Iasos Marble Quarries

Iasos

QuarryAsia · Kıyıkışlacık, Milas, Muğla Province, TurkeyBuilt 200 BCE

About

Quarries near Iasos, a small harbor city on a peninsula in the Gulf of Güllük in Caria, produced a red-and-pink veined marble known as Carian red or cipollino rosso. Iasian marble reached coastal cities across the eastern Mediterranean, appearing in buildings as far away as Roman Palestine and North Africa. Hadrian's reign brought fresh repairs to the city's harbor tower and fortifications in the years just after 117 CE, evidence of continued Roman investment there. Quarry workers exploited outcrops close to the shoreline, keeping the haul to the loading docks short.

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.