Into Turkey–Part Thirty-Six

Also usually missed by the normal tours is the important little museum of Ephesus, which we will now explore…

On the front outside the museum we see small stone representations of gladiators….

And the usual beautiful flowers..

And giant sarcophagi too big to fit into a small museum…

Inside the museum there are multiple statues of Artemis, who appears in various ways…. probably the items on her chest are breasts, but they could also be eggs…in either case they are symbols of fertility, as she was the goddess of fertility.

There is also a nice small model of the temple of Artemis in the museum…

Probably the emperor that John anathematized in his Revelation was Domitian who indeed persecuted Christians, and sent John himself into exile.

Of the three Flavian emperors (Vespasian his father, then Titus his brother) he was clearly the worst. He was paranoid and finally was done away with.

Here’s a nice bust of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius.. a much better emperor…

This is a sundial, before there were Arabic numbers… so Greek letter mark the divisions of degrees. Below is the symbol of the city of Ephesus on a coin— and the meaning of the word Ephesos, namely bee!

There are some busts of priests and priestesses…

Complete with their party hats on…

There is also a bust of a third century empress…

And more importantly a nice bust of Socrates…

There are the remains of a spectacular frieze rescued from a burnt down house and here is what the sign says it depicts…

Here is a spectacular serving tray…

Below, busts of Eros (looking anything but lustful) and Lysimachus

And one more interesting frieze and a few sides of sarcophagi for good measure….

After all that, we went to a carpet factory where we drank tea and were educated in how a silk worms threads could be turned into a beautiful and expensive carpet, expensive not least because even a small one takes up to 500 man hours to hand make if not more. The big one’s take years, which of course why in America we let machines do the work…. and the product is much inferior, to say the least. First he demonstrates how using a whisk broom and boiling water he can separate the threads from the cocoons (and by the way those worms only eat mulberry leaves if you want any production).Let me be clear, I saw no magic carpets, despite the name of the factory.

There was however one flying object hanging out in the room….

Then the thread is wound up on spindles…

Then the thread is dyed…

Using all natural dyes… e.g. vegetable and other plant dyes…

Then we have the long process of doing the double knot process done in Turkey which makes the weave much more secure than a single knot process, but also much more time consuming… the worker needs a comb like object to bang the threads down once knotted, and a knife to cut the thread as well.