Negev
The Negev or Naqab is a desert and semidesert region of southern Israel. The region's largest city and administrative capital is Beersheba, in the north. At its southern end is the Gulf of Aqaba and the resort city and port of Eilat. It contains several development towns, including Dimona, Arad, and Mitzpe Ramon, as well as a number of small Bedouin towns, including Rahat, Tel Sheva, and Lakiya. There are also several kibbutzim, including Revivim and Sde Boker; the latter became the home of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, after his retirement from politics.
Although historically part of a separate region, the Negev was added to the proposed area of Mandatory Palestine, of which large parts later became Israel, on 10 July 1922, having been conceded by British representative St John Philby "in Trans-Jordan's name". Despite this, the region remained exclusively Arab until 1946; in response to the British Morrison–Grady Plan which would have allotted the area to an Arab state, the Jewish Agency enacted the 11 points in the Negev plan to begin Jewish settlement in the area. A year later, the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine allotted a larger part of the area to the Jewish State which became Israel.
The desert is home to the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, whose faculties include the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research and the Albert Katz International School for Desert Studies, both located on the Midreshet Ben-Gurion campus adjacent to Sde Boker.
In October 2012, global travel guide publisher Lonely Planet rated the Negev second on a list of the world's top ten regional travel destinations for 2013, noting its current transformation through development.
Etymology
The origin of the word Negev is from the Hebrew root denoting 'dry'; in the Hebrew Bible, the word Negev is also used for the direction 'south'. Some English-language translations use the spelling Negeb.The Negev mentioned in the Bible consisted only of the northernmost part of the modern Israeli Negev, with the semiarid Arad-Beersheba Valley defined as "the eastern Negev".
In Arabic, the Negev is known as an-Naqab or an-Naqb, though it was not thought of as a distinct region until the demarcation of the Egypt-Ottoman frontier in the 1890s and has no single Arabic name.
During the British Mandate, it was called "Beersheba sub-district".
Geography
The Negev contains the oldest continuously exposed surface discovered on Earth, with an approximate age of 1.8 million years. During the Pleistocene, the Negev fluctuated between intervals of relative humidity and intervals of aridity similar to or even more severe than the present day; from around 80,000 to 13,000 years BP, during a time interval roughly corresponding to the Last Glacial Period, the Negev was significantly more humid than today. It covers more than half of Israel, over some, or at least 55% of the country's land area. It forms an inverted triangle shape whose western side is contiguous with the desert of the Sinai Peninsula, and whose eastern border is the Arabah valley. The Negev has a number of interesting cultural and geological features. Among the latter are three enormous, craterlike makhteshim, which are unique to the region: Makhtesh Ramon, HaMakhtesh HaGadol, and HaMakhtesh HaKatan.The Negev is a rocky desert. It is a melange of brown, rocky, dusty mountains interspersed by wadis and deep craters. It can be split into five different ecological regions: northern, western and central Negev, the high plateau and the Arabah Valley. The northern Negev, or Mediterranean zone, receives of rain annually and has fairly fertile soil. The western Negev receives of rain per year, with light and partially sandy soil. Sand dunes can reach heights of up to here. Home to the city of Beersheba, the central Negev has an annual precipitation of and is characterised by impervious soil, known as loess, allowing minimum penetration of water with greater soil erosion and water runoff.
The high plateau area of Negev Mountains/Ramat HaNegev stands between and above sea level with extreme temperatures in summer and winter. The area receives of rain per year, with inferior and partially salty soil. The Arabah Valley along the Jordanian border stretches from Eilat in the south to the tip of the Dead Sea in the north. The Arabah Valley is very arid with barely of rain annually. It has inferior soil, in which little can grow without irrigation and special soil additives.
Flora and fauna
Vegetation in the Negev is sparse, but certain trees and plants thrive there, among them Acacia, Pistacia, Retama, Urginea maritima and Thymelaea. Hyphaene thebaica or doum palm can be found in the Southern Negev. The Evrona Nature Reserve is the most northerly point in the world where this palm can be found.A small population of Arabian leopards, an endangered animal in the Arabian peninsula, has survived in the southern Negev but is now probably extinct. Other carnivora found in the Negev are the caracal, the striped hyena, the Arabian wolf, the golden jackal and the marbled polecat.
The Arabah Arabian gazelle survives with a few individuals in the Negev. The dorcas gazelle is more numerous, with some 1,000–1,500 individuals in the Negev. Some 350 to 500 Nubian ibex live in the Negev Highlands and in the Eilat Mountains.
The Negev shrew is a species of mammal of the family Soricidae that is found only in Israel. A population of the critically endangered Kleinmann's tortoise survives in the sands of the western and central Negev Desert.
Desert snails of the genus Euchondrus feed on endolithic lichens which live inside limestone rocks, converting rock and lichen into soil, and releasing between 22 and 27 milligrams of nitrogen per square metre of soil through their faeces.
Animals that were reintroduced after their extinction in the wild or localised extinction respectively are the Arabian oryx and the Asiatic wild ass, which in the Negev number about 250 animals.
Like many areas in Israel and the rest of the Middle East, the Negev used to host in the distant past the Asiatic lion and the Asiatic cheetah until their complete extinction at the hands of humans in later centuries.
The Arabian ostrich was once common in the Negev, but became extinct in the 1920s due to widespread hunting by humans. There was an attempt to reintroduce the ostrich to the Negev using the North African ostrich in 2004 but it failed.
Climate
The Negev region is arid, receiving very little rain due to its location to the east of the Sahara, and extreme temperatures due to its location 31 degrees north. However the northernmost areas of the Negev, including Beersheba, are semi-arid. The usual rainfall total from June to October inclusive is zero. Snow and frost are rare in the northern Negev, and snow and frost are unknown in the vicinity of Eilat in the southernmost Negev.History
Prehistorical nomads
Nomadic life in the Negev dates back at least 4,000 years and perhaps as much as 7,000 years.Bronze Age
The first urbanised settlements were established by a combination of Canaanite, Amalekite, Amorite, Nabataean and Edomite groups. Pharaonic Egypt is credited with introducing copper mining and smelting in both the Negev and the Sinai between 1400 and 1300 BC.Biblical
Extent of biblical Negev
According to Israeli archaeologists, in the Hebrew Bible, the term Negev only relates to the northern, semi-arid part of what we call Negev today; of this, the Arad-Beersheba Valley, which receives enough rain to permit agriculture and therefore sedentary occupation, is accordingly defined as "the eastern Negev".Biblical reference
According to the Book of Genesis chapter 13, Abraham lived for a while in the Negev after being banished from Egypt. During the Exodus journey to the Promised Land, Moses sent twelve scouts into the Negev to assess the land and population. Later the northern part of biblical Negev was inhabited by the Tribe of Judah and the southern part of biblical Negev by the Tribe of Simeon. The Negev was later part of the Kingdom of Solomon, and then, with varied extension to the south, part of the Kingdom of Judah.Iron Age
In the 9th century BC, development and expansion of mining in both the Negev and Edom coincided with the rise of the Assyrian Empire. Beersheba was the region's capital and a centre for trade in the 8th century BCE. Small settlements of Israelites in the areas around the capital existed between 1020 and 928 BCE.Nabateans and Romans
The 4th-century BC arrival of the Nabateans resulted in the development of irrigation systems that supported new urban centres located along the Negev incense route at Avdat, Mamshit, Shivta, Haluza, and Nitzana. This at least was the prevailing theory, until more recent research showed that the earliest form of Nabataean agriculture in the Negev Highlands was only based on spring-water irrigation, with the much more extensive run-off water harvesting techniques using barrages and terraces apparently developing and being used only later, during the 4th-7th centuries AD, after the 3rd-century collapse of long-distance trade.The Nabateans controlled the trade on the spice route between their capital Petra and the Gazan seaports. Nabatean currency and the remains of red and orange potsherds, identified as a trademark of their civilisation, have been found along the route, remnants of which are also still visible. Nabatean control of the Negev ended when the Roman Empire annexed their lands in 106 AD. The population, largely comprising nomads, venerated deities such as Dushara, Allat, and others.
Byzantine heydays: desert agriculture
rule in the 4th century introduced Christianity to the population. Agriculture-based cities were established and the population grew exponentially. As shown by the research conducted by Michael Evenari, novel techniques were employed, such as runoff rainwater collection and management systems, which harvested water from larger areas and directed it onto smaller plots. This permitted the cultivation of plants with much higher water requirements than the given arid environment could provide for. Evenari researched the ancient mechanisms, rediscovered the ratio of water collection area to cultivation area, and explained the various ancient techniques of land amelioration, such as wadi terracing and flash-flood dams, and the features used for collecting and directing runoff water. He thought that the creators of this elaborate systems had been the Nabataeans, a theory proved wrong by more recent studies, which dated the massive agricultural and demographic expansion in the area to the Byzantine period. The older explanation for the Tuleilat el-Anab, lit. 'grape mounds' phenomenon, has also been discarded: these large piles of rocks probably served two purposes: removing the rocks from the cultivated plots and accelerating the erosion and water transportation of topsoil from the runoff collection area onto those plots.Along with Avdat, Mamshit , Shivta, Haluza, and Nitzana, the settlements at Rehovot-in-the-Negev/Ruheibeh and Saadon are also significant for this period.