Caesarea Maritima: Herod's Harbor and the Pilate Stone - Scriptorium

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]a stretch of open Mediterranean coastline. No rivermouth, no natural harbor. Herod the Great looked at that shoreline and built the largest artificial harbor in the eastern Mediterranean. Between 22 and 10 BC, he engineered an entire Roman city from the seabed up using volcanic ash imported from the Bay of Naples that hardens underwater. He named it Caesaria Merida after his patron Augustus. Rome made it the administrative capital of Judea where every procurator from Caponius to Flores kept official residence.

[00:00:34]Jerusalem was the religious center.

[00:00:36]Cesaria was the seat of Roman power.

[00:00:39]That distinction matters for reading Acts. In Acts 10, a Roman centurion named Cornelius stationed at Cesaria with the Italian cohort becomes the first uncircumcised Gentile baptized into the early church. In Acts 23-26, Paul is held in Herod's pritorium for two years. Tried before Felix, then Fesus, then Herod Agria II. That pritorium has been excavated. In 1961, an Italian team recovered a reused limestone block from the theater. A four-line Latin inscription naming Pontius Pilatus, Prefectus Udayi, the only inscription ever found naming Pilot. the only contemporary epigraphic confirmation of his title. The stone is now in Jerusalem's Israel Museum. The harbor is a ruin. The inscription survived.