Banias

Banias or Banyas (Arabic: بانياس الحولة; Hebrew: בניאס; Judeo-Aramaic, Medieval Hebrew: פמייס, etc.;) is a site in the Golan Heights near a natural spring, once associated with the Greek god Pan. It had been inhabited for 2,000 years, until it was abandoned and destroyed following the Six Day War. It is located at the foot of Mount Hermon, north of the Golan Heights, in the part of Syria occupied and annexed by Israel. The spring is the source of the Banias River, one of the main tributaries of the Jordan River. Archaeologists uncovered a shrine dedicated to Pan and related deities, and the remains of an ancient city founded sometime after the conquest by Alexander the Great and inhabited until 1967. The ancient city was mentioned in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, under the name of Caesarea Philippi, as the place where Jesus confirmed Peter's confession that Jesus was the Messiah; the site is today a place of pilgrimage for Christians.

The first mention of the ancient city during the Hellenistic period was in the context of the Battle of Panium, fought around 200–198 BCE, when the name of the region was given as the Panion. Later, Pliny called the city Paneas (Greek: Πανειάς). Both names were derived from that of Pan, the god of the wild and companion of the nymphs.

The spring at Banias initially originated in a large cave carved out of a sheer cliff face which was gradually lined with a series of shrines. The temenos (sacred precinct) included in its final phase a temple placed at the mouth of the cave, courtyards for rituals, and niches for statues. It was constructed on an elevated, 80m long natural terrace along the cliff which towered over the north of the city. A four-line inscription at the base of one of the niches relates to Pan and Echo, the mountain nymph, and was dated to 87 BCE.

The once very large spring gushed from the limestone cave, but an earthquake moved it to the foot of the natural terrace where it now seeps quietly from the bedrock, with a greatly reduced flow. From here the stream, called Nahal Hermon in Hebrew, flows towards what once were the malaria-infested Hula marshes.

History

Semitic deity of the spring

The pre-Hellenistic deity associated with the spring of Banias was variously called Ba'al-gad or Ba'al-hermon.

Hellenism; association with Pan

Banias was certainly an ancient place of great sanctity, and when Hellenised religious influences began to overlay the region, the cult of its local numen gave place to the worship of Pan, to whom the cave was therefore dedicated.

Paneas was first settled in the Hellenistic period following Alexander the Great's conquest of the east. The Ptolemaic kings built a cult centre there in the 3rd century BCE.

In the Hellenistic Period the spring was named Panias, for the Arcadian goat-footed god Pan. Pan was revered by the ancient Greeks as the god of isolated rural areas, music, goat herds, hunting, herding, of sexual and spiritual possession, and of victory in battle, since he was said to instill panic among the enemy. The Latin equivalent for Paneas is Fanium.

The spring lies close to the 'way of the sea' mentioned by the Book of Isaiah, along which many armies of Antiquity marched.

In extant sections of the Greek historian Polybius's history of 'The Rise of the Roman Empire', a Battle of Panium is mentioned. This battle was fought in ca. 200–198 BCE between the armies of Ptolemaic Egypt and the Seleucids of Coele-Syria, led by Antiochus III. Antiochus's victory cemented Seleucid control over Phoenicia, Galilee, Samaria, and Judea until the Maccabean revolt. It was these Seleucids who built a pagan temple dedicated to Pan at Paneas.

In 2020, an altar was found with a Greek inscription, in the walls of a church of the 7th century A.D. The inscription writes that the altar was dedicated by Atheneon, son of Sosipatros, from the city of Antioch to the god Pan Heliopolitanos.

In 2022, the Israeli Antiquities Authority discovered a trove of 44 pure gold coins from the early 7th Century CE. While some of the coins were minted by the Byzantine-Roman Emperor Phocas (602-610 CE), most date to the reign of his successor, Emperor Heraclius (610-641). The latest of the coins date to the period of the Arab conquest of the Levant.

Roman and Christian Byzantine periods

Upon Zenodorus's death in 20 BC, the Panion , including Paneas, was annexed to the Herodian Kingdom of Judea, a client of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire. Josephus mentions that Herod the Great erected a temple of 'white marble' nearby in honor of his patron; it was found in the nearby site of Omrit.

In 3 BCE, Herod's son, Philip II (also known as Philip the Tetrarch) founded a city which became his administrative capital, known from Josephus and the Gospels of Matthew and Mark as Caesarea or Caesarea Philippi, to distinguish it from Caesarea Maritima and other cities named Caesarea . On the death of Philip II in 34 CE his kingdom was briefly incorporated into the province of Syria, with the city given the autonomy to administer its own revenues, before reverting to his nephew, Herod Agrippa I.

The ancient city is mentioned in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, under the name of Caesarea Philippi, as the place where Jesus confirmed Peter's assumption that Jesus was the Messiah; the place is today a place of pilgrimage for Christians.

In 61 CE, king Agrippa II renamed the administrative capital Neronias in honor of the Roman emperor Nero, but this name was discarded several years later, in 68 CE. Agrippa also carried out urban improvements.

In 67 CE, during the First Jewish–Roman War, Vespasian briefly visited Caesarea Philippi before advancing on Tiberias in Galilee.

With the death of Agrippa II around 92 CE came the end of Herodian rule, and the city returned to the province of Syria.

In the late Roman and Byzantine periods the written sources name the city again as Paneas, or more seldom as Caesarea Paneas.

In 361, Emperor Julian the Apostate instigated a religious reformation of the Roman state, in which he supported the restoration of Hellenistic polytheism as the state religion. In Paneas this was achieved by replacing Christian symbols with pagan ones, though the change was short lived.

In the 5th century, following the division of the Empire, the city was part of the Eastern (later Byzantine) Empire, but was lost to the Arab conquest of the Levant in the 7th century.

Early Muslim period

In 635, Paneas gained favourable terms of surrender from the Muslim army of Khalid ibn al-Walid after it had defeated Heraclius' forces. In 636, a second, newly formed Byzantine army advancing on Palestine used Paneas as a staging post on the way to confront the Muslim army at the final Battle of Yarmouk.

The depopulation of Paneas after the Muslim conquest was rapid, as its traditional markets disappeared. Only 14 of the 173 Byzantine sites in the area show signs of habitation from this period. The Hellenised city thus fell into a precipitous decline. At the council of al-Jabiyah, when the administration of the new territory of the Umar Caliphate was established, Paneas remained the principal city of the district of al-Djawlan (the Djawlan) in the jund (military Province) of Dimashq (Damascus), due to its strategic military importance on the border with Jund al-Urdunn, which comprised the Galilee and territories east and north of it.

Around 780 CE the nun Hugeburc visited Caesarea and reported that the town 'had' a church and a great many Christians, but her account does not clarify whether any of those Christians were still living in the town at the time of her visit.

The transfer of the Abbasid Caliphate capital from Damascus to Baghdad inaugurated the flowering of the Islamic Golden Age at the expense of the provinces. With the decline of Abbasid power in the tenth century, Paneas found itself a provincial backwater in a slowly collapsing empire, as district governors began to exert greater autonomy and used their increasing power to make their positions hereditary. The control of Syria and Paneas passed to the Fatimids of Egypt.

At the end of the 9th century Al-Ya'qubi reaffirms that Paneas was still the capital of al-Djawlan in the jund of Dimshq, although by then the town was known as Madīnat al-Askat (city of the tribes) with its inhabitants being Qays, mostly of the Banu Murra with some Yamani families.

Due to the Byzantine advances under Nicephorus Phocas and John Zimisces into the Abbasid empire, a wave of refugees fled south and augmented the population of Madīnat al-Askat. The city was taken over by an extreme Shī‘ah sect of the Bedouin Qarāmita in 968. In 970 the Fatimids again briefly took control, only to lose it again to the Qarāmita. The old population of Banias along with the new refugees formed a Sunni sufi ascetic community. In 975 the Fatimid al-'Aziz wrested control in an attempt to subdue the anti-Fatimid agitation of Mahammad b. Ahmad al-Nablusi and his followers and to extend Fatimid control into Syria. al-Nabulusi’s school of hadith was to survive in Banias under the tutelage of Arab scholars such as Abú Ishaq (Ibrahim b. Hatim) and al-Balluti.

Crusader/Ayyubid period

The Crusaders' arrival in 1099 quickly split the mosaic of semi-independent cities of the Seljuk sultanate of Damascus.

The Crusaders have held the town twice, between 1129–1132 and 1140–1164. It was called by the Franks Belinas or Caesarea Philippi. From 1126–1129, the town was held by Assassins, and was turned over to the Franks following the purge of the sect from Damascus by Buri. Later on, Shams al-Mulk Isma'il attacked Banias and captured it on 11 December 1132. In 1137, Banias became under the rule of Imad al-Din Zengi. In late spring 1140, Mu'in ad-Din Unur handed Banias to the Crusaders during the reign of King Fulk, due to their assistance against Zengi's aggression towards Damascus.

With the arrival of fresh troops to the Holy Land, King Baldwin III of Jerusalem broke the three-month-old truce of February 1157 by raiding …