The ancient city of Teos sits on the western coast of Türkiye, directly across the Aegean Sea from Athens. Today, it is rubble and ruins, but 2,000 years ago, it was a thriving center of Hellenistic and Roman art, culture, and trade. Few people have inhabited the area since the third century CE, and nothing was built atop the site, giving archaeologists like Mantha Zarmakoupi, the Morris Russell and Josephine Chidsey Williams Assistant Professor in Roman Architecture in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences, a unique opportunity for discovery.
Specifically, Zarmakoupi has focused on excavating an ancient city council building called the bouleuterion. “This is the best-preserved building in the city of Teos, and it seems to preserve for us the early history of Teos underneath it,” she says.
Four seasons of fieldwork later, her team’s research is beginning to shed light on the complex history of the structure and the once-grand city that surrounded it. The work has been able to pinpoint the timeline for the bouleuterion’s additions, uncover early Hellenistic mosaics, and reveal a monumental inscription that Zarmakoupi has partially deciphered.
Peter Satterthwaite, a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in ancient history working with Zarmakoupi on the excavation, emphasizes the bouleuterion’s significance as the heart of democratic political decision-making in Teos. “This building is extremely important for understanding the ancient communities that were living here and their institutions,” he says.
After several years of work, the team was able to pinpoint the timeline for the bouleuterion and its architectural additions: The bouleuterion itself was built during the Hellenistic period, probably toward the end of the third century BCE. The portico was added in the first century CE, during the Roman period.
The work also uncovered some unexpected surprises. Underneath layers of built-up dirt, Zarmakoupi and colleagues began to uncover the tiled edge of a mosaic. As they continued working, they realized there was not one mosaic but at least two, spread across separate rooms dating back to the third century BCE. One that stood out depicted two fighting cupids, figures of Eros, the Greek god of love, whose imagery is related to Dionysos, the Greek god of wine and the patron deity of Teos, with a major temple in the city.
“There’s this feeling of euphoria,” Zarmakoupi says, describing the moment she found the mosaics. “You’re like, ‘Oh my god, there’s something really there.’”
Read more at Omnia.
