Talk:Samsat

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Proposed merge of Samosata into Samsat

It seem that, for this region, the common practice is to cover both ancient and modern history in one article, and leave the historical name as a redirect. For example, Iconium to Konya, Melitene to Malatya, Trapezus to Trabzon, and Theodosiopolis (Armenia) to Erzurum. But for this city, we curretly have Samosata as a separate article. And there are also several contradictions between them like the time of the city's foundation.

I suggest merging these articles just as other linked articles. If no one objects, I will work on solving the problems above. Esiymbro (talk) 07:58, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

Support – Don't see any issue with this. --Semsurî (talk) 10:54, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

This merge was a mistake. One location is a 3,000 year old place of historical importance, that today is underneath a lake. The other is a planned city created less than 40 years ago, named after the first. For sites which have borrowed the name but are in different places, we have different articles (see Ascalon, Ashkelon, Isdud, Ashdod etc).

The article is very confusing at the moment and significantly underplays the important fact that the historical location is gone forever at the bottom of a lake.

It should be split back. Onceinawhile (talk) 23:03, 22 April 2026 (UTC)

@Semsûrî: I would like to create two separate articles: one on the ancient city and its modern submerging, and the other on the planned town to house its inhabitants.

The locations are 7-8km apart. The only connection is the name.

Splitting them back will allow a much better article on the history of Samosata, once an Assyrian capital.

These articles are interesting reads FYI:

• "Drowned Cities of the Upper Euphrates". AramcoWorld. Tragically, very little archeology was done at Samosata before the site was inundated in 1991, but there was enough to hint at its extent and splendor. The walls around the city were five kilometers (3 mi) long, and enclosed 200 hectares (500 acres). Samosata was thus three times the size of Pompeii, and 50 percent larger than Londinium, the capital of Roman Britain. A recently declassified US satellite photograph from 1968 provides the first aerial view of the city, showing the wall circuit, some hints of the internal road system and the huge prehistoric tell. On top of the mound, in the 1980's, Turkish archeologists excavated a large building with some surviving pieces of mosaic floors. As the walls of this building are also faced in opus reticulatum, it has been identified as the palace of the Commagenian kings, perched high above the city on what was already anancient tell. It commanded a view out over the Euphrates and across to what was, for several hundred years, the Parthian Empire on the other side. Outside the city walls can be found regular stretches of a raised aqueduct which brought water 40 kilometers (24 mi) to supply the baths and fountains of the city.
• Kruijer, L.W. (2022-05-24). "The assembled palace of Samosata: object vibrancy in 1st C. BCE Commagene". Scholarly Publications. This forced migration of ca. 3000 inhabitants from Eski Samsat to Yeni Samsat first of all meant a radical and potentially traumatic uprooting from a place that most people had called home their entire life. This biographical caesura was of course suffered first and foremost by individual persons, but it can also be considered in terms of the long historical life of the town itself. After almost 6000 years of habitation on and around the höyük, this long chronological fibre, stretching from the Chalcolithic to the late 20th century CE, was abruptly terminated. As such, the villagers of Eski Samsat not only were forced to bid farewell to the materiality of their personal histories, but also to that of a much deeper past. A past that, in fact, had never completely passed by as long as the höyük had still cast its long shadow over the village, as long as ploughing farmers would stumble on limestone Corinthian capital fragments and as long as children playing hide-and-seek in their backyards would pick up Iron Age pottery sherds.

Onceinawhile (talk) 17:36, 23 May 2026 (UTC)

I don't think the situation here is comparable to that of Ascalon, and the connection between old and new Samsat certainly goes much further than the name alone. When the old site was submerged, its population was relocated to the new site, which made it demographically the continuation of the same city. In addition the city was not renamed from Samosata to Samsat when it was moved, but instead the old site had been known as Samsat for centuries before it was submerged. Esiymbro (talk) 18:59, 23 May 2026 (UTC)

I don't really have an opinion on separating the two, as long as it makes sense. Semsûrî (talk) 19:08, 23 May 2026 (UTC)