Kingdoms of ruin: The Art and Architectural Splendours of Ancient Turkey 9780755625123, 9781845117993

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INTRODUCTION

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urkey has been called a crossroads of civilisations because of its position astride the continents, with 97 per cent of its land mass lying in Asia and the rest in Europe. The Asian and European regions of Turkey are separated by what the sixteenth-century French scholar Pierre Gille called the ‘strait that ends all straits’ – the Hellespont (Dardanelles), the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus – through which mariners since the night of time have sailed, voyaging from the Aegean to the Black Sea. Turkey in Europe comprises the region known as Thrace, while the Asian part of the country is called Anatolia, more generally known in the past as Asia Minor. Anatolia is the Greek word for ‘east’, or more literally ‘the land of sunrise’. The word probably originated with the first Greek mariners passing through the straits late in the second millennium bc, for they saw the sun rising in the land that stretched off to the horizon to their east where

they would soon begin to settle in a great migration that took them from their original homeland in what is now Greece. This was not the first migration between Europe and Asia, nor would it be the last, for it is in the geographic nature of Anatolia to provide a highway for humankind in its wanderings between the continents. And thus in Anatolia one finds the ruins and monuments of successive civilisations stretching back some eleven millennia to the Late Stone Age, a palimpsest of civilisations, with each successive one built on and from the ruins of those that have preceded it. This procession of civilisations is one of the themes of Jeremy Stafford-Deitsch’s Kingdoms of Ruin: The Art and Architectural Splendours of Ancient Turkey. He begins his book with chapter the ‘Significance in Ruins’, writing of what these remnants of civilisations mean to him and what they meant to travellers who preceded him. This is followed by a brief history of ancient Turkey, beginning

APHRODISIAS PRIESTESS

Portrait bust of a priestess of Aphrodite (second century ad), now in the Aphrodisias Museum. Located near quarries yielding superb marble, the city became renowned for its sculpture in Roman times and probably supported a school of artisans who were skilled reinterpreters of Hellenistic prototypes

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v i i i k ingd oms of ruin

with the first evidence of human habitation in Anatolia in the Palaeolithic era and ending with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in ad 1453. The third and final chapter, entitled ‘A Photographic Odyssey Through Ancient Turkey’, is a sequence of captioned photographs without text, images of the ancient monuments and works of art preserved in Turkey. His odyssey takes him on a series of interwoven journeys through Anatolia in which he photographs the remains of the various civilisations that have risen, flourished and fallen in Asia Minor from the Late Stone Age to the end of the Graeco-Roman era. The earliest known site of human habitation in Anatolia is the Karain cave in the Taurus Mountains above Antalya. Remains found there date back some 160,000 years to the Palaeolithic era, or Old Stone Age, including teeth and bone fragments of both Neanderthal and Homo sapiens. The earliest site of the Neolithic era, or New Stone Age, was discovered at Göbekli Tepe, a tumulus near Urfa in south-eastern Turkey, whose oldest layer is dated to circa 9500 bc. A shrine of that date with inscribed T-shaped pillars has been excavated and is considered to be the oldest known monumental religious structure in the world. It had been thought that structures of this complexity first developed after the beginning of agriculture but a study of the site revealed that the builders of the temple at Göbekli Tepe were hunter-gatherers. Klaus Schmidt has suggested that the neolithic agricultural revolution began at Göbekli Tepe when the hunter-gatherers began to cultivate wheat. James Mellaart’s excavation of the mound at Çatalhöyük south of Konya uncovered the first evidence of agricultural civilisation in Anatolia, the oldest level in the site dating to circa 8000 bc. The excavations, which have been

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continued in recent years by Ian Hodder, revealed ten successive layers of occupation, the oldest dating to circa 6800 bc. The settlement, estimated to have had a maximum population of up to 10,000, consisted of mud brick houses laid out carefully in grouped blocks around central communal courtyards. The houses were all of the same plan: a large living room furnished with benches, a kitchen with a hearth and a storage room, with entry via a ladder through a hole in the roof. Each house had a cult area or shrine with wall paintings of hunting and religious scenes. The shrines were decorated with bucrania, or bull heads, the symbol of male procreative power, either carved in relief or sculptured in the round. The cult areas also had representations of the great mother goddess of Anatolia, usually in the form of terracotta figurines. One of Stafford-Deitsch’s photographs in Kingdoms of Ruin shows a statuette of the mother goddess found at Çatalhöyük (p.35) and now exhibited at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara. The figurine is dated circa 5750 bc and shows the goddess as a gross seated figure with huge breasts, belly and thighs, apparently in the process of giving birth, flanked by a pair of guardian leopards. The fertility deity at Çatalhöyük was the prototype of later forms of the Anatolian mother goddess, the Phrygian Kubaba, the Lydian Cybele, the Greek Artemis, the Roman Diana and, eventually, the Blessed Virgin Mary. During the course of this development the fertility goddess became slim and virginal, as she appears in subsequent photographs in Kingdoms of Ruin. One of these is an image of a marble statue of Artemis Ephesia, found at Ephesus and dating from the Roman imperial era (p.39). The statue portrays the goddess as Artemis Polymastros, of the Many Breasts, but these appendages are now believed to represent bull testicles, symbols of

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introductio n i x

her procreative powers as a fertility deity. Another photograph shows a marble frieze from the Hellenistic theatre at Perge (p.37). The central figure is Tyche, the Greek goddess of fortune, who holds a cult image of Artemis, while in an altar beside her bulls are presented for sacrifice. Thus, it would appear that the figures of the mother goddess and the bull, which first appear as cult figures at Çatalhöyük, continued to serve as fertility symbols from the prehistory era into the Graeco-Roman period, evidence of the continuity of cultures in Anatolia, another theme in Kingdoms of Ruin. The Neolithic era was followed in turn by the Chalcolithic period (circa 6000–3000 bc), named for the copper which first came in to use then, and the Bronze Age (circa 3000–1200 bc), when bronze weapons, tools and utensils were used throughout Anatolia. The beginning of the Bronze Age coincides with the oldest stratum at Troy, the great fortress city on the Asian side of the Hellespont near the Aegean, first excavated by Heinrich Schliemann in 1870. The early Bronze Age saw the emergence of the Hatti, an indigenous people who dominated central Anatolia from the middle of the third millennium bc into the early second millennium. Their capital may have been at Alacahöyük, south of Çorum, where excavations have revealed 13 royal tombs. These tombs are dated to the twenty-third century bc, contemporary with what Schliemann called the ‘second settlement’ at Troy. This was the stratum in which he discovered what he believed to be the treasures of King Priam, a few of which are preserved in the Archaeological Museum in İstanbul. Most of the objects discovered in the excavations at Alacahöyük are now in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara, the most notable being the royal standards of the Hattian kings, some of them in the form of bronze ‘sun discs’, others topped with bronze figurines of

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bulls and stags inlaid with silver. One of the photographs in Kingdoms of Ruin shows a royal Hattian standard (p.40), another shows a pair of gold ear tassels (p.44) which Schliemann believed to be part of Priam’s treasure – two spectacular examples of Bronze Age metalwork. The Hatti were succeeded as the dominant Anatolian power by the Hittites, a European people who seem to have moved into Anatolia in the first half of the second millennium bc. Their capital, which they called Hattuşaş, was at Boğazköy (now known as Boğazkale) in central Anatolia, whose ruins were discovered in 1834 by the French traveller Charles Texier. As Texier wrote in wonderment at the time, ‘the grandeur and peculiar nature of the ruins perplexed me extraordinarily when I attempted to give the city its historical name’. Excavations of Hattuşaş began in 1906 under Hugo Winckler and soon resulted in the discovery of some 10,000 cuneiform tablets. During the subsequent half century these and thousands of hieroglyphic inscriptions were deciphered and today the history and culture of the Hittites are known almost as well as those of the other great civilisations of ancient Anatolia and the Near East. The realm known to historians as the Old Hittite Kingdom flourished during the period 1700–1500 bc. This was followed by the Hittite Empire, which lasted until around 1200 bc. The empire reached its greatest extent under Mursilis ii (1353–1320 bc), when it stretched from the Aegean to beyond the Tigris and from the Black Sea to Palestine. Then, at the end of the thirteenth century bc, all the cities of the great empires and kingdoms of the Bronze Age were utterly destroyed, Hattuşaş and Troy among them, perhaps by invaders from the north or by the mysterious Sea People mentioned in ancient Egyptian archives. Fragments of the Hittite Empire survived for a

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time in south-eastern Anatolia and Mesopotamia, where a number of so-called Neo-Hittite states emerged, the last of which was destroyed in 717 bc by the Assyrians under Sargon ii. The Hittites were succeeded as the dominant power in western Anatolia by the Phrygians, a European people who first moved into Asia Minor at the beginning of the first millennium bc, and by the middle of the ninth century bc they had established their capital at Gordion, west of Ankara. The Phrygians were in turn supplanted by the Lydians who, early in the seventh century bc, established their capital at Sardis on the site of an earlier city that had apparently been destroyed at about the same time as the fall of Homeric Troy. The siege of Troy is the subject of Homer’s Iliad, the historicity of which would seem to have been authenticated by Schliemann’s excavations in the Hisarlık mound on the Trojan plain. As Schliemann wrote just before he began his excavations, the site: fully agrees with the description Homer gives of Ilium and I will add that as soon as one sets foot on the Trojan plain, the view of the beautiful hill at Hisarlık grips one with astonishment. The hill seems designed by nature to carry a great city… there is no other place in the region to compare with it. Carl Blegen, who excavated Troy in the years 1932–38, wrote in 1963 that: It can no longer be doubted, when one surveys the state of our knowledge today, that there was an actual historical Trojan War in which a coalition of Achaeans, or Mycenaeans, under a king whose lordship was recognised, fought against the people of Troy and their allies.

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The question of the historicity of the Trojan War is still being discussed by scholars. Their arguments are summarised by Joachim Latacz in a book published in 2004, in which he concludes that ‘it would not be surprising if, in the near future, the outcome states: Homer is to be taken seriously’. After the destruction of Troy the site was sparsely occupied up until the beginning of the first millennium bc, when it was reoccupied by Greeks from the island of Lesbos, who called their new city Ilion, one of the names by which it is known in the Iliad. The new settlers were part of the great population movement that took the Greeks across the Aegean to the western coast of Anatolia and its offshore islands, where they founded city states that would soon organise themselves into three confederacies, those of the Aeolians, Ionians and Dorians. The eastern Greek cities produced the first Greek enlightenment, giving birth to the epics of Homer; the natural philosophy of Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Pythagoras, Heraclitus and Anaxagoras; the lyric poetry of Sappho, Alcaeus, Xenophanes and Anacreon; and the Histories of Herodotus, who at the beginning of his work writes that ‘his Researches are here put down to preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the achievements of our own and other peoples, and more particularly to show how they came into conflict’. The eastern Greek cities remained independent until 600 bc, when the Lydians invaded the territory of the Ionian Greeks and eventually subjugated them. Then in 546 bc, the Persian king Cyrus captured Sardis, bringing the Lydian kingdom to an end. Soon afterwards the armies of Cyrus conquered all the Greek cities in western Anatolia. The Ionian Greeks, aided by the Athenians,

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rebelled against Persian rule in 499 bc, burning Sardis and destroying the Temple of Cybele. The revolt lasted until 494 bc, when the Persians defeated the Ionian fleet off Miletus, which they then burnt to the ground.

conquered most of the rest of Asia Minor. The last of the independent states to fall to Rome was the kingdom of Commagene in south-eastern Anatolia, which became part of the Roman province of Syria in ad 72.

The Persian king Darius sent an army to invade Greece in 492 bc; when that failed he launched a fleet for a second invasion, which ended when his forces were defeated by the Greeks at the battle of Marathon in 490 bc. Ten years later Darius’ son and successor, Xerxes, led another invasion of Greece, which ended when his navy was defeated at Salamis in 490 bc and his army routed at Plataea the following year.

Anatolia prospered under Roman rule and Greek cities like Pergamon, Sardis and Ephesus grew enormously in size as successive emperors adorned them with temples and other edifices. Thus, the majority of the monuments one sees today along the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts of Anatolia are more Roman than Greek, as is evident from the photographs in Kingdoms of Ruin, most of whose last chapter is devoted to the Graeco-Roman period.

The Greek cities in Anatolia remained under Persian rule until they were liberated by Alexander the Great when he began his invasion of Asia in 334 bc. After the death of Alexander in 323 bc his empire was divided among his generals, the Diadochi, or Successors, one or another of whom ruled parts of Anatolia from time to time during the Hellenistic period.

The ancient Graeco-Roman era came to an end in ad 330, when Constantine the Great moved the capital of his empire to Byzantium on the Bosphorus, which then became Constantinople, the city of Constantine. Constantinople became the capital of what came to be called the Byzantine Empire, a Christian and predominantly Greek-speaking realm that evolved from the pagan and Latin Roman Empire in its eastern provinces. The Byzantine Empire was in turn supplanted by the Muslim and Turkish Ottoman Empire, which lasted until 1923, when its remnants in Anatolia and Thrace became the Republic of Turkey.

The strongest state to emerge in Anatolia during the Hellenistic period was that of Pergamon, which became an independent principality under Philetaerus in 282 bc. At its peak the kingdom of Pergamon ruled most of western Anatolia, from the coasts of the Aegean and the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Pergamon itself became one of the centres of Greek culture, its library rivalling the famous library in Alexandria. The Pergamene kingdom came to an end in 133 bc when its last king, Attalus iii, died and left his realm to Rome, which by that time had become the dominant power in the eastern Mediterranean world. Western Anatolia then became the Roman province of Asia and eventually Rome

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Jeremy Stafford-Deitsch’s odyssey chronicles the history and culture of the successive peoples who have followed one another in turn across the immemorial landscape of what is now Turkey, recording in his superb photographs the monuments and works of art that they have left behind. He evokes the lost worlds of these vanished and almost forgotten Anatolian civilisations, veritable Kingdoms of Ruin, which come to light again in his remarkable book. John Freely, Istanbul

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ANCIENT ANATOLIA SITES ILLUSTRATED AND CLASSICAL PROVINCES 0

50

BOSPHORUS

T HR ACE

Byzantium/Constantinople/ İstanbul • SEA OF MARMARA

• Troy Gülpınar

•

•Assos

LESBOS

DARDANELLES MYSI A

LY DI A

100

MILES 0

50

100

KILOMETRES

150

Aizanoi •

• Pergamon

• Sardis

CHIOS

• Ephesus

CARIA

• Hierapolis

• Aphrodisias • Priene Miletus • Sa • Alinda Didyma • Euromos • • Labranda Mylasa • • Stratoniceia Halicarnassus • Term • Kaunos Cnidus • LYCI A Telmessos • Tlos Ary Pınara • • Sidyma • Xanthos Letoön ••• • My Patara •And R HODES

MEDITERRANEAN SEA

BLACK SEA

PA PHL AG ONI A

BI T H YNI A

PON T US

Alacahöyük

Ankara Gordion

•

•

A R M ENI A

•• Hattuşaş • Yazılıkaya

G A L AT I A

• Midas City Arslankaya •• Arslantaş C A PPA DO CI A

PHRYGI A

• Mount Nemrut

Arsameia •

LYC AONI A

Eflatunpınar • • Fasıllar agalassos • ISAUR I A• Çatalhöyük PISIDI A

Ivriz

•

• Isaura Karatepe PA M PH Y LI A • messos • Aspendos CILICI A PEDI A S • • • Perge • Etenna Side • Seleukeia ykanda CILICI A T R ACHEI A • • Phaselis Olba/ Diocaesarea • • Kanytelis • Olympos yra • Imbriogon driake SY R I A

C Y PRUS

M ESOPOTA M I A

ONE SIGNIFICANCE IN RUINS

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he ruins of Anatolia are worthy of the epithet ‘breathtaking’. I discovered that this could be literally true when I visited Venice for the first time: I found I could barely breathe. It was as if the baroque glories of the waterlogged city had a double existence. On one hand there was the decadent city of history, tourists and gondolas, and on the other the impression that the city had a hidden second self. Penetrate the veil of the tangible surface and something rich in deeper meanings would blaze forth. Venice’s fortunes fluctuated according to her relationship with the Ottoman Empire, the empire that came to rule Anatolia, whose ancient ruins are the subject of this book. These ruins, like Venice, are breathtaking; however, the interplay of factors that makes you gasp is greater. For above and beyond the ruins themselves are their settings, whose range is considerable indeed, from mountain peaks to dramatic gorges and verdant valleys, from rolling plains to impenetrably ancient pine

forests, from fortress-crested hills to coastal scenery literally out of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Anatolia can bewitch: a friend who visited the mighty ruins of Pergamon returned convinced that he had lived there in a past life. If I have lived before then I can think of several ancient cities of the Anatolian landscape in which I would have been more than willing to spend my days: overdecorated Aphrodisias with clinking ringing from its sculptors’ workshops, or Priene with its view across the Meander valley and the Temple of Athena extant, or coastal Phaselis before it became a den for Cilician pirates. Indeed, the half-dead Mediterranean that now laps Anatolia’s shores is a very different sea from the one the ancients crossed at their peril. The philosopher Aristotle (384–322 bc) first described the great white shark from specimens in these radiant waters. One can almost hear the horrified curses of long forgotten fishermen who, struggling to pull their alarmingly heavy net into their

TEMPLE OF APOLLO

The Temple of Apollo at Side was one of a pair of all-marble Corinthian temples (the other was dedicated to Athena) built on the peninsula of Pamphylia’s major port. Dated to the second century ad, it reflects the wealth accumulated in this coastal town at the height of the Roman Empire

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SIDYMA TOMB

A looted Roman tomb in the necropolis of the remote Lycian city of Sidyma. When the city was visited by Sir Charles Fellows in 1840, the region was infested with lions, leopards, bears and hyenas. The Medusa head on the tomb was intended to protect the deceased from evil

tiny, wobbly boat, brought such a dead, entangled ‘monster’ alongside. Nowadays, the great white shark – like the Mediterranean monk seal and bluefin tuna on which it once feasted – is as good as extinct. Ruins embody the intuition that this world is not the whole story: we are haunted by them. And while I can offer no insights into the plausibility of this mystical position, I can say that much of my photographic endeavour has been spent attempting to acknowledge this natural supernaturalism. In the field of ruins, Egypt previously absorbed my interest. Even the word ‘Egypt’ looks like a pharaonic wreck, and the grandiosity of those monuments certainly made the task of photography straightforward enough. But while the top-heavy monumentality of the Egyptian remains obliterates the human, in Anatolia things are more subtle: the sites tell of the tension between the overblown and the mundane from which the modern world emerged. Every ruin has its burden of history and in Asia Minor each provides an incomparably heady mixture of associations: a unique flux of peoples, creeds, heroisms, brutalities and inspiring aesthetic achievements. A little-known danger of too deep an immersion in the mysteries of ruins is that they can make you feel rather important. While I would not classify myself as one of the world’s great extroverts, I will imperiously hold up a hundred tourists (at Ephesus that may be a conservative estimate) to get a particular shot. The solitary investigation of ruins can also make you go decidedly odd. At Phaselis I was outraged when I had to delay my picture-taking while several bikini-clad girls who had swum ashore from a yacht ambled in front of my camera. They may have been the next generation of brilliant classical scholars but the thought did not cross my mind; nor did it occur

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to me to include them in the photograph. Where the photographs herein are a success is where it is self-evident why they are unpeopled. When considering ruins there is a risk of succumbing to sentimentality. Yet we are halted before them. Is there then anything significant to articulate about our fascination for ruins or does their complex impact disguise the fact that the thoughts they evoke are better left unsaid? And what makes Turkey special? It does not seem to me that a Western traveller can fully come to terms with ancient Turkey without considering Europe’s previous – and at best uneasy – relationship with the Ottoman Empire. One traditional and supposedly clearcut theme of recent centuries – that of the adventurous European crossing the Dardanelles and going to ‘the Orient’ – is in part a conceit and not merely because Turkey had such a rich, often tortured, yet brilliant period of classical culture. Bleached fragments of temple entablature and museum-housed sculpture hardly paint the whole, multi-faceted story – not least because we forget how much was originally painted gaudily. The great Lycian city of Xanthos can illustrate the point. On first seeing the theatre, I rather pompously imagined performances of Greek drama there. However, the theatre is Roman and its orchestra pit rather deeper than the Anatolian norm. This suggests entertainment in its most brutal form: gladiatorial battles and bloody confrontations with wild animals, all good fun for the baying crowds. And when the blood, corpses, carcasses and gore had been cleared away the stage performances were most likely ribald comedies sponsored by popularity-seeking members of the elite. If Rome introduced brutality as theatrical entertainment into Anatolia, brutality proper was a way of life. As if a

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4 K I N G D OM S OF RU I N

XANTHOS

The Roman theatre within the Lycian acropolis at Xanthos by George Scharf. He first visited Xanthos with Charles Fellows in 1840. Fellows had rediscovered the city in 1838. In the foreground is a Lycian house tomb. In the background, on the right, is the famous Harpy Monument of about 480 bc

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S IG N I F IC A N C E I N RU I N S 5

microcosm of pivotal Turkey itself, the fate of Xanthos was – on two ancient occasions – appalling. In 545 bc, the Xanthians attempted to resist the Persians and were forced to retreat into their city. They immolated their women, children and slaves in the acropolis before the men marched out to certain death. And history virtually repeated itself half a millennium later in 42 bc: Rome was in civil war following the assassination of Julius Caesar. One of the assassins, Marcus Junius Brutus, arrived with his forces in search of money and more soldiers. The proud Xanthians again committed mass suicide rather than lose their freedom. This ‘history written in lighting’ can not only inform the visitor’s appreciation of Xanthos, but also warn against too sentimental a projection into the distant past. When trying to enter the minds of the Xanthians it is tempting to recall the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1844–1900) celebrated theory that Greek tragedy consisted of the tensions between the Apollonian (concerning analysis and individuation) versus the Dionysian (concerning the irrational, the ecstatic and the merging of the individual into a greater, undifferentiated and irresponsible whole) and apply the theory to the Xanthians themselves. Travelling around Turkey one is constantly struck by the artificiality of one’s thinking. Studded across the vast Anatolian landscape are the remains of its once dazzling classical cities. They seem strange, almost out of place and I am constantly and inappropriately surprised at their presence; it is a bit like bumping into a long lost friend in a foreign country. Unlike the magnificent dead end that was pharaonic Egypt, the Anatolian remains preserve architectural forms endlessly copied for millennia through Europe and beyond. The course of history took Anatolia away from Europe and it is as if, for the European, these fallen cities have become broken marble lighthouses.

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Of course, Anatolia’s formidable archaeological remains stretch long before and long after the Graeco-Roman presence: this was but one episode, though an episode of especial significance for the West. But what does it mean to be of a certain cultural type and what can the ancient Greeks themselves tell us? Originally, for the Greeks, ‘barbarian’ simply meant those peoples who did not speak Greek. Evaluation of their cultures was a distinct issue and appreciation there often was – for example, in the work of Herodotus of Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum) writing in the fifth century bc. If one ancient Greek philosopher haunts the background of the modern and suspiciously clear-cut discussion between East and West, Us and Them, it is not the transcendentally inclined Plato but rather his pupil, down-to-earth Aristotle with the formal establishment of logic: true or false; the championing of empiricism and of categories and the subsequent march of facts. For Aristotle, foreigners as barbarians were, unlike Hellenes, intrinsically suited for slavery. Servility was their natural condition because their rational faculties were dormant and they blindly fulfilled their instinctual needs. Aristotle’s attitude was in no small part a sign of the times. For the Persians, foreigners became progressively more inferior the further they were from the centres of the Persian Empire. And for Aristotle’s pupil, Alexander the Great (356–323 bc), such conflicts resulted in the shattering of the boundaries of the ancient world. Yet Plato, Aristotle and Alexander the Great are footnotes to Homer: all roads lead back to the blind bard whose poems were the foundation of the ancient Greek spirit. The Trojan War, the Persian Wars and the campaigns of Alexander defined what it was to be Greek.

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6 K I N G D OM S OF RU I N

BUST OF EURIPIDES

A Roman copy of a Greek bust of the tragic dramatist Euripides from the Asklepion of Pergamon and now in the town’s archaeological museum. Euripides’ undermining questioning of his world makes him the most modern of the ancient tragic poets

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Homer is thought to have been a native of Ionia on the western coast of Asia Minor. The modern reader of the Iliad (thought to have been written in the second half of the eighth century bc) might be disappointed by the lack of depth of its heroes, whose status is defined by glory in battle and the sacking of cities. Yet, when a grieving Priam visits the tent of Achilles and begs him to release the corpse of his son Hector so that he can be buried, the power of the scene depends on the resonance of Priam’s grief. Achilles had slain Hector because Hector had killed his friend Patroclus. Then, in his rage, Achilles desecrated the corpse: he dragged it around the walls of Troy behind his chariot, an outrage performed on a defeated equal. At the sight of the shattered father, Achilles was overcome with pity and they wept together over their losses. Against Aristotle, the acknowledgement by Homer of the depth of Priam’s grief has never been a comfortable bedfellow of slavery. Slaves, supposedly, like beasts of burden and the gladiators who fell in the theatre at Xanthos and unlike the Xanthians themselves, are replaceable. If Homer is the greatest of the ancient Greek poets he is hardly the only one with a claim to greatness and it might be of interest to recall here my encounter with the tragic dramatist Euripides (480–406 bc) because I believe he made a subtle contribution to this discussion. The episode starts with my first visit to Sardis, the ancient capital of the Lydian Empire. When I visited the fine Hellenistic temple of Artemis there, what immediately struck me was its careful alignment: the temple lines up exactly with the dramatic peak to its east. In the more ancient, indigenous religion of Anatolia, dramatic peaks and mountains had been sacred to the Anatolian mother goddess, Cybele, and there is little doubt that the subsequent Artemis cult in Anatolia was in no small part a continuation of the former.

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S IG N I F IC A N C E I N RU I N S 7

TROJAN WAR SCENE

This scene from the Trojan War decorates the sarcophagus of Aurelia Botiane Demetria of Perge (second century ad) and is now in the Antalya Museum. Menelaus (centre, right) has challenged and defeated Paris in single combat. Aphrodite appears above a stooped Paris and is about to rescue him

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8 K I N G D OM S OF RU I N

TEMPLE OF ARTEMIS

The Hellenistic Temple of Artemis at Sardis preserves the orientation of earlier sacred structures and is aligned to the dramatic peak, known today as Acropolis Hill, to its west beyond the Pactolus River. To its east, the temple lines up with the peak of the acropolis

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10 K I N G D OM S OF RU I N

PERICLES

A diminutive Roman bronze statuette from Pergamon (housed in the town’s archaeological museum) of the statesman Pericles (fifth century bc): he was the great champion of Athenian democracy and instigator of the Athenian Empire. Always portrayed in heroic, idealised form, Pericles was invariably shown wearing a helmet to hide his curiously elongated skull

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A few days after visiting Sardis I went to Pergamon to the north. Escaping the midday heat, I took a break from exploring the vast scale of the remains of the ancient capital of the Attalid kingdom by going to the fine museum in the town. What struck me most powerfully was a bust of Euripides, the pathos heightened by the fact that the bust had been defaced, one hopes by time. Writing immediately after the Persian Wars and living through the Peloponnesian War (the protracted internecine feud between Athens and Sparta), the East became central to Euripides’ most disturbing play, Bacchae. Therein, the power of religious ecstasy and illusion when set against mere rationality are devastatingly portrayed – but their origin is projected into Anatolia. The god Dionysus, accompanied by his frenzied female followers, journeys from Anatolia to wreak havoc at the court of Pentheus, king of Thebes. The horror culminates in Pentheus being savaged to death by the ecstatic worshippers and his own mother carrying the head presuming it to be that of a wild animal. We are told in the tragedy that Dionysus’ journey originated at Mount Tmolus, the sacred mountain of Lydia south of, and visible from, Sardis and that he travelled through Anatolian coastal towns – where Greeks and non-Greeks happily co-existed – before arriving on mainland Greece. In 498 bc, Sardis – then under Persian control – had been burnt by forces including the Athenians. Herodotus informs us that the burning of the Lydian capital was seen by the ancients as having been the cause of the Persian Wars. He informs us that a temple of Cybele at Sardis was destroyed, which is why the Persians subsequently destroyed Greek temples. Standing in front of the bust of Euripides in the Pergamon Museum I could not help wondering whether Euripides’ Bacchae was in fact a criticism of the Peloponnesian War via warnings drawn

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from Athens’ previous contribution to the destruction of Sardis. It was as if the look that came back from the defaced face was the look of someone whose message about rationality, the ecstatic and war, will forever go unheeded.

THE SULTANA

The Sultana in her State Carriage by Thomas Allom (1838). The elaborate contraption was drawn by oxen. A black eunuch is ready to stab to death anyone who dares to look inside it, while women and men line opposite sides of the street

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A European explorer of modern Turkey is stepping into the past in a variety of senses. Wandering through the Ottoman quarters of the towns represents more than a walk through intriguing alleys. On either side the tall, mostly wooden and somewhat ramshackle houses are usually in need of attention or even total restoration: even the decay is decaying. A broken door might allow a glimpse within to broken walls and splintered timbers. An open door might reveal a spacious courtyard. Historically indoctrinated suspicions about ‘the East’ would stir in the back of my mind on such walks. The cramped secrecy of the Ottoman dwellings – inwardlooking and secretive for an outsider – recalled the suggestions of mystery and intrigue that had seduced the pioneering European travellers of previous centuries. For these explorers, the Ottoman East must have seemed locked in decrepit opposition to the open path Europe had recently taken when it raised the flag of the Enlightenment and presumed that reason – and reason alone – was the answer to understanding the world and improving mankind’s condition in it. And then there is the harem. The absolute power of the sultan both fascinated and repelled. Until Ahmet i became sultan in 1603, fratricide was practised at court, where male relatives of the new sultan were killed thus removing rivals. His sons survived until the massacre of the next accession. After Ahmet i, princes survived, incarcerated from reality in the depths of the harem where many went insane. Yet Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,

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Facing page

ASKLEPION OF PERGAMON

The Asklepion of Pergamon was one of the most famous healing centres of the ancient world. Behind the Doric colonnade is the theatre of Roman date. Above and behind is the acropolis of the city

wife of the English ambassador, visited the Turkish baths in Sophia in 1716 and commented on the immaculate decorum of the women. Mistresses and slaves, undifferentiated by their nudity, were distinguishable only by where they sat. Inspired long after by her descriptions, Ingres painted Le Bain Turc (1862) wherein females languish in a sea of flesh: the Orient had become eroticised. The debt that ancient scholarship owes to Islamic scholars is too often forgotten and Anatolia again looms large. An example comes from the well-preserved Asklepion of Pergamon, one of the most famous healing centres of the ancient world. The physician Galen (ad 129–circa 199) started his career here studying the injuries of gladiators. Following the fall of the Roman Empire in ad 476, Europe was plunged into the Dark Ages: communities were isolated, brutal, feudal and illiterate and the little learning that persisted survived in the Church. The Persian polymath Avicenna (980–1037) re-worked Galen’s medical tomes and his Canon of Medicine – though uncritically repeating the often egregious errors of its antecedents – was a basic medical text of medieval Europe. During the Renaissance, humanist scholars repeated the experiments of Galen which became a significant component in the rise of modern science.

MOSAIC OF CHRIST

The famous depiction of Christ from the Deesis (Entreaty) Mosaic of Haghia Sophia. This world-weary Christ of the early fourteenth century perhaps recalls the sacking and desecration of the cathedral by the Crusaders in 1204. In candlelight, the gold surface of the mosaic danced as if alive with holy fire

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For the Moslem East, the Christian West had blood on its hands. In the gradual timescale of Islam (the Ottomans never developed anything more sophisticated than the water clock) the outrage of the Crusades had not faded; the barbarity of the infidels was neither forgivable nor forgotten. But the liberation of the Holy Land was sometimes more of an excuse for a crusade than a reason, as the Fourth Crusade most notoriously exemplified. The Christian city of Zara (in modern

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Croatia) was besieged and its inhabitants massacred (1202). Deflected from the Holy Land by Venetian ambition, the crusaders then sacked Constantinople (1204). The Eastern Church was all but destroyed, its treasures looted and the previously unconquered city reduced to poverty, unable to withstand subsequent Ottoman advances. Thereafter, the dominance of Venice in Mediterranean trade brought it frequently in conflict with the growing Ottoman Empire. By the sixteenth century its eastern trade routes were blocked and so began its own decline. The aesthetic achievements of the Ottoman court culminated in the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent (1520–66). In 1532, Süleyman, with an army of some 300,000, tried to conquer Vienna for the second time. His failure was due to campaign delays, bad weather and the refusal of Charles v, the Holy Roman Emperor, to meet him in battle. Frenchman Guillaume Postel (1510–81), the first oriental scholar, visited the Ottoman court on a diplomatic mission in 1535. Part genius and part madman, he learnt Arabic in İstanbul virtually overnight. Among his more eccentric beliefs was that Hebrew is the divinely inspired ancestral tongue of humanity and that when everyone reverts to speaking it, the problems of the world will vanish. Trade conflicts produced numerous wars. In 1684, in yet another clash between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, Venetian forces entered Athens and the occupying Turks took refuge in the natural fortress of its acropolis. They stored their ammunition in an intact Parthenon, presuming the Venetians would not bombard. They were wrong: the greatest surviving temple of the ancient world had its core ripped out by a direct hit that ignited the ammunition and killed 300.

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The eighteenth century initiated a series of spectacular illustrated books by Europeans travelling through the Ottoman Empire in search of ruins, and these volumes, now under lock and key in museums, institutions and private collections, will never be surpassed. Indeed, gazing at the views these pioneering explorers recorded I am humbled by the compositions, if sometime a little suspicious of the accuracy. Was that camel train really passing along the horizon to frame the foreground ruins just so? Was that fine ship, tilting daringly with sails billowing, really passing the headland strewn with temple fragments as evocatively as required? But this is the trivial criticism of the photographer whose reality is rigid. The monuments in these antique books are more often than not recorded accurately. The scholar and politician Robert Wood (1717?–71) travelled in the Levant and produced two stunning illustrated works on magnificently preserved yet virtually forgotten desert cities: The Ruins of Palmyra (1753) and The Ruins of Balbec (1757). These were to be a rich source of inspiration for the architects of the neo-classical revival. Wood saw himself as contributing to a tradition initiated by the greatest poet and traveller of all: Homer. For Wood, the pictorial vividness of the Odyssey demonstrates that Homer had actually visited the locations he described. Nor were Wood’s travels without significant personal risk. As he states at the opening of The Ruins of Balbec: Before we had quite finished our business at Palmyra our Arabian escort began to solicit our departure with some impatience: our safety in returning was, they said, much more precarious than our journey thither; because they had then only accidental dangers to apprehend, whereas they were now to guard against

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SIEGE OF RHODES

Engraving, after the Dutch seascape painter Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom (1566–1640), of the siege of Rhodes by Turkish forces in 1522. After capitulation, the Knights Hospitallers were allowed to leave in recognition of their heroic defence of the strategically crucial island which they had safeguarded for over 200 years

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a premeditated surprise from the King of the Bedouins, or wandering Arabs, who might have had intelligence of us, and think us a prize worth looking after. Wood’s interests were more than merely scholarly: for him, the great cultural achievements of the past were of urgent relevance to the present. More specifically, Wood attempted to draw didactic parallels between the astonishing grandeurs of Baalbec and Palmyra isolated in their desert wastes and his own island nation isolated from Europe. Though fearful of the threat posed to his party by the Bedouins, Wood thought that in their unencumbered freedom, the sedulity of their religious practices, their courage and hospitality co-existing without dissonance with the ever present possibilities of brutality and pillage, they were close to the world of Homer. In the following decades several other magnificent folio publications appeared depicting the ruins, cultures and scenery of the Ottoman-ruled eastern Mediterranean. The first of these great books was produced by the Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier (1752–1817) who, with various draftsmen and artists including Jean-Baptiste Hilaire (1753–1822), accompanied a cartographic expedition. The publication of the first volume of the magisterial three volume Voyage Pittoresque de la Grèce (1782–1822) by Choiseul-Gouffier was a factor in his becoming the pre-revolutionary ambassador of France to the Ottoman Court – a post that allowed him to continue his travels and researches. Another gifted artist in the expedition’s retinue was Louis-François Cassas (1756–1827) who published what was perhaps the outstanding work to date of the sites, ruins, peoples and costumes from the Levant to Lower Egypt: Voyage Pittoresque de la Syrie, de la Phoenicie, de la Palestine, et de la Basse-Egypte (1799–1800). However, an exceptional work specifically

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on the ancient remains of Anatolian Turkey was produced by another Frenchman, the archaeologist Charles Texier (1802–71), whose colossal Description de l’Asie Mineure (1839–49) is all the more remarkable in that it is the work of a single person. The level of personal risk these explorers encountered should not be underestimated. The remoter regions were infested with brigands and often ruled by brutes. When, in the first part of the nineteenth century, the Marquis de Laborde wanted to draw the façade of the fine Phrygian tomb at the village of Kumbet (near modern Eskişehir), he had to wait for the local Agha (official), who had built his home above it, to have his nap. The bloodthirsty autocrat was subsequently executed by the sultan for his atrocities. At the Lycian city of Tlos a nineteenth-century fortress surmounts the ancient acropolis. This was the stronghold of ‘Bloody’ Ali Ağa who murdered his own daughter. John Turtle Wood spent 11 years at Ephesus from 1863 on behalf of the British Museum searching for, locating and excavating the Temple of Artemis. In 1869, a band of brigands moved into the area and Wood increased his bodyguard to four armed men and equipped himself with a dagger and a revolver in response. On one occasion a bodyguard spotted one of the bandits trying to sneak up on Wood while the bandit’s comrades doubtless hid in the barley next to the ancient wall Wood was investigating. On another, seven brigands hid in one of Wood’s excavation trenches early one morning with the intention of kidnapping him but, by good luck, he was off site that day. Shortly after the close of the season the brigands succeeded in kidnapping the son of a local European farmer and held him for ransom. Another considerable hazard – which I discovered for myself – is posed by the powerful dogs the local shepherds

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TEMPLE OF AUGUSTUS

View by Jean-Baptiste Hilaire of a now vanished Temple of Augustus that once stood in Mylasa (Milas) from Voyage Pittoresque de la Grèce. As with so many Turkish towns with ancient roots, a visitor to modern Milas can see the reused fragments of previous buildings incorporated into more recent ones

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LYCIAN TOMB

A Lycian tomb façade at Myra from Charles Texier’s Description de l’Asie Mineure. Texier was not only a great explorer and scholar, but a great illustrator of his discoveries which included the Hittite capital of Hattuşaş (modern Boğazköy)

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often use to guard their flocks. Accounts by early explorers and archaeologists bemoan the danger these mastiffs posed to riders by striking terror in their horses – not to mention their willingness to bite. Known as the Kangal, the breed can grow to 65kg in weight and is fiercely loyal to its shepherd and protective of his sheep. Descended from stock bred to fight off any number of formidable predators, many now extinct – the Anatolian lynx, wolf, bear, hyena, jackal, leopard, lion even – these dogs may attack anyone who approaches their flock. Once, I was wandering about the acropolis of the Lycian city of Sura (to the west of Demre). Two medium-sized dogs approached, presumably protecting sheep somewhere nearby. I stood my ground and, after some half-hearted yapping, they retreated around the other side of the hill. So much for their bravery, I thought, complimenting myself on my own. A few seconds later I heard a deep, powerful noise from far off in the direction the two dogs had fled. I could not work out what it was and ignored it. Then I realised it was getting louder and nearer and that it was basso profundo barking – deeper, more resonant and more powerful barking than I thought any dog was capable of producing. Far down the slope I saw a huge dog with a massive, thick furred dark head and glowing orange coat bounding towards me. That it was barking thunderously and simultaneously leaping from boulder to boulder as it charged uphill suggested terrifying levels of stamina, ferocity and determination. I had not even seen a sheep. I decided once again to stand my ground. The dog slowed a metre in front of me snarling, snapping, barking and, behind its gnashing teeth, worrying its way ever nearer. I half expected the brute to have three heads. Somewhere in the distance I could hear the shepherd calling for his dog in a bored sort of way, as if it was being merely naughty. I climbed up a nearby boulder thinking the dog could not climb its sheer side – but it

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BRIGAND

John Turtle Wood’s depiction (1877) of one of the numerous brigands who threatened his work at Ephesus. The remote regions of Anatolia were infested with outlaws who posed a considerable threat to the pioneering explorers

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MARCUS AURELIUS

This bust of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (ad 161–180) is from Ephesus. It is now in the town’s archaeological museum. The emperor has been posthumously admired for the Stoic philosophy of his Meditations. In composing these in Greek, rather than Latin, he embodied the fusion of Greek and Roman culture at the height of the Roman Empire. The bust is 85 centimetres in height

did not have to. Obviously familiar with the terrain, it bounded round the other to where the boulder sank into higher ground and joined me. I fled. A few weeks later I was trying to find some tombs at the ancient mountainous site of Isaura but my route was blocked: a shepherd dozed with his flock resting between himself and another huge Kangal dog that, I suspected, was merely pretending to be asleep. Sure enough, when I was too close to retreat it sat up and performed an enormous yawn that revealed the true size of its maw. Then it playfully bounded over to greet me. When I think back to the European explorers who pioneered the rediscovery of ancient Anatolia it is with envy: beneath these wild olive groves and overgrown fig trees, in the very next flowering valley, on the summit of that unendingly ascending hill, a thousand pine trees deeper into this everlasting forest if the villager is to be trusted, there could be something truly spectacular. In 1706, the French adventurer Paul Lucas passed through the never-plundered and partly buried remains of Pisidian Sagalassos whose structures, fallen but mostly complete, continue to astound archaeologists. In the summer of 1834, Charles Texier was hunting down rumours of a lost Roman city in the Anatolian hinterland. Instead, he came upon a landscape of Hittite ruins – the ancient capital of Hattuşaş – and although he suspected the enormity of his discovery, it was at a time when the Hittites had slipped from the pages of history: the city’s builders were unknown. Again, the archaeologist Charles Thomas Newton’s Travels and Discoveries in the Levant of 1865 is a feast of informed adventure culminating in Newton’s own claim to immortality: the discovery of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus in 1856. Reading from the book, a modern archaeologist can only go weak at the knees. Here is an excerpt from his excavations of the Mausoleum:

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Digging below the foundations of this rubble wall, I came to an ancient wall, built of large blocks of white marble beautifully joined, rather more than six feet in height. On the top of this wall was a lion resting, apparently as he had fallen. His legs and tail were broken off, but the body was in the finest condition, and the head intact: the tongue, when first discovered, was painted bright red.1 John Turtle Wood, the discoverer of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, has already been mentioned and Sir Charles Fellows, the rediscoverer of ancient Lycia, will be discussed shortly; Heinrich Schliemann and Troy – the most famous pairing of explorer and site of all archaeology – will be considered later. But after these giants, we can imagine a trickle of anonymous, earnest adventurers tired, dirty, far from home. Perhaps an uxorious scholar from a European university, panting and perspiring as he stumbles across hot rocks, blinking through thick spectacles, his copy of the Iliad clutched to his breast tighter than the grip of his other hand with which he drags his wife, as he approaches the overgrown temple sanctuary of Apollo Smintheus at the site mentioned by Homer at the start of his matchless epic. Abandoning his wife to the shade of a pomegranate tree and perching on a broken column, he fumblingly opens the tome and reads aloud the ancient language with more authority in his voice than his wife has ever known, while the boy from the village of Gülpınar who led the way, giggles… Thereafter, the trickle became a flood of visitors and the more accessible sites had their undergrowth cleared. Excavated, tidied up, roped off, reconstructed, the tangible magic of the ruins was overwhelmed by their nudity while the most remote sites, unvisited even by treasure hunters, faded back into the unknown.

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What then is this significance in ruins? If the sophistry be allowed, significance in ruins is because significance itself is ruined: the current scientific paradigm allows no ‘grand Perhaps’. Though ruins embody what modernity cannot, trying to articulate this without it decaying into cliché is no easy task. Ruins as objects of aesthetic contemplation – or at least the most spectacular ruins of Anatolia – fall to my mind, under the category of the sublime. I am thinking of the huge tumulus and snapped colossi of the cenotaph of insane Antiochus i on Mount Nemrut, of the acropolis of Pergamon in an over-vivid sunset, of Alinda, Labranda and Arykanda. The archaeologist Sir Charles Fellows, travelling through the mountainous scenery of Lycia in May 1838, thought it the most sublime and beautiful he had ever seen, ‘the very perfection of the world’s loveliness’ and Romantic artists were not slow to incorporate Anatolian ruins into their paintings. Perhaps with the notion of ‘sublime ruins’ we are at the limit of what we can discuss. Philosophers analysing the concept of the sublime have not been able even to agree on their definition, let alone its relationship to the anarchy of ruins. Yet contemplated in solitude, such ruins defy the aesthetic categories of scale, harmony, order and beauty on which sanity depends: little wonder then that the shattered regularity of Classical remains evokes in the informed mind a particularly refined pathos. Alas, this impression is not to be grasped amongst a crowd of visitors or when cars and buses are clattering along nearby, their exhaust fumes befouling the resin-scented air. Ruins are victims of both space and time: the setting chosen for founding a city that gave it a head start in making it imposing and beautiful rebounds on it in its ruination. If the remains of Cnidus are not the most

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spectacular in Anatolia, the setting – hardy headlands buffeted and gentle harbours caressed by the impossibly blue sea – compensates. However, it is primarily the sublime in its aspect of time – the indifference of eternity – that haunts ruins. Defensive walls provided no defence, the acropolis no gods and the necropolis no peace: there is hardly a city of ancient Anatolia that has not been humbled by earthquakes. At Arykanda, Sir Charles Fellows – sensitive to the march of time and humanity’s magical efforts to vanquish it – was trying to identify imposing Roman buildings and noted that one had a Christian cross carved into it. He commented: It may also be of interest to the moralist, probably describing the exultation of the Christians of the Byzantine age over vanquished pagans; how soon did the Christians disappear before the Moslems, and how has time robbed both of this now ruined and deserted district! 2 Whenever I think of Anatolia it is Termessos that looms brightest in my mind. As one drives higher and higher up the winding mountain road that promises Termessos above and beyond, one can almost pity Alexander the Great marching his army up to its walls and then retreating without attempting to take the city. I cannot begin to conceive of the sacrifice – lives maimed, worn out, shattered, lost – required to build so much that was so fine in so high and inhospitable a setting and then for the glorious Termessians to think nothing of regularly plundering the equally beautiful coastal cities. It is precisely the interplay between collapsed human endeavour and the silent certainties of space and time that is so powerful here: the fallen secular and sacred buildings, the outrage of sarcophagi with lids askew throughout the necropolis, the giddy severity of

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TEMPLE OF APOLLO SMINTHEUS

Sunlight on broken columns: the Temple of Apollo Smintheus (Apollo the Mouse God) in the Troad. The Iliad begins with the Achaean camp ravaged by disease: Agamemnon had captured the daughter of this temple and refused to release her. The association with mice suggests the disease was plague

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mountain setting continually engulfed by clouds. Ruins intrude into the uncanny. The god of Anatolian ruins is not in the details, these are ours: the clumsy beauty of a tomb at Isaura, the pilaster capitals of the Didymaion, the shadow studded entablature of a temple at Termessos. This god dwells in the jutting backbone of Hittite walls, in cliffs pocked with Lycian tombs, in the willed madness for the fabulous in the stadium, theatre and latrines of Ephesus. This god is the presence of absence.

SARDIS IN A STORM

Engraving of a scene by Clarkson Stanfield from 1836 of a storm over Sardis with the remains of the Temple of Artemis in the foreground. The scene, with its storm, lightning, mountain range, ruins, terrified horse and thrown rider, incorporates a host of concepts both romantic and sublime

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For maximum impact then, ruins must be visited alone. On more than one occasion I have upset my guide by vanishing – simply to be more than alone. I remember several years ago trying to photograph the Temple of Poseidon on Cape Sunion in Greece. This Doric temple was completed in 449 bc after the earlier temple had been destroyed by the invading Persians in revenge for the destruction of Sardis. The windblown, bleached white temple is spectacularly sited on a precipitous headland overlooking the bluest sea in the world. On that spring day the headland was aglow with flowers. But there was a problem: tourists. As one coach party left and I thought I would have the site to myself for photography, another arrived. It was getting frustrating. I had set up my camera on its tripod and would regularly vanish under the dark cloth to check that the picture I wanted to take was sound – apart from the upside down tourists I could see in the focusing screen. Under the dark cloth I eventually noted that their number was at last diminishing. Perhaps I could snatch a hurried shot in a gap of tourists before the next coach party arrived. Then I felt something like an electric shock, a dizzying wave of significance. I was so startled that I resurfaced from beneath the dark cloth to see what had happened and realised that all the

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ARYKANDA HEROON

A heroon (monumental shrine to a hero) at the Lycian city of Arykanda. Aloof in its rugged mountain setting, Arykanda is the most spectacularly sited of Lycian cities. Despite the uplifting austerity of its setting, its people were famed for their hedonism and were perennially in debt

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ISAURA TOMB

This tomb in the remote mountain city of Isaura reflects, in its rustic character, the isolation of the region from the main cultural influences of the times. Isaura was the capital of the warlike kingdom of Isauria, which was only partially subdued by the Romans

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TERMESSOS SARCOPHAGUS

One of hundreds of looted sarcophagi in the necropolis of Termessos. The people of the city were Pisidians and constantly raided the neighbouring and richer Lycian and Pamphylian cities to supplement their meagre foods

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visitors had left. When the moment of willed-for solitude arrived the site evoked in me, with an electric jolt, its ancient numinosity.

SUNION

A dramatic view of the Temple of Poseidon on Cape Sunion, Greece, by Hugh William Williams (1829). The Persians destroyed the original temple in 480 bc and it was rebuilt 30 years later in the same austere Doric style

Must we pass over in silence why the ancient Xanthians preferred rabble-rousing blood baths in their theatre to Sophocles and twice chose collective suicide over enslavement, or does each example enrich the dreadfulness (in every sense) of the other? Their references were to a Heroic Age immortalised by the Iliad, an age peopled by the most organic heroes of all time whose lives were destroyed by the most beautiful woman the world has ever known – none of whom existed. Before solitary Hector faced raging Achilles, Priam lamented to the implacable Achaean champion, while watching from the walls that protected his cowering army: How many valiant sons I late enjoy’d, Valiant in vain! by thy cursed arm destroy’d: Or, worse than slaughtered, sold in distant isles To shameful bondage, and unworthy toils.3 Yet among the sorry fragments of ancient remains the sublime can fall away and our appreciation be refined as we become vulnerable to the tolerable; a ringing mobile phone no longer infuriates. In Turkey the ancient peoples still speak to us through their cultures, both those that seem distant and those that seem close: the naive charm of a Neo-Hittite relief of a mother suckling her child at the summer palace of Karatepe, a realistic Roman portrait bust, or a 2,000-year-old wooden comb in a glass case in a museum. Vast effects achieved by simple means. At Ephesus, on Curetes Street, the great column-fringed marble avenue dissecting the once mighty city, there is a subtle, wonderful rebellion against uniformity: the torus

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TERMESSOS TEMPLE BLOCK

Intricate relief work from an earthquake-shattered block of the Temple of Zeus Solymeus at Termessos. The temple is now an expanse of ornate rubble. The city, in its high, wild and inhospitable setting, successfully resisted even the attentions of Alexander the Great

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Facing page

AION

Aion, the personification of Eternity, in despairing pose. This is from the monument of C. Julius Zoilos at Aphrodisias and is displayed in the Aphrodisias Museum. Zoilos was a slave freed by Augustus who became rich and contributed to the beautification of the city

moulding of a single column base is carved with an elaborate yet inconspicuous decorative band – a stonemason’s claim to immortality. We, like the ancients, are reciprocally embedded in the world of our making. But will archaeologists of the future bother to excavate our ruins – skyscrapers and all?

KARATEPE SUCKLING SCENE

A relief on an orthostat of a mother suckling her child at the Neo-Hittite palace of Karatepe (about 700 bc), displaying both Phoenician and Aramaean influences. The fortress served as the summer residence of King Azatiwatas Endnotes 1. Newton, 1865 2. Fellows, 1852 3. The Iliad, Book xxii (trans. Alexander Pope)

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TWO A BRIEF HISTORY OF ANCIENT TURKEY

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t is not possible in the space available to discuss in detail the complexities of ancient Anatolia from prehistory to the fall of the (Western) Roman Empire. Instead, we will consider the major themes of kingdom, culture and conquest central to the remains illustrated herein.

PREHISTORY Our story begins in the Old Stone Age or Palaeolithic Period. This stretched from approximately 2,500,000 years ago to 10,000 bc and the most famous artefact to survive is the ubiquitous hand axe that first appeared about 700,000 bp (Before Present). Anatolia is very rich in caves, and investigations to date suggest a relatively high human population in the Old Stone Age. The outstanding discoveries have been at Öküzini cave and Karain cave near Antalya. At Karain cave there

is a cultural layer over ten metres in depth. Remains go back some 160,000 years and include Neanderthal and Homo sapiens teeth and bone fragments and artefacts, as well as vast amounts of burned and unburned animal bone. Indeed, the significance of this complex of caves and chambers as a key to the Palaeolithic Period in Asia Minor is reflected in the fact that it is to be proposed as a World Heritage Site by the Turkish Government. The transition from the Old Stone Age to the Middle and New Stone Ages across Europe and the Near East was neither uniform nor clear-cut. The domestication of wild animals and discovery of agriculture with associated settled communities and, thereafter, pottery – characteristics of the New Stone Age – are generally thought to have begun in the more temperate and well-watered region of the Near East termed the Fertile Crescent: the arc from the Persian Gulf north-east along the floodplains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to the

IVRIZ RELIEF

This Neo-Hittite relief at the spring at Ivriz (south-central Anatolia) is over four metres in height. On it, King Warpalawas of Tyana pays homage to Tarhundas, god of plenty. Dated to circa 720 bc, the scene is captioned in the Luwian hieroglyphic script; the name Ivriz is probably also Luwian

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MOTHER GODDESS

For some, this ‘Mother Goddess’ figurine from Çatalhöyük is a bridge from the remote past to the cult of Magna Mater or Great Mother of the Phrygians and on to Cybele of the Roman Empire. The figurine’s head and the head of the leopard on her left-hand side are reconstructions. The haunting figurine is 20 centimetres in height and takes pride of place in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara

Levantine coast and south-west to the northern reaches of the Nile floodplain. In recent years the significance of Anatolia at the dawn of civilisation has been radically revised. Göbekli Tepe in south-east Turkey is a conspicuous mound on a ridge in the foothills of the Taurus Mountains. Excavations at the site have uncovered a remarkable structure that was neither fortified nor accompanied by domestic dwellings: a pair of central pillars surrounded by a circular courtyard made from huge pilasters joined by monumental masonry. Carvings of wild animals, such as snakes, wild boars, foxes and lions, decorate the central pillars. The grandeur of what was surely a religious site became all the more astounding when archaeologists dated the material: the earliest building was older than 9000 bc and later building phases were dated to around 8000 bc. The significance of the ‘temple’ is that its builders were not settled. Their food, both plant and animal, was wild: they were hunter-gatherers. In other words, the standard model of development – settled communities producing ever more specialised rooms/buildings for a variety of evolving purposes – is refuted at Göbekli Tepe where a monumental religious structure appeared long before the domestication of wild foods and of settlements. The significance of Göbekli Tepe is yet to be fully understood, and excavations by Turkish and German archaeologists are ongoing. Indeed, although Anatolia was easily accessible to the Fertile Crescent via the Cilician coastal plane, as recently as the 1950s it was thought to have played no great part in the so-called New Stone Age (or Neolithic) Revolution due to the severity of its winters. (Note that the modern climate of Asia Minor consisting of short, hot summers and long,

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cold winters appears more extreme and less moist than in the past.) In 1958, James Mellaart and colleagues visited the now world-famous mound of Çatalhöyük, which they had noted but not visited some years before. (There are in fact two mounds; the East Mound and the smaller, later West Mound.) They immediately realised its potential: the East Mound had Neolithic pottery throughout, suggesting an intact prehistoric site of outstanding significance. Mellaart was to begin excavations in 1961. Before this, he had been excavating a site in south-western Anatolia called Hacılar whose oldest level has been dated to about 8000 bc. The location has since gained notoriety because of the steady supply of purported artefacts which have been shown via modern, sophisticated dating techniques to be fakes. Ongoing excavations at Çatalhöyük and work elsewhere have refined its significance. The site is not early in the Neolithic sequence, nor is it even particularly large; however, it is a treasure-trove of information both on early urban settlement and on cultural remains. Anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and schematic figurines are abundantly attested from Çatalhöyük. Indeed, the single most famous artefact from the site now occupies pride of place in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara. This is the 20 centimetre-high terracotta statuette termed the Mother Goddess that was recovered from a grain bin. The statuette is dated to about 5750 bc. Seated and flanked by two leopards – perhaps giving birth – the female figure with exaggerated belly and hips is stylistically connected to similar Neolithic figurines from around the Mediterranean. Such figurines have been widely interpreted as representing a prehistoric omnipresent Mother Goddess and associated matriarchy, although more recently both contentions have been

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challenged by archaeologists. Nevertheless, this particular figure from Çatalhöyük connects intriguingly to considerably later depictions of Cybele, the ancient Mother Goddess of Anatolia. Certain rooms at Çatalhöyük were decorated with cattle symbolism: seats and benches extruded cattle horns and plaster bucrania (bull heads) placed in prominent positions. The impracticality of such structures implies ritual practice. These themes suggest that the female figurines of Çatalhöyük are part of a complex web of symbolism that is not exclusively reducible to the cult of a Mother Goddess. Nevertheless, the prominence of Cybele in subsequent Anatolian religion can hardly be exaggerated. It has recently been argued that the curious excrescences on the chest of surviving Roman statues of Artemis of Ephesus represent the testes of sacrificed bulls. Perhaps the association with fertility and bulls suggested at Çatalhöyük is connected via an unbroken sequence with such very much later female figures.

The above dash through Anatolia’s most ancient prehistory brings us to the beginning of our subject matter: the cultures originating in the Bronze Age. During the Chalcolithic Period, bronze artefacts ‘unwittingly’ appeared. Impurities of mainly arsenic or tin in the range of 5–15 per cent in the smelted copper ores produced bronzes, but not bronzes whose improved hardness was appreciated by the smelter over copper. Around 3000 bc, bronze artefacts whose function reflected the greater hardness of the material over copper (such as weapons and tools) made their first appearance in Anatolia; thereafter, both tin-copper bronzes and arsenic-copper bronzes are attested. While ores containing arsenic and copper are generally more common than tin-copper ores, the toxicity of the former must have been calamitous for the smelters who inhaled the arsenic fumes. Indeed, the Greek god Hephaestus – the blacksmith who, according to Homer, fashioned Achilles’ shield – was lame, presumably as a result of low-level arsenic poisoning.

The people of Çatalhöyük used obsidian (black volcanic glass) derived from two local volcanoes for their stone tools and traded obsidian with communities further afield.

At the end of the fourth millennium bc the first writing systems were being developed in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and the cultures of those regions saw a rapid and spectacular efflorescence thereafter. The invention of the potter’s wheel was another landmark. Writing systems provided the advantage of being able accurately to record trading activities, which must have been a significant factor in the cultural development of these peoples. Anatolia, previously at the forefront of humanity’s progress, now became something of a backwater. Its own autochthonous hieroglyphic script, Luwian, was not to appear for another thousand years.

In the sixth millennium bc in Anatolia, copper artefacts began to appear at prehistoric sites such as the West Mound of Çatalhöyük. Archaeologists name the age of copper metallurgy in the Near East the Chalcolithic; culturally, the period was a continuation of the Neolithic. Metallurgy stimulated the development of trade networks. There was cultural variation in Anatolia throughout this period and evidence of external influences, for example, from the Aegean islands infiltrating the north-west. In a Late Chalcolithic layer at the site of Beycesultan in western Anatolia, a cache of metal objects in a pot included a silver ring – the earliest known use of this metal.

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During the Early Bronze Age (circa 3000–2200 bc) different regions of Anatolia had distinctive cultures and many settlements were fortified. Metallurgical skills

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TYCHE

This frieze from the theatre of Perge in Pamphylia (and now in Antalya Museum) shows the seated Greek goddess Tyche holding a cornucopia (symbol of plenty) in her left hand and a cult image of Artemis of Perge in her right. An altar burns beside her as bulls are presented for sacrifice

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ARTEMIS EPHESIA

A Roman copy, in marble, of the archaic and presumably colossal wooden statue of Artemis Ephesia (Greek: Kybele) that was housed in the great temple at Ephesus. This statue, found with two others in the city’s prytaneum (a public hall for visitors) is 174 centimetres in height and now in the Ephesus Museum. Modern scholarship suggests that the bulges on the chest represent the testes of sacrificed bulls

advanced and copper, bronze, electrum, gold, silver and iron were worked, suggesting specialists and social stratification. A particular form of building first appeared, termed a megaron – a long, rectangular house divided into several rooms along its length with a central hearth and entrance invariably placed in one of the shorter sides. The basic form of this building was to have a long history in both Anatolia and Greece. In the latter, with the introduction of a pillared porch, it became the precursor of the temple in antis.

HATTI It is tempting, as one gazes across the vast, barren expanses of inland Anatolia, to wonder how such an unforgiving landscape could have been so productive for early human civilisation. In fact, these expanses were once deeply forested regions (a source of seemingly limitless timber) rich in game animals. Extensive vegetation limited erosion and raised the ground water, which increased the fertility of the soil. It is millennia of human overuse that have turned so much into steppe. More important still were the metal-rich ores of the northern mountains. During the second half of the third millennium bc, Anatolia was returning to the forefront of cultural advance in terms of metallurgy, sculpture and architecture. Termed the Early Bronze Age, the two outstanding cultures of this period in Anatolia were the Hattian principalities in its centre and Troy to the west. Indeed, the earliest attested name for Anatolia is the Land of Hatti, which was the name given in Mesopotamian sources in the second half of the third millennium bc, and this persisted for some 1,500 years, being attested in 630 bc in the Assyrian Annals (royal inscriptions idealising the exploits of the king).

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The Hattians had their own language and were possibly indigenous to Anatolia. Their culture flourished from the middle of the third into the early second millennium bc. Subsequently, an Indo-European people who called themselves Nesians overthrew the Hattian principalities and adopted much of their culture. Scholars named these invaders Hittites because they originally presumed that they had evolved from the Hattians. Indeed, the ancient name of the later Hittite capital Hattuşaş (modern Boğazköy) shows that it was sited on and named after a Hattian settlement. Though the Hittites were linguistically and ethnically distinct from the Hattians, the Hittite pantheon incorporated Hattian gods and Hittite religious ceremonies even included recitations in the earlier, unconnected language. Thus, invaluably, the later Hittites give us clues about the language of a distinct, proto-historical people. Evocatively, the names of later Hittite kings, such as Tudhaliya, derive from the Hattian names of Anatolian mountains. The ancient site of Alacahöyük (45 kilometres south of Čorum) has yielded, from its Hattian cemetery, 13 royal tombs with spectacular examples of metalwork which represent the finest assemblage of Early Bronze Age burial goods from the Mediterranean region. The finds eclipse even Schliemann’s treasures from Troy. The artefacts are dated to late in the third millennium bc and are now housed in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara. Bronze statuettes of bulls and stags (thought to represent deities) have been recovered from the Alacahöyük graves; these were presumably attached to wooden poles, perhaps as sacred standards. Intriguingly, a stylistically similar and contemporary bull statuette was recovered from the burial of a nomadic chieftain at the Maikop mound in the North Caucasus of Russia, suggesting a connection with the Hattian people. Perhaps

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Facing page

CEREMONIAL MACE

A ceremonial mace from the Bronze Age burials at Alacahöyük. The number, variety and quality of burial items recovered from the site are unique and eclipse even the contemporary, though more famous, finds at Troy. The mace is now housed in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara

the outstanding example recovered from Alacahöyük is the bronze statuette of a stag decorated with silver inlay. As well as zoomorphic ceremonial standards, the Alacahöyük graves yielded bronze standards of more abstract designs symbolising the sun and heavens. These items, bedecked with rattles, were probably shaken for magical effect during ceremonies. Elegant ‘beak-spouted’ pottery vessels – a characteristic Hattian pottery style – were also recovered. Other treasures include silver figurines, gold ornaments (buckles, dress and hair ornaments, bracelets, pins, necklaces, diadems, bowls and jugs) all outstandingly worked, as well as weapons (in the tombs of males) inlaid with or partly made of gold.

TROY

STAG EMBLEM

A bronze statuette of a stag decorated with silver inlay from the royal burials at Alacahöyük, now in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara. Originally mounted on a ceremonial standard, the figure is 52.5 centimetres in height and dated to the late third millennium bc. It is thought to represent a male deity

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The archaeological evidence suggests that in western Anatolia, significant settlement remains start in about 3000 bc: much later than elsewhere: The other great Anatolian culture of the Early Bronze Age (circa 3000–2200 bc) was centred on Troy, near modern Čanakkale. Troy’s earliest level (termed Troy i and dated from 2920–2350 bc) was fortified, and megaron buildings of the Aegean type were discovered there. Early Bronze Age Troy ii dates from 2600 bc–2350 bc and hence it is roughly contemporary with the treasures of Alacahöyük discussed above. Heinrich Schliemann (1822–90), the discoverer of Troy, was part genius (a master of numerous languages and possessor of a formidable memory) and part rogue: he had made a fortune as a ruthless businessman and that ruthlessness, indeed frequent dishonesty, continued in his archaeological dealings. He thought nothing, for example,

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of cheating colleagues or the Ottoman government out of valuable finds. Indeed, even his claim that his fascination for Troy went back to childhood was probably a romantic invention. From a modest background, Schliemann was a fanatically driven autodidact battling against stuffy academics; desperate for fame and scholarly approval, he became the first celebrity archaeologist. For some, Schliemann is above and beyond criticism: the founder of prehistoric archaeology in the Mediterranean (he also excavated in Greece at Tiryns and Mycenae). For others he was a scoundrel. A French aristocrat, the Compte de Gobineau, visited Hisarlık (the site of Troy) with the Emperor of Brazil in 1876 and instantly judged Schliemann to be a charlatan, liar and imbecile. When the Emperor ordered de Gobineau to cease arguing with Schliemann he responded by agreeing so wholeheartedly with everything Schliemann said – no matter how ridiculous – that the Emperor frequently dissolved in hysterics. Suspicion has been brought to bear on just how much of Schliemann’s success was really based on luck. There were persistent rumours from contemporary archaeologists that Schliemann planted finds or assembled disparate artefacts to make his discoveries more spectacular and therefore newsworthy. Suspiciously, he tended to make his greatest discoveries a few days before digging stopped, raising the question of whether he knew in advance what was about to be discovered. As an excavator, Schliemann has received merciless criticism. The first trench he dug at Troy – a crude, broad canyon dissecting the ancient mound – obliterated all as it plunged to the base of the mud brick mound. Yet this trench was dug when Schliemann was an archaeological novice and when archaeological excavation was in its infancy. And, unlike contemporary archaeologists for

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whom archaeology was little more than glorified digging to recover buried valuables, Schliemann – however naively he correlated his finds with the Homeric poems – was searching for an answer to one obsessively intriguing question: was the mound of Hisarlık the site of ancient Troy? Nor was Schliemann (who started work in 1870) the first modern explorer to suspect that the mound of Hisarlık hid the secrets of the Trojan capital. In the early 1820s, the Scot Charles Maclaren had already suspected the same and Schliemann was continuing the work of the Englishman Frank Calvert who, in 1863 and 1865, did preliminary work there. A modern visitor to Troy cannot fail to see why an untrained Schliemann, intoxicated with the Iliad and desperate for fame and scholarly recognition, impetuously identified the remains he uncovered in his huge trench above the deepest level (termed Troy i) with the city of Homer’s immortal poem. Named Troy ii, the remains revealed palatial buildings of the megaron type within a fortified citadel of mud brick walls surmounting stone foundations. A great paved ramp led up to the south-west gate. For Schliemann, there were no doubts: this was the Scaean Gate of the Iliad: Here, therefore, by the side of the double gate, upon Ilium’s Great Tower, at the edge of the very abrupt western declivity of the Pergamus, sat Priam, the seven elders of the city, and Helen…1 It was a short distance away from this ramp on, or around 31 May 1873, that Schliemann found – or claimed to find – what he named Priam’s Treasure. In his account in Troy and its Remains, Schliemann writes that early in the morning he was working in the trench that led along the wall attached to the Scaean Gate. A ‘copper article’,

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which subsequently turned out to be a shield, caught his attention and he thought he saw the glint of gold behind it. To protect the discovery from his workmen he ordered them to take an early breakfast. Then, using a knife and with great risk to himself lest the overhead wall collapse, he hurriedly dug out find after find and handed them to his wife Sophia who, hiding them in her shawl, smuggled them into their hut. (In fact, it has been shown that Sophia was not at Troy at this time: Schliemann presumably wrote her into the story.) The items recovered included a copper shield, a copper cauldron, a copper plate and silver vase, gold cups and bottles, an electrum cup, 13 copper lances and six large knife blades of pure silver, 14 copper battle-axes and seven copper daggers. The objects were grouped together in a ‘rectangular mass’ and Schliemann also found what he took to be the remains of a key. He concluded that the treasure was hurriedly packed into a wooden chest by a member of Priam’s family who failed to escape the conflagration as Troy was sacked. But there was more: once inside the hut an examination of the largest silver vase revealed that it was packed with jewellery: two splendid gold diadems; a fillet, and four beautiful gold ear-rings of most exquisite workmanship: upon these lay 56 gold ear-rings of exceedingly curious form and 8,750 small gold rings, perforated prisms and dice, gold buttons, and similar jewels, which obviously belonged to other ornaments; then followed six gold bracelets, and on the top of all the two small gold goblets…2 The Ottoman authorities were sufficiently suspicious of Schliemann’s integrity to have assigned an official to keep an eagle-eye on the excavations. It appears that this official, Effendi Amin, noted the uncharacteristic lay-off

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of the workers and demanded to see what Schliemann had taken into his hut. Having been unceremoniously rebuffed he set off for the town of Čanakkale, presumably to fetch reinforcements. Schliemann in spectacular contravention of the firman (contract) he had signed with the Ottoman authorities – which entitled him to half of any treasure he found but did not allow him to export anything – used this opportunity to smuggle the entire treasure out of Turkey to Greece. With the treasure gone, the unfortunate Effendi Amin was imprisoned. The Priam Treasure was subsequently ‘donated’ by Schliemann (in lieu of sundry honours) to the people of Germany and thereafter housed in Berlin’s Ethnographic Museum. In the Second World War, with the fall of Berlin, the Russians appropriated the treasure and it is now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow – and is the subject of an ongoing diplomatic storm about who owns it. A few pieces of stolen treasure from a lesser hoard were reclaimed by the Ottoman authorities when they were tipped off that the wife of one of Schliemann’s workmen had appeared bedecked in spectacular jewellery. These, along with pieces that Schliemann later handed over so that he could continue excavating Troy, are now on display in the İstanbul Archaeological Museum. However divided archaeologists are on the integrity of Priam’s Treasure, they are united in one fact: the treasure, genuine or composite, did not belong to the Homeric king of Troy. Schliemann had dug far too deep: Troy ii, with its impressive walls and ramp, its citadel and evidence of destruction by several conflagrations, was far too early. In fact, Troy ii has been dated to 2550–2250 bc: the level is roughly contemporary with the treasures from Alacahöyük already discussed. Modern scholarship dates the drama of the Iliad to over 1,000 years later than Troy ii: in fact, to the grandly fortified Late Bronze Age

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THE GREAT RAMP AT TROY

The ramp that led up to the south-west gate of Troy ii. Schliemann’s romantic imagination peopled the scene with the heroes of the Iliad. Late in his career and in the face of overwhelming archaeological evidence, he admitted that these remains considerably predate the setting of the Iliad

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city that was destroyed in a conflagration around 1180 bc and whose imposing remains are labelled Troy vi. This level was excavated by Schliemann with the help of the studious and methodical Wilhelm Dörpfeld, who brought discipline to the archaeological proceedings. When they discovered Mycenaean pottery therein Dörpfeld instantly realised its significance, while Schliemann long resisted.

TROJAN TREASURE

Although Schliemann smuggled the so-called ‘Treasure of Priam’ out of Turkey, a few pieces of Trojan treasure were appropriated by the Ottoman authorities, including these spectacular gold ear tassels which are now on display in the Archaeological Museum of İstanbul

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Troy’s strategic importance – crucial for its wealth – derived from the fact that prevailing currents flow and winds blow against ships trying to enter the Black Sea from the Aegean via the Dardanelles. Many must have sought shelter in Troy’s harbour – and been taxed for the privilege. Homer’s geographically convincing account suggests that he explored the landscape (circa 750 bc) for the story he placed some 450 years earlier in what is now termed the Late Bronze Age. If the story is rich in the trappings of Mycenaean culture, its violence and pillage might in fact echo the little-understood chaos that subsequently swept the lands bordering the eastern Mediterranean. Waves of migrating peoples from southeast Europe (referred to in the Egyptian records as the Sea Peoples) are thought to have been responsible for the disruption. Whoever they were, they appear to have destroyed the Mycenaean civilisation and Troy, were the cause of the depopulation of central Anatolia and moved remorselessly through the Levant – only to be halted at the gates of Egypt. It was not until the arrival of the Phrygians some 400 years later that a unified civilisation again reasserted itself within Anatolia. Homer lived before the dawn of Greek classical culture in what is termed the Archaic Age, a time when Greek colonies were appearing on the western coast of Anatolia. He was doubtless assimilating and refining oral poetry

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ILIAD WALL

If any remains at Troy correspond to the legendary events of the Iliad then the best candidates are the imposing Late Bronze Age fortifications of Troy vi such as these walls leading to the East Gate. A mud brick superstructure would have significantly raised the height of the walls

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that originated in this previous Dark Age whose heroic themes he or the oral bards projected into the more distant past, a past when Mycenaean culture was securely woven across mainland Greece. By the time Troy was occupied by Greek colonists (the level is termed Troy viii and roughly contemporary with Homer) the name of the settlement was Ilion. Scholars have long suspected that Ilion echoes the earlier Hittite name of Wilusa which identified a Middle to Late Bronze Age vassal state of the Hittite Empire – in other words that Wilusa and Ilium and thus Troy were one.

THE HITTITES At the start of the second millennium bc, Anatolia was a land in chaos. Destruction layers attest to devastating violence at numerous sites. Waves of Indo-Europeans entered Anatolia through the Caucasus Mountains in the north-east and through the Balkan Peninsula to the west. The Trojans, who were to found Troy vi, appeared from the west around this time. The Luwians entered Asia Minor and occupied the south-west. Entering Anatolia most probably from the north-east were the tribes who knew themselves as Nesians but who have (thanks to the conflation with Canaanite folk in the Bible by the same name) become known in modern times as the Hittites. The discovery that they spoke an Indo-European language was the key for translating their language: the Nesian verb for eat was ‘ezza’, which is remarkably close to the medieval German ‘ezzan’, while the Nesian noun for water was ‘watar’. The Hittites settled first in south-eastern Anatolia but gradually moved into and conquered the centre, overthrowing the civilisation of Hatti. As some of these invading rulers took

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native names it is not always clear where and when specific advances occurred. Nevertheless, by about 1600 bc the Hittite Old Kingdom was in place. Proto-history is replaced by history in the region because of the arrival of writing. Anatolia, while rich in timber, precious stones, copper, silver and gold, was comparatively poor in tin. However, it was a vital trading partner for the Assyrians in metal-poor Mesopotamia. Numerous Assyrian merchant colonies, known by the Assyrians as karum, were established and integrated into Anatolian urban centres such as Hattuşaş and Kanesh (modern Kültepe) to barter for such items (especially copper) in exchange for tin and cloth. Long caravans of donkeys threaded their way back and forth between Mesopotamia and Anatolia. Known to the Hittites as Nesa, Kanesh was very probably the original Hattian capital. The Assyrian merchants recorded their transactions in Akkadian cuneiform script – a Mesopotamian writing system originating with the Sumerians circa 3000 bc – on clay tablets which have survived in great numbers. Furthermore, the Assyrians held a considerable advantage in calculating both the purchase and resale value of traded items and therefore grew rich, thanks to the ability to write and thus record the minutiae of their business transactions. Kanesh and the subsequent capital of the Hittites, Hattuşaş, fell to the Hittite warriors around 1700 bc. This is recorded in the oldest historical text in the Hittite language known as the ‘Anitta Text’. This informs us that Pithana, king of Kussara (whose location is unknown), favoured by the Storm God, conquered Nesa in a night attack. After taking the city he did not harm its inhabitants. The text continues stating that his son Anitta won countless battles and, after its inhabitants

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had been weakened by famine, conquered Hattuşaş also by employing a night attack. He raised it to the ground (the text states, more poetically, that he sowed it with weeds) presumably because it was now the capital of the Hattians. Anitta’s use of horses, or rather horse-drawn chariots armed with warriors, was a devastating innovation on the battlefield. Subsequently, the horse was to facilitate contact across the Near East between previously isolated regions. The Anitta Text records two important themes: the (occasional) willingness of the invaders to assimilate rather than obliterate and the feudal tensions and instabilities of Anatolia at this time. Indeed, the Nesians – who referred to themselves as the people of Hatti – adopted much of the Hattian religion and culture. It was some 100 years later in about 1650 bc that the Hittite ruler Hattusili i transferred the capital from Kussara to the city that his ancestor Anitta had sown with weeds. Indeed, the name Hattusili means ‘of Hattuşaş’ and was probably adopted to make the Great King more attractive to the conquered Hattians. Hattusili i was the founder of what is now referred to as the Hittite Old Kingdom, which lasted some 200 years. While Hattusili i was to be recognised as the ‘Great King’, those regions that fell under Hittite dominion were expected to preserve their own customs and worship their traditional gods in their own language. With central Anatolia secure, the Hittite monarchs became ever more ambitious: raids into the Levant for plunder were transformed into invasions. Hattusili i’s grandson, Mursili i, conquered northern Syria and captured Aleppo, bringing it into the Hittite Empire before advancing south-east and destroying Babylon,

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thus ending the Hammurabi dynasty. He returned to Hattuşaş victorious, only to be murdered in a palace intrigue. The glorious dawn of the Hittite Old Kingdom did not continue. Endless court intrigues and yet more murders marred future successions, and by the middle of the second millennium bc the Hittites had little influence beyond central Anatolia. There were two regional superpowers at this time. In northern Mesopotamia was the empire of Mitanni whose people, the Hurrians, were most probably of IndoEuropean origin and perhaps from the Caucasus region (the Hurrian language is unrelated either to Semitic or Indo-European languages but may have affinities with Georgian). Their capital, Urkesh, was in north-eastern Syria and the mound is now called Tell Mozan. To the south was Egypt, flexing its expansionist muscles in the Levant after being unified by the monarchs of Thebes (modern Luxor) at the start of the New Kingdom (circa 1550 bc). Against this background of international power politics the Great Kingdom of the Hittites was rapidly emerging. Soon the Mitannian Empire would be gone and Egypt’s most grandiose ruler, Ramesses ii, would narrowly escape catastrophic defeat at the hands of the Hittites. Around the middle of the second millennium bc the Hittites were smelting iron. This metal, originally extracted from meteoric rocks, may have had religious significance for the Hittites long before they had developed the technology to produce iron artefacts that were superior to bronze ones. It is nevertheless tempting to suppose that Hittite forces, equipped with iron weapons, held a decisive advantage on the battlefield against foes wielding more fragile bronze arms. Yet within 300 years the Hittite Empire itself would be destroyed.

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The founder of the Hittite Empire was Tudhaliya ii. The ancient sources suggest that although he was of royal extraction (his mother, a princess, was named after a Hurrian moon goddess) he did not have a legitimate claim to the throne. (This was a time when Hattian influences in Hittite culture reappeared with increased fervour as if to reinforce Tudhaliya ii’s rule.) When Tudhaliya ii ascended the Hittite throne, the situation in northern Syria – the Hittites’ traditional vassal region – was dire. The Egyptians had extended their hegemony deep into Syro-Palestine, while Mitannian incursions had also eroded Hittite authority. Though the king of Aleppo originally sided with Tudhaliya ii, he later formed an alliance with the Mitannians. Amongst his conquests, Tudhaliya ii defeated the Mitannians and sacked Aleppo. Meanwhile, he reestablished Hittite dominion in south-west Anatolia. In northern Anatolia, invading tribes known as the Kaska had destabilised the Black Sea region, and their bold raids into Hittite regions were to become a longstanding problem. Growing Egyptian – Mitannian diplomacy – for example, marriages between the royal houses – may have been designed to present a combined front against the Hittite menace. In fact, the Mitannian Empire was caught between the ambitions of the Hittites and Assyria. Under the Great King Suppiluliuma i (1380–1345 bc) the Hittite Empire reached its peak. After original setbacks he finally defeated the Mitannians and sacked their capital Wassukkani; Tushratta, their king, was subsequently assassinated. Mitanni became a vassal state of the Hittite Empire and was renamed Hanigalbat. It subsequently fell to the Assyrians and was absorbed into their own empire.

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In the reign of Suppiluliuma i the Hittite Empire surpassed in extent the empires of Egypt and Assyria. It was stabilised by a system of vassal and buffer states ruled by Suppiluliuma’s sons or by puppet kings controlled by both military power and diplomatic skill. In eastern Anatolia the fall of Mitanni gave the Hittites unencumbered access to the region’s metals. Though documentary sources are lacking, in western Anatolia this corresponded to the period of Troy vi, suggesting that Troy was also a vassal state of what was now the most powerful empire in the ancient Near East. Suppiluliuma i and his first-born son, Arnuwanda ii, both died of the plague, which they caught from Palestinian prisoners that were brought to the Hittite capital. On ascending the throne Arnuwanda’s brother, the brilliant Mursili ii (1345–1315 bc), inherited the traditional challenges of keeping the empire secure – including the immediate rebellions by vassal states designed to test the mettle of the new monarch. On a personal level it appears that Mursili ii stuttered as a result of having been struck by lightening – construed as being a punishment by the gods for the crimes of his forbears – and that eventually he became dumb. Mursili ii’s successor and son, Muwatalli (1315–1282 bc), returned order to western Anatolia: a treaty with Prince Alaksandus of Wilusa was in all likelihood a treaty with the ruler of Troy. To the north, Muwatalli dispatched his brother Hattusili to confront the never-ending attacks of the Kaska tribes, and the brilliant Hattusili would eventually subdue them. Muwatalli briefly transferred the capital from Hattuşaş to Taruntasha to the south (perhaps near modern Adana) – including the transfer of the cult statues – in part so that he would be better positioned to combat Egyptian expansionism and

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KING’S GATE

The entrance gates at Hattuşaş were formed by megalithic blocks shaped into a paradolic arch. This, the King’s Gate, had the two-metre high figure of an axe-wielding god (the horned helmet is indicative of divine status) on the inside. (The original relief was removed to the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara, in 1907)

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YAZILIKAYA GODS

Two kilometres north-east of Hattuşaş was the sanctuary of the Hittite pantheon. Known today as Yazılıkaya, the open-air shrine consisted of an extensive series of rock-cut reliefs of gods, goddesses, kings and supernatural beings, many captioned with Luwian hieroglyphs. Pictured above are 12 marching gods of the underworld

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in part because of the never-ending assaults of the Kaska peoples that reached as far as Hattuşaş itself. Meanwhile, far to the south, when Ramesses ii (1279–1213 bc) ascended the throne of Egypt, his ambitious gaze had looked north to the Levant; he was duty-bound to at least match the brilliant military campaigns of his father Sety i. In the fourth year of his reign Ramesses ii succeeded in securing Syrian lands and even forced the nation of Amurru, previously a Hittite vassal state, under his yolk. Muwatalli vowed revenge, and a confrontation with the two superpowers was inevitable. This happened the following spring near the town of Qadesh which, located on the banks of the River Orontes, straddled vital trade routes and was itself a constant source of contention. Ramesses ii’s army was considerably smaller than that of Muwatalli; the latter had reinforcements from his allies including the king of Aleppo and, as testimony to his brother Hattusili’s success in northern Anatolia, Kaska soldiers. Worse still, the Egyptian forces as they advanced north towards Qadesh were divided and marched along different routes: the elite troops followed the coastal route while the main army, separated into its four divisions, marched north inland in straggling fashion. A pair of captured local tribesmen convinced the Egyptians that the Hittites were nowhere near, and so the leading Egyptian division, with the impetuous young king at its head, decided to set up camp to the west of Qadesh and await the arrival of the other troops. It was a trap: the Hittite forces were hidden to the east of the town and launched a massive chariot assault on the second division of the Egyptian army, which was making its way towards the camp. The division was smashed and its troops fled in panic for Ramesses’ camp. Although

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Egyptian sources claim that Ramesses ii saved the day almost single-handedly (and even boasted of a mighty victory over ‘the vile, fallen one of Hatti’), it was the serendipitous arrival of the Egyptian elite forces that stopped the camp being overrun. The fighting continued the next day but without clear outcome. Politically, however, the result was not in doubt: when the Egyptian forces withdrew from the region the Hittites moved into the vacuum and regained their former vassal lands. Although Ramesses ii refused to sign a treaty with Hatti when Muwatalli ruled, he did so some 15 years later when Muwatalli’s gifted brother and former commander of the army, Hattusili, took the throne (by deposing his nephew). Indeed, Hattusili iii was not above teasing Ramesses ii about the bombastic claims of victory at Qadesh with which the pharaoh smothered vast expanses of Egyptian temple walls. The Hittite version of the peace treaty (which was discovered at Boğazköy) is preserved in the İstanbul Archaeological Museum. The reason for the peace – which together with non-aggression clauses promised mutual support against the aggressions of another kingdom – is probably accounted for by the growing might of Assyria, whose armies had reached the banks of the Euphrates river and were now threatening the Hittite Empire. However politically and militarily gifted Hattusili iii and indeed his son Tudhaliya iv (1250–1220 bc) were, the task of holding the Hittite Empire together became ever more difficult. By usurping the throne, Hattusili iii had set a poor example to the minor kings of the federation: for them the emperor and his descendant had no clothes. Under Tudhaliya iv, western Anatolia twice revolted. Thereafter, the Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta i (1244–1208 bc) crossed the Euphrates and captured and deported 28,000 Hittite subjects.

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MAGICAL HITTITE STONE

This carefully shaped and polished nephrite (jade) stone of local origin was found in a storeroom of a temple at Hattuşaş. It probably had magical or religious significance: the Hittite texts mention sacred stones

Weakened from without and within, the Hittite Empire collapsed around 1190 bc (in the reign of Suppiluliuma ii) due to factors that are still the subject of scholarly debate. The collapse is a convenient – if somewhat arbitrary – marker for the end of the Anatolian Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age. Traditional explanations for the empire’s collapse centre on massive coordinated waves of migratory peoples moving into Asia Minor, perhaps from the Balkan Peninsula or from other regions of the eastern Mediterranean, who swept all before them and destroyed Troy before reaching and obliterating Hattuşaş. Indeed, the remorseless advance of these migrating or displaced peoples appears to have threatened Assyria to the east and was not halted to the south until 1176 bc when, according to the Egyptian records, they were soundly defeated both on sea and land by Ramesses iii when they tried to occupy Syria – an occupation that would have threatened Egypt itself. But by then the Hittite Empire was already no more. Inevitably, the archaeological evidence cannot fully support such clear-cut themes. There is indeed evidence of localised destruction at the once great city of Hattuşaş, and the royal palace, some walls and temples show signs of conflagration. But the city appears already to have been abandoned and its departing people left behind only what they could not or would not carry, such as immense storage jars and innumerable archival tablets. Nor is there evidence of the site being thereafter occupied by a sophisticated new people. Nearby settlements dated after the demise of Hattuşaş, for instance on the nearby rocky crest of Büyükkaya, have yielded evidence of technologically primitive people lacking both literacy and the potter’s wheel. They were probably peripheral

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Anatolians moving into an abandoned region. And, with advancing archaeological inroads into the so-called Anatolian Dark Age, cultural continuity from Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age – if on a less centralised and therefore less spectacular scale – is being discovered. Though the Hittite Empire was gone, the art forms that had centred on its palace culture did not vanish. Indeed, in northern Mesopotamia and in south-eastern Anatolia unmistakably Hittite styles interwoven with other influences – Aramaean, Assyrian and Phoenician – evolved in what are now termed Syro-Hittite states for another 500 years. (The Aramaeans were nomads from the east of the Euphrates who were a constant menace.) Sometimes termed Neo-Hittite, such states in Anatolia included Tabal and Karkamish (Carchemish). Straddling the trade routes, controlling ports, mountain passes and river crossings, the post-Hittite states were culturally and economically advanced and inevitably attracted attention from the ambitious Assyrians whose empire was to expand into what is now known as the Neo-Assyrian Empire (934–610 bc) which, at its height, controlled the Fertile Crescent and conquered Egypt as well. Compared to the grandiosity of the Egyptian rulers, who were living gods, and the brutality (both legal and military) of the Assyrians, the Hittites come down to us as a more humane people. The king was only deified in death, while in life he was answerable to a council of nobles in what has been seen as the first constitutional monarchy. Women were on virtually the same level as men and a slave could marry a free woman. In the early second millennium bc another important civilisation developed in eastern Anatolia contemporary with the early Syro-Hittite city states. The Urartian civilisation, centred on Lake Van in eastern Anatolia,

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was of Hurrian ancestry and an important force in the complex trade and power networks of the region. Well defended by its remote and fortified cities, Urartu resisted Assyrian aggression from the south. At one stage it controlled, with Syro-Hittite states, the Syrian ports responsible for trade with the Greeks and Etruscans and the oriental influences on archaic Greek art derived from this connection. Urartian metallurgy was outstandingly skilful as is shown, for example, by spectacular bronze cauldrons and candlesticks. Furthermore, the Urartians developed a sophisticated architecture.

CAULDRON

This bronze cauldron is half a metre in height and was found in the unplundered Great Tumulus of Gordion (720–700 bc). It is now in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara. The ‘bird-men’ who support the rings have been attributed, on stylistic grounds, to Urartian artists. So esteemed was Urartian metallurgy that it was traded through the Mediterranean and has been discovered in both Greek and Etruscan sites

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THE GREEKS OF THE ANATOLIAN COAST Until the end of the Bronze Age there were few Greeks living along the Anatolian coast, apart from in a few Mycenaean settlements. Anatolia’s proximity to Greece – facilitated for travel by the innumerable islands between the two – made contact easy and migratory waves of Greeks arrived from late in the second millennium bc. According to Greek mythology the major Greek tribes were descended from sons of the patriarch Hellen (hence Hellenes). The Ionian Greeks who arrived to occupy the region near modern Izmir traced their ancestry back to a mythical Ion, ruler of Athens, who was the grandson of Hellen. The more famous Ionian cities on the southwestern Anatolian coast were Ephesus, Priene and Miletus. Western philosophy began in Ionia with philosophers including Thales, Heraclitus, Pythagoras and Anaxagoras. Achaeus, the brother of the mythical Ion, provided the origin of Homer’s term Achaeans for the collective Greek forces in the Iliad. To Ionia’s north was Aeolis (or Aeolia)

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LION TOMB OF CNIDUS

Reconstruction of the Lion Tomb of Cnidus by Richard Pullan who discovered it in 1858 while working with the archaeologist Charles Newton at the site. The date of the monument is uncertain. The lion, carved from a single block of marble from Mount Pentelikon in Greece, is now in the British Museum (Newton, 1865)

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whose 12 cities were founded by Thessalian Greeks tracing their ancestry to Aeolus, another son of Hellen. The Aeolian cities, including originally Smyrna (modern Izmir), formed a league, although Smyrna was incorporated into the Ionian confederacy in 699 bc. The relatively small cities (or poleis) of Greece and the poleis of Anatolia were fortified centres of trade and agriculture controlling a specific territory. They were developing self-governing systems that were the seeds for future democracy. Indeed, the word political means ‘of the polis’. For the Anatolians, the relative security, wealth and stability of the Greek city states along the coast must have been a source of envy. While the Greek coastal cities of Anatolia mostly kept themselves aloof from the indigenous peoples at this early stage, to the south of Ionia the Dorian Greeks (who claimed descent from Dorus, another son of Hellen) initiated a pattern that was to spread across Anatolia. They had occupied, via the islands of Cos and Rhodes, the Carian peninsulas and founded the cities of Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum to the south of Ionia) and Cnidus. They intermingled and married the native Carians, and Greek culture permeated inland in this region as early as the fifth century bc. Indeed, in advance of what was to happen throughout Anatolia, the Carians – keen to embrace Greek culture – adopted the Greek language in their cities as early as the fourth century bc. The great peninsula on which Troy was located (the Troad) was occupied early in the eighth century bc by Greeks from Mytilene (Lesbos). Contemporary with this, other Greek settlements were being founded along both the north and south coasts of Anatolia with merchants trading far beyond. It has been estimated that Miletus,

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the largest Ionian city, had a population of 64,000 in 494 bc. Barely able to feed itself, it established its own satellite colonies along the coast. As mentioned above, Greek trade led to contact in the east with the Urartian and Syro-Hittite controllers of northern Syrian ports, which explains the influence of such exotic styles on both archaic Greek and Etruscan art.

THE PHRYGIANS The Phrygian Empire now appeared in west-central Anatolia and at its height occupied much of the land previously under Hittite suzerainty. A migrating people, the Phrygians probably came from Thrace. Their tendency to bury their elite in grand and sometimes gigantic tumuli suggests an origin from the Danube region or southern Russia. Centred on Gordion (south-west of Ankara) where there are nearly 100 such tumuli (mostly unexcavated), the kingdom was at its height from the middle of the eighth until early in the seventh century bc. The greatest of the Phrygian tumuli is the so-called Great Tumulus with a diameter of 300 metres and a height of 50 metres. Dated to the late eighth century bc, the tumulus has been attributed to King Midas. The Phrygian Empire was defeated by the Cimmerians, a displaced people probably originating north of the Black Sea. Thereafter the Lydian Empire, founded by indigenes and centred on Sardis, filled the Anatolian power vacuum. Nevertheless, Phrygian culture persisted for several centuries. Phrygians were subsequently valued as slaves by the Greeks, and the Phrygian cap, worn by freed slaves in Roman times, was adopted as recently as the French Revolution as a symbol of liberty.

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GREAT TUMULUS GORDION

The Great Tumulus at Gordion has been attributed to King Midas. It is by far the largest of the Phrygian tumuli. Excavated in 1957, the intact burial chamber yielded superb bronze items – bowls, jugs, brooches – but lacked artefacts made of precious materials

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Legendary accounts of a Phrygian King Midas are centred on the region of the Lydian capital of Sardis. In one, King Midas was the offspring of King Gordius and the mother goddess Cybele. Some villagers had come across the sleeping drunkard Silenus – a follower of Dionysus – and had tied him up. Midas discovered this and rescued him and Dionysus, in gratitude, offered to fulfil any wish that Midas requested. The latter asked that everything he touched be turned to gold. He had not considered that this would include his food. In pity, Dionysus eventually sent a hungry Midas to cleanse himself in the Pactolus river (which flows through Sardis). This, supposedly, explains the occurrence of gold (now long gone) in the river and connects with the immense wealth of subsequent Lydian kings such as Croesus. Herodotus informs us that a King Midas sent a throne to the Greek sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi as a dedication; in other words, there were cultural connections beyond merely traded goods. Furthermore, the Assyrian records identified the Phrygians as the Mushki (named after the most easterly tribes with which they had originally had contact) and, hence, Assyrian accounts of King Mita of the Mushki presumably refer to the Midas of Greek history. The nomadic Cimmerians attacked Phrygia in the reign of a King Midas and defeated him in battle, after which he committed suicide, and in 696 or 695 bc they may have sacked the capital of Gordion. Like Midas, the dynastic Phrygian kings’ name Gordius also still resonates. In 333 bc, Alexander the Great on his conquest of Anatolia arrived at Gordion then under Persian rule. Here, supposedly, in a temple was the antique chariot of a King Gordius. The yolk was bound to the pole by a knot that could only be untied by the

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future ruler of Asia. Alexander sliced through the knot with his sword. At the centre of the Phrygians’ religious pantheon was their savage mother goddess known as ‘Matar’ or Mother. One of her epithets was ‘kubileya’ or ‘of the mountain’ and it is from this word that her classical name Kybele (in Greek) and Cybele (in Latin) derives. (The Phrygian cult originates with the Neo-Hittite goddess Kubaba of the early first millennium bc.) The cult in its Phrygian form was overseen by eunuch priests called the Gallai and included frenzied, drunken self-mutilation (including castration) during nocturnal festivals in the mountains by young men who chanted to the rhythmic clash of percussion instruments. Cybele, feared yet respected, was to haunt the religious and physical landscapes not only of ancient Anatolia but – spread via Greece and Rome – the entire Mediterranean world. Indeed, like her considerably more benign Egyptian counterpart, Isis, she was not vanquished until the ascendancy of the Virgin Mary of Christianity. In Hellenistic times, the Anatolian goddess Artemis was associated – and sometimes conflated – with Cybele as the two represented complimentary aspects of the feminine (the relationship between the Artemis of Greece and the Artemis of Anatolia is far from clear). Anatolian temples descended from Cybele-based cults invariably face west, and the Temple of Artemis at Sardis is an obvious example. At Aizanoi the archaeological evidence demonstrates that, although Zeus was the primary god of the temple, the west-facing front and subterranean shrine were adapted for the worship of Cybele (or her Greek mother goddess equivalent, Rhea, who inherited the cult). There is an ancient cult centre to Cybele in a cave some three kilometres from the temple.

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GORDION SITULA

A magnificent situla (bronze bucket) in the form of a lion’s head from the Great Tumulus at Gordion. The eyes were probably once inlaid with precious stones. The situla is 22.3 centimetres in length and is now in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara. The tumulus also yielded several pieces of elaborately worked and inlaid wooden furniture

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The themes above – mythical, religious and architectural – demonstrate how subsequent peoples syncretised aspects of the more ancient Phrygian culture with their own. A journey to the sacred acropolis of the Phrygians, known today as Midas City or Yazılıkaya (the ancient name is unknown), which is located 90 kilometres south-east of the modern town of Eskişehir, provides further evocative glimpses of those religious beliefs. This imposing site – a steep-sided plateau set in a dramatic landscape of boulder-crowned, scarp-edged hills – predates the Phrygians as sacred. As the sun drifts across the heavens, heavily worn and barely discernible Hittite reliefs of figures form and fade on the rock surfaces.

FORTUNA

A second-century ad Roman statue of Fortuna (Greek: Tyche) from Prusias on the Hypium and now in the İstanbul Archaeological Museum. By Roman times, in urban settings the Anatolian Mother Goddess had become associated with the classical bearer of good fortune and protectress of cities. The statue is 265 centimetres in height

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The visitor arriving at the base of the eastern end of the plateau in the morning is immediately confronted with a spectacular façade carved in the cliff face. This is the so-called Midas Monument and, like the other surviving Phrygian remains at this site, has been dated to the seventh or sixth century bc. The monument is some 16 metres in height and while its debt to an archaic Greek temple façade is apparent, so too are its stylistic departures. The curled form of the acroterion and the geometric patterns covering the surface of the monument are both uniquely Phrygian. The decoration is perhaps a projection of the geometric patterns typical of Phrygian pottery onto a larger canvas. Two lines of Phrygian inscriptions – one running above the left-hand side of the gable and the other inscribed vertically on the right-hand pilaster – are, frustratingly, untranslated. The script has many affinities with the archaic Greek script and while the language was Indo-European and the letters can be pronounced, there is no known parallel text (as is the case with Egypt’s famous Rosetta Stone) whereby the meaning of the words can be deciphered. Nevertheless, the name of the site – Midas City – derives

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EGG-AND-DART MOULDING

The upper and lower decorative patterns on this block are traditionally referred to as egg-and-dart moulding. This was a standard feature of the Ionic order. More recent scholarship suggests the ‘eggs’ in fact represent bull testicles and perhaps derive from the ancient cult of Cybele. The fragment is from the Temple of Leto at Letoön

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MIDAS MONUMENT

The Midas Monument is the most impressive of the rock-cut monuments surviving from the ancient citadel of the Phrygian cult centre nowadays known as Midas City. A statue was probably placed in the niche during ceremonies: some Phrygian façade monuments have the relief of a figure carved in the niche

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MIDAS DOUBLE THRONE

Stepped altars were common monuments of Phrygian cult practice. The one on the high plateau of Midas City has been interpreted as a double throne whereon statuettes of the Mother Goddess and her consort were placed. Its form seems to imitate the silhouette of the hills to the north-east

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from the early nineteenth century when Captain Leake, the site’s modern discoverer, discerned the word midai in the higher inscription. He therefore erroneously presumed and publicly announced that he had discovered the tomb of King Midas, and the misidentification has persisted. While the site does have rock-cut tombs along its edge, the Midas Monument was never one of them. It is by far the most imposing rock-cut artefact at Midas City, but it is not the only grand temple-like façade there. It is orientated to catch the morning sun; however, on the other side of the acropolis on the cliff edge facing west is a similar but unfinished façade known as Küçük Yazılıkaya. The Turkish name – which translates as ‘Small Inscribed Rock’ – is something of a misnomer as this façade is an impressive ten metres in diameter. The name distinguishes it from the Midas Monument which is considerably larger (its diameter approaches 20 metres). The Midas Monument is called Yazılıkaya, which means ‘Inscribed Rock’ in Turkish. If these temple façade monuments are conceptually connected then the connection is presumably the sun’s journey, which lights their faces in the morning and afternoon and so, symbolically, unifies the whole site. Numerous small offering niches are to be found hewn from the living cliffs of Midas City and the large boxshaped recess in the Midas Monument was probably a niche for offerings or for the placement of a cult image. The name Cybele has been deciphered in one of the inscriptions, and she is therefore presumed to have been the goddess of the site. The acropolis of Midas City includes on its vertical sides modest, usually crudely carved niches in what are often out of the way places. A small, badly carved recess

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in a hidden rock might be topped with a grandiose acroterion, while nearby the parallel troughs gouged by innumerable wheels on an ancient stone road lead publicly and inexorably towards the splendid façade of Küçük Yazılıkaya. Perhaps these dichotomies of scale reflect a demarcation between private and public worship. Stranger still are the heavily eroded miniature carved altars with miniature steps that are better suited in scale to mice than to humans! Even the imposing Küçük Yazılıkaya has a diminutive version of itself carved next to it. On the windswept plateau of Midas City, one is immediately struck by the panoramic grandeur of the setting: the rushing sense of space as clouds scud overhead, the jagged silhouette of the scarp-studded horizon. It is easy to see why this plateau was deemed sacred. To the north-east, the horizon is ragged with rocky hills fixed like petrified waves. These may provide part of the explanation for the strangest surviving monument of the plateau, the stepped altar with what appears to be a double seat or throne. Perhaps a cult object was placed here or perhaps a pair of objects, more specifically, statuettes of Cybele and her consort. By the fourth century bc the myth of Cybele included in its basic themes the tragic tale of her love for the young shepherd, Attis, who died by self-castration when their affair failed. For later authors such as Ovid this provided the precedent for the self-castration of the goddess’ priests. An interesting feature about this stepped structure is how, when viewed in the context of the hills to the north-east, its silhouette mirrors theirs. That they are to the north-east might connect with the rising of the sun on the summer solstice when it ascends at its most northerly point, though it does not

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rise directly behind any of them from the perspective of the altar. At its height, Phrygia was a formidable regional force which, when allied to Urartu to the east, was a threat to Assyrian interests. Indeed, the Assyrian ruler Sargon ii (721–705 bc) managed to conclude a peace treaty with a Phrygian king Midas. In writing to Ashu-sharru-usur, his Cilician governor, Sargon could boast by the pantheon of Assyrian gods that any Anatolian kings visiting the governor should polish his sandals with their beards.

LYDIA Between Ionia and Phrygia another great kingdom came to ascendancy in the first millennium bc before crumbling under the Persians. It was centred on the Hermus valley. According to Herodotus, a King Gyges founded Lydia’s Mermnad dynasty, initiating Lydia’s rise to greatness (which coincided with the demise of Phrygia). Like the Phrygian king Midas before him, Gyges made a dedication to the Greek oracle at Delphi. Assyrian records identify a King Gyges from the seventh century bc who defeated the Cimmerians only to be defeated and killed by them ten years later. The Lydian king sent an envoy to the court of Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian monarch, seeking help against the never-ending Cimmerian menace. Yet for the bemused Assyrians, despite the range of languages for which they had interpreters, the Lydian tongue (which is descended from the earlier Hittite-Luwian) was completely unknown. The capital of ancient Lydia was Sardis, whose Lydian remains are mostly buried under the extensive and spectacular Hellenistic and Roman structures.

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Nevertheless, it appears that the city developed rapidly from the early seventh century bc and at its height the original Lydian capital may have had a population of 50,000. The Lydians were deeply influenced by Greek culture, controlled the Greek coastal city states and offered them protection. The Lydian Empire came to rule Anatolia west of the River Halys, which flows to the east of Ankara. The Pactolus river, which flows through Sardis, was rich in gold flushed out of the mountains and this was a source of immense wealth for the Lydians; it appears to have been extracted and refined in workshops at Sardis from 600– 550 bc. The world’s first coinage has been attributed to the Lydians, as has what was possibly the first public market, an innovation that was a feature of the resurgent capital. The most famous name to come down to us from ancient Lydia is King Croesus who reigned from 560 to 546 bc. His father, Alyattes, had captured the Greek city of Smyrna to the west and the Phrygian capital of Gordion to the east. The latter brought him into conflict with the empire of the Medes, which was seeking to control Cappadocia. For six years war dragged on, only ending with a peace treaty in 585 bc when a battle was halted by the sinister occurrence of a solar eclipse. In the treaty, Lydia maintained dominance of the region to the west of the River Halys while the Medes controlled the region to its east. The treaty was secured by marriage: the daughter of the Lydian king married the son of the Median ruler. Under Croesus, Lydia attained the height of its prosperity. With more friendly relations achieved with the Greek coastal states, the Lydian court was flooded with and enriched by Greek artisans and intellectuals. Meanwhile, under Cyrus the Great a new Persian threat was emerging. In 550 bc, Cyrus defeated the Medes – now Lydia’s allies

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SARDIS GYMNASIUM

Sardis, capital of the Lydian Empire and seat of the Persian satraps, is mostly buried under later remains. The Marble Court of the gymnasium has been rebuilt. It dates to the reign of the emperor Geta who was murdered in his mother’s arms by his brother and co-emperor Caracalla in ad 212

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– to his north and Cyrus considered himself inheritor of their empire. Croesus made treaties with Egypt and Babylon to protect against the growing Persian threat. He consulted the oracle of Delphi on whether to cross the River Halys and attack Cyrus’ forces. The oracle replied that if he did, a great empire would be destroyed. In 547 bc, with the aid of the philosopher Thales of Miletus who altered the course of the River Halys, Croesus took his army across and confronted the Persians. After inconclusive encounters, Croesus withdrew for the winter, but the Persian forces followed him all the way to Sardis. In 546 bc on the plain of Thymbra, the Persian army met a rapidly re-formed Lydian force. Cyrus suspected that the horses of the Lydian cavalry would panic in the presence of his camels and so he ordered his soldiers to mount the camels of the baggage train and used them offensively, which indeed resulted in the Lydian horses bolting. The Lydians and their allies retreated into the city, which fell after two weeks of siege. The doomed empire foreseen by the oracle at Delphi had been Croesus’ own. Lycia, Caria and the Troad were all conquered. The Greek poleis mostly attempted to resist the Persian invasion but were overcome and several were sacked. Croesus spent the next two decades as a guest of the Persian court, but the Persian presence in Anatolia would last another 200 years. After annexing Asia Minor, the Persians turned on Lydia’s allies. Cyrus defeated Babylon while his son was to defeat the Egyptians in 525 bc.

LYCIA No people ever lived in a more spectacular landscape than the Lycians: south-west Anatolia is a patchwork of valleys

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alternating with mountains that can reach as high as 3,000 metres; there are immense, ancient pine forests, river-gouged ravines and lush, secluded valleys. The centre lacks rivers and the people are dependent on wells. The Mediterranean Sea meets the Lycian coast in a sublime shoreline of beaches, islands and breeze-cooled headlands. The majority of the population lived along the coast in fine cities; the Lycians were skilled seafarers and practised both trade and piracy. Further inland, the valley of the River Xanthos was also once rich in splendid cities. Today, as before, when the summer heat is at its fiercest the inland villagers take their flocks and move into the cooler uplands. The Hittites and Phrygians stamped their cultural originality on ancient Anatolia. With the former, it is tinged with distance and otherness; with the latter the gulf persists between the Phrygians’ ordinary lives set against the great fields of tumuli offset by the high mountain shrines and barbarity of their forgotten worship. One feels one cannot know them. With the Lycians, proud, brave and fierce, there is more familiar ground under one’s feet thanks to Hellenic influences. There is evidence of trade with the Greeks as early as the start of the seventh century bc, although Greek attempts to colonise the region were largely unsuccessful. The language of the Lycians is imperfectly understood. The alphabetic script derives from the archaic Greek script of Rhodes but both script and language were soon abandoned after the conquest of Alexander the Great and the rapid Hellenisation of the region. In the days of the Hittite Empire the Lycian territories were for the most part politically weakened by their internecine ambitions and thus controlled easily enough

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by Hattuşaş, which knew them as the lands of Arzawa. However, the Lycians – fiercely independent in their remote region – played their part in the combined war of attrition against the Hittites that gnawed away at the empire and facilitated its eventual downfall. Furthermore, the Lycian coastal population may have supplied some of the migrating peoples who shattered the eastern Mediterranean world (Lycians are specifically identified in an inscription of the Pharaoh Ramesses iii at his mortuary temple in Egypt).

TELMESSOS

View of tombs at the ancient Lycian port of Telmessos (Fethiye) by John Allan (1843). In the foreground is a Lycian sarcophagus. On the cliff face behind are rock-cut tombs some with façades derived from Greek temple architecture. The highest tomb (from the fourth century bc) belonged to Amyntas, son of Hermagios

Referred to in the ancient texts as the Lukka, the Lycians were most probably the region’s indigenes. In the Iliad they fought on the side of the Trojans and were led by their heroes Glaukos and Sarpedon. In Greek mythology, the former’s grandfather was Bellerophon who flew the winged horse Pegasus and slew the fire-breathing Lycian monster, the Chimaera. Thereafter, Bellerophon married the daughter of the Lycian king and initiated a dynasty. Inland, on the eastern side of the Xanthos valley, is the city of Tlos which is perhaps the oldest Lycian settlement and was known as Tlawa in Lycian and Dalawa in Hittite. In one tomb is a relief of Bellerophon on Pegasus. It is not clear whether the myth was originally Lycian and adopted by the Greeks or of Greek origin. Certainly, the exotic grotesqueness of the fire-breathing Chimaera – with the head and body of a lion, a snake for a tail and a goat’s head emerging from its trunk – suggests it is an oriental creation, most probably Hittite. For Pliny, the myth of the fire-breathing Chimaera originated with a volcano in eastern Lycia near the coastal town of Phaselis; for Strabo, the myth was centred on a valley by Mount Cragus in western Lycia near the inland city of Pınara. In the third century bc, the 23 Lycian cities came together as a federation that practised proportional

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MYRA TOMBS

The western necropolis of Myra, near the Roman theatre, has some of the finest examples of Lycian house-type tomb façades. Even the beams of wooden houses are faithfully reproduced in stone. Some tombs have reliefs and the faint remains of paint suggest that originally they were colourfully decorated

representation: the major cities of Xanthos (primus inter pares), Olympos, Myra, Pınara, Tlos and Patara, each cast three votes; secondary cities cast two votes and minor cities cast one. Public expenses and judicial appointments were likewise met by the cities according to their wealth and size. Originally, the council met under a Lyciarch to debate mighty topics, such as the waging of war and the forming of alliances. Under the Romans, who were impressed by the system, the Lycians were left to their own governmental devices until ad 43 when Emperor Claudius made Lycia a province.

NEREID MONUMENT

Hypothetical reconstruction of the Nereid Monument at Xanthos by its discoverer, Charles Fellows (1852). While the high podium is of Persian influence, the Ionic form of the building recalls temples on the Athenian acropolis. The monument is the outstanding example of the Lycian tomb built in the form of a temple

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The most spectacular remains of ancient Lycia are the tombs that are seemingly everywhere. They divide into several distinct types. The mighty Lycian stone sarcophagus, gothic in the arch of its high and ridged roof and often placed on a stepped platform, provided inspiration for architects when images were brought back to Europe by Victorian explorers. First and foremost was Charles Fellows of the British Museum, the champion and rediscoverer of the region. He, in fact, brought the elaborately decorated lid of Merehi’s tomb and the spectacular tomb of Payava from the acropolis of Xanthos (Payava was probably a governor of the city) to the British Museum. Payava’s tomb includes, in its sumptuous decorations, a martial scene of Payava leading cavalry to engage infantry. On its roof, Payava is portrayed in his chariot. The tomb’s date can be inferred by the scene of Payava leading a Lycian delegation before the Persian satrap: the damaged text includes the Lycian word for satrap, ‘Ksadrapa’, and the name that accompanies the title has been translated as Autophradates. There was indeed an Autophradates who was satrap of Lydia late in the first half of the fourth century bc and, a few decades later, a Persian naval commander by the same name in the Aegean during the advance of Alexander the Great.

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LYCIAN SARCOPHAGUS

This marble sarcophagus was found in 1887 in the royal necropolis of Sidon. Though basically Lycian in form, it combines oriental and Greek elements. Female sphinxes decorate the tympanum of the lid, while below two centaurs fight over a deer. The sculptor was almost certainly a Greek. Some 296.5 centimetres in height, 137 centimetres wide (this view) and 253.5 centimetres in length, it is housed in the İstanbul Archaeological Museum. Late fifth century bc

Another form of unique Lycian tomb predating Alexander the Great’s conquest is the rock-cut tomb whose façade recalls the wooden houses of the living to provide an eternal dwelling for the dead. This evolved from a simple entrance cut into the cliff face. At various Lycian cities – Telmessos, Pınara, Tlos, Myra – whole cliffs are given over to these structures. At Xanthos there are several imposing examples of another kind of Lycian tomb: the pillar tomb. Here, a high monolithic block supports the burial chamber which can be richly decorated in sculpture. The marble decorations of the tomb chamber of the so-called Harpy Monument at Xanthos (whose reliefs in fact include sirens rather than harpies) were brought to the British Museum by Fellows. The most impressive funerary structure of ancient Lycia was the hero shrine or heroon. The outstanding example is the Nereid Monument of Xanthos, also brought to the British Museum by Fellows. Modern scholarship dates the monument, rich in Greek influences, to early in the fourth century bc. It is thought to have been the tomb of the ruler Erbinna who reigned from circa 390 to 370 bc. Indeed, with its slim Ionic columns and temple-like form placed on a high base, it may have been designed to echo both the Erechtheum and the Temple of Athena Nike built on the Athenian acropolis a few decades earlier during lulls in the ongoing hostilities with the Persians. The heroon is nowadays named after the nereids or sea nymphs who once stood between its columns and who, again, recall details from the Athenian acropolis, namely the depiction of the diaphanously clad Iris from the west pediment of the Parthenon. Indeed, archaeological investigation of the podium of the Xanthian heroon

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revealed Athenian pottery from as early as the sixth century bc showing both the significance of the site and the long-standing Athenian trade contract or even actual presence at Xanthos. The frieze of the Temple of Athena Nike in Athens is decorated with scenes from the Trojan War; the great heroon of Xanthos includes, perhaps for diplomatic reasons, more generalised martial scenes in its sculpture, including the Persians. One hundred years earlier, the Lycians had provided forces for Xerxes’ Greek expedition and thereafter, though Greek cultural influence ran deep in Lycia, Persian hegemony waxed and waned.

THE PERSIAN PRESENCE Under Darius the Great (circa 522–486 bc) the Persian Empire reached its greatest extent: it stretched from Anatolia in the west to Egypt in the south and east into Asia and northern India. Sardis, renamed Sparda, became the administrative capital of Asia Minor and the third largest city of the empire. It was linked to Susa, the Persian capital, by the famous Royal Road. Built by Darius i, this legendary road covered a distance of over 2,500 kilometres. Messengers, equipped with fresh horses at regularly spaced and garrisoned way stations, could cover the distance in nine days. A garrison was installed at Sardis, which, with Ephesus (to which it was linked via a continuation of the Royal Road), became a Persian power base. Anatolia was divided into some half a dozen satrapies (the exact number and boundaries of which frequently changed). The satraps – viceroys answerable to the Great

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King and mostly Persian nobles – tended to occupy the palaces of those whom the Persians had conquered. Meanwhile, secret police, soldiers and civil servants kept the Great King privately informed of their particular satrap’s activities. The mechanism, which must have fostered paranoia and intrigue while limiting the autonomy of each satrap, functioned efficiently enough for Alexander the Great subsequently to employ it. The Greek cities, though they had to pay tribute, were mostly left to their own devices. Their neverending struggle for independence – to preserve the individuality of the polis from the blanket of Persian imperialism – was energised by the Homeric past: the task was deemed a heroic duty. Interestingly, the period of the Persian occupation, in which local Anatolian customs and traditions were not obliterated, resulted not in Persian culture permeating Anatolia to any great extent, but rather initiated the efflorescence of Greek culture therein. From the reign of Cyrus the Great the Ionian cities had to provide not only soldiers but craftsmen of various types to the Great King. During the reign of Artaxerxes (464–424 bc) there may have been genuine goodwill between Greeks and Persians; Herodotus is the most famous example of a Greek who travelled freely through the Persian Empire. Persian royal architecture is rich in influences from conquered lands and both Lydian and Ionian specialists contributed to the task: the high columns of the Apadana (great hall) at Persepolis trace their inspiration back to Ionic columns. Conversely, though Ionic in its decorations, the Massalian Treasury at Delphi (built by the people of modern Marseilles) has unmistakably oriental details in its column bases,

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while its capitals derive inspiration from Egypt. This suggests an architect well-travelled through the Persian Empire. In a style that has been called Anatolian-Persian, the Ionian craftsmen incorporated oriental elements into their works, including palmettes, rosettes, lotuses, horned griffins and Persian-style sphinxes. The tendency to build imposing and sometimes vast sepulchral monuments (outstandingly, the burial monument of the Carian satrap Mausolus at Halicarnassus) was against the Greek spirit and again of oriental origin. In 499 bc, the Ionian Greeks rebelled against Persia, and Athens sent forces to help. They were defeated in 494 bc at the naval battle of Lade (off Miletus). This may account for Persian interest in invading mainland Greece. However, the Persian invasion attempts all failed and at the battle of Plataea (479 bc) the last major effort of the Persians under Xerxes (son of Darius the Great) was rebuffed. In 449 bc, a peace treaty was signed between Greece and the Persian Empire. Thereafter, in the so-called Classical Age (479–338 bc) an expansionist Athens came into increased conflict with the other Greek states, especially Sparta. To the north, Philip ii of Macedon (considered by the Greeks as a neighbour rather than a fellow Greek) had begun his conquest of mainland Greece and by 338 bc the task was complete. Philip ii set himself the task of liberating the Greek coastal cities of Anatolia from Persian hegemony, in part to win favour with the mainland Greeks over whom he now ruled. But the result of his diplomatic efforts was that many thousands of mainland and Anatolian Greeks enlisted in the Persian army to oppose him. In 336 bc, Philip ii was assassinated.

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DIDYMA PILASTER CAPITAL

This spectacular pilaster capital from the sumptuously adorned Temple of Apollo at Didyma is from the inner, open-air court wherein the shrine was located. Its griffins and rosettes are Persian in origin. This part of the temple is probably of late Hellenistic date. The temple was never completed

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DARDANELLES

An eighteenth-century view of the Ottoman fortifications guarding the Dardanelles. The strategically vital strip of water dividing Europe from Asia brought wealth to ancient Troy and later to Constantinople/İstanbul. The name Dardanelles derives from Dardanus, the mythical founder of Troy

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ALEXANDER THE GREAT: CONQUEST AND ITS LEGACY In the spring of 334 bc a fleet of some 160 triremes and numerous other vessels transported an army across the Hellespont. It was heading east. Plutarch informs us that a conservative estimate of the army’s size is some 30,000 foot soldiers and 4,000 cavalry. At its head was a fanatically driven and charismatic young man of 22 years of age who, within five years, would have destroyed the Persian Empire and within 11 would be dead, having led his army deep into the Caucasus and as far as India. As a teenager, Alexander had had Aristotle as his tutor. Scholars have long debated what influence the philosopher had on his pupil. One cannot but suspect that Aristotle’s brilliant yet pedantic rationality must have exasperated the fiery teenager whose favourite reading was the Iliad. In his ethical theory, Aristotle taught the principle of the golden mean: between cowardice and rashness is the moral virtue of courage; this is arrived at by rational consideration of the situation. But on the tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula and before crossing the Hellespont, Alexander had made an offering at the tomb of the Thessalian king Protesilaus, the first casualty of the Trojan War. It had been prophesied that the first Greek to set foot on Trojan soil would die and Protesilaus knowingly leaped ashore, thus fulfilling the prophecy. Alexander, who led from the front and was the first to land in Asia Minor on his own campaign, was deeply superstitious.

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Alexander was driven by intensity: he was a bereaved son haunted by the ambition of a murdered father with whom he had quarreled and with whom he had been reconciled. At the wedding banquet of Philip ii’s seventh marriage – to a Macedonian woman – the woman’s uncle had challenged Alexander’s legitimacy because his mother was not Macedonian. In the row that followed, Philip had charged Alexander with sword drawn, only to fall drunkenly to the floor. Alexander had inherited both his father’s magnificent army and his ambition to liberate the Greek coastal cities of Anatolia. He transformed the ambitious conquest into the seemingly superhuman: he would destroy the Persian Empire. Alexander had forced the Pythian priestess at the oracle of Delphi to proclaim him invincible and had the martial self-confidence of an Achilles. Before taking up his post to teach the son of the Macedonian king, Aristotle had spend three years at the Mysian coastal city of Assos at the invitation of his friend the eunuch Hermeias. The latter was its tyrant and had been a fellow student of the recently deceased Plato. Indeed, Aristotle married Hermeias’ adopted daughter. At this time, the Greek coastal cities of Anatolia were semi-independent of Persian rule. When Aristotle left Assos, he travelled to the nearby island of Lesbos to pursue his revolutionary zoological studies. One can almost imagine, as the other travellers delighted in dolphins cavorting in the ship’s bow wave and called them fish, Aristotle noted that they were breathing air and suspected otherwise. In fact, he was two millennia ahead of his time: having dissected dolphins he realised that they bear live young nourished during development by a placenta and, hence, that they

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are kin to land mammals rather than to fishes. But such discoveries lay in the future. The last thing Aristotle would have seen from the ship as he looked back towards Assos was its glorious high landmark: the austere Temple of Athena crowning in dark silhouette the summit of the proud city. Today it is possible to stand amongst the scattered fragments of Doric column of the archaic temple on the acropolis and gaze across the sea mist to distant Lesbos. It is tempting to suppose that, when Alexander crossed the Hellespont for Anatolia with architects, engineers and surveyors in his retinue, it was in deference to the encyclopedic interests of his tutor. By the time Aristotle was teaching Alexander, Hermeias – ruler of Assos – had been tricked and captured by the Persian general Memnon of Rhodes and had been sent in chains to the Persian capital where he was interrogated and crucified. Using Hermeias’ official seal, the Persian general had then written in Hermeias’ name to the cities loyal to Assos, telling them that they were all to surrender their autonomy to the Persian Empire. Thus, despite being encircled by formidable defensive walls (which are mostly extant), Assos and the region fell under Persian control without a fight. One cannot but suspect that Aristotle, smarting at the dreadful fate of his father-in-law, had encouraged his pupil in his mighty ambitions. After crossing the Hellespont, Alexander headed for Troy. He left his own panoply in the temple as an offering and removed some of the ancient, consecrated weapons from the Trojan War. These would be carried onto the battlefield by his shield bearers before him. Alexander confronted and defeated a Persian army at the River Granicus and the region was liberated. The people of Sardis offered no resistance when Alexander entered

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the city. Tribute previously paid to the Persian king was transferred to Alexander, and the Lydians’ own laws were reinstated. The most imposing site at Sardis is the Temple of Artemis, the magnificent if never-finished Ionic temple whose construction was initiated shortly after Alexander’s conquest. Wary of a naval battle with the formidable Persian fleet, Alexander decided to march along the coast and defeat it on land by capturing the coastal cities and thus depriving it of harbours. Ephesus greeted Alexander’s liberation with alacrity. In 356 bc – the year of Alexander’s birth – the original Temple of Artemis there, which had been partly financed by Croesus of Lydia, had been destroyed. A madman called Herostratus had supposedly burnt down the famous archaic temple to immortalise himself. A more prosaic explanation is that the temple was slowly sinking under its own weight, perhaps even threatening to collapse in the waterlogged soil and the priests therefore wanted it replaced. The seemingly unsuitable site – a swamp – must have been chosen for symbolic reasons in deference to the Artemis/Cybele cult. The temple was rebuilt in the Hellenistic Age but not by Alexander the Great. When he offered to rebuild it he received one of the most brilliantly tactful snubs in diplomatic history: the Ephesians replied that it was not right for a god to build a temple to a god. Virtually nothing remains of the rebuilt Artemision of Ephesus, where Alexander’s temple-building ambitions were thwarted. Elsewhere, however, are stunning remains of temples to which Alexander contributed. At the city of Priene (resited in 350 bc), the Macedonian conqueror completed the construction of the Temple of Athena Polias whose architect, Pythius, was also the architect of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. This temple – which

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ASSOS ACROPOLIS TEMPLE

The archaic Temple of Athena (circa 530 bc) at Assos was built of local stone and is 238 metres above sea level on the city’s acropolis. Behind the re-erected Doric columns is the island of Lesbos. Aristotle’s pioneering zoological studies were based on the marine fauna of the region

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Below

ARTEMISION OF EPHESUS

Transverse reconstruction of the Artemision of Ephesus by John Turtle Wood. He found the temple, buried under swampy sediment, by following a series of clues in ancient inscriptions. His reconstruction of 1877 was partly based on antique coins depicting the cult statue of Artemis in an inner room open to the sky

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ALEXANDER SARCOPHAGUS

In this scene on a sarcophagus attributed to the Phoenician king Abdalonymos, Alexander (on horseback and wearing a lion’s head) slays a Persian. Found in the royal necropolis at Sidon, the sarcophagus is one of the supreme achievements of Hellenistic art. Its overall dimensions are 195 centimetres in height by 318 centimetres in length and 167 centimetres in width. The sarcophagus is housed in the İstanbul Archaeological Museum

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is considered to embody the canonical form of the Ionic order – had the dedicatory inscription: ‘King Alexander presented the temple to Athena Polias’. The rigorous distinctions between Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders we nowadays presume are more a feature of Renaissance scholarship than of the original architects. Although there were indeed rules there was also a certain plasticity of interpretation. Fearful of the proximity of the Persian fleet, the people at the coastal city of Miletus held out against Alexander and he was required to take the city by siege. Due south of Miletus – and linked to it by a sacred road – was the ancient oracular and cult centre of Didyma. The name Didymaion means twin temples, and while the oracular centre for Apollo has always been known, the recent discovery of the remains of a cult centre for Artemis – his twin sister – confirms the meaning of the town’s ancient name. Apollo, like his sister (the Asiatic) Artemis, was probably not a god of Greek origin. Miletus had reached its height in the first half of the sixth century bc and a considerably more ancient temple to Apollo was then rebuilt at Didyma. The oracle of Apollo at Didyma was as famous in the ancient world as its rival, the oracle at Delphi, and the two were not always on friendly terms. The archaic Temple of Apollo at Didyma was destroyed by the Persians after the Ionian revolt was ended at the battle of Lade in 494 bc. The plundered bronze cult statue of Apollo was taken to the ancient Persian capital of Ecbatana. Alexander the Great initiated the rebuilding of the Didymaion. In 300 bc, Seleucus i (one of Alexander’s officers who subsequently founded the Seleucid Kingdom centred on Syria) returned the cult statue of Apollo to Didyma.

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The modern list of the Seven Wonders of the World derives from Antipater of Sidon who wrote in the second century bc. It refers to extraordinary sights encountered within the boundaries of – or initiated by – Alexander’s Hellenising expedition. We have already touched on two: the Artemision at Ephesus and the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The Hellenistic Didymaion stood relatively unscathed until the fifteenth century ad when it collapsed due to an earthquake. Nevertheless, its glories – the superb quality, detail and extravagance of its decoration constrained within the gigantic scale and classical dignity of the overarching, overwhelming conception – are still apparent now that the debris and clutter of later settlements (including a windmill that once perched on top of the mound) have been cleared. Many have wondered why this astonishing monument was never included in a list of wonders of the ancient world. The Didymaion probably failed to qualify because, despite the fact that construction continued into the Roman era, it was never finished. Alexander continued his march along the coast. On the borders of Pamphylia, Lycia and Pisidia was the isolated mountain city of Termessos – 1,000 metres above sea level in the rugged western extremity of the Taurus Mountains. Its people were proud and fierce inhabitants of an unforgiving landscape who regularly plundered the coastal cities. When Alexander reached the precipitous road leading to Termessos he realised that an army could be stopped by but a handful of determined defenders. Sure enough, the Termessian troops had taken up position. Alexander halted his army and pretended to pitch camp for the night. Falling for the ruse, the majority of the defenders withdrew into the city and Alexander’s troops advanced,

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PRIENE TEMPLE OF ATHENA

The re-erected columns of the Temple of Athena Polias at Priene have not been raised to the correct height and so do not adequately convey the elegance of the structure: they should be one column drum higher. The temple was built by Pythius in the second half of the fourth century bc

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overwhelming the remaining sentries. As he reached the city walls he understood that Termessos was virtually impregnable. Alexander decided against a prolonged and costly siege and withdrew, leaving the proud and fierce people of Termessos unconquered. In Pamphylia, the cities of Sillyon and Aspendos – perhaps emboldened by the quality of their defences – attempted to resist Alexander’s progress, but Perge opened its city gates to the conqueror. With the coastal cities subdued, Alexander then marched north into the Anatolian hinterland. Darius iii confronted him on the coastal plain of Issus in the autumn of 333 bc. The Persian army was routed and Darius fled, his family falling into the hands of the victor.

MAUSOLEUM OF HALICARNASSUS

Excavated by Charles Newton in 1857–58, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus – the burial monument of Mausolus, satrap of Caria (377–353 bc) – has inspired numerous reconstructions based on the archaeological and documentary evidence. The building’s spectacular sculpture, rather than its formidable size, was its claim to fame in the ancient world (Letharby, 1908)

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With Anatolia secure, Alexander marched south for the Persian satrapy of Egypt and entered unopposed. He was crowned pharaoh at Memphis and after a foolhardy and nearly disastrous journey deep into the western desert to the remote temple at Siwa Oasis, he was proclaimed the son of the god Ammon. While, for the blinkered Aristotle, foreigners were markedly inferior to Greeks and best suited for slavery, for Alexander the outcome of cultural and ethnic intermingling (under a pan-Hellenic canopy) was potentially enriching. He married a Persian princess, while 80 of his officers and 10,000 of his men took Persian wives, to the mounting discontent of the Macedonians. Paradoxically, this autocrat planted – by totalitarian force – the rational, compromising and democratic principles of Greek culture into foreign lands. Indeed, the contradictions that energised Alexander must have baffled a rationalist of the calibre of Aristotle: here was a ‘Greek’ conqueror

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DIDYMAION

The Hellenistic Temple of Apollo at Didyma was the fourth largest temple in the Hellenic world after the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Temple of Hera at Samos and the Olympieum at Agrigento. At 19.7 metres high, its columns were the tallest of any Greek temple

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ALEXANDER ENTERS BABYLON

An engraving after a painting by Louis xiv’s foremost artist Charles Le Brun (1619–90) recreates Alexander’s triumphant entry into Babylon. Le Brun’s dazzling recreations of Alexander’s career – which fed the Sun King’s insatiable taste for the magnificent – so thrilled the French monarch that he showered the artist with honours

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who was to declare himself a god and insisted on the Persian custom of proskynesis. Previously, this had required all to prostrate themselves in the presence of the Persian monarch – who was not, however, perceived to be a god. By 324 bc, an increasingly unbalanced Alexander believed he was indeed divine and required proskynesis as confirmation. Returning from India, Alexander made Babylon – the greatest city of the ancient world – his capital. On 13 June 323 bc, he died at 33 years of age as the result of a fever caught during drunken revelry. Although traditionally described by his conquests as the initiator of the Hellenistic Age (which is generally agreed to have ended during the reign of Augustus), we have seen above that Greek influences had already entered the Achaemenid Empire – for example, in Anatolia under its Carian satrap Mausolus – as well as having previously influenced semi-independent peoples such as the Lycians. Nevertheless, after Alexander, the process caught on and spread like wildfire with the founding of new cities and the rapid adoption of Greek culture in established centres. The personal and public aspects of Alexander’s achievements diverged in his legacy. While Alexander’s stature as a god-like commander was hardly challenged, architectural impulses thereafter shifted in the cities conquered, absorbed or founded by his expedition. Vast temples were no longer considered the chief buildings required at the expense of all else. Instead, new temples were reduced in scale while other public buildings – theatres, baths, council chambers – were stylistically perfected, subtly acknowledging the inherent significance of the participatory citizen at the expense of the remote, religious elite and its tendency to produce

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(supposedly by divine sanction) autocratic and even monomaniacal rulers.

ANATOLIA IS ABSORBED BY ROME Alexander’s empire soon disintegrated under the ambitions of his generals. By the early third century bc Anatolia was divided up between two post-Alexander dynasties: the Ptolemies of Egypt controlled Caria and Lycia, while the Seleucids of Syria governed much of the rest. During the reigns of Attalus i (241–197 bc) and Eumenes ii (197–159 bc) Pergamon in Mysian western Anatolia expanded into a dazzling Hellenistic kingdom. It contained one of the largest libraries (some 200,000 volumes) in the ancient world (the building survives on the acropolis) and the quality of Pergamon’s sculpture and architecture were without peer. Attalus i took control of Seleucid territories only later to be repulsed by Antiochus iii (223–187 bc) when the latter ascended the Seleucid throne. The Pergamon kingdom had always allied itself with the Roman Republic. Meanwhile, Antiochus’ expansionist ambitions – which threatened the stability of the entire region – culminated in 196 bc with his crossing the Hellespont. A reluctant Rome was forced to act, and in the Syrian War (192–189 bc) Antiochus was defeated and Rome inherited Anatolia. When Attalus iii died in 133 bc without an heir he bequeathed the kingdom of Pergamon to Rome, and in 129 bc western Anatolia became the Roman province of Asia. However, the Romans, though masters of the battlefield, were poor administrators. The province was under the authority of a governor with one year’s tenure.

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Most governors saw this as a chance to amass a personal fortune, or rather three fortunes: one for living, one for bribing the judges should the governor be sent to Rome for trial, and one for repaying the debts that secured the governorship. Mithridates vi (132–63 bc), king of Pontus (on the southern coast of the Black Sea), fought three wars against Rome in an attempt to claim Anatolia for himself and build an empire in opposition to Rome. His final defeat came at the hands of Pompey the Great in 66 bc who had previously, in a brilliant three-month campaign, exterminated the Cilician pirates who had become a major threat both to the region’s shipping and coastal communities. With the defeat of Mithridates vi, Rome gained yet more provinces: Judaea, Pontus, Crete, Seleucid territories and Cilicia. In the last days of the Roman Republic, Anatolia was ruthlessly fleeced by Pompey, Mark Antony and Sulla, who needed to pay their troops. The outcome of the struggles was the reign of Augustus (31 bc–ad 14) and the birth of the Roman Empire. During the reign of the second emperor, Tiberius (ad 14–37), numerous Hellenistic coastal cities of Anatolia were flattened in an earthquake. This allowed them to be rebuilt according to Roman architectural models, including the triumphal arch and wide, straight streets. Alexander’s conquests had left a trail of cities requiring Hellenistic architectural forms for their modernisation and so architecture, which had previously been a parttime craft, had become a full-time career. Subsequent Roman architects inherited a treasure-trove of building forms and techniques from their Greek forbears. In fact, the Romans were insatiably interested in things Greek/

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Hellenistic, and pieces of Hellenistic architecture were transported from Asia Minor to Rome. While the names of Greek architects are known from literary sources, their Roman descendants are mostly anonymous. Emperor Hadrian (ad 117–138) was a great initiator of building projects in Anatolia and throughout the empire (it is said that he approached the task as if it were a military campaign), but the extent to which he personally contributed to the designs is unclear. There is a presumably scurrilous account that he had his predecessor Trajan’s (ad 98–117) master architect Apollodorus executed because the latter had dared to criticise one of Hadrian’s own building plans. Furthermore, there is the probability that the architects working in Asia Minor in the second century ad were mostly Greeks. Pliny the Younger was governor of the province of Bithynia (in north-west Anatolia) during the reign of Trajan. When he wrote to the emperor requesting that he send an architect to solve an ongoing problem at the city of Claudiopolis, Trajan replied that it was more normal for architects to be sent from Asia to Rome instead of the other way around. With the Pax Romana, several centuries of relative peace resulted in Asia Minor, during which the mounting wealth of its cities could be spent on impressive public buildings. For the most part, the Greeks kept to their coastal cities where Greek was the spoken tongue, while elsewhere Roman bankers and tradesmen founded cities further inland. In the second century ad, under Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, the province attained its golden age: most of the imposing Roman remains date from this period, as well as the great aqueducts. But Anatolia was less than secure. To the east was the formidable Parthian Empire, which had been established

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PERGAMON ACROPOLIS

The Hellenistic theatre on the acropolis of Pergamon dwarfs the Temple of Dionysus on the tier below (middle left), suggesting an egalitarian, participatory significance for the citizen. The Roman emperors of the second century ad reinstated the imperial cult as the Temple of Trajan on the summit attests

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KANYTELIS CHURCH

The ancient city of Kanytelis (near Mersin) has the remains of several Byzantine basilicas (churches whose plan derives from the Roman public hall) which date from the fifth and sixth centuries. The finest example is the Papylos Church: its rich frescoes, which included depictions of the four evangelists in the apse, have vanished

by Asian nomads called the Parni at the expense of the Seleucid dynasts. The Romans considered Parthia their natural enemy: in 53 bc the Roman general Crassus had been defeated by the Parthians. His lumbering infantry had no answer to the swift and mobile Parthian cavalry and their unfamiliar tactics – most famously the Parthian shot, which entailed firing volleys of arrows while in full retreat. Mark Antony’s campaign into Armenia against the Parthians resulted, in 36 bc, in his own forces suffering heavy losses and ignominious retreat. Augustus’ solution had been to allow the kingdom of Commagene – now occupying what had been Seleucid territory on the right bank of the Euphrates – to act as a buffer state between the Roman Empire’s eastern border and Parthia. Under Antiochus i (69–31 bc), who had been a friend of Pompey, Commagene had reached its height though one cannot help wondering whether the overblown Hierothesion (or tomb sanctuary) of Antiochus i on Mount Nemrut derived from the paranoia of his tiny kingdom being so precariously sandwiched between the truculent superpowers of Parthia and Rome. Whether the tumulus contained (or indeed contains) Antiochus i’s burial or the complex is his cenotaph is unresolved. Under Tiberius, Commagene was absorbed into the empire and in ad 72 Vespasian annexed it to the province of Syria because Antiochus iv – its then king – was suspected of plotting with the Parthians against Rome. The Romans mounted expeditions against the Parthians but, apart from Mesopotamian territories taken by Trajan, had little lasting success: the Euphrates was the natural limit of the eastern expansion of the Roman Empire, not least because to advance beyond it required – strategically – advancing all the way to the banks of the Tigris.

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By now, Anatolia was divided into five provinces, and an ambitious road and bridge building programme, originally intended for moving troops, had been completed which facilitated both communication and trade. With the taxation system improved under the empire, the governor could no longer grow rich on bribes from farmers; corruption was reduced and the farmers flourished, which contributed to the soaring wealth of the region. After the collapse of the Roman Republic, Emperor Augustus had replaced Pergamon with Ephesus as the seat of the provincial governor; its coastal position was invaluable for east–west trade and it was less confined by – and burdened with – its Hellenistic past than Pergamon. Ephesus was carefully transformed into a spectacular Roman-Hellenistic city that was to rank as one of the greatest cities of the empire. Public offices were held by members of wealthy families who saw it as their duty to contribute to the beautification and improvement of the city: the numerous plinths of their statues are still visible throughout Ephesus. With two imperial cult temples (one for Vespasian and one for Hadrian) as well as the legendary Hellenistic Artemision in the background, Ephesus reigned as the first city of Asia during the height of the empire. Pergamon, though no longer the seat of the governor, preserved its autonomy and likewise flourished – even if its great library had been depleted by Mark Antony, who sent a substantial portion to the library of Alexandria as a gift to Cleopatra. On the highest terrace of Pergamon’s acropolis, the Hellenistic buildings of local andesite were restored; the builders used the same stone and also fine white marble for their own buildings and the city became a focal point of high culture under the patronage of the

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emperors. The massive Temple of Serapis at Pergamon (second century ad) attests to another phenomenon of the times: with Egypt under Roman rule, several of its deities were to be established at cult centres throughout the Roman world. Serapis was, in fact, a Ptolemaic syncretism of the Egyptian bull god Apis and of Osiris, god of the underworld. Meanwhile, the ferocious mother goddess Cybele, whom we first met in the depths of Anatolian prehistory, was also spreading throughout the empire to the awe, fear and revulsion of the Romans themselves. Thereafter, decline: overseas, incompetent emperors came and went as the empire was eroded by barbarian hordes. Provincial armies made up of local troops became increasingly less answerable to central Rome. In the third century ad the borders of Roman Asia were increasingly threatened. To the east was the Sassanid Empire of Iran, which had replaced the Parthian Empire and had expanded to the opposite bank of the Euphrates. The Sassanian rulers saw themselves as heirs of the Achaemenid Persians: on a cliff face in Iran at Naqsh-e Rustam (near ancient Persepolis) are the impressive rock-cut tombs of four Achaemenid rulers: Darius i, Xerxes i, Artaxerxes i and Darius ii. Beneath them are imposing Sassanian royal reliefs; one shows the Roman Emperor Valerian who was captured by the Sassanian king Sapor i in ad 260. Campaigning against the Persians with a plague-weakened army, Valerian sought a private meeting with Sapor to discuss a peace treaty, only to be captured and vanish from history.

Palmyra’s ruler Odaenathus succeeded in expelling the Sassanians from the region but on his assassination (ad 267) his widow, Zenobia, announced herself empress of a new empire and reigned in the name of her son. This empire took control of swathes of Asia Minor, of Syria and of Roman Egypt. In ad 272, the Roman Emperor Aurelian defeated Zenobia and brought her to Rome in chains of solid gold. Diocletian (reigned ad 284–305) restored order to a chaotic empire by reorganising the army so that it could secure the borders. He instigated the ‘Great Persecution’ of the Christians because they refused to worship the Imperial Cult, a strategy he had revived in an attempt to unify the people of the empire under a common goal. Once Diocletian had structured succession according to his own model – a tetrarchy or empire under the command of four rulers – he retired. An important feature of Diocletian’s reign was making certain occupations, such as soldier, tenant farmer and baker, both compulsory and hereditary in order to stabilise the foundations of the economy. Indeed, Diocletian’s steady, if ruthless hand, laid the foundations on which the Late Roman Empire was established. Diocletian’s intended tetrarchy collapsed into war, with Constantine emerging as sole emperor. In ad 324, the ancient town of Byzantium opened its gates to him; thereafter, he decided to remodel, enlarge and re-fortify the city which was to become the new capital of the empire.

Palmyra, in the Syrian desert, straddled crucial trade routes and had prospered as a result, growing from being a free city of the Roman Empire to becoming a Roman colony. The Sassanians blocked Palmyra’s trade routes.

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HAGHIA SOPHIA AND THE BLUE MOSQUE

Mosques of St Sophia and Sultan Achmet, from the gate of the Seraglio by John Frederick Lewis (1838). The Blue Mosque (or Sultan Ahmet Camii) in the distance was built atop the Byzantine imperial palace by Ahmet i early in the seventeenth century as the counterpart to Haghia Sophia

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CONSTANTINOPLE, THE EASTERN EMPIRE AND THE END In ad 330, the city of New Rome was dedicated in a ceremony in the Hippodrome. Its name would soon become Constantinople. The persecution of Christians ended under Constantine, and his conversion to Christianity and subsequent beneficence to the religion resulted, especially in the East, in numerous other pagans also converting. After the reign of Theodosius i (ad 379–395) the Roman Empire split into Greek East and Latin West. In ad 476, the western empire died when its emperor was deposed by a barbarian general in the army. The eastern empire – whose cultural core was to remain Greek – considered itself the continuation of the Roman Empire. Under Justinian (ad 527–565), Byzantine architecture was perfected and Constantinople became the most impressive city of late antiquity. In ad 537, Haghia Sophia, or the Church of Divine Wisdom, was dedicated as its cathedral. In the following centuries the Byzantine Empire was constantly pressured by influences and threats (not least Islamic armies from the east) and it evolved in increasing isolation from the countries to its west. The great encircling walls that had been built by Theodosius kept Constantinople, if not its territories, safe. In ad 1071, at Manzikert in Asia Minor, a vast Byzantine army was destroyed by an even greater force of Selçuk Turks which succeeded in surrounding and obliterating it. The empire lost its eastern territories. Appealing to

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Europe – with which the Eastern Roman Empire shared a common religion – brought the crusaders who pushed back the Selçuk Turks, though the crusaders were at least as interested in seizing riches and land for themselves as in liberating the Eastern Church. In ad 1204, Constantinople was sacked by the crusaders: the greatest treasures of Christendom were looted and the soul ripped out of Byzantium. Thereafter, the empire struggled on, growing ever more enfeebled. In 1451, Mehmet ii became the Ottoman sultan. Within a few months in ad 1452 he had built the Rumeli Fortress (or Fortress of Europe) on the European side of the Bosphorus. Across the narrow strait was another Turkish fortress – the Fortress of Asia – built 50 years before in a previously unsuccessful siege of Constantinople by Sultan Beyazit i. The artillery of the combined fortresses now blocked Constantinople’s access to the Black Sea. In the spring of the next year, the Ottoman fleet sailed into the Sea of Marmara, isolating the city from the west. The Church of Rome did not send help. Mehmet ii’s armies then surrounded the ancient land walls of the city and, after a seven-week siege, the Ottoman troops broke through and defeated the hopelessly outnumbered Byzantine forces. Several thousand Europeans, mostly Italians, had come to help defend the centre of the Orthodox Church. Constantine xi Dragases, the last emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, died defending his city. Constantinople became İstanbul.

Endnotes 1. Schliemann, 1875 2. Schliemann, 1875

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THREE A PHOTOGRAPHIC ODYSSEY THROUGH ANCIENT TURKEY

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HITTITE SPHINXES A pair of sphinxes from the time of the Hittite Empire still guards the entrance gate of the city of Alacahöyük. Their eyes would have been inlaid with precious stones. On the orthostats worshippers adore a goddess. (The orthostats are replicas: the originals are now in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara)

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EFLATUNPINAR At the spring at Eflatunpınar is a Hittite religious monument from the thirteenth century bc. It is 710 centimetres in width and 420 centimetres in height. Major deities appear in the centre of the monument beneath winged sun discs, while supernatural beings support the enormous overhead stone, again carved in the form of a winged sun disc

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FASILLAR MONUMENT Facing page: the Fasıllar Monument, 50 kilometres from Eflatunpınar, is an eight-metre high basalt sculpture of the sky god Teshup. It was once thought that it was intended to be placed on top of the monument at Eflatunpınar, but the latter could not have taken the weight Right: a standing replica of the Fasıllar Monument in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara

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LION GATE The Lion Gate in the south-western curve of the city walls at Boğazköy is dated to the second half of the second millennium bc. Thick wooden doors, perhaps reinforced with bronze, once stood between the inner and outer pairs of lions. Mighty towers originally flanked the entrance

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PHRYGIAN TOMB The tomb known as Arslantaş is a spectacular example of a Phrygian tomb whose façade was carved out of the cliff face. Two lions rear up over the tomb chamber’s entrance, while beneath each lion is a (heavily eroded) cub. The tomb presumably predates Phrygia’s being absorbed into the Lydian Empire

YAZILIKAYA SWORD GOD AND KING The rock sanctuary of Yazılıkaya, near Boğazköy, has two main chambers extensively decorated with reliefs. In the inner chamber (to the left) is the underworld god, Nergal, in the form of a vertical sword. On the right, the Great King Tudhaliya iv is protectively embraced by the god Sharruma

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PHRYGIAN MONUMENT The Phrygian cult monument known as Arslankaya was hewn from an isolated rock and marks the entrance to a fecund valley. Dated to early in the sixth century bc, its elaborate architectural façade surrounds a deep rectangular niche housing a heavily eroded figure of the Mother Goddess

XANTHOS FUNERARY MONUMENTS At Xanthos there are outstanding examples of Lycian funerary monuments. On the right is the tomb known as the Harpy Monument attributed to Kybernis, commander of Lycian ships under the Persians at the battle of Salamis (480 bc). On the left, a Lycian sarcophagus surmounts a monumental base

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XANTHOS HILL TOMBS The necropolis on the hill at Xanthos has outstanding examples of Lycian tombs. This pillar tomb has a highly polished marble burial chamber suggesting that, unlike the burial chamber of Kybernis’ monument, it was originally painted and was never intended to be carved. Below it are Lycian house-façade tombs

BUCAK TOMB This tomb façade at Bucak (near Kapakli) incorporates several traditional elements. Carved on an artificial plinth, the main body of the façade imitates a wooden Lycian house. Above is depicted a Lycian sarcophagus lid with the deceased couple seated in panels. Imitation bull horns jut out from the apex

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PINARA TOMB AND THEATRE At Pınara, one of the major cities of the Lycian League, inscriptions on this fine sarcophagus identify the deceased as Arttumpara. In the background is a well-preserved Hellenistic theatre and on the horizon, beyond the dip formed by the Xanthos valley below, is the Massikytos range

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TLOS CITADEL The Lycian acropolis at Tlos includes both sarcophagus tombs and rock-cut house tombs. The summit of the hill was converted in Ottoman times into a fortress which is thought to have been the base of the nineteenth-century brigand known as Kanlı Ali Ağa (Bloody Chief Ali)

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ASSOS TEMPLE OF ATHENA Crowning the summit of Assos, the ancient Temple of Athena (late sixth century bc) was built after the original (polygonal) walls made the city safe. The temple was a landmark for sailors. Built in archaic Doric form, it nevertheless uniquely incorporated Ionic elements such as its elaborate frieze

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ASSOS WALLS The city of Assos on the southern coast of the Troad has excellently preserved fortification walls. On the right is a tower of the Western Gate. Further up the hill slope is a smaller gate. The use of ordered, rectangular stone blocks dates these structures to the fourth century bc

PERGAMON TEMPLE OF DIONYSUS The Temple of Dionysus on the acropolis of Pergamon dates from the second century bc and was originally built of local andesite stone. Early in the third century ad, Emperor Caracalla refashioned it in marble, and after its consecration he was worshipped there as the new Dionysus

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PERGAMON TRAJANEUM View to the Temple of Trajan (Trajaneum) on the acropolis of Pergamon. Unlike the Hellenistic monuments built in the local stone the temple was fashioned in marble and was built in honour of Trajan by his successor, Hadrian (ad 117–138), on the high plateau of the acropolis

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TRAJANEUM STOA The Trajaneum at Pergamon was built in the Corinthian style. The temple is located in the middle of a terrace enclosed on three sides by a stoa (a columned walkway) whose capitals were invented at Pergamon and are known as the Pergamene capital

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PERGAMON SERAPEUM Below the acropolis of Pergamon is a massive red-brick building known as the Crimson Basilica. Built in the second century ad, the brickwork was originally encased in marble. Egyptian-style statues and the west-facing orientation of the complex identify it as a cult centre to the Egyptian underworld god Serapis

SARDIS TEMPLE STELE Sardis was once one of Anatolia’s greatest cities. This view is looking east from the Temple of Artemis to the acropolis. The stela in the foreground honoured Apphion, a priestess of the Artemis cult. The Mongul conqueror Tamerlane sacked the city in ad 1402, after which it faded into obscurity

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SARDIS SYNAGOGUE Roman Sardis had a sizeable, influential and wealthy Jewish community, as the reconstructed synagogue demonstrates. The fact that it formed part of the complex of buildings including the gymnasium indicates the assimilation of the Jewish community there into Roman cultural life by the third century ad

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AIZANOI Aizanoi is one of the few well-preserved classical cities in the landscape of ancient Phrygia. The Ionic Temple of Zeus dates to early in the reign of Hadrian (ad 117–138) and is the best-preserved temple in Anatolia. Typical of Hadrian’s reign, it is an outstanding neo-classical restatement of Hellenistic architecture

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AIZANOI CYBELE ACROTERION Near Aizanoi there was an ancient cult centre to Meter Steunene (Cybele). In the crypt of the Temple of Zeus terracotta figurines of Cybele were discovered. This acroterion in female form once decorated the apex of the west-facing pediment of the building. These combined points imply that Cybele was also worshipped here

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HIERAPOLIS BATHS The northern baths at Hierapolis date from the second century ad. Early in the sixth century the calidarium (the room with water heated by the hypocaust system) was converted into a church. The building was subsequently shattered by an earthquake and is now on the verge of collapse

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HIERAPOLIS THEATRE Phrygian Hierapolis (Pamukkale), located in the fertile Lykos valley, grew wealthy because it straddled trade routes. The Roman theatre has been reconstructed. The ground storey of the stage building was articulated with niches in front of which were spiral-fluted marble columns with composite capitals

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HIERAPOLIS STOA BASILICA

HIERAPOLIS CAPITAL

On the east side of the agora at Hierapolis was an imposing stoa-basilica running its entire 280 metre length. This re-raised column of the lower (of two) storeys has an elaborately decorated capital. While the outer surface was decorated with Ionic volutes, the sides have baroque masks

The entrance of the stoa-basilica at Hierapolis incorporated columns whose capitals depicted lions savaging bulls. (This capital is now in the Hierapolis Museum.) Countless lime kilns in the area attest to the subsequent fate of the marble: it was transformed into lime after the devastation of a fourth-century earthquake

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EPHESUS HERCULES GATE Curetes Street at Ephesus violates – and therefore presumably predates – the Hellenistic-Roman grid of the great classical city. It was possibly incorporated into the processional route of the Artemis cult. The Hercules Gate appears to have been relocated on Curetes Street to prevent access by wheeled traffic

HIERAPOLIS NECROPOLIS The northern necropolis at Hierapolis has a wide variety of well-preserved house tombs and sarcophagi. In the foreground in this view are a variety of Roman sarcophagi and funerary structures. Immediately behind is a tumulus of Hellenistic date, surmounted by a symbolic phallus. It recalls the tumuli of the Phrygians

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EPHESUS KATHODOS The narrow street at Ephesus, known in ancient times as Kathodos (the Way Down), is dissected by a structure known as the Embasis. Reliefs on its surviving bases on either side of the street depict Hermes holding a ram and a caduceus. The reliefs face the Processional Way

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EPHESUS TEMPLE OF HADRIAN The temple on Curetes Street at Ephesus was dedicated to Hadrian (ad 117–138) who visited the city in ad 128. The friezes inside the temple include scenes connected with the city’s founding. Statues of the tetrarchs (governors) were placed on the pedestals in front of the temple around 300 bc

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EPHESUS LIBRARY OF CELSUS The façade of the Celsus Library at Ephesus alternates the aediculae (shrines) on its storeys. It was built by Gaius Julius Aquila, the consul for ad 110, as a heroon for his father, Julius Celsus Polemaenus, who was consul in ad 92 and proconsul of Asia in 106–107

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CELSUS LIBRARY STATUE The great library at Ephesus was reconstructed in the 1970s. The four statues in the first storey aediculae (these are replicas) recall the outstanding qualities of the deceased. This one is Sophia (Wisdom); the other virtues are Arete (Excellence of Character), Ennoia (Discernment) and Episteme (Authoritative Knowledge)

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EPHESUS THEATRE By the third century ad the frequently enlarged theatre at Ephesus held 25,000 spectators. By this time it hosted games and gladiatorial battles designed, by Rome, to keep the plebs entertained. Scientists have reconstructed the gladiatorial bouts at Ephesus from the injuries to skeletons discovered in a nearby cemetery

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PRIENE BOULEUTERION The bouleuterion (council chamber) of Priene is relatively well preserved: when the roof burned down the structure was sealed in the clay and tiles of the roof. It has been dated to about 200 bc. In the centre of the auditorium is a finely decorated marble altar

BASILICA OF ST JOHN Ephesus, its port silted up, malaria-infested, sacked by the Goths in ad 262 and shattered in the next century by earthquakes, was thereafter abandoned. Its survivors relocated to the hill known as Ayasoluk (Greek Hagios Theologos: Holy Theologian). The Byzantine Basilica of St John marks the purported burial site of the apostle

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PRIENE THEATRE The theatre at Priene seated about 6,500 people and, according to standard Hellenistic theatre design, was incorporated into the natural slope of the hillside. Dated by their inscriptions to about 200 bc, five elaborate seats for the city’s elite were placed in the first row of the theatre

PRIENE TEMPLE OF ATHENA In the fourth century bc, Priene was sufficiently wealthy to attract the legendary architect Pythius to design the Temple of Athena Polias. The goddess’ sanctuary was visible from the floodplain of the Meander river below the city

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MILETUS THEATRE The theatre is the most impressive building to survive at the ancient coastal city of Miletus. Though its origins were in the fourth century bc, it was enlarged in Roman times. Thereafter, a Byzantine fort was built immediately above the theatre, which was plundered of stones for the new structure

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DIDYMA COLUMN BASE To the south of Miletus (and connected to it by a sacred road) was the ancient oracular centre and shrine of Apollo Branchidae at Didyma. Though constructed over five centuries, the Hellenistic Didymaion was never completed. The elaborately decorated column base dates to the reign of Caligula (ad 37–41)

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DIDYMA ADYTON This view from the adyton (inner sanctuary) of the Temple of Apollo Branchidae is upwards, via a flight of steps, towards the higher level of the outer temple. Two of the architects responsible for this massive building, Paionios of Ephesus and Daphnis of Miletus, had also worked on the Artemision of Ephesus

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EUROMOS DEDICATION PANELS The inscribed panels on the columns of the Temple of Zeus at Euromos announce who financed them: the magistrate and physician Menecrates and his daughter, Tryphaena, paid for seven and the magistrate Leo Quintus paid for the other five. Three unfluted – and therefore unfinished – columns stand behind

EUROMOS TEMPLE OF ZEUS The Temple of Zeus at the Carian city of Euromos stands clear of the olive groves and undergrowth that cover most of this otherwise unexcavated city. A peripteral temple (having a single row of columns) of the Corinthian order, it is dated to the reign of Hadrian (ad 117–138)

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ALINDA AGORA The city of Alinda demonstrates the fate of so many ancient cities: the original structures were robbed of their stones for later ones. This modest cottage – itself now ruined and abandoned – was built from tiles and stones of the city. Behind is the magnificent ashlar masonry of the Hellenistic agora

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ALINDA COTTAGE The villagers of Karpuzlu, downslope of the classical city of Alinda, had no shortage of building materials. This house sports a classical frieze depicting a martial scene among its massive pieces of Alinda-derived masonry. Recently, robbers attempted to chisel the frieze out of the building

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APHRODISIAS TETRAPYLON The imposing tetrapylon of Aphrodisias – a monumental gate composed of four sets of four columns – is dated to the second century ad. It was recently reconstructed. Aphrodisias became the first city of Roman Caria; after its abandonment, the local village of Geyre echoes the name of the ancient province

APHRODISIAS ODEION The finely worked marble of the stage building of Aphrodisias’ odeion (concert hall) attests to the significance of marble for the city. There were marble quarries on the slopes of nearby Mount Salbakos (Baba Dağı) and Aphrodisias developed an outstanding school of sculptors whose work spread across the Roman Empire

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APHRODISIAS TEMPLE OF APHRODITE Aphrodisias became wealthy as the Anatolian cult centre of the goddess Aphrodite. Indeed, she appears to have transplanted the cult of the goddess Nina (derived from Astarte of the Babylonians). The Temple of Aphrodite, in the Ionic order, was completed in the reign of Augustus (31 bc–ad 14)

APHRODISIAS ROMAN BATHS The forecourt of the Baths of Hadrian at Aphrodisias was originally richly decorated with marble ornamentation: it is difficult to appreciate the splendour of the building from the surviving, unadorned sandstone blocks. The shattered remains of a marble pilaster decorated with acanthus motifs lies in the forecourt

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APHRODISIAS THEATRE The Doric order stage building of the theatre at Aphrodisias was rebuilt in the reign of Augustus by the freed slave C. Julius Zoilos. The band of Ionic egg and dart in the pillar capitals attests to the experimentation of architectural forms in the provinces in the reign of Augustus

APHRODISIAS EROS This pillar fronts the Imperial Hall of the bath complex next to the theatre at Aphrodisias. The chubby, winged male infant (or putto) is a depiction of Eros who was associated with (and sometimes considered to be the son of) Aphrodite. In the classical world, Eros was the great tormentor in matters of love

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APHRODISIAS STADIUM The great stadium at Aphrodisias is exceptionally well preserved. At 270 metres in length, it seated 30,000. Unusually, both extremities are rounded. Originally for athletics, in Roman times gladiatorial contests and animal hunts were introduced. The remains of a small amphitheatre from Late Antiquity are discernible in the eastern end

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MYLASA TOMB Little remains of the important Carian city of Mylasa other than the spectacular Roman tomb known as Gümüşkesen (the name refers to silver supposedly buried within). It is thought that this mausoleum was modelled on the great tomb of the Carian satrap Mausolus at Halicarnassus to the south-west

LABRANDA Labranda, in the mountains north-east of Mylasa, was a sacred precinct centred on a temple to Zeus Stratios (the Warlike). Above the terraces on the hill slope (left of centre) is a tomb which may have housed Idrieus who succeeded his brother, Mausolus, as satrap of Caria (351–344 bc)

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STRATONICEIA GATE The monumental gate of Stratoniceia is Roman. Founded by the Seleucid king Antiochus i (281–261 bc), the city was named after his wife Stratonice. She had been married to his father, Seleucus i, but when the king saw his son dying of love for her, he gave her to him

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STRATONICEIA TEMPLE On the hill slope immediately above the theatre at Stratoniceia are the remains of a temple of the Ionic order. Inscriptional evidence has shown that this Roman temple was devoted to the imperial cult: as the new emperor apotheosised his predecessor, so his own authority was enhanced

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STRATONICEIA THEATRE The remains of the Hellenistic theatre of Stratoniceia. Like many other Hellenistic cities of Anatolia, Stratoniceia was founded on an older settlement. There had been an ancient cult sanctuary nearby to Zeus Chrysaoreus (Golden Sword) and the town was previously named Chrysaoris

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CNIDUS THOLOS The claim to fame of the Dorian city of Cnidus in the Graeco-Roman world was a nude statue of Aphrodite by Praxiteles; his model was his mistress, the courtesan Phryne. This tholos was previously thought to have housed the statue but is now known to have been a temple dedicated to Athena

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KAUNOS TOMBS The temple-façade tombs of Kaunos are dated before the arrival of Alexander the Great. It has been suggested that the large, unfinished tomb on the right is contemporary with the Macedonian conquest. Its unfinished state yields information about the construction technique. Kaunos was abandoned when its harbours silted up

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KAUNOS TOMB FAÇADE The most impressive legacy of Kaunos, on the southern coast of Caria, is the series of temple-façade tombs in the cliff faces to the east of the city. Kaunos is on the border with Lycia, and these tombs recall contemporary Lycian tombs carved with the façade of the Ionic order

LETOÖN THEATRE The Lycian sanctuary at Letoön features the remains of three temples: one to Leto and one each to her twin children, Apollo and Artemis. The well-preserved theatre has been dated to the second century bc. The southern entrance is elegantly framed by a Doric pediment

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SIDYMA TOMBS Although the name Sidyma (like Didyma) identifies this remote Lycian city as very ancient, the majority of the remains are from Roman times – including these sarcophagi in the necropolis. The village of Dodurga occupies the centre of the ancient city, incorporating and reusing much of the ancient material

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PATARA TRIUMPHAL GATE Much of the Lycian coastal city of Patara is half drowned by sand dunes. The city evocatively combines Lycian fragments with Graeco-Roman ruins. This Lycian sarcophagus is dwarfed by the Roman triumphal gate (circa ad 100) – once bedecked with busts and statues – at the entrance to the city

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TLOS THEATRE The theatre at Tlos still has many of the original decorated and sculpted blocks of the stage building on site, though in a chaotic state. This fine Hellenistic theatre was orientated so that the audience’s view of the city’s acropolis was partially obscured by the stage building

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ANDRIAKE GRANARY The emperor Hadrian built granaries at the Lycian ports of Patara and at Andriake (the port of Myra) to store grain that was to be transported to Rome. The granary at Andriake is well preserved and busts of Hadrian and his wife, Sabrina, are still visible on its façade

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OLYMPOS TEMPLE The Lycian coastal city of Olympos had been a major city of the Lycian Federation. It was overrun by Cilician pirates in the first century bc who were eventually defeated by the Romans. This doorway to the cella of a temple may date to the reign of Marcus Aurelius (ad 161–180)

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MYRA THEATRE The Roman theatre at Myra was set against the dramatic backdrop of the rock face. The foreground block depicts actors’ masks. In ad 141, Lycia was devastated by an earthquake. A wealthy Lycian benefactor by the name of Opramoas donated funds for rebuilding, including the repair of the Myra theatre

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PHASELIS THEATRE Phaselis had three harbours and shared much of its history with Olympos immediately to the south. The Roman theatre has been dated, on inscriptional evidence, to the reign of Emperor Domitian (ad 81–96). On the horizon is the mountain of Tahtalı Dağı, known to the ancients as Mount Olympos

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TERMESSOS THEATRE Termessos is one of the most spectacular ruined cities in Anatolia. It is perched between two mountains. The Rosy Mountain (Gülü Dağı) was known to the ancients as Mount Solymos and the Termessians knew themselves as Solymians. The mountain’s peak forms a fine backdrop to the Hellenistic theatre

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TERMESSOS BOULEUTERION The bouleuterion at Termessos was built of regular courses of rectangular blocks (ashlar masonry). The upper level was articulated by Doric pilasters placed on Ionic bases. Window frames are visible, showing that the building was roofed. Fragments of marble that once decorated the interior have been found in the rubble

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TERMESSOS CORINTHIAN TEMPLE Thick foliage and undergrowth have smothered much of ancient Termessos. The city was located just north of Pamphylia in Pisidia. These fragmentary remains – including a finely sculpted Corinthian capital – identify a ruined temple hewn, like the rest of the city, from the local stone

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TERMESSOS GYMNASIUM Below the theatre at Termessos are the overgrown remains of the gymnasium complex. Though the Termessians constantly raided neighbouring cities and even resisted conquest by Alexander the Great, as Rome grew in power they shrewdly sided with it, thus maintaining virtual independence – even when Termessos was incorporated into Roman Asia

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SAGALASSOS THEATRE The stage building of the theatre at the Pisidian city of Sagalassos. The city was never looted. Many of its buildings are therefore relatively complete, though shattered by earthquakes and partly buried. Eighteenth-century explorers were overwhelmed by the grandeur of the setting and splendour of the remains

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PERGE GATE In Roman times the Pamphylian city of Perge soon outgrew its Hellenistic limits. In the foreground are mosaics of the courtyard of the Roman baths complex. Behind is the third-century bc Hellenistic city gate. Statues of the city’s legendary founders once stood in its courtyard

SAGALASSOS DORIC FOUNTAIN The late Hellenistic fountain house (nymphaeum) at Sagalassos was discovered mostly buried in the hill slope but virtually complete by archaeologists. As the water that had originally fed this fine Doric building was still running past, this allowed the building to be reconstructed according to its original function

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PERGE FOUNTAIN At the northern end of the main colonnaded street running through Perge are the remains of a nymphaeum dated to the second century ad. Spring water from the acropolis hill above flowed into a pool beneath the statue of the river god Kestros before being channelled through the city

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ASPENDOS THEATRE Aspendos attained its full magnificence in the second century ad. The outstandingly preserved Roman theatre from the reign of Marcus Aurelius (ad 161–180) recalls Greek models by being adapted to the slope of the hill. The stage building, though lacking sculptures, columns and pediments, is otherwise intact

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ASPENDOS FOUNTAIN On the hill above the theatre of Aspendos is a complex of Roman buildings. In the background is a basilica that was much altered in Byzantine times. In the foreground is the side view of the nymphaeum whose façade was originally decorated in sculptures, pediments and columns

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SIDE MONUMENTAL LIBRARY In the first century bc Side, Pamphylia’s major port, harboured an infamous colony of Cilician pirates whom the people tolerated but who were eventually eradicated by Pompey. Thereafter, the city gained respectability and prospered under Roman control, becoming headquarters of the provincial governor. The monumental library recalls this prosperity

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SELEUKEIA AGORA Seleukeia in Pamphylia shares its name with several other Anatolian cities founded by the Seleucid dynasts. Seleucus i Nicator (312–281 bc), a successor of Alexander the Great, probably founded the city. Now enclosed by mighty pine forests, its ruins – including this imposing agora – are rarely visited

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ISAURA The city of Isaura Palaia was built in a remote and inaccessible region. In 323 bc, after the Isaurians had assassinated the Macedonian governor of Cilicia, forces under Perdikkas attempted to capture the city. Its soldiers, rather than surrender or be defeated, burned their homes and families – and then themselves

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IMBRIOGON TOMB In the east of the ancient province of Cilicia Tracheia are the remains of Imbriogon, a Roman town of the second and third centuries ad. There are several fine templetombs still standing. This, perhaps the earliest, has Ionic capitals to the ground floor columns and Corinthian capitals above

ETENNA The remains of an unidentified building at Etenna in Cilicia Tracheia. This remote city, like Isaura Palaia to the north-east, has evidence of contemporary plundering – fresh piles of earth where treasure hunters have been digging. Their finds will pass into the illicit trade in ancient artefacts and be lost to scholarship

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IMBRIOGON TOMBS Temple-tombs at Imbriogon. The one on the right is two storeys in height; the lower burial chamber was carved out of the living rock and several sarcophagi are still present. On the pediment is a pair of decapitated busts. The burial chamber of the other tomb is empty

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OLBA AQUEDUCT Inscriptions announce that the aqueduct at Olba was built by Septimius Severus (ad 193–211). It carried melted snow and rainwater to the nymphaeum on the other side of the hill. Above are two watchtowers which may have been built to protect the aqueduct

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DIOCAESAREA ZEUS TEMPLE The cult centre for Olba had, at is core, a Hellenistic temple in the Corinthian order dedicated to the god Zeus Olbios. Priest-kings both administered the cult and ruled the region as a theocracy. In Roman times the cult centre grew into a separate city that was named Diocaesarea

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KANYTELIS Kanlıdivane, the Turkish name for ancient Kanytelis, means 'the mad place of blood' and identifies the central chasm that turns red in the rays of the setting sun. On the right of the chasm is a fine Hellenistic tower and opposite is the Byzantine church known as Papylos

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ARSAMEIA At Arsameia on the Nymphaios, the Commagene king Mithridates Kallinikos is depicted on a slab shaking hands with a nude Hercules. Below, a Greek inscription declares that this sanctuary was built by Antiochus i, son of Mithridates, which dates it to about 50 bc. Beneath the inscription is a tunnel of unknown function

ANKARA CITADEL The citadel of Ankara’s original fortifications date to Emperor Heraclius (ad 610–641). Thereafter, it was extended, strengthened and repaired by Byzantine, Selçuk and Ottoman forces over the centuries as the different building materials – ranging from statues to altars to massive masonry blocks - attest

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MOUNT NEMRUT The Commagene Kingdom existed from 162 bc to ad 72 as a buffer between Rome and Parthia. On Nemrut Dağı, overlooking the plain of the Euphrates from a height of 2,206 metres, is the tumulus built by the Commagene king Antiochus i for his grandiose burial

MOUNT NEMRUT The monumental iconography on Nemrut Dağı associates the deified King Antiochus i with his Greek and Persian ancestry via synchretism. Here, on the East Terrace, are (left) the fallen head of Apollo/Mithras (the Zoroastrian sun god) and (right) that of Hercules/ Artagnes (or Verethraghna, the Zoroastrian dragon-slayer)

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to Classical Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Irwin, R., 2006. For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies. London: Allen Lane. Jenkins, I., 2006. Greek Architecture and its Sculpture. London: The British Museum Press. Knapp, A.B., 1988. The History and Culture of Ancient Western Asia and Egypt. Belmont: Wadsworth. Korfmann, M.O., 2005. Troia/Wilusa (trans: J.D. Carpenter Efe). Istanbul: Ege Yayınları. Kuhrt, A., 1995. The Ancient Near East c.3000–300 bc. London: Routledge. Latacz, J., 2004. Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery (trans: K. Windle and R. Ireland). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lawrence, A.W., 1973. Greek Architecture. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Lethaby, W.R., 1908. Greek Buildings Represented by Fragments in the British Museum. London: Batsford. Lewis, J.F., 1835. Constantinople. London: T Maclean. McDonagh, B., 2001. Turkey. London: A&C Black. Macqueen, J.G., 1986. The Hittites. London: Thames and Hudson. Mellaart, J., 1998. ‘Çatal Höyük: the 1960s Seasons’, in R. Matthews (ed.), Ancient Anatolia. Ankara: British Institute of Archaeology, 35–41. Mellaart, J., 1998. ‘Hacılar: 1957–1960 Excavations’, in R. Matthews (ed.), Ancient Anatolia. Ankara: British Institute of Archaeology, 53–60. Moorehead, C., 1995. The Lost Treasures of Troy. London: Phoenix. Newton, C.T., 1865. Travels and Discoveries in the Levant. London: Day and Son. Pasinli, A., 2005. İstanbul Archaeological Museums. İstanbul: A Turizm Yayınlari. Perrot, G. and Chipiez, C., 1892. History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia. London: Chapman and Hall. Pillow, K., 2000. Sublime Understanding. Cambridge (Mass): The MIT Press. Renfrew, C. and Bahn, P., 1996. Archaeology: Theories Methods and Practice. London: Thames and Hudson. Roller, L.E., 1999. In Search of God the Mother. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rosenmeyer, T.G., 1983. ‘Tragedy and Religion: The Bacchae’, in E. Segal (ed.), Oxford Readings in Greek Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rumscheid, F., 1998. Priene. Istanbul: Ege Yayınları. Said, E.W., 2003. Orientalism. London: Penguin Books. Sams, K. and Temizsoy, İ. (preparers), Undated. Gordion Museum. Ankara: Republic of Turkey Ministry of Culture. Scherrer, P. (ed.), 2000. Ephesus: The New Guide (trans: L. Bier and G.M. Luxon). Istanbul: Ege Yayınları. Schliemann, H., 1875. Troy and its Remains. London: John Murray. Seeher, J., 2002. Hattusha Guide. Istanbul: Ege Yayınları. Serdaroğlu, Ü., 1995. Assos. Istanbul: Archaeology and Art Publication. Spawforth, T., 2006. The Complete Greek Temples. London: Thames and Hudson.

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Stierlin, H., 2001. Greece from Mycenae to the Parthenon. Köln: Taschen. Strauss, B., 2007. The Trojan War. London: Hutchinson. Sumner-Boyd, H. and Freely, J., 1987. Strolling Through Istanbul. London: Kegan Paul International. Taşkiran, C., 1993. Silifke (Seleucia on Calycadnus) and Environs. Published by the author. Texier, C., 1839–49. Description de l’Asie Mineure. Paris: Le Ministère de l’Instruction Publique. Williams, G., 1967. Turkey: A Traveller’s Guide and History. London: Faber and Faber. Williams, H.W., 1829. Selected Views in Greece. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green. Wilson Jones, M., 2003. Principles of Roman Architecture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Wood, J.T., 1877. Discoveries at Ephesus Including the Site and Remains of the Great Temple of Diana. London: Longman, Green and Co. Wood, M., 2005. In Search of the Trojan War. London: BBC Books. Wood, R., 1757. The Ruins of Balbec, Otherwise Heliopolis in Coelosyria. London.

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INDEX Abdalonymos 80 Achaean x, 23, 28, 54 Achaemenid Empire 87, 92 Achaeus 54 Achilles 6, 28, 36, 77 Aegean vii, ix–xi, 36, 40, 44, 70 Aeolia (Aeolis), Aeolians x, 56 Ahmet i 11, 93 Aion 30 Aizanoi xii, 58, 126–129 Akkadian 46 Alacahöyük ix, xiii, 38, 40, 42, 96 Alcaeus x Aleppo 47–48, 51 Alexander the Great xi, 5, 22, 29, 58, 68, 70, 72, 74, 77–78, 80, 82, 84, 86–88, 177, 192, 202 Alexandria, Library of xi, 90 Ali, Bloody Chief (Kanlı Ali Ağa) 16, 111 Alinda xii, 22, 158–159 Allan, John 69 Allom, Thomas 11 Alyattes 66 Amin, Effendi 42 Ammon 84 Amurru 51 Amyntas 69 Anacreon x Anatolia vii, viii, ix–xi, 1–2, 5–6, 10, 12, 16, 19–20, 22, 24, 33–34, 36, 38, 40, 44, 46–48, 51–52, 54, 56, 58, 60, 66, 68, 72, 74, 77–78, 84, 87, 88, 90, 92, 123, 126, 173, 189 Anaxagoras x, 54 Anaximander x Anaximenes x Andriake xii, 183 Anitta 46–47 Anitta Text 46–47 Ankara xiii, 34, 56, 66, 216 Antiochus i of Commagene 22, 90, 216, 220 Antiochus iv of Commagene 90 Antiochus i of Seleucid Empire 170 Antiochus iii of Seleucid Empire 87 Antipater of Sidon 82 Antoninus Pius 88 Antony, Mark 88, 90 Apadana 74

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Aphrodisias vii, xii, 1, 30, 161–166 Aphrodite vii, 7, 162, 164, 175 Apis 92 Apollo 23, 58, 82, 178, 220 Apollodorus 88 Apollo Sanctuary, Delphi 58 Apollo Temple, Didyma 75, 82, 85, 153–154 Apollo Temple, Gülpinar 20, 23 Apollo Temple, Side 1 Apphion 123 Aramaeans 52 Aristotle 1, 5–6, 77–79, 84 Armenia xiii, 90 Arnuwanda ii 48 Arsameia xiii, 216 Arsenic 36 Arslankaya xiii, 107 Arslantaş xiii, 104 Artagnes 220 Artaxerxes i 74, 92 Artemis viii–ix, 6, 36–38, 58, 78, 80, 82, 134, 178 Artemis Polymastros viii Artemis Temple, Ephesus (Artemision) 16, 20, 78, 80, 82, 85, 90, 154 Artemis Temple, Sardis 6, 8, 24, 58, 78, 123 Arttumpara 111 Arykanda xiii, 22, 25 Arzawa 69 Ashlar masonry 158, 190 Ashurbanipal 66 Ashu-sharru-usur 66 Asia Minor vii–viii, x–xi, 2, 6, 33–34, 46, 52, 68, 72, 77, 88, 92, 94 Asklepion of Pergamon 6, 12 Aspendos xiii, 84, 198–200 Assos xii, 77–79, 114, 117 Assyrian Annals 38, 58, 66 Assyrian Empire 46, 48, 51–52, 66 Assyrian merchant colonies 46 Astarte 162 Athena 1, 82, 175 Athena Nike Temple, Athens 72 Athena Temple, Assos 78, 79, 114 Athena Temple, Priene 1, 78, 82–83, 149 Athenian Empire 10 Athens 10, 11, 14, 54, 72, 74

Attalus i 87 Attalus iii xi, 87 Attis 65 Augustus 30, 87–88, 90, 162, 164 Augustus Temple, Mylasa 17 Aurelian 92 Aurelius, Marcus 20, 88, 185, 198 Autophradates 70 Avicenna 12 Azatiwatas 30

Baalbec 14, 16 Baba Dağı 161 Babylon 47, 68, 86–87, 162 Bacchae 10 Barbarian 5, 92, 94 Bellerophon 69 Beyazit i 94 Beycesultan 36 Bithynia xiii, 88 Black Sea vii, ix, xiii, 44, 48, 56, 88, 94 Blegen, Carl x Blue Mosque, İstanbul 93 Bodrum 5, 56 Boğazköy (Boğazkale) ix, 18, 38, 46, 51, 102, 104 Bosphorus vii, xi, xii, 94 Bronze 10, 36, 38, 40, 47, 54, 57, 59, 82, 102 Bronze Age ix, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44–46, 52, 54 Brutus, Marcus Junius 5 Bucak tomb 108 Bucrania viii, 36 Büyükkaya 52 Byzantine Empire xi, 94 Byzantium xi, xii, 92, 94

Caesar, Julius 5 Caligula 153 Calvert, Frank 41 Čanakkale 40, 42 Cappadocia xiii, 66 Caracalla 67, 117 Carchemish 52 Caria xii, 56, 68, 74, 84, 87, 156, 161, 168, 178 Cassas, Louis-François 16 Çatalhöyük viii, ix, xiii, 34–36 Caucasus 38, 47, 77

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Caucasus Mountains 46 Celsus Library, Ephesus 141–143 Chalcolithic ix, 36 Charles v, Holy Roman Emperor 14 Chimaera 69 Choiseul-Gouffier, Compte de 16 Christ 12 Christians/Christianity 12, 22, 58, 92, 94 Church of Rome 94 Cilicia xiii, 34, 66, 88, 204, 206 Cilician pirates 1, 88, 185, 201 Cimmerians 56, 58, 66 Claudiopolis 88 Claudius 70 Cleopatra 90 Cnidus xii, 22, 55–56, 175 Commagene, Kingdom of xi, 90, 216, 220 Constantine i (The Great) xi, 92, 94 Constantine xi Dragases 94 Constantinople viii, xi, xii, 14, 76, 94 Copper 36, 38, 41–42, 46 Corinthian order 1, 82, 120, 156, 191, 206, 212 Cos 56 Cragus, Mount 69 Crassus 90 Crete 88 Crimson Basilica, Pergamon 123 Croesus 58, 66, 68, 78 Crusades 12, 14, 94 Curetes Street, Ephesus 28, 134, 139 Cybele viii, xi, 6, 10, 24, 36, 58, 61, 65, 78, 92, 129 Cyrus the Great x, 66–68, 74

Dalawa 69 Danube, River 56 Daphnis of Miletus 154 Dardanelles vii, xii, 2, 44, 76 Dardanus 76 Darius i (The Great) xi, 72, 74, 92 Darius ii 92 Darius iii 84 Delphi 58, 66, 68, 74, 77, 82 Demetria, Aurelia Botiane 7 Diadochi xi Diana viii Didyma xii, 75, 82, 85, 153–154 Didymaion 24, 82, 85, 153–154

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Diocaesarea xiii, 212 Diocletian 92 Dionysus 10, 58, 117 Dionysus Temple, Pergamon 89, 117 Dodurga 180 Domitian 187 Doria, Dorians x, 56, 175 Doric order 12, 24, 28, 78–79, 82, 114, 164, 178, 190, 194 Dörpfeld, Wilhelm 44 Dorus 56

Eastern Roman Empire 94 Ecbatana 82 Eflatunpınar xiii, 98, 101 Egypt 2, 5, 16, 36, 44, 47–48, 51–52, 58, 60, 68–69, 72, 74, 84, 87, 92, 123 Electrum 38, 42 Embasis, Ephesus 136 Ephesus viii, xi, xii, 2, 16, 19–20, 24, 28, 36, 38, 54, 72, 78, 80, 82, 85, 90, 134–146, 154 Erbinna 72 Erechtheum 72 Eros 164 Etenna xiii, 206 Ethnographic Museum, Berlin 41 Etruscans 54, 56 Eumenes ii 87 Euphrates, River 33, 51–52, 90, 92, 220 Euripides 6, 10 Euromos xii, 156 Europe vii, 2, 5, 11—12, 16, 33, 44, 70, 76, 94

Fasıllar monument xiii, 101 Fellows, Charles 2, 4, 20, 22, 70, 72 Fertile Crescent 33–34, 52 Fortress of Asia 94 Fortress of Europe 94 Fortuna 60

Galatia xiii Galen 12 Gallai 58

Gallipoli Peninsula 77 Geta 67 Geyre 161 Gille, Pierre vii Gladiators 2, 6, 12, 145, 166 Glaukos 69 Göbekli Tepe viii, 34 Gobineau, Compte de 41 Gold 12, 38, 40, 42, 44, 46, 58, 66, 92 Gordion x, xiii, 54, 56–59, 66 Gordius 58 Goths 146 Granicus, battle of the 78 Great Persecution (of Diocletian) 92 Greece vii, xi, 10, 24, 28, 38, 41–42, 46, 54–56, 58, 74 Gülpınar xii, 20 Gülü Dağı 189 Gümüşkesen 168 Gyges 66

Hacılar 34 Hadrian 88, 90, 119, 126, 139, 156, 183 Hadrian Temple, Ephesus 139 Haghia Sophia, İstanbul 12, 93–94 Halicarnassus xii, 5, 20, 56, 74, 78, 82, 84, 168 Halys, river 66, 68 Hammurabi dynasty 47 Hanigalbat 48 Harem 11 Harpy Monument, Xanthos 4, 72, 107 Hatti ix, 38, 40, 46–48, 51 Hattuşaş ix, xiii, 18, 20, 38, 46–47, 49–52, 69 Hattusili i 47 Hattusili iii 48, 51 Hector 6, 28 Hellenes 5, 54 Hellenistic Age 58, 78, 87–88, 90 Hellespont vii, ix, 77–78, 87 Hephaestus 36 Hera Temple, Samos 85 Heraclitus x, 54 Heraclius 216 Hercules 216, 220 Hermeias 77–78 Hermes 136 Hermus valley 66

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Herodotus x, 5, 10, 58, 66, 74 Heroon 25, 72, 141 Herostratus 78 Hierapolis xii, 130–134 Hierapolis Museum 133 Hierothesion of Antiochus i 90 Hilaire, Jean-Baptiste 16, 17 Hippodrome, İstanbul 94 Hisarlık x, 41 Hittite Empire 46–48, 51–52, 68, 96 Hittites ix–x, 18, 20, 24, 38, 46–52, 56, 60, 66, 68–69, 96–98 Hodder, Ian viii Homer x, 5–6, 14, 16, 20, 36, 41–46, 54 Homo sapiens viii, 33 Hurrians 47

Idrieus 168 Iliad, The x, 1, 6, 20, 23, 28, 41–45, 54, 69, 77 Ilion x, 46 Ilium x, 41, 46 Imbriogon xiii, 206–209 Imperial Cult, Roman 89–90, 92, 171 India 72, 77, 87 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 12 Ion 54 Ionia, Ionians x, xi, 6, 54, 56, 66, 74, 82 Ionian Confederacy 56 Ionian Revolt 82 Ionic order 61, 70, 72, 74, 78, 82, 114, 126, 133, 162, 164, 171, 178, 190, 206 Iris 72 Isaura xiii, 20, 24, 26, 204, 206 Isauria xiii, 26, 204 Isis 58 Islam/Islamic 12, 94 Issus, battle of 84 İstanbul ix, xii, 14, 42, 44, 51, 60, 72, 76, 80, 94 İstanbul Archaeological Museum ix, 42, 51, 60, 72, 80 Ivriz xiii, 33

Judaea 88 Justinian 94

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Kanesh 46 Kangal, guard dog 19–20 Kanlıdivane 214 Kanytelis xiii, 90, 214 Karain cave viii, 33 Karatepe xiii, 28, 30 Karpuzlu 159 Karum 46 Kaska tribes 48, 51 Kathodos, Ephesus 136 Kaunos xii, 177–178 Kestros 196 Knights Hospitallers 15 Kubaba viii, 58 Küçük Yazılıkaya, Midas City 65 Kumbet 16 Kussara 46–47 Kybele 38, 58 Kybernis 107–108

Laborde, Marquis de 16 Labranda xii, 22, 168 Lade, battle of 74, 82 Latacz, Joachim x Leake, Captain 65 Le Brun, Charles 86 Lesbos (Mytilene) x, xii, 56, 77–79 Leto 178 Leto Temple, Letoön 61 Letoön xii, 61, 178 Levant 14, 16, 20, 34, 44, 47, 51 Lewis, John Frederick 93 Lion Gate, Hattuşaş 102 Lion Tomb, Cnidus 55 Louis xiv 86 Lucas, Paul 20 Lukka 69 Luwian script 33, 36, 50, 66 Luwians 46 Lycaonia xiii Lycia xii, 2, 4, 16, 20, 22, 68–72, 82, 87, 178, 180, 183, 185 Lycian tomb designs 70–72 Lyciarch 70 Lydia viii, x, xii, 6, 10, 56, 58, 66–68, 70, 74, 78, 104

Lydian Empire 6, 56, 66–67, 104 Lykos valley 131

Maclaren, Charles 41 Maikop mound 38 Manzikert, battle of 94 Marathon, battle of xi Marmara, Sea of vii, xii, 94 Massalian Treasury, Delphi 74 Massikytos range 111 Mausoleum of Halicarnassus 20, 78, 82, 84, 168 Mausolus 74, 84, 87, 168 Meander valley 1, 149 Median Empire 66 Mediterranean Sea xi, xii, 1–2, 14, 16, 34, 38, 41, 44, 52, 54, 58, 68–69 Megaron 38, 40–41 Mehmet ii 94 Mellaart, James viii, 34 Memnon of Rhodes 78 Memphis 84 Menecrates 156 Menelaus 7 Merehi, Tomb of 70 Mesopotamia x, xiii, 36, 38, 46–47, 52, 90 Meter Steunene 129 Midas City xiii, 60, 63–65 Midas, King 56–58, 65–66 Midas Monument 60, 63, 65 Miletus xi, xii, 54, 56, 68, 74, 82, 151, 153–154 Mita 58 Mitannian Empire 47–48 Mithras 220 Mithridates i of Commagene 216 Mithridates vi of Pontus 88 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 11 Mother Goddess 6, 34, 36, 58, 60, 64, 92, 107 Mursili (Mursilis) i 47 Mursili (Mursilis) ii ix, 48 Museum of Anatolian Civilizations viii, ix, 34, 38, 40, 49, 54, 59, 96, 101 Mushki 58 Muwatalli 48, 51 Mycenae 41 Mycenaean culture 44, 46, 54 Mylasa xii, 17, 168

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Myra xii, 18, 70, 72, 183, 185 Mysia xii, 77, 87

Naqsh-e Rustam 92 Neanderthal viii, 33 Nemrut, Mount (Nemrut Dağı) xiii, 22, 90, 220 Neo-Assyrian Empire 52 Neo-Hittite culture 28, 30, 33, 52, 58 Neolithic viii, ix, 34–36 Nereid Monument, Xanthos 70, 72 Nesians 38, 46–47 New Rome 94 Newton, Charles Thomas 20, 55, 84 Nietzsche, Friedrich 5 Nina 162 Nymphaeum 194, 196, 200, 210

Obsidian 36 Odaenathus 92 Odyssey, The 1, 14 Öküzini cave 33 Olba xiii, 210–212 Olympieum, Agrigento 85 Olympos xiii, 70, 185, 187 Olympos, Mount 187 Orontes, River 51 Orthodox Church 94 Osiris 92 Ottoman Empire xi, 1–2, 14 Ovid 65

Pactolus River 8, 58, 66 Paionios of Ephesus 154 Palaeolithic Period viii, 33 Palestine ix, 16, 48 Palmyra 14, 16, 92 Pamphylia xiii, 1, 27, 37, 82, 84, 191, 194, 201, 202 Paphlagonia xiii Papylos Church 90, 214 Paris 7 Parni 90 Parthenon, Athens 14, 72 Parthian Empire 88, 90, 92 Patara xii, 70, 181, 183

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Pax Romana 88 Payava, Tomb of, Xanthos 70 Pegasus 69 Peloponnesian War 10 Pentelikon, Mount 55 Pentheus 10 Perdikkas 204 Pergamene capital 120 Pergamon xi, xii, 1, 6, 10, 12, 22, 87, 89–90, 92, 117–123 Perge ix, xiii, 7, 37, 84, 194–197 Pericles 10 Persepolis 74, 92 Persia, Persians x, xi, 5, 10, 12, 24, 28, 33, 58, 66–68, 70, 72–75, 77–78, 80, 82, 84, 87, 92, 107, 220 Persian Wars 5, 10 Phaselis xiii, 1–2, 69, 187 Philetaerus xi Philip ii of Macedon 74, 77 Phrygia 16, 34, 44, 56, 57–60, 63–66, 69, 104, 107, 126, 131, 134 Phrygian Empire 56 Phryne 175 Pınara xii, 69, 70, 72, 111 Pisidia xiii, 20, 27, 82, 191–192 Pithana 46 Plataea, battle of xi, 74 Plato 5, 77 Pliny 69, 88 Plutarch 77 Polis, poleis 56 Pompey the Great 88, 90, 201 Pontus xiii, 88 Poseidon Temple, Sunion 24, 28 Postel, Guillaume 14 Praxiteles 175 Priam ix, 6, 28, 41–42, 44 Priam’s Treasure 38, 41–44 Priene xii, 1, 54, 78, 83, 146–149 Processional Way, Ephesus 134, 136 Proskynesis 87 Protesilaus 77 Prusias on the Hypium 60 Ptolemaic religion 92 Ptolemies of Egypt 87 Pullan, Richard 55 Pushkin Museum, Moscow 42

Pythagoras x, 54 Pythius 78, 83, 149

Qadesh, battle of 51 Quintus, Leo 156

Ramesses ii 47, 51 Ramesses iii 52, 69 Rhodes xii, 15, 56, 68, 78 Roman Empire 1, 12, 20, 33, 34, 88, 90, 92, 94, 161 Roman Republic 87–88, 90 Rome xi, 2, 5, 58, 87–88, 90, 92, 145, 183, 192, 220 Rosetta Stone 60 Royal Road 72 Rumeli Fortress 94

Sabrina, wife of Hadrian 183 Sagalassos xiii, 20, 192–194 Salamis, battle of xi, 107 Salbakos, Mount 161 Sapor i 92 Sappho x Sardis x–xi, xii, 6, 8, 10–11, 24, 56, 58, 66–68, 72, 78, 123–124 Sargon ii x, 66 Sarpedon 69 Sassanid Empire 92 Satrap 67, 70, 72, 74, 84, 87, 168 Scaean Gate 41 Scharf, George 4 Schliemann, Heinrich ix, 20, 38, 40–44 Schliemann, Sophia 42 Schmidt, Klaus viii Second World War 42 Selçuk Turks 94, 216 Seleucids of Syria 82, 87–88, 90, 170, 202 Seleucus i 82, 170, 202 Seleukeia xiii, 202 Septimius Severus 210 Seraglio 93 Serapis 92, 123 Serapis Temple (Serapeum), Pergamon 92, 123 Sety i 51 Seven Wonders of the Ancient World 82

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Sharruma 104 Side xiii, 1, 201 Sidon 72, 80, 82 Sidyma xii, 2, 180 Silenus 58 Sillyon 84 Silver 36, 38, 40, 42, 46, 168 Siwa Oasis 84 Smyrna 56, 66 Solymos, Mount 189 Sophia, Bulgaria 12 Sophocles 28 Sparda 72 Sparta 10, 74 Sphinx 72, 74, 96 Stanfield, Clarkson 24 St John, Basilica of, Selçuk 146 Stone Age vii–viii, 33–34 Strabo 69 Stratonice 170 Stratoniceia xii, 170–173 Süleyman the Magnificent 14 Sulla 88 Sultan Ahmet Camii, İstanbul 93 Sumeria 46 Suppiluliuma i 48 Suppiluliuma ii 52 Sura 19 Susa 72 Synagogue, Sardis 124 Syria xiii, 47, 48, 51–52, 54, 56, 82, 87, 90, 92 Syrian War 87 Syro-Hittite states 52, 54, 56

Tabal 52 Tahtalı Dağı 187 Tamerlane 123 Tarhundas 33 Taruntasha 48 Taurus Mountains viii, 34, 82 Tell Mozan 47 Telmessos xii, 69, 72 Termessos xiii, 22, 24, 27, 29, 82, 84, 189–192 Teshup 101 Testes, bull 36, 38 Tetrapylon, Aphrodisias 161 Tetrarchy 92

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Texier, Charles ix, 16, 18, 20 Thales x, 54, 68 Theodosius i 94 Thrace vii, xi, xii Thymbra, plain of 68 Tiberius 88, 90 Tigris, river ix, 33, 90 Tin 36, 46 Tiryns 41 Tlawa 69 Tlos xii, 16, 69–70, 72, 111, 182 Tmolus, Mount 10 Trajan 88–90, 119 Trajan Temple (Trajaneum), Pergamon 119–120 Troad 23, 56, 68, 117 Trojan War 5, 7, 72, 77–78 Troy ix–x, xii, 6, 20, 38, 40–46, 48, 52, 56, 76, 78 Tryphaena 156 Tudhaliya 38 Tudhaliya ii 48 Tudhaliya iv 51, 104 Tukulti-Ninurta i 51 Tumulus 22, 54, 56–57, 59, 68, 90, 134, 220 Tushratta 48 Tyche ix, 37, 60

Wood, John Turtle 16, 19, 20, 80 Wood, Robert 14, 16

Xanthos xii, 2, 4–6, 70, 72, 107–108 Xanthos valley 68–69, 111 Xenophanes x Xerxes i xi, 72, 74, 92

Yazılıkaya (Hittite) xiii, 50, 104 Yazılıkaya (Phrygian) 60, 65

Zara, Croatia 12 Zenobia 92 Zeus 58 Zeus Chrysaoreus Sanctuary, Stratoniceia 173 Zeus Olbios Temple, Diocaesarea 212 Zeus Solymeus Temple, Termessos 29 Zeus Stratios Temple, Labranda 168 Zeus Temple, Aizanoi 126–129 Zeus Temple, Euromos 156 Zoilos, C. Julius 30, 164 Zoilos Monument, Aphrodisias 30

Urartian Empire 52, 54, 56, 66 Urartu 54, 66 Urfa viii Urkesh 47

Valerian 92 Van, Lake 52 Venice 1, 14 Verethraghna 220 Vespasian 90 Virgin Mary viii, 58 Vroom, Hendrick Cornelisz 15

Warpalawas 33 Wassukkani 48 Williams, Hugh William 28 Wilusa 46, 48 Winckler, Hugo ix

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