Detail from the "Gypsy Girl" Mosaic, possibly originally meant to be a likeness of the goddess Gaea.
This mosaic is one of a large number of masterpiece mosaics discovered during an excavation of the ancient city of Zeugma, on the banks of the Euphrates River in present-day Turkey. Tragically, much of the city's ruins have been lost, unexplored by archaeologists, due to the creation of a reservoir after the Euphrates was dammed for hydroelectric power. A large portion of the site is now underwater. Part of the site's excavation was covered on an episode of NOVA on PBS (click image for link).
Zeugma is not the only site to have either been lost or threatened with inundation by damming projects. An overview of some other such "hotspots" can be found on the PBS site.
No comments:
Post a Comment