Turkey - Zeugma

In 1999, construction of a new dam on the Euphrates river in Turkey led to the destruction of some twenty major sites in the history of the valley. The Franco-Turkish mission, created in 1995, organised salvage missions at the three most important sites in the region: Seleucia-Zeugma and Apamea, which played a major role in ancient Greece and Rome, and Horum Höyük, which presented levels of protohistoric occupation.

Horum Höyük was the site of a specific exploration. This text will deal only with the first two sites.

The twin cities of Seleucia and Apamea were founded on opposite sides of the Euphrates by Seleucus I around 300 BC, at the place where the river flowed from the Anatolian Plateau and then meandered through a widely open plain. The cities were at a key location in the Seleucid Empire, where they controlled passage on the Euphrates from the route that connected the capital, Antioch, and the Mediterranean world with Mesopotamia and greater Asia. There was an east-west road leading from Apamea to Iran, via Edessa, then beyond into China. Another southbound road followed the Balikh River before picking up the Euphrates again and leading on to India via Seleucia along the Tigris River. These crossroads were so important that the name Seleucia was gradually replaced by the name Zeugma (in Greek, the bridge or link) due to the presence of a pontoon bridge.

Later, the conquest of Mesopotamia by the Parthian Empire, bordered on the west by the Euphrates, brought Apamea under the control of the Parthians. Zeugma, however, gained quite an important military status. A Roman legion later came to be stationed there, thus undoubtedly contributing to the city’s prosperity.

Seleucia-Zeugma and Apamea were located in an area of intense cultural exchange. There, descendents of Greek colonists rubbed shoulders with Roman soldiers, Syriac-speaking natives, and Parthians. It is therefore of particular interest to study the material civilisation that emerged from all of these contacts.

The location of the two cities was permanently established by F. Cumont in 1917. Since that time, the only research missions devoted to these sites were J. Wagner’s predominantly epigraphic study, published in 1976, the excavation of a Roman villa by Dr. R. Ergeç, director of the Museum of Gawiantep, and, lastly, the Australian mission led by Dr. D. Kennedy. There have, in fact, never been any archaeological missions encompassing both sites. And yet, the city of Apamea, situated on the plains, was completely inundated by the waters of the new dam, and the hillside Zeugma site lost about one-fifth of its surface area. The four dig campaigns undertaken by the Franco-Turkish mission are of course unable to cover the entire area of both sites. The decision was therefore taken to concentrate the searches on the areas of urban development that were flooded, with a particular focus on the element that gave them their exceptional character: their development in connection with the river.

In order to gather as much information as possible as quickly as possible, and given the numerous difficulties generally posed by expropriation issues, the dig teams have had recourse whenever possible to new, efficient and rapid techniques.