Tent Work in Palestine — Part 98

The wall of the Roman town was traced, and found to embrace an area of four hundred acres; but Crusading Cæsarea was much smaller, being only about thirty acres, within a rectangle of six hundred yards by two hundred and fifty.

Cæsarea was considered, after the fall of Jerusalem, to be the capital of Palestine. Sometimes it was spoken of as part of the "land” by the Jews, sometimes it was excluded. Jews, Syrians, and Samaritans dwelt in it, and the place was the scene of many bloody feuds between them. In the Talmud the port (Leminah), and the famous promenade along the mole are noticed, but I find no ancient account of the great aqueducts which brought water to the city, otherwise supplied only by a single well. One of these is carried from springs on the Carmel hills, a distance of eight miles, on arches with a double channel, and is perhaps the finest engineering work in the country, evidently of Roman origin; the second, or low level, brings water from the pool above the dam in the Crocodile River. The manner in which the rocky ridge along the coast is pierced, and long rock-staircases cut down to the tunnel, with the separation of the two channels when crossing the great marshes, are indications of high scientific education in the builders. The native tradition says that the two aqueducts were made, by two daughters of a king, for a wager as to who should first convey water to the capital.

The history of Cæsarea is one of many vicissitudes. It became a bishopric in 200 A.D., and was the home of Origen and of Eusebius. The Franks took it in 1001, when the green glass dish, called "the Holy Grail,” was found by the Genoese. Saladin conquered it in the fatal year 1187; but its walls were again erected by Gautier d'Avesnes, in 1218, and the place was taken back by the Moslems the same year. Ten years later it was again taken, and again fell. In 1251 it was re-fortified by St. Louis; but the invincible Bibars destroyed it in 1265. The restorations of St. Louis are still plainly distinguishable from the older work of Gautier.

On the south side of the town the Crusading towers project into the sea along the great mole, and stand probably on the site of Herod's tower Drusus. On the north the pillars of the Roman town have been used up to form a long jetty, running parallel with the reefs; and other shafts have, as at Ascalon, been built into the walls. On the top of the southern hill, within the Crusading walls, are the foundations of the fine cathedral, and to the north is a second smaller church. These are the only public buildings which remain distinguishable, and the whole extent, within the Roman enceinte, is now but a mass of fallen masonry, excepting the dark, dismantled towers and scarps of the thirteenth-century fortress, and the shapeless tower on the mole.