Turkey

In our travels overseas, we have come across many beautiful places and peaceful villages and towns. We see people busy in their farms, stores, and businesses. Most of them have communication with the “outside” world through internet and so forth. We also visit ruins and evidence of ancient civilizations and ponder over what happened and wonder what is about to become of the current civilization. You see, these ruins were also once vibrant and peaceful villages and towns in communication with their outside world using horses, camels, and boats. Scientists explain that it was due to volcanic eruption, pestilence, drought, or climate change. Yes, these are all part of the Earth’s natural cycles. The scientists have yet to figure out when and how they occur, let alone control them.

Were these old civilizations exploited? Did that also lead to their demise? How, and by whom? Earth’s natural cycles are difficult to understand. But can we understand human exploitation and control it? These series of articles provide a methodical way to analyze exploitation, explores many types of exploitation, reveal new ones that may emerge. The analysis methodology used is systematic and is based on my experience as a systems engineer.

A system is defined as an organized collection of parts (or subsystems) that are highly integrated to accomplish an overall goal. The system has various inputs, which go through specific processes to produce certain outputs, which together, accomplish the overall desired goal for the system. In this context, civilization is a system, and exploitation is a process. More on this in subsequent parts of the series. Let’s look at an example ruins of an ancient civilization, and look for evidence of human exploitation, and natural earth’s cycles.

Ephesus has a long history of conquest and human exploitation, too much to cover here. For details, see Ephesus – HISTORY . Here is some interesting information from history.com, “Mary, the mother of Jesus, is thought to have spent her last years in Ephesus with Saint John. Her house and John’s tomb can be visited there today … In 262 A.D., the Goths destroyed Ephesus, including the Temple of Artemis. Some restoration of the city took place, but it never regained its splendor. In 431 A.D., a council was held in the Church of Saint Mary which confirmed the Virgin Mary as the mother of God … Emperor Theodosius erased all traces of Artemis during his reign. He banned freedom of worship, closed the schools and temples and forbade women many of the rights they’d enjoyed before. The Temple of Artemis was destroyed, its ruins used to build Christian churches”. 

The Arcadian Way is a marble road that connected the harbor and the theatre in Ancient Ephesus. It had streetlights, shops and galleries. The harbor silted up due to earth’s natural cycles.

Quote History.com:

“During the Byzantine era, Constantine the Great declared Christianity the official religion of all of Rome and made Constantinople the capital of the Roman Eastern Empire. This left Ephesus, a city already facing decline due to accumulating silt in its harbor, left to fend increasingly for itself”.

“The city relied heavily on its iconic places of worship to attract visitors to support its struggling economy. Still, Ephesus was a port city with a deteriorating harbor and there was only so much that could be done to literally keep it afloat”.

“In the sixth and seventh centuries A.D., a massive earthquake and the harbor’s continuing decline left Ephesus a shell of the city it used to be, and Arab invasions forced most of the population of Ephesus to flee and start a new settlement. Ephesus continued to deteriorate, although it experienced a brief period of growth and construction under the rule of the Seljuk Turks in the fourteenth century”.

“The Ottoman Empire took final control of Ephesus in the fifteenth century; however, the city was in dire straits, its harbor practically useless. By the end of that century, Ephesus was abandoned, its legacy left to archaeologists, historians and the thousands of visitors to flock to the region each year to see the ancient ruins”.