Robin Cormack

Byzantine Aphrodisias: changing the symbolic map of a city

The excavation of Aphrodisias in Caria has now uncovered so substantial an area of the city that the site must now feature in studies of both the Ancient and Byzantine city. Aphrodisias offers an example of a city whose history runs from the second half of the first century BC (when the settlement first prospered as a Free City in the fertile plain around the shrine of Aphrodite) until the late Middle Ages. But the chronological range of the surviving material also sets a familiar problem of urban history. How can such studies interpret buildings and settings which existed and functioned over many centuries, maintaining a presence in the city as its history passed from one historical ‘period’ to another? Can their permanence be recognised as a ‘continuity’; or should one look for clues of change and discontinuity? Is indeed the dichotomy of continuity and discontinuity an inevitable part of the vocabulary of urban history? The words have certainly dominated discussion of ‘capital’ cities like Rome and Constantinople in which much stress has been laid on identifying ‘continuities’, the strength of ‘tradition’, and significant ‘renewals’ of the past.