"Ave Tiberius !!!" a Tiberias Travel Page by traveloturc

Tiberias is a town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee (Lake of Tiberias) , Lower Galilee, Israel. It was named in honour of the emperor Tiberius.

Tiberias was built at about AD 20 by Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great on the site of the destroyed village of Rakkat, and it became the capital of his realm in Galilee. It was named in honor of Antipas' patron, the Roman Emperor Tiberius.During Herod's time, the Jews refused to settle there.However, Antipas forcibly settled people there from rural Galilee in The Sanhedrin, the Jewish court, fled from Jerusalem during the Great Jewish Revolt against the Roman Empire, and after several stations eventually settled in Tiberias. Following the expulsion of all Jews from Jerusalem after 135, Tiberias and its neighbor Sepphoris became the major centers of Jewish culture. The Mishnah, which grew into the Jerusalem Talmud, may have begun to have been written here.
In 613 it was the site where the final Jewish revolt against the Byzantine Empire started coming into aid of the Persian invaders. Following the Arab conquest, the Caliphate allowed 70 Jewish families from Tiberias to form the core of a renewed Jewish presence in Jerusalem.A Samaritan center existed in Tiberias in the middle of the 4th century. The Crusaders later captured the city and made it the capital of the Galilee, but Saladin retook the city for the Muslim Empire in 1187. The city suffered a decline until it was revived by the Ottoman Turks. After the city was built up over a period of about a century, it was devastated by an earthquake in 1837.

Tiberias sits along the 32-mile shoreline of the Sea of Galilee. The Sea lies roughly 650 feet below sea level and is 14 miles long and 7 1/2 miles wide at its widest point. The Sea is the major source of fresh water for the entire country. The Sea, really a lake, lies on the ancient "Via Maris," a route that linked Egypt and Mesopotamia.
The New Testament contains several references to the lake, which is known alternatively as the Sea of Galilee, Sea of Tiberias and the Sea of Gennesaret. This is where Jesus calmed the stormy sea (Mathew 8) and walked on the water (Mathew 14).
Israelis call the Sea by the biblical name Kinneret. This was the name of a city on the northwestern edge of the lake during the Canaanite and Israelite periods. The reference to the Sea of Tiberias is attributable to the newer riparian city