Plank Road: Empuries

We visited the excavations of both a Greek and a Roman city at Empuries. The Phoenicians founded a settlement in the first half of the sixth century BC, they were primarily interested in trade with the local Iberian tribe. The Phoenicians wanted metal and wheat, the Iberians were interested in trading for wine...sounds like the Iberians were a sensible people. Years later, the Phoenicians founded a colony, known as Emporion, which means market.

During the second Punic War, (Romans vs Carthaginians) a Roman army under the leadership of Scipio landed here with the aim of blocking land access to the Carthaginians. In 195 BC, the Romans set up a military camp on the hill above the Greek city, the military camp coexisted with the Greek city. But during the last quarter of the first century BC, the two cities were joined under the Romans.

The excavation of the Greek city is fairly large but is currently under restoration, or destruction, depending how you view these things. Therefore, access to the majority of the Greek ruins is severely limited.

There are really two different time periods of interest, the early period of the sixth century BC and the later period after the Romans came, the second century. Most of the excavation involves the later period, the earlier period ruins are still underground. Archaeologists in the past did not date the ruins so they would just dig up whatever they found, which makes a bit of a mess of things. More recent excavations dig with respect to the period.

Excavations began in 1908 and have continued ever since. However, only about 20% of the Roman city has been excavated. They are putting up fake columns and such that look really terrible, the site would be so much better if they left the ruins as best they could without using new materials. If you have any clue about the layout of ancient Greek and Roman cities, you can easily fill in the blanks.

The excavation found a spectacular statue of one of the Greek gods, they think it is Asklepios, the god of medicine, or it could be Serapis. A copy sits outside in the site of the temple, the real thing is in the museum. The statue is interesting as it is made up of two different types of marble. The head and torso are made of Parian marble from the Greek island of Paros, Parian marble lent itself to rounded shapes. The marble that makes up the drapery is Pentalic, from Attica, this is a hard marble that was useful for creating texture. The collection in the museum is rather small, this likely signifies that there is a lot left to be discovered underground.

By the second half of the third century AD, the Roman city was abandoned, it had lost its importance as the other Roman cities of Tarraco (Tarragona), Barcino (Barcelona) and Gerunda (Girona) grew in importance.

The site was completely empty of visitors, when we were moving onto the Roman ruins, we finally glimpsed two other people. We don’t usually use audio-guides, but they handed them to us so we listened in. The narration was just plain weird, rather than being truly informative, the narrative tried to be humorous, but failed miserably. It was pretty decent with regard to the Greek site, but then went all out wacko with respect to the Roman ruins. There isn’t all that much excavated so they really tried to stretch it out with annoying banter. As usual, click on pics to enlarge.

Asklepios situated in the site of the temple