Cities in Anatolia that Held Out Against Alexander the Great

for regular videos on ancient cultures and forgotten civilizations Please Subscribe when traveling the world it's nice to get some perspective and one great way of achieving that is with a globe yeah Globes provide an enhanced sense of context and geographical literacy which is beneficial to have whether you're a traveler or not and I especially like moag Globes the sponsor of today's video what's so great about M Globes they rotate by themselves without a cord without batteries what's the trick it turns when it's exposed to ambient light hidden magnets inside provide the movement this is first of its kind technology I got one with an antique map but they have more than 40 other designs as well they even have an outer space collection featuring Graphics by NASA and JPL you can browse what you like at Mobil globes.co.il room it tells people you're a world traveler if not literally at least in the heart and what better way to annoy the flat earthers I'm putting a custom link below this video and if you click on it you'll get 10% off any 6in or 8.5 in moag Globe if you can't access the link for some reason just go to mobg globes.co.il he presented himself as a liberator and when it came to the majority Greek cities on the west coast his armies were largely welcomed with open arms that wasn't the case everywhere though some cities didn't mind Persian Rule and others preferred independence from any Empire currently in our travels we are in the area that in ancient times was called pamilia and making our way towards pidia the people here weren't particularly welcoming of Alexander in this episode we will be exploring three fascinating cities learning about their culture and looking at their attitude toward the advancing Macedonian [Music] forces welcome to the antiqui travel guide a helping hand for visiting historic places follow us to different countries as we search for ancient artifacts if you too wish to explore the ancient path through travel we'll help you plan where to go what to see and how best to enjoy what you encounter in this series of the atg you can accompany Tess and me on our Trek through turkia Homeland of the ancient frians Lans Trojans Hittites lydians Galatians and Greeks come on let's go we woke up near the site of ancient Ceda which we visited in our previous episode all right so we're just heading out we're leaving the Wonder life Hotel um it's a great No Frills place it's clean it's pretty quiet um not a whole lot but there's a nice pool and you can get a breakfast in the morning um pretty No Frills place to stay if you're staying in Cay Tess and I are traveling with our Turkish interpreter and guide Mustafa and behind the scenes as as always is our videographer Rachel the first ancient city on today's track is one that sat not too far from CA also in the region of pamilia but a few miles off the coast in the hills and on the river called yuadon in ancient times and Cai today Greek tradition says that the settlement was founded by Greeks who came from Argos a city in the pelones this would have been around 1,000 BCE the city minted its own coins one of the earliest to do so and the coins that have been discovered have revealed some interesting information for example in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE the name of the city was estadia heliz to Estus and this may indicate that a king named aouada who we know from hittite inscriptions ruled this area in hittite times may have been the city's namesake maybe there was a village here before the Greeks arrived but soon thereafter the the city's name was changed to aspendos and that is what it was called for a long time the coins show two naked wrestlers as the symbol of the city so we just arrived at Asbestos aspendos aspendos and uh it cost 200 L to get in which is the equivalent of about 8 us so let's go our Museum passes will get us in if we do it correctly maybe not [Music] [Music] we are here in the theater of aspendos the best preserved theater Roman Theater from Antiquity it was built in the 2 Century during the reign of the uh Emperor Marcus aurelus and the architect was Zeno a guy who lived here in aspendos uh in the SK behind me there were inscriptions found above the entrances uh in which two brothers ctus crispinus and ctus aspac catus dedicated this theater they they probably funded it uh and I quote to the gods of this country and to the Imperial house there's a legend concerning the creation of this theater and it is that the king of aspendos had a competition uh who could build the best um public work in the city um and they would be awarded a prize the prize being the King's Daughter and uh so there were two main um Builders who were in competition and one built the uh Aqueduct and canals for the city and the King was about to give the award to this man but he said well we better go check out the theater just to be sure so they came to the theater and uh he stood in awe of what he saw before him and then he heard a voice whisper in his ear saying give me your daughter because I am the winner and he looked around he didn't know who it was and it was the builder way far away but the Acoustics of the theater were so good he could hear him like it was right next to him and he says you will have my daughter and so as The Story Goes The Wedding took place right down there the theater could hold 7,000 Spectators and up here this is a colonade where people could seek shade but we also have evidence that they had a canopy extending from here down a bit so that even if you're sitting in the rows above here there was a a canopy that protected you from the Sun the information about how many people could be accommodated here varies Al low estimate says up to 7,000 but more than double that has been fit in here for modern [Music] events the SK had five doorways leading out onto the pro skum that's the stage the largest doorway is in the middle [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so they actually still do live performances in this place um it would be pretty incredible to see like a play or or a musical performance here it's just absolutely amazing the sound hello [Music] look at this there is no way the Romans had this high technology it can only mean one thing this theater is more than 15,000 years old even though the theater is the most impressive and most visited part of aspendos there are other ruins to see we didn't have a whole lot of time we wanted to visit the neighboring city of perga also this morning but we walked up the trail towards the Acropolis to see what else we could find now we're hiking again oh like nearby Ceda aspendos too was ruled by the kingdom of Lydia but was then conquered by the Persians that happened in 546 B.C but the fact that it continued to Mint its own coins suggests it had a degree of Independence but then in 467 BCE a fleet arrived here under the command of an Athenian Greek named kimon and they defeated a Phoenician Fleet that the Persians had stationed here an elite group of Greek soldiers then dressed up in the clothes of some Persian soldiers they had taken prisoner and they walked into the Persian War camp on land the Persians thought they were their own men they then waited for the Greek forces to land turned on the Persians and the Persian force was destroyed aspendos then became a member of the dean League an alliance managed by Athens let's the water flow from rain and all that and then you keep the street dry isn't this cool we're entering a one of the gates of the city aspendos had a booming economy in those days Boats were able to Traverse the idon river which extended 16 km to the coast they made a lot of money from Trading salt olive oil and wool but aspendos was most famous for its horse breeding they say the city's horses were the most prized in all the Mediterranean three of aspendos City gates are preserved this is the East Gate the street leads up to the agara on the Acropolis in 411 BCE the Persians regained control of the city and it remained theirs until 3:33 when it surrendered to Alexander the Great they double crossed him though and attempted to reassert their independence after he left so he came back and reconquered them leaving a Garrison in the city to ensure they wouldn't make any more trouble later on it came under the rule of the saluca Empire until the Romans took it from them in the 2 Century BCE and gave it to pergamon then finally it became romes the Romans built many magnificent buildings here and aspendos population peaked at about 20,000 people that building there is the Basilica which was used as a court and political venue there once was a statue of the Roman emperor hadrien in one of the wall niches which is now at the archaeological Museum in antalia which we will be visiting tomorrow although we didn't go up to see it if you come here take your car up to the top of the hill and you'll be able to get a good look at the aqueduct of aspendos it brought water from two different sources and one of the more fascinating aspects of it is its siphon system an inscription names a tiberious Claudius italicus the chief Centurion of a Roman legion stationed here as the donator of 2 million dinar to construct it this appears to have been in the 2 Century for students of Hydraulic Engineering the aspendos water system is of special interest because of its two towers and unique siphons one of them a reverse siphon is the only Roman reverse siphon that has survived until today the city went into decline between the fourth and 7th centuries and its demise was sped up by the Arab incursions that occurred after that in the 13th century it was conquered by the selic and in the 15th century by the Ottomans there is a walking trail between aspendos and the nearby city of perga but we took the car so far we have seen the ruins of three cities of the region of ancient pamilia liba Ceda aspendos but the fourth one per or Pera in Latin in Greek was arguably the most prominent archaeologists from Istanbul University have been working here since 1946 ancient writings tell us that there was a magnificent Sanctuary dedicated to Artemis situated on a hill outside inside the city but unfortunately archaeologists have not yet found its Remains the famous Greek mathematician and astronomer apollonius was a resident of perga he was known for advanced thinking in Geometry he invented the terms ellipse Parabola hyperbola and he developed a hypothesis about the planets having eccentric orbits to explain their movements pgus theater is across the street from the ticket office and outside the park proper we visited it last but it probably is a better idea to visit it first right after getting your ticket and then to enter the park all right second stop of the day we are at pay this is also 200 L to get in which is the equivalent of about $8 us it is 10:00 a.m. and it is scorching hot so if you visit these sites make sure you're prepared with sunscreen hats everything the sun is brutal here but I'm excited so let's check this out Legend has it that perga was founded by Greeks right after the Trojan War in the 13th century BCE and we do find evidence of the beginning of occupation here around that time we also have an inscription on a bronze plate that was found at the hittite capital of husha that speaks of a city by the name of parha so we think they are one and the same we don't hear about the city again until the 4th Century BCE when it is mentioned in a paraplu a geographic iCal text which says it sat on the river Kyros that's the river called auxu today at that time it was under Persian domination and remained so until Alexander came here in late 334 early 333 perga differed from the other two cities we explored today in that it immediately surrendered to Alexander and did not give him any notable resistance they even offered to help Alexander as guides to the region of pamilia I'm sure this made aspendos angry because they were next the stadium here at perga is the uh the second best preserved one in turkey and it is one of the largest as well it's 23 34 M long and 34 M wide and it could accommodate about 12,000 Spectators along the longer side of the stadium there were 30 vaults and inscriptions and a few of them indicate that they were shops that people could buy things in and then down at the far end I don't know if you can see that there's a little bit of a wall that was built there because that part was used for gladiatorial combat and they wanted to protect the audience in the seats so here's an example of one of the these uh shops so people could go in and out through here you can enter the stadium and come out and then there will be things to uh buy here um when you're going in you might want to pick up a few things when you leave also you might want to pick up a few things see they had it all monetization down even back then you ever go to Disney I don't know you've never been in the dis Disney World but you go to Disney and as soon as you get out of the ride there's a shop you have to walk through the shop in order to get out so all over turkey there are mulberry trees delicious I grew up with these trees in my backyard we used to make pies having some Nostalgia here in Turkey there were you know many Berry trees on the road to home mhm and whenever I came from school I'll stop there and eat them some before like 20 minutes that's what I would do a little bit messy here after the death of Alexander perga became a colony of the kingdom of pergamon during those years it expanded grew in prosperity started minting its own coins and took on a more helenistic character then as with aspendos Ceda and liba the salid conquered it the Romans came in 188 defeated the SIDS and gave these cities to pergamon peron's last king gifted these cities to Rome upon his death in 133 BCE here we are at the city Gates uh you can see a huge tower on this side and it remains of a huge tower on that side and then the gate going in here this is a Roman gate it was built in the 3r century during the reign of the emperor Septimus seus let's go inside an inscription found here and which was written in the first century CE tells us us that the regions of pamilia and nextdoor neighbor liia formed a Federated State under Roman rule and that the city of perga took an active part in the administration after going through the Roman gate you'll see the remains of the earlier helenistic gate straight ahead but between the two gates are the remains of a courtyard it was once adorned with statues the surviving ones are now in the archaeological Museum in antalia perhaps the most interesting was a statue of plank Magna a noble woman of perga who was honored here because she funded many of the city's public buildings projects here we are at the nyam of the city we saw the one at Sida yesterday uh which was a much larger one but here's the Nyon that held the water that the aqueduct brought down into the City and uh this was put up in the time of Septimus Severus uh again like the gate and it was dedicated in an inscription to Artemis peraya Artemis of per and to septimia sis and to his sons kakala and Gita and to the empress ulia domna and to the city of [Applause] perga and here we see the uh the bath house uh the southern bath of the city it's huge as you can see [Music] here we are at the or gate to the city uh the Roman gate is up there this is the original gate it's the helenistic gate it comes from the 3rd Century BCE and uh you can see the main road leading from it see the colon Street there and um this has been refurbished uh in the Roman period and it's being refurbished today uh but this was where people entered the city originally before it started expanding out a little bit more that's it plank Magna funded the refurbishment of the inner horseshoe shaped Courtyard between the towers this was between 120 and 122 CE they overlaid the walls with marble blocks and added a two-story colonade of Corinthian style columns the niches between the columns on the Second Story held statues of mopsos and calus the legendary founders of the city on the first story they had statues of the deities Hermes Aphrodite and Pan behind me here is the agara this is the main Market of the city and uh this would have been filled with vendors every day this is where people came to shop it was the outlet mall of ancient times uh but take a look here these columns there's a whole hundreds of them in this city hundreds of these columns and what are they they're Granite now some people you might hear around the internet saying things like oh well do you know in the Greeks and the Romans they were only able to make columns that were in sections and it is true that the Greeks and Romans did make columns in sections sometimes but they also had single block Columns of granite okay this is a single piece of granite now some of these have been broken and put back together okay but they were all single pieces of granite okay yes the Romans had a thriving Granite industry and they had many hundreds of these uh in many cities around their empire in its Heyday during the 1 and 2nd centuries perga was one of the greatest cities in Anatolia and you can get a taste for its magnificence by walking around in it most of the preserved structures here are from this time period interestingly perga also is mentioned in the book Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament there it is said that the Apostle Paul and companions came to this city to preach Christianity then he went North to Antioch of pidia and returned here again today there's a hiking trail that connects these two cities that is named after him it would take about 3 days to walk it beginning at the helenistic gate is the main street of perga which leads to the Acropolis shops once line the sides of the street this is where the shop were along the street where people bought things the water flowed down the middle of the street here underneath and underneath a statue that was here all the way to the nmon just outside the helenistic gates this is a magn magnificent sight partway up there is another large colon Street perpendicular to this one and the intersection divides the city into four districts at the far north end of the main street is the entrance to the Acropolis and it also is another nyf called the Fountain of hadrien you can see the bottom of a statue here this was a statue of the god kestros the god of the local River there were also statues of the emperor hadrien but they are now at the archaeological Museum in antalia we'll be going there tomorrow this has got to be it so right outside the city wall here we have a tomb uh the tomb of plank Magna who is that this is a woman a very wealthy woman who funded many of the building projects here in the city and sponsor and sponsored them and she was so appreciated for this they gave her Honor by giving her a beautiful tomb right here next to the City Gate plank Magna was the daughter of a Roman Senator and the wife of another one but she was a local lady she was descended from a dynasty of kings of capadia and was High Priestess of the Artemis cult here in perga Herod the Great of Judea was her third great-grandfather on her mother's side 10-minute planks yeah that's why she C thank you sorry I cannot sometimes stop the urge to make silly jokes so we are at the theater at perge and it's actually another 200 L to get in here which is another about $8 um so you have to pay twice if you're visiting everything in P had we gone to the theater first I think we might have been able to avoid the second charge this theater sits on a hill right outside the city uh and it would be on the approach Road uh up to the city and uh it is uh magnificent I mean look at the artwork still available here the sculptures on the skan Fantastic we didn't see that aspendos and uh this H uh theater could hold about 15,000 people so it's about the same size as the one we saw at CID the marble reliefs that you see along the SK here and the SK was about two stories are scenes from mythology and especially from the life of dionis the god that was associated with the theater the theater was built about uh 120 CE so right at the height of the Roman Empire they're probably statues here yeah I expect that there were probably statues that sat right here yeah life size there once was a colon Gallery around the top of the auditorium but it is not in as good of condition as we saw at aspendos perga Had A Renewed period of prosperity in the Fifth and 6th centuries when it was the center of a Christian bishopi it was inhabited until about the 12th or 13th century [Music] fight sea Lev this is [Music] we then drove North up into the mountains and on the way we stopped near the village of aason to get something to eat foreign tourists don't generally come here we're going to get a taste of the authentic culture of the mountain people of turkia we found a place called yaa Kent restaurant and the owner is one of the York people we talked about last episode he want he wanted to be a king he also rejected it the food was fresh well prepared and absolutely delicious so [Music] good look at that cheesy fish cheese weren lying really okay got a piece that when I was a child I was just you know munching them yeah yeah yeah we talked to the owner after the meal and Mustafa translated for us he he or originally from merine tarus it's a province in Turkey just at the other side of Taurus Mountains yes I know where it is Tarsus yeah they were you know raising goats sheeps does he his family own this restaurant does he own this restaurant uh he owns this restaurant okay from his fifth grade you know he was 12 uh he started as a waiter at Summers you know as a summer job then he grew to be a chef okay and he says he lived The Village at 2014 uh he was a chef a grill chef at Istanbul in a restaurant then he came here and opened this shop mhm when he came here uh they they bought this place uh now they are uh all this products we eat they raise them themselves oh yeah the fish too there are fish farms here but the other you know lamp uh the other meat products MH uh they grow them themselves uh and he runs this place with his wife okay uh but he uh has a baby now which is five uh five and a half months uhh so his wife taking care of the baby okay he has around this place now by himself what is his name tell him it was delicious we love the food uh and we will tell people about his restaurant on YouTube restaurant Che be your topal with his full name okay uh he would be very glad okay I will do that so he just invited us over here to pick some cherries to eat so here we are uh you can pick from the garden [Music] okay I love [Applause] cherries our final destination for this episode is the best of the three the city of sagalassos the Turks call it sasos what makes sagalassos so great well for one the ruins are situated high up in the mountains and just the drive to get there is magnificent it's even more magnificent when you get to the city and look down but also and more importantly the site is very well preserved so much so that 90% of its ashlar building remains are still here though many many of those structures are destroyed but most of them could be reconstructed if they had the money and the [Music] [Music] time it's not common to find a city of medium size in such decent condition an archaeologists have done systematic work here for two decades documenting every layer of occupation all right we are at sagalassos this place is absolutely incredible we had to drive up this Winding Road through the mountains to get here um it is 125 L to get in which is about five bucks and your museum pass will cover it the city was continuously occupied for about 1,000 700 years the earliest evidence of settlement is from the aeonid Persian period in the 5th Century BCE relatively late compared to some of the other cities we've seen according to the Roman historian Arian when Alexander the Great conquered the area sagalassos put up a fight Arian says that sagalassos was not a small City though archaological remains suggest it was hardly more than a village why they thought they could beat Alexander I don't know know but its position up here was very defensible in fact it's difficult to believe that people came up here just to farm most of these Mountain strongholds were chosen as places for Refuge so what is this building R in now this is the bath SL gymnasium it originally was just a bath built around 120 CE and then uh they expanded it into a bath SL gy and uh people could work out and bathe uh in most bath houses they would have several different rooms where uh the bathers could go in succession hot room cold room and so forth um it was kind of a bathing process so they actually had gyms to work out yeah and everybody worked out naked it was all men okay bunch of naked men working out together yeah yeah it was a custom one of the things they used to do in the bath is they' uh they'd have these skin scrapers to they they'd basically scrape off their sweat oh and also dirt we do that with horses yeah oh do you sweat scrapers yeah after Alexander's death sagalassos came under the rule of various helenistic kingdoms the antigonid Empire The salid Empire and the kingdom of pergamon we are currently in the region of ancient pidia as we have now left pamilia and the political landscape of pidia in this period is still a bit unclear but we do know that sagalassos along with the cities of terasos and selga was important we're heading up to the upper agor the uh Market uh in the upper part of the city as you already know the territory of pergamon was bequeathed to the Romans in 133 BCE so that is when sagalassos came under Roman rule it was made part of the Roman province of Asia in 129 but the Romans did not really get directly involved until after they defeated the salisian Pirates a century later and then they just gave this area to the king of galatia who was their client almost 2,000 years old it's pretty good shape too it was not until 25 BCE that pdia came back under direct Roman rule and at that time it was incorporated into the Roman province of galatia the Romans did a lot of building work here which changed the physical appearance of the city markedly and before you knew it sagalassos was the foremost City in all of pidia all right Tes knowledge everybody what type of this is upside down but what type of column capital is this what style huh anybody anybody Vier take the credit Corinthian yes very good Mustafa it is Corinthian yeah the two arches you see there which are at the two Southern entry points to the upper agara are the arch es of Claudius an inscription on the further one did not survive but we have one on the closer one from about 43 CE which is dedicated to the emperor Claudius and his brother germanicus but it seems to have replaced an original inscription dedicated to someone else and we think it was Caligula claudius's predecessor whose name was condemned when he died in 41 and his inscriptions were erased the monuments are said to have been financed by calicles son of Darius as a result his family was the first in the city to be awarded Roman citizenship probably the most impressive surviving Monument is the anonine nyum constructed between 160 and 180 CE during the time of the antonine dynasty though it had its Beginnings in the days of Augustus okay you've seen two of them already in two other ancient cities so you should know by now that this is a nyum and this is where water was brought into the city uh through Aqueduct uh to supply the city with water and they still got the water running this is so cool you can get a feel for it you know so some of the people here are actually drinking this water which I I probably wouldn't recommend um but it's really special for them as City people to come out in the the Mountain Air and to drink this fresh spring water yeah the people would come here and this is where they would draw up their clean water oh this is wonderfully cold um and uh yeah now I don't think people were allowed to bathe in here but they were allowed to drink from it and they were allowed to uh take water out of it the design motifs of the nyam such as theater masks grapes and intoxicating plants are related to the god dianis there's also a statue of dianis and a seder this water is so cold um it's probably coming from Up the Mountain the N building project was financed by a man named Titus flavus sanus naon his family name can be seen on many inscriptions throughout the city indicating they were important here for some time his name in particular is seen a lot this Fountain was remodeled around the year 500 and made to be a monument to his family statues of the Gods Nemesis Apollo esus and coronus were added a short time later when Christianity became predominant Christians toppled all the statues into the Basin ooh maybe it doesn't it might not go anywhere okay I'm going to go in here and see what we [Music] got oh it goes It goes a long way it's freezing cold in here it's like it's like 90° outside but it's like freezing cold in here it's dripping there's a stairway leading up yeah it's still it there's another floor o yeah it course it it keeps going uh no it's we've come to a dead end but um I think it probably extended further in ancient times it just needs to be dug out you know um but I'm not sure where it went wa does it look like it goes up it does look like it goes up you know what do you think I should okay here we go it looks like it goes up so I just want to see no there's a ceiling here and there are huge bugs on the ceiling oh my God they're they look like giant mosquitoes but they seem to be dormant camera so okay no problem Mo stuff I check them out what's funny is uh some people are claustrophobic and some people are afraid of heights what I don't know I have to read the archaeology on it I'm sure there's one on the other side too but I'm guessing it's just an access um Corridor to get to the top of the thing cuz it goes up right yeah it goes up so it's probably just an excess corridor Titus naon the same fellow who funded the anonine NF also had a library built in the city but as you can see there isn't much left of it now in the Roman times originally they would have just had Scrolls but in later Roman times they would have started having actual codexes which is the books codices I should say um yeah but can you imagine just picture it this above way up above our heads beautiful facade you walk into the library amazing in the Eastern suburbs of the city Artisans produced a wide range of products but what sagalassos was widely known for was its red slipware which It produced between the 1st and 7th centuries and exported all throughout the Mediterranean but even before and after that it made a lot of pottery over 50 kils and workshops have been found the city is in fact the longest non-stop producing Pottery Center known from classical Antiquity right down there is a uh the Bulet terion uh that is the building where the Boule met that's the Town Council you can even see the seats where the men probably sat around uh when they were deliberating and so forth and right here next to the Bulet terion is a Christian Basilica and they found uh a beautifully preserved mosaic on the floor uh but it's not there now because they wanted to make sure it it stayed preserved so they took it to the museum this structure right behind me is a heroon which is a monument dedicated to a hero this is the city's hero now we don't exactly know who it is because we didn't find an inscription that told us but we did find uh remnants of a statue about a two and a half meter tall statue and we found the fellow's head okay and it was a young man so we know it was a young Aristocrat of some kind who must have performed some great thing for the city but can't tell you much more than that oh and uh when this building was found it was all toppled to the ground but it has been rebuilt uh using the original Stones now you might ask well how do they know how what it looked like well we know what heroin look like from other cities uh so that gives us an idea and then of course the rest of it is just fitting a jigsaw puzzle together you know when I when I thought we were coming to see ancient ruins I did not expect to see such great views yeah we've been to a lot of places where like the views have been amazing yeah more often than not been pretty gorgeous places the urban planning that must have gone into creating the city must have been extensive they were able to adapt to the terrain very well and lay out a coherent City Center they also had to take into account water runoff off and flood risks the flow of the water including for distribution to the people had to be carefully planned I love taking a look sometimes at the decorative work on the stones now these have been weathered quite a bit but you can see this is a very common way of doing it you dress the blocks by cutting away a frame on them and then you can do whatever you want with this but what they did here was they chip little little holes you know sometimes we do that in decoration today you just just make a bunch of a little of little holes and that was the uh the decorative style for this wall what we have here is another Nim uh no running water here and it's smaller but this one was constructed in the 2 Century during the reign of the emperor hadrien it was funded by a Roman Knight by the name of Tiberius Claudius Pisa who lived here at sagalassos and he loved the emperor hadrien so he dedicated this nyam uh to the emperor here you can see the lower agara and Street going down and off to the left there you see that on the hill that's the remains of a temple it was a very important Temple and a very a large Temple uh that was built in the reign of antoninus pasus in the 2 Century uh dedicated to the Imperial cult and statues of the Emperors were there as well as um of priests and of Victors um and that Temple was in operation for a few centuries but by the time you get to the Christian period late 4th Century they closed it down you might be wondering did sagalassos ever have to defend their City against an invading Army I mean they're way up here in the mountains right who's going to come up here well they did see that Hill there in the background that's called Alexander's Hill and there was a battle fought here between the sagoian and Alexander the Great in 333 BCE Alexander was coming through this territory conquering it and the Sagal lasan held out against him and they had a decisive battle on that hill where Alexander defeated the calasans and took the City I forgot to mention that there was a fort on top of that hill and it remained there throughout the helenistic and Roman periods set of pipes holding up that rock sometimes we see these little Contraptions holding up the stone so they don't fall I don't know how well they're going to how long they're going to last but uh yeah the city grew in size and stature until the early 4th Century after which the the Roman government made administrative changes and sagalassos lost its position as the leading city of pidia in the fifth and sixth centuries eight different churches were built here but a massive earthquake laid the city low in the 7th century and although people lived here after that it was never the same occupation finally ended around the 13th century as the sun was coming down we drove back down the mountains towards the coast we'll be staying in the big city of antalia for the next two nights in our next episode we will show you the archaeological Museum of antalia where artifacts from many of the sites we have seen and ones we will see are on display then we will go explore the ancient ruins of Kira and aronda never heard of them well you will we'll see you then la [Music]