New info on the central church at Shivta

ARCHAEOLOGY: Before the Storm: How Early Christians Built Another Church in Ancient Shivta. Possibly the early Christians in the Negev didn't identify the storm clouds building over their heads. Or maybe they did, and wanted to pray (Ruth Schuster, Haaretz).

In the late 6th century or possibly the early 7th, the Christians of Shivta built another church.

The Central Church was squeezed in between existing homes in the late 6th or early 7th century, hundreds of years after the village's foundation in the deep desert. It was the Shivta's third monumental church, which ostensibly reflects prosperity and population growth.

Indeed Shivta, founded during the Roman period, flourished in the Byzantine period, from the 5th to the 7th century. The people developed remarkable ways to efficiently farm the Negev, growing the usual suspects, including grapes for wine. Plausibly the third church was erected because of a growing population's need.

In hindsight, that need may not have lasted for long. The Central Church was built on the cusp of the village's decline ...

The site of Shivta is important for the archaeology of the late-antique Negev. It has been the subject of many PaleoJudaica posts.

For more on the apocalyptic social collapse in the late-antique Negev, see here.

Whatever the limitations of Harris Dunscombe Colt, the excavator of Shivta in the early twentieth century, his management of his things, such as it was, resulted in the preservation of a suitcase full of artifacts (noted here and here) and, now, the survival and recovery of important sketches of the Shivta excavation which shed light on that third church.

Shivta is perhaps best known for the portrayal of Jesus's face on a wall painting in the baptistry of the north church. See here links.

For still more posts involving Shivta, start here (cf. here) and follow the links.

The peer-review article underlying the current Haaretz one is published in the current issue of the Palestine Exploration quarterly (156, issue 2, 2024). It is behind a subscription wall, but the abstract, acknowledgements, and notes are available for free.

Old Ground Plan - New Insights: The Central Church Compound in Shivta Revised

Emma Maayan-Fanar & Yotam Tepper
Published online: 17 Jun 2024
Cite this article https://doi.org/10.1080/00310328.2024.2363671

ABSTRACT

The three monumental churches of the Byzantine site of Shivta in the Negev Desert were fully excavated in the first third of the 20th century. Lacking the original archaeological reports, discussion of them has been based mostly on contemporary observations of the ruins. The Central Church, situated in the center of the village and surrounded by houses, has received the least scholarly attention of the three churches. Recently recovered data, including its ground plan executed by Colt’s expedition in 1937, and archival materials published here for the first time, enabled re-examination of the Central Church structure within the compound, its history, date, and identification of the function of some of the rooms. Analysis of old and new data led us to propose an updated plan of the Central Church complex. Accordingly, new insights are proposed regarding the place of the church within the village, its neighboring domestic structures, its relation to the other two churches of Shivta, and the layout of the site.

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