OCR Text |
Show OLDEST CITY IN THE WORLD Sir William Ramsay, Archaeological Authority, Considers Konia the Most Ancient Town. Athens. The great archaeological authority, Sir William Ramsay, considers con-siders the oldest city in the world to be the city of Iconium, or Konia, as H is called today, says the Christian Herald. The modern Iconium has very much to interest the traveler, and I know of no such place in all Asia Minor which has left a mora abiding impression upon my mind than this city. Our visit, to be sure, was in midwinter. The snow was still piled high in some of the streets; the wind blew shrill and gustily through the narrow alleys; but a day or two of warm sunshine contended with the north wind for the mastery, and changed the whole aspect of things even in this forbidding season. The city derived Its name from the eikones or images of mud, which, according ac-cording to the ancient legend of the place, were made by Prometheus and Athena at the command of Jupiter, i U .A J) : lis ' wa?- f V' "I r ' 5 ." ' t t-t In Ancient Konia. who, after the great flood, caused the winds to blow upon the eikones and they became living men and women. Thus, according to this tradition, Iconium was the first place settled after the flood. But the traditions of the place go back even beyond the flood to the time of King Nannakos, who was told by the oracle that when he died there should come a mighty deluge in which all men should perish. per-ish. Thereupon he called all the peo. pie together to a great temple and cried so bitterly and with such a flood of tears in which his Phrygian sub jects joined, that "the weeping in the time of Nannakos" became a proverb even among the Greeks of later days. The Golden Age of Iconium, however, how-ever, both commercially and politically, political-ly, was not in the time of Nanakos, or even of St. Paul, but many hun. dreds of years later, when the Selju-kian Selju-kian Turks, the most virile as well as the most artistic of all the Moslems, Mos-lems, in the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries made Konia the capital of the powerful empire ol Roum. "The city was then made so splendid," it is said, "with beautiful buildings, palaces, mosques and mausolea, that the proverb arose and lasted long among the Turks, 'Se all the world; see Konia.'" |