Blog of Parag

Mosaics of Zeugma

Yesterday's Nova featured rescue of some roman artefacts from an escavated villa in Zeugma, Turkey. This site was to go under water after construction of Birecik dam on the Euphrates river. According to the archeological evidence, this site witnessed the last battle between the romans that lived there and their persian attackers.

They showed construction of the dam and how this site along with a village of 30,000 residents gradually submerged under the backwaters of the dam. It was impressive to see the water accumulate slowly over time, swell and capture houses, farms, orchards, anything that came within its reach. The program website
describes other sites around the world that are threatened by submerging under the backwaters of dams.
This includes the Narmada project in India and Three Gorges dam in China among others. The Sardar Sarovar and Narmada Sagar project in India has the great potential of improving life for millions, but, the sad part is that there is no
proper plan for relocation of all the displaced people and historical temples and monuments that will go underwater. Hopefully, the 'Narmada Bachao Andolan' will be successful in taking all this into account.

Anyway, the main focus of the program was the artefacts rescued from the roman site. Initially, they didn't find anything but, fallen pillars, some pottary and a collection of decorative items and coins. The archeologists had almost run out of time when they found some exquisite mosaic floors from some rooms of the villa. Here is an example...

This looks like a carpet, but, it is a mosaic made up of small colored tiles. The story depicted in this scene is that of Achilles...

When Helen, the beautiful wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta, was kidnapped to Troy, Menelaus called upon his fellow chieftains to help him recover
his wife. One of them was the great warrior Achilles. Achilles's mother, the immortal sea-nymph Thetis, knowing that her son's fate was to perish at Troy if he went, dispatched him to the court of King Lycomedes. There, at her urging, he disguised himself as a maiden and joined the king's daughters. Odysseus, learning that Achilles was at the palace, appeared before the women as a merchant, offering items for sale, including weaponry. While the daughters naturally gravitated towards the feminine objects, Achilles, as this mosaic depicts,
couldn't resist the arms. Thereby unmasked, Achilles quickly agreed to accompany Odysseus to Troy, where Achilles was eventually killed by a poisoned arrow that struck him in the heel. It was his one weak spot: When he was a baby, his mother Thetis dipped him in the River Styx, which made him invulnerable except where she held him at the heel.

Here is a closeup of one of the faces not from this mosaic but a similar one. It is unbelievably intricate, and must have taken months to make the whole mosaic. I was truly amazed at the detail that is captured in these mosaics. Reminds me of similar mosaics that we saw in Rome.

Here is another of those excellent mosaics.

This mosaic tells the story of Daedalus and Icarus...

When King Minos of Crete decided to keep alive a magnificent bull that Poseidon had given him for sacrifice, the sea god punished him by having Minos's wife Pasiphae (seated at left in the mosaic) fall in love with the bull. To satisfy her desire, the architect Daedalus and his son Icarus (second from right and far right, respectively) built her a hollow cow in which she could hide and mate with the bull. Their coupling produced the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, which was shut away in the maze-like Labyrinth (upper right). Later, when Minos had
Daedalus and Icarus shut up in the Labyrinth, they escaped using wings fixed to their bodies with wax. Daedalus safely reached Sicily, but Icarus, exulting in his new-found abilities, flew too close to the sun; the wax melted and he fell to his death in the sea.

Posted by Parag at October 15, 2003 04:25 PM