Hawzah News Agency - The remnants of an ancient mosque have been discovered beside the Sea of Galilee, leading experts to believe that relations between Muslims and Christians may have been cordial at the time.

The foundations of the mosque date back to just a generation after the life of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH), who died in 632 AD.

According to experts, the development phases of the ruins suggest that the Muslim rulers may not have been so keen to wield their authority over the other religions in the region.

Dr Katia Cytryn-Silverman from the Institute of Archaeology at the al - Khalil University has been overseeing the dig in the city of Tiberias, just south of the Sea of Galilee.

"You see that the beginning of the Islamic rule here respected very much the population that was the main population of the city: Christians, Jews, Samaritans," Cytryn-Silverman told the AP.

"They were not in a hurry to make their presence expressed into buildings. They were not destroying others' houses of prayers, but they were actually fitting themselves into the societies that they now were the leaders of."

Cytryn-Silverman told another outlet that the area in which the mosque was discovered had been "multireligious" and a "very moving symbol of regional coexistence".

Archaeologists originally thought that the site was an ancient marketplace, before determining that it was, in fact, a place of Islamic worship.