Location information

Canatha

CANATHA (Ancient city) SYRIA
  In the Hauran N of Soueida, Canatha was one of the cities of the Decapolis at the end of the Hellenistic period. The city, perched on a steep plateau bordered to the E by a deep ravine, contains many ancient monuments: temples, palaces, churches, a triumphal arch, the SW rampart gate, and tower tombs. Travelers in the past saw a dozen of the latter, still several stories high.
  On a wooded slope to the NW stood a temple, a peripteral structure, with Corinthian columns and carved pedestals and bases. The principal street led E to a flagged space bordered by columns, then some ruins of baths, and nearby a building with a vaulted hall containing inscriptions that refer to Agrippa, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, and Julia Domna. On the opposite side of the ravine was an odeon designed like a theater, almost entirely cut in the rock, and next to it a nymphaeum. At the highest point of the city, at the E end of a long terrace, was a portico of Corinthian columns, then an atrium that led to a basilica. The latter had a doorway framed with carved foliated scrolls and maeanders. A church is attached to the W side of the atrium by its chevet. This church is a modification of a building with a porticoed entrance to the N and a semicircular three-lobed exedra to the S, originally a praetorium. Farther S, beyond a Byzantine cistern, are the ruins of a so-called temple of Jupiter.

J. P. Rey-Coquais, ed.
This text is from: The Princeton encyclopedia of classical sites, Princeton University Press 1976. Cited Nov 2002 from Perseus Project URL below, which contains bibliography & interesting hyperlinks.

• http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Per...