Most of what there is to see in the museum under the hotel itself involves the villas and their mosaics, which are still in situ, in the place where they were found but this is not entirely so.  So pottery and other objects were found and are displayed like at a normal museum… for instance…   But the real focus is not what you find in the few glass cases but what you see when you walk on the elevated... Read more

Antioch on the Orontes is a nice smaller town where we fill find excellent Kunefe— a delicious dessert which is a sort of shredded wheat and honey and nuts concoction.  This word just in, the people who invented baklava (yes the Turks not the Greeks did that) are really good at pastry sorts of desserts. But of course there are other things to see and check out… for instance the mosaic art shop which makes beautiful things like this… You... Read more

On the way to Antioch on the Orontes where the followers of Christ were first called Christianoi, or partisans of Christ,  we stopped at a remarkable Hittite site, where statues were made.  The Hittites are perhaps one of the least well known ethnic groups when it comes to Bible readers, though they may remember Uriah was a Hittite, the first husband of Bathsheba.  In fact the Hittites carved out a considerable Empire which at one point in fact covered much... Read more

The Zeugma Mosaic Museum is perhaps the most amazing mosaic museum in all the Lands of the Bible. The museum has a brief picture exhibit of pictures of what happened at Zeugma when all the mosaics had to be removed… Most of the exhibit is just mosaics, but some reconstruction of some sample rooms where the mosaics were is also undertaken… The one mosaic which has been give its very own. room and exhibit is the gypsy girl, sometimes also... Read more

Gaziantep is a city on the spice route, which has an incredible bazaar, and an even more incredible mosaic museum with mosaics that were moved lock, stock, and barrel from nearby Zeugma, a Roman frontier city on a lake with many impressive villas.  The archaeologists had to work at warp speed to get the job done, because the new dam was about to let water cover the whole site.  We’ll look at the latter in subsequent posts, but let’s start... Read more

Gobeckli Tepe (which means pot-bellied hill in Turkish) is a religious site, a high place in the OT sense, in southeastern Turkey which has rightly created a sensation. The German scholar who helped excavate it wrote a book about it entitled Der Ersten Tempel— the first temple. By various means of reckoning, this site dates to somewhere between 8-10,000 B.C. And it has mightily confounded secular anthropologists who had assumed that religion only shows up after agriculture and village life. ... Read more

Urfa, or Sanli-urfa (which means beautiful Urfa, pronounced Shanli-Urfa) is an interesting town. According to one Muslim tradition, this is where Abraham is buried (compare what the OT says). In fact this city in NT times and before was known as Edessa.  In this post we will look at the market place in town, and then in the next post we will consider the now famous archaeological site of Gobeckli Tepe which is not far outside the city and the... Read more

Tombs come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, there are even double decker tombs when a family only had entitlement to a small piece of land for burial… There were Jewish tombs with the sign of the menorah carved into the lintel… Even in the city of the dead, there were signs of life… There were house shaped tombs, or mausoleums…. These tend to have benches inside to lay the coffins on… Some even have two floors worth of... Read more

In order to get to the nekropolis, one has to actually go past what was once the main street into town from the nekropolis end of town, so we will look at a few things before we start examining tombs…. From the backside one can even see the snow-capped mountains even in late July…. But right next to the Frontinus gate is in fact the tomb of a wealthy businessman named Flavius Xeuxis 72 trips around Cape Malea on the... Read more

Meanwhile back on the ground, let’s see the ancient city of Hierapolis, which according to tradition a Philip settled here, most likely the one who had the prophesying daughters in Acts, not the apostle, bearing in mind how all those persons got blended together in the second and later centuries.   As you can see from the map this is a long linear site and at the far left end of the map is the necropolis, or the city of... Read more