Among the artefacts is a marble bathtub, nearly five feet long and carved with decorative mouldings and sculpted lion-paw feet, likely taken from the Terrace Houses where rich Romans once lived.

However, over the centuries it was apparently repurposed as a fountain trough, complete with holes cut into it for water to flow, serving as ancient site recycling. 

The find reflects a theme archaeologists call spolia, where older building materials and objects get reused in new construction - something familiar to site teams everywhere who’ve ever borrowed a couple of bricks or reclaimed timber from an earlier structure, Beliefnet reports.

The Turkish team also found the fragmented torso of a Roman statue, once part of some unnamed man, that had been flipped face-down and incorporated into a roadway as paving.