Zeugma means the crossing, or the bridge, and the name is the whole explanation for the city. It sat at one of the main fording points of the Euphrates, where the trade roads running north to south and east to west met, on hills ten kilometres east of Nizip; locally the place is still called Belkıs. Around 300 BC Seleucus I Nicator, one of Alexander's generals, founded a city at the point where Alexander had crossed the river and named it Seleuceia on the Euphrates; opposite it he founded a second town for his wife Apama, and joined the two by a bridge. From 31 BC the place passed to Rome and took the name Zeugma.
Its position made it a legionary base in the early imperial period and a frontier city of the Roman east, which is to say a place where cultures met and mixed — and that is exactly what comes out of the ground. The Roman centuries were the best it had. In AD 256 the Sasanian king Shapur I took the city, burned it and tore it down, and it never regained its standing.
What the Roman city left behind is above all its floors. The mosaics of its wealthy villas, most of them of the second and third centuries, reached a level the ministry sets beside the finest anywhere, and only part of the area has been dug. Excavation also produced the bullae, the clay seal impressions, which the ministry credits with bringing a world record to Gaziantep and to Türkiye. Two integrated temples of the Commagene period stand here as well, of a kind the ministry says is unmatched elsewhere. The site went onto the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List in 2012.
Where Zeugma actually stood took a long time to settle. Ancient writers had described it, but for years it was placed at Birecik, in what is now Şanlıurfa. The American researcher J. R. Metheny was the first to propose the settlement at Belkıs village, and in the early 1970s the German archaeologist Jörg Wagner, working on his doctorate, brought the archaeological, numismatic and epigraphic evidence together and made the identification comprehensively.
Most of what is known came out of the ground in a hurry. When it became clear that the Birecik dam would flood all of Apamea and part of Seleuceia, rescue excavation was mounted with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the Packard Humanities Institute and others; by the time that work ended in 2000 the mosaics, frescoes and finds from the Roman houses now under water had been lifted and taken to the Gaziantep museum. Digging resumed in 2005 under Prof. Kutalmış Görkay of Ankara University. Earlier campaigns include the Gaziantep museum's work of 1987 on the south-eastern cemetery, where rock-cut tomb chambers were found, joint excavation with the University of Western Australia between 1992 and 1994, and French work at Apamea by the University of Nantes from 1995. The site is reached on vehicles running to Belkıs Merkez Mahallesi in Nizip.
Getting there
- Access
- Take a vehicle to the Belkıs Merkez neighbourhood of Nizip in Gaziantep.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Gaziantep as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 3.2 °C in January to 28.1 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in January (103 mm) and lightest in August (5 mm). Long-term means for 1940-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
Visiting hours
- Hours
- 08:00 - 19:00
