Efraim Lev

al. 2018). Within the larger frame of our project we explore the attributes of the phenomenal success of Byzantine society in the semi-arid area of the Negev, and the nature of its decline. As part of the project, several trash mounds were excavated within three of the main settlements of the Negev, namely, Elusa, Soubeita, and Nessana. The ancient trash yielded an exceptional abundance of food refuse, ranging from bones of sheep and goats to seeds of edible plants and wood used as fuel. These bones are the best empirical evidence to reconstruct the food preferences and culinary practices of the Ne-gev Desert people in Byzantine times. The organic material also included numerous bones of parrotfish (Bar-Oz et al. 2019). The unexpected discovery of par-rotfish is one of the peculiar aspects of these excavations (Blevis 2019). All fish remains were identified to biological taxa based on morphological and metric criteria, using the fish-reference collection of Irit Zohar, which is stored in the Laboratory of Archaeozoology at the University of Haifa. Specifically, a significant number of remains of Red Sea par-rotfish were identified, based on the presence of their beak-like tooth plate and pharyngeal bones, which are distinct from those of their Mediterranean cousins (Blevis and Zohar, table S7 in Bar-Oz et al. 2019). The Byzantine Negev The Negev desert was located in a remote corner of the empire, distant from the imperial centers of power to the north. But modern scholarship has mostly neglected a simple fact in its numerous studies of late antique Negev society, namely, its northern reaches lay in proximity to the Mediterranean coast, allowing, at least in theory, for a manageable connection of the entire micro-region to Mediterranean networks of commerce and knowledge (Wickham 2005). Located between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, and bordering the Sinai Peninsula and the Jordan Valley, the Negev Desert was home to seminomadic peoples since at least the second millennium BCE. Patterns of a more complex society, employing sedentary settlement forms and reliant upon imported goods, appeared in the Nabatean period, towards the second century BCE, and continued to develop during the time of the Nabataean kingdom and its incorporation into the Roman Empire in the first and second centuries CE (Rubin 1996). Under the Byzantine Empire, the entire area flourished and reached an unprecedented economic peak. It subsequently declined rapidly, possibly even before the Muslim conquest (Bar-Oz et al. 2019). The strong connective capacity of this area-bridging the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, and by implication East and Figure 1. The Byzantine Negev. Maps prepared by Sapir Haad. the corals' health and helps to preserve the delicate balance of the reef 's ecosystem (Bellwood et al. 2004). As a dominant component of the reef, parrotfish are considered a keystone species and play a critical part in the survival of the entire coral reef ecosystem. Nowadays, however, populations of parrotfish are endangered worldwide across their distribution range. A recent study conducted for The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species found that numerous populations of parrotfish face risk of regional extinction. Among the main reasons is excessive fishing, which often employs nonselective fish traps and nets. In addition, parrotfish are targets of nocturnal spearfishing throughout their distribution range (Comeros-Raynal et al. 2012). Parrotfish in the Byzantine Negev

One of the many medical recipes from the Cairo Geniza collected by Prof. Efraim Lev was identified by Dr. Amir Ashur as probably written by Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher, legalist and physician (1138-1203). The recipe was written to a certain, unknown, person, and his disease in not mentioned either.

The recipe contains various medical substances and plants, including precise description on how to use it. In this paper we will discuss this recipe, identify the substances and plants mentioned and we will try to place it in the wider context of Greek, Arabic and Medieval Mediterranean medicine.