Susita sits on a flat-topped foothill 2 kilometres east of and 350 metres above the Sea of Galilee, 144 metres above sea level, near modern Kibbutz Ein Gev. Little known or visited by the public, it remains inaccessible and surrounded by uncleared minefields.
Entrance to Susita from the east, looking into Nahal Susita
A damaged asphalt road – officially closed for public use – leads up from Ein Gev by the Kinneret, or down from Afik in the Golan heights, reaching a parking place on its east side. We visited on a beautiful spring day, when the surrounding hills were covered with wild flowers and grass. Below is a slide show of the spring flowers on the way up to Susita. In a few weeks it will all be parched, dried out foliage, turning to dust, but how beautiful is the stark contrast!
History
Excavations at Susita/Hippos have revealed traces of habitation from as early as the Neolithic period, with the site again being inhabited in the third century BCE by the Ptolemies, though whether it was an urban settlement or a military outpost is still unknown. During this time, Coele-Syria served as the battleground between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, the two dynasties descending from captains of Alexander the Great. The city of Hippos itself was established, as Antioch of Hippos (Ἀντιόχεια τοῦ Ἵππου; in Latin: Antiocheia ad Hippum), by Seleucid settlers, most probably in the middle of the second century BCE. Hippos is ancient Greek for “horse” and Antioch is a common name of Seleucid monarchs. In the third century CE Mosaic of Rehob, the site is known by its Aramaic name, Susita (סוסיתא), meaning “mare” (female horse), by which name it is commonly known in Israel today, whilst the Arabic name, Kulat el-Husn, means “Fortress of the Stallion.” Despite the similarities, the precise reason why the city received this name is unknown, although the city is located on a high flat diamond-shaped hill, which might be considered shaped like a horse's back.
As the Seleucids took possession of all of Coele-Syria, Hippos grew into a full-fledged polis, a city-state with control over the surrounding countryside. Antiochia Hippos was improved with a temple, a central market area, and other public structures, though the poor availability of water – the citizens relied on rain-collecting cisterns – limited the growth of Hellenistic Hippos.
The city came under Hasmonean influence – following the Maccabean revolt which resulted in an independent Jewish kingdom in 142 BCE – when Alexander Jannaeus led a campaign to conquer lands east of the Jordan River, around 83–80 BCE.
In 63 BCE the Roman general, Pompey, conquered Coele-Syria, including Judea, and ended Hasmonean independence. Pompey granted self-rule to some ten Hellenistic cities on Coele-Syria's eastern frontier, an informal group (rather than a league) of cities known as the Decapolis (Δεκάπολις, meaning “Ten Cities”), including Hippos, incorporated into the Roman Provincia Syria. In other words these cities were not Semitic in culture, and any Jewish inhabitants formed an (often persecuted) minority. Under Roman rule, Hippos retained a certain degree of autonomy, minting its own coins stamped with the image of a horse in honour of the city's name.
Map of the Decapolis [Credit: creative commons BY-SA 2.5]
Hippos was given to Herod the Great in 37 BCE, but returned to the Province of Syria on his death in 4 BCE. According to Josephus, during this time, Hippos, a pagan city, was the sworn enemy of the new Jewish city across the lake, Tiberias. Additionally, the Jerusalem Talmud and other Jewish Halachic literature relates that Hippos’ population was mainly non-Jewish. Despite the trade connections between Hippos and the Jews dispersed in the towns and villages along the shores of the Kinneret and in the nearby Golan Heights, Hippos was regarded as the sworn enemy of Jewish Tiberias. Jews had resided in Tiberias when it was still known by its previous name, Rakkat, but the city was given the name Tiberias in 20 CE by Herod’s son, Herod Antipas, in honour of the Roman Emperor, Tiberius. Josephus reports that during the Great Jewish Revolt of 66–70 CE, Hippos persecuted its Jewish population, although some Jews from Susita participated in attacks on Magdala and elsewhere. Hippos itself fell under attack by rebels at least once.
In the New Testament, when Jesus mentions a “city set upon a hill” that “cannot be hidden” he may have been referring to Hippos. In addition, the Miracle of the Swine may also be related to Hippos. The miracle, an exorcism performed by Jesus when he drove demons out of two possessed men and into a herd of pigs, is mentioned in all three Synoptic Gospels (Mark 5:1-20, Luke 8:26-39, Matthew 8:28-34), but although some manuscripts of Matthew’s Gospel as well as all versions of Luke and Matthew name the location as Gadara or Gerasa, two other cities of the Decapolis of which Hippos was one. However other manuscripts of Matthew’s Gospel refer to Gergesa, which has been identified with all three cities, as well as nearby Kursi.
After the Romans put down the second Jewish revolt, they created the province of Palaestina in 135 CE, of which Hippos was a part. This was the beginning of Hippos' greatest period of prosperity and growth, when it was rebuilt on a grid pattern, centred on a decumanus maximus (a Roman east-west main street). The city is 650 metres by 170 metres at its maximum, surrounded by a wall which stretches along the rim of the rock, and has two gates – an eastern gate and a western gate at either end of the decumanus maximus. The streets were lined with hundreds of red granite columns imported from Egypt; the great expense required to bring these columns is proof of the city's wealth. Other improvements included a Kalybe (a shrine to the Emperor), a theatre, an odeion, a basilica, and new city walls. The most important improvement, however, was the aqueduct, which led water into Hippos from springs in the Golan Heights, 50 km away. The water, collected in a large, vaulted cistern, allowed a larger population to live in the city. Besides the fortified city itself, Hippos controlled two port facilities on the Kinneret (lake Tiberias) and an area of the surrounding countryside.
The imperial restructuring under the emperor Diocletian placed Hippos in the province of Palestina Secunda, encompassing the Galilee and the Golan. After Christianity became officially tolerated in the Roman Empire, Christianity came slowly to Hippos. There is no evidence of any Christian presence before the 4th century CE. A Byzantine-era pagan tomb of a man named Hermes has been found just outside the city walls, attesting to the relatively late presence of paganism here. Gradually, however, the city was Christianized, becoming the seat of a bishop by at least 359 CE: a Bishop Peter of Hippos is listed in surviving records of church councils in 359 and 362.
Thus Hippos remained a Greco-Roman city from its founding in the 3rd century BCE until the 7th century CE, when the Muslim armies conquered Palestine. Hippos' new Arab rulers allowed the citizens to continue practicing Christianity, a policy continued by the Umayyad Caliphate. However, the population and economy continued to decline, and the city was abandoned after an earthquake in 749 CE destroyed it. There is no mention of the place under the name of Kulat el-Husn in the classical Arabic sources, but a village called Sūsiyah, as well as a whole district, Kūrat Sūsiyah in the province of Urdunn, which included the Golan, has appeared a few times in the Arabic sources.
The site lay undisturbed until, in the War of Independence, members of Kibbutz Ein Gev occupied a Syrian outpost atop Susita and established an outpost of the army, taking advantage of the topography of the site. In 1951 a full military post was established by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) – the site was by then just on the Israeli side of the 1949 UN-demarcated ceasefire line between Syria and Israel – after which rescue excavations were carried out until 1955. The IDF used Susita for the same purpose as the ancient Greeks — as a fortress and border defence against Syria until the Golan Heights were captured by Israel in the Six Day War of 1967, when it was abandoned by the army.
One of the abandoned IDF buildings
To this day, a cable car built in 1948 by Lt. Col. David Laskov can still be seen in the northern part of the city, which was used to supply equipment from Kibbutz Ein Gev to the soldiers on the hill, and there are also many remains of communication trenches and firing positions that were part of the IDF post. On the 19th Independence Day of the State of Israel, Iyar 5727, the commander of the post, Lieutenant Rami Zayit, was killed; and his memorial is located at the western end of the mountain.
From left to right: Cable car built in 1948 by Lt. Col. David Laskov [credit: Creative Commons, Dorontalmi]; My father-in-law inside an abandoned communication tunnel; Dugout from the 1950s, when the IDF fortified the eastern gate to Susita; Memorial to the commander of the Susita outpost, Lieutenant Rami Zayit, who fell on the spot on Independence Day 1967 [credit: Dr Avishai Teicher]
My father-in-law (pictured above in an abandoned communication tunnel) visited Susita with us, having come here only once previously. In 1967, his elite Golani unit was given the task of scaling mount Susita from the west, via a long and steep snaking path, keeping very low to the ground, and under cover of dark, since it was feared that the Syrians would take the site, which lay just on the Israeli side of the UN ceasefire line. His unit spent the night inside one of the stone buildings, never raising their heads above the parapet, but in the event there was no attack.
In 1964 Mt Susita was declared a National Park, and in 2004 the area around it, including the site itself, were declared a National Reserve.
Archaeology
The German railroad engineer and surveyor Gottlieb Schumacher first surveyed Hippos in 1885, whilst surveying in preparation for the construction of the Damascus-Haifa railway, which branched off from the Hejaz railway at Deraa. However he incorrectly identified the ruins as those of the town of Gamla.
Following the construction of a military post by the Israel Defence Forces in 1951, limited rescue excavations were carried out by the Israeli Department of Antiquities until 1955. They unearthed some domestic buildings, the main city gate at the east and a large Byzantine church that had probably been the seat of Hippos' bishop.
Following an archaeological survey conducted in 1999, it was decided to embark on a large-scale scientific project of excavations. The site has been excavated annually since as an international project. The first eleven seasons (2000–2010) were a collaboration between the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa, the Research Centre for Mediterranean Archaeology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the National Museum of Warsaw and Concordia University, St Paul, Minnesota. From 2012 the excavations have been directed by Dr Michael Eisenberg of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa. The objective is to uncover the entire ancient city, the street network, the main secular and religious public buildings, as well as the domestic quarters; to survey and excavate the two necropoleis located to the south and the south-east of the city; and to examine the relationship between the city and the surrounding countryside in future seasons, especially the area stretching between the city and the Kinneret, including conducting a detailed survey of the lake's shore to establish the exact location of Hippos' port.
It was Josephus Flavius, the famous Jewish-Roman historian, who told us there was a small Jewish minority in the pagan Roman city of Hippos, and that, during the Great Revolt, the Hippos Region was severely ravaged by the Jewish rebels though they could not have overtaken the highly fortified city itself. In return, Hippos citizens jailed the small Jewish community living among them. The Jewish community at Hippos continued to exist during the Byzantine Period when it became a bishopric, and all this begs the question as to where the synagogue of Hippos was located. But although as many as six Byzantine churches have been excavated to date and at least another two surveyed, the synagogue has not been discovered yet.
You can see an aerial view of the site below (credit: creative commons; Avram Graicer), annotated with the main features excavated to date, and my pictures below that.
You can see a 3D model of the site, constructed by the Hiipos-Sussita Excavations Project, below.
Hover over the photos below for captions.
Many amazing artefacts and mosaics have been uncovered, most notably in 2015 when a large bronze mask was uncovered, almost without equal for its dimensions, and dated between the 1st century BCE and 2nd century CE, depicting the Greek god Pan. You can find out about this and more on the Hippos-Sussita Excavations Project website, and you can see below a video made moments after the mask of Pan was found by Dr. Michael Eisenberg of the University of Haifa.