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This chapter is an essay in cultural history, exploring the relationship between the forms of epigraphical expression and the expectations of the intended audiences. It does so by studying the (mostly religious) inscriptions of Hellenistic and Roman Asia Minor, and seeks to modify recent interpretative notions of town and country as ‘worlds apart’ or of ‘collective identity’. With much illustrative detail, the chapter shows how anxieties about crops and livestock were reflected in epigraphic forms and terminology, not least in prayers to weather gods. A second section emphasises the prominence and powers accorded to local gods, as are visible both in the prayers offered on behalf of village communities, and in the texts of confession and expiation set up by individuals. The chapter ends by downplaying notions of serious tension between rural Anatolian cult practice and ‘an essentially urban cultural mainstream’.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the root cause of the Greek refugee problem. It then discusses the persecutions of Greeks in Eastern Thrace and Asia Minor; resettlement of Greek refugees in Macedonia, 1913-1915; the Asia Minor catastrophe; displacement of Ottoman Greek citizens from their ancestral lands; and the Convention of Lausanne on 30 January 1923.

This chapter examines Iranian names and Persian influence on the religious sanctuaries in Asia Minor. It explains that religious cults with Persian associations were extraordinarily tenacious and long-lasting across the entire land mass of Asia Minor, but that Persian influence on religious activity in Asia Minor was not uniform in nature. The chapter suggests that many of the cults in Asia Minor were undoubtedly of a hybrid nature and contained Greek or native Anatolian as well as Iranian features.

The geographical characteristics of the Pontus combined with the historical circumstances of the region's colonization by the Greeks were important factors which defined the nature of this ‘world apart’, and these have been the dominant themes of modern historical study. However, neither physical geography nor the colonial experience inevitably implied the emergence of a distinct Pontic world or a Pontic community. Nor do the facts of geography or the major developments of external political history help to explain the identities that the peoples of Pontus claimed for themselves, or that were ascribed to them by outsiders. Indeed, there is a need to ask in what ways, and at what periods, the inhabitants of Pontus themselves felt any sense of shared identity to correspond with the outside perception, that they inhabited a world of their own. Given the obvious problems of regional definition, this chapter is divided into four sections. The first and second look at the Pontic region defined in its earliest sense as the territories and communities associated with the Black Sea itself. The third is concerned with the Pontic regions of Asia Minor. The fourth deals more specifically with the kingdom of the Mithridatids, the so-called kingdom of Pontus. But the starting point, which has led to this structure, is an analysis of the region's name, and in particular of the adjectival form Ponticus Ποντικός, which was derived from it.

The story of Nicopolis ad Istrum and its citizens exemplifies much that is common to the urban history of the whole Roman Empire. This chapter reviews the history of Nicopolis and its transition into the small fortified site of the fifth to seventh centuries and compares it with the evidence from the Near East and Asia Minor. It argues that Nicopolis may not have experienced a cataclysm as has been suggested, and that, as in the fifth and sixth century west, where landowning elites showed a striking ability to adapt and survive, there was an important element of continuity on the lower Danube, which in turn may account for the distinctive ‘Roman’ element in the early medieval Bulgar state. It also suggests that the term ‘transition to Late Antiquity’ should be applied to what happened at Nicopolis in the third century: what happened there in the fifth was the transition to the middle ages. This chapter also describes late antique urbanism in the Balkans by focusing on the Justiniana Prima site.

This chapter examines the dating of the aphrodisias stele inscriptions and the Semitic name-use by Jews in Roman Asia Minor. It investigates the progressive Hebraization of the Jewish onomasticon in western Anatolia between the second and sixth centuries AD and suggests that the Hebraizing trend became increasingly strong in the second half of this period. The chapter asserts that onomastic change during this period reflects changes in society as a whole.

In recent years, there has been a revival of interest in Late Antiquity and especially in observing — and trying to account for — the changes and evolutions which separate the Roman world from the early medieval successor states in the West, and the Byzantine Empire in the East. Most historians, once mistrustful of archaeology's potential role, now accept that this relatively new discipline can contribute substantially to the study of the ancient past. However, archaeology, like history, is constrained by its own limitations: excavation can provide no answers to questions not rooted in the data it extracts from the ground. This chapter, and the chapters which follow, cover a wide spectrum of issues, going beyond the problem of continuity or collapse on the lower Danube. Modern research programmes operating within the region and further afield, both in the northern Balkans and in Asia Minor, are analyzed. Cities and urbanism in the Roman Empire are discussed.

This final chapter continues the story of Arab‐Byzantine warfare. Mu‘awiya's second major offensive (669–74) is traced from the opening act (the assassination of Constans II) to the naval defeat which brought it to a halt and opened the way for a Byzantine‐sponsored rebellion in Syria and Palestine. After a summary account of the second Arab civil war (682–92) and the humiliating treaty (686) which the Emperor Justinian II imposed on ‘Abd al‐Malik (685–705), a new phase of Arab expansion is described, in the course of which Byzantium lost north Africa (698) and the pressure on Asia Minor steadily intensified from 709 to a climax in the 717–18 siege of Constantinople. Key structural features of the new Muslim state are identified. The chapter ends with a cast‐forward to the successful guerrilla war of defence fought by Byzantium in the eighth and ninth centuries.

Alexander's conquest of western Asia Minor marked a dramatic turning point in Erythraian politics. For the previous fifty-four consecutive years (386–332) and for seventy-two of the previous eighty years (412–394 and 386–332), oligarchs controlled that polis. By the end of the 330s, however, the democrats were in control. What many Erythraians likely considered to be the natural and immutable political order had been completely upended. This chapter analyzes the Erythraian democrats' efforts to maintain control of their polis in the face of efforts by their anti-democratic opponents to reinstate the pre-Alexander status quo. Based on an analysis of the events referred to in the Philites stele and their likely historical contexts, it argues that the creation and subsequent manipulation of the statue of Philites played an important role in the foundation, contestation, and ultimate securement of the democracy that was established in Erythrai in the wake of Alexander's conquest of western Asia Minor.

This chapter explores the dominant status of Hemingway's text for writing in English about events in postwar Asia Minor. It argues that the Smyrna Disaster is the first event in modern Greek history after the Greek War of Independence to gain a secure place in English literature and language thanks to Hemingway; the text that canonized it was Hemingway's “On the Quai at Smyrna”. In English, the phrase the Smyrna Disaster referred not simply to a historical event but also to a style of writing and a particular postwar perspective.

Many examples exist that reveal structures common to all sanctuaries in Hellenistic and Roman Asia Minor and illustrate that a religious sphere can be distinguished within any context of life in ancient Anatolia. This chapter examines how unusual cults, for example the so-called temple-states in central Anatolia, fit into the patterns observed; whether the economy of cults were of the same quality; how processes of Hellenisation and urbanisation affected the role of cults; how and by whom the economy of the sacred was maintained or changed; and whether Asia Minor was an area distinct from other areas, possibly because of its compartmented religious life, because of an exceptional history, or because of its theocratic origins. The chapter also explores sacred finances, sacred land, and religious administration.

This chapter explores the nature of the acquisition of the overseas territories in Asia Minor by Ptolemy II Philadelphus. It takes as its focus one inscription (SEG 28.1224), which apparently contains a record of a diplomatic exchange between the king and the city of Telmessos in Lycia. It argues that inscription dates to the moment of Ptolemaic acquisition and provides evidence for the willing subordination (Deditio) of the city to Ptolemaic power by its citizens in order to escape worse conditions under their existing suzerain, Lysimachus, and his family. This model of bloodless transferral of power, it is suggested, may help to explain the lack of any evidence for a military conquest of the region by Ptolemaic forces in the 280s.

Chapter 2 shows that Philip’s Macedonian peace served as a framework for his own military alliance, the League of Corinth. Philip reorganized all the other Greek alliances in the name of freedom, posing as the protector of freedom for individual cities in Greece. Having inherited this system, Alexander (the Great) started a new trend, using “freedom” and “autonomy” to define the status of individual Greek cities in return for their loyalty to him. This chapter also examines the development of particular aspects of the status of Greeks cities during Alexander’s reign, which would survive into the Hellenistic and Roman periods. My examination shows that neither the obligation of the city to pay tribute (with or without other contributions) nor its obligation to accept a garrison was relevant to its status as a “free” and “autonomous” city.

The verse epitaph of the second-century bishop Abercius of Hierapolis, ‘the queen of Christian inscriptions’, is one of the best known and most thoroughly studied of all early Christian texts. Less well-known is the extraordinary Life of St Abercius, a fictionalised hagiography composed by an anonymous native of Hierapolis in the late fourth century ad. The Life has generally been dismissed as an extended elaboration of the epitaph of Abercius, of little or no historical value in its own right. This chapter aims to rehabilitate the Life as a uniquely valuable document of the processes by which the Christians of Late Antique Asia Minor re-fashioned their (pagan) Roman past in their own image, through creative readings of those second-century epigraphical monuments — including, but not restricted to, the Abercius epitaph — which survived in the fourth-century urban landscape.

This chapter evaluates two Seleukid usurpers in their attempts to make themselves king, and to maintain the kingship within a period of twenty-five years in the same geographic region: Asia Minor. A careful analysis of the available sources, and a careful reconstruction of usurpers’ historical narrative reveals that both usurpers used different strategies to maintain their positions: one stressed his blood relationship with previous kings, while a second placed a heavy stress on his individual achievements. Both usurpers are also characterized by creating a distinct differentiation in their royal portrait to that of the reigning king, and it is argued that this was a conscious choice. Overall this chapter sets out the parameters for kingship in the Seleukid empire in the third century: family relationships and individual success, and it argues that already at this point, individuals outside the royal family could make royal offers and be accepted as kings.

This chapter describes Byzantine's drastically shrunken territory as well as other changes one hundred years after the defeat of the imperial fleet by the Arabs at Phoinix. Not only had the eastern provinces of Syria, Palestine and Egypt been lost but in 697 the Arabs had overrun the exarchate of Carthage, putting an end to Byzantine rule that had lasted since Belisarius's reconquest in 534. The largest remaining block of Byzantine territory was in Asia Minor, stretching from the Bosporus to the Taurus mountains. New and powerful enemies had also replaced the old ones. The Sassanid Persians were gone, being even less successful than the Byzantines in stemming the Arab advance. In the Balkans, the power of the Avars had waned after their failure to take Constantinople in 626 and they had lost their hegemony over the Slavs. Their place as the dominant power in the Danube basin had been taken by another migrant Turkic tribe, the Bulgars.

The reader is taken on a tour of Asia Minor and the western territories of the east Roman empire, beginning and ending in Constantinople, and is introduced to a varied set of local historical sources. They include two celebratory sermons delivered by a high‐ranking official of the patriarchate (Theodore Syncellus) after the waning of the Avar threat to Constantinople, three historical texts with a Constantinopolitan focus, a saint's life full of information about Galatia and Bithynia (the Life of Theodore of Sykeon), a collection of miracles stories set in Thessalonica, and a Christian–Jewish disputation set in Carthage. The most interesting of these local sources are records of the show‐trials of Pope Martin and Maximus Confessor in the 650s and of subsequent interviews with Maximus.

Why Barnabas was sent to Antioch, and why he recruited Paul. The problems of table-fellowship for Jewish and Gentile believers in Antioch. The Roman road system in Asia Minor as arteries through which the gospel flowed in a mission shared by Paul and Barnabas. Travel conditions were harsh and unforgiving, and gave rise to a key element in Paul’s theology (‘Sin’).

This chapter deals with the knowledge provincials had, and the use they made, of Roman criminal procedure in the provinces of Asia Minor during the imperial period. This will be examined through two main categories of evidence: (1) petitions to emperors complaining about Roman soldiers or functionaries’ abuses against local population, (2) funerary inscriptions including provisions claiming that fines should be paid to the imperial treasury in case of desecration. This evidence supports the view that (unlike part of scholarship has been assuming for a long time) Roman criminal procedure still included accusatorial features under the Principate and that a formal accusation was needed for a proper criminal investigation to be launched. It is argued that provincials were deeply aware of what Roman criminal law was and could explicitly refer to some specific provisions in order to defend their own interests and even to challenge decisions made by the Roman administration.