2 New Sheqalim The Port of Caesarea

Caesarea Maritima was built by Herod the Great between roughly 22 and 10 BCE, and its harbor — called Sebastos, after Augustus — was an engineering feat of the ancient world: concrete poured underwater using volcanic pozzolana imported from Italy, creating one of the largest artificial harbors Rome had yet seen. The port declined after the Arab conquest and silted over almost completely by the medieval period, leaving the submerged remains that Israeli marine archaeologists began systematically excavating in the 1980s, just years before this coin's issue.

The 1995 date places it within Bank of Israel's ongoing commemorative series celebrating archaeological sites, each tied to active excavation programs partly funded through numismatic sales.