AUGUSTA Cilicia Campestris, Turkey.
Just over 16 km N of Adana in a loop of the river Seyhan (Sarus), and at the W end of a narrow plain bounded N and S by low hills. With the Roman urbanization of the E Cilician plain after the fall of the Tarcondimotid house in A.D. 17, the city (named for Livia, the widow of Augustus) was founded in A.D. 20. Represented at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the city probably did not long survive, as an important center, the Moslem invasion of Cilicia in the 7th c.The site, discovered by chance in 1955, was identified by ancient literary references and from the presence there, and in the neighboring village of Gübe, of local semiautonomous coins of Augusta. In the same year (1955) Gübe, and with it the ruins of Augusta, disappeared below the waters of the Seyhan dam, but not before the site had been partially surveyed and individual buildings planned. Among these were the foundations of a triumphal arch, two colonnaded streets crossing each other at right angles in the manner typical of town planning in Roman Cilicia, a theater, a civic basilica, some shops, a bath building, and a dam on the river. These structures were all of brick and mortar, and probably of 3d c. date.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
F. Blumer, Kleinasiatische Münzen (1902) III 436-37; M. Gough, “Augusta Ciliciae,” AnatSt 6 (1956) 165-77; M. Akok, “Augusta şehri harabesi,” TürkArkDerg 7.2 (1957) 15-20; A.H.M. Jones, Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces (2d ed. 1971) 206.M. GOUGH