Ephesus was built four times, on four different sites, by four different sets of hands. Ask who built Ephesus and the honest answer is a list rather than a name: Bronze Age Anatolians on Ayasuluk Hill, Ionian Greek colonists who arrived under a prince called Androclos, Lysimachos — a general of Alexander the Great — who moved the entire population down into the valley you walk today, and the Roman emperors and private citizens who then faced that valley in marble. Almost every building in your photographs belongs to that fourth city, and a surprising number of them still carry the name of the person who paid.
When was Ephesus founded?
It depends which Ephesus you mean, and the range is about seven thousand years wide. Farmers were living beside this estuary in the seventh millennium BC, at the Neolithic mound of Çukuriçi Höyük just outside the ruins. A Bronze Age town stood on Ayasuluk Hill above modern Selçuk, almost certainly the Apasa named in Hittite records as the seat of the Arzawa kingdom. The sanctuary of the Anatolian mother goddess who later became Artemis was, in UNESCO’s account of the property, founded by the second millennium BC. The Greek city that gave Ephesus its name and its language came later again, around the tenth century BC. So when a guide says the city is nine thousand years old and a guidebook says three thousand, both are right. They are counting different cities.
Was Ephesus built by the Greeks or the Romans?
The Greeks founded it; the Romans built what you see. Ionian colonists settled beside the goddess’s spring and did the wise thing — they kept her, calling an Anatolian mother goddess Artemis rather than replacing her, which made the shrine the engine of the city’s wealth for the next thousand years. Croesus of Lydia took the city around 560 BC and paid for much of the great temple of artemis that grew out of that shrine, the one later counted among the seven wonders of the ancient world. But the ruins in the photographs are Roman. Asia Minor passed to Rome in 133 BC and Ephesus was made capital of the new province of Asia, and from that moment the city had the money, the marble and the imperial attention to rebuild itself on a scale nothing Greek here had matched. The full sequence is set out in our history of ephesus.
The general who moved the whole city
The single largest act of building at Ephesus was an act of moving. Alexander the Great passed through in 334 BC and offered to fund the rebuilding of the burned Artemis temple; the city declined, politely. After his death his general Lysimachos took the region, and in the 290s BC he did what Alexander had not been allowed to: he founded a new Ephesus on a new site, in the saddle between the two hills where the ruins stand now, walled it, and left the old settlement around the artemision behind. Tradition adds the detail everyone remembers — that the Ephesians refused to move until Lysimachos blocked the drains during a storm and flooded them out of their houses. He renamed the new city Arsinoë, after his wife. The name lasted no time at all. The site lasted two thousand years.
The names still carved on the buildings
Roman Ephesus was not built by the state alone. It was built by wealthy Ephesians competing to put the family name on something permanent, which is why the city reads like a donor wall. The library of celsus was begun around AD 110 by Tiberius Julius Aquila as a memorial to his father, Celsus Polemaeanus — a Greek from Asia Minor who had risen through the Roman Senate to govern the very province he came from, and who lies in a vault beneath the reading-room floor. The temple of hadrian on Curetes Street was the city flattering a traveling emperor who came more than once. The fountain of trajan turned the municipal water supply into a portrait of an emperor with the world under his foot. And the finest piece of stonework in the lower city was paid for by two men who had been slaves.
Mazaeus and Mithridates had been slaves in the household of Augustus. Freed, they spent their money on a triumphal arch — and signed it in bronze letters.
The mazaeus and mithridates gate, the triple arch beside the library that most visitors walk under without looking up, was built in 4–3 BC by two freedmen of the imperial household and dedicated to Augustus, his wife Livia, his general Agrippa and his daughter Julia. The sockets that held the bronze letters are still there in the architrave, and you can trace the words with a finger. It is the clearest answer this city gives to the question of who built it: in this case not kings at all, but two former slaves with a commercial agora to announce and a debt of gratitude to pay in public.
| What | Who paid for it | When |
|---|---|---|
| Temple of Artemis, rebuilt | Croesus of Lydia, then the city itself | from c. 560 BC |
| The walled city and its street plan | Lysimachos, general of Alexander | 290s BC |
| Mazaeus & Mithridates Gate | Two freedmen of Augustus | 4–3 BC |
| Fountain of Trajan | The city, in the emperor’s honor | c. AD 102–114 |
| Library of Celsus | Tiberius Julius Aquila, for his father | from c. AD 110 |
| Temple of Hadrian | The city, in the emperor’s honor | around AD 130 |
How was Ephesus built?
With local stone and borrowed labor. The white stone came from quarries in the hills a few kilometers away — the marble of ephesus was good enough that the city exported it — and arrived as rough blocks to be finished on site by masons whose chisel marks you can still read on the unpolished undersides. The heavy half of the work, the quarrying and hauling and lifting and paving, was done substantially by the slaves of ephesus, who left no inscriptions at all. That is the uncomfortable other side of every donor’s name on every architrave: one man paid, and a great many people carried. The terrace houses on the slope show the same arrangement from the inside — heated floors, hot and cold running water, painted walls, and a service stair for the people who kept all of it working.
Seeing the builders on the ground
Names are what turn a ruin back into a city, and they are easy to point out once you know where to look: the dedication over the gate, the tomb under the library, the reused block in a later wall that gives away a second round of building. Our stop-by-stop city tour route walks the site downhill in the order the monuments were meant to be met, and a private ephesus tour can be weighted toward inscriptions and building history for anyone who would rather have that than the highlights reel. A half-day ephesus tour covers the main street and the gate comfortably. If you are reading before you travel, the pages on the great theater and the commercial agora carry their construction phases in detail, and where ephesus is today explains what became of the fourth city in the end.
