---
title: "Two 1930s Photographs Show Who Got the Best Graves in a Negev Church"
description: "At Byzantine Shivta, a chapel built for baptisms became a burial place for priests and the children of powerful families"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-10-10T01:08:01Z
modified: 2026-10-10T11:34:52Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/two-1930s-photographs-show-who-got-the-best-graves-in-a-nege-1ad41d
language: en
tags: ["archaeology", "history", "byzantine", "church", "israel", "mideast", "science"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Two 1930s Photographs Show Who Got the Best Graves in a Negev Church

*At Byzantine Shivta, a chapel built for baptisms became a burial place for priests and the children of powerful families*

By Nate Ledger · October 10, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/two-1930s-photographs-show-who-got-the-best-graves-in-a-nege-1ad41d

## In brief

- A baptistery in Shivta’s North Church in the Negev became a burial chapel for priests and elite families in the 7th century
- Researchers know of no comparable baptistery burial chapel elsewhere in the Negev or Palestine
- Two unpublished 1933–1934 photographs in UCL archives let researchers place three of the seven graves
- The seven tombs held nine people who died between AD 612 and 679, six of them priests
- Three deaths within seven days in November 643 may point to a plague outbreak, though the inscriptions give no cause

In real estate, the oldest rule is that there are only a few good locations and the people who already have money get them. It turns out the rule also applies after death. In the seventh century, in the Byzantine desert town of Shivta in what is now Israel’s Negev, the most exclusive place to be buried was a small chapel in the North Church that had been built for baptisms. Priests were buried there, and so were young members of the right families. Other prominent residents had to settle for the church’s entrance hall and courtyard.

As Leman Altuntaş [reported for Arkeonews](https://arkeonews.net/90-year-old-photographs-reveal-an-unusual-burial-tradition-in-a-byzantine-church/), Emma Maayan-Fanar of the University of Haifa and Yotam Tepper of the Israel Antiquities Authority have reconstructed how the graves were laid out in [a study in *Palestine Exploration Quarterly*](https://doi.org/10.1080/00310328.2026.2716943). Burial inside churches was common across the Byzantine world. Burial inside a baptistery was not. The researchers know of no comparable case anywhere in the Negev or Palestine, though there were similar arrangements elsewhere around the Mediterranean.

Shivta had three monumental churches, and the North Church was the largest. Its baptistery had a cross-shaped font, and above it the apse held a painting of Christ’s baptism. That is the image which [Live Science reported](https://www.livescience.com/64173-earliest-jesus-portrait-israel.html) in 2018 had been described as the earliest depiction of Jesus found in Israel. The room’s whole purpose was spiritual rebirth. A Christian burial is about resurrection and eternal life, which is a neighbouring idea but a different service. Nobody knows whether the font stayed in use once the dead started arriving. If you ran the parish, you might reasonably think a family tomb next to the place where babies are baptized makes for an awkward combination. It seems the parish did not.

## A guest list with no seating plan

The difficulty is in the record-keeping. H. D. Colt’s expedition dug at Shivta in 1933–1934. It wrote down the Greek inscriptions on the tombstones and then lifted the stones out of place, but it never produced a full final report saying where each grave had been. That left archaeologists with the names and dates and no seating plan. Who lay next to whom is exactly the information that tells you about the relationships between the dead, and it was lost when the stones were moved.

It was mostly lost, anyway. Two unpublished photographs taken by Colt’s team before the stones came up had survived in the archives of University College London. Maayan-Fanar and Tepper matched the marble slabs, inscriptions and carved crosses visible in the photographs against the recorded stones, and that let them fix the original positions of three of the seven graves.

The seven tombs held nine people, who died between AD 612 and 679, a span of 67 years. Six were priests, and one of them was also a monk. The other three came from families with close ties to the church’s leadership. Membership was very restricted.

The earliest burial was a child named Abraham, who died in 612. His father, John, held the title vicarius, an important military and administrative post, and was closely connected to the North Church. Thirty-one years later another young relative, Stephanos, was laid in the same tomb. He was the son of Abraham’s brother George. The researchers read the layout as a social hierarchy: the baptistery for priests and especially privileged relatives, the outer spaces for other notable people. The church also had its own place on the ladder. In [a 2022 paper in *Byzantinische Zeitschrift*](https://cris.haifa.ac.il/en/publications/the-baptistery-in-the-north-church-of-shivta-structure-ritual-art), the same two authors pointed out that the burials beginning in 612 suggests either that the custom came later or that the baptistery itself is later than once thought.

## Crosses and plague

Another tombstone belonged to a different Stephanos, a priest who died on December 17, 636. Under his Greek epitaph someone carved an unusual Golgotha Cross, which shows a cross rising from a stepped base standing for the hill where Christians believe Jesus was crucified. It stands for sacrifice, resurrection and the hope of life after death. The date matters. The Byzantine-Sasanian wars of 602–628 had ended only a few years earlier. Emperor Heraclius had brought the True Cross back to Jerusalem in 629–630, and Muslim armies were now advancing across the region. The researchers can’t tie the carving to any particular event. They suggest it may reflect the religious worries of the time, and possibly a wish for divine protection.

Then there is November 643. Three people connected with the North Church died on the 5th, the 8th and the 11th of that month, one every three days. The researchers suggest that a local outbreak tied to the first plague pandemic, usually called the Plague of Justinian, may explain the cluster. They are careful to say that the inscriptions give no direct evidence of what killed anyone. By simple arithmetic, the boy Stephanos was buried in 643 as well, 31 years after his uncle Abraham, though the reporting does not say whether he was one of those three deaths.

The last known burial in the baptistery dates to 679, decades after the Islamic conquest. Its inscription is roughly cut and its stone came from nearby, unlike the expensive marble of earlier generations. That probably says something about Shivta’s shrinking wealth. It also shows that a Christian family could still claim the best spot in the church long after the political order had changed. The town didn’t disappear. Its leading families lost influence gradually, and its church adjusted. In this case the adjustment was that the premium product kept going, on cheaper stone.

In a sense, the most damaging thing to happen to this carefully ranked burial ground in about 1,300 years was a two-season dig in the 1930s, which removed in a few months the arrangement the families had built up over decades. Luckily, someone on the dig took two photographs first.