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This book is a major undertaking that surveys most of the documented history of the city of Banias from antiquity through the second half of the 20th century. Known in antiquity as Paneion, Paneas, Caesarea Paneas, or Caesarea Philippi, Banias is situated on the slopes of Mount Hermon at the springs of the Banias River, a tributary of the Jordan. Wilson suggests that originally it was a site protected by Ba
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al and his son Aliyan, the god of sources. Sometime after the conquest of Alexander the Great, the Canaanite god merged with the Greek god Pan, and it served as a local center for pilgrimage and worship. A change in this pastoral ambiance occurred in 200 B .C ., when the Seleucid king, Antiochus III, conquered the entire southern Levant from the Ptolemies.
In 20-19 B .C ., Herod the Great erected a temple, according to Josephus "at the sources of the Jordan; the place is called Paneion" and "near the place called Paneion" (p. 10), and dedicated it to the worship of his patron, Augustus, and perhaps also to the goddess Roma. The temple of Augusteum was one of the earliest prototypes of a Roman imperial cult temple. Wilson's presumption that Herod settled this place with Jews and built a palace for himself to reinforce his economy and quell the Iturean insurgences has neither archaeological nor historical foundations.
Approximately 17 years later, presumably a year after his ascension to power, Philip Herod, son of Herod the Great, expanded the project, founding a city near the Augusteum named Caesarea Paneas, known in the New...