Ephesus Through the Centuries

By All Over InformationUpdated August 10, 20268 min read

No ancient city in Turkey tells a longer or richer story than Ephesus, and the secret of enjoying it fully is to read its stones as a timeline. From a small Ionian settlement to the capital of Roman Asia, from a Christian pilgrimage center to a buried ruin and a world heritage site, the city lived through nearly three millennia of change. This guide walks you through that story century by century, so that when you stand on Curetes Street or in the Great Theatre, you know exactly which age you are looking at and what came before it.

The Beginnings: Bronze Age and Ionian Settlement

The site of Ephesus was occupied long before the Greeks arrived. Bronze Age settlements existed in the area, and the region was part of the wider Aegean world that traded with Mycenaean Greece. The natural anchorage at the mouth of the Cayster River made the location valuable from the beginning.

Around the turn of the first millennium BC, Greek-speaking Ionians established themselves on the coast, and Ephesus became one of the cities of the Ionian League. The foundation legend credits Androklos, son of the Athenian king Codrus, who followed an oracle’s guidance to the spot.

The city grew around its sanctuary of Artemis, whose cult absorbed much older local traditions of a mother goddess. Already in these early centuries the temple, not the town, was the great center of the place, drawing pilgrims before the city itself became famous.

The Archaic Century: Croesus and the Artemision

In the sixth century BC, Lydia, the powerful kingdom to the east, extended its rule over the Greek cities of the coast, and Ephesus came under the sway of King Croesus. Far from destroying the city, Croesus treated it generously and contributed lavishly to the rebuilding of the Temple of Artemis.

The temple that resulted was one of the marvels of the Greek world, and the sixth century was also the age in which Ephesus produced its most famous citizen, the philosopher Heraclitus, whose ideas about change and fire shaped Western thought.

The alliance with Lydia ended when the Persians conquered Croesus’s kingdom in the 540s BC. Ephesus, like the other Ionian cities, passed under Persian rule, though it retained its temple, its festivals, and much of its prosperity.

Ephesus, Turkey — Photo by PublicDomainPictures on Pixabay

The Persian and Classical Years

For the better part of two centuries, Ephesus lived under Persian domination, paying tribute but continuing to trade. The city took part in the Ionian Revolt against Persia around 500 BC, and it suffered the consequences when the revolt failed.

The classical era brought a famous act of destruction: in 356 BC, the night Alexander the Great was said to have been born, a man named Herostratus set fire to the Temple of Artemis so that his name would be remembered. The temple burned, and the Ephesians rebuilt it on an even grander scale.

When Alexander himself arrived in 334 BC, the city had already recovered. He offered to fund the completion of the temple, and the Ephesians, with a mixture of flattery and diplomacy, declined, saying that one god should not build a temple to another.

The Hellenistic Rebuild: Lysimachos and the New City

The most important event in the city’s physical history came after Alexander’s death, when his successors divided the empire. The general Lysimachos, who ruled western Anatolia, decided that the old city by the harbor was doomed and moved the population to new ground between Mount Pion and Mount Coressus.

He drained the marshes, built defensive walls, and laid out a new street plan, and the city he created is the one you walk today. The relocation was not popular, and the new city, briefly named Arsinoe after Lysimachos’s wife, took time to fill, but it proved the right decision as the old harbor slowly died.

Ephesus remained an important city through the Hellenistic centuries, allied first with the Seleucid kings and then with Rome. In 133 BC, when the last king of Pergamon bequeathed his kingdom to Rome, the new province of Asia was created, and Ephesus became its capital.

The Early Roman Empire: Augustus and the Provincial Capital

Under Augustus, the first Roman emperor, Ephesus entered the most brilliant phase of its history. As the capital of the province of Asia, it was the seat of the Roman governor and the first city of the province in wealth, population, and prestige.

The city grew rich on trade through its harbor and on the administration of the empire. Augustus and his successors, along with wealthy local citizens, filled the city with public buildings: aqueducts, baths, gymnasiums, fountains, and temples, many of them dedicated to the imperial cult.

The early imperial period also saw the arrival of Christianity. The Apostle Paul spent more than two years in the city, and the riot of the silversmiths described in the Book of Acts shows how rapidly the new teaching unsettled the old order of the Artemis cult.

The Second Century: The Golden Age

The second century AD was Ephesus’s golden age. The emperors Trajan and Hadrian patronized the city, and the building projects of the era gave the cityscape the form you see today. The Library of Celsus was completed around 125 AD, the Great Theatre was enlarged, and Curetes Street was lined with monuments.

The Terrace Houses on the slope above the street were rebuilt and decorated in these years with their richest mosaics and frescoes, and the city’s population reached its peak, making Ephesus one of the largest cities of the Roman world.

Trade, law, and culture flourished together. The proconsul of Asia held court here, the great festivals of Artemis drew crowds from across the Mediterranean, and the city’s wealth was visible in every public space. It was, by any measure, one of the great cities of antiquity.

Christianity Arrives: Paul, John, and the First Council

The Christian story of Ephesus runs from the middle of the first century onward. Paul’s long stay, the letters written from the city, and the tradition that John the Apostle lived here and cared for the Virgin Mary made Ephesus a holy place for the early church.

In 431 AD the Third Ecumenical Council met in the Church of the Virgin Mary and declared Mary the Mother of God, a decision that defined Christian doctrine and sealed the city’s importance in church history.

The city’s Christian centuries also produced its most visible surviving monument, the Basilica of St John, built by the emperor Justinian in the sixth century over the apostle’s reputed tomb on the hill of Ayasoluk. Pilgrims came from across the Christian world, and the city’s old pagan glories faded into the background of its new identity.

The Byzantine City: Basilica and Slow Decline

The Byzantine centuries were a long retreat. Justinian’s basilica made the hill of Ayasoluk the new center of settlement, while the classical city on the plain below was slowly emptied. The harbor, the source of the city’s ancient wealth, was filling with silt.

The silting was a battle the city could not win. Dredging and channels delayed the end, but the sea retreated kilometer by kilometer, and trade moved elsewhere. Earthquakes and raids, including the Gothic sack of 262 AD, added to the damage.

By the later Byzantine period, the old city was largely abandoned, its marble stripped for building material, and its great buildings collapsed into the marsh. The settlement of Ayasoluk survived, but the Ephesus of the emperors was gone.

The Medieval Twilight and Abandonment

The Seljuk Turks took the region in the eleventh century, and in the following centuries the area passed between Turkish beyliks and the Byzantine state before settling under Ottoman rule. The town of Ayasoluk, later called Selcuk, remained a modest market town.

The great monuments of the ancient city were treated as quarries. The Temple of Artemis was stripped to its foundations, and its stones were used for churches, mosques, and houses, including the Isa Bey Mosque built in the fourteenth century on the hill.

By the Ottoman centuries, the site of Ephesus was a place of ruins and marsh, known to travelers and antiquarians but largely forgotten. Its statues were broken or carried away, and its streets lay buried under silt and earth.

Rediscovery and the Modern Age

The recovery of Ephesus began in the nineteenth century. In 1863 the British engineer John Turtle Wood began the search for the Temple of Artemis, and in 1869 he found its platform beneath the marsh. The discovery put Ephesus back on the map of the ancient world.

Systematic excavation followed. From 1895, Austrian archaeologists worked the site, uncovering the theatre, the streets, the Library of Celsus, and the Terrace Houses, and their work continues today. The finds filled the museums of Vienna, London, and Selcuk.

In 2015 UNESCO inscribed the archaeological site of Ephesus on the World Heritage List, and the city that had vanished beneath the marsh became, once again, one of the most visited places in Turkey. The centuries have come full circle: a ruin, then a wonder, and now a wonder again.

Frequently asked questions

Which century was Ephesus at its most powerful?

The second century AD, under the high Roman Empire, was the peak. Ephesus was the capital of the province of Asia, among the largest cities of the Roman world, and the era of Trajan and Hadrian produced the Library of Celsus, the enlarged theatre, and the richest decoration of the Terrace Houses.

What caused the decline of Ephesus?

The silting of the harbor was the underlying cause. The Cayster River deposited silt faster than the city could dredge it, the sea retreated, and trade moved away. Earthquakes, the Gothic raid of 262 AD, and the shift of settlement to the hill of Ayasoluk completed the process.

When was the Temple of Artemis destroyed?

The temple was burned by Herostratus in 356 BC and rebuilt on a grander scale. It survived through the Roman period but was stripped of its stones in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its marble was reused for other buildings. Its foundations were rediscovered by J. T. Wood in 1869.

All Over Information

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