Volume XIV of the Aphrodisias monographs series is dedicated to the Place of Palms, a large tree-lined urban park with a long pool surrounded by Ionic colonnades. The carefully recorded excavation and material study of the site, formerly known as the ‘South Agora’, was made possible by a gift from Mica Ertegün, thus the Mica and Ahmet Ertegün South Agora Pool Project (2012-2018). The project directors Andrew Wilson and Ben Russell are the editors and authors of the volume together with a team of fifteen collaborators and the site owes its new name to an honorific poem found inscribed on the Propylon of the complex, praising its restorer in c. 500 C.E., one Ampelios. They have shown that in the Roman Imperial and Late Antique periods the site functioned as an urban park, whose conception and earliest phase date back to the first century C.E.; it was inspired by the porticus complexes of Rome. The park linked the two poles of the city’s political life, the Council House and the Theater. The site reached its most monumental, architecturally unified state in the late fifth or early sixth century and declined in the seventh century.
Chapter 1 (‘Introduction’), by Wilson and Russell, gives a report on the early investigations and excavation of the site and discusses the theories about its function that were formulated before and after the last phase of new excavations. The scope and methodology of the project together with the important new conclusions about the history and function of the site are then summarized.
Chapter 2 (‘Pool, Stoa, Palm Grove: Design and Construction, First Century AD’) by Wilson, Russell and Angelos Chaniotis, vividly describes the earliest phase of construction, which is dated to the first century. This phase included: the well-preserved Ionic-style North Stoa, which originally extended to 204 m.; a second stoa, running along part of the south side of the open area; a vast ornamental pool (173 m x 24 m) in the middle; and a palm grove. Planting trenches confirmed the hypothesis that the open space was a garden. Putting it in context, the authors suggest that the Place of Palms emulated metropolitan porticoes, while its ornamental pool was perhaps the largest of its kind anywhere at the time of its construction.
Chapter 3 (‘Use, Maintenance, and Modification: First to Fourth Centuries AD’), by several contributors,[1] analyzes the history of the site from the first to the fourth centuries. New buildings were added, the most notable of which was the Propylon (before 96 C.E.). The dedicatory inscription for this building has been preserved. The South Stoa was also reconstructed around this time. The largest new addition was the enormous Civil Basilica, with its north facade opening directly onto the site from the south. Finally, the West Stoa was added in the Hadrianic period to serve as a gateway to the so-called Hadrianic Βaths. The series of repairs, additions, and alterations that were made to the above buildings from the first to the fourth century are described here. Coin finds from the same period are used to better understand the changing use of the site. The final section summarizes the new evidence and contextualizes the architectural profile of the site, attempting to explain its precocity in comparison to other urban centers in Asia Minor.
Chapter 4 (‘Destruction and Renewal: The Place of Palms Reborn, Fifth to Seventh Centuries AD’), also by several contributors,[2] documents the extensive repairs and refurbishments of the buildings on the site in the late fifth or early sixth century. The excavation and conservation program of 2012-2017 allowed good documentation of these phases, which are also recorded epigraphically; the local notables Ampelios, Albinos and Philippos along with the provincial governor Doulkitios are named as patrons of an exceptionally ambitious urban project, which was embarked upon after a devastating earthquake in the late fifth century. Since much of what survives of the pool, the planting of the grove, the West Stoa, the North Stoa, the new South Stoa(s), and the Propylon belongs to the Late Antique reconstruction work, Chapter 4 deals in detail with stratigraphy, architecture, numismatics, ceramics, and archaeobotanical data. The latter, consisting of the finds from the ring drain around the pool, provides the first evidence of diet (and possibly ritual waste) from Aphrodisias. The title of Maioumarch (the official who presided over the celebration of Maiouma) in Doulkitios’s inscription from the Propylon explains, according to the authors, the key function of the Place of Palms, at least in Late Antiquity. Maiouma was a spring festival of revelries and theatrical performances involving water. It is attested in several late antique cities, especially in the East; in its de-paganized form, it survived until the Middle Byzantine period, if not later.[3] The association of the Place of Palms with Maiouma is a significant contribution to our knowledge of public leisure culture in Late Antiquity. The large shallow pool in the Place of Palms, equipped with a marble bench around the edge and a large, shaded space beyond it, would have functioned as a ready-made aquatic auditorium. This section concludes with an account of repairs to the site in the late sixth century or slightly later, also discussed in Chapter 6.
Chapter 5 (‘Informal Writing, Drawing, and Carving in the Place of Palms’), by Chaniotis, Wilson and Russell, offers a detailed study of a variety of types of informal writing, drawing, and carving that provide a window into the activities that took place in the Place of Palms: a total of 1,059 items, which are also cataloged in Appendix 2, are discussed here. The site represents the largest assemblage of such evidence in a single architectural complex in the Roman East. The corpus includes acclamations, prayers and invocations, ‘labels’, obscene texts, commemorative and pictorial graffiti, topos inscriptions and masons’ marks. This last group together with that of gameboards are particularly numerous and informative and the resulting data is masterfully treated here. Close study of the gameboards and graffiti gives the authors the opportunity to define and record what people did and experienced during their time at the site when it was functioning as an urban park.
Chapter 6 (‘The Basin at the Propylon: Statuary and Mythological Reliefs, c. AD 500-550’), by R.R.R. Smith and Joshua J. Thomas, examines an ambitious sixth-century addition to the site: a huge new reservoir for the pool, placed in front of the Propylon and decorated with reused material. The monument represents a striking new case study of redeployed Late Antique mythological and honorific statuary. An extensive set of mythological parapet reliefs were reused to decorate the top of the basin wall; they were separated by small Eros piers, while in the center of the basin wall, a tall statue base honoring a former governor, and a seated statue of an intellectual-looking figure were also re-used to commemorate the Late Antique builder-founder of the monument. The original inscribed honorific text was covered with stucco, so that a text could be painted over it commemorating the new honorand. The statue’s head may be identified with a damaged male head, bearded and heavily mustached, found near the bottom of the pool. A thoughtful discussion of the possible honorand and the ideas that the monument was intended to evoke concludes this section.
Chapter 7 (‘The Sculptural Life of the Place of Palms, First to Seventh Centuries’), by Joshua J. Thomas, presents the results of the project, producing a find distribution map of nearly one thousand separate sculptural finds from the Place of Palms and investigating their possible association with display contexts. Most of the finds come from statue assemblages that reflect display contexts dating back to Late Antiquity. The nodal points for the display of honorific portraiture were the Propylon and especially the West Stoa (a forthcoming Aphrodisias volume will be devoted to the Late Antique portraiture from the latter). Important finds also come from the pool and its surroundings. Examples of repurposed statue monuments in Late Antiquity and unpublished pieces of Late Antique portrait statuary stand out in the related discussion. The catalog also includes statues and fountain sculptures as well as mythological and votive sculptures from the edge of the pool and other sites in the area.
Chapter 8 (‘The End of the Place of Palms, Seventh Century AD’), with various authors contributing,[4] presents the stratigraphic evidence for the demise of the site in the seventh century. The main evidence comes from two successive phases of deposits in the pool, representing artificial dumps of debris caused by large-scale clearance activities. The detailed study of the ceramics, metal and glass finds, as well as the archaeobotanical evidence from the dumped deposits, provides a wealth of information about the activities in the area in the decades preceding the traumatic events of the early to mid-seventh century and feeds into the working scenarios about the violent end of the Place of Palms. A utilitarian/mercantile change of function is proposed for the pool and the area up to the later part of the seventh century. The datable evidence suggests that the pool went out of use soon after the 640s. Various possibilities regarding the agents of destruction are carefully examined and compared with recent evidence from other sites in Aphrodisias and Asia Minor as a whole. The favored scenario indicates a sack by an invading force, probably Sassanid Persians in 617 C.E., swiftly followed by an earthquake around 620, and later by one or more Arab raids in the second half of the seventh century. Key to this theory, among a wealth of data from the site and elsewhere, is an Arabic-countermarked coin of Heraclius and pieces of weaponry from the pool deposit.
Chapter 9 (‘After Antiquity: The Byzantine and Ottoman Periods’), also by several of the contributors,[5] presents the post-antique phases of the site from the eighth to the twentieth centuries. They are studied in a systematic and thorough way, yielding important evidence for the Byzantine, Seljuk, Beylik and Ottoman periods. After a period of limited Byzantine activity, when the city was known as Stavropolis, the site reemerges as part of a fully-fledged village in the Beylik and Ottoman periods, providing us with the most detailed evidence to date of life in the city in the post-antique period.
Chapter 10 (‘Faunal Remains from the Late Antique to Ottoman Periods’), by Angela Trentacoste, is the last chapter of the main part of the volume and documents the faunal remains from the site, representing the first systematic analysis of this material from Aphrodisias for the Late Antique and later periods. Most of the remains discussed are from the Late Antique, classical Ottoman, and late Ottoman periods and most of the discussion relates to these periods. Although the overall amount of material is modest, its analysis provides clear indications of changing patterns of animal usage and discard (e.g. the use of domestic livestock, goat-herding, hunting, and local fauna).
The volume ends with Conclusions (in English and Turkish), Appendices, Bibliography, Illustrations, and General Index. The six appendices present the epigraphic material (App. 1 & 2 by Chaniotis), catalogs of coin finds from the Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic periods (App. 3 & 4),[6] tables of Late Roman and Early Byzantine pottery (App. 5 by Ulrike Outschar), and Context Descriptions (App. 6 by Allison Kid and Russell).
Overall, the volume represents a superb example of scholarship by an international team of renowned experts. Although the Roman, Late Roman, and post-antique periods are all treated with equal care, this volume will primarily be useful to the student of Roman Archaeology and Late Antiquity in particular. It is during the latter period that the complex reached its most monumental state, from which most of the evidence comes, representing a type of site that knows no parallel. The conclusion that in Late Antiquity it principally functioned as a recreational space (with the highest concentration of gameboards recorded anywhere in the Roman world) and the venue for the local festival of Maiouma is of great value. Furthermore, the volume is groundbreaking in terms of the analysis it provides of archaeobotanical, faunal, and medieval ceramic remains in relation to the long history of Aphrodisias, offering important historical insights and will be used as a reference work in the future.
Notes
[1] Ben Russell, Andrew Wilson, Allison Kidd, Angelos Chaniotis, Ahmet Tolga Tek and Hüseyin Köker.
[2] Andrew Wilson, Ben Russell, Allison Kidd, Angelos Chaniotis, Hugh Jeffery, Tim Penn, Hüseyin Köker, Ahmet Tolga Tek, Ulrike Outschar, Erica Rown and Mark Robinson.
[3] G. Deligiannakis, “H υστερορωμαϊκή καταγωγή των εθίμων του Κατακλυσμού στην Κύπρο. Μια νέα υπόθεση εργασίας” Byzantina Symmeikta 31 (2021), 219-40.
[4] Andrew Wilson, Ben Russell, Allison Kidd, Ahmet Tolga Tek, Hüseyin Köker, Tim Penn, Hugh Jeffery, Erica Rowan, and Ulrike Outschar.
[5] Allison Kidd, Ben Russell, Andrew Wilson, Tim Penn, Hugh Jeffery, Muradiye Brusalı, and Ulrike Outschar.
[6] Appendix 3 by Ahmet Tolga Tek and Hüseyin Köker; Appendix 4 by Betül Teoman and Gültekin Teoman.