Everyday Life in a Greco-Roman city at the time of Mohammed (6th c.).

When working outdoors with soil, walls, and finds, it is easy to let the everyday life of Sagalassos slip by. We are studying the city from the last century or two of the ancient world. We are certainly covering a period of urban life which was witnessed in the Near East by the prophet Mohammed, as well as by a host of Christian saints, the lives of which tell us a great deal about how the late antique city worked – no more so than the life St Symeon the Fool of Emesa, who got up to all kinds of mischief ministering to the shopkeepers and circus workers of his adopted city: from pooing in the agora, to selling farting beans in the street, to disrupting glass-blowers, to entering single-sex baths, to pelting widows with nuts in church. Such tales bring the empty remains of architectural spaces back to life, putting behaviours, objects and people into buildings, turning ruins into an ancient city. They are not just a whimsy but are a necessary part of the deduction required to get beyond the limitations of our evidence towards the city as it existed in the past, prior to processes of selective preservation, decay, and problematic record.

We respond to interest in daily life by talking about the intended function of architecture: porticoes being constructed to provide shade for goods to be displayed and to spare pedestrians from rain. Or we discuss fountains, in their practical as well as decorative uses, as community hubs and places of monumental display. We could also look at stone surface markings: revealing gameboards on the steps of the porticoes and sometimes on the road paving. Or attempts to regulate traffic, as seen by a set of iron rings for tethering animals, recovered on the piers of the 6th c. portico at the top of the street in 2007, just before one gets to the Lower Agora. Here, donkeys were undoubtedly unloaded for sale of their produce. These iron rings don’t look much but they are testimony to an ordered management of the street surface for animals, which was as much a part of the business of the council of notables as was the paving and the complex water pipes that ran beneath it. For me at least, the longer I stay at Sagalassos, the noiser my head becomes with donkeys, market traders, busy artisans, and late drinkers of the city, ghosts of the place leaving their testimonies in stone.

23.1 A gameboard by the Late Fortification, of a type also seen along the colonnaded street (found and reported many years ago by the Leuven team).

23.2 Iron rings: for tethering. A set has been established mid-way up the piers of the western (piered) portico of the Colonnaded Street, which dates from the 6th c. Here visible as small bits of iron stuck within piers.