Overview
Caesarea Maritima occupies the Sharon coast of present-day Israel, between Tel Aviv and Haifa. Herod the Great rebuilt the decayed Hellenistic anchorage of Straton’s Tower between 22 and 10/9 BCE as a marble-faced city named for Augustus, with a temple to Roma and Augustus on a raised platform facing the sea. The harbour — Sebastos, the Greek for Augustus — was the first large-scale use of hydraulic pozzolana concrete in the eastern Mediterranean: volcanic ash shipped from the Bay of Naples, dumped in timber caissons in open water to form breakwaters larger than the Piraeus. Josephus describes the inner basins, towers, and colonnades; underwater archaeology since the 1960s (Avner Raban and successors) has mapped the northern and southern moles, now partly collapsed by earthquake and current.
On land the city became the capital of Roman Judaea after 6 CE, then of Syria Palaestina and Palaestina Prima — a six-century administrative centre. The “Pilate Stone,” a Latin dedication of a Tiberieum by Pontius Pilatus, prefect of Judaea, was found in the theatre in 1961 during the Italian mission directed by Antonio Frova. The apostle Paul was imprisoned here (Acts 23–26). A theatre, a 300 m hippodrome later converted to an amphitheatre, vaulted warehouses, Crusader walls, and the high-level aqueduct from the Carmel springs structure the visitor circuit. The city fell to Baybars in 1265; the ruins are now Caesarea National Park.
"The king overcame nature, and built a haven larger than was the Piraeus, and had docks in it for ships, and towers upon the breakwaters, so that this city should not want a harbour."
— Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 15.331–341, on Herod’s harbour of Sebastos (Whiston trans., public domain)
In 2025 Gil Gambash, Ehud Arkin-Shalev, Emmanuel Nantet (University of Haifa) and John Wood and Timmy Gambin (University of Malta) published the first stage of Caesarea SubMaritima in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering: diver-based photogrammetry of the harbour entrance (Raban’s areas G and K) produced a high-resolution 3D model. The two sides of the channel use different masonry, which the authors read as an original Herodian build plus a later repair; despite collapse and sedimentation the entrance remains deep and wide enough for vessels, so Sebastos did not die only because the mouth silted shut. The related SHIPs project (from autumn 2023) re-examined the North Caesarea 1 merchantman in the northern bay. Pair the port with Ostia Antica for imperial harbour archaeology, Masada for Herodian building, and Jerash for a comparable eastern Roman city.
The 2018 IAA mosaic of three togate figures under a Byzantine shop — often recycled in travel copy as a “new 2025 find” — belongs to that earlier bridge-rebuild season, not to the SubMaritima survey. The 2025 news is underwater: geometry of the mouth, not a newly unveiled pavement.