The geography of Müsgebi in Caria

[Labels in the form of Fnnnn or Cnnnn refer to sites in the Mycenaean Atlas Project.]

Müsgebi, on Turkey's Bodrum Peninsula, is one of the several sites testifying to the supercession of Minoan settlers by Greek-speakers, Mycenaeans, during the Late Bronze Age.[1]  M. appears to have consisted of a settlement site and a large cemetery; the geography has always seemed a bit obscure to me and this post is an attempt to clarify what I have been able to find out.  Figure 1 shows the general situation.

Fig. 1. The Bodrum Peninsula with locations of Bodrum/Halikarnassos, 
Müsgebi/Ortakent, and the island of Kos shown. 

The valley of Müskebi lies about 6.5 km. to the west of ancient Halicarnassus (measuring from the Mausoleum at F2121).  By ferry it is about 2 hrs. from Kos.  The valley itself is about 7.8 km. from N to S.  It ends with a range of hills on the N through which pass roads to Yalikavak on the N coast.  As early as the Bronze age the valley was the location of a Greek settlement that came to be known in the Classical period as Episkopi (C7880).  In modern times the two towns of Ortakent and Müskebi have grown to the point where they have merged; the conglomeration now bears the name of Ortakent.  

In the early 1960's Dr. George Bass, the well-known underwater archaeologist, was exploring this region of the Turkish coast when local informants showed him artifacts (primarily pottery) and told him of graves in the area.[2]  He was able to locate a few of these graves (chamber tombs) which were then intensively investigated by Boysal from 1963 on. [3]   At least 50 chamber tombs were ultimately identified and some excavated.  The haul of pottery was vast.

In 1963 Emily Vermeule[4] and a small team were sponsored in an effort to locate 'the Greek citadel' in the area.  In this she did not succeed but she was able to establish the ancient Greek nature of the area around this coast and establish that the richest source of artifacts was the wells that the inhabitants were enlarging and deepening.  And she relocated Bass's chamber tomb cemetery in an area about 4 km to the N of the coastline and placed in an area rich in white ceramic-grade clay; now a quarry.[5]

Where is the cemetery?

The cemetery is described like this in our sources:

a) Bass [1963] 353 : " ... a low hill about one and a half kilometers from Müskebi. The face of the hill had been cut away by camel drivers who had been seeking white clay for making mortar."

b) Mee [1978] 137: "The 48 chamber tombs were cut into the east and west slopes of a valley 1 km. to the north of Müsgebi ... "

c) E. Vermeule's sketch map marks it unambiguously as 'chamber tombs' and 'Mycenaean'.  She places it directly to the north of 'Müskebi'.  Additionally the photo accompanying her article clearly shows the ridge which shelters the cemetery.   I reproduce the photo here.

Fig. 2.  The Muskebi valley from the sea.  The photo was taken from approximately 37.019823° N, 27.344607° E on an azimuth of approximately 355°
Post-processed by rhc.

  

The caption reads:  "The beach and orchards of Müskebi (formerly Episkopi) viewed from out at sea. The Early Bronze Age settlement lies just inland in the center of the picture, and the Mycenaean cemetery is far up the valley on the right."   This photo is reproduced in Google Earth as Figure 3.

  

 

Fig. 3.  Reproduction in Google Earth of Vermeule's photograph. Here the actual quarry can be seen as the white patch at the very tip of the red arrow.

These indications are consistent with each other and, as a result, there can be no doubt that the quarry/chamber tomb cemetery is at C1495 (37.06842° N, 27.33957° E)

A close-up picture of this quarry from Google Street View

Fig. 4. The ridge and quarry are right behind the sign and the tree. The entrance
to the quarry, about 450 m. distant, is to the right.   The word 'beton' means 'concrete'. 
The picture was taken from 37.064532° N, 27.337401° E

Here is the scene of the quarry as seen in Google Earth.  The location from which the photo in Figure 4 was taken is shown here at bottom center as 'Photo Location'.

Fig. 5.  The quarry in which the Mycenaean Chamber Tomb cemetery of Müskebi was found (C1495).

Location of the Greek Settlement

Fig. 6.  The site of the settlement of Episkopi, Caria.  The site is across the road and to the left (E) of the housing complex in the middle distance.  Note the modern (?) tomb (F7926) on the lower left.  The lighter land-mass on the horizon is Kos. The darker land mass in from of it is part of the Bodrum Peninsula.
Used with kind permission of Eberhard Zangger and Luwian Studies.

The essentially Greek nature of this area and the extensive nature of the settlement was convincingly established by Vermeule.  Many of the pottery finds that she was shown or which her team discovered came from the inhabitants' digging of wells along the coast or close to it.  This is evident from her map:

Fig. 7.  The area of most intensive  pottery discoveries is in the lower left of
Vermeule's sketch map.

Luwian Studies gives the site of the settlement in two ways.  Zangger et al. [2022] 106 gives the site as "350 m south of the old windmills overlooking the old village center of Ortakent."[6]  The Luwian Studies website gives a slightly different location: 37.041583° N, 27.353133° E [7]

These two alternatives are shown in Figure 8.  

Fig. 8.  Upper portion of the Müskebi plain.  

The windmills called out in Zangger et al. [2022] are at the top at F7929.  The tomb clearly visible on the lower left of Fig. 6 is at F7926.  The location 350 m. to S of the windmills is the blue paddle marker at C7880.  The green paddle marks the lat/lon pair called out in Luwian Studies, no. 121.  The Mycenaean Atlas Project currently has adopted the C7880 position for the settlement at Müskebi.  Because of the well-watered nature of this landscape we probably can assume that the Greek settlement spread out over this entire plain. 

Vermeule marked out a larger and different area closer to the mouths of the streams on the S (here shown in blue and a tributary in green).  Figure 9 shows Vermeule's emphasis in context of the above.

Fig. 9.  Southern Müskebi plain.

One final consideration.  Zangger suggests that the river has moved the coastline about two and a half km. southward since the Bronze Age. [9]  That would mean that at the time Müsgebi was inhabited in LH I and LH II the coastline would have looked more like this:

Fig. 10.  During the BA the site of Müskebi may have been on the water's edge.

Here I have tried to indicate what it would look like if we move the sea coast two and a half km. to the north of its current position.  Some of what are currently hills would have been islands and it appears that Müskebi (C7880) would have been on, or very near, to the water's edge.  In other words, there is every possibility that the Mycenaean site of Müskebi would have been a seaport and some of the Mycenaean center of Vermeule would have been underwater.

Footnotes

[1] Plausible scenarios sketched out in Mellink [1983] 139 et passim : " Tombs of Minoan settlers have not yet been found on the Anatolian west coast. Mycenaean tombs begin to be known from Late Helladic IIIA 1-2 on (tomb group from Ephesos, chamber tombs at Müsgebi west of Halikarnassos), not much before 1400.  Aegean archaeologists infer from these data that Achaians from ca. 1450 on were taking over Minoan coastal sites in the Aegean and in West Anatolia (principally in Caria)."

[2] Bass[1963] 353 : "Later I was able to visit Müskebi, accompanied by Haluk Elbe, Director of Antiquities in Bodrum and archaeological commissioner for our underwater excavation, and Machteld Mellink. Haluk Bey explained our mission to a group of townspeople, and soon several more vases were produced from houses in the village. Afterwards we were led along a track, by Bekir Aras, to a low hill about one and a half kilometers from Müskebi. The face of the hill had been cut away by camel drivers who had been seeking white clay for making mortar. The scarp here revealed at least six chamber tombs, quite close together, ... " 

Mellink [1963] 180. "BODRUM-MÜSGEBI.  In 1962, George F. Bass of the University Museum, in charge of underwater explorations off the Carian coast, noticed that villagers in Müsgebi, about 5 miles west of Bodrum, had accidentally exposed some Mycenaean chamber tombs.  These tombs were originally cut into the soft limestone slopes of a hill which is now being used as a source of white earth for the making of mortar.  The site is about an hour from the sea on the east side of a small stream.  No traces of these tombs would have been visible on the surface before a road was cut in the slope and quarrying started."

[3] Cook and Blackman [1971] 48; Vermeule [1964] 244.  A partial bibliography of Boysal's work is in Mee [1978] 151.  Most accessible of Boysal's works might be Boysal [1969] : Katalog der Vasen im Museum in Bodrum: I - Mykenisch-Protogeometrisch (Ankara 1969) 1-28, plates 1-33.  I note that this is available online for reasonable prices.

[4] Vermeule [1964] 245. "Also in 1963 our miniature expedition of three was dispatched by Pennsylvania and Boston Universities to survey the entire valley of Müskebi, to look for the Mycenaean citadel and to record any other noteworthy features or antiquities."

[5] Called out on a nearly impenetrable sketch map in Vermeule [1964] 246.  This is reproduced here in Figure 7.

[6] Zangger et al. [2022] 106.

[7] Online here.

[8] Vermeule [1964] 246.

[9] Zangger et al. [2022] 106, "The nearby river carries much water and sediment at times, as evidenced by the wide channels that have been constructed throughout the village. The river has shifted the coastline seaward by 2.5 km since the Bronze Age."

Bibliography

Bass [1963] : Bass, George F., 'Mycenaean and Protogeometric Tombs in the Halicarnassus Peninsula', American Journal of Archaeology, (67:4) 353-361. Online here.

Cook and Blackman [1971] Cook, John Manual and David J. Blackman (1971): “Archaeology in Western Asia Minor 1965–1970”. Archaeological Reports (17) 33–62. Online here. 1971.

Güterbock [1983] : Güterbock, Hans G., 'The Hittites and the Aegean World: Part I. The Ahhiyawa Problem Reconsidered', American Journal of Archaeology (87:2) 133-138. 1983.  Online here.

Hajnal et al. [2022] :  Hajnal, Ivo with Everhard Zangger and Jorrit Kelder, edd.  The Political Geography of Western Anatolia in the Late Bronze Age; Proceedings of the EAA Conference, Bern, 7 September 2019.  Archaeolingua; Series Minor. Budapest, Hungary, 2022.  ISBN 978-615-5766-54-1. 

Mee [1978] : Mee, Christopher B. (1978): “Aegean Trade and Settlement in Anatolia in the Second Millennium B.C.”. Anatolian Studies (28), 121‒155. Online here. 1978.

Mellink [1963] : Mellink, Machteld J., “Archaeology in Asia Minor”. American Journal of Archaeology 67: 180-181.  1963 Online here.

Mellink [1983] : Mellink, Machteld J., “The Hittites and the Aegean World: Part 2. Archaeological Comments on Ahhiyawa-Achaians in Western Anatolia”. American Journal of Archaeology (87:2) : 138‒141. Online here

Vermeule [1964] : Vermeule, Emily. 'The Early Bronze Age in Caria', Archaeology (17:4), 244-249. 1964. Online here.

Zangger et al. [2022] : Zangger, Eberhard, Alper Asinmaz, and Serdal Mutlu, 'Middle and Late Bronze Age Western Asia Minor: A Status Report', in Hajnal et al. [2022], pp. 39-179.  2022.  Online here.