New discoveries are being made at the great Roman Theater of Apamea in Syria.
The Great Theater at Apamea in northern Syria vies with the Large Theater at Ephesus, Turkey for the honor of being the largest extant Roman edifice of its type to have survived the ravages of time. Both buildings are estimated to have held audiences of over 20,000 persons, and both may have had their origins in an earlier Greek Hellenistic structure that was overbuilt in the Roman Era. Only one other theater, the Theater of Pompey in Rome, is known to have been larger. However, Pompey’s lavish building is buried under the modern streets of the city, and its surviving remains can only be studied piecemeal in a few basements and cellars of Rome. The structures at Apamea and Ephesus thus provide archaeologists and historians with the largest extant visible examples of Roman Era theaters in the world, giving scholars unprecedented opportunities to study the variety of entertainments that theaters presented to the public, the roles theaters played in the socio-political milieus of their day, and the amazing accomplishments attained by Hellenistic and Roman engineers and craftsmen. The recent excavations undertaken by the Syro-American Expeditions to the Great Roman Theater at Apamea in 2008-2010 provided new insights into understanding this massive theater, the only surviving theater under study from the famous Syrian Hellenistic cities of Apamea, Seleucia, Antioch, and Latakia founded by Seleucus Nicator and eventually conquered by Rome. In addition, excavations are adding new insights into the uses of certain types of theaters as water catchment and display facilities as well as the evolution of theater structures from the Hellenistic and Roman Periods into the Byzantine Christian Era.............
While the Large Theater at Ephesus (where St. Paul’s teachings caused a demonstration by the pagan worshippers of Artemis/Diana) has been excavated, the Great Roman Theater at Apamea has never been fully exposed, studied, or understood in its cultural contexts utilizing the most up-to-date archaeological techniques. This massive structure at Apamea is associated with many unresolved questions and archaeological mysteries. For example, do the current visible remains of the Apamea Theater rest over earlier structures, possibly dating back to the Hellenistic Era and Seleucus Nicator’s expansion of the Macedonian/Greek city after its founding by Alexander the Great? Significantly, very few Hellenistic buildings have survived from antiquity due to later Roman overbuilding and the quarrying of their finely finished building stones in the Christian and Islamic Periods. Thus, determining the structural evolution of the Great Theater of Apamea could be important in understanding both Hellenistic and Roman engineering techniques in the East as well as the archaeological and cultural history of this region of Greater Syria. Another question to be addressed is, how did the Great Theater relate to the overall city of Apamea with its famous philosophical schools rivaling Alexandria and Rhodes, its oracle Temple of Zeus Belos, as well as Apamea’s famous actors who are known from extant inscriptional evidence to have been some of the most talented entertainment professionals in the East? Was the Great Theater part of a ritual processional way associated with the Zeus Belos Temple and that of an as yet unknown temple of a female consort? As theatrical entertainments in the Roman world evolved from formal Greek performances to those of mime and dance, how did these changes in theatrical presentations affect the architectural elements of the stage in theaters in the Eastern Empire? The discovery and excavation of an intact stage structure would be extremely helpful in understanding these processes and entertainments. The Great Theater at Apamea presents our archaeological research team with just such an opportunity due to the fact that the support structures of the stage appear to have been preserved under the collapse of the elaborate backdrop wall (See Figure 2). How were the large crowds of over 20,000 people serviced in relation to their needs for hygiene, food, and other types of audience facilities? The areas surrounding other extant theaters both in the East and in Rome have been greatly disturbed or destroyed over time, thus our present knowledge of the support systems of Roman theaters of this size is currently very limited. This fact makes the relatively undisturbed contexts of the Apamea Theater potentially important in understanding the service industries associated with entertainment structures of this theater’s massive size, especially in the Eastern Empire.
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Remains of the Theater at Ephesus
Fig. 1a: Remains of the Great Roman Theater of Apamea taken from the opposite heights of the citadel, Qalat al-Mudiq, looking from the northwest to the southeast. [Syro-American Expedition to Apamea, Syria, 2009].
http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/june-2012/article/uncovering-the-great-theater-of-apamea
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