There has been a tragedy and a second is in progress.
Location of Zeugma - Samosata lies 75 km away to the north-east.
First the tragedy. A decade ago the waters building up behind the massive wall of the Atatürk Dam on the Euphrates in Turkey began to flood the streets of the little deserted village of Samsat. A disaster for the poor villagers who had been expropriated and obliged to leave ancestral homes in the interest of a greater and wider good.
More important, the flood waters were lapping over the fields beneath which lay the remains of the ancient city of Samosata. The city had been the capital of allied kings of the Roman Empire one of whom, Antiochus IV, was described as a man "who had inherited great wealth and was the richest client-king of all" (Tacitus Hist 2.81.1). In the first century AD, the kingdom was annexed by Rome to the province of Syria, the city flourished as a frontier town of the Roman Empire, and an entire legion of 5000 soldiers was placed there. Written sources provided occasional insights at various points during its subsequent history but the flesh for these bones was to be found within the town wall circuit of 5 km enclosing some 250 ha/ 600 acres, and beyond it in the remains of the ancient villages, farms, aqueducts, quarries and roads of its hinterland.
A number of Turkish and foreign teams did carry out surveys and excavations, but for so large an area it was modest. None of the foreign institutes undertook any major project at Samosata itself which was left to the valiant but limited resources of Turkish archaeologists. Today it is all under a deep and vast lake - readers might look at the superb aerial view by Ed Kashi of the lake where once it stood (National Geographic May 1993) - and if, a century hence, the dam were to be drained the traces of what was once one of the handful of second rank cities of the Roman Empire will have been further eroded and contaminated by not only the decades of waterlogging but now a vast accumulation of silt too.
Nothing more can be done about Samosata but something could yet be done about Zeugma.
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During several centuries of first Greek then Roman rule, Zeugma was the location of the first and only permanent bridge over the Euphrates between the Taurus Mts and Babylonia several hundred kilometres away. That in itself made the twin cities of Seleucia and Apamea at either end of the bridge of signal importance.
The majestic view from Belkis Tepe over Seleucia (under the pistaccio trees) and Apamea on the far bank. In the lower centre can be seen the outline of the buried theatre identified by Algaze's survey. To its right probably lay the agora. The hills around were covered with houses and the legionary fortress may have been on the left centre.
In the first century BC it too passed under Roman rule and received a legion in garrison. There were only eight legions in all of Rome's Asian provinces between the Black Sea and the Red and two of them were located at Samosata and Zeugma within 70 km of one another, an indicator of the military significance of these places. For several centuries Zeugma ("the bridge", or, as we might call it, Bridgetown), as the twin towns came to be known, flourished as a fortress city, urban centre, trade centre, garrison, nodal point of several key routes, and meeting point of East and West. Here more than anywhere the Roman and Parthian Empires met. Here too the Semitic cultures of Syria mingled with those of Iran and Anatolia.
The existence of ruins of the Classical period around the little Turcoman village of Belkis upstream from the modern bridge of Birecik has been known to western scholars for over two centuries. By the beginning of this century growing awareness of the extent of the remains indicated a major city but there was no consensus as to which since many scholars believed the ancient bridge had lain at Birecik. Since the 1970s, however, it has been indisputable that the ruins at Belkis and opposite, around Tilmusa on the other bank, had to be those of Zeugma, a town at least as large as Samosata, twice the size of Roman London and three and half times that of Pompeii.
In the 19th century looters carried off superb mosaics and works of art fine enough to be covetted by the world class museums of imperial Britain, France, Germany and Russia. The potential of the site was revealed further by the systematic recording of visible features in the 1970s by Jörg Wagner. And now looters have again been at work, this time leading to the accidental discovery of a well-preserved villa with not just stunning mosaics but with glass and bronze household items still scattered across the floors from when the building was burned. In a western country it would have attracted TV cameras and large funds. Turkey, however, is like as a vast outdoor museum and, although it attracted media attention, not least through the efforts of Mrs Ayfer Ünsal of the Gaziantep newspaper, it has received less than its due and the implications have been given inadequate international concern. Turkey, nothwithstanding its strong antiquities legislation and vigorous archaeologists, lacks the resources to meet all of the many daily threats to its material heritage.
More alarming still, however, the Turkish government is building yet another dam to provide water for irrigation as part of its vast South-east Anatolia Development Project to revitalise the region. The dam is to be called the Birecik Dam but it is located at Zeugma, 500 m downstream of the city, and is now in progress. When it is complete all of Apamea on the east bank and half of Seleucia on the west, as well as scores of other sites of every period further up the valley will have disappeared under a new lake. Worse still, because the dam is so close to the site, it will suffer not just from emboldened looters and the effects of water and silt but from the construction work itself as access roads for plant are driven through and material is carried away for building.