After the Flood!

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It was called one of the biggest archaeological finds in years: In late November 1999 Turkish and French archaeologists began excavating the ancient Roman city of Zeugma in southeastern Turkey. Within weeks, they’d unearthed two large villas containing over a dozen exquisite ancient Roman mosaics. Preliminary surveys revealed that hundreds of other villas lay buried just beneath the surface of the surrounding area. It’s a 035“second Pompeii,” crowed one local Turkish politician.

But time was running out for the 2,300-year-old city on the banks of the Euphrates. On April 29, 2000—less than six months after the Turkish and French team began their excavations—the Turkish government completed construction of a new hydroelectric dam that sent millions of gallons of water spilling across the surface of Zeugma. The flood waters created by the dam continue to rise at a rate of about 3 feet a day, and by late October of this year somewhere between 10 percent and 30 percent of the city’s ruins will be completely submerged beneath an artificial lake.

Turkey’s decision not to halt construction of the $1.5 billion Birecik Dam, which sits just half a mile south of the archaeological site, ignited a firestorm of controversy around the world. American, British and Western European newspapers all accused the Turkish government—which has some of the strictest antiquities laws in the world—of hypocritically turning its back on its cultural heritage. “Turkey floods newly discovered outpost,” one CBS News story announced, before going on to accuse the Turkish government of destroying priceless cultural artifacts. “Too Fast in Turkey,” scolded the International Herald Tribune.

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Most of the western news coverage of Zeugma focused on the excavation team’s dramatic “last-minute” discoveries at the site. “Concentrated excavations began only last winter, after it became clear that the site was about to be lost,” reported a frontpage article in the New York Times. “[The excavators] say they are amazed at what they’ve found.”

But the saga behind Zeugma’s much-lamented drowning is actually much more complicated, and much, much older, than the popular media coverage has suggested. Scholars have been aware of the existence of a significant Roman settlement in the area around Zeugma for more than 200 years.¹ The tombs of Zeugma’s ancient necropolis have always been visible from the nearby modern village of Belkis, and Roman coins, seals and ancient debris are often found in the surrounding countryside. For many years, the identity of the ancient city near Belkis was unknown, but in the 1970s the German archaeologist Jörg Wagner discovered a set of inscribed roof tiles that helped to identify the ruins as Zeugma.²

Founded in the third century B.C. by the Seleucid king Seleucus Nicator, Zeugma was once the site of the only ancient bridge across the Euphrates. The bridge originally linked two important Seleucid settlements, the town of Seleucia, on the west bank of the Euphrates, and the town of Apamaea, on the east bank; but over time the two communities merged into a single great metropolis, which became known by the general name Zeugma (meaning “junction” or “span” in ancient Greek.)

Conquered by the Romans in the first century B.C., Zeugma became the base of a Roman military force (the IV Scythica legion) and the easternmost outpost of the Roman Empire. Under Roman rule, Zeugma served as an important trading center on the Silk Road, attracting rich merchants and powerful military officials, who built some of the most lavishly decorated villas in the ancient Near East. At the height of the Pax Romana, Zeugma probably had a population of over 60,000 civilians and 10,000 soldiers, but the city sank into obscurity after it was sacked by the Persian Sassanians around 252 A.D. and then leveled by an earthquake in the late third century A.D.

When the Turkish government began erecting a series of dams in southeastern Turkey in the 1980s, a handful of archaeologists expressed concern about the fate of Zeugma. From 1992 to 1994, Turkish archaeologists from the local Gaziantep Museum conducted a series of rescue excavations at the site. Following a “robber’s tunnel” originally dug by looters, they excavated a tomb and two ancient villas with ornate floor mosaics, wall paintings and small bronze figurines. One of the houses contained the remains of a badly damaged but still spectacular mosaic, depicting the marriage of Dionysus and Ariadne. (Unfortunately, due to a lack of security at the 037site, this mosaic was subsequently stolen by looters.)

One year after the Turkish excavators located the House of Dionysus, and Ariadne the Australian archaeologist David Kennedy conducted his own brief survey of the ruins at Zeugma. In the course of 17 frantic days in September 1993, Kennedy and a small team of volunteers mapped out the location of several villas and excavated another large house with floor mosaics.

Kennedy concluded that Zeugma had the potential to be a world-class archaeological attraction. “At Zeugma one is confronted with a site of Mediterranean-wide significance,” he wrote in his 1998 book The Twin Towns of Zeugma on the Euphrates. The city offers “great potential as a combined research and rescue project.”³

Despite two years of non-stop lobbying, Kennedy was unable to obtain money for a major dig from either Turkish or foreign sources. Turkish officials were consistently helpful and eager to work with foreign archaeologists, he said, but they lacked the funds necessary to mount a serious investigation of the 50,000-acre site. At present, the Turkish government devotes less than one percent of its annual budget to the preservation of antiquities. With these funds, Turkish officials are expected to preserve and excavate more than 30 ancient cities and hundreds of smaller archaeological sites.

Kennedy believes that Zeugma fell victim to two recent trends in classical archaeology. First, he says, there is an insidious trend towards “continued excavation, decade after decade, at a handful of major city sites which are under no threat, but absorb substantial resources.” Second, there is the increasing “unfashionableness of city excavation among younger classicists.”

Perhaps because of such academic biases, Zeugma had still not been thoroughly investigated by the end of 1999, when a small team of archaeologists from the Gaziantep Museum and the University of Nantes, in France, embarked on a last-ditch effort to excavate the lowest levels of the city. In mid-April they dazzled the archaeological world with their discovery of two more palatial Roman villas—both of them remarkably intact and crammed full of artifacts, frescoes and mosaics.

At last count, at least 16 stunning floor mosaics had been recovered from the site, many of them depicting scenes from Greek mythology. One second- or third-century A.D. pavement shows a life-sized figure of Achilles in the court of Lycomedes. (The King of Scyros, Lycomedes sought to prevent Achilles’s death in the Trojan war by hiding the Greek hero in his court and disguising him as a woman.) Another mosaic features an exquisite rendering of the Greek gods Tethys and Oceanus, and still others show scenes from the legend of the minotaur.

“On a scale of 1 to 10, these mosaics are absolutely a 10, ” raves Christine Kondoleon, a mosaics expert and curator of Greek and Roman art at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, who recently returned from a month-long visit to site. According to Kondoleon, the mosaics from Zeugma easily rival those at Antioch or Tunis. Indeed, Kondoleon suspects that some of the Zeugma floors may actually have been created by artisans trained in the celebrated workshops of Antioch (“Polyglot Antioch”).

Along with the floor pavements and wall frescoes, 038the last-minute excavations at Zeugma also turned up a magnificent 5-foot-tall bronze statue of Mars, about 3,700 Roman coins and an archive of more than 60,000 ceramic seals.

As spectacular as these finds are, they came too late to save Zeugma from the deluge. By early May 2000, when the first press reports about the demise of Zeugma began to appear, Turkey had already finished building the Birecik Dam, which is expected to provide millions of dollars worth of electricity to one of the poorest and most underdeveloped regions in Turkey.

The Turkish government did order a ten-day suspension in the operation of the dam in early June, but it could not afford a longer delay. According to Akif Oktai, consul for cultural affairs at the Turkish embassy in Washington D.C., it would have cost Turkey at least $120 million to postpone the operation of the dam for four months, as some archaeologists requested. “We tried very hard to find some scheme to stop the flooding,” Oktai told Archaeology Odyssey, “but there really were pressing economic concerns.”

Ironically, as public criticism of Turkey’s decision to proceed with the dam has mounted, it is the archaeologists who have rushed to Turkey’s defense. “It’s not reasonable to expect the Turks to abandon the dam and mount a major stratigraphic excavation of the site,” said Richard Hodges, a British archaeologist from the University of East Anglia who has recently joined the team working at Zeugma. “They’re a developing country, and they just don’t have the resources.”

“I really don’t think there’s any point in slamming the Turks,” echoed Christine Kondoleon. “They tried very hard to rescue the site once they realized its importance.” (Of course, it should be noted that many foreign archaeologists are reluctant to criticize the Turkish government publicly, since, as one scholar put it, “the Ministry of Culture won’t let you back into the country if you say anything nasty about them.”)

Now that the initial furor over whether or not to proceed with the dam has abated, foreign archaeologists and Turkish authorities are working together to preserve as much of Zeugma’s remaining heritage as they can. Thanks to all the publicity surrounding the flooding of the site, the Turkish Ministry of Culture has now received a $5 million grant from the 039California-based Packard Humanities Institute, which will be used to excavate and preserve those portions of Zeugma that have not yet been affected by flooding. (Since Zeugma was built into a hill, scholars estimate that between 70 and 90 percent of the ancient city will actually remain above water.)

Over the next few months, money from the Packard Institute will be used to fund an ambitious rescue excavation of the half-mile-long terrace that is expected to be submerged this October. Preliminary surveys suggest that the terrace is densely packed with buildings, ranging from private villas to a monumental public archive full of ceramic seals. With the help of a special archaeological conservation unit from England, the Turks expect to have most of the terrace surveyed and excavated before the area is submerged.

Another portion of the Packard grant will be used to hire a team of mosaic conservators from the Centro di Conservazione Archeologica in Rome. Under the leadership of the renowned mosaic expert Roberto Nardi, this group will help conserve any new mosaics that come to light in the coming months. Once rescue excavations are complete, they will also set about restoring the 1,800 square feet of mosaics that have already been shipped to the Gaziantep Museum. If enough mosaics are excavated, the Turks may consider opening up a new mosaic museum at Zeugma or Gaziantep.

Unlike previous digs at Zeugma, which have been very small in scale and poorly funded, the Packard Institute’s projects will involve hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of high-tech equipment, dozens of professional excavators and scores of Turkish workmen. The excavations are being guided by a research committee including David Packard, Richard Hodges and Catherine Abadie-Reynal (an archaeologist from the University of Nantes who has been carrying out a geophysical survey of the Zeugma region for over five years).

Hodges estimates that the total costs of the excavation and conservation projects may run as high as $20 million over the next five years; the Packard Institute has already expressed an interest in donating additional funds, and Turkey is considering 041several other offers of financial assistance.

“We hope that this will be a learning experience in how to carry out economic development projects while avoiding these kinds of archaeological losses in the future,” said Hodges.

If the Packard Institute’s initiatives prove successful, Turkey’s critics may one day have to revise their accounts of the flooding of Zeugma. After all, many archaeologists now believe that the inundated portions of the site will emerge relatively unscathed when the dam is shut down and the flood waters recede in 50 years. Meanwhile, thanks to all of the media frenzy surrounding the building of the Birecik Dam, the city of Zeugma has finally begun to attract the serious archaeological attention it deserves. Could it be that the story of Zeugma will end not in tragedy but in triumph—with the rising waters of the Euphrates lifting this ancient city out of obscurity?

It was called one of the biggest archaeological finds in years: In late November 1999 Turkish and French archaeologists began excavating the ancient Roman city of Zeugma in southeastern Turkey. Within weeks, they’d unearthed two large villas containing over a dozen exquisite ancient Roman mosaics. Preliminary surveys revealed that hundreds of other villas lay buried just beneath the surface of the surrounding area. It’s a 035“second Pompeii,” crowed one local Turkish politician. But time was running out for the 2,300-year-old city on the banks of the Euphrates. On April 29, 2000—less than six months after the Turkish and French […]