Around 2,400 years ago, the great city of Elusa arose in the heart of the Negev Desert, at the crossing point of two great trading routes: the Incense Road and the biblical Way of Shur. Elusa presumably began, as desert cities do, with a village built around an oasis. That particular area is rich in groundwater. At first a village of pagans worshipping Venus, Aphrodite (locally named al-Allat) and the like, the people there would convert to Christianity in the 4th century C.E.

We can be confident that this particular set of ruins in the heart of what is now an Israeli army firing zone is the actual Elusa (Haluza to Hebrews and al-Khalasa in Arabic) because archaeologists have now found an inscription in Greek naming the place, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced on Wednesday.

Much is unknown about the inscription other than its existence, but it seems to date to Emperor Diocletian’s reign, around 1,700 years ago, when the great 10th Roman Legion was being moved from inside Israel to Aqaba, which led to a lot of development in the region, the archaeologists explain.