The ‘Place of Palms’: An Urban Park at Aphrodisias

Excavations at Aphrodisias in the 1980s revealed an extraordinary monumental water-basin (170 x 30m) in the centre of a colonnaded square, formerly called the ‘South Agora’. A hypothesis that the complex was not an agora at all but ‘the place of palms’ mentioned by a sixth-century benefactor in an inscription on its Propylon was demonstrated during a five-year excavation project — The Mica and Ahmet Ertegün South Agora Pool Project. This volume publishes the rich results of this excavation and the long life of the complex from the first to the sixth century and beyond. The pool was surrounded by palm trees and Ionic stoas, in the manner of the urban parks or porticus familiar in early imperial Rome. The Aphrodisian example gives us an entirely new sense of what these porticus complexes were like.