Battle of Panium

In −200, during the Fifth Syrian War, the Seleucid king Antiochus III defeated the Ptolemaic army of the Aetolian general Scopas at Panium, the cave sanctuary of the god Pan at one of the springs of the Jordan, later Caesarea Philippi and today Banias. The Greek historian Polybius (Histories 16.18–19) describes the battle: the king's son, also named Antiochus, led the cavalry charge that broke the Ptolemaic flank, and war elephants took part.

The battle ended about a century of Ptolemaic rule over Judea. Josephus (Antiquities 12) reports that the Jews of Jerusalem welcomed Antiochus, supplied his army and helped besiege the Egyptian garrison in the citadel; in return he granted tax relief, support for the Temple and the right to live by their ancestral laws. Many interpreters read Daniel 11:15–16, "the king of the north shall come and cast up a mound ... and he shall stand in the glorious land," as an allusion to these events, the prelude to the crisis under his son Antiochus IV.