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

ABSTRACT

The three monumental churches of the Byzantine site of Shivta in the Negev Desert were fully excavated in the first third of the 20^th 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Byzantine period; Byzantine archaeology; Church architecture; Holy Land; Shivta; Colt’s excavation in Shivta; Archival research
• Central Church

Acknowledgements

We thank the Archive of the Department of Antiquities of Mandatory Palestine (1919–1948), IAA, for access to Isbeita, SRF_71(100 / 100), photos: 4881–4883, and 9916. We wish to thank the following: Ian Caroll from University College London (UCL) Special Collections, Archives and Records Department; Felicity Cobbing, Chief Executive and Curator, the Palestine Exploration Fund, for her help with the plan of the Central Church; M. Peleg for his help during the first stages of collecting the material for this research (see Peleg and Tepper 2019); Prof. Arthur Segal for kindly permitting us to use his plans of Shivta; S. Haad for her valuable assistance in production of maps and drawings for this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The excavations (2016 and 2019 seasons) were conducted by Y. Tepper and G. Bar-Oz on behalf of the Zintan Institute of Archaeology of the University of Haifa. Research of the first season was conducted under licenses from the Israel Antiquities Authority G-87/2015, G-4/2016. The second season (license nos. G-82/2018, G-5/2019) was funded by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority (Rakefet Foundation). For more details, see: Tepper and Bar-Oz 2019; 2020.

2 Restudying the records of the Colt expedition, we can point out that his method, accepted in his time, was to open trenches within the spaces within the site and to excavate them, in most cases, all the way to the foundations of the wall structures. Then, he sketched them, sometimes taking a random photo, and then covered them with fill removed from a nearby trench excavation, which, we assumed, was more important or presentative, according to the considerations preceding him at the time. This methodological note is relevant to understanding the current state of preservation of the church, large spaces of which remain covered and inaccessible to modern scholars.

3 On Colt’s map Shivta is referred to as a ‘town;’ here we prefer to follow Hirschfeld (1997; 2003a; 2003b) and refer to it as a village under the administrative jurisdiction of Elusa (Elliott 1982, 36, 58). See also: Kraemer (1958, nos. 75, 79; for more details, see: Maayan-Fanar, Tepper and Asscher 2021, 147–149; for a different perspective, see: Dauphin 1987, 259–62).

4 Such towers were found within other houses in Shivta as well, for example in houses 38 and 47 adjacent to the South Church (Hirschfeld 2003a, 13).

5 Archive of the Department of Antiquities of Mandatory Palestine (1919–1948), The Israel Antiquities Authority.

6 The following description is based, in addition to the plan, on Colyn Baly, S’baita work journal of 1937 and photographic materials held in The Harris Colt box, UCL Special Collections, Archives and Records Department. The full scientific report as a final publication of the journal is currently in preparation by the authors (Tepper and Maayan-Fanar in preparation).

7 Thus, he stated that all the churches and adjacent chapels and baptisteries had wooden roofs; smaller spaces were roofed by stone slabs supported by arches (Colt 1962, 26). The arches are clearly visible on the plan, while many fallen arch stones were documented with roofing slabs found in great quantities within the Central Church compound. Each house had a water cistern, also indicated on the plan.

8 It is generally accepted that the narthex in early churches appeared in the mid-5^th century. Most did have an atrium; its shape, orientation, and function are subject to regional developments and topographic conditions. However, the data are not always clear, since many atria, for example in Jordanian churches, were neglected in early excavations (Michel 2001, 18–23). Jabal Harun Church in Jordan did not have an atrium or narthex until its fourth stage, dated to the mid to later 6^th century (Mikkola et al. 2008, 119). In the Negev the narthex and atrium are not always well defined (Rosenthal-Heginbottom 1982, 167–74), and according to Figueras (2004, 51), did not exist together.‏

9 Colyn Baly, S’baita work journal of 1937, The Harris Colt box, UCL Special Collections, Archives and Records Department.

10 See note 9.

11 The synthronon in the Central Church could have been made of wood. According to Colt, evidence of a synthronon made of stone was not found in the churches he excavated in Shivta or Nessana, however he mentioned the stone base for the bishop’s throne in the Saints Sergius and Bacchus Church at Nessana and the South Church at Shivta; in the latter it was not attached to the wall of the apse (Colt 1962, 11). Such holes in the South Church at Shivta were recently described by Tepper and Farhai, who documented coin deposits on two of them, dated to the 5^th century at the earliest (Tepper and Farhi 2023). Urman suggested the existence of a wooden synthronon in the Central Church in Nessana (Urman 2004, 70). The synthronon is common in the churches of Palestine and Transjordan. Many were added at the later stages of the church, however, examples dated to the 5^th century and even earlier were also found (Mikkola et al. 2008, 109). For the types of synthronon in the Negev, see also Rosenthal-Heginbottom (1982, 154–156).

12  See note 9 above. Height differences between the central and the side apses, as well as some sort of niches or rooms above lateral apses in both the North and South Churches, are still visible in situ (Shereshevski 1991, 74–5).

13 See note 9 above. Benches alongside walls of the church were documented in Jabal Harun, Petra; some have a ‘cushion-like ridge’, of an uncertain date (Mikkola et al. 2008, 111), which might be associated with benches in the narthex of the Central Church. According to Mikkola the benches made of wood, masonry, or other materials, are common in the churches of Palestine and Transjordan; although sometimes associated with later stages of the churches, there is no definite proof that they did not exist prior to the late 6^th century contrary to Michel’s proposal (Mikkola et al. 2008, 111–12; notes 76–78).

14 This room remained unidentified till the plan was rediscovered. The font, covered with earth and rubbish, is not visible today. The doorposts are the same ones described by Segal (1988, 86).

15 See note 9 above. For details on Shivta's blocked entrances, see Tepper et al. 2015.

16 A room located at the eastern end of the northern aisle accessed from the church can be found in the Lower Church at Humayma, dated to the late 5^th or the 6^th century, and is proposed to be a sacristy (Schick 2013, 232, 252–58; also Michel 2001, 141–43). In the South Church in Nessana (dated to the beginning of the 7^th century), a room located at the southeast end, a priest room or sacristy, is accessed directly from the bema of the southern apse. Along its northern wall, the church has a corridor that can be accessed by two openings: one from the narthex, another from the area close to the northern apse (Colt 1962, 43–45, pl. 68). In Shivta’s Central Church the corridor led from within the bema to the residential complex to the east (no. 21 according to Hirschfeld 2003b), while on the other side, a short corridor connected the southern aisle at its east end with a room. These variations in architectural layouts across different churches suggest diverse arrangements of architectural elements.

17 See notes 9 and 15 above.

18 It is not clear if the baptistery mosaics were eventually excavated by Colt. If they were, perhaps the fragments of the mosaics recently discovered in the Colt house originally could be from there or from the liturgical corridor leading into the northern apse of the church. The mosaics were excavated in 1936, although their documentation has yet to be recovered. Anyhow, it was suggested to date this coloured mosaic, according to decorative iconographic considerations, to the 5^th century (Talgam, Tepper, Peleg and Bortnik 2022, mosaic C; 241–243).

19 See note 9 above. In the North Church in Shivta there is a pipe in the wall of the baptistery that allows filling it with water from the outer side of the wall.

20 According to Segal (1983, 162), the entrance between rooms 309 and 310 was closed at some point, although the excavators did not mention that.

21 However, refer to Hirschfeld (2003b, 395, note 5), who believed that the North Church was the most recent of Shivta's three churches. J. Patrich suggests that the Central Church might have originally been built in the 4^th century and later rebuilt as a tri-apsidal (Patrich 2006: 343).

22 Segal proposed that the stable was eliminated when the entrance from room 311 to the courtyard 102 of the south house was added (Segal 1983, 162–163).

23 See Di Segni (2016) who cautioned against identifying a church with additional rooms and even oil and wine presses as a monastery without epigraphic confirmation. On the problematic identification of the churches within the settlements as monastic, see also Fiema 2008, 425–6.

24 This would be similar to the South Church in Nessana where a residential structure to the southeast of the church is believed to have been that church's priestly residence (Urman 2004, 40–53; Ruffini 2011, 203).

25 For the collapse of the settlement system in the Negev, as documented in the archaeological research, see in detail: Fuks et al. 2016; Tepper et al. 2018b, Bar-Oz et al. 2019, and Yan et al. 2021. A decline in agriculture and urban development alongside a surge in church construction in the 6^th and 7^th centuries has been noted also in Petra (Fiema 2006). This phenomenon calls for further research.

26 For the North Church in Shivta, see: Maayan-Fanar and Tepper 2022b. At this point, the South Church has less proven evidence; however, due to peculiar stylistic similarities between current lintel ornamentation from the Central Church tower found originally within the compound, the doorjamb capitals in the South Church and three ornamented column drums discovered in the Eastern Church of Nessana during the excavations conducted by Urman and Shereshevski, Golan suggested that they could have been produced by the same workshop (Golan 2020, 29–30; 278; pl. 42, cf pls. 63–64).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emma Maayan-Fanar

Emma Maayan-Fanar is a senior lecturer at the Department of Art History at the University of Haifa, Israel. She received her PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2004. Her main research interests are Byzantine illuminated manuscripts, Early Christian and Jewish art in the Holy Land, and 19^th century photography of the Holy Land. She published a book Revelation through the Alphabet: Aniconism and Illuminated Initial Letters in Byzantine Artistic Imagination, Geneva: La Pomme d’Or, 2011, and a number of articles in peer-reviewed journals. Since 2016 she studies early Byzantine wall paintings in Shivta. Recently, an unknown wall painting of the Baptism of Christ was discovered, representing the earliest surviving depiction of the Holy Face in a church in the Holy Land.

Yotam Tepper

Yotam Tepper is a research fellow at the University of Haifa and researcher and archaeologist at the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). He received his PhD at Tel Aviv University (Legio in the Roman Period). He has directed large excavations (Akko; Kefar ʻOthnay) and surveys in Israel for the last three decades. His latest project includes survey and excavation in the region of the Roman military camp at Legio (el-Lajjun). He is also a specialist in research on the Byzantine Negev settlements (Shivta, Saʻadon and Nessana) including ancient agricultural installations in an arid region. He has published several articles on these projects and is a co-author of books about Ramat Ha-Nadiv, Beth She‘arim, and ancient roads in Israel.