Priene Audio Guide

A Greek city called Priene once stood here, a member of the Ionian League. Around 350 BCE it was rebuilt from scratch on the steep slopes of Mount Mycale. The plan came from Mausolus, the Carian satrap of the Persian Empire, who wanted a model city with a permanent deep-water port. Construction had already begun when the Macedonians took the region, and Alexander the Great personally took over the project. He and Mausolus meant Priene to be a model city for the Greek world. It stayed small, with perhaps four to five thousand inhabitants, and never held much political importance. Much of the city was built of marble quarried on Mycale itself, with wood for roofs and floors. These heavy Hellenistic walls and the paved road beyond them were the city's front door.

Photo: Dosseman · CC BY-SA 4.0

Priene was built for walking uphill. Its six main streets run east and west, each about six metres wide, and narrower lanes cross them at right angles. The surfaces were paved in stone from the mountain's own quarries. Water came from springs and streams on Mycale, carried in by aqueduct to cisterns, then piped or channelled onward to houses and fountains. A system of channels drained the whole sloping grid. Both the water supply and the sewers can still be traced on the ground here. Beyond the stone, the land falls away to a broad flat plain, which is now a checkerboard of farm fields.

Photo: Dosseman · CC BY-SA 4.0

Not every god worshipped in Priene was Greek. Among the city's temples, archaeologists revealed a sanctuary of the Egyptian gods Isis, Serapis and Anubis. These cults travelled west from Egypt as the Hellenistic world grew connected, and Greek cities adopted them alongside their own ancient worship. So a Prieneian could honour Athena on the high terrace, sacrifice to Demeter, and also pray to an Egyptian goddess in the same city. The precinct here is an open platform of stone blocks and fallen masonry, humbler than the great marble temples. It is the clearest sign of how cosmopolitan this small Ionian town had become.

Christopher de Lisle · CC BY-SA 4.0

This mound is made of earth dug out of Priene. Theodor Wiegand excavated the city between 1895 and 1899 for the Berlin Museum, and the spoil was heaped up here. It now happens to be one of the best viewpoints over the valley. And the valley is the point. The Maeander River carries sediment down from its valley and dumps it at its mouth, so the shoreline crept steadily westward. Priene began as a port with two harbours on the sea. Geoarchaeological research suggests it lost its open connection to the sea around the first century BCE. Its merchants probably moved to Miletus ahead of most residents. By 300 CE the whole Bay of Miletus, except Lake Bafa, had silted in. A port city ended up many kilometres from the water.

Photo: Rigorius · CC BY-SA 4.0

Asclepius was the Greek god of medicine, and sanctuaries in his honour drew the sick from all over the Greek world. Priene had one of its own, a sacred precinct set just east of the agora. The precinct's remains are rough and broken today, blocks of grey stone heaped among pine trees. In its day the sanctuary of Asclepius belonged to the city's religious district, one of four districts that a visitor could count in the city's plan.

Photo: Rigorius · CC BY-SA 4.0

This precinct feels almost rural, a scatter of masonry on a quiet terrace with a long view. That is a clue to how Priene's plan worked. The city was built on terraces cut into the slope, and the grand monuments took the best of them: the temple of Athena high on the west side, the theatre, the agora, the council chamber. Smaller sanctuaries settled into the terraces left over between them. A modest precinct like this one still kept its altar and its place in the religious life of the grid. The plan assigned every terrace a purpose, sacred or civic or domestic.

Christopher de Lisle · CC BY-SA 4.0

Priene ran itself as a democracy, and this building housed part of its executive. The official head of state was a prytane, elected periodically together with more specialised magistrates. He and his colleagues conducted the city's day-to-day business from here. The building stood north of the agora, next to the council chamber, forming the political district of the city's four districts. Inside, the Prytaneion probably kept the city's sacred hearth, the symbolic centre of civic life. All decrees in Priene were issued in the name of the Prieneian people, and the officials here carried out what that people decided.

Photo: O.Mustafin · CC0

The day-to-day legislative work fell to the boule, the city council, which met here. The room takes the form of a small theatre, with steep tiers of stone seats rising around a central altar, and it once had a wooden roof. It is counted among the best-preserved council chambers of the Hellenistic world. The mechanism was simpler than that of Athens, whose population was far larger, but the principle was the same: an elected council doing the daily work of governing.

Photo: Rigorius · CC BY-SA 4.0

At the centre of the council chamber stands this carved marble altar, and it explains how meetings here began. In Greek civic practice, business opened under religious ritual, with an offering to the gods before debate could start. The altar's weathered sides still carry carved figures and bands of ornament, though time has softened the detail. So politics and religion shared the same floor. The councilors took their seats on the tiers around it, and the first act of any session was an act of worship at this block of stone.

Ken and Nyetta · CC BY 2.0

The council that sat on these tiers handled daily business, but major decisions went to a wider body. An assembly of citizens met periodically in Priene to rule on the big questions placed before it. Not everyone shared in it. In the countryside lived the pedieis, the plainsmen, who were not Prieneians. Their property rights and tax duties were defined by law, but they had no voice in this chamber. They are perhaps an inheritance from the days when Priene stood in the valley, before the city moved to this mountainside.

Photo: Rabe! · CC BY-SA 4.0