Looking for Aphrodite. David Price Williams
there, because almost 1,300 years later we uncovered his graffiti on the chancel floor, scratched in an arcane, kufic script:
Allahum ghufur Yazid ibn Sufyan
“O God pardon Yazid ibn Sufyan!”
At Knidos, there is nothing later; the city drew its last breath that day.
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CHAPTER TWO
IN THE BEGINNING
Hippodamus, son of Euryphon, a native of Miletus, invented the art of planning and laid out the street plan of many cities.
Aristotle
If Yazid presided over the final days of Knidos, how and when had it all begun? How did such an illustrious city come to be built on this isolated, wild and wind-swept promontory? To discover the answer to that, we have to go back in time, beyond the turn of the millennia into the bright day and murky night of ancient history, back beyond Imperial Rome to the time when the Greeks were paramount in this part of the Mediterranean.
At the beginning of the 4th century BC, the original community of Knidos was a small, undefended agricultural settlement some distance to the east. It lay on the edge of the only agriculturally suitable plain in the middle of a finger of land in south western Asia Minor. It had probably been established there for hundreds of years, since the Bronze Age in fact, peopled by a mixed population of Carians, the indigenous peoples of the region, and Dorians, Greeks from across the Aegean with whom Knidians had by now long since intermarried. But, around about the mid 300’s BC, the good burghers of Knidos resolved to reposition their city. Taking a conscious decision to decamp, the boulé (council) of Knidos chose to move their new metropolis 35 kilometres west, to the tip of the long, rugged peninsula sticking out into the Aegean Sea around which all ships in the East Mediterranean must navigate. Here they were going to connect an adjacent offshore island to the mainland, thus creating two harbours, one either side of the newly built isthmus. The reason why they were doing this was because a new era was dawning, an era of maritime trade, and they wanted to be in the mainstream of this change, to be part of the new world of Hellenism and part of the new
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financial order it brought with it. Some of the cities they knew had already made similar moves - Rhodes for example, and Halicarnassus not very far away on the other side of the Ceramic Gulf. At the proposed new site Knidos would have sheltered harbours, a haven from the dreaded Boreas, the North wind, which brought cold and rain from as far as the Black Sea and the steppes of Southern Russia. And it was going to be protected by huge monumental walls which would encompass the hills overlooking the sea. And with a civic flourish, they adopted a new style of city planning too which was to make Knidos one of the finest city-scapes in the Mediterranean. The tip of the peninsula, also known as Cape Crio, was going to be invested with a Hippodamian Grid.
The plan the Knidian masons adopted was invented by one Hippodamus who hailed from the Ionian city of Miletus. He was born around 500 BC and came to be certainly the greatest, if not the very first, urban planner of his day. He is also credited with being an architect, physician, mathematician, meteorologist and penseur extraordinaire, but town planning seems to have been his real forte. Aristotle, who never met the man, believed him to be an eccentric if talented fop.
“Some people thought he carried things too far,” wrote the metaphysical philosopher, “with his long hair, expensive ornaments, and the same cheap, warm clothing worn winter and summer.”
Whoever gave him that idea we shall never know, since Aristotle was born over one hundred years after Hippodamus. Nevertheless, Hippodamus had excelled himself by redesigning the Piraeus, the harbour out-port of Athens, which he had done at the request of no less a politico than Pericles. His concept of urban philosophy was to create a city which was a grid iron in plan, with straight streets running parallel to each other at even intervals, and cross streets, also at even intervals, running perpendicular to them. This might seem relatively simple, a sort of Manhattan of the ancient east, except
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that there had been absolutely no town planning anywhere up to this point, and anyway his urban oeuvre was well over two thousand years earlier than New York. It’s true that he is credited with more plans than he was possibly able to execute, in the sense that some, like Rhodes, happened after he had died. But there is no doubting that he was a major influence on the way new cities should be laid out, and more than a century after his birth, Knidos implemented Hippodamus’ basic idea for their new metropolis. But as we shall see, the Knidians set about the ‘Hippodamus thing’ with even more panache than their classical neighbours.
Looking at Cape Crio today, the chosen site for their new city, it is not difficult to see why they selected it sitting as it does on this corner of the Mediterranean. But in its day it was an audacious notion and required a considerable imagination and courage to design. The site consists of an island of unusual ruggedness. On its south side, the side facing away from the city, the island, called by some Triopium, is a succession of sheer, forbidding cliffs rising straight out of the sea, with the great volcano of Nisyros not ten nautical miles distant, and the long rocky island of Tilos a bit further to the south. The sea is deep just off the island and the contrary winds that gust around the point nearly always cause the surface of the sea to boil in a squally spindrift. To the landward side, the island slopes, steeply at first, then at a shallower angle towards what was once a deep race between the island and the promontory.
The mainland, meanwhile, is a continuation of the mountain range that begins west of present-day Datça, rising to over three thousand feet and then diminishing in a series of precipitous hills to the tip of the peninsula. Today, the site has largely returned to its former uninhabited state, and to some the place has assumed its original barren and forbidding appearance.
The concept in the mind of the engineers who opted for this location was to join the middle of the island to the mainland with a man-made isthmus across the centre of the intervening straits, a distance across the narrows of
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about one hundred and fifty metres. By extending moles from the mainland and from the island at either end of the channel, it would thus be possible to create two deep water harbours, the one on the west rather smaller, with a narrower entrance, more susceptible to storm swells, and the one on the east slightly more open and considerably larger, with a central entrance facing towards the island of Rhodes. The thinking was that shipping from the east would pass north of the point of Rhodes, or setting sail from Rhodes itself, bear under the Isle of Symi, across the Gulf of Doris between Nisyros and Knidos, passing very close to Cape Crio before turning north into the Gulf of Kos and the Ceramic Gulf to Halicarnassus and thence into the Aegean. Not for nothing can it be said that Knidos was to be built for maritime protection exactly at the junction of the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean proper. Incidentally, to sail the alternative route into the central Aegean, passing the southern tip of Rhodes and towards Carpathos and Crete is to court disaster. The Carpathian Sea is one of the worst I have ever had the misfortune to sail in. Like Halicarnassus, only more so, Knidos is difficult to get to by land, but very much more easily reached reach by sea.
The designers of the new city took every advantage of the spectacular local topography. With the Hippodamian grid very much in vogue, they decided to apply it here. However, unlike the Piraeus, or Rhodes, or Miletus, which were on a level plane, the Knidian grid-iron was to be elevated to around twenty degrees. In a truly remarkable feat of engineering, huge artificial ashlar-blocked stone terraces were erected, one above another, filled in behind with the spoil created by cutting into the slope at the back of each terrace, row by row, up the hillsides on the mainland and facing them on the island, set out like two gigantic opposing straight rows of stadium seats, one on either side of the newly built harbours. Along these terraces were built horizontal roadways, linked at regular intervals by stepped streets, to create a series of regular, tiered city blocks. At the crucial position on the mainland just above the western Commercial Harbour, a three-width block was planned as the focus of the city.
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Incredibly, the whole site was to be defended by a massive stone wall, probably twelve to twenty metres in height, running down