Turks aren't Arabs!

Thanks, Daniel, for keeping up your blogs. Anatolia ... ah Anatolia, the land of the rising sun (in Greek A. = East). I only wish I could be there with you – specially in Ephesus. Speaking of which, I noticed with glee that you referred to the "20th century classicist Alfred Deissman". Well done! However, his name was actually Gustav Adolf Deissmann (1866-1937), and he wasn't a classicist per se, but rather a theologian who in 1895 became the world-leading expert in the postclassical (koine) Greek language – streets ahead of all classicists. Regarding his role in Ephesus, you are quite right, had he not championed its cause after WW1, much of what one sees there today would have been lost forever – and with it a large chunk of our knowledge of the ancient world and its people. In AD 100 Ephesus had a pop. of some half a million people, no wonder you were awed by its size. You also wrote of the Artemision that in the Apostle Paul’s time "They started changing [!] “Great is Diana ...”, and puzzled over how Diana and Artemis could possibly be the same god. Artemis was the name of the Greek goddess whom the Romans took over and called Diana (talk about plagiarism). Actually, this kind of ‘godnapping’ was nothing unusual in the ancient world. The Christians did the same later with the images and statues of the Roman goddess Isis and her son Horus, by simply renaming them Virgin Mary and her son Jesus. Hey presto – the myth is re-cycled, repackaged and sold to millions as sacred reality.

Actually, there were quite a few tyops [!] you didn't notice ;-) The Wikipedia entry for Deissmann is pathetic ...