Horvat Rehava

The story

Horvat Rehava is an archaeological site in the Negev Highlands, about a kilometer south of Dimona. G. Kirk surveyed it between 1937 and 1938, and then the site was called Umm al-Tin; in 1955 the archaeologist Nelson Glueck surveyed it, in 1965 the survey team of Rudolph Cohen surveyed it, and in 1974 Cohen carried out a salvage excavation at the site. At the site are the remains of an elliptical fortress, whose diameter ranges between sixty and seventy-five meters, and it is part of the Negev fortresses which in the opinion of scholars were built in the Iron Age. The thickness of the walls is sixty centimeters and their height has been preserved to half a meter. The wall of the fortress is a casemate wall, two parallel walls divided into rooms, of which eight have been uncovered. The size of the rooms is not uniform, and within them vessels of two kinds were found: pottery made on the wheel, characteristic of the tenth century BCE, and coarse pottery made by hand, characteristic of the Negev. On part of the ruin of the fortress a building was built in the Roman or the Byzantine period. The fortress stands alone, and the remains uncovered around it are of the later building only.

• Biblical
• Archaeology
• Dimona