Gözlükule: The Mound Beneath Tarsus

Gözlükule is the settlement mound that stands in the middle of modern Tarsus. It is the single most important fact about the archaeology of the city, for a plain reason: the Roman town the Apostle Paul was born into lies beneath a living town, and the mound is the one place where the ancient city has been excavated stratigraphically in depth. (Scholarship) Almost everything that is known about Tarsus from the ground rather than from books comes out of this one hill.

What a mound is, and why this one matters

A höyük is not a hill. It is a city that has fallen down and been rebuilt on its own rubble, hundreds of times, until the accumulated debris of living stands above the plain. Cut into it, and you cut through the centuries in order. That is why Gözlükule can answer a question the rest of Tarsus cannot: not *what* was here, but *when*, and *in what sequence*.

The excavation established that the mound was occupied continuously from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age — a settlement already ancient before there was any Cilicia to speak of, let alone a Roman province. (Scholarship) The renewed excavations record levels running from the Neolithic all the way up to the Ottoman period. (Scholarship) The city Paul names in Acts is one thin band in a sequence thousands of years deep.

Hetty Goldman's excavation, 1930s

The mound was chosen, not stumbled upon. Hetty Goldman conducted a reconnaissance of Cilicia in 1934, and it was that survey which led her to select Gözlükule for excavation. (Scholarship) The campaign ran through the field seasons of the later 1930s, each reported year by year — 1936, 1937, 1938 — before the war closed the work and long before the final volumes appeared. (Scholarship)

The results were published by Princeton University Press in three volumes, and they remain the standard reference: Volume I on the Hellenistic and Roman periods — the city of Paul's own century — Volume II on the long prehistory from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age, and Volume III on the Iron Age. (Scholarship) Volume I in particular is still the standard reference for the Hellenistic and Roman pottery, small finds and stratigraphy of Tarsus. (Scholarship)

Goldman was among the very few women directing a major Near Eastern excavation in her generation, working under the auspices of Bryn Mawr College and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

The dig reopened, 2001

After a gap of some sixty years, excavation at Gözlükule resumed in 2001, as the Tarsus-Gözlükule Interdisciplinary Research Project under Boğaziçi University, applying modern interdisciplinary methods to the mound. (Scholarship) The work is ongoing, and each season is published in the annual *Kazı Sonuçları Toplantısı* reports. (Scholarship)

This matters for how the older results should be read. Goldman's mid-century phasing of the Iron Age has since been refined by the renewed excavations, and the newer sequence should be preferred where the two differ. (Scholarship) A seventy-year-old excavation report is a primary record, not a final verdict; that is true of the best of them, and Goldman's are among the best.

What Gözlükule does not tell us

Nothing excavated at Gözlükule has been connected to the Apostle Paul, and nothing is likely to be. Archaeology of this kind recovers cities, not individuals: pottery sequences, house plans, burnt layers, coins. It can tell us that Tarsus was a substantial and long-inhabited place with a Hellenistic and Roman city on top of a very deep past — which is exactly what Acts assumes when Paul calls it "no mean city" (Acts 21:39). It cannot put a man in a room.

That distinction is worth holding on to. The mound is the strongest physical evidence the Library has for the *city*, and no evidence at all for the *apostle*. Both statements are true at once, and a reader is better served by being told so.

For the city above the mound, see our reference on Tarsus; for the man, the Apostle Paul; for the province, Cilicia; and for the Roman-period city in particular, Roman Tarsus.