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Iasos  MINOAN and Mycenean seafarers looking for settlement sites in the second millennium BC favoured low promontories or peninsulas with beaches on which to draw up their ships. The drop-shaped peninsula of Iasos is just such a place, and, sure enough, Minoan and Mycenean pottery has been found here by the Italian excavators, as it has at Miletos and other places on this coast. The remains which concern us however belong to the classical period and later.


Ancient Iasos depended on fi sh and prawns for its livelihood, and still today it is famed for its fi sh and there are fi sh-farms growing sea-bass and sea-bream in the sea north of the site. This shallow rich sea (known as the Little Sea in antiquity) originally extended much further north over the area of drained marshland on which Bodrum-Milas airport now lies. Dolphins are common in the area, and one of principal motifs of Iasean coinage is a boy swimming with a dolphin. Strabo tells us that the soil of Iasos was poor, though today it produces some of the best olive-oil in Turkey. Ancient Iasos was also known for its quarries of pinkish marble.


The site occupies the whole of the peninsula, which was originally defended by a fi ne Hellenistic wall; little of this now remains for many blocks were removed in barges in the nineteenth century to build the quays of Istanbul, a fate which befell several other ancient sites on the west coast of Turkey. Immediately across the isthmus a stretch of fl at ground contains some of the main public buildings, including a colonnaded agora rebuilt in the late 130s AD, within which are the remains of a Byzantine basilical church and its graveyard. Around or near the agora are a well-preserved semi-circular council chamber; a possible sebasteion (temple for the worship of a Roman emperor); a probable sanctuary of Artemis Astias, where the statue of the goddess is reported to have stood open to the sky, for her father Zeus protected her when he sent rain or snow; and a Roman bath-house and gymnasium. Further up the hill is the large but poorly preserved theatre built in the fourth century BC with Roman additions, and facing north-east (although more Greek theatres seem to face west than in any other direction, there was no hard and fast rule, and the terrain available seems to have been the determining factor). Continuing towards the fortress of the acropolis, whose present walls may have have been built by the Knights of St John, we reach a basilical church, built originally in the 6th century but converted to a much smaller church a few centuries later. Further south is an opulent Roman mansion with mosaics and frescoes, and nearby is a poorly preserved sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone, as usual set well away from the centre of the city.


On the mainland is the necropolis of the ancient city with tombs going back to prehistoric times. The most striking is a reconstructed mausoleum of the Roman period; standing in its own colonnaded courtyard near the remains of an aqueduct, it takes the form of a Corinthian temple on a podium which originally had ten steps, and within which are several burial chambers. The courtyard has been restored and converted into a museum housing the important inscriptions found on the site and other artefacts. The other noteworthy structure on the mainland is an unfi nished wall over 2.5 km long dating to the fi fth or fourth centuries BC; Bean plausibly suggests that it was built as protection for the camp of Amorges, a Persian nobleman who revolted from the Persian king and maintained himself at Iasos until it was captured and sacked by the Spartan allies of the Persian king in 412 BC.