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.
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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.
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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.
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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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