Ephesus Marble Quarries
About
Quarries in the hills around Ephesus, including the Belevi site nine kilometers northeast of the city, supplied the marble behind one of the Roman Empire's largest urban building programs. White marble cut from these hills faced the Library of Celsus, the Marble Street, and the great theater that made Ephesus the leading marble-consuming city in Roman Asia Minor. Workers at Belevi also cut a darker banded stone prized for accent work alongside the white variety. Quarrying at Belevi ran from the early Roman period through the 6th century CE.
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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