https://ancientrome.org/tags/herod/ Recent content in Herod on Ancient Rome Hugo en-us Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/caesarea-maritima-a-roman-city-built-from-nothing/ Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/caesarea-maritima-a-roman-city-built-from-nothing/ <p>Caesarea Maritima was built by Herod the Great on a site with no natural harbor, no fresh water source, and no existing urban infrastructure, over a period of approximately twelve years ending around 10 BC, and it became the capital of the Roman province of Judaea and one of the most important cities on the eastern Mediterranean coast. The feat of urban creation involved harbor engineering that modern marine archaeologists have called the most ambitious building project in the ancient world: an artificial harbor of roughly 100,000 square meters created by sinking enormous concrete blocks into water sixty meters deep, using hydraulic concrete — the pozzolanic technology that gave Roman harbor structures their extraordinary durability — in its most ambitious application anywhere in the empire. The harbor blocks, two thousand years later, still lie beneath the Mediterranean, structurally recognizable and studied by diving archaeologists who find in them evidence of Roman engineering at its most technically extraordinary.</p>