Hippos (Sussita) of the Decapolis: The Civic Basilica and the Southern Bathhouse

Hippos of the Decapolis, perched on Mt. Sussita just east of the Sea of Galilee, has been excavated since 2000 by the Hippos Excavations Project on behalf of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology, University of Haifa. After twenty-five years of investigation, Hippos is one of the most systematically explored cities of the Decapolis and among the best-documented Classical sites in the southern Levant.

This volume presents a detailed study of two centrally located monumental public buildings that reflect the peak of Hippos’s prosperity in the mid-first through third centuries CE: the civic basilica and the Southern Bathhouse. The strata below and above the remains of these Roman-period buildings reveal the city’s earlier Hellenistic and Early Roman phases and its later Byzantine and Early Islamic occupation up to the 749 CE earthquake, when the site was abandoned. The fully exposed civic basilica, constructed at the end of the first century CE and brought down by the 363 CE earthquake, is the smallest but the most thoroughly studied among the known basilicae of Roman Greater Syria and Arabia. The Southern Bathhouse, built in the second century CE, has over half of its plan revealed by excavations. Together with the full record of ceramic building materials and portable finds, it is one of the most thoroughly published examples of these marvels of Roman engineering in the Near East.

This comprehensive publication makes a significant contribution to the study of Roman civic and bathing architecture, urbanism, and material culture, offering essential resources for Classical-period archaeologists, historians of the Roman East, and specialists in Greco-Roman studies.

Arleta Kowalewska is a research fellow at the Zinman Institute of Archaeology of the University of Haifa and codirector of the Hippos Excavations Project.

Michael Eisenberg is a senior researcher at the Zinman Institute of Archaeology, a Professor of Classical-Period Archaeology at the School of Archaeology and Maritime Cultures at the University of Haifa, and codirector of the Hippos Excavations Project. He is also a Corresponding Member at the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut and a research fellow at the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology.