Following an earlier visit to the lower reaches of the Hermon (Banias) river, one of the main tributaries of the Jordan river, we decided it was high time to visit the source, the Banias spring at the foot of Mount Hermon, where there are the remains of the temenos (sacred precinct) devoted to Pan, the god of the wild and companion of the nymphs, and other classical gods.
Banias is the Arabic and modern Hebrew name of an ancient site originally developed around a spring long associated with the Greek god Pan but, before that, with the pre-Hellenistic deity, Ba'al Gad or Ba'al Hermon. The city is mentioned in the Jewish scriptures (Joshua 13:5; 11:17; 12:7) under the name Ba'al Gad, the most northern point to which Joshua's conquests extended, described as being "in the Valley of Lebanon below Mount Hermon. Ba'al Gad was a god of fortune who may later have been identified with Pan.
History of the city
A city associated with the temenos was founded sometime after the conquest by Alexander the Great, and the Ptolemaic kings built a cult centre there in the 3rd century BCE. It was first mentioned during the Hellenistic period, in the Greek historian, Polybius's The Rise of the Roman Empire, who described the Battle of Panium (ca 200-198 BCE), when the name of the region was given as the Panion. In this battle, the Seleucids, led by Antiochus III, were victorious over the Ptolemys, leading to their control over Phoenicia, Galilee, Samaria, and Judea until the Maccabean revolt. The Seleucids built a pagan temple to Pan at Paneas (Πανειάς).
Detail of a scalloped niche and inscription in tabula ansata, above the large niche in the Court of Pan and the Nymphs. The inscription is in Greek, dated to the year 150 (87 CE, counting from Pompey's entry at 63 BCE), and reads: "Dedicated to Pan, son of Diopan who loves Ekho [b]) The priest Victor, son of Lysimachus".
In 20 BCE, Herod the Great annexed Paneas to his Kingdom and erected a temple there in honour of his patron. In 3 BCE, Philip II (Philip the Tetrarch) re-founded the city as his administrative capital, renaming it Caesarea Philippi (to distinguish it from other cities of that name such as Caesarea Maritima) according to Josephus.
The Gospels of Matthew (16:13) and Mark (8:27) refer to it by this name, describing how Jesus approached the area near the city, but without entering the city itself, asking his closest disciples who they thought he was. Accounts of their answers, including the Confession of Peter, are found in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, as well as Luke; Peter confessed Jesus as Messiah and the "Son of the living God", and Jesus in turn selected Peter as the leader of the Apostles, and stated, famously, "Upon this rock I will build my Church." According to ecclesiastical tradition, a woman from Paneas, who had been bleeding for 12 years, was miraculously cured by Jesus.
In 34 CE, on the death of Philip II, his kingdom was briefly incorporated into the Roman province of Syria, with the city given the autonomy to administer its own revenues, before reverting to his nephew, Herod Agrippa I, and in 61 CE, king Agrippa II carried out urban improvements and renamed it Neronias in honour of the Roman emperor Nero, but this name was discarded by 68 CE.
During the First Jewish–Roman War (67 CE), Vespasian briefly visited Caesarea Philippi before advancing on the city of and, with the death of Agrippa II and Herodian rule around 92 CE, the city once again returned to the province of Syria.
Roman written sources, including Pliny, and those from the Byzantine period, call the city Paneas, or occasionally Caesarea Paneas. In the year 361, Emperor Julian the Apostate instigated a religious reformation of the Roman state, in which he supported the restoration of Hellenic paganism as the state religion. In Paneas, though the change was short-lived, this was achieved by removing Christian symbols. The Byzantine city was lost to the Arab invasion of the 7th century. It is at this stage that the name mutated to Banias, due to the lack of a "P" sound amongst the Arabs.
In 635 Paneas gained favourable terms of surrender from the Muslim army of Khalid ibn al-Walid, but its depopulation was rapid, as its traditional markets disappeared, and the city fell into terminal decline: only fourteen of the 173 Byzantine sites in the area show signs of habitation from this period. Around 780 CE, a nun, Hugeburc visited Paneas and reported that the town "had a church and a great many Christians," but it is unclear whether she was referring to the time of her visit or its past. Despite this decline, Paneas remained the principal city of the district of al-Djawlan in the province of Damascus due to its strategic military importance on its northern border. By the ninth century it was known as Madīnat al-Askat (city of the tribes).
The transfer of the Abbasid Caliphate capital from Damascus to Baghdad led to a general decline in the provinces and, by the tenth century, Paneas found itself a provincial backwater in a slowly collapsing empire whose control next passed to the Egyptian Fatimids, but the city was taken over by an extreme Shī‘ah sect of the Bedouin Qarāmita in 968. In 975 the Fatimid, al-'Aziz, regained control of the city.
During the twelth century the Crusaders held the town twice, between 1128 and 1132, and from 1140 to 1164, and from 1157 Banias became the principal centre of Humphrey of Toron's crusader fiefdom, after it had first been granted to the Knights Hospitallers by King Baldwin. But
after Nūr ed-Din's ousted Humphrey from Banias in 1164, a Saracen garrison was established there.
Ibn Jubayr, the geographer, traveller and poet from al-Andalus, described Banias:
This city is a frontier fortress of the Muslims. It is small, but has a castle, round which, under the walls flows a stream. This stream flows out from the town by one of the gates, and turns a mill ... The town has broad arable lands in the adjacent plain. Commanding the town is the fortress, still belonging to the Franks, called Hunin, which lies 3 leagues distant from Banias. The lands in the plain belong half to the Franks and half to the Muslims; and there is here the boundary called Hadd al Mukasimah-"the boundary of the dividing." The Muslims and the Franks apportion the crops equally between them, and their cattle mingle freely without fear of any being stolen.”
After the death of Nūr ed-Din in May 1174 King Amaury led the crusader forces in a siege of Banias. The Governor of Damascus allied himself with the crusaders and released all his Frankish prisoners. In 1177 King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem ("the leper") laid siege to Banias, but withdrew after receiving tribute from Samsan al-Din Ajuk, and in 1179 Saladin took personal control of the forces of Banias.
In the first decade of the thirteenth century, Banias was partially destroyed by an earthquake. By Ottoman times,
The traveller J. S. Buckingham described Banias in 1825: "The present town is small, and meanly built, having no place of worship in it; and the inhabitants, who are about 500 in number, are Mohammedans and Metouali, governed by a Moslem Sheikh." By the 1870s there was a population of only 350 Muslims in the town.
Following the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, the Banias spring remained in Syrian territory, while the Banias River flowed through the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) into Israel. After a series of failed negotiations with Syria in 1953, and after Israel began to plan its National Water Carrier to help irrigate the country, the Syrians began shelling. Although Banias was included in the Jordan Valley Unified Water Plan, which allocated Syria 20 million cubic metres annually from it, the plan was rejected by the Arab League. Instead, at the 2nd Arab summit conference in Cairo of January 1964 the League decided that Syria, Lebanon and Jordan would begin a water diversion project. Syria started the construction of canal to divert the flow of the Banias river away from Israel and along the slopes of the Golan toward the Yarmouk River. Lebanon was to construct a canal from the Hasbani River to Banias and complete the scheme, diverting 20 to 30 million cubic metres of water from the river Jordan's tributaries to Syria and Jordan. This plan would have deprived Israel of its main water source and was countered with military intervention to stop the works.
On June 10, 1967, on the last day of the Six Day War, the Golani Brigade captured the village of Banias.
The site today
The spring at Banias formerly originated in the large cave in the sheer cliff face (pictured below), which was gradually lined with a series of shrines. An earthquake moved the spring to the foot of the natural terrace at the mouth of the cave, where it now seeps quietly from the bedrock, with a greatly reduced flow.
The temenos, at the mouth of the cave, included several temples built on an 80 metre long natural terrace along the cliff which towered over the north of the city. In its final phase there was a temple to Augustus at the mouth of the cave, which was the Grotto of the god Pan, a courtyard of Pan adjacent, used for rituals, and various other temples and rock-carved niches for statues. The illustration below shows an artist's impression of the scene.
Above: Artist's impression of the Sanctuary of Pan. From left to right: Temple of Augustus at the mouth in front of the Grotto of the god Pan; Courtyard of Pan & the Nymphs; Temple of Zeus; Court of Nemesis; Tomb Temple of the Sacred Goats. In the foreground on the right is the Temple of Pan & the Dancing Goats. [Detail of signboard at Hermon Stream (Banias) Nature Reserve.]
Below is a slideshow of these sites today - hover over the pictures to see the captions.
The Banias or Hermon stream leads south from the temples to further remains of the city of Banias.
The Banias (or Hermon) stream
"Banias excavation area B," dated to the reign of Herod Philip; the remains are thought to be a propylaea, a splendid gateway, which led to the area of the temples at the Banias springs. The remains of a Byzantine church were also discovered in this area, one of whose rooms would have contained a statue of Jesus described in the Gospels: Banias was identified as the place where Jesus healed the "woman who had been subject to bleeding" (Mark 5:25, Luke 8:43), who placed a statue of him there in gratitude, apparently the fist statue of Jesus to be made. Christian tradition also makes Banias (as Caesarea Philipi) the place where Peter stated that Jesus was the Messiah, and Jesus answered him (Matthew 16:17-18) saying that on "this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it."
Remains of a modern mosque and minaret, part of the deserted Syrian village at Banias.
An abandoned Maronite church on the edge of Nahal Sa'ar, below Banias. The inscription in French and Arabic reads, "Que Dieu recompense les benaifeteurs dans les dons ont permis la construction de ce sanctuaire" - May God reward the benefactors whose donations allowed the construction of this sanctuary.
There is much more to be seen at Banias, a little further downstream, the subject of a future post!