Archaeology Magazine - July/August 1995 - 124

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On the right wall of the Painted Tomb's portico, the mother is shown seated, with her daughter or a servant behind a chair, and
her son, shown nude, infront of it. To the right of thefamily tomb's entrance the mother is depicted with her daughter.
medallions; scarabs of Nefertiti and Tuthmosis I; a
bronze statuette of a woman or goddess covered with
gold foil; various carved ivory objects; and a trumpet
carved from a hippopotamus incisor. Many of the items
recovered from the wreck were normally perishable organic materials such as terebinth resin (used as incense),
ebony logs, and pellets of processed murex dye. More
than 350 ingots of tin and bronze have also been found,
as well as turquoise, cobalt, and purple glass ingots. Bass
suggests the cargo may have been a royal consignment
such as those described in correspondence found in the
Egyptian royal archive at Tell el-Amarna.
Pulak and Bass believe the ship was traveling east to
west. The cape and nearby rocky islands make navigation here difficult, and anyone sailing along this stretch
of coast would have done well to keep farther out to
sea. Our captain suggested that the ship was sailing
from the protected harborage of Aperlae when it struck
the rocky coast and sank.
A small Lycian town, now partly submerged, Aperlae is on a ridge overlooking the Mediterranean. According to Strabo, Aperlae was united with the nearby
towns of Simena, Isinda, and Apollonia as a sympolity
,a
civic union of small towns. Together the four towns
.shared one vote in matters before the Lycian League.
Aperlae's ruins include a wall of carefully cut stone
blocks, an arched gateway, numerous Lycian sarcophagi, foundations of small buildings, and quays. From
Aperlae we sailed to Kekova Bay and the small Lycian
coastal cities of Simena and Teimiussa. Simena has a
small medieval casde within which is a diminutive ancient theater with scarcely a dozen rows of seats, and a
tower from Teimiussa's city walls still stands.

July/August

1995

Myra, Lycian Méré, is some 16 miles west of Finike,
our next port. Strabo says Myra had three votes in the
Lycian League. In 42 B.C. Brutus' lieutenant Lentulus
Spinther extorted funds from the city to support the
pro-Republic forces during the Roman civil war. Paul
changed ships at Andriake, Myra's harbor, on his way
to Rome in A.D. 60. In the fourth century it was the
bishopric of St. Nicholas. The church of St. Nicholas is
in the modern town of Demre adjacent to Myra, but
only the crypt may be from the time of Nicholas,
whose bones were taken by Italian merchants in 1087
and placed in a reliquary in the cathedral at Bari.
While most theaters were constructed by cutting
seats into a convenient hillside, Myra's was built from
the bottom up, its seats supported by two vaults. Scattered on the ground around the theater are numerous
carved heads and theatrical masks that once decorated
the facade of a second-century A.D. stage. A cliff face
west of the theater is honeycombed with fourth-century
B.C. tombs. A second group, to the east, includes one
known as the Painted Tomb. Studied by Fellows in
1843, the tomb's sculptures show traces of their original red, yellow, and blue paint.
Strong winds kept us from landing at Olympus, so
we continued on to the marina at Kemer, taking a car
to the ancient harbor city of Phaselis on the eastern
boundary of Lycia. Until the founding of Attaleia
(modern Antalya) in the second century B.C., Phaselis
was the chief port of the region. Plutarch notes that the
Athenian commander Kimon "liberated" Phaselis from
Persian rule in 468 B.C., but the port returned to the
Persian fold, aiding the Persian governor Mausolus
when Lycia rebelled. Phaselis joined the Lycian League

Archaeology Magazine - July/August 1995

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - July/August 1995