Not all the mosaics with mythological images in them were excavated and taken off to the Zeugma museum. There are a few partial exceptions.
It the picture above you can see some of the terra cotta pipes for the running water in the building, and yes they had toilets in houses as well. Here’s the even bigger pipes, and yes they had cisterns in house for collecting water as well for bathing etc.
Notice the cistern in the picture above and below.
Some even went in for spiraling decorative columns…
There is even a room that ended up with graffiti scrawled on, surely late in the history of this town when the Romans had abandoned some if not all of the site due to earthquakes and invaders.
There are multiple descriptions of the House of Dionysius, so named for the large mosaic lifted from here and visible in the Zeugma museum in Gaziantep.
But there were other smaller houses with mosaics….
An inscription was found from King Antiochus I, at Zeugma, warning potential robbers away from the sanctuary of Apollo.
But it was not just the high and mighty who lived and died at Zeugma. Consider this small statue of a child who died prematurely, holding some food in one hand and his pet bird in the other. Notice the facial expression. In the Greek and Roman world, one of the most dishonoring things that could happen is if you and your name were forgotten altogether. Grave stele’s were erected to prevent this. Even beloved pets sometimes got an inscription to the effect of– don’t you forget about me and our good times together.
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