revealed some Iron Age remains. Pottery sherds of the Iron Age and Persian period were discovered at the surface of the tell.
Roman period with Herodians In Roman times, the city was known as
Iamnia, also spelled
Jamnia. It was bequeathed by
Herod the Great upon his death to his sister
Salome I. Upon her death, it passed to the Roman emperor
Augustus, who managed it as a private
imperial estate, a status it was to maintain for at least a century. After Salome's death, Iamnia came into the property of
Livia, the future Roman empress, and then to her son
Tiberius. During the
First Jewish–Roman War, when the Roman army had quelled the insurrection in
Galilee, the army then marched upon Iamnia and
Azotus, taking both towns and stationing garrisons within them. According to rabbinic tradition, the
tanna Yohanan ben Zakkai and his disciples were permitted to settle in Iamnia during the outbreak of the war, after Zakkai, realizing that
Jerusalem was about to fall, sneaked out of the city and asked
Vespasian, the commander of the besieging Roman forces, for the right to settle in Yavne and teach his disciples. Upon the fall of Jerusalem, his school functioned as a re-establishment of the
Sanhedrin.
Byzantine period , showing ) (Lit. "Jabneel, which is also Jamnia") Byzantine period finds from excavations include an aqueduct east of the tell, and a kiln. The world's largest wine factory from the Byzantine period has been uncovered by Israeli archaeologists, after a two-year excavation process; the importance of its wine was exemplified by its use by emperor Justin II in 566 at his table during his coronation feast.
Early Islamic period The historian
al-Baladhuri (d. 892 CE) mentioned Yibna as one of ten towns in
Jund Filastin conquered by the
Rashidun army led by
Amr ibn al-As during the
Muslim conquest of the Levant. The 9th-century historian
Ya'qubi wrote that it was an ancient city built on a hill and inhabited by
Samaritans. The geographer
al-Maqdisi, writing around 985, said that "Yubna has a beautiful
mosque. From this place come the excellent
figs known by the name of Damascene." An additional kiln, and part of a commercial/industrial area were uncovered at the west of the tell in 2009. Ibelin was first sacked by
Saladin before his army was comprehensively routed at the
Battle of Montgisard in late 1177. In August 1187, it was retaken by Saladin and burned down, and ceased for some time to form part of the Crusaders' kingdom. The Jewish traveler
Benjamin of Tudela (1130–1173) identified Jamnia (
Jabneh) of classical writers with the
Ibelin of the Crusades. He places the ancient city of Jamnia at three parasangs from
Jaffa and two from
Ashdod (
Azotus). During the
Mamluk period (13th–16th centuries), Yibna was a key site along the Cairo–Damascus road, which served as a center for rural religious and economic life. Ibelin's parish church was converted into a mosque, to which a minaret was added during the Mamluk period in 1337. The minaret survives until today, while the mosque (the former Crusader church) was blown up by the Israeli army in 1950. The
Mausoleum of Abu Huraira, a
maqam (religious shrine), in Yibna was described as "one of the finest domed mausoleums in Palestine". The site has been considered by Muslims as the tomb of Abu Huraira since the 12th century. After Israel's capture of Yibna in 1948, the shrine was taken over by
Sephardic Jews who consider the tomb as the burial place of Rabbi
Gamaliel of Yavne.
Ottoman period The village became part of the
Ottoman Empire in 1517. In the 1596 Ottoman tax registers, it fell under the
nahiya (subdistrict) of
Gaza, part of the ''
liwa''' (district) of
Gaza, with a population of 129 households, an estimated 710 persons, all Muslims. The villagers paid a fixed tax rate of 25% on a number of crops, including wheat, barley, summer crops,
sesame seeds and fruits, as well as goats, beehives and vineyards; a total of 34,000
akçe. Three quarters of the revenues went to a
waqf (religious endowment). During the Ottoman period, Yibna was an important stop along the Cairo-Damascus road. In the
French campaign in Egypt and Syria in 1799, it was shown on the map that
Pierre Jacotin compiled that year as 'Ebneh'. An American missionary,
William Thomson, who visited Yibna in 1834, described it as a village on hill inhabited by 3,000 Muslims who worked in agriculture. He wrote that an inscription on the mosque indicated that it had been built in 1386, while
Denys Pringle indicates 1337 as the construction year of the minaret. In 1838, Yibna was noted as a Muslim village in the Gaza district. An Ottoman village list from 1870 found that Yibna had a population of 1,042 living in 348 houses, although this number only counted adult males. In 1882, the
Palestine Exploration Fund's
Survey of Western Palestine described Yibna as a large village partly built of stone and situated on a hill. It had olive trees and corn to the north, and gardens nearby.
Oral histories of Yibna mention Late Ottoman
infant jar-burials, commonly associated with
nomads or
itinerant workers of
Egyptian origins.
British Mandate In 1921, an elementary school for boys was founded in Yibna. By 1941-42 it had 445 students. A school for girls was founded in 1943, and by 1948 it had 44 students. increasing in the
1931 census to 3,600, of whom all were Muslims except for seven Christians, two Jews and one
Baháʼí, living in a total of 794 houses. The inhabitants of Yibna cultivated not only the fertile alluvial plains but also the sandy hinterland known as
Rimāl Yibnā. Despite being classified as uncultivable under Ottoman land law, villagers, in cooperation with
nomadic groups, developed fig orchards, vineyards, and seasonal fields among the dunes. British cadastral and tax reforms in the 1920s and 1930s accelerated these efforts, and by the 1940s local farmers had managed to cultivate up to 10 percent of the dunefield, transforming marginal lands into productive plots. In 1941,
Kibbutz Yavne was established nearby by refugees from Germany, followed by a
Youth Aliyah village,
Givat Washington, in 1946. In addition there were 1,500 nomads living around the village. while 127 dunams were classified as built-up areas. File:Yibna 1929.jpg|Yibna 1929 1:20,000 File:Yibna 1941.jpg|Yibna 1941 1:20,000 File:Yibna 1945.jpg|Yibna 1945 1:250,000 ==1948 and aftermath==