Making the Naqab Bloom: The Byzantines Did It First
Archaeological survey finds not the odd isolated farm but intense agriculture in Israel’s Naqab desert in the Byzantine period, between the 2nd and 6th centuries
Six cities, three towns, hundreds of farms. The Negev [Naqab] Desert during the Byzantine period was much more intensely occupied and farmed than had been thought until now, going by a new archaeological survey conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority.
The survey found dozens of hitherto unknown small sites, from farms to storage pits to quarries. The upshot is a new picture of the ancient Naqab during the Byzantine period, from the second to the sixth century C.E.
The archaeologists behind the survey hoped for insight into two questions about the Byzantine Naqab. How did the arid southern desert become so prosperous back then? And why did the good times end?
Not ‘Nabatean’
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
The Naqab is littered with archaeological remains. Humans and their predecessors, hominins, have been passing through it for over a million years, but it seems few actually settled down there. Yet that changed in the second century C.E., when a period of extraordinary prosperity in the Naqab began. New settlements, farms and roads were built.
Generally the general [Israeli] public dubs the ancient towns there, Avdat, Mamshit, Shivta, Rehovot ba-Negev and Haluza as “the Nabatean cities” but Naqab scholars have long realized that the vast majority of the structures in these settlements weren’t built by Nabateans, but by Christians living under the Byzantine Empire.
The perception of the towns as “Nabatean” was bequeathed to the public by Professor Avraham Negev of the Hebrew University, who harbored a deep appreciation of this ancient nomadic people. But based on their belief system, the Nabateans did not drink wine or plant trees. but rather engaged in trade with the Far East.
They are unlikely therefore to have been the driving force behind these elaborate settlements, and following Naqab, later scholars painted a different picture. The farmers in the early medieval Naqab developed a sophisticated irrigation system, and grew grapes for wine, figs, grains and more. Some of their produce was exported to Europe, mainly through the ancient port at Gaza.
In recent years two investigators associated with the Israel Antiquities Authority, Ofer Sion and Yotam Tepper, conducted a thorough survey around the known ancient settlements, by car, by foot and by drone. Their surveying was usually confined to the weekends because most of the territory under study lies within Israeli army firing zones.
“We found an entire geographical region unknown to the [Israeli] public. Take the handful of farms that now exist in the Negev and multiply them by a thousand. We discovered that each of the Byzantine settlements had a periphery that comprised hundreds of farmhouses and [altogether] 40,000 dunams of cultivated lands around them,” Sion says. “We found dozens of new sites, numerous water cisterns, pits, farmhouses, quarries, structures. In Shivta alone, the number of recognized sites was doubled in the wake of the survey, from 150 to 300.”
Some of the settlements also featured churches and public buildings, all surrounded by crops, the smaller being around 100 dunams in area (at Metzad Yeruham) and the larger around 10,000 dunams (Avdat).
It isn’t that they were geniuses, Sion says: it’s that they did a Sisyphean job of surveying, systematically moving from wadi to wadi. Thus, connections began to emerge.
“All of a sudden, you discover 25 uniform field towers (towers that served for storage, sleeping and guarding in the agricultural areas). That is something that shouts out to you. We learned to talk with the stones,” he says.
Imperial investment
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
To understand the anomaly of the Naqab’s development in the Byzantine period, we need to hark back to the late Roman period.
In the year 106, the Roman Empire annexed the Nabatean kingdom and called it the province of Arabia. The province’s capital was Petra, in today’s southern Jordan. Two Roman legions were dispatched to the Naqab. When they retired, some soldiers would settle there.
Come the Christian Byzantine era, the process gained momentum. “The Byzantines realized they needed to reinforce the Naqab front against the Persians and the nomads in the east. It was a region that if you do not live in it, it gains control over you. They invested billions in the Naqab, in today’s terms - in salaries to soldiers, in tax incentives and in monetary support,” says Sion, on the basis of survey’s findings and on past research.
What happened isn’t unlike today, when the Israeli army moved a cluster of training bases to southern Israel, and suddenly the local towns, Yeruham and Dimona, began to bloom, says Tepper. “The empire also awarded tracts of land and subsidies,” he adds.
The empire’s most important investment was in building irrigation systems based on capturing floodwater, slowing the water’s passage downstream from farm to farm, and giving the floodwater time to percolate the soil to the roots.
The centralized management turned the Naqab into a continuous expanse of settlements and small farms surrounded by fields. Archaeologists have known about the large sites for decades but now the survey revealed the wealth of the agricultural expanse around them: masses of small sites, water facilities, watch towers, pits, dams and more.
If until recently the Byzantine Naqab was described as islands of settlement within an expanse that was largely desolate, Sion and Tepper suggest seeing it as a complete whole.
A change in the weather
Scholars are split over why the Naqab’s agriculture boomed under the Byzantines. Some think the prosperity was driven not only by imperial policies but by climatic variance that made the region slightly more hospitable. Others argue imperial government intervention had to be there.
Sion and Tepper agree that even if the weather was clement, that can’t explain why the region did so well during the Byzantine period. Both believe the expansion would have been impossible without massive intervention by the empire, the army and the church. But it is also apparently the case that rainfall in the region was more regular than it is now.
Supporters of the climatic approach to change argue that one doesn’t need extreme variations like we are experiencing now to influence the course of history. Just a bit more rain could have sufficed to transform the Naqab from desert waste to inhabited region.
The investigators also found evidence of social stratification in the Byzantine Naqab. Sion describes a semi-feudal system in which elites, retired soldiers clergy and merchants, lived in towns, while the farmers lived in small farmhouses in the agricultural hinterland surrounding the settlements.
Towns such as Rehovot ba-Naqab had homes over 300 square meters in area; the average home in Mamshit was 400 square meters. But the farmers seem to have lived in what were basically huts outside the city centers. “In Avdat, we surveyed over 10,000 dunams of agricultural land. We found 200 caves in a cliff next to it that served mainly for storage, but there are only 16 structures in the city itself. Clearly, 16 families cannot maintain 10,000 dunams,” says Sion.
Decline and collapse
Come the sixth century, the Naqab settlements began to decline. There is no consensus why.
Sion says that the empire ceased to nurture the region. A historical document from the middle of the sixth century says that Emperor Justinian neglected the soldiers there: he began by treating them with indifference and a sort of derisiveness. The payments were four or five years in arrears. After some time, for no apparent reason, the emperor altogether revoked the status of the regular army soldiers. “From then onward, the boundaries of the empire were left unguarded, and the guards and soldiers were forced to seek handouts from others accustomed to giving charity,” wrote the historian Procopius of Caesarea.
There was also an epidemic in the region, and then, in the seventh century, came the Muslim conquest. They didn’t destroy the settlements and farms, but the upheaval contributed to their gradual decline.
Some homes had been sealed up and abandoned. But the archaeologists found concrete evidence of the decline in the pigeon cotes.
The Byzantine farmers had used pigeon guano to fertilize the mineral-poor lands and built dovecotes with room for hundreds of pigeons each in their fields. A study that was begun by Yigal Tepper (the father of Yotam) and the late Professor Yizhar Hirshfeld of the Hebrew University, which was subsequently continued by Yotam Tepper and Professor Guy Bar-Oz of the University of Haifa, looked at pigeon remains in the cotes and concluded that as of the mid-sixth century, the farmers had stopped feeding the birds.
Professor emeritus Rihav Rubin of Hebrew University, who investigated the settlements of the Naqab for years, applauds the survey, especially the drone work; but he disagrees with some of the conclusions.
First of all, regarding the magnitude of the cultivated areas. Rubin claims that, as early as the 1950s, Yehuda Kedar, analyzing British aerial photographs, showed tens of thousands of cultivated dunams dating to the Byzantine Period.
His second beef is the reliance on the Byzantine army. “The historical record of activity of the army in the Byzantine Naqab is quite scanty. Aside from two inscriptions found in the Arava, we have no military inscriptions in the Naqab, nor any data on the army’s activity as an organization responsible for the development. Therefore, the riddle of who stood behind the widespread agricultural activity is not easily resolved. Nevertheless, we have to honor Sion and Tepper for the colossal scope of the very high-quality data that they have produced.”
He also feels it misguided to lump the settlements of the Naqab together, Rubin adds. “In Halutza, there was a decline at an earlier stage, in Shivta there is a pause in the Muslim period and, in Nitzana, they built a new church in the early eighth century. The picture is hardly uniform. I think that, in the early seventh century, the Naqab began to decline, as an indirect result of the Arab conquest. There are no more government subsidies, there is a decline in wine consumption, and it is then that you see gradual processes of abandonment. People took their things and left.”
Photo: Aerial photo of the Naqab with blue marks indicating Byzantine-period farms along a wadi. Source: A. Vigman.
Related articles:
Jesus’ Face Discovered in Ancient Naqab Church
Archaeologists find second early mosque in Israel, built by spectacular Byzantine estate
Byzantine Secret of Surviving in the Naqab: Midget Pigeons
| Themes |
| • Access to natural resources • Agriculture • Historic heritage sites • National • Regional |
