Who ruled Ephesus?

Ephesus was a Greek city on the Aegean coast of Ionia, beside the modern town of Selçuk in İzmir province, Turkey. Famous for its Temple of Artemis, counted among the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, it became the capital of the Roman province of Asia and one of the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean, as well as an important early Christian centre. The silting of its harbour slowly ruined it, and by the fifteenth century it had been abandoned.

People lived around the site from about 6000 BC. Hittite records name Apasa as the capital of the western Anatolian kingdom of Arzawa, and some scholars identify it with Ephesus; a Mycenaean-era burial ground has also been found there. Attic and Ionian Greek settlers founded the Greek city on Ayasuluk Hill in the tenth century BC. Legend named an exiled Athenian prince, Androklos, as founder. The settlers merged their Artemis with a great Anatolian mother goddess, and her sanctuary grew into one of the most celebrated temples of the Greek world.

Ephesus had close ties with the kingdom of Lydia. When King Croesus besieged it, the citizens are said to have tied their walls to the temple with a rope to place the city under the goddess's protection; Croesus later paid for much of the temple's rebuilding. After Cyrus the Great overthrew Croesus, the Persian general Harpagos subdued the Ionian cities in 547 BC and they became part of the Achaemenid Empire. Ephesus joined the Ionian Revolt and, after the Persian defeat in 479 BC, the Athenian-led Delian League, but in the later Peloponnesian War it changed sides to Sparta and passed back under Persian rule. The Temple of Artemis was set on fire in 356 BC, according to tradition by a man named Herostratus, and the citizens began a still larger replacement.

Alexander the Great entered the city in 334 BC. According to the ancient story, he offered to pay for the new temple if his name were inscribed on it, and the Ephesians declined. His successor Lysimachus, who took the city in 290 BC, moved the population to a new site about two kilometres away, partly because the old harbour had become malarial marsh. After his death in 281 BC Ephesus passed to the Seleucids, then for about half a century to the Ptolemies of Egypt, and after Rome defeated Antiochus III in 190 BC to the Attalid kings of Pergamon.

Through the Attalid bequest the city became Roman in 129 BC. Heavy taxation made Ephesus welcome Mithridates of Pontus in 88 BC, but Sulla restored Roman control in 86 BC. Under Augustus Ephesus replaced Pergamon as the seat of the governor of Asia and entered its most prosperous era; its monuments came to include a theatre for about 24,000 spectators and the Library of Celsus. Its Roman population is debated: older estimates of up to 225,000 are now widely rejected, and recent studies by J. W. Hanson and others suggest roughly 34,000 to 72,000.

The apostle Paul lived in Ephesus for about three years in the 50s AD, and Christian tradition associates the city with the apostle John. Church councils met there in 431 and 449.

The Goths sacked the city and its temple in 263, though Constantine later rebuilt much of it. Under the Byzantine Empire it remained the leading city of Asia Minor after Constantinople in the fifth and sixth centuries, and the Basilica of St John was built under Justinian. Destruction in 614 or 615, probably during the war with the Sasanians, began a steep decline, worsened by Arab raids from the 650s and by the harbour silting up until it lay some five kilometres inland. The Seljuks took Ephesus in 1090 before the Byzantines regained it in 1097.

In 1304 the town surrendered to the Turkish Menteşe emirate and soon passed to the Aydınid emirate, which built the İsa Bey Mosque at neighbouring Ayasuluk. It first came under the Ottoman Empire in 1390, was briefly lost after Tamerlane defeated the Ottomans in 1402, and was reabsorbed in 1425. By then the old city was abandoned; Ayasuluk was renamed Selçuk in 1914.

British architect John Turtle Wood began searching for the Temple of Artemis in 1863 and found its pavement in 1869. Austrian excavations started in 1895 under Otto Benndorf, whose Austrian Archaeological Institute still leads the work. Ephesus became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015.