Aphrodisias City Marble Quarries
About
Aphrodisias grew wealthy on marble pulled from hillsides just two to four kilometers from the city, feeding one of the Roman world's most famous sculpture industries. Local white and blue-gray stone supplied the temple, theater, and stadium that Aphrodisias built during its first- and second-century construction boom. City workshops carved the marble into portrait statues and sarcophagi shipped as far as North Africa and Italy. The quarries and the sculptors' workshops they fed later earned Aphrodisias recognition as a single UNESCO World Heritage property.
What happened here
The rock is worked in benches from the top down, so that gravity does the moving. Channels are cut around a block with a pick, then it is split from the bed with iron wedges driven into a line of holes, sometimes with wooden wedges soaked to swell. Blocks are dressed roughly on the spot — no one hauls waste — and marked with the quarry, the gang, the date and the consular year, which is how the empire keeps track of what it owns. Sledges, rollers and ox teams take them to a river or the sea, because moving stone overland is the expensive part. Fine marbles are imperial monopolies. Abandoned faces still show the last unfinished cut, stopped mid-job and never resumed.
Sources
Nearby
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