History of Aphrodisias
Aphrodisias lies in the Meander river basin, a fertile valley 230 kilometres south east of Izmir in the province of Aydin. It is famous for its sanctuary of Aphrodite, the city’s patron goddess, goddess of nature, love and fertility.
The cult of the goddess has its roots in prehistoric times; two prehistoric settlement mounds mark the earliest habitation of the site in the sixth and fifth millennium B.C. Aphrodisias remained a small village throughout the late Neolithic and Chalcolithic period then developed through the Bronze and the Iron Ages, until the second century B.C., the date of the earliest coins and inscriptions attesting the name of the city.
In the late first century B.C., the city came under the protection of Emperor Augustus and the Julio-Claudian emperors. In A.D. 22, Tiberius reconfirmed the privileges granted earlier by the Senate.
The first and second centuries A.D. were a time of great prosperity during which most of the major monuments of the site were built. These centuries witnessed the increasing fame of the cult of Aphrodisias and above all the importance of the school of sculpture. From the later first century B.C., spurred by the excellent marble supplies located in the Salbakos mountain, sculptors produced beautiful statuary that rapidly came to be in demand in Rome as well as elsewhere in the Mediterranean.
With the gradual division of the Empire into two parts, its fate became bound up with that of Eastern Roman and later the Byzantine Empire. In the third century, Aphrodisias became the capital of the new Roman province of Caria and from the fourth century, the city was the seat of a Christian bishop.
Aphrodisias was affected by many earthquakes. Some occurred in early Imperial times and an earthquake in the fourth century in the 350s or 360s, seriously damaged Aphrodisias and its neighbour Ephesus. The continued vitality of the city through the fifth century is attested by the wholesale reconstruction of the Temple of Aphrodite as a Christian basilica.
Aphrodisias managed to maintain its importance until the seventh century. Between then and the thirteenth century, with the appearance and establishment of the Seljuk Turks in Anatolia, Aphrodisias once again was a small village within the territory of the Beylik of Aydın or of Menteşe.
However in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, the fertility of the plateau attracted settlers and eventually the Turkish village of Geyre grew over and among the ruins of once handsome monuments.
Introduction
“Aphrodisias,” wrote Octavian the Triumvir a few years before he became the Emperor Augustus,
“is the one city from all of Asia that I have selected to be my own“. This majestic testimonial is incised, in exquisite Greek lettering, high on what is known as the Archive Wall of the city’s Theatre – the wall on which the Aphrodisians recorded the decrees, treaties, laws and privileges of which they were particularly proud.
And no wonder; for they knew that they were blessed among men.
First, their unswerving loyalty to Augustus and his successors had earned the immunity from imperial taxation – a sign of imperial favour not lightly bestowed.
Second, there was the fame of their city itself, both as a place of religious pilgrimage (for it was, as its name implies, sacred to the goddess Aphrodite) and as a cultural and intellectual centre to which students and scholars flocked from all over the Hellenistic world.
Third, there was their superb climate – as perfect as any in the world, with a two-thousand-foot altitude to shield them from the worst of the summer heat.
Fourth – and for visitors to Aphrodisias today, perhaps the most important reason of all – there was the marble.
And marble was the Aphrodisians’ trump card. Theirs was perhaps the finest available anywhere: a rich creamy white in colour and sparkling with tiny crystals, it could be worked with and against the grain, it could be polished till it dazzled. Moreover, it was accessible: the quarries were almost immediately above the town – an important consideration with a material of which a cubic foot weighs some hundred and fifty pounds.
Aphrodisias took full advantage of these twin blessings, thus becoming the centre of a school of sculpture that flourished for an unbroken period of some six hundred years, until a cataclysmic earthquake ended its prosperity for ever.
Excavation History
It was in 1961 that the present continuing programme of excavation began, under the direction of the late Professor Kenan Erim, who dedicated virtually his entire career to the site and worked there every summer until his untimely death, at the age of only sixty, in 1990.
The work now continues under co-directors Professor R.R.R. Smith and Christopher Ratté, – and not a year goes by without their adding dramatically to the already astonishing wealth of ancient sculpture that has been brought to the surface in the past forty years. This comes principally – but by no means exclusively
– from the Sebasteion, a vast complex devoted to the worship of the deified Roman Emperors. Essentially, this consisted of two parallel colonnades some hundred yards in length, each carrying three superimposed rows of columns; between the columns on the two lower levels ran long rows of superb marble relief panels – perhaps as magnificent a processional way as could be found anywhere in the ancient world.
With several of these panels – and much else besides – being uncovered annually, the authorities are faced with a serious problem of storage and display. The present otherwise admirable museum, opened on the site in 1979, was bursting at the seams within five years of its inauguration; as a result, nearly all the finds of fifteen years have had to be locked away in a huge depot, where they could be seen by practically no one. A new museum was therefore essential, with a long gallery in which the panels from the Sebasteion are displayed in a setting similar to that for which they were intended.
You must climb to the topmost gallery of that vast theatre, capable of holding some eight thousand spectators, and gaze out over the country beyond; you must wander between the surviving colonnades of the Sebasteion to the Nymphaeum or ornamental pool, loud with the croakings of a thousand frogs; you must rest for a while in the little semicircular Odeon, as quiet and intimate as the Theatre must have been noisy and tumultuous; you must make your way to the Stadium -the best preserved of its kind anywhere in the Mediterranean-and you must then return at sunset to the central point of the city, the great temple of Aphrodite.
Finally, you will come to the Tetrapylon, that glorious monumental gateway, the columns of which have been re-erected to give us a better idea of its former splendour. To many of us, this lovely monument is the most moving of all; for in its shadow stands the simple grave of Kenan Erim, who devoted his life to Aphrodisias and who – like Octavion himself – loved this city more than any other.
Acknowledgments
After a short reconnaissance trip in 1959, the archaeological exploration of ancient Aphrodisias in Caria was initiated in the summer of 1961 under the aegis of New York University and its Department of Classics. The late Professor Kenan T. Erim was Director of Excavations at Aphrodisias until his death on 3rd November, 1990. His successors are co-Directors R.R.R. Smith, Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Arts, Oxford University and Christopher Ratté, Associate Professor of Classics and Fine Arts, New York University.
Without invaluable funding and generous financial support, it would not have been possible to develop Aphrodisias into one of the most significant and fruitful classical archaeological enterprises of the late 20th century onwards. Much gratitude is due to, amongst others, the Minister of Culture and the Directorate – General of Antiquities and Museums of Turkey, the National Geographic Society, Andrew W. Mellon Foundations, Charles E. Merrill Trust, Anne S. Richardson Fund, American Express, Littauer, Wenner – Gren, Vincent Aslar, Irvine and Ford Foundations, the Department of State of the USA, the American Research Institute in Turkey, Dumbarton Oaks, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for Humanities, Francesca Von Hapsburg and the Arch Foundation, Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the World Monuments Fund, the Institute of Fine Arts, New York and the Friends of Aphrodisias, London, Paris, New York, Izmir and Istanbul.
Theatre
Archive Wall, Theatre
In the mid-third century AD, the short end-wall of the stage building (the so-called Archive Wall), viewed by spectators entering the Theatre by its northern entrance (parodos), was inscribed with various documents from the city archive. They are copies of documents relating to the privileges granted by the Roman senate and by Octavian (the future emperor Augustus) to Aphrodisias in 37 BC and confirmed by successive emperors in Rome, up to Gordian III in the AD 230s. The most dramatic document s are private letters written in a short, clipped style by Octavian to agents in the region: they were never meant for publication. One, positioned in the upper centre of the wall, under the large heading ‘For Good Fortune’ (Agathe Tychei) concerns C. Julius Zoilos (Octavian warns that he wants good care taken of the city of ‘my Zoilos’). The whole archive wall is an extraordinary monument of public writing and political memory.
Hadrians Baths
Bouleuterion
Temple of Aphrodite
Stadium
The Stadium is located on the north side of Aphrodisias forming part of the city walls. The stadium is one of antiquitys largest and well preserved with two semi-circular ellipes at its ends and a seating of 30000 spectators.
Terapylon
