Shivta

Listen for a moment. There is almost nothing to hear. A dry wind moves across the pale stone, a bird calls somewhere above, and your own footsteps crunch on dust and gravel. Under the desert sun, the walls around you glow the colour of old bread. This is Shivta, a town of stone streets, houses and churches standing alone in the Negev desert of southern Israel.

The first thing many visitors notice is how complete it feels. Doorways still frame the sky. Arches still curve across empty rooms. Streets wind between walls, so you can still follow them as a resident once did. Nobody lives here now, and nobody has for more than a thousand years. Yet the plan of the town is still easy to read, almost like a map drawn in stone.

Shivta probably began as a modest settlement of the Nabataeans. They were an Arab people, famous for the rock-cut city of Petra in Jordan. They grew wealthy by guiding caravans of incense and spices across the desert toward the Mediterranean. Their routes crossed the Negev, and a chain of towns grew along them. Shivta is one of four desert towns that UNESCO lists as World Heritage, together with Avdat, Mamshit and Haluza, under the name the Incense Route.

Most of what you see today, though, comes from a later chapter. In the Byzantine period, roughly the fifth to seventh centuries, the eastern Roman Empire was Christian. Shivta grew into a farming town of some size. Its people built solid stone houses, workshops, and not one but three churches. For a small town in the desert, that number is a surprise, and it suggests a community with real wealth and strong faith.

Here is a detail most people walk past. Shivta has no defensive wall. Instead, the outer houses stand side by side, and their back walls form the edge of the town. From outside, this created a closed ring of stone. It is a clever, practical solution. The people saved effort, and they still had a boundary between the settlement and the open desert.

Now look up at the roofs, or at the places where roofs once rested. Timber is scarce in this landscape, so builders found another way. They raised stone arches across a room. Then they laid long slabs of stone from arch to arch, like planks on beams. You can still see many of these arches standing. They are one of the clearest signs of how people here worked with what the land gave them.

The greatest question at Shivta is water. The town has no spring and no river. Rain falls only a few times a year, often in short, heavy bursts. So the people of Shivta collected every drop they could. Channels guided runoff from roofs, streets and the surrounding hills into cisterns, which are underground tanks cut into the rock. As you walk, look for round openings in courtyards. Many of them lead down into these hidden stores.

Near the southern part of town, you will find large open reservoirs. These public pools gathered water from the streets after a storm. Out in the valleys beyond the town, farmers built low stone walls across the slopes. These terraces slowed the floods and trapped soil and moisture. With them, people could grow crops, including grapes, in a place that looks barren today. Wine pressing installations have been found in the area, and wine from the Negev had a good name in the Byzantine world.

The South Church sits close to those reservoirs. It has three rounded apses at its eastern end, the semicircular spaces where the altar stood. Faint traces of painted plaster have survived on its walls. And right beside it stands something remarkable: the remains of a small mosque from the early Islamic period. It was built against the church, so the two buildings share space. Its prayer niche faces south, toward Mecca. It is quiet evidence that Christians and Muslims may have lived side by side here for a time.

At the northern end of town is the largest church, with an atrium, a baptistery and a cemetery. In 2018, researchers studying the painted plaster at Shivta published a striking finding. On a faded wall painting of a baptism scene, they identified what they believe is a face of Christ. It shows him young, with short curly hair, unlike the long-haired image that later became familiar. The paint is very faint, so do not expect a clear portrait. Still, it is moving to know such a face may have looked down here for centuries.

The town faded slowly rather than all at once. After the Islamic conquests of the seventh century, people continued to live here for a while. Over time, though, the trade routes and the economy changed, and the population dwindled. Recent studies of the town's rubbish heaps suggest the decline may have begun earlier than scholars once thought. In the end, the desert sand settled over empty streets, and the dry climate protected what remained.

Shivta waited a long time for outside attention. Before the First World War, a survey of this desert region recorded the site. Two members of that survey later became famous — the archaeologist Leonard Woolley, and T. E. Lawrence, remembered as Lawrence of Arabia. Later, in the 1930s, an American-led expedition excavated parts of the town, and archaeologists have continued to study it since then. Much of what you see was cleared and stabilised during this work.

Before you leave, find a quiet corner and stand still. Look at the line where pale stone meets the brown desert. Look at an arch against the hard blue sky, and notice how little separates the town from the empty land around it. As you walk back toward the entrance, remember the people who caught each rare rainfall. Their careful work is the reason these walls are still here for you today.