Ephesus
The ancient Greco-Roman city of Ephesus ranks with Pompeii and Santorini (Thera) as examples of the world's best preserved ancient cities. All three are subject to on-going archaeological excavation and investigation but unlike the other two Ephesus was not buried alive by a volcano but simply abandoned when it was then partially destroyed by an earthquake in 614 CE and its harbour was then allowed to silt-up. In that respect it has echoes of Petra in Jordan that was simply abandoned due to climate change. The ruins are now eight and a half km inland, separated from the sea by a large area of flat, apparently productive, agricultural land where once the ancient harbour held hundreds of ships at anchor.
I've been here before - over thirty years ago. That time I was on a cruise ship so I'd recently been to Santorini. Ephesus was less impressive, both by comparison and because it was less excavated than it is today. Back then there was no public access to the Terrace Houses, as we'd seen on Santorini, just a large crane in my photos, that suggested that something was going on. Now the Terrace Houses can be visited under a huge semi-transparent roof.
On the other hand it was a lot less busy back then as virtually all the tourists were from our ship. We had the place to ourselves. This time we certainly didn't have it to ourselves.
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Hadrian's Library (left 1988 - right 2019)
The Large Amphitheatre (left 1988 - right 2019)
The crane over the Terrace Houses in 1988 - these are off to the left in the 2019 photo
The highlights of Ephesus include 'Hadrian's Library' - he certainly got around - and the afore mentioned Terrace Houses. Six of these were somehow buried and thus preserved, perhaps by a landslide, and excavations began in the 1960's.
Built on steeply sloping land at the end of the 1st Century BCE they had two storeys, with living and dining rooms downstairs and bedrooms upstairs. Clay pipes beneath the floors and behind the walls carried hot air through the houses from a Roman style furnace. So that they also had bathrooms and hot and cold running water. They were used as dwellings for several centuries before their demise, so the wall decorations we see here are not the original. Yet some of the floor mosaics may be. When discovered they were called: 'the houses of the rich' but as these six are the only survivors, who knows what the other dwellings were like? There are bigger mansions at Pompeii so these could be quite modest.
Today townhouses like these would be middle class. A comfortable society, unless you were a slave. Yet it's days were numbered as their world was soon to be unsettled by: natural disasters; climate change; technological advance; and social and religious revolution.
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The Terrace Houses spacious rooms with tiled floors and plastered and decorated walls
they had in floor heating and plumbing - bottom right is a bath.
They've been under cover and available to the public since 1999.
As I mentioned above, these Terrace Houses are strikingly similar to houses excavated in remnants of ancient Minoan city of Akrotiri on Santorini, less than 300 km away by sea. Those too are two storey with: wall frescos; mosaic floors; plumbing; and heating and are in similar condition having been buried by the eruption of the Thera volcano that destroyed much of the Santorini settlement and half the island.
That eruption was one of the most massive in recorded history and had huge impacts on the whole Mediterranean region. So it's of great interest to many disciplines, from historians and archaeologists, to earth scientists, for whom the date is critical to other liked events. As a result they disagree on the actual year. But most now agree that it was somewhere between 1600 and 1525 BCE.
Suffice it to say that the discovery of houses like these, buried beneath volcanic ash nearly four thousand years ago, revealed that the Ancient Minoans were much more socially advanced than the Ancient Greeks of the same period, on whom historians had previously relied for knowledge about Minoan culture.
That of course leads to the question: what metaphysical beliefs were contributing to this society's obvious success? And the answer is: we don't really know because their writing has not yet been deciphered. So most of what we know about them is from their quite prolific and beautiful art. But we do know that they were polytheistic and most of their deities were female. Perhaps one was a version of Artemis who has also been associated with the Amazons.
At Ephesus there is also a very large but still partly ruined amphitheatre (the one mentioned in the Bible) that has restoration work underway in addition to: public toilets; the inevitable brothel, like those at Pompeii but relatively boring having no surviving images, except for markings in the street pointing the way for sailors; a large number of fallen columns; and the footprints ruined domestic, commercial and religious buildings.
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The large amphitheatre; the public toilet; and at the other end of the city the small amphitheatre
It's a big site and there is a lot more as yet unearthed in the surrounding fields.
It requires at least half a day, to walk around it all.
There is very little shade and we were well advised to take umbrellas (portable shade-providers - from the Italian ombrella, the diminutive of ombra: ‘shade’) along with a water bottle. Good tips - should you wish to visit.
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Take a water bottle and an umbrella - mine is on the ground near my feet
The Ancient Church of Mary
Adjacent to the present Ephesus car park is another group of ruins that include the apse and pillars that remain of the Ancient Church of Mary. Archaeologists have determined that the church was built over an older Roman temple to the cult of Hadrian (him again), and to have been later expanded.
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The ancient Church of Mary c.431 visited by Pope Paul VI in 1967
The church is thought to have been built for the 'Council of Ephesus' (the Third Ecumenical Council of 431) that was held to resolve a doctrinal dispute: was Mary was the mortal mother of Jesus, the man who later became one with God or was Mary the mother of God? With the aid of the same Holy Spirit that guides them to a new Pope the bishops declared Mary 'Theotokos' - the God-bearer - the mother of God.
A plaque records the 1967 visit of Pope Paul VI who held a mass here
Opponents of the Mother of God position argued that this introduced a paradox - how could Mary be the mother of her maker? It seems a valid argument to us, except that 'mother' had a different meaning to the ancients. For them a woman was the 'nurturer' of the man's seed, that had been implanted by the man and given the 'spark of life' by God at conception, a process in which she played no material part, except to provide nurture: the fluids necessary for survival and growth. A child was related by nature only to his/her father.
Thus Mary as 'Nurturer of God' seemed perfectly rational to men who had no realisation that an ova from the mother, that must be alive, merges with man's living sperm. Today, every informed person knows from the IVF procedure alone (if such confirmation was required) that life is already evident in both components and does not begin anew. We also know that both parents, their parents and their parents parents, and so on, according to generation, are roughly equal contributors to the new 'randomly combined' blastocyst that grows into a child.
There are other interesting outcomes of this ancient misconception, like patrilineal inheritance. One of these is the Messianic prophecy of the Jewish Bible- particularly Ezekiel 37:24.
In order for Jesus to be the prophesied Jewish Messiah he had to be a 'Son of [King] David' - born into the House of David. Thus both the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are at pains to assert that Joseph was descended from King David (Matthew 1- 'The genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham' - and again in Luke 3:23-38 - by a totally different line).
As they were ignorant of reproductive biology, these genealogies are all male: 'sons of', all the way down, until Joseph, when the line is inexplicably broken by a virgin birth.
Like Mary as 'Theotokos' her virginity was probably retrospectively added by early editors (Luke 1:34-37) after Jesus was declared the son of God in John's Gospel - else why did the original author of Luke bother with the elaborate genealogy of Joseph two chapters later?). The only other reference to Mary's virginity, in the Bible, (expressed as her innocence of apparent premarital sex, revealed in a dream) is in Matthew - also probably retrospectively added - given the original author's similarly elaborate genealogy.
Yet, in the light of modern reproductive knowledge, we know that we each have four grandparents; eight great grandparents; and so on. After 26 generations since King David (Matt 1:1-17) Mary, like Joseph and everyone, had around 67 million ancestors - obviously these millions of ancestors are not unique - many are the same person by different lines. So in a small isolated community like the Jews everyone eventually becomes distantly related to everyone else. But Matthew's 26 generations are insufficient to account for the actual time back to the historical King David. Luke fixes this by increasing it to 41 generations. This results in around 2 trillion ancestors. Thus Mary was just as likely to be related, by many thousands of lines, to King David as was Joseph - as indeed was anybody born in the region - and by now - you and me too. So the old biblical problem is solved: Jesus was related to David whether Joseph was his father or not.