TARSUS
Cilicia Campestris, Turkey.
A very
ancient city founded on the earlier course of the Tarsus
Çay (Kydnos) only 40 km from Adana in the center of
the alluvial plain. Known from excavation as a settlement
from Neolithic times, Tarsus was long a Semitic city with
important Oriental connections through its landlocked
port of Rhegma. Indeed, apart from a brief period under
the Satrap, it had local autonomy under the Persian Empire with rulers known as
syennesis. Such it was when
Xenophon and his Ten Thousand passed through Cilicia
at the beginning of the 5th c. B.C. After Alexander's conquests, however, Tarsus was in dispute between the Seleucid and Ptolemaic factions, and was known for a while as Antioch on the Kydnos for Antiochos Epiphanes, and in
order to prove a respectable pedigree chose to claim
Perseus and Herakles as founders. In 67 B.C., after two
centuries of turbulent misrule, Tarsus was occupied by
Pompey during his Cilician campaign against the pirates,
and it is at least possible that the father of St. Paul (a
Tarsiot and Roman citizen by birth) had been honored
for his services as a tent contractor to the Roman army
at this time. If Paul was Tarsus' most illustrious son,
among spectacular events in the city's history, Cleopatra's
regal progress up the Kydnos for her rendezvous with
Antony ranks high.
N of Tarsus, Septimius Severus' passage through the
Cilician Gates in pursuit of Pescennius Niger in 193 is
marked by an inscription on the rock face. Tarsus was
designated “first, greatest and most beautiful; the metropolis of the three provinces of Cilicia, Isauria and Lycaonia” and was the seat of a great university. Under Diocletian, Tarsus became metropolis of Cilicia Prima, the W part of the plain, while Anazarbos administered the
E half. The retreat of the sea, due to silt carried downstream by the Kydnos, and the resulting abandonment of
Rhegma, led Justinian in the 6th c. to divert the river
into the channel E of the modern city, and through which
it still flows. With the Arab occupation of Cilicia, Tarsus
was laid in ruins, but was rebuilt by Harun-ar-Rashid to
become the military base for the annual Moslem campaign against Byzantine territories N of the Taurus. It
was reconquered by Nikephoros Phokas in the 10th c.,
only to fall again, first to the Christian kingdom of Little
Armenia, then to the Egyptian Mamelukes, and finally to
the Ottoman Turks.
Classical Tarsus lies deep beneath the modern city,
and the port of Rhegma is surely to be found in the
eucalyptus forest that drains the swamps that marked the
course of the Kydnos when it became choked with silt.
A battered brick-faced arch on the road W of the city,
and sometimes known as St. Paul's Gate, is of Arab date,
and the only certain Roman monument is a massive concrete foundation known locally as Donuk Taş (The Frozen Stone), which was probably the podium of an important public building, since fragments of marble
veneer are scattered nearby. In the Museum of Adana is
the material discovered during excavations at Gözlü
Kule, the original settlement, which shows evidence of a
continuous occupation from the Neolithic to the Arab
period. Also in the Adana Museum are the chance finds
of pottery, figurines, statuary, mosaic, and other objects
encountered by workmen on civic projects. Among them
is a fine marble sarcophagus decorated with the scene of
Priam begging Achilles for the return of the corpse of
Hector.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
W. M. Ramsay, “Cilicia, Tarsus, and
the Great Taurus Pass,”
The Geographical Journal (Oct.
1903) 1-56; G. Le Strange,
The Lands of the Eastern
Caliphate (1930) 130-34; A.H.M. Jones,
Cities of the
Eastern Roman Provinces (2d ed. 1971) Index s.v.; H.
Goldman, ed.,
Excavation at Gözlü Kule, Tarsus (1950-1963).
M. GOUGH
