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Greek city of Tarsos in Cilicia
Bronze 17mm (92 grams) Struck circa 164-27 B.C.
Reference: BMC 21,184,134; Levante 976; SNG BN 1362
Certification: NGC Ancients Ch XF Strike: 4/5 Surface: 4/5 2077753-003
Club; MH-TPO (in monogram form) flanking; all within oak wreath.
TAPΣEΩN, Zeus Nikephoros enthroned left, holding Nike and scepter; star in left field.
The first city of Cilicia and capital of the native rulers down to circa 400 B.C., Tarsus was situated in the fertile eastern plain on the river Kydnos, about 12 miles from the sea. In the 4th century, until the arrival of Alexander in 333 B.C., Tarsus was the chief mint of the Persian satraps. Eventually, in the 1st century B.C., it became the capital of the Roman province of Cilicia.
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 In the ancient Greek religion, Zeus was the “Father of Gods and men” who ruled the Olympians of Mount Olympus as a father ruled the family. He was the god of sky and thunder in Greek mythology. His Roman counterpart is Jupiter and Etruscan counterpart is Tinia.
Zeus was the child of Cronus and Rhea, and the youngest of his siblings. In most traditions he was married to Hera, although, at the oracle of Dodona, his consort was Dione: according to the Iliad, he is the father of Aphrodite by Dione. He is known for his erotic escapades. These resulted in many godly and heroic offspring, including Athena, Apollo and Artemis, Hermes, Persephone (by Demeter), Dionysus, Perseus, Heracles, Helen of Troy, Minos, and the Muses (by Mnemosyne); by Hera, he is usually said to have fathered Ares, Hebe and Hephaestus.
As Walter Burkert points out in his book, Greek Religion, “Even the gods who are not his natural children address him as Father, and all the gods rise in his presence.” For the Greeks, he was the King of the Gods, who oversaw the universe. As Pausanias observed, “That Zeus is king in heaven is a saying common to all men”. In Hesiod’s Theogony Zeus assigns the various gods their roles. In the Homeric Hymns he is referred to as the chieftain of the gods.
His symbols are the thunderbolt, eagle, bull, and oak. In addition to his Indo-European inheritance, the classical “cloud-gatherer” also derives certain iconographic traits from the cultures of the Ancient Near East, such as the scepter. Zeus is frequently depicted by Greek artists in one of two poses: standing, striding forward, with a thunderbolt leveled in his raised right hand, or seated in majesty.
Tarsus (Hittite: Tarsa; Greek: Ταρσός; Armenian: Տարսոն, Hebrew: תרשיש) is a historic city in south-central Turkey, 20 km inland from the Mediterranean. It is part of the Adana-Mersin Metropolitan Area, the fourth-largest metropolitan area in Turkey with a population of 3 million people. Tarsus forms an administrative district in the eastern part of the Mersin Province and lies in the core of Çukurova region.
With a history going back over 6,000 years, Tarsus has long been an important stop for traders and a focal point of many civilisations. During the Roman Empire, Tarsus was the capital of the province of Cilicia. It was the scene of the first meeting between Mark Antony and Cleopatra, and the birthplace of Paul the Apostle.
Geography
Located on the mouth of the Berdan River (Cydnus in antiquity), which empties into the Mediterranean, Tarsus is a junction point of land and sea routes connecting the Cilician plain (today called Çukurova), central Anatolia and the Mediterranean sea. The climate is typical of the Mediterranean region, with very hot summers and chilly, damp winters.
Tarsus has a long history of commerce, and is still a commercial centre today, trading in the produce of the fertile Çukurova plain; also Tarsus is a thriving industrial centre of refining and processing that produces some for export. Industries include agricultural machinery, spare parts, textiles, fruit-processing, brick-making and ceramics.
Agriculture is an important source of income: half the land area in the district is farmland (1,050 km²) and most of the remainder is forest and orchard. The farmland is mostly well-irrigated, fertilised and managed with up-to-date equipment.
Excavation of the mound of Gözlükule reveals that the prehistorical development of Tarsus reaches back to the Neolithic Period and continues unbroken through Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Ages.
The settlement was located at the crossing of several important trade routes, linking Anatolia to Syria and beyond. Because the ruins are covered by the modern city, archaeology has barely touched the ancient city. The city may have been of Semitic origin; it is first mentioned as Tarsisi in Neo-Assyrian records of the campaigns of Esarhaddon, as well as several times in the records of Shalmaneser I and Sennacherib, the latter having the city rebuilt. A Greek legend connects it with the memory of the Assyrian king Sardanapalus (Ashurbanipal), still preserved in the Dunuk-Tach, called ‘tomb of Sardanapalus’, a monument of unknown origin.
Stephanus of Byzantium quotes Athenodorus of Tarsus as relating another legend:
Anchiale, daughter of Iapetus, founded Anchiale (a city near Tarsus): her son was Cydnus, who gave his name to the river at Tarsus: the son of Cydnus was Parthenius, from whom the city was called Parthenia: afterwards the name was changed to Tarsus.
Much of this legend of the foundation of Tarsus, however, appeared in the Roman era, and none of it is reliable. The geographer Strabo states that Tarsus was founded by people from Argos who were exploring this coast. Another legend states that Bellerophon fell off his winged horse Pegasus and landed here, hurting his foot, and thus the city was named tar-sos (the sole of the foot). Other candidates for legendary founder of the city include the hero Perseus and Triptolemus, son of the earth-goddess Demeter, doubtless because the countryside around Tarsus is excellent farmland. Later the coinage of Tarsus bore the image of Hercules, due to yet another tale in which the hero was held prisoner here by the local god Sandon. Tarsus has been suggested as a possible identification of the biblical Tarshish, where the prophet Jonah wanted to flee, but Tartessos in Spain is a more likely identification for this.
In 67 BC, Pompey, after crushing the Cilician pirates, subjected Tarsus to Rome, and it became capital of the Roman province of Cilicia. In 66 BC, the inhabitants received Roman citizenship. To flatter Julius Caesar, for a time it took the name Juliopolis. It was also here that Cleopatra and Mark Antony met and was the scene of the celebrated feasts they gave during the construction of their fleet (41 BC). In William Shakespeare’s 1606 play Antony and Cleopatra (Act 5, Scene 2), after Antony’s death Cleopatra says she is going to Cydnus to meet Antony, i.e., she will commit suicide to meet him in the afterlife; “Go fetch / My best attires: I am again for Cydnus, / To meet Mark Antony“
In the Roman period, the city was also an important intellectual centre, boasting its own academy. One of its leading disciples, the philosopher Athenodorus Cananites, was the tutor of the first Roman emperor, Augustus, a fact which secured continuous imperial patronage for the city.
When the province of Cilicia was divided, Tarsus remained the civil and religious metropolis of Cilicia Prima, and was a grand city with palaces, marketplaces, roads and bridges, baths, fountains and waterworks, a gymnasium on the banks of the Cydnus, and a stadium. Tarsus was later eclipsed by nearby Adana, but remained important as a port and shipyard. Several Roman emperors were interred here: Marcus Claudius Tacitus, Maximinus II, and Julian the Apostate, who planned to move his capital here from Antioch if he returned from his Persian expedition.
Bishopric
The first recorded bishop of Tarsus, Helenus, went several times to Antioch in connection with the dispute concerning Paul of Samosata. Le Quien mentions twenty-two of its bishops, of whom several are legendary. Among them are:
- Lupus, present at the Council of Ancyra in 314;
- Theodorus, at the Council of Nicaea in 325;
- Helladius, condemned at Ephesus, and who appealed to the pope in 433;
- the exegete Diodorus, teacher of Theodore of Mopsuestia and consequently one of the fathers of Nestorianism.
From the 6th century, the metropolitan see of Tarsus had seven suffragan bishoprics (Echos d’Orient, X, 145).
The Greek archdiocese, again mentioned in the 10th century (Echos d’Orient, X, 98), has existed down to the present day, as part of the Patriarchate of Antioch.
At about the end of the 10th century, the Armenians established a diocese of their rite; Saint Nerses of Lambron was its most distinguished representative in the 12th century.
Tarsus is included in the Catholic Church’s list of titular sees as a metropolitan see of both the Latin, the Maronite and the Melkite Catholic Church.
Middle Ages
Following the Muslim conquest of the Levant in the 630s, the city came first into contact with the forces of the Rashidun Caliphate. It is unclear when the town was first captured by the Arabs, but it is clear that it, and the wider region of Cilicia, remained contested between the Byzantines and the new Caliphate for several decades, up to the early 8th century. According to the Muslim sources, during his retreat the Byzantine emperor Heraclius (r. 610-641) deliberately withdrew the population and devastated the region between Antioch and Tarsus, creating an empty no man’s land between the two empires.
It was not until the early Abbasid period that Tarsus, by then lying in ruins, was once more reoccupied and refortified, this time as an advanced strongpoint within the fortified zone of the al-ʿAwāṣim, stretching from Tarsus northeast to Malatya, and as an assembly centre for expeditions against the Byzantine Empire. The first attempt was undertaken by al-Hasan ibn Qahtaba al-Ta’i in 778/9, but it was apparently unsuccessful, and the city was not fully restored until 787/8, by Faraj ibn Sulaym on the orders of Caliph Harun al-Rashid (r. 786-809). 3,000 Khurasanis and 2,000 Syrians (a thousand each from Antioch and al-Massisa) were given houses and land in the new fortress city. Tarsus was apparently recovered by the Byzantines soon after, at some point at the turn of the century. The city probably remained in Byzantine hands during the Abbasid civil war of the Fourth Fitna, but returned to Muslim control by 830, when Caliph al-Ma’mun (r. 813-833) recommenced offensive campaigns against Byzantium, using the city as a base.
Henceforth and until the Byzantine reconquest in the 10th century, Tarsus was one of the main centres for the holy war (jihād) against Byzantium, comprising annual raids (ṣawāʿif) into Byzantine lands through the Cilician Gates when the mountain snows had melted and passage was possible. These were mounted by the local garrisons, maintained by the taxation not only of the frontier zone of the al-ʿAwāṣim but also by generous subsidies from the caliphal government, and large numbers of volunteer warriors of the faith (mujahidun or ghazis). Tarsus remained under direct Abbasid control until 878/9, when it and wider Cilician border zone were granted to the autonomous ruler of Egypt, Ahmad ibn Tulun. The local governor Yazaman al-Khadim returned the city to the direct allegiance to Baghdad from 882 on, but was forced to recognize the Tulunids again in 890. Tulunid possession of the border zone lasted until the death of Ibn Tulun’s heir Khumarawayh in 896, after which Caliph al-Mu’tadid (r. 892-902) re-asserted direct control. The area remained under Abbasid rule for the next four decades. After a brief period where the border zone was under Ikhshidid control, in 946/7, Tarsus recognized the overlordship of the Hamdanid emir Sayf al-Dawla of Aleppo, who had become the new master of northern Syria and of the Byzantine borderlands. Facing a resurgent Byzantium, he was able to stem the tide for a while, but in 965, the Byzantine emperor Nikephoros II Phokas (r. 963-969) captured the city, ending Muslim rule there. Throughout this period, the governors of Tarsus also operated an active mint in the city.
The terms of surrender of the city allowed any Muslim who wished to leave with as many of his possessions as he could carry. Many of those who left eventually settled, according to al-Muqaddasi, at Baniyas. Most of those who remained behind became Christians, and the local main mosque was either torn down or turned into a stable. The city remained under Byzantine rule until 1085. It was thereafter disputed between Latin Crusaders, Byzantines (1137-72), Seljuk Turks, and the Armenians of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia (Kingdom of Lesser Armenia). These last became definitively masters until about 1359, when it was captured by the Ramadanids with Mamluks. Finally, the area was brought under the control of the Ottoman Empire by Selim I in 1516.
In the Middle Ages Tarsus was renowned throughout the Middle East; a number of Arab writers praised it as a beautiful and well-defended city, its walls being in two layers with five gates and earthworks outside, surrounded by rich farmland, watered by the river and the lake. By 1671 the traveller Evliya Çelebi records “a city on the plain, an hour from the sea, surrounded by strong walls two-storeys high, moated on all sides, with three distinct neighbourhoods inside the walls”.
Ottoman and modern period
Under Ottoman rule, it initially formed part of the Eyalet of Aleppo. After the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus in 1571 it became seat of a sanjak (sub-province) within the Cyprus Eyalet, before being transferred in 1608 to the sanjak of Adana as a kaza (district).
Despite its excellent defences, Tarsus was captured from the Ottomans in 1832 by the Mamluks of Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt, son of Muhammad Ali, and for 8 years remained in the hands of the Egyptians, who began growing cotton on the surrounding plain. Upon the return of the Ottomans this cotton drove a substantial growth in the economy of the area, due to increased world demand for the crop during shortages caused by the U.S. Civil War. A new road was built to the port in Mersin and the city of Tarsus grew and thrived. Still today many large houses in the city stand as reminders of the wealth generated during this period. However, after being a port for 3,000 years, by the end of the 19th century neglect resulted in Tarsus no longer having access to the sea, and the delta became a swamp. At this point Tarsus was a typical Ottoman city with communities of Muslim Turks, Christian Greeks and Armenians. At the founding of the Turkish Republic in the 1920s the swamp was drained and the River Berdan was dammed to build Turkey’s first hydro-electric power station. Irrigation, roadworks and a railway brought the economy of Tarsus back to life, with new factories, particularly producing textiles.
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