Lost Roman Treasure homepage

At the height of the Roman Empire an opulent city stood at the eastern frontier on the most important crossing of the Euphrates River. Called Zeugma ("Junction") after the bridge that linked its opposite banks, the city disappeared into history after the empire fell. Now its remains are about to disappear beneath a mammoth reservoir. This program records the frantic scramble to recover the glory that was Zeugma.

Buried by centuries of silt and dirt, Zeugma was long neglected by archeologists, until the rising edifice of a nearby hydroelectric dam forced them to act quickly before the site was flooded. What they found dazzled them.

NOVA's film team was on the scene to record how the traditionally painstaking work of excavation had to yield to emergency measures. With only six weeks to finish a dig that would normally take years, researchers made a rough-and-ready map of the site by measuring magnetic fluctuations at the surface, revealing faint traces of ruined walls, streets, and houses below.

Pinpointing the largest and presumably wealthiest homes, the international team went to work with heavy tools, including a judiciously operated bulldozer. With just two weeks to go before rising water forced them to higher ground, they hit pay dirt: a sprawling 14-room villa.

The program captures some of the ensuing moments of discovery. As workers brush dirt from a mosaic floor, for instance, archeologist Catherine Abadie Reynal of the University of Nantes, France, spots something. "It's very strange," she says tentatively. "There's an inscription. Superb. It's in Greek! Icarus. Pasiphae. They're all mythological characters. Daedalus! Icarus's father! It's a family gathering! Oh, it's fantastic."

The perfectly preserved mosaic is just one of many exquisite creations in colored tiles found at the site. Depicting tales from myth and literature, the artworks may have served as conversation pieces during lavish banquets. There are also delicate wall paintings, coins, pottery, inscribed stones, bits of cloth, and lots of charred wood. Researchers believe that something dreadful happened to the villa and to Zeugma, possibly connected with the invasion of the Persians around A.D. 250.

"We have evidence of a terrible fire," says archeologist Pierre Leriche of Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. "Some kind of huge collapse...then it all settled down until there was a landslide and the house was abandoned."

Modern-day residents of the valley are undergoing their own cataclysm. Families that have lived along the Euphrates for generations must now salvage what they can and move to new houses that have been promised by the Turkish government.

And with the barest taste of the riches that were ancient Zeugma, archeologists salvage what they can and cover the rest, hoping that colleagues in the future can complete the job underwater or, perhaps, when the hydroelectric dam is itself a ruin and the reservoir long since drained away.