Mykale (Dilek Dağları) Survey

Mykale (Dilek Dağları) Survey

The following report was kindly provided by Professor Hans Lohmann.

North of the Milesian and Latmian gulf, Mount Mykale rises up to 1200 m above sea level, in this way forming a natural boundary between the northern and southern territories of Ionia. The Mykale extends for more than 30 kilometres from east to west, between the modern town of Söke and Cape Dip Burun (ancient Trogilion) in the province of Aydın. Its ridge is slightly nearer to its southern foot, making the slopes less steep in the north whereas those in the south are often extremely precipitous. In 2001 Hans Lohmann, Georg Kalaitzoglou and Gundula Lüdorf of the Ruhr-University at Bochum started a systematic field survey in the westernmost part of Mycale, which consequently led to the discovery of the Archaic Panionion in 2004 and its excavation during the years from 2005 to 2007.

2001 and 2002

Despite the fact that the ancient town of Priene, on the southern slopes of the Mykale, has been excavated since 1895 and that already in 1908 the Prussian officer Karl Lyncker mapped the entire mountain range, the Mykale remained a terra incognita up to the end of the twentieth century. It was, therefore, not completely surprising that from its very beginning the survey in the Mykale contributed considerably to our knowledge of the historical topography of southern Ionia.
During the Classical period the only ancient town of any importance was Priene, which was re-founded on the southern slopes of the Mykale in the Late Classical period, about 350 BC. The little polis of Thebai near the modern village of Doğanbey in the southwestern part of Mykale and its surroundings was surveyed and mapped during the first campaigns of the survey. It became evident that it did not exist as a settlement before the end of the 5th century BC and was abandoned in the late 2nd century BC. During the Archaic period only a modest peak sanctuary existed on the spot.
Since no other ancient settlement was known between Priene and Thebai it was quite a surprise when in 2002 a settlement of high antiquity was found lying on an isolated rock just north of the village of Atburgazı. The foundations of several dozen houses were on three different levels, or terraces, cut into the living rock. The abundant Greek pottery found on the spot makes clear that this settlement goes back at least to the second half of the 7th century BC. The settlement had no more than about forty houses at most and was occupied to the end of the 4th century BC. It was evidently not affected either by the suppression of the Ionian revolt in 494 BC or by the battle at the Mykale fought between Greeks and Persians in 479 BC, only a few kilometres to the west near modern Doğanbey. No ancient name has been handed down to us that might be applied to it. During the Middle Byzantine period (12th/13th century AD) a monastery associated with some nearby caves was built atop the ancient village, thereby razing its walls to the ground. Only the rock cuttings have survived.

2004

The survey of the Mykale (Dilek Dağları) was continued in 2004 in the eastern part of the mountain range, in a triangle marked by the town of Söke to the east and the villages of Tuzburgazı and Güzelçamlı in the southwest and northwest respectively.
Apart from some level ground in Mykale's easternmost region there is hardly any room for human settlements within the mountain range. The inhabitants preferred instead the lower slopes and foothills. Little wonder, therefore, that in Byzantine times the Mykale, like nearby Latmos (Beşparmak), served as a place of refuge. Several important Byzantine churches and monasteries have been known since the days of Theodor Wiegand: examples include Hagios Antonios on the south slope of Dayıoğlou Tepe, at 900 m above sea level, and the famous Kurşunlu Manastır. The latter consists of a Byzantine church restored and decorated with stucco ornaments in the 18th or 19th century, a large fortification tower with at least three storeys and a surrounding fortification wall.
The Byzantine period forms an important part of the cultural heritage of Mount Mykale because of the usually good state of preservation of its monuments. The Byzantine fortresses at Atburgazı and Akçakonak (Gümelez Kale) in the foothills of the southern slopes of the mountain range were mapped and the large Byzantine fortress of Fındıklı Kale, high above modern Davutlar, intensively surveyed. From the enormous amount of pottery it is obvious that Fındıklı Kale was more than simply a place of refuge. It might well have been the residence of the local dynast Sabas Asidénos, who established himself in the Mykale during the reign of the Latins (1204-1261).
Prehistoric sites are extremely rare. In 2002 numerous obsidian flakes and blades were observed, together with a great number of Late Chalcolithic to Middle Bronze Age pottery sherds, on the shore of the beautiful bay at the westernmost tip of Mykale (Classical Glauke limen: Thucydides 8.79.2). It is unlikely that this was a long-term, permanent settlement, rather it seems that people came there from time to time in order to do some fishing and hunting.
The largest prehistoric site was found in 2004 near the southeastern tip of Mykale, at Yenidoğan, a few kilometres southwest of Söke. There a hill rises to about 60 m above sea level to form a terrace more than 60 m across. The flanks of the terrace are so steep in this otherwise unstable terrain that we have to assume some very large walls are hidden within the slope. On top of the hill some modern cuttings extend into the Bronze Age strata. Masses of Middle and Late Bronze Age pottery sherds were found at this place mixed with shells of Cerastoderma edule, a species of edible mollusc, which seems to indicate that during the second half of the 2nd millennium BC the shoreline was still not far away. The pottery has close parallels with the pottery of the indigenous people in the area north of the Latmian gulf. Surprisingly enough, no Mycenaean imports have been found. Furthermore, as no Early Iron Age or Protogeometric pottery turned up at this place the prehistoric settlement at Yenidoğan evidently had been abandoned before the Greeks appeared. The site was declared an archaeological area.
Obviously from the very beginning of the so-called Ionian migration the indigenous Carian population established relations of trade and exchange with the immigrants and started to imitate their pottery. Therefore, the Protogeometric tombs on the northern flanks of Kale Tepe, west of the modern village of Güzelçamlı, do not testify to an early Greek or "Ionian" settlement. A well-preserved fortification of the early 7th century BC surrounds the top of Kale Tepe. Close parallels for this type of fortification, with regard to building technique and plan, are known in Caria. Therefore, the circuit wall on Kale Tepe is Carian rather than Greek. Already at the beginning of the 20th century U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff had correctly identified the fortification on Kale Tepe with the "Karion" (Carian fortress) mentioned no less than eighteen times in inscription no. 37 from Priene. This inscription, which has recently been re-edited by Anna Magnetto, is among the most important documents as far as the historical topography and the history of Mount Mykale are concerned. It was set up at the beginning of the 2nd century BC to mark an end to the age-old conflict between Samos and Priene over the chora of Melia after the Meliakos polemos (Melian war) of the 7th century BC.
In a publication of 1967, G. Kleiner and P. Hommel abandoned this identification and called the place Melia instead. From ancient sources, as for instance Hekataios of Miletus (FGrH vol. 1, 9 frg. 11), we learn that Melia was an ancient town or settlement destroyed by the allied forces of the Ionians in the so-called Meliakos polemos, before the middle of the 7th century BC. But exploratory trenches dug within the circuit wall on Kale Tepe by Kleiner and Hommel produced no evidence of a settlement. A single apsidal house was found, but one house does not prove the existence of a town. A Greek inscription at the main gate only testifies to the fact that the Greeks were in possession of the site in the second half of the 6th century BC. This is neither surprising nor does is it lend support to the identification of the site as Melia. The circuit wall on Kale Tepe could not, in any way, be taken to represent the important site of ancient Melia. Melia's vast territory extended from the westernmost tip of Mykale as far as Marathesion, south to modern Kuşadası. Immediately after the Meliakos polemos the chora of Melia hinterland was divided among the victorious parties of Samos, Miletus, Priene and Ephesos, which were united in the Ionian League. The coast north of Mount Mycale was divided between Samos and Priene, yet still caused endless quarrels between the two cities up to the Hellenistic period.
The important role of the Ionian League in the formation of the Ionian tribe and the cultural identity of the Ionians was noted by Herodotus. The Panionion, the cult centre of the Ionian League, was dedicated to Poseidon Helikonios and, according to Herodotus, located in the Mykale. Homer (Iliad 20.403 ff.) alluded to the cult of Poseidon Helikonios but, it has to be said, mentioned neither the Ionians nor the Panionion. This has in later times given support to the theory that the Ionian League was not founded prior to the 7th century BC, much less one year after the Trojan War, as asserted on the Marmor Parium, the Early Hellenistic marble chronicle from the island of Paros (IG XII.5.444).
As early as 1673 Pickering and Salter found an inscription concerning the Panionion in a Byzantine church on the road leading from Güzelçamlı to Davutlar, about 1 km west of the so-called Otomatik Tepe, where, in 1900, Theodor Wiegand localized the Panionion. Remains of a semi-circular theatre cavea were visible in the western flank of that hill and an altar on top of it. Excavations were carried out in the 1950s by G. Kleiner and P. Hommel. Irrespective of the fact that they found neither Archaic pottery nor any inscriptions they had no hesitation in identifying the site as the "Panionium", the central cult place of Poseidon Helikonios mentioned by Herodotus and other ancient writers.
The results of that excavation of 1956 were never subjected to a comprehensive critique despite the fact that there was sufficient ground for concern. First, the Archaic age of the altar on top of Otomatik Tepe could well be called into question since no architectural fragments of the Archaic period were found. Second, the half-circle cavea of the theatre is a construction dating to the second half of the 4th century BC. Such semicircular caveas were first conceived for the theatre of Dionysus at Athens, built under the archonship of Lycourgos. The theatre at Güzelçamlı cannot be supposed to be earlier. Its measurements resemble closely the theatre at Priene, which has been dated around 300 BC. More importantly, no Archaic pottery was ever found at Otomatik Tepe, while elsewhere excavations of Archaic Greek sanctuaries have consistently yielded vast quantities of such pottery.
From the results of the survey of the site in 2004 it became evident that the so-called "Panionium" in Güzelçamlı had never been in use and was left unfinished. Detailed study at the so-called bouleuterion quickly showed that the cutting of the rock within the koilon or cavea was never finished. In many places the underlying rocks are even today protruding into the seat rows. Furthermore, large gaps, clefts and fissures interrupt the rows and wait to be covered with nicely worked marble seats, which, however, never arrived. It seems highly improbable that the ambassadors of the twelve Ionian cities were forced to sit on natural rock without any properly fashioned seats.
The attempt to renew the cult of Poseidon Helikonios and the festival of the Panionia in the middle of the 4th century BC may well have been in connection with the re-foundation of the town of Priene. Diodorus (15.49) provides important testimony to the re-founding of the Panionion: "Formerly the Panionium was in a lonesome place, later they re-founded it in the neighbourhood of Ephesus". His mention of Ephesus as a point of reference for his Roman audience should not distract from the fact that he explicitly speaks of two Panionia, an older and a younger one. Herodotus (1.148) noted in a famous, frequently quoted passage that the Panionion is a holy place in the Mykale, extending or protruding to the north, a formula that in no way could be applied to the topographical situation existing at Otomatik Tepe near Güzelçamlı. In short, these critiques imply that the sites of Archaic Melia and the Archaic Panionion are still in question.
During the survey campaign of 2004 we found a site on the southwest slope of Çatallar Tepe that, despite its enormous extension and its marvellous state of preservation, had so far been completely overlooked. Some walls up to 3 m wide form a huge triangle, its tip pointing to the north and its base in the south, altogether covering an area of more than 5 hectares. The southern wall has almost completely collapsed. There were neither towers nor bastions. The main gate is difficult to make out among the huge mass of collapsed stones, but two wall-ends can be seen to overlap for a couple of metres. These walls form a primitive tangential gate characteristic of fortifications of the 7th and 6th centuries BC. The southern wall connects to separately walled enclosures on marked elevations in the southwest and the northeast. The entire manner of construction suggests Carian rather than Greek workmanship. The earliest pottery collected on the site may be dated to the first half of the 7th century BC, the latest to the end of that century.
Looking at the enormous extent of this place and the amount of pottery spread everywhere it is evident that this was a settlement of no little importance. Furthermore, the walls show clear evidence of intentional destruction; they have evidently been razed to the ground. The only explanation for this is a siege; we are immediately reminded of the fate of Melia, which was conquered by the Ionian League and its chora divided among the victors.
North of the southern wall a rather even terrace is surrounded by untouched rock. In the southeastern part of this area a low elevation bears evidence of a collapsed temple. The surface was covered with architectural fragments, stones and many roof tiles. Without excavation it was impossible to say whether the plan was peripteral, amphiprostyle or simply a templum in antis.

2005-2007

The site on Mount Çatallar had been completely unknown to archaeologists up to 2004 but unfortunately illicit digging, even with the help of a bulldozer, had already done extensive damage to the site. Under the auspices of the Museum of Aydın and its director Emin Yener, to whom I wish to express my sincere thanks, and with kind permission of the General Directorate of Antiquities and Museums of Turkey, a rescue excavation was started in 2005 and continued in 2006 and 2007. By the end of the second campaign the temple had been completely excavated.
Already during the first campaign of 2005, an older, almost quadrangular naiskos had been discovered underneath the temple of the 6th century BC, identified as the Archaic Panionion mentioned by Herodotus (1.143 and 1.148). It belongs to the same period as the fortified Carian settlement and had been destroyed together with it about 600 BC. After a gap of thirty or forty years, the Panionion, the central cult place of the Ionian League, was erected on the spot.
The orientation of the younger temple, i.e. the Archaic Panionion, is due east. Its length measures about 29 m. The temple displays a rather unique plan: it combines a pronaos with eight columns in two rows with an almost quadrangular cella, or naos, of 8.65 x 7.6 m and a large gathering hall, or lesche. The latter could be entered through a double-leaf door placed in the southern wall. Three columns along the longitudinal axis of the room supported the wooden roof beams. The temple, therefore, had thirteen interior columns, but neither a prostyle front nor a peristasis. Such a hybrid combination of a temple and a lesche is unique in Archaic Greek architecture. This gathering hall forms but one argument among many that the temple at Çatallar Tepe was the Archaic Panionion in the Mycale.
The walls of the temple were built most likely of pounded clay, rather than mud bricks, over stone foundations approximately 1.5 m high. In relation to the 6 m height of the entire building they seem rather weak, with a width of no more than 0.59 m. The walls of the pronaos ended with huge marble slabs. A kyma served as a capital above the anta. The foundations of the walls have been built from small stones of the grey-blue marble typical of the Mykale and the visible part, above floor level, shows regular traces of a chisel. Patterns that look like ornament might easily be explained as an attempt to improve the adhesion of plaster covering all the walls of this temple.
The few fragments of the columns that are preserved are all unfinished. The lower edges of the drums are smoothed, not fluted. This indicates that no fluting was intended. The lower diameter of the drums is 0.54 m while the upper measures 0.48 m, which fits perfectly with the lower diameter of the tori. The columns, therefore, did not only become slightly smaller with increasing height but the tori found in the excavation did not serve as bases but as capitals of the interior columns. Only the columns in the pronaos were crowned by Ionic capitals of the so-called torus-type, very similar to two examples found at Didyma. The volutes have not been sculpted three-dimensionally in the round. Instead, clearly incised lines mark the volutes. The height of the entire columns may have reached 6 m. No dowels fixed the column drums to each other or to the marble slabs of the stylobate, which all differ in size and shape. Since no bases are preserved, the columns were erected directly above the stylobates.
For the time being no remains of architraves have been identified among the debris. They presumably consisted of wood, like the architraves of the third Heraion at Samos, the so-called Rhoikos temple. The top layer of the mud brick wall was formed by marble slabs, which protruded 0.3 m from the wall. Almost identical elements were found on the site of Yria at Naxos, where, however, the walls were made entirely of stone. These simple slabs are forerunners of the later geison and were fitted to each other by iron clamps embedded in lead. Pairs of cylindrical holes served to fix the spars.
The temple had a wooden roof-truss, forming a ridged roof covered with roof tiles of the Corinthian type C2, according to the typology established by Wikander. Typical for these is the recessed posterior part, where the next tile was intended to hook on. Roof tiles of this type are not confined to the Archaic period. The eaves were decorated with an interlace, the kalypteres at the edge of the roof with lion's head antefixes. The indentation of the antefixes with the eaves is identical to those on Archaic roofs at Miletus. However, ground up mussels of the type Cerastoderma edule, which live in the Menderes delta, were added to the clay of the roof tiles to reduce their shrinking during firing; this points strongly to production of the tiles in the Archaic town of Priene, which nowadays lies, inaccessible, under metres of alluvium in the Menderes plain. An inscription that might be restored as "Prieneon" lends further support to this assumption.
The best evidence for the date of the temple is provided by the lion's head antefixes, which can easily be dated to the years around 540 BC. Three identical antefixes, evidently made from the same mould, were donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art at New York by the widow of a Swiss dealer in 1992 but probably came from this site. Two similar, but slightly more recent, antefixes have been found at Didyma and at Miletus. These antefixes may, therefore, be based on a Milesian prototype. The temple had been completely roofed when it burned down in about 550 BC.
Most parts of the marble architectural elements, as well as fragments of the roof tiles, are heavily touched by fire. The latest fragments of pottery found on the floor of the lesche and belonging to the destruction level date to the middle of the 6th century BC. Evidently, during the later second half of the 6th century BC the site was taken over by shepherds and soon fell into oblivion.
The discovery of an Archaic temple of the mid 6th century amidst the ruins of a fortified settlement of the 7th century BC, which apparently was abandoned by the end of that century, raises many questions, and challenges many old theories. In the light of the re-interpretation of the findings of G. Kleiner and P. Hommel at Güzelçamlı, the younger Panionion located there cannot be taken any longer to be on the same spot as the Archaic Panionion, mentioned by Herodotus, especially since a displacement of the Panionia is explicitly testified to by Diodorus (15.49). The thorough excavation of the German archaeologists G. Kleiner and P. Hommel over fifteen months with up to fifty workers at Otomatik Tepe did not come up with any noteworthy remains of the Archaic period. The few unpublished fragments of reputedly Archaic pottery from the filling of the clearly non-Archaic temenos wall at Otomatik Tepe cannot be considered seriously to represent the debris of an Archaic sanctuary. As anybody ever engaged in the excavation of an Archaic sanctuary knows, pottery is usually found there in huge quantities. The site at Çatallar Tepe indeed perfectly fulfils all expectations. It is situated in the very heart of Mount Mycale. The temple has been erected within the ruins of a devastated Carian settlement, thus continuing an older Carian cult. Its unique plan, combining a temple with a lesche, meets the requirements of a cult place intended to bring together the ambassadors of the twelve Ionian cities for a strange sacrifice of non-Greek type.
Having spent six campaigns surveying in the Mykale I am ready to confidently state that no other candidate for the Archaic Panionion is to be seen in the Dilek Dağları. The site at Çatallar Tepe agrees with what we would postulate both for the Archaic Panionion and for Melia. It has an enormous extension to the north and it is a lonesome place. The site commands an overwhelming view of the whole of Ionia, correlating nicely with Herodotus' enthusiastic words about the beauty of Ionia. Moreover, the whole situation exactly fits the thesis of Wilamowitz, who in 1906 and without any archaeological evidence was convinced that Melia and the Panionion occupied the same spot. We also should not be too much surprised that Poseidon Helikonios was venerated on top of a mountain. Samian inscriptions testify to the fact that also on the island of Samos a sanctuary called "Helikonion" (i.e. a cult place of Poseidon Helikonios) was a mountain peak sanctuary.
The question of why the Panionion at Çatallar Tepe was not rebuilt after its destruction can easily be answered by pointing to the destruction of Archaic Priene and the enslavement of its population by the Persian commander Mazares after the fall of Sardis in 542 BC. The meetings of the Ionian League during the second half of the 6th century BC mentioned by Herodotus might well have taken place in much humbler surroundings in Priene itself.

See also Melia.

Bibliography

H. Lohmann et al., "Forschungen und Ausgrabungen in der Mykale 2001-2006", Istanbuler Mitteilungen 57 (2007), 59-178

Website

Information on the project is at
http://www.pm.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/pm2004/msg00306.htm