Nazareth was a new city that started developing some eight to nine decades before the time of Jesus. It was a home to Mary and it was occupied during the late Hellenistic period, through the Roman period and into the Byzantine period.
Jesus was grown up in Nazareth, a small village in the hills between the Sea of Galilee and the Mediterranean Sea. Nazareth was a quiet place for a boy to grow up in, and Jesus spent practically all his childhood and early manhood there - some 30 years.
At the beginning of the Christian era the village of Nazareth was a collection of huts, built like all small oriental houses of sun-dried clay, put up apparently without any pretension to design.
The population of Nazareth were of a mixed kind, consisting of Hebrews, Phoenicians, Arabs, and Greeks, to which were added a number of Roman officers and guards, stationed there for the protection of the interests of the Romans.
However, it was only in about the 1850s that the Europeans began to develop their interest in Nazareth as a Holy City, a city holy to Christianity.
City of Nazareth
