Banias (; ; Judeo-Aramaic, Medieval Hebrew: , etc.;Jastrow, M, 1903, p. 1185 and 1189, or webpage. ), also spelled Banyas, is a site in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, Syria near a natural spring, once associated with the Greek god Pan. It had been inhabited for 2,000 years, until its Syrian population fled and their homes were destroyed by Israel following the 1967 Six-Day War. It is located at the foot of Mount Hermon, north of the Golan Heights, the classical Gaulanitis, in the part occupied 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 dating from the Hellenistic and Roman periods.
Herod the Great, king of Judaea, constructed a temple dedicated to Augustus at the site, although nearby Omrit is a strong candidate for being the site of this temple. Subsequently, Herod's son, Philip the Tetrarch, further developed the area, establishing a city. In 61 CE, Agrippa II expanded and renamed the city Neronias Irenopolis. The ancient city was mentioned in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, under the name of , 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 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 (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.
Etymology The ancient city was first mentioned in the context of the Battle of Panium, fought around 200–198 BCE, when the name of the region was given as the . Later, Pliny called the city (). Both names were derived from that of Pan, the god of the wild and companion of the nymphs. In later Arabic usage the place-name became Bāniyās (بانياس), commonly explained as a phonological adaptation of Greek Paneas in which the initial /p/ shifted to /b/ because /p/ is not native to Arabic phonology. The continuity of the name across periods is reinforced by the site’s long-standing administrative role in the region and by the survival of related local toponymic traditions in later sources.
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.Bromiley, 1995, p 569
Hellenism; association with Pan The spring lies close to the 'way of the sea' mentioned by the Book of Isaiah,Isaiah 9:1 along which many armies of Antiquity marched. It 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 the Arcadian goat-footed god Pan, to whom the cave was therefore dedicated.Kent, 1916, pp. 47-48 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.Philippe Bourgeaud, The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece, tr. K.Atlass & J.Redfield, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 1988
Paneas (,Stephanus of Byzantium, Ethnica, §P499.23 Latin Fanium) 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 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.Perseus Digital Library. TUFTS University Polybius Book 16 para 18Perseus Digital Library. TUFTS University Polybius Book 16 para 19Perseus Digital Library. TUFTS University Polybius Book 16 para 20 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.Chambers Dictionary of Etymology: The Origins and Development of Over 25,000 English Words, Robert K. Barnhart, Sol Steinmetz (eds.)(1999) Chambers Harrap Publishers L, , p. 752
In 2020, an altar with a Greek inscription was found in the walls of a church of the 7th century A.D. The inscription records that the altar was dedicated by Atheneon, son of Sosipatros, from the city of Antioch to the god Pan Heliopolitanos.Altar Dedicated to Pan Unearthed in Golan Heights
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 (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 (Matthew 16, , Mark 8, ). On the death of Philip 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.Madden, 1864, p. 114 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.Schürer, Millar, Vermès, 1973, p. 494 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,Norwich, 1988, pp. 88-92 in which he supported the restoration of Hellenistic polytheism as the state religion.Brown, 1971, p. 93. In Paneas this was achieved by replacing Christian symbols with pagan ones, though the change was short lived.
Following the division of the Empire in the late 4th century, the city became part of the Eastern (later Byzantine) Empire. Archaeological excavations indicate a severe urban decline during the early Byzantine period. Although the precise causes of this decline cannot be determined with certainty and were likely multiple, excessive taxation has been proposed as the explanation that best accords with the available evidence. This interpretation is supported by a passage in the Jerusalem Talmud (yShevi'it 9:2), which states that "Diocletian oppressed the inhabitants of Paneas," prompting threats of mass flight ("we are going"). Scholars have associated this passage with the growing vulnerability of landholders following Diocletian's reforms. Further corroboration comes from epigraphic evidence: an exceptionally dense concentration of Diocletianic boundary stones (inscriptions delineating village territories under the Tetrarchy) has been documented in the hinterland of Paneas.Within the territory of Paneas, 22 of the approximately 40 such stones known from the Levant have been identified, indicating intensive land registration and the presence of numerous privately owned, independently taxed plots. The structure of Diocletian's reforms, which imposed fixed tax assessments and collective fiscal liability on villages, meant that when some landholders abandoned their fields, the resulting tax burden fell disproportionately on those who remained. These conditions are widely regarded as contributing to the city's decline in late antiquity, culminating in what the site's excavator described as "the apparent death of the city" in the early 5th century CE.
Early Muslim period The region was lost by the Byzantines to the Arab conquest of the Levant in the 7th century. In 635, Paneas gained favourable terms of surrender from the Muslim army of Khalid ibn al-Walid after it had defeated Heraclius's 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.Le Strange, 1890, p.39
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.Gregorian, 2003, pp. 26 - 38 With the decline of Abbasid power in the tenth century, Paneas found itself a provincial backwater in a slowly collapsing empire,Salibi, 1977, p. ?? as district governors began to exert greater autonomy and used their increasing power to make their positions hereditary.Applied History Research Group, University of Calgary, "The Islamic World to 1600" , Last accessed October 30, 2008 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.