Major Find at Sagalasso
July 30, 2007
A huge, exquisitely carved marble statue of the Roman emperor Hadrian is the latest find from Sagalassos, an ancient Greco-Roman city in south-central Turkey. Archaeologists estimate that the figure was originally between 13 and 16 feet in height (four to five meters). It is, says excavation director Marc Waelkens, one of the most beautiful portraits of Hadrian ever found.
The discovery was made by archaeologists from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), who, under Waelkens' direction, have been investigating the site since 1990. Last month a new excavation campaign started, and the Belgians resumed work at the Roman Bath, focusing on the southeastern corner of the complex.
On Sunday the first fragments of a over life-size statue, a foot and part of a leg, were unearthed. The foot is 31.5 inches (0.80 meters) long; the leg, from just above the knee to the ankle, is nearly five feet (1.5 meters). The elaborate sandal depicted on the footed indicated to the archaeologists that the fragments were from the statue of an emperor. On Monday, the almost intact head of the statue was discovered, revealing that the statue was of Hadrian, who ruled from A.D. 117 to 138. The head measures more than 27 inches (0.70 meters).
Construction of the bath complex in Sagalassos was started during Hadrian's reign, though the building was finished only several decades later. The bath complex is one of several major building projects at Sagalassos that can be dated to the time of Hadrian and the city had a sanctuary of the imperial cult dedicated to Hadrian and his successor Antoninus Pius.
The statue probably dates from the beginning of Hadrian's rule.
A frieze slab from the NW Heroon
City in the Clouds
In 1706, Paul Lucas, traveling in southwest Turkey on a mission for the court of Louis XIV, came upon the mountaintop ruins of Sagalassos. The first Westerner to see the site, Lucas wrote that he seemed to be confronted with remains of several cities inhabited by fairies. Later, during the mid-nineteenth century, William Hamilton described it as the best preserved ancient city he had ever seen. Toward the end of that century, Sagalassos and its theater became famous among students of classical antiquity. Yet large scale excavations along the west coast at sites like Ephesos and Pergamon, attracted all the attention. Gradually Sagalassos was forgotten...until a British-Belgian team led by Stephen Mitchell started surveying the site in 1985.
The Roman Baths at Sagalassos
Since 1990, Sagalassos has become a large-scale, interdisciplinary excavation of the Catholic University of Leuven, directed by Marc Waelkens. We are now exposing the monumental city center and have completed, or nearly completed, four major restoration projects there. We've also undertaken an intensive urban and geophysical survey, excavations in the domestic and industrial areas, and an intensive survey of its vast territory. Whereas the former document a thousand years of occupation, from Alexander the Great to the seventh century, the latter has established the changing settlement patterns, the vegetation history and farming practices, the landscape formation and climatic changes during the last 10,000 years.
Field Notes
After nearly exactly one year (some recent updates excluded), we are resuming our weekly reports. To summarize briefly the main results of last year, the older site at Tepe D�zen proved to be the Early Iron Age predecessor of Sagalassos (see 2006 Tepe D�zen, July 30-August 10), densely inhabited from the eighth century B.C. at the latest until a (major) abandonment in the course of the fourth century B.C., when some of inhabitants, most probably because of water shortages, moved to the current site. In the mean time, the study of the regional pottery contemporary with Tepe D�zen, has shown that the latter site eventually became the main regional center, undoubtedly with an "urban" character and controlling already a large territory, before it was abandoned.
The location of the Iron Age settlement on Tepe D�zen
As for Sagalassos itself, the works on the embellishment and expansion of the site in early Imperial times proved to be more impressive than previously assumed, as the colonnaded N-S street (see 2006 N-S Colonnaded Street, July 10-August 16) was not following a natural ridge, but built upon a massive fill with thousands of cubic meters of stone and earth between the limestone hill carrying the Apollo Klarios shrine and the natural platform with the temple dedicated to the Divine Hadrian and Antoninus Pius. Moreover the fact that further test soundings refined its construction date to the Augustan period turned it into one of the oldest colonnaded streets of Anatolia.
The Colonnaded Street proved to be built upon a massive fill between the hill of the Apollo Klarios shrine and the platform on which stood the Hadrian and Antoninus Pius shrine.
The work in the Odeon suggested that this covered concert hall, which at the west seems to have been interwoven with the masonry of the late Hadrianic fountain's back wall, was part of the same Hadrianic building operation. The beautiful corridor exposed in 2005 was doubled by a second one, containing two stairways: one leading to the VIP box above the vaulted entrance leading to the first corridor from the podium and another one leading to a separate entrance for the VIP's. The interior scaenae frons (stage facade), however, seems to have been added in its current state in the Severan period (late second-early third century A.D.). After a partial collapse, possibly caused by an earthquake around the transition of the fifth to the sixth century A.D., the podium was abandoned and the orchestra's soil raised, and the building most probably henceforth used for with animal and gladiator fights; eventually, it became the dump of a butcher.
The excavated part of the Odeon seen from the West
Work in the nearby Roman Baths (see 2006 Roman Baths, July 10-August 10) focused on the south side of the complex, where a row of original rooms, consisting of a caldarium or hot water bath with two major bath tubs, and a tepidarium (for half warm water) with a foot bath formed the transition toward the cross-shaped cold-water room or frigidarium I, partially exposed with its mosaic floors in 2005 and this year producing the major find thus far, the head of a colossal marble statue of Hadrian. During the sixth century A.D., when the Kaisersaal (used for representing and worshiping the imperial family) had lost its function and was transformed into a larger caldarium, the new caldarium of 2006 was turned into a heating room, one of the tubs becoming a praefurnium, whereas the tepidarium continued to exist. This means that the baths had a double sequence of caldarium, tepidarium and frigidarium: one along the west and north side (for the women?) and one along the east and south side (for the men?). New dates obtained by AMS radiocarbon dating from bone from the baths now place the major earthquake destroying the city between the late sixth and the earlier seventh century A.D., i.e. nearly a generation earlier than previously assumed.
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