Antioch on the Orontes was a Hellenistic Greek city founded by Seleucus I Nicator in 300 BC. It was one of the greatest and most important Greek cities of the Hellenistic period. The city served as the capital of the Greek Seleucid Empire and later as regional capital to both the Roman and Byzantine Empire. During the Crusades, Antioch served as the capital of the Principality of Antioch, one of four Crusader states that were founded in the Levant. The modern city of Antakya, in Hatay Province of Turkey, was named after the ancient city, which lies in ruins on the Orontes River and did not overlap in habitation with the modern city.
A mosaic is a pattern or image made of small regular or irregular pieces of colored stone, glass or ceramic, held in place by plaster/mortar, and covering a surface. Mosaics are often used as floor and wall decoration, and were particularly popular in the Ancient Roman world.
Ancient art refers to the many types of art produced by the advanced cultures of ancient societies with different forms of writing, such as those of ancient China, India, Mesopotamia, Persia, Palestine, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The art of pre-literate societies is normally referred to as prehistoric art and is not covered here. Although some pre-Columbian cultures developed writing during the centuries before the arrival of Europeans, on grounds of dating these are covered at pre-Columbian art and articles such as Maya art, Aztec art, and Olmec art.
Antakya, modern form of Antioch, is a municipality and the capital district of Hatay Province, Turkey. Its area is 703 km2, and its population is 399,045 (2022). It is the capital of Hatay Province, the southernmost province of Turkey. The city is located in a well-watered and fertile valley on the Orontes River, about 20 kilometres (12 mi) from the Levantine Sea.
A meander or meandros is a decorative border constructed from a continuous line, shaped into a repeated motif. Among some Italians, these patterns are known as "Greek Lines". Such a design may also be called the Greek fret or Greek key design, although these terms are modern designations even though the decorative motif appears thousands of years before that culture, thousands of miles away from Greece, and among cultures that are continents away from it. Usually the term is used for motifs with straight lines and right angles and the many versions with rounded shapes are called running scrolls or, following the etymological origin of the term, may be identified as water wave motifs.
The Worcester Art Museum houses over 38,000 works of art dating from antiquity to the present day and representing cultures from all over the world. The museum opened in 1898 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Its holdings include Roman mosaics, European and American art, and a major collection of Japanese prints. Since acquiring the John Woodman Higgins Armory Collection in 2013, it is also home to the second largest collection of arms and armor in the Americas.
Opus sectile is a form of pietra dura popularized in the ancient and medieval Roman world where materials were cut and inlaid into walls and floors to make a picture or pattern. Common materials were marble, mother of pearl, and glass. The materials were cut in thin pieces, polished, then trimmed further according to a chosen pattern. Unlike tessellated mosaic techniques, where the placement of very small uniformly sized pieces forms a picture, opus sectile pieces are much larger and can be shaped to define large parts of the design.
Hellenistic art is the art of the Hellenistic period generally taken to begin with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and end with the conquest of the Greek world by the Romans, a process well underway by 146 BC, when the Greek mainland was taken, and essentially ending in 30 BC with the conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt following the Battle of Actium. A number of the best-known works of Greek sculpture belong to this period, including Laocoön and His Sons, Venus de Milo, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. It follows the period of Classical Greek art, while the succeeding Greco-Roman art was very largely a continuation of Hellenistic trends.
The Hatay Archaeology Museum is the archaeology museum of Antakya, Turkey. It is known for its extensive collection of Roman and Byzantine Era mosaics. The museum is located in Antakya, the main city of Hatay. Construction of the museum started in 1934 on the recommendation of the French archaeologist and antiquities inspector Claude M. Prost. It was completed in 1938 and came under Turkish control in 1939 following Hatay's unification with Turkey. The museum was opened to the public in 1948 and re-opened in 1975 following renovation and expansion.
The Church of Saint Peter near Antakya (Antioch), Turkey, is composed of a cave carved into the mountainside on Mount Starius with a depth of 13 m (42 ft.), a width of 9.5 m (31 ft.) and a height of 7 m (23 ft). The church is not to be mistaken with the former cathedral of Antioch, the church of Cassian which was also called church of St. Peter.
Prusias ad Hypium was a city in ancient Bithynia, and afterwards in the late Roman province of Honorias. In the 4th century it became a bishopric that was a suffragan of Claudiopolis in Honoriade. Before its conquest by King Prusias I of Bithynia, it was named Cierus or Kieros and belonged to the Heraclea Pontica. Photius writes that it was called Kieros, after the river which flows by it.
Early Byzantine mosaics in the Middle East are a group of Christian mosaics created between the 4th and the 8th centuries in ancient Syria, Palestine and Egypt when the area belonged to the Byzantine Empire. The eastern provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire and its continuation, the Byzantine Empire, inherited a strong artistic tradition from pagan Late Antiquity. The tradition of making mosaics was carried on in the Umayyad era until the end of the 8th century. The great majority of these works of art were later destroyed but archeological excavations unearthed many surviving examples.
The Lod Mosaic is a mosaic floor dated to ca. 300 CE discovered in 1996 in the Israeli town of Lod. Believed to have been created for a private villa, it is one of the largest and best-preserved mosaic floors uncovered in the country. It depicts land animals, fish and two Roman ships. It was restored in the labs of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). After an overseas tour of several years it opened in the purpose-built Shelby White and Leon Levy Lod Mosaic Archaeological Center in June 2022.
A Roman mosaic is a mosaic made during the Roman period, throughout the Roman Republic and later Empire. Mosaics were used in a variety of private and public buildings, on both floors and walls, though they competed with cheaper frescos for the latter. They were highly influenced by earlier and contemporary Hellenistic Greek mosaics, and often included famous figures from history and mythology, such as Alexander the Great in the Alexander Mosaic.
The Zliten mosaic is a Roman floor mosaic from about the 2nd century AD, found in the town of Zliten in Libya, on the east coast of Leptis Magna. The mosaic was discovered by the Italian archaeologist Salvatore Aurigemma in 1913 and is now on display at The Archaeological Museum of Tripoli. It depicts gladiatorial contests, animal hunts, and scenes from everyday life.
Ancient Greek art stands out among that of other ancient cultures for its development of naturalistic but idealized depictions of the human body, in which largely nude male figures were generally the focus of innovation. The rate of stylistic development between about 750 and 300 BC was remarkable by ancient standards, and in surviving works is best seen in sculpture. There were important innovations in painting, which have to be essentially reconstructed due to the lack of original survivals of quality, other than the distinct field of painted pottery.
The Judgement of Paris is the theme of a mosaic from the early second century AD, discovered in 1932 in Antioch. It is one of the most important mosaics from the ancient city, which was located a short distance from the site of modern Antakya (Antioch). The mosaic is normally housed in Paris at the Louvre, although it has been known to go on tour. In 2007 it was scheduled to feature in an itinerant exhibition of important pieces that the Louvre organised in the United States.
The Worcester Hunt Mosaic is a large Byzantine floor mosaic located at Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts. The mosaic was originally constructed for an upscale villa in Daphne, just outside of Antioch. The mosaic was discovered during an archeological expedition which lasted between 1932 and 1939. It is currently the largest Antioch mosaic located within the United States. It measures approximately 20.5 feet x 23.3 feet.
The mosaics of Delos are a significant body of ancient Greek mosaic art. Most of the surviving mosaics from Delos, Greece, an island in the Cyclades, date to the last half of the 2nd century BC and early 1st century BC, during the Hellenistic period and beginning of the Roman period of Greece. Hellenistic mosaics were no longer produced after roughly 69 BC, due to warfare with the Kingdom of Pontus and the subsequently abrupt decline of the island's population and position as a major trading center. Among Hellenistic Greek archaeological sites, Delos contains one of the highest concentrations of surviving mosaic artworks. Approximately half of all surviving tessellated Greek mosaics from the Hellenistic period come from Delos.
The Megalopsychia Hunt of Antioch are two floor mosaics from the late fifth to early sixth century, part of a large group of mosaics known collectively as the Antioch mosaics. They were discovered at the ancient village of Yakto, near Daphne, a suburb of Antioch, near the modern city of Antakya, Turkey.
