To My Family and Uğraş Uzun - Bilkent University

the barracks today strengthens this likelihood. The barracks themselves were built
by Ibrahim Pasha in 1832-3, whose father Mehmet Ali Pasha revolted against the
Ottoman Empire and held Antakya under his control between 1833-9 (Demir:
1996: 90).
Ibrahim Pasha also had a palace built near the barracks closer to the
Orontes river. Gertrude Lowthian Bell, who visited Antakya in 1905, and
published her memories in 1908 (Demir, 1996: 183), writes in her memoirs that
she saw “two fine sarcophagi, adorned with putti and garlands and with the
familiar and…. typically Asiatic motive of lions devouring bulls” standing in the
garden of the serail (Bell, 1985: 322). She also wrote a letter from Antakya to her
parents in 1905 mentioning the two sarcophagi that she saw in the garden of the
serail (Bell, 1905).
In the Princeton excavations of 1933-6, the excavators did not examine
this precise area, but they were able to locate the existence of three necropoleis
very near to the point (Fig. 34) (Stillwell, 1938: 1-3). One of these cemeteries is
possibly the one mentioned by L’Abbe E. Le Camus (Demir, 1996: 174). L’Abbe
E. Le Camus visited Antakya in 1888, and he wrote in his memoirs that near
Phyrminus, the eastern flood-bed running into the Orontes, there were the ruins of
eastern walls, which were near the Latin cemetery (Fig. 35) (Demir, 1996: 174).
A map of J. Jacquot drawn in 1931, however, records the existence of sarcophagi
in the general area where the Antakya Sarcophagus was found (Fig. 36) (Jacquot,
1931: 345; Demir, 1996: 102).
Although no other burials were apparently detected during the excavations
at the location where the Antakya Sarcophagus was found, the area could not
have been thickly populated when the burial was made, as there were certainly
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