The city and harbor were built under Herod the Great during 22-10 BC near the site of a former Phoenician naval station known as "Straton's Tower". It later became the provincial capital of Roman Judea, Roman Syria Palaestina and Byzantine Palaestina Prima provinces.
The city was populated throughout the 1st to 6th centuries AD and became an important early center of Christianity during the Byzantine period, but was mostly abandoned following the Muslim conquest of 640. It was re-fortified by the Crusaders, and finally slighted by the Mamluks in 1265.
The location was all but abandoned in 1800. It was re-developed into a fishing village by Bosniak Muslim immigrants after 1884, and into a modern town after 1940, incorporated in 1977 as the municipality of Caesarea within Israel's Haifa District, about halfway between the cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa.
The ruins of the ancient city, on the coast about 2 km south of modern Caesarea, were excavated in the 1950s and 1960s and the site was incorporated into the new Caesarea National Park in 2011.
The site of the former Phoenician naval station was awarded to Herod the Great in 30 BC. Herod built his palace on a promontory jutting out into the sea, with a decorative pool surrounded by stoats. He went on to build a large port and a city, which he named in honor of his patron Caesar Augustus.
In the year AD 6, Caesarea became the civilian and military capital of Judaea Province and the official residence of the Roman procurator Antonius Felix, and prefect Pontius Pilatus.
This city is the location of the 1961 discovery of the Pilate Stone, the only archaeological item that mentions the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate, by whose order Jesus was crucified. It is likely that Pilate used it as a base, and only went to Jerusalem when needed.
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