The route that carried frankincense and myrrh from southern Arabia to the Mediterranean crossed some of the driest country on earth, and the Nabataeans who controlled it built a chain of cities along the way. Avdat is among the best preserved: a hilltop enclosure with the remains of a temple platform, later Byzantine churches, a wine press, a bathhouse, dwellings and burial caves cut into the chalk. Around it lie the traces of a farming system engineered to capture the few violent rains of the year and direct them into terraced plots, an achievement studied by agronomists to this day. Inscribed on the World Heritage List as part of the Incense Route desert cities, Avdat is filmed here in 4K, with aerial views that reveal both the city plan and the runoff channels in the surrounding slopes.
