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EPHESUS
According
to the old legends, Ephesus was
founded by the female warriors known
as the Amazons. The name of the city
is thought to have been derived from
"APASAS", the name of a city in the
"KINGDOM OF ARZAWA" meaning the "city
of the Mother Goddess". Ephesus was
inhabited from the end of the Bronze
Age onwards, but changed its
location several times in the course
of its long history in accordance
with habits and requirements.
Carians and Lelegians are to be have
been among the city's first
inhabitants. Ionian migrations are
said to have begun in around 1200
B.C. According to legend, the city
was founded for the second time by
Androclus, the son of Codrus, king
of Athens, on the shore at the point
where the CAYSTER (Küçük Menderes)
empties into the sea, a location to
which they had been guided by a fish
and a wild boar on the advice of the
soothsayers. The Ionian cities that
grew up in the wake of the Ionian
migrations joined in a confederacy
under the leadership of Ephesus. The
region was devastated during the
Cimmerian invasion at the beginning
of the 7th century B.C. Under the
rule of the Lydian kings, Ephesus
became one of the wealthiest cities
in the Mediterranean world. The
defeat of the Lydian King Croesus by
Cyrus, the King of Persia, prepared
the way for the extension of Persian
hegemony over the whole of the
Aegean coastal region. At the
beginning of the 5th century, when
the Ionian cities rebelled against
Persia, Ephesus quickly dissociated
itself from the others, thus
escaping destruction.
Ephesus remained under Persian rule
until the arrival of Alexander the
Great in 334 B.C., when it entered
upon a fifty year period of peace
and tranquillity. Lysimachus, who
had been one of the twelve generals
of Alexander the Great and became
ruler of the region on Alexander's
death, decided to embark upon the
development of the city, which he
called Arsineia after his wife
Arsinoe. He constructed a new
harbour and built defence walls on
the slopes of the Panayır and Bülbül
Mts., moving the whole city 2.5 km
to the south-west. Realising,
however, that the Ephesians were
unwilling to leave their old city,
he had the whole sewage system
blocked up during a great storm,
making the houses uninhabitable and
forcing the inhabitants to move. In
281 B.C. the city was re-founded
under the old name of Ephesus and
became one of the most important of
the commercial ports in the
Mediterranean.
In 129 B.C. the Romans took
advantage of the terms of the will
left by Attalos, King of Pergamon,
by which they were bequathed his
kingdom, to incorporate the whole
region into the Roman Empire as the
province of Asia. Ancient sources
show that at this time the city had
a population of 200,000. In the 1st
century B.C. the heavy taxes imposed
by the Roman government led the
population to embrace Mithridates as
their savior and to support him in
his mutiny against Roman authority
and in 88 B.C. a massacre was
carried out of all the Latin
speaking inhabitants of the city,
which was then stormed and sacked by
a Roman army under Sulla, It was
from the reign of Augustus onwards
that the buildings we admire today
were constructed. According to
documentary sources, the city
suffered severe damage in an
earthquake in 17 A.D. After that,
however, Ephesus became a very
important centre of trade and
commerce. The historian Aristio
describes Ephesus as being
recognised by all the inhabitants of
the region as the most important
trading centre in Asia. It was also
the leading political and
intellectual centre, with the second
school of philosophy in the Aegean.
From the 1st century onwards,
Ephesus was visited by Christian
disciples attempting to spread the
Christian belief in a single God and
thus forced to seek refuge from
Roman persecution. Besides enjoying
a privileged position between East
and West coupled with an
exceptionally fine climate, the city
owed its importance to its being the
centre of the cult of Artemis.
For the Christians, the city, with
its highly advanced way of life, its
high standard of living, the variety
of its demographic composition and
its firmly rooted polytheistic
culture, must have presented itself
as an ideal pilot region... From
written sources we learn that St
Paul remained in the city for three
years from 65 to 68, and that it was
here that he preached his famous
sermons calling upon the hearers to
embrace the faith in. one God. He
taught that God had no need of a
house made with human hands and that
he was present in all places at all
times. This was all greatly resented
by the craftsmen who had amassed
great wealth from their production
of statues of Artemis in gold,
silver or other materials. A
silversmith by the name of Demetrius
stirred up the people and led a
crowd of thousands of Ephesians to
the theatre, where they booed and
stoned Paul and his two colleagues,
chanting "Great is Artemis of the
Ephesians! Great is Artemis of the
Ephesians!" So turbulent was the
crowd that Paul and his companions
escaped only with great difficulty.
From his Epistles to the communities
it would appear that Paul spent some
time as a prisoner in Ephesus.
Legend has it that St John the
Evangelist came to Ephesus with the
Virgin Mary in his care. Some also
say that it was here that he wrote
his Gospel and was finally buried.
In 269 Ephesus and the surrounding
country was devastated by the Goths.
At that time there was still a
temple in which the cult of Artemis
was practised. In 381, by order of
the Emperor Theodosius, the temple
was closed down, and in the
following centuries it lay
completely abandoned, serving as a
quarry for building materials.
The situation of the city, which had
given it its privileged geographical
position, was also the cause of its
decline and fall. The prosperity of
the city had been based on its
possession of a sheltered natural
harbour, but by the Roman period
ships reached the harbour to the
west of Mt Pion 1.5 km from the
Temple of Artemis through a very
narrow and difficult channel. The
cause of this was the Meander
(Cayster) River, which emptied into
the Aegean a little to the west of
the city of Ephesus, where it
created a delta formed by the
alluvium carried down by the river
over thousands of years. By the late
Byzantine era the channel had been
so silted up as to be no longer
usable. The sea gradually receded
farther and farther, while the
marshy lands around the harbour gave
rise to a number of diseases, such
as malaria. The new outlook that had
arisen with the spread of
Christianity led to the gradual
abandonment of all buildings bearing
witness to the existence of
polytheistic cults and the
construction in their place of
Christian churches. In the year 431
the third Ecumenical council took
place in Ephesus.
Emperor Theodosius convoked another
council in Ephesus in 449, which
came to be known as the "robber
council". From the 6th century
onwards the Church of St John was an
important place of pilgrimage, and
Justinian took measures to protect
it by having.the whole hill on which
it stood surrounded by defence
walls. Shortly afterwards, the
Church of the Virgin and other
places of worship were destroyed and
pillaged in Arab raids. In the 7th
century the city was transferred to
the site now occupied by the town of
Selçuk and during the Byzantine era
Ephesus grew up around the summit of
Mt Ayasuluğ. The city enjoyed its
last years of prosperity under the
Selçuk Emirate of the Aydınoğulları.
During the Middle Ages the city
ceased to function as a port.
By the 20th century the silt carried
down by the Meander had extended the
plain for a distance of 5 km.
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