The Hellenistic eastern wall of Perge · Wikimedia Commons

City Walls of Perge

Moenia Pergae

WallLycia et Pamphylia · Aksu, Antalya, TurkeyBuilt 300 BCE

About

Perge's Hellenistic founders enclosed the city with a wall studded with rectangular towers at even intervals across the 3rd century BCE, a circuit the city never needed to fully rebuild afterward. The eastern and western stretches still stand largely as built, running from the acropolis mound down toward the plain. Only the southern wall received a Roman-era addition, and that came in the 2nd century, decades after Trajan's reign. By 117 CE the Hellenistic walls had guarded Perge for roughly four centuries, one of Pamphylia's best-preserved fortification circuits today.

What happened here

A town wall is a claim as much as a defence. It is faced in stone, cored with rubble and concrete, and pierced by gates that are more decorated than the rest of it put together. Towers project so that anyone at the base can be shot from the side. In most of the empire in this century the walls are old, unmanned, and half built over — shops lean against them and houses are cut into them — because the frontier is a long way off and the danger is not here. On the frontier itself a wall is something else entirely: a continuous barrier with ditches, gates at intervals, patrol tracks and manned turrets, built to control movement rather than to stop an army.