Stratum 1. While cleaning the section, the western side of the mosque’s eastern wall was exposed. The wall (length 13 m, max. preserved height 2.5 m) was built of roughly hewn, medium-sized stones. Eight courses survived, as well as a foundation course that was set on bedrock in the south and on a gray soil fill mixed with stones in the north. The southern part of the wall (length 8 m) was the eastern wall of the prayer hall, whose southeastern corner was preserved. Three pilasters built of dressed stones were leaning against the wall and supported arches, which held the roof. The northern continuation of the wall (an additional 3 m) constituted the eastern wall of the corridor that continued north of the prayer hall. Next to the wall was a fill that extended up to the presumed elevation of the building’s floor, at the top of the foundation course and contained pottery vessels from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries CE, among them Rashaya el-Fukhar Ware (Fig. 2:1, 2). The date of the potsherds coincided with the local tradition that referred to the mosque as El-‘Umri. The name probably indicates that the mosque had been built during the rule of Daher el-‘Umar in the middle of the eighteenth century CE.

 

Stratum 2. Fragments of pottery vessels from the Mamluk period (thirteenth–fourteenth centuries CE; Fig. 2:3, 4) were discovered in an accumulation of gray soil mixed with medium-sized fieldstones below the foundations of the wall exposed in the vertical section. A small part (0.9 × 1.3 m, height 0.3 m) of a wall’s foundation course, built of roughly hewn medium-sized stones, was also ascribed to this stratum. The wall, oriented east–west, was founded on a thin layer of virgin soil that covered bedrock. The fills near the wall and in the rest of the excavation area contained fragments of pottery vessels from the Mamluk period (thirteenth–fourteenth centuries CE; Fig. 2:5, 6). It is, therefore apparent that the Ottoman-period mosque was built above a Mamluk structure.