Archaeological find evidences pilgrimages to the Holy Land 1,500 years ago

Archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) have unearthed a Byzantine-era church in the northern Negev Desert, adorned with wall art depicting ancient vessels that pilgrims would have used to travel to the Holy Land.

“This surprising and intriguing find of ship drawings in a Byzantine church in the northern Negev opens a window into the world of Christian pilgrims who visited the Holy Land 1,500 years ago. It also provides first-hand evidence about the ships they traveled on and the maritime world of that time,” said Eli Escusido, director of the AAI.

The discovery, made south of the Bedouin city of Rahat, where the AAI has been carrying out excavations for several years, was revealed in a press release issued on May 23. The excavated site tells the story of settlement in the Negev at the end of the Byzantine period and the beginning of the early Islamic period.

According to the excavators, “these intriguing drawings could have been left by Christian pilgrims arriving by boat at the port of Gaza; Their first stop inland was this church in Rahat, continuing from here to other sites throughout the country.”

This site, in fact, is just a half-day walk from the ancient port of Gaza, and the church is located along an ancient Roman road that led from the coast to Beer Sheva, the main city of the Negev.

According to the directors of the excavation, Dr. Oren Shmueli, Dr. Elena Kogan-Zehavi and Dr. Noé David Michael on behalf of the AAI, together with Professor Deborah Cvikel from the Department of Maritime Civilizations at the University of Haifa, It is reasonable to think that Christian pilgrims traveled this route to reach the Christian holy places in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, as well as the monasteries in the Negev hills and in the Sinai.

“It is reasonable to think that their first stop after disembarking from the ships in Gaza port was this same church revealed in our excavations south of Rahat,” the scholars noted.

The ships drawn on the rock “are a greeting from the Christian pilgrims who arrived by boat at the port of Gaza,” the excavation directors continued. “Pilgrims who visited the church left their personal mark in the form of drawings of ships on its walls. The ship is in fact an ancient Christian symbol, but in this case, apparently, it is a true graphic representation of the real ships in which the pilgrims traveled to the Holy Land.

Cvikel described one of the drawings: “One of the boats is represented as a line drawing, but you can discern that its bow is slightly pointed and that there are oars on both sides of the boat. It may be an aerial representation of the ship, although it appears that the artist was attempting a three-dimensional drawing. “It is possible that the lines under the boat represent the path traced by the oars through the water.”

“Boats or crosses left by visiting Christian pilgrims as a testimony of their visit are also found in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem,” he added, highlighting a common practice of pilgrims of that era.

The reference is probably to the famous ship of the “Sir, we went”, the only image of a boat found in the Holy Sepulcher (while the crosses are countless). It is a charcoal drawing, dating between the 2nd and 4th centuries, found on a stone used in a very old wall located in the area of ​​the basilica’s foundations, in the part that belongs to the Armenians.

Translated and adapted by the ACI Prensa team. Originally published in CNA.