Editing Decapolis (section)

===Hellenistic period===
[[File:בית_שאן_סקיתופוליס.jpg|thumb|Roman theatre and cardo of Scythopolis ([[Beit She'an]], Israel)]]
Except for Scythopolis, Damascus and Canatha, the Decapolis cities were by and large founded during the [[Hellenistic period]], between the death of [[Alexander the Great]] in 323 BC and the Roman conquest of [[Coele-Syria]], including [[Judea]] in 63 BC. Some were established under the [[Ptolemaic dynasty]] which ruled Judea until 198 BC. Others were founded later, when the [[Seleucid Empire]] ruled the region. Some of the cities included "Antiochia" or "Seleucia" in their official names (''Antiochia Hippos'', for example), which attest to Seleucid origins. The cities were Greek from their founding, modeling themselves on the Greek [[polis]].

In 63 BC, the Roman general [[Pompey]] conquered the eastern Mediterranean. The people of the Hellenized cities, who were under the rule of the Jewish [[Hasmonean dynasty|Hasmonean Kingdom]],<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Millar |first=Fergus |title=The Roman Near East: 31 BC–AD 337 |publisher=Harvard University Press |year=1995 |isbn=978-0-674-77886-3 |edition= |location=Cambridge, Massachusetts |pages=39 |chapter=For the moment it is enough to recall that when Pompey had acquired the area for Rome in the 60s, he had made a deliberate point of liberating all those cities in this area which had been under Jewish rule (following conquests by the Hasmoneans), and had made them part of the province of Syria. |quote=}}</ref> welcomed Pompey as a liberator. When Pompey reorganized the region, he awarded a group of these cities with autonomy under Roman protection; this was the origin of the Decapolis. For centuries the cities based their [[calendar era]] on this conquest: 63 BC was the epochal year of the [[Pompeian era]], used to count the years throughout the Roman and Byzantine periods.