History of Ephesus

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 harbor turn to farmland. Here is the whole arc, in the plain order a guide tells it.

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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 one of the five largest cities of the empire — home at its height, on modern estimates, to somewhere between about 34,000 and 172,000 people. Nearly everything you photograph today is this city: the Library of Celsus, the enlarged Great Theater, 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 harbor’s accelerating silt, plagues and shifting trade. Byzantine Ephesus contracted uphill to Ayasuluk around the basilica of St John; the Ottomans’ predecessors, the Turkish emirs of Aydın, gave the town its handsome İsa Bey Mosque in 1374–75; and by the fifteenth century the old marble city was pasture. Travelers described column drums among the reeds where a city of tens of thousands had stood. Our post on what happened to Ephesus takes those blows one at a time, with what you can still see of each.

Rediscovery (1863–today)

British engineer John Turtle Wood, hunting the lost Artemision for the British Museum, found it under six meters 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.

This is the skeleton of the story — the gods, the apostles, the philosophers and the councils that filled in the flesh are in our History & Myths pages.

Sources & further reading

Good to know

History of Ephesus — common questions

How old is Ephesus?

The classical city you walk today is largely Roman — roughly 2,000 years old — but the valley has been settled for about 9,000 years: the Çukuriçi mound beside the ruins yielded Neolithic tools from around 7000 BC, and a Bronze Age city called Apasa stood here before the Greeks arrived around 1000 BC.

When did Ephesus fall?

It never fell to an army in one blow. The decline ran from the 3rd century — a devastating earthquake and the Gothic sack of AD 262 — through centuries of the harbor silting up, until the population had moved uphill to Ayasuluk by the Byzantine period and the old marble city was pasture by the 15th century.

Why is Ephesus important?

Three reasons at once: it was one of the five largest cities of the Roman world and the capital of the province of Asia; it held the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World; and it is central to early Christianity — Paul’s longest residency, John’s traditional tomb, the Council of 431 and the first of Revelation’s seven churches.

Was Ephesus a Roman city?

It was founded by Greeks and became Roman in 133 BC, when the Attalid kingdom was bequeathed to Rome. Almost everything visible today — the Library, the enlarged theater, the Terrace Houses, the marble streets — is from its Roman golden age.

Who founded Ephesus?

Legend says the Amazons, then Androclos the Athenian prince; archaeology says farmers were here millennia earlier, and a Bronze Age city called Apasa preceded the Greeks. Every founder story in Ephesus is true enough for its own era.

Why did Ephesus decline?

No single catastrophe — the harbor silted, earthquakes and the 262 Gothic raid wounded the center, trade moved, malaria spread. Cities die the way the river killed this one: slowly, then completely.

When was Ephesus rediscovered?

It was never exactly lost — locals always knew the ruins — but scientific excavation began in 1863–69 with J. T. Wood’s hunt for the Artemis temple, and continues today under Austrian-Turkish collaboration.

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