Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 93, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 April 1912 — DIGGING UP OLD EPHESUS [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

DIGGING UP OLD EPHESUS

EVERYONE who cares at all about -classical antiquity is glad—tohear that the Austrian Archaeological institute is resuming its exploration of the city of the great Diana.. It is, fortunately, rare for politics to interfere with science, but at Ephesus (as recently at Cyrene) the exception occurred. The right under which the Austrians be-, gan work in 1899 was based on a personal permission from Sultan Abdul Hamid; and with the new order, which was established in 1908, it not only lapsed, but could not be renewed in its terms consistently with the Constitution. Almost immediately followed the annexation of Bosnia. The difficulties of Austrian would-be concessionaries in the Ottoman empire were redoubled; the Institute had to shut up its house in Ayasoluk, stack its rails and cars, and leave the scene of ten seasons’ operations to be reoccupied by the rank vegetation which a marshy site on the hot west coast of Anatolia is only too ready to send up, writes D. Q. Hogarth, in Illustrated London News. I walked over the field of ruin in the autumn of 1910, and found it fast becoming a thicket of reeds and brushwood; but what it must have looked like last spring, after the heavy snows and rains of the severest winter ever known in the Levant, I can only guess. Four years ago the site gave me the best idea that I have ever been able to get-of the splendid appearance which a great Graeco-Roman city, built in a land of marble, must have made. True that even here the imagination had a great deal to do. Hardly any building except the theater had more than a course or two of its external walls, or more than a foot or two of its column-shafts upstanding. The least-destroyed' structure, the Library of Celsus, is not preserved above the height of a man; the larger agora was still uncleared of the deposit of ages, and the streets were littered with chaotic ruin. But still there ran the paved streets, plain to see; there were the monuments which had lined them, in their original places, or as near as might be; there were the marketplaces, and here, there, and everywhere, the gate-posts, lintels, architraves and columns which had made the splendor of the facades. It seemed that no building in this quarter of Ephesus had not been fronted with marble and carved richly. Truly this had been no mean city! How Germans Excavate. German excavators are very fond of such a superficial clearance of an ancient site, and, with that object the authorities usually place an architect at the head of their expeditions. There is much to be said for their policy. The evidence for one period of antiquity is made visible as a whole and on the spot; and the German diggers, having more to show the visitor than another digger has who burrows to the bottom of all things, removing what lies above as soon as he has recorded it, probably educate more people in archaeology (so far as a tourist spending two or three hours on a site can pick up archaeology) than any other. The lesson of a cleared site is so obvious and SO easily read. The other kind of digger, whose results are hardly to be seen and appreciated until they appear in the cases of some distant museum, appeals only to those who already know much of antiquity, and have studied elsewhere the lesson which he does but illustrate. When I dug at Ephesus myself for the British museum some years ago (though not in the city area), I made for the bottom of things at once, regardless of overlying things, once these had been recorded. That I did so, however, is neither to my credit nor to my discredit, for really I had no choice, Jf I was to get any results worth mentioning. I was commissioned to dive onoe more, and tor the last time (ift all likelihood) into the noisome pit which Wood had

made thirty-five years before in order to get down to the site of the temple of Ephesian Artemis. What little the Byzantine builders of churches and the moslem builders of mosques had left of the great shrine, as it had been in Roman and Hellenistic times, he carried almost entirely away. Below that stratum something had survived of the earlier temple which Croesus helped to build. Of this 'also Wood removed all except some patches of pavement, drums of columns, and bits of walling and foundations. Unless there were still earlier temples below this—and below, as it happened, the spring water-level to boot —I had nothing to do put put the place tidy, make as accurate a plan as possible of the meager vestiges, and come away. Therefore, my one chance was to probe below Wood’s lowest. I procured a big steam engine and pump, probed, and found there were remains of not less than three shrines below. Each had been smaller than Its successor, but all were built round the same central point which the greater temples above them used. That point was marked by a square basis of ashlar masonry which had four times been restored, enlarged and heightened; but through all its changes it had supported the cult-statue of the great goddess, looking seawards down the ever-length-ening naves of her successive shrines. Probes Rich Bhrlne. .. And I had Buch further rewardasa digger may always hope for if he probes to the bottom of a site once occupied by a very rich shrine. The floor of the earliest shrine of all was found to be littered with remains of offerings in ivory, gold, silver, bronze, terracotta and other materials; and the rubble cbre of the earll<«tpartestal was sown with yet more of these things —mostly gauds of pious women who had thrown them in when the square basis was first being built. Those which I found on the floor outside had, no doubt, been trampled into the slime when the earliest shrine was sacked or otherwise ruined, and they had been left for mq because their existence had been forgotten. Those within the basis may have been remembered, ‘When it came to be restored; but superstitious piety respected the structure into whose core they had passed until all memory of them, too, faded away. So I got them as well —nearly two thousand of them! They have proved of much more worth than mere loot; for they have told us what early lonian art could produce—have told us, in fact, just what the Austrian excavations in the city have failed to telL I left the site of the Artemisium to become a modus again, and even a worse one than of old, for the deep digging had tapped fresh springs. There was no help tor it, nor is then any hope of fresh discoveries there in time to come. The site of the greatest of ancient shrines must remain a pool in winter and a fever-breeding hole in summer. All our hope tor new light on Ephesus rests on the continuation of the Austrian excavation in the city. May it go deeper as it goes farther!