Antioch

A History

Andrea U. De Giorgi, A. Asa Eger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317540410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte medievale

Winner of ASOR's 2022 G. Ernest Wright Award for the most substantial volume dealing with archaeological material, excavation reports and material culture from the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean.

This is a complete history of Antioch, one of the most significant major cities of the eastern Mediterranean and a crossroads for the Silk Road, from its foundation by the Seleucids, through Roman rule, the rise of Christianity, Islamic and Byzantine conquests, to the Crusades and beyond.

Antioch has typically been treated as a city whose classical glory faded permanently amid a series of natural disasters and foreign invasions in the sixth and seventh centuries CE. Such studies have obstructed the view of Antioch's fascinating urban transformations from classical to medieval to modern city and the processes behind these transformations. Through its comprehensive blend of textual sources and new archaeological data reanalyzed from Princeton's 1930s excavations and recent discoveries, this book offers unprecedented insights into the complete history of Antioch, recreating the lives of the people who lived in it and focusing on the factors that affected them during the evolution of its remarkable cityscape. While Antioch's built environment is central, the book also utilizes landscape archaeological work to consider the city in relation to its hinterland, and numismatic evidence to explore its economics. The outmoded portrait of Antioch as a sadly perished classical city par excellence gives way to one in which it shines as brightly in its medieval Islamic, Byzantine, and Crusader incarnations.

Antioch: A History offers a new portal to researching this long-lasting city and is also suitable for a wide variety of teaching needs, both undergraduate and graduate, in the fields of classics, history, urban studies, archaeology, Silk Road studies, and Near Eastern/Middle Eastern studies. Just as importantly, its clarity makes it attractive for, and accessible to, a general readership outside the framework of formal instruction.

1
The eagle of Zeus arrives (303 bce–64 bce)

Even without seeing it, one can have full knowledge of it from hearsay, for there is no corner of land or sea to which the fame of the city has not spread.

– Libanius, Oration 1

Introduction

Why Antioch was founded on a rather unpromising site, how its community developed an urban infrastructure, and how it grew to become a capital under the Seleucid kings are the main themes of this chapter. The political instability in the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s unexpected death in 323 bce and the establishment of the Seleucid dynasty are, however, the fundamental antecedents to the city’s foundation. In this vein, we cannot separate the analysis of Antioch’s genesis and growth from presenting the agency behind it or the motives that prompted the formation of an enclave of Greeks along the riverbanks of the Orontes.

Upon Alexander’s death, the vast empire he had conquered was carved up by his leading generals, who established their own kingdoms and dynasties; among these was Seleucus I Nicator (305–281 bce), whose far-flung Seleucid Empire stretched from the furthest reaches of Alexander’s conquests in modern-day Pakistan back through what is today Afghanistan, Iran (Persia), Iraq, Syria, and into central Turkey. The recent burgeoning interest in the Seleucid monarchy has brought into sharper focus the political and cultural outlooks of this dynasty.¹ The nature of its rule, suspended between Greek and Persian paradigms, has drawn interest from scholars of various learned traditions (Figure 1.1).

More to the point, a wealth of studies have debunked the myth that the Seleucid world was peripheral to Greece and Persia, bringing more and more into focus the centrality of the kingdom’s mechanisms, above and beyond the questions of what is Western and what is Eastern.² How the Seleucids effectively negotiated realities of power and forged a novel monarchic discourse through local allegiances and universalistic aspirations is a question that continues to be vigorously debated.³ Indeed, the patchy and skewed textual records of the Seleucids have failed to hamper a growing scholarly veering toward the Hellenistic kingdoms. The biased, pro-Roman voices of Polybius, Livy, and Appian, to name but a few, remain nevertheless key to reconstructing the historical discussion of the Seleucids. In particular, emphasis on the lives and deeds of Seleucus I Nicator, Antiochus III the Great, and Antiochus IV Epiphanes illustrates the role of the kingdom as it forged its own concept of “state” and made its mark on the political realities of the time. Antioch is typically foregrounded in much of this scholarship, for the city was central in Seleucid politics and indeed transformed the Hellenistic East in fundamental ways.⁴ Yet much as the ancient accounts contribute to the discourse of the city coalescing and rising to unexpected heights under these monarchs, the dearth of textual and epigraphic sources has hindered analysis of the city’s socio-political configuration. One can only lament the epigraphic habit of the city, the condition by which the local culture minimized the dissemination of its public records, constituting a hurdle that ultimately frustrates insights into the lives of Antioch’s inhabitants. But disquieting though the picture might seem, new archaeological and numismatic data offers ways to further our understanding of the city’s history and materiality.

Figure 1.1 The Hellenistic kingdoms

Source: Created by Claire Ebert

Topography

Antioch on the Orontes lies at the junction between the southernmost extension of the Amuq Plain (Amik Ovası) and the slopes of Mt. Staurin and Mt. Silpius (Kusseyr Dağı, Habib Neccar Dağı, part of the Jibāl al-Aqra); here the Orontes River (Asi River, also known in antiquity as Drakon or Typhon)⁵ bends its course southward as it points decisively toward the Mediterranean coast. Crucial though it was for providing the region with plenty of water, the Orontes also dictated the shape and conditions of the ancient settlement (Figure 1.2). In particular, its unpredictable regime, affected as it was by climatic, hydrological, and, indeed, anthropogenic factors as well as propensity to flood, greatly affected the topography of Antioch. Any facile determinism aside, the river commanded Antioch’s nucleation as well as urban development for centuries.

Indeed, Antioch’s location was completely ill suited for urban expansion; hemmed in between the Amanus Mountains (Nur Dağı), the river, and the slopes of Mt. Silpius and Mt. Staurin, the city from its outset had to reckon with conspicuous runoff from the mountain massifs and the capricious regime of the Orontes, such as when fall and winter rainstorms gusted through the region, causing rivers and streams to swell beyond measure. The rushing waters would spill over their banks, inundate homes, and sweep away livestock, mills, and bridges, flooding freshly tilled fields. In the city, people would often resort to jars, buckets, and sponges to bail out their shops and houses.⁶ All the same, a complex system of conduits, dams, and aqueducts attests to the tenacity with which the Antiochenes coped with this frail ecology and sought to control the impetus of seasonal streams from the adjacent mountains. In particular, the Antioch excavations in 1937 recovered what the archaeologists referred to as a Hellenistic system of tunnels designed to impound inflows and channel them under the main thoroughfare.⁷ The reign of Justinian in the sixth century saw the consolidation of the so-called Iron Gate, incorporating centuries of waterworks and man-made modifications planted deep in the gorge between Mt. Silpius and Mt. Staurin. Serving as both gate and dam, it was the city’s most spectacular effort to curb the erratic waters of the Parmenios, a torrential stream flowing into the Orontes and also known as the Onopniktes or “donkey drowner” (and today, Haci Kürüş Deresi).⁸ Yet even the Iron Gate and its infrastructure of canals and tunnels could only partially contain the seasonal impact of the streams: thick gravel and cobble alluvial fans accumulated for centuries at the foot of the two mountains and now bury large tracts of the ancient city under meters of sediment.

Figure 1.2 The Orontes River and Antioch

Source: Declassified Corona imagery, 1967

The role of the Orontes, inasmuch as it shaped the local topography, has not been sufficiently brought into focus by previous scholarship.⁹ Erratic in the extreme, 30 to 35 meters wide, with an average discharge of 11 cubic meters per second, the river rises in the Lebanon mountains near Hermel and enters the plain of Homs in Syria via the Wadi al-Rablah, then driving north past Homs and Hama and turning decisively west.¹⁰ From Syria, the Hatay corridor drives the Orontes into Turkey, eventually bending west at the modern village of Demirköprü, ancient Gephyra. Some 15 kilometers southwest the Orontes waters the site that, poised on the slopes of Mt. Staurin and Mt. Silpios, accommodated the foundation of Antioch. Because of its endemic propensity to change course, today the Orontes skirts the northwestern sector of Antioch, no longer forming the Island, that is, the “city within the city,” which retained its centrality for centuries. Further south, the river skirts the Daphne plateau on its left and then continues its course all the way to the Mediterranean coast, emptying its waters some 22 km from Antioch. The Tyche (deity of fortune) of Eutychides of Sykion (Figure 1.3), showing the divine fortune of Antioch with turrite crown, holding a sheaf of grain and sitting on the rock of Mt. Silpius with the personified Orontes swimming at her feet, lulls us into believing the harmonious unity between the city and the river. The sculptural group was commissioned by Seleucus Nicator and executed by Eutychides, a pupil of the great artist Lysippus.¹¹ A mid-third-century ce coin depicts on the reverse the Tyche under the baldachin of a four-column shrine (tetrakionion), which is the building that accommodated Eutychides’s statue at least until the sixth century ce,¹² though where this shrine was located cannot be established. But the truth is that the Orontes compromised the fortunes of the city time and again; its tendency to swell in the winter season – when sheets of rain pummel the region – led conspicuous alluvial debris and sediment to accumulate along its course, as attested by the disappearance of the ancient Island in the late medieval era.¹³

Figure 1.3 The Tyche of Antioch by Eutychides, Roman copy

Source: Photo Copyright Governorato SCV-Direz...