Liber Annuus

The city of Be’er Sheva thrived during the Byzantine period; however, its development during the Early Islamic period is less apparent. This article addresses the cultural processes experienced in the ancient city in the two centuries following the Arab conquest by focusing on a rich glass corpus from the city center dated to the late Byzantine and Early Islamic periods, and examining additional, contemporaneous glass assemblages from Be’er Sheva.

The combined insights from this study suggest that during the 6th-8th centuries CE the inhabitants of Be’er Sheva’s city center and residential areas were culturally engaged and familiar with the elaborate trends of the glass industry of their time. Moreover, no break is evident in the glass products throughout the major historical events of this period. Nevertheless, the occurrence of several Muslim-related glass vessel-types may suggest a transformation of a part of the population or a change in the culture of some of the inhabitants, which took place in the Early Islamic period, possibly in the 8th century CE.

Furthermore, although a few of the specimens that occurred in the 8th century CE belong to types that may have continued into the Abbasid period as well, none of the glass finds presented herein may indisputably be assigned to the 9th century CE or later. The glass finds from Be’er Sheva, therefore, suggest that the activity in the city center and residential areas decreased or ceased around the late 8th or early 9th century CE.

Besides having a functional purpose as a source of light, oil lamps, from their inception, were highly regarded and endowed with cultural and spiritual powers, following the suggestion that the closed lamp was adorned as a “House of Light” since the Classical (Hellenistic) period, inspired by architectural elements such as the column, whose height reached the sky and whose massiveness supported a heavy structure such as the Temple. I propose renaming the wheel-made saucer or “Beehive”-shaped oil lamp of the second-third parts of the Islamic period the “Dome”-shaped lamp, as the upper part that covers the receptacle is in the shape of a dome. Moreover, the dome of this lamp assumes the same shape as the dwellings that the Arab nomadic tribes constructed to provide shelter from the oppressive heat yet remain in command of the sky, i.e., the seat of God.

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