The ‘Place of Palms’: An Urban Park at Aphrodisias

Short Description

Excavations at Aphrodisias in the 1980s revealed an extraordinary monumental water-basin (170 x 30m) in the centre of a colonnaded square, formerly called the ‘South Agora’. A hypothesis that the complex was not an agora at all but ‘the place of palms’ mentioned by a sixth-century benefactor in an inscription on its Propylon was demonstrated during a five-year excavation project — The Mica and Ahmet Ertegün South Agora Pool Project. This volume publishes the rich results of this excavation and the long life of the complex from the first to the sixth century and beyond. The pool was surrounded by palm trees and Ionic stoas, in the manner of the urban parks or porticus familiar in early imperial Rome. The Aphrodisian example gives us an entirely new sense of what these porticus complexes were like.

Series Description

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The series is dedicated to the publication of archaeological research at the ancient site of Aphrodisias. Aphrodisias was a prosperous city of the Roman period, well known for its cult of Aphrodite and its marble-carvers, and it has remarkably preserved remains from the second century BC to the sixth century AD. The archaeology of the city is especially well-suited to the study of public art and monuments in their ancient contexts and to the investigation of the elaborate architectural mise-en-scène of urban political life in the Eastern Roman empire.