Restoring The Floor Of The Second Temple

Recently, Israeli archaeologists have been able to recreate some of the geometric floor tiles of the Second Temple, built by Herod the Great, and destroyed by the Romans during the Jewish Revolt of 66-73AD.  The reconstruction came through the painstaking reassembly of thousands of fragments discarded as rubbish by the Islamic Waqf which governs the Temple Mount, site of the Second Temple.  After the Israelis conquered East Jerusalem in the 1967 War, a conquest triggered by Jordan's attack on Israel, Israeli authorities, in an effort to minimize religious tension, vested authority over the Temple Mount with Islamic religious institutions.  Jews have been paid back by the Waqf's insistence that there never was a Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount and by its efforts to get rid of any evidence of a Jewish presence by excavations designed to destroy and/or remove such evidence.  You can read more about this remarkable reconstruction in this article in Haaretz.