There are a nunber of excellent mosaic floor remains found in the Adana Museum mainly up on the top floor of this converted warehouse, including a floor from a synagogue which depicts the Isaianic scene of Isaiah’s vision of animal paradise and one about Noah’s ark and his animals. Here are some samples. I’ll let you guess which is from Isaiah and which is from Genesis. There is also considerable funerary art, including the so-called sarcophagus of Achilles, which is... Read more
Before this trip, I had never been to Adana, and so never to the considerable Adana museum. This city may ring a bell since we have an airbase there, Incerlik and that Turkey is a member of NATO. The holdings of the Adana museum are considerable, so multiple blog posts are in order, My one complaint is this museum should be air conditioned! It was brutally hot both outside and inside this museum, with the visitors dripping on the antiquities! ... Read more
There is a debate amongst Biblical scholars about which Ur Abraham came from— Ur of the Chaldees in Mesopotamia, or Urfa in Turkey. I am unconvinced that it is Urfa, but it is true that Urfa is not a long way from Haran, which Abraham certainly came through. Haran today is right on the Syrian border and remains a very small town, which once had a major Islamic University, in the late middle ages. More recently, it has had numerous... Read more
On the edge of the eastern part of the Empire, Roman emperors were still expanding or shoring up their territory, and one example is this splendid bridge over a major river, which until very recently was still taking regular car traffic. This bridge is on the edge of the Commagene kingdom (more about that in subsequent posts). Here’s the bridge…. Severus ruled from 193-211 A.D. Thus this is one of the last construction projects in the east, before the Empire... Read more
Tarsus today is a small town. The first time I visited it 20 years ago, it had a Christian school. Today that is a public school. There is a St. Paul Church in Tarsus, but it only dates to 1862. There is no historical evidence that Paul ever started a church here, and none of his letters suggest that he did. But there are some... Read more
You may have recognized that smirking face from Top Gun: Maverick, or Hitman. But now he’s the star of the new thriller Twister…. which of course is a movie done before in 1996, only this time with King Stephen the Spielberg being the executive producer. The early reviews of the movie are very good, saying its the best action thriller of the summer, and I can only agree. It’s one of those movies that makes you grip the theater seat... Read more
Not all the mosaics with mythological images in them were excavated and taken off to the Zeugma museum. There are a few partial exceptions. It the picture above you can see some of the terra cotta pipes for the running water in the building, and yes they had toilets in houses as well. Here’s the even bigger pipes, and yes they had cisterns in house for collecting water as well for bathing etc. Notice the cistern in the picture above... Read more
The Roman elites in a colony city tended to cluster together in one part of the city, think the high rent district. In many ways, they kept to themselves, partially out of self-preservation. Overlords are often badly out number by local natives, not to mention by their slaves. Like at the slope houses in Ephesus, houses were built up a hill, and packed together side by side…. Sometimes, it is hard for students to imagine from the ruins what the... Read more
The word zeugma in common parlance means bridge, and in this case it refers to a frontier town built next to a crucial bridge across the Euphrates guarded by the Romans on the eastern frontier of the empire. Very few tour groups ever go to Zeugma itself, only to the Zeugma Museum on Gaziantep which is spectacular, and which we have done various blog posts on previously. But finally we went this time to the site itself. The backstory is... Read more
The port for the city Antioch was a considerable distance from the city, a full 18 miles over rugged terrain. But this is where Paul and Barnabas would have sailed from to go to Cyprus, and where they came back to after the first missionary journey. Today there is little to see of the ancient port, but it was an important port in ancient times, especially for the Romans as they built their Empire eastward. Here are some shots of... Read more
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