abbasid rule. The Umayyads established or developed important administrative and economic centers in the area, including nearby Ramla, which became the capital of the district. After the Umayyads, the Abbasid caliphate ruled much of the region from 750, meaning that the complex belongs to a period when the region was being reorganized politically and economically under Muslim rule.

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The complex seems to have operated for 150 years, then was abandoned and reoccupied in the tenth century. This later phase, dating to the Fatimid period, produced residential buildings, production facilities, and numerous tabuns, or clay ovens. The site was abandoned again in the late 11th century, shortly before the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem and much of the surrounding region.

The commercial and industrial complex at modern Ramat Gan, with its well-planned roads, was occupied during various periods of Muslim rule. The IAA reports, however, that the excavation yielded no finds establishing the religious or ethnic identity of the people who lived and worked at the site.

Lauren K. McCormick is an assistant editor at Biblical Archaeology Review and a specialist in ancient Near Eastern religions, visual culture, and the Bible. She holds degrees in religion from Syracuse University, Duke University, New York University, and Rutgers University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship on religion and the public conversation at Princeton University.

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