Into Turkey— Part Thirty-Seven

This will be the last post on Turkey until after Christmas.    Since Ephesus is one of the two or three largest tourist attractions in all of Turkey, there are vendors aplenty… some of them more honest than others….

And they say there’s no truth in advertising….

There are many many things to see at this site, which only exists outside of a city due to the earthquakes and the moving of the entire town as a result….. a map and some aerial pictures first will show that we are dealing with a city built between two hills without a genuine acropolis, and without major walls…. but then this city used to be right by a harbor before the Meander and the harboe silted up.

You can see what was happening.  The city, already before the NT era was already suffering from a harbor that was silting up so badly ships couldn’t come all the way to the docks…..  These aerial shots make the point as well…  that green space in the upper part of the picture used to be all water leading up to the docks near the south agora…

You can see where the water is today, but that is a modern lake…

Here is a schematic of the city…

You can see the south harbor on the left of the picture and then on the upper right of the schematic.  With the lost of a proper harbor, that meant the loss of trade, but also the loss of religious pilgrims.  No wonder the silversmith in Ephesus went ballistic when he thought Paul’s preaching was further compromising an already diminishing market for his shrines.

We will start at the high point in the city and work our way down to the stadium and where the south agora and lower harbor used to be… So important was this city that various emperors patronized it and built things here to support the city’s prosperity (and increase those emperor’s popularity of course).

There was a agora, a large imperial complex, an odeon and much more at the high end of the city, and it was a quite a long way from this odeon where the city council met to the stadium at the bottom of the main street, Curetes Street, and so it took a while for a clerk at one end of town to hoof it down to the stadium and stop a near riot over Paul and his preaching against Artemis…but that was not the first trouble Paul caused in his 2.5 years in this city.  There was also the condemnation of magic and the burning of magic books…

Here is the remains of the temple of Domitian…

In fact Augustus himself had set this whole imperial patronage in motion by making Ephesus the capital city of the province of Asia, the most important of the western provinces in that land.

Here below is the odeon….

While there is ongoing archaeological work on this site probably less than a half has been dug, and of the half that has, there is much reconstruction still to be done especially in the high end of the city leading down to the slope houses of the elites…

And throughout the city there was signs of life, of building, and of whimsy too… like the graffiti, this actually scratched into some rich person’s wall in the slope houses….

This seems to be a business record of the costs of things bought….

We will deal with the slope houses in the next post, after Christmas…..