Nitzana (Nabataean city)

Did You Know?

• In January 2021, a 1,400-year-old tombstone with a Greek inscription for a Christian woman named Maria was discovered at Nitzana National Park.
• The tombstone inscription reads: 'Blessed Maria who lived an immaculate life'.

Nessana papyri

Excavations in 1935–37 uncovered a large collection of papyri from the sixth and seventh centuries, written in Greek, Latin, Arabic, Nabataean, and Syriac. These documents, found in two store rooms of the ruined Church of Mary Mother of God and of the soldier saints Sergius and Bacchus, span 505 to 689 CE and cover the final phase of Byzantine administration and the early Islamic period. Private papers, including wills, far outnumber official records; among the finds are a fragmentary text of Virgil, a Latin-Greek glossary of the Aeneid, fragments of the Gospel of John, early seventh-century church archives, and the personal papers of George, son of Patrick, alongside the archives of the military unit Numerus of the Most Loyal Theodosians. The papyri reveal that the largely Nabataean inhabitants became Christianized and Romanized, and they document the arrival of a Byzantine phylarchate. Many ancient Negev city names are known only from these documents. One of the last papyri describes coinage struck and soldiers employed by Abd al-Malik, marking the replacement of Roman institutions with Umayyad power.