Archaeologists excavating a Roman-era villa on Turkey’s Aegean coast have uncovered a floor mosaic that names two household animals: a cat labeled with the Greek word for emerald and a dog labeled with the Greek word for ocean. The find offers a rare, personal glimpse into how a wealthy Roman family thought about the animals living alongside them nearly 1,800 years ago.
The mosaic sits at the center of a villa unearthed beneath the ancient city of Adramytteion, a former provincial capital on Turkey’s western coast. Researchers date the residence to the late second or third century A.D., a period when the site functioned as a busy harbor town at the head of a gulf on the Aegean Sea.
The reception hall at Adramytteion
The mosaic was found in a large hall that archaeologists believe served as the villa’s main reception room, part of a residence built around a central atrium with three separate mosaic-paved halls. Hüseyin Özgen, an archaeologist at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University who leads the excavation, began working at Adramytteion in 2012, but his team only located this particular villa recently, excavating it across 2025 and early 2026. In a study forthcoming in the Journal of Mosaic Research, Özgen describes the room’s floor as one of the most elaborate found at the site so far.
The mosaic measures roughly 16.4 by 11.8 feet and is built from 15 separate panels arranged in three rows. Craftsmen combined white, black, red, orange, yellow, pink, burgundy, blue, turquoise and green tiles to render birds, fish and wild animals alongside two mythological figures: a gorgon that may depict Medusa and a winged horse that may depict Pegasus. Excavations at Adramytteion, conducted under the direction of the Balıkesir National Forces Museum Directorate with permission from Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, have covered roughly 9,000 square metres of the site and revealed multiple layers of occupation spanning the city’s history, according to a report on the excavation from HeritageDaily.
The winged horse motif is not a generic decorative flourish. The same image appeared on coins minted by Adramytteion in the fourth century B.C., roughly five centuries before the villa was built, suggesting the symbol remained tied to the city’s identity across multiple political eras. Its reappearance on a private residence’s floor points to a household that wanted to signal a connection to the city’s civic history alongside its personal wealth.
A cat named Emerald guards the entrance
Of the many creatures depicted across the 15 panels, only two carry inscribed names. Visitors entering the hall from the courtyard would first see a pale cat resting on a blue-green cushion to their left, with the Greek letters spelling “Zmaragdin,” meaning emerald, inscribed above it. The relaxed pose, curled on a cushion rather than prowling or hunting, led Özgen to conclude the animal was most likely a household pet rather than a working or stray cat kept for pest control.
One possible explanation for the name traces back to Roman Egypt, where emeralds were mined from desert deposits in antiquity. Özgen suggests the villa’s owner may have had trade connections to North Africa, making a gemstone name for a prized cat a plausible nod to the source of the family’s wealth.
A dog named Ocean marks the harbor city
On the opposite side of the entrance, a second panel shows a dog caught mid-leap or mid-run, labeled with the Greek letters spelling “Okeanos,” meaning ocean. Because Adramytteion was a working harbor city built around maritime trade, Özgen proposes that the dog’s name likely reflects its immediate surroundings rather than any deeper symbolism.
Both panels flank the entrance in a way that suggests deliberate composition: a viewer stepping into the hall would be greeted by the cat on one side and the dog on the other before taking in the wider scene of birds, fish and mythological figures spread across the remaining panels.
Naming pets as a marker of household identity
Özgen argues that Emerald and Ocean were likely familiar figures to everyone who lived in or visited the villa, whether or not they were pets in the modern sense. Commissioning a mosaic that memorialized them by name, rather than depicting animals as generic decorative motifs, suggests the household wanted the floor itself to double as a record of daily life and ownership.
Naming individual animals in Roman domestic art is unusual enough that the discovery has drawn attention from specialists in Roman provincial archaeology, since most surviving mosaics depicting animals treat them as symbolic or decorative rather than as named members of a household.
Pygmy figures point toward North Africa
Alongside the named cat and dog, the mosaic’s other panels include pygmy figures interacting with birds, a motif closely associated with North African mosaic workshops of the Roman period. Combined with the possible link between Emerald’s name and Egyptian emerald mines, the pygmy imagery reinforces the idea that the villa’s owner had commercial or cultural ties reaching across the Mediterranean rather than purely local wealth.
Adramytteion’s position as a trading city with two harbors made it a natural hub for that kind of exchange. Goods, artistic styles and craftsmen moving through the port could easily have introduced North African mosaic conventions to a household wealthy enough to commission a floor on this scale.
A villa built for trade and daily routine
Beyond the mosaic hall, the villa included a network of drainage channels, pipelines and installations serving wet areas, along with several secondary rooms surrounding the atrium. That infrastructure, combined with the villa’s prominent position within a trading port, points to a household with substantial resources and connections extending well beyond Adramytteion itself. Excavators also identified an earlier Hellenistic structure beneath the villa’s foundations, with some of its walls reused when the Roman residence was built, showing continuous occupation of the plot across centuries.
The villa’s eastern hall points to a second century A.D. origin, but the building did not stay static. After sustaining damage later in the Roman period, a new hall was added to the south of the central atrium during the fourth or fifth centuries A.D., decorated with its own geometric and figurative mosaics in the style of that later period.
Özgen and his team continue excavating the site, and further study of the villa’s other rooms may clarify how the reception hall related to the rest of the residence and whether other inscribed names turn up elsewhere in the complex. For now, Emerald and Ocean stand out precisely because they are exceptions: two individually named animals in a genre of Roman art that typically renders creatures as generic symbols rather than as members of a specific household.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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