founded a city which became his administrative capital, known from Josephus and the Gospels of Matthew and Mark as Caesarea or Caesarea Philippi, to distinguish it from Caesarea Maritima and other cities named Caesarea (, ). On the death of Philip II in 34 CE his kingdom was briefly incorporated into the province of Syria, with the city given the autonomy to administer its own revenues, before reverting to his nephew, Herod Agrippa I. The ancient city is mentioned in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, under the name of Caesarea Philippi, as the place where Jesus confirmed Peter's assumption that Jesus was the Messiah; the place is today a place of pilgrimage for Christians. In 61 CE, king Agrippa II renamed the administrative capital Neronias in honor of the Roman emperor Nero, but this name was discarded several years later, in 68 CE. Agrippa also carried out urban improvements. In 67 CE, during the First Jewish–Roman War, Vespasian briefly visited Caesarea Philippi before advancing on Tiberias in Galilee. With the death of Agrippa II around 92 CE came the end of Herodian rule, and the city returned to the province of Syria. In the late Roman and Byzantine periods the written sources name the city again as Paneas, or more seldom as Caesarea Paneas. In 361, Emperor Julian the Apostate instigated a religious reformation of the Roman state, in which he supported the restoration of Hellenistic polytheism as the state religion. In Paneas this was achieved by replacing Christian symbols with pagan ones, though the change was short lived. In the 5th century, following the division of the Empire, the city was part of the Eastern (later Byzantine) Empire, but was lost to the Arab conquest of the Levant in the 7th century. Early Muslim period In 635, Paneas gained favourable terms of surrender from the Muslim army of Khalid ibn al-Walid after it had defeated Heraclius' forces. In 636, a second, newly formed Byzantine army advancing on Palestine used Paneas as a staging post on the way to confront the Muslim army at the final Battle of Yarmouk. The depopulation of Paneas after the Muslim conquest was rapid, as its traditional markets disappeared. Only 14 of the 173 Byzantine sites in the area show signs of habitation from this period. The Hellenised city thus fell into a precipitous decline. At the council of al-Jabiyah, when the administration of