Seleucia

• 1. Introduction

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  Seleucia was once one of the largest cities in the known world, a metropolis on the west bank of the Tigris River that ancient texts claim held 600,000 people. Only Rome, Alexandria, and possibly Antioch were more populous. And yet today the city is gone, swallowed by desert sands, its location only rediscovered in the 1920s by archaeologists who were actually looking for somewhere else.

  How does a city that size vanish? How does a place that stood at the center of empires for centuries fade so completely that it had to be found again? And what did the people who lived there actually leave behind? Those are the questions that draw us to Seleucia.

• 2. A City Built by Force

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  Seleucus I Nicator founded Seleucia around 305 BC, and he did not do it gently. Seleucus was one of the Diadochi, the generals who divided Alexander the Great's empire among themselves after Alexander died. To build his new capital into something worthy of that name, Seleucus forced nearly all of the inhabitants of Babylon to leave their ancient city and resettle in Seleucia. The only people spared from this relocation were the priests at the local temples and those who supported them.

  A tablet dated to 275 BC records that the Babylonian population was transported to Seleucia, where a palace and a temple called Esagila were built. The choice of location was not random. Seleucia sat at the point where the Tigris met a major canal running from the Euphrates, placing it in a position to draw traffic from both of Mesopotamia's great river systems.

  Excavations have since confirmed just how large the city became. The walls enclosed at least 550 hectares, an area equivalent to a square roughly 1.5 miles on each side. Scholars estimate that the population exceeded 100,000 early on, likely growing considerably after that. Polybius noted that Seleucia used the Macedonian term peliganes for its governing council, a detail that points to its character as a Macedonian colony. Pausanias adds that Seleucus also settled Babylonians there alongside the Macedonian colonists, and the archaeological record bears this out: the finds suggest a large population that was not primarily of Greek culture.

• 3. A Hellenistic Crossroads

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  Seleucus eventually moved his main administrative capital to Antioch in northern Syria, but Seleucia never became merely a provincial town. During the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, it ranked among the great Hellenistic cities, comparable to Alexandria in Egypt and larger than Syrian Antioch itself. Scholars have debated the exact foundation date, with proposals ranging from 312 BC to 306 BC to 300 BC; Auguste Bouch-Leclerq put it at 300 BC in a study published in 1914.

  When the Parthians under Mithridates I took the city in 141 BC, they found something they chose to preserve rather than transform. Tacitus wrote that Seleucia remained a fully Hellenistic city even under Parthian rule. That Hellenistic character apparently persisted in its civic life as well: ancient texts describe a senate of 300 people governing the population alongside the Parthian overlords.

  A battle fought near Seleucia in 55 BC had consequences that reached well beyond the city's gates. Mithridates III, the reigning Arsacid king, faced a challenge from the deposed Orodes II. Mithridates had the support of Aulus Gabinius, the Roman governor of Syria, and a Roman army. Even so, Mithridates lost. Orodes re-established himself as king, and the dynastic succession of the Arsacid line was settled in the shadow of Seleucia's walls.

  Not everyone who passed through Seleucia did so under good circumstances. In 41 BC, around 5,000 Babylonian Jewish refugees were massacred inside the city, an event recorded by Josephus.

• 4. Destruction and Rebuilding

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  In 117 AD, the Roman emperor Trajan burned Seleucia during his conquest of Mesopotamia. The destruction turned out to be temporary. Trajan's successor, Hadrian, ceded the city back to the Parthians the following year, and it was rebuilt in the Parthian style.

  The second destruction was final. In 165 AD, the Roman general Avidius Cassius destroyed Seleucia completely. There was no subsequent rebuilding of the old city on that site. More than sixty years later, the Persian emperor Ardashir I did construct a new city across the river, which the Sassanids called Veh-Ardashir. For a long time scholars assumed Veh-Ardashir occupied the same ground as Seleucia, but Italian excavations eventually showed it was a completely fresh construction, separate from both Seleucia and the nearby capital of Ctesiphon.

  The city of Seleucia itself gradually gave way to the desert. The Tigris River eventually shifted its course, and the site was likely abandoned as a result. The name survived in different forms across different cultures: the Sassanids called the eastern city Veh-Ardashir; Arabs knew it as Bahurasir; texts from the Church of the East's synods referred to it as Saliq or sometimes Mahhoze.

• 5. Christianity's Eastern Headquarters

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  Christians had been present in Mesopotamia from the 1st century onward, and by the 3rd or 4th century Seleucia had become an important center for the faith. The years before 410 AD had been difficult ones. The Persian Sasanian king Yazdegerd I issued an edict of toleration that ended a period of persecution lasting 70 years. With that reprieve, the Christian communities of the region set about rebuilding their institutional structures.

  In 410 AD, the Council of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, also known as the Synod of Mar Isaac, convened under the presidency of Mar Isaac, the bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon. The assembly made a decision with lasting consequences: it declared the bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon the primate of the Church of the East, granting him the title Catholicos. Mar Isaac was confirmed in this role as Catholicos and Archbishop of all the Orient. The synod also formally aligned the church with the Council of Nicaea and the Nicene Creed. Under the canons adopted at the synod, no election of a bishop anywhere in the East could be valid without the Catholicos's approval.

  The peace did not last. Toward the end of Yazdegerd I's reign, persecution of Christians resumed in 420. Dadyeshu was elected Catholicos in 421 and was himself imprisoned during the renewed attacks. When he was released he resigned and left Seleucia, but the church refused to accept the resignation. The Synod of Dadyeshu met in 424 in Markabta of the Arabs, with Mar Dadyeshu presiding. That synod went further than the one in 410. It declared that the Catholicos was the sole head of the Church of the East, answerable to God alone, with no ecclesiastical authority standing above him. The synod's decision served a political purpose as well: by asserting total independence from Rome, the Persian Christians could reassure the Sasanian monarchy that they owed no loyalty to the empire's Roman enemy.

• 6. What the Excavations Found

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  Archaeologists looking for the ancient city of Opis stumbled onto Seleucia's location in the 1920s. Beginning in 1927, University of Michigan professors Leroy Waterman and Clark Hopkins led excavations at the site on behalf of the American School of Oriental Research of Baghdad. Waterman worked from 1927 to 1932; Hopkins followed from 1936 to 1937. Funding came from two American art museums, the Toledo Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the finds went to the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology.

  The objects recovered ranged widely: large numbers of bronze coins, salt receipts bearing the city's name, a blue glazed incense burner that ended up in the Baghdad museum, a stele with a Greek inscription, beads, metal weights, surgical instruments, and one pre-Sargonic brick.

  A second campaign brought Italian researchers to the site. From 1964 to 1968, and again between 1985 and 1989, a mission from the University of Turin directed by Antonio Invernizzi and Giorgio Gullini excavated at Seleucia. Their most striking find was a Seleucid archive building containing approximately 30,000 seal impressions, every one of them in a fully Greek style. That archive offers a direct window into the administrative culture Seleucus established. The Italian team also found, embedded in an outer wall from the Parthian period, a reused brick stamped with a date of 821 BC, placing it in the Neo-Assyrian period long before Seleucia existed.