The history of Ephesus is long enough that the city changed address four times, changed gods twice, and spent its final centuries watching its own harbour turn to farmland. Here is the whole arc, in the plain order a guide tells it.
Before the Greeks (c. 7000–1000 BC)
People farmed this valley five thousand years before the first Greek sail arrived — the Çukuriçi Höyük mound by the ruins has yielded Neolithic tools and dwellings from around 7000 BC. In the Bronze Age, Hittite records name a western city called Apasa, seat of the Arzawa kingdom — very likely the ancestor whose name survived into “Ephesos”. Legend, preferring better stories, credits the founding to the Amazons, the warrior women of Anatolian myth, and made their queen-names part of the city’s memory.
Greek Ephesus (c. 1000–560 BC)
Ionian colonists under Androclos — son of the Athenian king, guided by an oracle’s fish and boar — settled by the sacred spring of an ancient Anatolian mother-goddess. The colonists did the wise thing: rather than replace her, they called her Artemis and kept the shrine. That merger of Greek name and Anatolian goddess became the city’s engine for the next millennium.
Lydians, Persians, Alexander (560–290 BC)
Croesus of Lydia, proverbially rich, conquered the city around 560 BC and paid for much of the great Artemis temple — his column inscription survives. Persia swallowed Lydia; Ephesus lived two centuries under satraps, punctuated by the temple’s arson in 356 BC. Alexander the Great arrived in 334 BC, offered to rebuild the temple and was famously declined; his successor Lysimachus dragged the population — reluctantly, tradition says he had to block the drains during a storm to force the move — to the current site between the two hills, walled it, and named it briefly after his wife Arsinoë. The name did not stick. The location did.
The Roman golden age (133 BC–3rd century AD)
Bequeathed to Rome with the Attalid kingdom in 133 BC, Ephesus became capital of the province of Asia and grew into the empire’s fourth or fifth city — perhaps 200,000 people at its height. Nearly everything you photograph today is this city: the Library of Celsus, the enlarged Great Theatre, the Terrace Houses, the aqueducts, the marble streets. It was in this Ephesus that Paul preached, that the silversmiths rioted, and that the goddess and the new faith began their long negotiation.
Decline, Byzantium, silence (3rd–15th century)
The blows came in series: a devastating earthquake and the Gothic sack of 262, the harbour’s accelerating silt, plagues and shifting trade. Byzantine Ephesus contracted uphill to Ayasuluk around the basilica of St John; the Ottomans’ predecessors, the Seljuk emirs of Aydın, gave the town its handsome İsa Bey Mosque in 1375; and by the fifteenth century the old marble city was pasture. Travellers described column drums among the reeds where the world’s fourth city had stood.
Rediscovery (1863–today)
British engineer John Turtle Wood, hunting the lost Artemision for the British Museum, found it under six metres of silt in 1869; Austrian archaeologists took over the city excavations in 1895 and — wars excepted — have never stopped. A century and a half of digging has exposed perhaps a fifth of the city. The other four-fifths wait under the fields, which is the most cheering sentence in Ephesian history: most of it is still to come.
