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Located in Turkey, the settlement of Satala ( ''Satał''), according to the ancient geographers, was situated in a valley surrounded by mountains, a little north of the Euphrates, where the road from Trapezus to Samosata crossed the boundary of the Roman Empire. Later it was connected with Nicopolis by two highways. This site must have been occupied as early as the annexation of Lesser Armenia under Vespasian. Trajan visited it in 115 and received the homage of the princes of the Caucasus and the Euxine. It was he doubtless who established there the Legio XV ''Apollinaris'' and began the construction of the great ''castra stativa'' (permanent camp) which it was to occupy till the 5th century. The town must have sprung up around this camp; in the time of Ptolemy it was already important. In 530 the Persians were defeated under its walls. Justinian I constructed more powerful fortifications there, but these did not prevent Satala from being captured in 607-8 by the Persians. Satala is now Sadak, a village of 500 inhabitants, in the Kelkit district of Gümüşhane Province in Turkey. Satala was first investigated by Alfred Biliotti, the British vice-consul at Trebizond. He visited the site in September 1874 as a response to the finding of bronze statue fragments including the piece now known as the Satala Aphrodite. The site's identification as Satala was not firmly established until 1894. The artifact was found in a field outside Sadak in the late nineteenth century. It is now in the British Museum.〔British Museum Collection()〕 The webpage of the British Museum states that it's a "bronze head from a cult statue of Anahita in the guise of Aphrodite or Artemis."〔 just as most Armenian scholars believe it to be the statue of goddess Anahit, the Armenian equivalent of Aphrodite. Some remains of the walls of the rectangular legionary fortress survive, though much ruined. Their line can be traced in part on all four sides of the fortress that encompassed an area of 15.7 ha (smaller than most legionary fortresses). These walls probably date from the 6th century AD when, according to Procopius, Satala's fortifications were extensively rebuilt by Justinian, but in places they reuse the foundations of earlier walls. Within the walls little remains, and ruined structures noted by Biliotti have been demolished. The legionary base had a civilian settlement to the north of the north wall, but no traces of any substantial buildings survive. A ruinous structure consisting of a row of arches stands at some distance to the southeast of the fortress. Biliotti described it as a basilica, but since then it was frequently regarded as the remains of an aqueduct leading to an as yet unidentified lower city. This theory is now considered obsolete and the ruin has been reconfirmed as that of a basilica church. Lightfoot speculates that it might have been a martyrium church dedicated to the patron saint of Satala, St. Eugenius. 〔C.S. Lightfoot, “Survey work at Satala,” in R. Matthews (ed.), Ancient Anatolia, pp. 273-84, Oxford, 1998.〕 The Christians were numerous in the time of Diocletian. Le Quien, ''Oriens Christianus'', I, 431, mentions seven of its bishops: *Evethius, at Nicaea, 325 *Elfridius, 360 *Poemenius, about 378 *Anatolius, 451 *Epiphanius, 458 *Gregory, 692 *Philip, 879. The see is mentioned in the ''Notitiae episcopatuum'' until the thirteenth century, and we know the name of the bishop, Cosmas, in 1256. ==External links== *(Livius.org: Satala ) * 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Satala」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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