According to the Palestine Exploration Fund, Beshshit stands for Beit Shit, meaning "house of Seth. The tomb of Neby Shit was in Bashshit, and other sanctuaries for him in the region included one in Samaria, as well as Al-Nabi Shayth further north in Lebanon. The tomb lies within a triple-domed mosque of the same name located on the side of a hill that lay in the center of the former village.
History
Pottery remains from the early Islamic era and a coin from the Umayyad era have been found here, together with pottery remains from the 12th–13th centuries CE. During the Crusader period in Palestine, Bashshit was referred to as Basit. It is documented in the writings of Yaqut al-Hamawi who mentioned it in his Mu'jam, describing its proximity to al-Ramla. Coins from the Mamluk era have been found here.
gave an account of the village in the 17th century, noting that the Arab scholar Jamal al-Bashshiti was from the village. In 1838 it was noted as a village, Beshit, in the Gaza district. In May 1863 Victor Guérin found the village to have 350 inhabitants, surrounded by tobacco fields, while an Ottoman village list of about 1870 showed that Bashshit had a population of 159, with a total of 57 houses, though the population count included men only. It was also noted that the name came from "House of Seth". In the late 19th century, while under Ottoman rule, Bashshit was an important village between Yibna and Isdud. The village structures in Bashshit were made of adobe bricks. There were cultivated gardens with cactus hedges, and on a hill, stood a three-domed shrine. At the end of WWI there apparently was some fighting in/around Bashshit, as used ammunition dating from that era have been found. The New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade operated in the area in 1917.
During the British Mandate period, Bashshit had an elementary school, built in 1921, in which 148 students were enrolled in the mid-1940s. The village had a mosque and several artesian wells. Most of the residents were farmers. In the 1922 census of Palestine conducted by the British Mandate authorities, Bashit had a population of 936; all Muslims, increasing in the 1931 census to 1,125, still all Muslims, in a total of 333 houses. By 1945, the population had increased to 1,620, the population being entirely Arab in ethnicity. The village comprised a total area of 18,553 dunums. A large number of inhabitants were employed in cereal farming, which occupied most of the land area. Some land was also allocated for irrigation and plantation, and the growing of citrus fruits and olives. Types of landuse in dunams by Arabs in the 1945 statistics:
Land Usage
Dunams
Citrus
66
Irrigated & Plantation
651
Olives
67
Cereal
17,558
Urban
58
Cultivable
18,275
Non-cultivable
220
The land ownership of the village before occupation in dunams:
Between May 10 and May 13, 1948, the village was attacked by the 52nd and 53rd battalions of the Givati Brigade as part of Operation Barak. The villagers put up a major struggle, but the houses were mostly all destroyed. Today, there are seven Israeli settlements on the village land, including Newe Mivtach, Meshar, Kfar Mordechai, Misgav Dov, Kannot, Shedema, and Aseret. Of Bashshit's former structures, three houses and a pool remain; two of the houses are deserted and an Israeli family occupies one. The surrounding lands today are cultivated by Israelis for agricultural production. The village contains an archaeological site, al-Nabi 'Ararat, which has some remaining pillars and cisterns. However, the site is fenced off and marked as a "dangerous building" and the cisterns are heavily populated with bats. The remains of a courtyard in front of the khirbat is heavily overgrown with weeds.
Excavations
In 1999, the village became subject of an archaeological investigation by the Israel Antiquities Authority. The excavation, directed by T. Kanias, with the assistance of A. Hajian, R. Graff and M. Saltzberger involved the excavation of the sewer line which revealed building remains and ceramic fragments from the Early Islamic period and the 12th–13th centuries CE. Various sized kurkar stones were discovered 0.9 m below the surface, pottery fragments from the Early Islamic period and a few animal bones. Numerous potsherds were excavated also dating to the 12th–13th centuries CE, including the foot of a clay box lined with chalk and decorated with a geometric pattern and the remains of a plaster floor. A salvage excavation in 2016 revealed remains from the Umayyad, Mamluk and Ottoman era.
