Day five Acre/Akko (I know they are out of order!)

Today we drove up North to Acre or Akko as it is sometimes called.
Standing on the hill which still bears his name, a little over a mile east of the present day Acre, Napoleon hand his eyes fixed on History as he directed his army’s siege of the walled city in 1799. Unknown to him, history was curled up beneath his feet, some 4,000 years waiting to be exposed. Archaeologists have now stripped back layers of the past and have exposed one of the oldest settlements in this part of the world. It was first mentioned in writings of the Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III. Acre/Akko appears in the Bible. The city was part of the territory designated to the tribe of Asher, but as Judges 1:31-32 tells us “Asher did not drive out the inhabitants of Acco, or…… So the Asherites lived among the Canaanites, the inhabitants of the land; for they did not drive them out.” 200 years later, Akko is mentioned as part of King David’s empire along with a strip of coast extending to Tyre. David’s son, Solomon, handed this territory back to Hiram. A major landmark in Acre’s history was Alexander the Great’s unopposed conquest in 332 B.C. Julius Caesar visited it in 47 B.C.
The city is now inhabited mostly by muslims, Israeli Muslims. We toured a Turkish bath and were … I don’t know if entertained is the right word, Darrel says ripped off by a cheesy video production of the bath done very much in a revisionist history of the bath and the area done from a muslim point of view with Al Jazzar being the just ruler (looping off of ears, noses and heads is afterall a very just way to deal with someone you do not like, at least their history believes it is just) and jews being sneaky and not to be trusted. We had some good falaful and chips (French fries) and enjoyed some ice cold fresh squeezed orange juice.
We also went and saw an old templer’s tunnel, built to take water to the city by the templer knights.