The Major Religions of the World ....Revisited: The Significance of Mecca

It needs to be noted that Arabs had been making the pilgrimage to Mecca-to the enormous granite Ka'aba, the old shrine at the center of the city-for hundreds, possibly thousands of years, before Islam to pay tribute to these 360 gods represented inside the Ka'aba's walls. Muhammad destroyed all but two -- that of the Virgin Mary, and that of Christ. However, even those representations would eventually be banned under Islam's subsequent prohibition of images. This prohibition was not endorsed by the Prophet.

Controversies have exploded over images depicting the Prophet Muhammad, namely his depiction as a turbaned terrorist in one of a dozen cartoons by Danish artists. Muslims explicitly prohibit images of God, Muhammad, and other prophets. Islam prohibits the representation of the human figure in art.

But does the Qur'an actually ban representations of Muhammad, or others? The answer is no. There is not a single verse in the Qur'an that explicitly prohibits images of Muhammad-or of ALLAH, or God, for that matter, or any other human figure.

In any event, up until that time, Mecca's most important god was the god Hubal (an idol god worshipped in Arabia), having been placed there by Muhammad's ruling Quraysh tribe. Historians state that the Ka'aba became the repository of these 360 idols and tribal gods from all of Arabia's nomadic tribes, and Hubal was the most senior of these 360 god idols worshipped in the shrine.

You'll want to look up "radioisotope dating" ~ and beware ~ the EVO/CREO battle proceeds apace with even the EVOs jumping into dating dinosaurs BEFORE they even explain the process.

The basic idea is that there are radioactive elements in rocks. They have half lives.

Slick scientific geniuses can measure the relative amounts of different isotopes left behind by the primary radioactive elements and come up with a date for when the rock was last melted.

Now that's going to give you a nice early date for a whole lot of stuff ~ but the trick here is that when someone cuts the rock, "weathering begins" on a new surface. Again, there are radioactive isotopes there. The isotopes for different elements weather at different rates (inasmuch as they have different chemical characteristics), so, one more time, really, really, really smart scientific superscientists can figure out how long the cut rock has been aging at the surface.

A far easier method is to find some biological remains at the site, do a radiocarbon 14 test on part of it, and there you have it ~ but that only goes back a few tens of thousands of years, and with a question about cut stone, it'll only tell you when it was put in place, not when it was cut.

When it comes to cut stone these days the archaeologists are very interested in when things were cut ~

NOTE: All of this stuff is expensive to do.

The radioisitope dating I can believe, and the C-14 dating.

But a building stone in the Kaabal - where did it start out, when was it cut, was it used in another structure first?

Weathering, without a complete history, not of the stucture, but of the stone, is nonsense.

Although I do recall one case where a monastary was dated by the wear on the front step ... average number of monks, four masses a day...

First you take a big cut stone, and you slice it in two. That tells you exactly what the composition of that stone (in this case granite) was the day it was cut.

You then compare that surface to the weathered surface.

What I'm afraid has happened to virtually all the stones in the Kaaba is that they were repolished in more recent times.

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