Caesarea Maritima Overview

Kenneth Holum
This grant will fund writing and editing of four volumes entitled The Combined Caesarea Expeditions, Final Report: The Temple Platform and the Inner Harbor. These volumes will be the final report of excavations that Avner Raban and Kenneth G. Holum conducted between 1988 and 2000.

Caesarea Maritima, located at 32° 40' north and 34° 53' east on the Mediterranean coast of Israel, is an urban site occupied ca. 400 B.C.E.-1295 C.E. Above abandoned Straton’s Tower, a small Hellenistic city of the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C.E., King Herod the Great (d. 4 B.C.E.) founded Caesarea 22-10/9 B.C.E. naming it for the Roman emperor Caesare Augustus. In 6 C.E. Caesarea became headquarters of the Roman governors of Judaea, later Palestine, and it remained provincial capital throughout the period of Roman and Byzantine rule. After the Muslim conquest in 640, the city declined, but a smaller Muslim town flourished from the 7th century through the 11th. In 1101 the Crusaders conquered the Muslim town, and despite vicissitudes Caesarea survived as center of a Crusader principality until 1265. Destroyed by the Egyptian Mamluks in 1287, the site lay virtually abandoned until resettled by Muslim refugees from Bosnia in the 19th century.

Despite rich evidence from all periods, Caesarea long remained underpublished. An exception was the Caesarea Ancient Harbour Excavation Project (CAHEP) that in the 1980s explored the celebrated harbor Sebastos that Herod had built when he founded Caesarea. In 1988 Kenneth G. Holum and Avner Raban joined forces in the Combined Caesarea Expeditions (CCE) to continue exploration of the harbor under water and of the now landlocked harbor basins, the harbor quays, and related harbor installations (area I). Raban and Holum also excavated on land the Temple Platform (area TP) and its retaining walls (area Z). On this artificial platform, adjacent to the harbor, Herod had positioned a grandiose pagan temple to the gods Roma and Augustus. CCE excavations ending in 2000 recovered instructive remains of Herod’s temple and harbor and even more plentiful evidence for the harbor’s later history, for an Early Christian Church that replaced Herod’s temple when Caesarea became Christian, for a medieval dwelling quarter that extended over both the landlocked Inner Harbor and the Temple Platform, and for monumental courtyard buildings on the Temple Platform that probably functioned as cloisters for the Knights Templar who dominated Caesarea in the 13th century.

Sadly, Avner Raban died in 2004, so Kenneth G. Holum is taking on publication of a substantial part of his legacy, areas I and Z. In three years, with support of this grant, the team intends to complete all four volumes on areas TP, Z, and I. Affiliated throughout with the American Schools of Oriental Research, we anticipate publication in the ASOR Archaeological Reports series.