Antioch mosaics

History

Antioch was an ancient city located just outside the modern day city of Antakya, Turkey. Hellenistic art began to influence mosaic art in the city from the time of Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire, with Ancient Antioch serving as capital during some periods. Roman mosaic art took on a common symbolic form with minor regional variations throughout many cities and palaces in the empire. During the reign of Hadrian, during the 2nd century, through to the reign of Justinian in the 6th century, mosaic floors were the fashion in the city and its surrounding suburbs. Antioch served as a regional capitol for periods of the Tetrarchy and was home to many wealthy patrons of art. The city thrived until it was destroyed by earthquakes in 526 and 528.

Beginning in 1932, a consortium of museums and institutions sponsored expeditions to the archaeological sites where the city of Antioch once stood. These museums, the Worcester Art Museum, Princeton University, the musée du Louvre, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and Harvard University's affiliate Dumbarton Oaks, were attempting to uncover great monuments, palaces, and treasures, but were disappointed when most of what was unearthed, under tons of silt, was just the remains of houses, most without any remaining walls. The only surviving part of the majority of the houses was the floors.

The floors the archaeologists discovered were covered in intricate mosaics. More than 300 mosaics were found.

In 1939 the expedition ended and the archaeologists packed up to leave. They left about half of the unearthed mosaics to the city of Antakya, the modern day city located at Antioch, which subsequently built a museum, the Antakya Archaeological Museum, to house them. The rest of the mosaics were split up amongst the institutions that took part in the dig, and were sent all over the world. To be transported, large amounts of concrete was poured behind the mosaics to create a stable backing. When dividing up the floors, the archeologists, often took apart rooms and sent different parts of the floor to different museums. For an exhibit at the Worcester Art Museum in 2000, mosaics were compiled from Paris, Baltimore, Princeton and Wellesley, to reassemble a single room's floor. After the expedition left, the pits were filled back in and olive groves were planted over them.