Caesarea Maritima
Interesting facts
- A limestone block found reused in the theatre carries an inscription naming Pontius Pilate, the only archaeological find bearing his name and title.
- Shipping the volcanic ash for the breakwaters from Italy would have taken at least 44 voyages by ships carrying 400 tons each.
- Cores drilled from the moles show their concrete was weaker than in Italian ports: the mortar bonded poorly with the local kurkar stone and the lime was badly mixed.
- The harbour's name, Sebastos, is simply the Greek form of Augustus, the emperor to whom Herod dedicated both city and port.
- The Jewish historian Josephus compared the harbour in size to Piraeus, the great port of Athens.
- In the 6th century an octagonal Byzantine church was built directly on the podium of Herod's temple to Rome and Augustus.
- After the Crusader sack of 1101 the Genoese carried off a green hexagonal bowl they took for emerald, the Sacro Catino, later revered as the Holy Grail.
- In 2015 divers found about 2,000 Fatimid gold coins on the seabed off the harbour, and hundreds more were recovered in 2021.
- In 1880 refugees from Bosnia, most of them from Mostar, settled among the ruins and built a small town from the ancient masonry.
- A Roman marble sarcophagus found in 2025 shows a drinking contest in which a tipsy Hercules reclines while a triumphant Dionysus looks on.
Why it is worth it
On a coast with no natural harbour, Herod the Great built one. Between 22 and 15 BC his engineers threw two breakwaters into the open sea, 500 and 275 metres long, and enclosed about 100,000 square metres of water. It was the largest artificial harbour of its time built in open water. To make concrete that would set under the waves, Herod shipped more than 24,000 cubic metres of volcanic ash from Pozzuoli in Italy and poured it into floating timber caissons and sunken barges. A geological fault runs along this coast. Earth tremors, and a tsunami in the first or second century, slowly broke the moles apart. By the sixth century the harbour could no longer be used, and today its moles lie more than five metres under the sea.
The harbour, named Sebastos, was the centrepiece of a new city that Herod dedicated to Augustus around 10 BC as Caesarea, near a small Phoenician trading post known as Straton's Tower. Herod gave it a temple to Rome and Augustus, markets, baths, broad streets and a palace on a promontory over the sea, with an ornamental pool ringed by colonnades. A theatre facing the Mediterranean and a hippodrome hosted games every five years. Aqueducts brought water from the foothills of Mount Carmel. When Judaea became a Roman province in 6 AD, Caesarea replaced Jerusalem as the seat of its governors, Pontius Pilate among them, and remained a provincial capital for about six centuries. It also became a major centre of early Christianity. According to the Acts of the Apostles, Peter baptised the centurion Cornelius here. In the third century Origen worked here on his Hexapla, and the city's church library was later said to hold some 30,000 manuscripts.
After the Muslim conquest of 640 the city lost its role as a capital. It was fortified again in the eleventh century and taken by the Crusaders in 1101. In 1251 Louis IX of France surrounded it with high walls and a deep moat, and parts of those walls still stand. The Mamluks destroyed it in 1265. A small fishing village later grew among the ruins; its people left or were expelled in 1948. Large-scale excavations since the 1950s have uncovered the Roman, Byzantine and Crusader layers, and in 2011 the ruins became Caesarea National Park.
Getting there
The ruins lie on the Mediterranean coast of Israel, between Tel Aviv and Haifa, beside the modern town of Caesarea. Or Akiva is about 3 km away. Haifa Airport (HFA) is about 37 km to the north. Ben Gurion Airport (TLV), the country's main international airport, is about 54 km to the south.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Caesarea, also Caesarea Maritima, Caesarea Palaestinae or Caesarea Stratonis, was an ancient and medieval port city on the coast of the eastern Mediterranean, and later a small fishing village. It was the capital of Roman Judaea, Syria Palaestina and Palaestina Prima, successively, for a period of c. 650 years and a major intellectual hub of the Mediterranean. Today, the site is part of the Caesarea National Park, on the western edge of the Sharon plain in Israel.
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