Masada
Herod's palace fortress on a rock above the Dead Sea. UNESCO listing (opens the UNESCO site) ↗︎
History
The story of Israel
This narrow coast has been a crossroads since prehistory; the caves of Mount Carmel hold traces of human life over hundreds of thousands of years. Canaanite and Phoenician ports, the kingdoms of the Bible, Persians, Greeks and Romans all left their mark. In the first century BC Herod the Great built the harbour city of Caesarea and the palace fortress of Masada above the Dead Sea.
Byzantine, early Islamic, Crusader and Mamluk rule followed; Acre, with its knights' halls and caravanserais, was the Crusaders' chief port. The Ottomans governed from 1517 to 1917, and the British Mandate from 1920. The State of Israel was founded in 1948. In the 1930s, architects trained in the Bauhaus tradition built the white modernist city of Tel Aviv beside old Jaffa.
A short timeline
- PrehistoryHundreds of thousands of years
The caves of Mount Carmel.
- AntiquityFrom the 2nd millennium BC
Canaanite and Phoenician ports; the biblical kingdoms.
- Herod and Rome1st century BC onwards
Caesarea and Masada.
- Byzantine, Islamic and Crusader4th to 13th centuries
Acre and its halls.
- Ottoman and Mandate periods1517 to 1948
Then the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.
