AUGUSTA
Cilicia Campestris, Turkey.
Just
over 16 km N of Adana in a loop of the river Seyhan
(Sarus), and at the W end of a narrow plain bounded
N and S by low hills. With the Roman urbanization of
the E Cilician plain after the fall of the Tarcondimotid
house in A.D. 17, the city (named for Livia, the widow
of Augustus) was founded in A.D. 20. Represented at the
Council of Chalcedon in 451, the city probably did not
long survive, as an important center, the Moslem invasion
of Cilicia in the 7th c.
The site, discovered by chance in 1955, was identified
by ancient literary references and from the presence
there, and in the neighboring village of Gübe, of local
semiautonomous coins of Augusta. In the same year
(1955) Gübe, and with it the ruins of Augusta, disappeared below the waters of the Seyhan dam, but not before the site had been partially surveyed and individual
buildings planned. Among these were the foundations of
a triumphal arch, two colonnaded streets crossing each
other at right angles in the manner typical of town planning in Roman Cilicia, a theater, a civic basilica, some
shops, a bath building, and a dam on the river. These
structures were all of brick and mortar, and probably of
3d c. date.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
F. Blumer,
Kleinasiatische Münzen
(1902) III 436-37; M. Gough, “Augusta Ciliciae,”
AnatSt
6 (1956) 165-77; M. Akok, “Augusta şehri harabesi,”
TürkArkDerg 7.2 (1957) 15-20; A.H.M. Jones,
Cities of
the Eastern Roman Provinces (2d ed. 1971) 206.
M. GOUGH
