Negev
Byzantine Churches in the Negev. In the first century BCE, the Nabateans (nomadic traders from Northern Arabia) established a kingdom in todays Kingdom of Jordan with Petra as its capital. They accumulated great wealth from their trade in costly perfumes and spices from East Africa and Arabia, which they transported by camel caravans to the souther...
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Kurnub is located some 40 km. east of Beer Sheva, above Nahal Mamshit. The Romans fortified it as one of the limes, the network of forts demarcating and protecting the eastern border of the Roman Empire. During the Roman and Byzantine periods, Kurnub was a flourishing city. In the second half of the 4th century, two churches were built here. The ci...
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Shivta is located some 40 km. southwest of Beer Sheva. Some of the buildings now standing date from the Roman period, but most were built in Byzantine times, when the inhabitants engaged in intensive agriculture. In the 4th century two churches were built here (the northern and the southern); later, in the 5th-6th century, when the city expanded, t...
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Avdat is located on a mountain ridge in the center of the Negev highlands. In the middle of the 3rd century it was resettled and became an important Roman military outspost, with a residential quarter on the spur southeast of the acropolis. In the sixth century, under Byzantine rule, Avdat had an estimated population of 3,000. New agricultural crop...
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The Negev (also Negeb; Hebrew: נֶּגֶב, Tiberian vocalization: Néḡeḇ, Turkish: Necef Çölü) is a desert and semidesert region of southern
Israel. The Arabs, including the native Bedouin population of the region refer to the desert as al-Naqab (Arabic: النقب). The origin
of the word Neghebh (or in Modern Hebrew Negev) is from the Hebrew root denot...
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