The museum of Şanlıurfa—Edessa in antiquity—preserves mosaics of the Roman period. They are less celebrated than those of Zeugma, which were moved to a purpose-built museum in Gaziantep when the power station was built on the Euphrates—but no less remarkable, and perhaps more so. Not least because they were never moved anywhere at all, but carefully preserved on the spot where they were found.
A Museum Beneath a Giant Dome
Officially opened in 2015, Urfa’s new museum goes by the name of the Museum of Archaeology and Mosaics. It is one of the largest in Türkiye: thirty-four thousand square metres, six thousand of them covered by the country’s largest dome, eighty-two metres across, sheltering the mosaic display. Visitors get the splendid opportunity of walking through the Roman villas of ancient Edessa and seeing these unique mosaics—assembled from pebbles of the Euphrates—not framed on a wall but underfoot, exactly as their makers intended.
The pearl of the collection is held to be the mosaic depicting a hunt of the Amazons. Note that these Roman mosaics are captioned in Greek: it was Greek that remained the language of the eastern half of the Roman Empire, and Greek that passed by inheritance to Byzantium.
The Legacy of Osroene
Besides the mosaics found here on the spot, the museum also displays mosaics uncovered in other parts of Edessa. These are notable in that, while belonging to roughly the same period, they reflect the life of the indigenous population of Roman-occupied Osroene.
By way of reminder: in 127 BC the Nabataean tribe of the Osroeni arrived here, speaking one of the Aramaic languages and using the Syriac script (though Movses Khorenatsi, naturally, considered them Armenians).
The best known of the Osroenian mosaics shows Orpheus charming the wild beasts. This is one of the widely diffused subjects of Roman mosaic, in which quite disparate images were interwoven—but the Phrygian cap on Orpheus’s head remained obligatory throughout.
The Legend of King Abgar
Osroene was ruled by the Abgarids, the most celebrated of whom was Abgar V, surnamed Ukkama, “the black.” His fame rests on a correspondence with Christ later attributed to him—the tradition took shape by the fourth century. He is supposed to have begged to be healed of a grave illness, promising in return to baptise his country; and Christ is supposed to have advised him to wait for the Resurrection, after which one of his disciples would come and heal him.
A somewhat later legend connected this story with the appearance in Edessa of the Image Not Made by Hands, allegedly sent to Abgar by the Saviour himself. Scholars say that in fact Christianity reached Edessa a good deal later, under Abgar IX, around the year 200. And it is to that era that the mosaic bearing the face of Christ belongs—the piece with which our walk through the mosaics of Urfa comes to an end.
