Scythopolis
Interesting facts
- More than 50 clay coffins with human faces moulded on their lids, mostly from the 13th and 12th centuries BC, were found at the site; some have strange, Aegean-looking features.
- Pharaoh Thutmose III recorded his 15th-century BC conquest of the town in an inscription at Karnak in Egypt.
- Excavators found two stelae of Seti I and a monument of Ramesses II; one stele mentions the Habiru, once controversially linked to the Hebrews.
- An Egyptian stele shows that a large Canaanite temple on the mound was dedicated to a local god named Mekal.
- According to the Hebrew Bible, the Philistines hung the bodies of King Saul and three of his sons on the town's walls after the battle of Mount Gilboa.
- A Roman-era sarcophagus inscribed for "Antiochus, son of Phallion" may have held a cousin of Herod the Great.
- The mosaic of the House of Leontius synagogue shows a temple menorah beside the Hebrew word shalom.
- The Muslim victory over the Byzantines here in 634 was remembered in Arabic as Yawm Baysan, "the day of Baysan".
- The Crusaders raised a small moated fort south-east of the Roman theatre, which Saladin destroyed in 1183.
- Under the Mamluks the town was a relay station on the postal route between Damascus and Cairo and the region's centre of sugar-cane processing.
Why it is worth it
At the foot of a great mound in the Jordan Valley lies one of the most complete Roman and Byzantine cityscapes in the Levant: colonnaded streets paved in dark basalt, a theatre, baths and a nymphaeum, all brought down together by an earthquake in 749. This was Scythopolis, the city whose ruins now fill a national park on the northern edge of modern Beit She'an, a town in the hot, dry valley where the Jezreel Valley meets the Jordan.
The site is far older than its classical name. Excavations on the tell — begun by the University of Pennsylvania in 1921 and resumed by the Hebrew University from 1983 — have uncovered around eighteen successive towns, with occupation reaching back to the Late Neolithic or Early Chalcolithic. For some three centuries in the Late Bronze Age it was an Egyptian administrative and military base. In the Hellenistic period it was refounded as Scythopolis, "city of the Scythians", a name possibly linked to Scythian mercenaries settled there. After Pompey's conquest in 63 BCE the city was rebuilt under Gabinius, and its centre moved off the summit of the tell onto the surrounding slopes. It became the leading city of the Decapolis and the only one of the league west of the Jordan. Basalt from Mount Gilboa, about 7 km away, served as building stone, and an aqueduct brought water from the same hills.
The city kept growing under Byzantine rule. In 409 it became capital of the province of Palaestina Secunda, and by the 6th century it reached some 40,000 inhabitants and spilled beyond its walls. Churches and monasteries left fine mosaics, among them a zodiac in the monastery of Lady Mary, alongside a Jewish synagogue and a Samaritan one whose floor avoids all human and animal figures. After the Muslim conquest of 634 the city, now Baysan, carried on, and its colonnaded market street was rebuilt under the Umayyad caliph Hisham in the 720s. On 18 January 749 a catastrophic earthquake brought it down; a freshly minted coin of that very year, found beneath the collapse, helped fix the date. Survivors settled among the ruins, but the city never regained its former scale. Since 2000 Beit She'an has been on Israel's tentative list for World Heritage status.
Getting there
The archaeological park adjoins the town of Beit She'an, about 1 km from the centre, on Highway 90, the north–south road along the Jordan Valley. Beit She'an has a station on the Jezreel Valley railway. The nearest airport is Haifa International Airport (HFA), about 55 km away; the country's main international gateway is Ben Gurion Airport (TLV) near Tel Aviv.
On these lists
32.50465, 35.50400per Wikidata