Explore Ancient Anatolia

The sea-horse hippocampus is a mythological creature shared by Phoenician and Greek mythology. Hippocamps appear with the first Orientalizing phase of Etruscan civilization: they remain a theme in Etruscan tomb wall-paintings and reliefs, where they are sometimes provided with wings, as they are in the Trevi fountain. Katharine Shepard found in the theme an Etruscan belief in a sea-voyage to the other world.

In ca. 1200 BC, Uriah the Hittite leaves his conquered homeland and, following his father's instruction, seeks refuge with an old family friend, eventually finding himself in a great battle between the Canaanite forces of Sisera and the Hebrew forces of Barak...

PHOTO: Oceanus of Ephesus and Zeus of Gaza in the background at Istanbul Archaeology Museum. In classical antiquity, Oceanus was believed to be the world-ocean, which the ancient Romans and Greeks considered to be an enormous river encircling the world. Strictly speaking, Oceanus was the ocean-stream at the Equator in which floated the habitable hemisphere. In Greek mythology, this world-ocean was personified as a Titan, a son of Uranus and Gaia.

The Black Sea coast is different from the rest of Turkey. For more than 5000 years Sinop, the central point on the coast, has seemed more remote from the rest of the Anatolian land mass than from Greece, Italy, Africa, the Crimea, Istanbul, and Rome. How was Sinop connected to them?