Haifa's ancient fishermen hauled up sea snails that dyed prayer shawls
On the slopes of Mount Carmel, Haifa has changed hands among Canaanites, Romans, Crusaders, Ottomans and the British over some 3,000 years. Talmudic fishermen there gathered murex snails for purple dye, a seventh-century wreck offshore held pottery never seen before, and the city moved its whole site in the 1760s.
The earliest settlement nearby, Tell Abu Hawam, was a small Bronze Age port founded in the 14th century BCE. By around the 3rd century CE, the Talmud describes Haifa as a Jewish fishing village and home of Rabbi Avdimi, where fishermen caught the snails used to dye prayer shawls; the name appears more than 100 times in that text. Its origin is unclear. Some link it to the high priest Caiaphas, Crusaders connected it to Cephas, the Aramaic name of Saint Peter, and others point to Hebrew words for shore or covering.
After the Arab conquest the town lived in the shadow of Acre, but by the ninth century it traded with Egyptian ports, built ships and prospered from glass and snail dye. The Persian traveller Nasir-i-Khusrau saw palm gardens and shipwrights building very large vessels there in 1047. A 25-metre wreck from the seventh century, found nearby, carried 103 amphoras, including two types never discovered before.
Prosperity ended around 1100 when Crusaders besieged the town and took it after fierce resistance from its Jewish majority and Fatimid garrison. Saladin captured it in 1187, Richard the Lionheart regained it in 1191, and in 1265 the Mamluk sultan Baibars razed its walls and most homes so Europeans could not return. Hermits living in Mount Carmel's caves in the twelfth century founded the Carmelite order, and their Stella Maris monastery now stands over a cave linked to the prophet Elijah.
In the 1760s the medieval town was demolished and rebuilt 2.5 kilometres east as a fortified settlement, today's Old City. The population was almost entirely Arab in the late nineteenth century and about 55 percent Jewish by 1945; during the 1948 war most Arab residents fled or were expelled, and the city became part of Israel. Today it is Israel's third-largest city, home to the Technion, the Baha'i World Centre and, until recently, the country's only underground railway, the Carmelit.
Source: Haifa
