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Ancient Caesarea's water arch collapsed, putting its preservation at risk; The 1,870-year-old structure, built by Emperor Hadrian, was renowned for its precise design and impressive attention to detail at the time The historical water arch in Caesarea suffered a collapse during the early hours of Friday. This arch stands on the Aqueduct Beach, a popular bathing spot. Representatives from the Antiquities Authority were present at the site this morning, and a team from the Antiquities Authority's Conservation Directorate is expected to evaluate the extent of the damage on Sunday. The collapsed portion of the arch, a 1,870-year-old addition built during...

Caesarea is the largest Roman ruin in Israel today. It was built by Herod The Great, an ambitious puppet of the Romans, who was appointed the king of Judea by Rome. This city had a huge chariot race track, a theatre, aqueducts, and an artificial harbor that's underwater today. This harbor was built by Herod in order to create for himself an international city with direct links to Rome. This virtual tour and documentary explores the history of this fascinating place, from its founding by Herod, its use as a Roman provincial capital, the harbor's role in the war between...

Yahalom-Mack adds that her team was surprised to trace the ingots to Sardinia, which is “beyond the western Mediterranean, beyond the [Cypriots’] regular route of trade, which is Egypt, the Levant, Anatolia and the Aegean.” Though Cyprus was once considered a passive player in the Bronze Age metal trade, simply producing copper for other countries, more recent research has painted a portrait of a “small but agile nation with both formal and informal trade ties that may well have helped fill the power vacuum that occurred with the collapse of entranced empires around 1200 B.C.E.,” per the Times of Israel.Divers...

The coins are dated to the end of the 11th century, which would link the cache to the Crusader conquest of the city in the year 1101, one of the more critical events in the city's medieval history... A small bronze pot was found a few days ago at the Caesarea National Park, and inside it were 24 gold coins and a gold earring... found hidden between two stones in the side of a wall, located in a house in a neighborhood that dated from the Abbasid and Fatimid periods (909-1171 CE)... According to the Antiquities Authority, most inhabitants of...

Did the great flood of Noah's generation really occur thousands of years ago? Was the Roman city of Caesarea destroyed by an ancient tsunami? Will pollution levels in our deep seas remain forever a mystery? ~snip~ "When I was looking for a partner, I needed to find a team of marine scientists who were leaders in their fields," says Weil, a Swedish environmental philanthropist who helped conceive and fund the idea of giving a free, floating marine research lab to any scientist who needed it. "I didn't want us to be just another Greenpeace group of environmental activists. My dream...

One civilization's trash is another civilization's treasure. A ship in Israel's Caesarea Harbor was filled with bronze statues headed for recycling when it sank about 1,600 years ago. Now, thanks to a chance discovery by a pair of divers, archaeologists have salvaged a haul of statuary fragments, figurines and coins from the seafloor. The coins found in the wreckage date to the mid-300s A.D. Some show Constantine, who ruled the Western Roman Empire from A.D. 312-324, and who unified the Eastern and Western Roman Empire in A.D. 324; he ruled both until his death in A.D. 337. Other coins show...

Julia Shvicky of Kibbutz Barkai and Janet Daws, visiting from England, found some bones that had washed up on the shore during a stroll by the beach... At first, the sisters did not know they had found human bones. They took them to the kibbutz nurse who told them the bones were part of a human spinal cord and hip. They immediately handed their find over to the police who briefly quizzed them and sent the human remains to the National Institute of Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir for examination. Though test results are not yet in, police and the...

Kobi Sharvit of The Israel Antiquities Authority Fatimid period gold coins that were found in the seabed in the Mediterranean Sea near the port of Caesarea National Park in Caesarea, Israel, Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2015. A group of amateur Israeli divers have stumbled upon the largest collection of medieval gold coins ever found in the country, dating back to the 11th century and likely from a shipwreck in the Mediterranean Sea. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit) Israel on Wednesday unveiled the largest collection of medieval gold coins ever found in the country, accidentally discovered by amateur divers and dating back about a...

"The silver is mine and the gold is mine,' declares the LORD Almighty." -Haggai 2:8 (Jerusalem, Israel)—[CBN News] A group of divers came across the largest treasure trove of gold coins ever discovered in Israel. Nearly 2,000 gold coins dating to the 11th century were recovered in an Israel Antiquities Authority salvage mission led by the IAA's Marine Archaeology Unit. Members of a diving club in the ancient harbor in Caesarea National Park discovered the coins. At first they thought the coin they saw was a toy, but soon realized it was genuine. They returned to shore and reported the...

A group of divers in Israel has discovered almost 2,000 ancient gold coins—the largest cache in the country’s history—off the coast of the city of Caesarea, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Wednesday. The coins have been at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea for about 1,000 years, said Robert Cole, a numismaticist for the Israel Antiquities Authority. * * * The majority of the coins were forged in Egypt and North Africa and have been traced to the 10th- and 11th-century Fatimid caliphs Al-Ḥākim and Al-Ẓāhir. The coins are still in near-perfect condition because gold isn’t affected by air or...

A group of divers in Israel has stumbled upon the largest hoard of gold coins ever discovered in the country. The divers reported the find to the Israel Antiquities Authority, and nearly 2,000 coins dating back to the Fatimid period, or the eleventh century, were salvaged by the authority’s Marine Archaeology Unit. The find was unearthed from the seabed of the ancient harbor in Caesarea National Park, according to a press release from the Israel Antiquities Authority. “The discovery of such a large hoard of coins that had such tremendous economic power in antiquity raises several possibilities regarding its presence...

A 500-square-meter mosaic depicting an intricate design of flamingos, peacocks, ducks and other animals that adorned the floor of a fifth-century C.E. villa, was unearthed recently on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean near Caesarea. Parts of the floor were first discovered in the 1950s by archaeologist Shmuel Yeivin. However, it was not fully excavated at the time due to budgetary constraints. This time, after an initial week-long excavation by Dr. Yosef Porat and Peter Gendelman of the Israel Antiquities Authority, the authority refused to continue the dig, citing a lack of funds. The Caesarea Development Corporation has agreed to pay...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDpqbzcmZYI Glenn Beck kicks off his four-day Restoring Courage rally with Courage to Love; a reminder that the situation in Israel can only be resolved through global solidarity and trust in the Divine.

Central to the early Christian community was an ethic which, on the one hand, condemned violence and bloodshed and, on the other, vigorously upheld the sanctity of life. Such an ethic had, and still has, manifold ramifications. In the case of the early Christians, it led them not only to shun the violent “pastimes” of the Roman arena, but also to eschew participation in the militarism of the Roman state. Of great import with regard to our contemporary scene, this ethic led the early Church to articulate a clear position concerning the treatment of the unborn. In the following paper,...

LONDON Newly apppointed Mossad chief Meir Dagan is planning to reactivate a special operations unit, code named Caesarea, to target the commanders, controllers, and financiers of terrorist groups throughout the Middle East, the London Sunday Times reports. Quoting sources close to the Mossad, the paper said Islamic extremists abroad will become as vulnerable as those in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. "There is no reason why we should not do the same abroad. They will have nowhere to hide," said one source who is said to be familiar with Dagan's plans for the Mossad. "Gone are the days of...

FLOAT out beyond the Crusader city walls, Roman aqueduct and 19th-century mosque. Then descend through a cloud of quicksilver bubbles 20ft and 2,000 years to Herod The Great’s sunken harbour. Here, just off Caesarea port, a unique underwater archaeological park opened yesterday, showcasing 80,000sq m of a sunken harbour built by the biblical king of the Jews for Caesar Augustus. It is no ordinary “museum” — no chattering schoolchildren, no queues, no headphones, and the only sound that of boat propellers passing above your head as you swim around the “exhibits”. “I am excited. I think anyone in the field...