Story

Herod's Caesarea Maritima

22-10 BCE

Biblical Narrative

Now Herod the king, when he had built up the Temple unto the Lord, and the citadel called Antonia, and palaces in Jerusalem and in Jericho and in Masada and in Herodion, and fortresses upon every mountain and at every desert pass, looked yet for some other great work, that his name might be remembered among the kings of the nations. And he turned his eyes to the sea — to the place which was called Strato's Tower, on the coast of Sharon between Joppa and Dor — where there was no harbour, but only a long open beach upon which no ship could safely lie.

And he sent for craftsmen out of every land, builders and stone-cutters and divers and engineers, and he gave them silver beyond measure, and he said: Build me here a city. Make me a haven against the south-west wind, where great ships from Alexandria and from Tyre and from Cyprus may rest, and from Spain in the West and from Pontus in the North. Let it be greater than the haven of Piraeus; let it be a wonder to the nations.

And the workmen took stones beyond counting, and lowered them by ropes and by cranes into the deep, twenty fathoms of water, and they made therewith a mole that ran out into the sea two hundred cubits in width, and the half of it was breakwater against the waves, and the other half was a covered colonnade, where ships might be unloaded in shelter from rain and from storm. And they built behind the harbour a city of white stone, with a temple unto Caesar Augustus and unto the goddess Roma, with a hippodrome by the sea, and a theatre carved into the slope, and an aqueduct ten leagues long bringing pure water from the springs of Mount Carmel.

And after twelve years was the work finished, and Herod called the city Caesarea, in honour of his patron the Caesar; and he held games there for fifteen days, and brought wild beasts from Africa, and gladiators from Rome, and athletes from every Greek city. And from that day Caesarea was the seat of the Roman governors of Judea — and there, in the days of Tiberius the emperor, sat one Pontius Pilate, who was governor when our Lord was crucified.

He had no fit material that he might use for so great a work, and the place itself was opposite to his purposes; but he overcame the difficulty by his liberality, and accomplished a work that nature had refused to give.Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews XV.332

Archaeology · History · Genetics

Caesarea Maritima was constructed by Herod the Great between c. 22 and 10 BCE on the site of the abandoned Hellenistic settlement of Strato's Tower (Josephus, Antiquities XV.331–341, Jewish War I.408–415). The harbour, named Sebastos (Greek for Augustus), was the largest artificial harbour in the Roman world at the time of its construction — fifty hectares of enclosed basin, with two great moles totalling some 800 metres in length.

The remarkable underwater archaeology of the harbour was led by Avner Raban (University of Haifa) and Robert Hohlfelder (University of Colorado) between 1980 and 2003. They documented the use of pozzolana — volcanic ash imported from the Bay of Naples — mixed with lime and seawater to make hydraulic concrete that sets underwater. Vitruvius (De Architectura V.12.2) describes the recipe; the Caesarea moles, dated by ceramic and dendrochronological evidence to the late first century BCE, are the earliest large-scale Roman application of this technology in the eastern Mediterranean.

Subsidence and tectonic activity have lowered the moles 5–7 metres below their original waterline; archaeologists have recovered the timber forms (caissons) into which the concrete was poured, preserved by anaerobic mud — including stamps of Italian timber suppliers and the names of Herodian-era ship's carpenters. By the third century CE the harbour was already silting up; by the time of the Crusader occupation in the twelfth century only a small inner basin remained usable.

The Pilate Inscription — discovered in 1961 by an Italian expedition led by Antonio Frova and reused as a step in the renovated Caesarea theatre — is a four-line dedicatory stone in Latin that reads: [DIS AUGUSTI]S TIBERIEUM / [PON]TIUS PILATUS / [PRAEF]ECTUS IUDA[EA]E / [REF]E[CIT]. It is the only contemporary inscription naming Pontius Pilate ever found, and confirms (against earlier Christian tradition that called him ״procurator״) that his correct title in the 30s CE was praefectus, prefect — exactly as the title appears in early Roman provincial epigraphy.

The Sebastos harbour at Caesarea is the most ambitious piece of civil engineering surviving from Herod's reign. The discovery of the harbour's underwater concrete moles in the 1980s confirmed the technological audacity that Josephus had described.Robert Hohlfelder, Sebastos: The Harbour Complex of King Herod (1985), paraphrased