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The city of Ephesus was one of the largest and most important cities in the ancient Mediterranean world, lying on the western coast of Asia Minor (in modern day Turkey). It was one of the oldest Greek settlements on the Aegean Sea, and later the provincial seat of Roman government in Asia. Situated at end of the Royal Road-the chief thoroughfare of the Roman East-the city was a western terminus of East-West trade, with one of the most important Mediterranean harbours for exporting products to Greece, Italy and the rest of the Roman West. The city itself developed around an ancient shrine of the earth goddess Artemis (Roman Diana), and later, from the beginning of the Christian era, became a key city in the expansion of Christianity, from which St Paul launched many of his missions.

Little is known of the city's origins. Greek settlements dotted the coast of Asia Minor as early as the Bronze Age (in the second millennium BC) and increased during the age of Greek colonization (ca. 700 BC). Interspersed among these were settlements of non-Greeks, such as native Anatolians and Phoenician traders. Ruled by a succession of conquerors, including the Persians and the Greeks, under the Roman Republic, Ephesus held the technical status of a "free" city, although it was ultimately subject to Roman control. However it was allowed to coin its own money and operate its own city council.

In the Imperial era, Ephesus became the seat of Roman government in the new province of Asia, while Caesar Augustus' reforms improved the city economy and initiated a time of peace and prosperity which would last down to the third century AD. Many of the great ruins in Ephesus today were completed during the reigns of Caesar Augustus (r. 27 BC - 14 AD) and his successor Tiberius (r.14-37 AD). These include, for example, the town-hall (the Prytaneion), a hippodrome stadium, and new aqueduct lines. Throughout the Pax Romana (a time of prosperity and stability roughly spanning from Augustus to 180 AD,) civic development continued in Ephesus on a grand scale. During this time, such Hellenistic sites as the famous theatre were revamped and new Roman sites like the Odeum (a theatre used for city council meetings and theatrical performances), the library of Celsus, the state Agora (or city square), bath houses and public latrines were built.

The heart of the business district of ancient Ephesus was the market square, which acted as a hub for the trade that arrived in the city from across the Empire, and particularly, the Roman East. This marketplace is 112 meters square, encompassed on all four sides by a two storied stoa (a covered passageway, lined with columns) which presumably contained merchant stalls. Its construction began under the reign of Tiberius, in about the year 23 AD, and was completely finished about thirty years later, although according to dedicatory inscriptions, it appears to have been open for business by as early as 43 AD. The market would have been supplied by the city's man-made city harbour, which was surrounded by warehouses filled with products being shipped west or arriving from the eastern provinces and beyond via caravans of merchants along the Royal Road.

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The city of Ephesus was one of the largest and most important cities in the ancient Mediterranean world, lying on the western coast of Asia Minor (in modern day Turkey). It was one of the oldest Greek settlements on the Aegean Sea, and later the provincial seat of Roman government in Asia.

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Ancient Olympia was an ancient Greek sanctuary site dedicated to the worship of Zeus located in the western Peloponnese.

The Pan-Hellenic Olympic Games were held at the site in honor of Zeus every four years from 776 BC to 393 BC.

https://www.britannica.com/place/Olympia-ancient-site-Greece

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https://www.britannica.com/place/Ephesus

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Ephesus, Greek Ephesos, the most important Greek city in Ionian Asia Minor, the ruins of which lie near the modern village of Selƈuk in western Turkey.

In Roman times it was situated on the northern slopes of the hills Coressus and Pion and south of the Cayster (Küçükmenderes) River, the silt from which has since formed a fertile plain but has caused the coastline to move ever farther west. The Temple of Artemis, or Diana, to which Ephesus owed much of its fame and which seems to mark the site of the classical Greek city, was probably on the seaboard when it was founded (about 600 bce), one mile east by northeast of Pion (modern Panayir Daǧ). In Roman times a sea channel was maintained with difficulty to a harbour well west of Pion. By late Byzantine times this channel had become useless, and the coast by the mid-20th century was three miles farther west. Ephesus commanded the west end of one great trade route into Asia, that along the Cayster valley, and had easy access to the other two, along the Hermus (Gediz) and the Maeander (Büyükmenderes) rivers.

© Dmitry V. Petrenko/stock.adobe.com

History

Ephesus enters history in the mid-7th century bce, when it was attacked by the Cimmerians. Unlike its neighbour, Magnesia, it survived the attacks. For part of the early 6th century the city was under tyrants. Though allied by marriage to the kings of Lydia, its people could not hold back the Lydian Croesus, who asserted a general suzerainty over the city. He did, however, present many columns and some golden cows for a new and splendid rebuilding of the Artemiseum ( Temple of Artemis). At this time, according to Strabo, the Ephesians began to live in the plain, and to this period too should be allotted the redrafting of the laws, said to have been the work of an Athenian, Aristarchus. Ephesus soon submitted to Cyrus of Persia. Early in the Ionian revolt (499-493 bce) against the Persians, Ephesus served as a base for an Ionian attack on Sardis, but it is not mentioned again until 494, when the Ephesians massacred the Chiot survivors of the Battle of Lade. The massacre may have occurred because Ephesus was a commercial rival of the chief rebels, Chios and Miletus. Ephesus maintained friendly relations with Persia for about 50 years: in 478 Xerxes, returning from his failure in Greece, honoured Artemis of Ephesus, although he sacked other Ionian shrines, and left his children for safety in Ephesus, and Themistocles landed there in the 460s on his flight to Persia. But after 454 Ephesus appears as a regular tributary of Athens. Great Ephesians up to this time had been Callinus, the earliest Greek elegist (mid-7th century bce), the satirist Hipponax, and the famous philosopher Heracleitus, one of the Basilids.

Ephesus shared in a general revolt of 412 bce against Athens, siding with Sparta in the Second Peloponnesian War, and remained an effective ally of Sparta down to the end of the war. Threatened by Persia after 403, Ephesus served in 396 as the headquarters of King Agesilaus of Sparta. In 394 the Ephesians deserted to Conon's anti-Spartan maritime league, but by 387 the city was again in Spartan hands and was handed by Antalcidas to Persia. There followed the pro-Persian tyranny of Syrphax and his family, who were stoned to death in 333 on Alexander the Great's taking the city. After 50 years of fluctuating fortune, Ephesus was conquered by the Macedonian general Lysimachus and resettled around Coressus and Pion (286-281 bce). Lysimachus introduced colonists from Lebedus and Colophon and renamed the city after his wife, Arsinoo-a name soon dropped. This was the beginning of Ephesus's Hellenistic prosperity. It became conspicuous for the abundance of its coinage.

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After the defeat of Antiochus the Great, king of Syria, by the Romans in 189 bce, Ephesus was handed over by the conquerors to the king of Pergamum. Attalus III of Pergamum bequeathed Ephesus with the rest of his possessions to the Roman people (133 bce). Thenceforth, Ephesus remained subject to Rome, except for a brief time beginning in 88 bce, when, at the instigation of Mithradates the Great of Pontus, the cities of Asia Minor revolted and killed their Roman residents. The Ephesians even killed those Romans who had fled for refuge to the Artemiseum, notwithstanding which they returned in 86 bce to their former masters. Their claim, preserved on an extant inscription, that in admitting Mithradates they had merely yielded to superior force was rudely brushed aside by Sulla, who inflicted a very heavy fine. Although it twice chose the losing side in the Roman civil wars and although it was stoutly opposed by Pergamum and Smyrna, Ephesus became under Augustus the first city of the Roman province of Asia. The geographer Strabo wrote of its importance as a commercial centre in the 1st century bce. The triumphal arch of 3 bce and the aqueduct of 4-14 ce initiated that long series of public buildings, ornamental and useful, that make Ephesus the most-impressive example in Greek lands of a city of imperial times.

Meanwhile, the Christian church began to win converts. A famous protest in the theatre against the teachings of St. Paul, described in Acts 19, is dated about 57 ce. According to local belief, Ephesus was the last home of the Virgin, who was lodged near the city by St. John and died there. The tradition that St. Luke also died there seems to be less strongly supported. Ephesus was one of the seven churches of Asia to which the Revelation to John was addressed.

The Goths destroyed both city and temple in 262 ce, and neither ever recovered its former splendour. The emperor Constantine, however, erected a new public bath, and Arcadius rebuilt at a higher level the street from the theatre to the harbour, named after him, the Arkadiane. A general council of the church, held at Ephesus in 431 in the great double church of St. Mary, condemned Nestorius and justified the cult of the Virgin as Theotokos (Mother of God). A few years later, according to legend, the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus (a group of 3rd-century Christian martyrs) were miraculously raised from the dead. They too became the object of a famous cult. The emperor Justinian built the magnificent basilica of St. John in the 6th century. By the early Middle Ages the city was no longer useful as a port and fell into decline. Late Byzantine Ephesus, conquered by the Seljuqs in 1090, was merely a small town. After brief splendour in the 14th century, even this was deserted, and the true site of the Artemiseum remained unsuspected until 1869.

Excavations and extant remains

J.T. Wood, working at Ephesus for the British Museum between 1863 and 1874, excavated the odeum and theatre. In May 1869 he struck a corner of the Artemiseum. His excavation exposed to view not only the scanty remains of the latest edifice (built after 350 bce) but the platform below it of an earlier temple of identical size and plan subsequently found to be that of the 6th century bce, to which Croesus contributed. The sculptured fragments of both temples were sent to the British Museum. In 1904 D.G. Hogarth, heading another mission from the museum, examined the earlier platform and found beneath its centre the remains of three yet older structures. In its earliest known phase the temple was apparently a small platform of green schist, containing a sealed deposit of primitive coins and other objects. These date from about 600 bce.

It is impossible to assign the various architects named by ancient authors to the respective phases of the temple. At best, Chersiphron and Metagenes can be tentatively assigned to the Temple of Croesus, Chirocrates or Dinocrates to that of the 4th century. There had perhaps been some repairs toward 400 bce, associated with the architects Paeonius and Demetrius and with the prizewinning dedicatory hymn of the famous musician Timotheus. The Artemiseum passed rapidly through three phases before about 550 bce. The Temple of Croesus (the fourth phase) was remarkable for its great size (it was more than 300 feet long and 150 feet wide), for the carved figures around the lower drums of its columns ( columnae caelatae), and for the smaller but elaborate figured friezes along its roof gutter ( sima). Croesus's temple seems to have been burned down in 356 bce. The new temple built shortly afterward copied the old in its columnae caelatae, one of which was by Scopas, but the new sima had, instead of small, crowded figures, a more conventional, if vigorous, rinceau ornament. The cella contained, among other great works, the Amazons of Polyclitus, Phidias, and Cresilas.

Lysimachean Ephesus has been continuously excavated since 1894 by the Austrian Archaeological Institute, but so solid and extensive is the Roman town that by the early 1960s the Austrians had rarely penetrated to Hellenistic levels.

On the hill of Ayasoluk (Hagios Theologos) is Justinian's church of St. John the Theologian, built around a shrine variously associated in the early Middle Ages with the death or bodily assumption of St. John. The church, uncovered since 1922, is a noble structure but badly restored. On the hill there is also a beautiful Seljuq mosque dedicated in 1375.

The public buildings of the city are arranged in a rectangular street pattern going back to Hellenistic days. They include the theatre, capable of seating nearly 25,000 spectators and completed in its present form under Trajan; the agora (marketplace), surrounded by stoas (sheltered promenades), dating from the time of Severus; the library of Celsus, also Trajanic and well known because of its facade; and an immense array of baths and gymnasiums.

All these buildings are to the west of Pion. On its north side is the stadium and north of this the gymnasium of Publius Vedius Antoninus, relatively small but very complete and with a notable chapel for the cult of Antoninus Pius. South of Pion were the odeum-another gift of Vedius-a roofed semicircular theatre to hold 1,400 persons, and also a series of fountains and aqueducts, notably the aqueduct of Gaius Sextilius Pollio, which crossed the valley from Coressus. The unmortared city wall along the crest of Coressus appears to be that of Lysimachus.

Of the early Byzantine city, besides the stretch of curtain wall on Panajir Dağ, there remain the ruined church of the Seven Sleepers to its east and the long double basilica of the Virgin, the scene of the council, to its west. This basilica was rebuilt several times; it was largely around this building, between the great gymnasiums and the stadium of the classical city, that the early Byzantine Ephesians gathered.

Mic Anderson, Copy Editor.

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...two main Ionian cities were Ephesus and Miletus; Miletus was very active in colonization, whereas at Ephesus, where the surrounding country produced enough grain and raw materials for the use of the city, there was less pressure for emigration and the founding of colonies. In the early 7th century the...

...2nd century, Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, claims that John's tomb is at Ephesus, identifies him with the beloved disciple, and adds that he "was a priest, wearing the sacerdotal plate, both martyr and teacher." That John died in Ephesus is also stated by St. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon c. 180...

...worship of Diana was at Ephesus, where the Temple of Artemis (or Diana) was one of the Seven Wonders of the World. In Roman art Diana usually appears as a huntress with bow and quiver, accompanied by a hound or deer....

key people

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Second Council of Ephesus

First Council of Ephesus

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Ephesus, the most important Greek city in Ionian Asia Minor, the ruins of which lie near the modern village of Selƈuk in western Turkey.

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World History Encyclopedia

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Wikipedia

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Artemis

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The Temple of Artemis or Artemision ( Greek: Ἀρτεμίσιον, Turkish: Artemis Tapınağı ), also known less precisely as the Temple of Diana , was a Greek temple dedicated to the goddess Artemis. It was located in Ephesus (near the modern town of Selçuk in present-day Turkey).

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Teresa's slide, not here.

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Location

Today: Turkey

One of the most important harbors and exported products to Greece.

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COMMERCIAL AGORA

Ephesus made all its money by trading; by the harbors or by the commercial agora. The commercial agora was a major trade center in Asia Minor.

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TEMPLE OF ARTEMIS

Temple of Diana

Goddess Artemis

By 401 AD it had been destroyed

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The Temple of Zeus at Olympia was an ancient Greek temple in Olympia, Greece, dedicated to the god Zeus.

The temple, built in the second quarter of the fifth century BC,

was the very model of the fully developed classical Greek temple of the Doric order.

Olympia.gov

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The government at Ephesus was ruled by a succession of conquerors including Persians and the Greeks, under the Roman Republic.

Ephesus had the status of a “free city”, although it was ultimately subject to Roman control. However, it was allowed to coin its own money and operate its own city council.

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Wikipedia

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Britannica

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Trade was a fundamental aspect of the ancient Greek world and following territorial expansion, an increase in population movements, and innovations in transport, goods could be bought, sold, and exchanged in one part of the Mediterranean which had their origin in a completely different and far distant region. Food, raw materials, and manufactured goods were not only made available to Greeks for the first time but the export of such classics as wine, olives, and pottery helped to spread Greek culture to the wider world.

From Local to International Trade

In Greece and the wider Aegean, local, regional, and international trade exchange existed from Minoan and Mycenaean times in the Bronze Age. The presence, in particular, of pottery and precious goods such as gold, copper, and ivory, found far from their place of production, attests to the exchange network which existed between Egypt, Asia Minor, the Greek mainland, and islands such as Crete, Cyprus, and the Cyclades. Trade lessened and perhaps almost disappeared when these civilizations declined, and during the so-called Dark Ages from the 11th to 8th centuries BCE international trade in the Mediterranean was principally carried out by the Phoenicians.

The earliest written sources of Homer and Hesiod attest to the existence of trade ( emporia) and merchants ( emporoi) from the 8th century BCE, although they often present the activity as unsuitable for the ruling and landed aristocracy. Nevertheless, international trade grew from 750 BCE, and contacts spread across the Mediterranean driven by social and political factors such as population movements, colonisation (especially in Magna Graecia), inter-state alliances, the spread of coinage, the gradual standardisation of measurements, warfare, and safer seas following the determination to eradicate piracy.

From 600 BCE trade was greatly facilitated by the construction of specialised merchant ships and the diolkos haulway across the isthmus of Corinth. Special permanent trading places ( emporia), where merchants of different nationalities met to trade, sprang up, for example, at Al Mina on the Orontes river (modern Turkey), Ischia-Pithekoussai (off the coast of modern Naples), Naucratis in Egypt, and Gravisca in Etruria. From the 5th century BCE, Athens' port of Piraeus became the most important trading centre in the Mediterranean and gained a reputation as the place to find any type of goods on the market.

Traded Goods

Goods which were traded within Greece between different city-states included:

cereals

wine

olives

figs

pulses

eels

cheese

honey

meat (especially from sheep and goats)

tools (e.g.: knives)

perfumes

fine pottery, especially Attic and Corinthian wares.

The most important trade exports were wine and olives, while cereals, spices, & precious metals Were Imported.

Fine Greek pottery was also in great demand abroad and examples have been found as far afield as the Atlantic coast of Africa. Other Greek exports included wine, especially from Aegean islands like Mende and Kos, bronze work, olives and olive oil (transported, like wine, in amphorae), emery from Delos, hides from Euboea, marble from Athens and Naxos, and ruddle (a type of waterproofing material for ships) from Keos.

The goods available at the market places ( agorai) of major urban centres which were imported from outside Greece included:

wheat

slaves from Egypt

grain from the Black Sea (especially via Byzantium)

salt fish from the Black Sea

wood (especially for shipbuilding) from Macedonia and Thrace

papyrus

textiles

luxury food such as spices (e.g.: pepper)

glass

metals such as iron, copper, tin, gold and silver.

Trade Incentives & Protection

Maritime loans enabled traders to pay for their cargoes and the loan did not have to be repaid if the ship failed to reach safely its port of destination. To compensate the lender for this risk, interest rates ( nautikos tokos) could be from 12.5 to 30% and the ship was often the security on the loan.

The involvement of the state in trade was relatively limited; however, a notable exception was grain. For example, so vital was it to feed Athens' large population and especially valuable in times of drought, trade in wheat was controlled and purchased by a special 'grain buyer' ( sitones). From c. 470 BCE the obstruction of the import of grain was prohibited, as was the re-exportation of it; for offenders the punishment was the death penalty. Market officials ( agoranomoi) ensured the quality of goods on sale in the markets and grain had its own supervisors, the sitophylakes, who regulated that prices and quantities were correct.

Besides taxes on the movement of goods (e.g.: road taxes or, at Chalkedon, a 10% transit charge on Black Sea traffic payable to Athens) and levies on imports and exports at ports, there were also measures taken to protect trade. For example, Athens taxed those citizens who contracted loans on grain cargo which did not deliver to Piraeus or those merchants who failed to unload a certain percentage of their cargo. Special maritime courts were established to tempt traders to choose Athens as their trading partner, and private banks could facilitate currency exchange and safeguard deposits. Similar trading incentives existed on Thasos, a major trading-centre and large exporter of high quality wine.

With the decline of the Greek city-states in the late Classical period, international trade moved elsewhere; nevertheless, many Greek cities would continue to be important trading centres in Hellenistic and Roman times, especially Athens and the free-trade ports of Delos and Rhodes.

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Trade was a fundamental aspect of the ancient Greek world and following territorial expansion, an increase in population movements, and innovations in transport, goods could be bought, sold, and exchanged...

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Miletus became known for the great number of colonies it founded. It was considered the greatest Greek metropolis and founded more colonies than any other Greek city.

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Corinth was a trade center because of its fertile land, excellent for agriculture.

During Roman period, Corinth was a great colony.

Corinth was first inhabited during the Neolithic period AKA 5,000 BCE

Corinth had an oligarchy as a form of government

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Corinth was a monarchy.The people were ruled by a kind.The king had many advisors.Together,Corinth’s government solves many problems that face cities today.During the 8th and 7th centuries Corinth was ruled by the Bacchiad family of nobles.Surrounded by fertile plains and blessed with natural springs,ancient Corinth was a centre of trade,had a naval fleet and participated in various Greek wars.