Category:Sebaste (subject)
Sebaste / Samaria was the capital of the region of Samaria.
Overview
Samaria, the ancient capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel destroyed by the Assyrians, reemerged in importance in the Persian period under the dynasty of the Sanballats. The tensions between Samaritans and Jews resulted into a religious schism at the time of Nehemiah.
Samaria rebelled to Alexander the Great and was destroyed in 332 BCE; thousands of Macedonian soldiers were settled there.
In 108 BCE John Hyrcanus besieged and destroyed the city that was resettled under Alexander Jannaeus.
After the Roman conquest by Pompey in 63 BCE, Samaria was annexed to the Roman province of Syria. In 30 BCE the emperor Augustus awarded the city to Herod the Great, who renamed it Sebaste in honor of Augustus (Gr. Sebastos = Augustus). Herod the Great had his sons from Mariamne, Aristobulus IV and Alexandros, brought to Sebaste, and strangled there in 7 BCE.
Sebaste was again destroyed during the Jewish War. In the second century CE, it was granted the status of Roman colony by Septimius Severus, who supported the construction of monumental public buildings.
In Christian and Muslim traditions Sebaste was associated with the burial place of John the Baptist.
The city lost its importance and was abandoned after the 12th century.
Sebaste in ancient sources
Sebaste in scholarship
The first excavation of the site was conducted by Harvard University, under the leadership of Gottlieb Schumacher in 1908 and then George Andrew Reisner in 1909 and 1910 with the assistance of architect C.S. Fisher and D.G. Lyon. Between 1931 and 1935, the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, the Palestine Exploration Fund, and the Hebrew University conducted a second expedition, under the leadership of J.W. Crowfoot, with the assistance of K. Kenyon, Eleazar Sukenik, and G.M. Crowfoot. In the 1960s small-scale excavations were carried out by the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, under the leadership of F. Zayadine.
Sebaste in fiction
References
- Samaria-Sebaste / Joseph Patrick / In: The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism (2010 Collins / Harlow), edited volume, 1184-1186
External links
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