Label Text:
Antioch, the capital of the Roman province of Syria, was one of the four great cities of the ancient world. In the 1930s excavations were undertaken to uncover the city's ruins; this mosaic was discovered in August 1937 in Seleucia Pieria, Antioch's seaport. It was one section of a floor panel of a "triclinium," or dining room, of a private house. More than half of the floor was lost to erosion, but other surviving fragments are now in museums in Detroit and Norman, Oklahoma. From the fragments we can determine that the center of the floor contained figures personifying Roman provinces, next to corresponding river figures in the four corners. This, one of the corners, can be identified by the inscription as Pyramos, a river located in the province of Cilicia. Antioch became part of the Roman Empire in the first century A.D. Although its inhabitants adopted Roman ways of life, their language continued to be that of their Hellenistic ancestors, as evidenced by the Greek inscription.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1938.14 |
