Overview

Bibliography

Hippos is one of the Decapolis cities according to Josephus and Pliny. The site is known as Qal‘at el-Husn in Arabic and Sussita in Aramaic. The remains of the city sit atop a hill some 355 meters above and 1.5 kilometers east of the Sea of Galilee. The site was occupied for about a thousand years from the time of the Seleucids (third-second century BCE) until its destruction by earthquake in the Arab period (748/9 CE). Hippos may have been the “city set on a hill” mentioned by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:14).

This site was once identified as ancient Gamla, because the shape of the site resembles a camel's hump, and ancient Hippos was associated with the neighboring village of Sussiya. Surveys and the recent excavations, however, have convinced most scholars that this is the site of ancient Hippos.

The site was first excavated by Claire Epstein (1950-1955) for the Israel Department of Antiquities. She uncovered the large Byzantine cathedral. In 2000 excavations of the site resumed under the direction of Arthur Segal for the Zinman Institute of Archaeology of the University of Haifa, in cooperation with the Polish Academy of Sciences, the National Museum at Warsaw, and Concordia University (St. Paul). In addition to working on the Cathedral, they have begun to uncover a Hellenistic compound, a Roman forum, two Byzantine churches, an odeion, a Roman bath, and the east city gate.

The archaeological strata uncovered at the site, as illustrated in the site plan, date to the following periods:

	Umayyad Period
	Byzantine Period
	Late Roman Period
	Early Roman Period
	Hellenistic Period