Listed 9 sub titles with search on: Information about the place for wider area of: "HAIFA Town ISRAEL" .
A Phoenician seaport town, the modern Acre. The Greeks, having changed the original name into Ake, connected with it the fabulous legend of Heracles having been bitten here by a serpent, and of his having cured (akeomai) the wound by a certain leaf.
Phoenician city called Akko on the coast S of Tyre, refounded by Ptolemy
II Philadelphos (285-246 B.C.). According to Isaeus and Demosthenes, there was
an Athenian merchant colony there as early as the 4th c. B.C. In Hellenistic times
Ptolemais was an important strategic site. It passed under Seleucid control in
the 2d c. B.C. and became the main base of the Syrian Greeks against the Jews
during the Maccabaean wars, and of the Romans in the Jewish wars of Vespasian,
Titus, and Hadrian in the 1st and 2d c. A.D. Claudius gave it the title of colony.
The Moslems took it in A.D. 638. The town was completely destroyed at the end
of the Crusades and rebuilt at the end of the 18th c. The aqueduct visible to
the NE dates from ca. 1800.
There are virtually no ancient remains. The ramparts, the temples
of gods known from the town's coinage, the gymnasium built by Herod the Great,
the public baths where, according to the Michnah, the rabbi Gamaliel did not fear
to bathe himself underneath a statue of Aphrodite, have all disappeared.
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.
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