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Archive for the Category »Anatolian Civilizations «
Urartu. To the north-east, in the region of the high mountains that surround Lake Van, the Kingdom of Urartu (the Ararat of Genesis), mentioned in cuneiform tablets dating from the first half of the 13th century B.C., took advantage of the decline of the Assyrian Empire at the end of the 9th and during the 8th century to extend its conquests as far as Aleppo in Syria. In 585 it fell into the hands of the Median king Cyaxares. The bronze cauldrons from Urartu, with handles made of male or female sirens’ heads and protomes of griffins and bulls, were exported into neighbouring Phrygia, Greece, Etruria, and even Gaul.
Phrygia. The Mushki in the heart of Anatolia created principalities which entered into federation with the Kingdom of Phrygia: its capital was at Gordion, named after its first king, Gordias (8th century B.C.), whose son, the Mita of the Assyrian annals, was the famous Midas, the husband of a Greek princess called Demodice or Hermodice’, the daughter of a Greek king of Kyme called Agamemnon. The Phrygians were well-known as stock breeders and so adept in the art of weaving that its invention has been ascribed to them. They also made fine bronze vases and painted pottery decorated with ibexes, lions, horses, and birds which were separated by bands with geometrical designs. The cult of their goddess of fertility, Cybele, characterized by frenzied orgiastic rites accompanied by music, spread through the Graeco Roman world where it satisfied a need for excitement which the traditional religion did not always meet. The strange Phrygian rock sanctuaries often mistaken for tombs illustrate the complexity of the
civilizations of Asia Minor by the manner in which the niched façades increasingly embody local features such as motifs taken from weaving and ornaments borrowed from Greece. The wild beasts guarding the goddess belong to the traditional patrimony of Anatolia. Thrones cut into the mountains and used for statues of the goddess or her priestesses recall to this day the ancient religious cults, as do the funerary tumuli that abound in the regions of Gordion and Ankara. In the first half of the 8th century B.C., the Phrygians were invaded by the Cimmerians who set out from the Caucasus and pushed as far as the shores of the Aegean.
Lydia. The Lydians, with their capital at Sardis, exercised their power west of Phrygia. They owed their proverbial wealth still symbolized by the name of their king Croesus to the gold-bearing sands of the Pactolus and the mines of Mounts Tmolus and Sipylus. They were the first to mint a regular coinage, first of electrum, then of gold. Their country was first known as Maeonia (this is the name by which it is referred to in the Iliad). Under the dynasty of the Mermnades, founded at the beginning of the 7th century B.C. by Gyges, the murderer of the famous king Candaules, the Lydians subjected the Greek towns in the west. Gyges attacked Smyrna and Miletus and captured Colophon. His son Ardys conquered Priene. Herodotus has described the military progress of the armies of King Alyattes, the father of Croesus, which at the end of the 7th century went into battle to the sound of pipes, harps, and flutes. After a long siege they entered Smyrna which they destroyed. To the east, the kingdom of the Lydians had
expanded at the expense of Phrygia as far as the Halys which separated it from the states of the Median Cyaxares whose son Astyages had married the daughter of Alyattes. Croesus himself subjugated the cities of Asia Minor and compelled them to pay tribute to him, but kept no garrisons in them. The Lydians favoured the establishment of tyrants at Ephesus and Miletus (the word tyrant is not derived from the Greek but probably was a Lydian word). Croesus, the master of the west coast, whose exploits foreshadowed those of Darius and Xerxes, even contemplated the conquest of the Aegean islands, but abandoned this plan because of the war he was waging against Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire a war in which he was defeated. Sardis might be compared with Alexandria in its wealth, the pleasures it offered, and the cosmopolitanism of its population. The poet Alcman was born in the Greek colony of Sardis.
Caria. The Carians, south-east of the Menderes, traditionally thought to have been driven from the Aegean islands by the lonians and Dorians, occupied a mountainous country with few fertile plains apart from those the Greeks were holding on the coast. They were not prosperous like the neighbouring Lydians. Labranda a prehellenic name like that of many towns in Caria was the centre of a flourishing cult of Zeus with the two-headed axe (labrys).
Lycia. East of Caria, on the most westerly of the two promontories of the south coast of Anatolia, between Anticragus and Mount Solyma, the Lycians produced a rather original civilization. Although the Iliad cites them as allies of the Trojans under the command of Sarpedon and Glaucus, there is no archaeological evidence of their existence before the end of the 8th century B.C. Like the Phrygians, the Lydians, and the Carians, they borrowed most of the symbols of their alphabet from the Greeks. According to Herodotus, the Lycians had some matriarchal institutions such as using a “matronym” instead of a patronym and establishing a genealogy on the maternal side.
Greeks and Persians
In the middle of the 6th century B.C., round 547-546, Croesus sought to halt the expansion of the young Achaemenid empire founded by Cyrus. This venture went badly for him, In five or six years, the Persian armies led by Cyrus himself or, in his absence, by the generals Mazaces and Harpagus conquered Anatolia. It is said that Groesus was captured and condemned to die at the stake, but was reprieved at the last minute by his merciful conqueror. A certain number of Greeks then left Anatolia. The Phocaeans emigrated en masse with their wives and children to Corsica and to Gtreare Greece. The famous Pythagoras of Samos left for Crotona. But at the beginning the Achaemenid rule weighed no more heavily on the Greek cities than that of the Mermnades. They retained their autonomy, and Miletus according to Herodotus—attained “the peak of its prosperity”. For strategic and economic reasons the Persians built roads, the most important of which was the Royal Road dotted with stopping plasce and fine hostelries
(to quote Herodotus), linking Susa with Sardis, the residenceoj the governor, and from there continuing to the sea at Ephesus which was a very busy port. Commercial and intellectual relations with Greece seem to have increased, especially with the Athens of Peisistratus which liked to think of itself as the ”metropolis of the Ionians”. Attic pottery with black figures was imported and imitated in Asia Minor. At this period Ionic influence in the Greek world was at its height, as is shown by the kores of Athens and the metopes in the temples of the Heraion at the mouth of the Sele in Campania. The sanctuary of Apollo at Amyclae near Sparta was decorated with friezes by the sculptor Bathycles of Magnesia. To execute the decoration on the palaces he was building at Susa, Darius sent for sculptors from Ionia and Sardis, whence he also fetched cabinet-makers. The Great Kings with whom Greeks such as Hippias took refuge after being driven from Athens as did other Greek tyrants, including Themistocles at a much
later date often sent to Greece for statues, painted gold vases, and goldsmith’s work, and sometimes for the artists themselves.
In Lycia perhaps under the influence of Assyrian obelisks triumphal funerary pillars made their appearance; these were embellished by Ionian sculptors with scenes illustrating the hunting and military exploits of the ruling families, the great ceremonial occasions of their reigns, and their funerals.
Darius reorganized his empire, dividing it into twenty satrapies, four of which covered Anatolia. The government of secondary satrapies was entrusted to local dignitaries.
In 499 B.C., the cities of Ionia and Aeolis, followed by the Carians, revolted against Darius; perhaps they were worried Carians, revolted against Darius; perhaps they were worried by the danger presented to their trade by Persian expansion in Egypt and on the shores of the Black Sea, as well as resenting a better-organized government that exacted the payment of an annual tribute. An army left Ephesus and burnt down Sardis. Miletus was recaptured by the Persians in 494 and completely destroyed, while most of the population were massacred. Most of the survivors were resettled at the mouth of the Tigris, though some succeeded in reaching Sicily together with the Samians.
Athens and Eretria sent help to the Ionians, and this sparked off the Median wars in which the armies of Darius were defeated at Marathon (490) and those of his successor Xerxes at Salamis (480), Plataea, and Mycale (479) where the Ionians, compelled to fight with the Persians, deserted and turned against them.
The Greek cities of Ionia, Caria, and Lycia, conquered by Cimon, were incorporated in the “League of Delos” whose aim was to defend them against the Persians and to which they had to pay a tribute and this they did more or less regularly. In 469 Cimon won a double land and naval victory over the Persians at the mouth of the Eurymedon in Pamphylia and this practically marked the end of the Median wars. Although the Persians had lost their political hold over the west and south coasts of Anatolia, they nevertheless still controlled the interior of the country.
The Milesians reoccupied the ruins of their liberated town and began to rebuild it on a chequerboard plan of the type known as “Ionian” in ancient times and linked with the name of the architect Hippodamus of Miletus, who planned the new Piraeus. The reconstruction of their town kept the Milesians busy for centuries, until the Hellenistic period.
The Greek cities of Asia Minor were compelled to give way before the advance of the commercial and political imperialism of the Athenians, and their earlier prosperity did not return in the 5th century. Some of their citizens e.g. the philosopher Anaxagoras of Clazomenae and the lovely Aspasia of Miletus preferred to live in the Athens of Pericles, while the historian Herodotus left his native Halicarnassus and moved to Thurii, a colony founded by the Athenians.
It was a period of great architectural enterprise. The sculptors’ workshops remained fairly busy, but they produced nothing really original. Masters like Pythagoras of Samos (the namesake of the philosopher) and Bion of Miletus preferred to exile themselves in the west. When the Ephesians wanted to decorate their sanctuary of Artemis with statues of wounded Amazons, they called on the famous sculptors of mainland Greece, Polyclitus, Phidias, and Cresilas. In Lycia, however, the art of sculpted sarcophagi was making great strides that promised well for the future.
Disappointed in their hopes, the Greek cities took advantage of the Peloponnesian War to free themselves from Athenian rule. Two Athenians sent to Lycia and Caria at the head of troops to collect the contribution due to the League of Delos were killed. Chios, Miletus, Clazomenae, Ephesus and Erythrae under the influence of the exiled Alcibiades espoused the cause of Sparta which concluded an alliance against Athens with the GreatKing through the intermediary of the satrap Tissa-phernes. Thus the west and south of Asia Minor were plunged into war. The situation was often confused and this provided fertile ground for such adventurers as Amorges, the bastard of a former satrap who rebelled against Darius II with the help of the Athenians. Greek and especially Peloponnesian mercenaries enlisted in one camp or the other, and ten thousand of them joined the service of the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger who disputed the throne with his brother Artaxerxes II on the death of their father Darius II; Xenophon’s Anabasis has preserved a record of these events.
After the defeat of Athens, Sparta could not bring itself to restore the Greek cities of Asia Minor to the Persians against whom the Spartan King Agesilaits waged a war that drained the resources of the city. Thus, after many vicissitudes, in 386 B.C. the Spartan admiral Antalcidas concluded a peace treaty with Artaxerxes II by which the Greek cities of Asia Minor were restored to the Great King.
This led to a veritable renaissance, since Persian rule proved more profitable than liberty under Athenian supervision.
New towns were built at Priene and Cnidus, and the recon struction of Miletus went ahead. Smyrna and Colophon expanded. At Ephesus the Temple of Artemis, burnt by Herostratus in 356 was rebuilt, and the gigantic Temple of Artemis Cybele at Sardis was partly modelled on it. At Halicarnassus a satrap of Carian origin, Mausolus, and his sister wife Artemis had a monumental tomb built by the architect sculptors Pytheus and Satyrus of Paros; the name “Mausoleum” has been used ever since to designate a sumptuous tomb. To decorate it with sculptures they called in Scopas of Paros, Leochares of Athens and Timotheus from the region of Epidaurus who worked with a native Carian artist, Bryaxis; the latter was also invited to work for Egypt and Attica. Having no great masters, the Greeks of Asia Minor commissioned Praxiteles to carve the Aphrodite of Cnidus and the sculptures for the altar of the Artemision at Ephesus. However, the Greek artists of Asia Minor, developing a local tradition, excelled in the manufacture of fine sarcophagi which were exported as far afield as Sidon in Phoenicia (for example, the “Lycian” sarcophagi of the satrap and the weeping women in the Archaeological Museum at Istanbul).
The gradual Hellenization of Anatolia, dazzled by the splendour of Greek and especially Attic civilization, continued. Was there not a4th century Lycian prince called Pericles? The slabs in the Museum at Vienna from the heroum of Trysa, now Golbasi, dating from the end of the 5th century, are an example of the provincial adaptation of the Attic and Ionic style. The funerary monument of the Nereides from Xanthus, dating from ca. 400 B.C., is both architecturally and in the use of decorative figures sculpted in the round or in relief one of the masterpieces of Greek Ionic art (British Museum). Several rock tombs in Lycia and Caria have the Ionic and even Doric facades of Greek temples. Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus, the Persian satraps, minted coins with their effigies based on models by Greek artists. Excavations undertaken by Ekrem Akurgal, the Turkish archaeologist, at Dascyleion on the site of the palace of the satrap Pharnabazus mentioned by Xenophon in the Hellenica have yielded besides indisputably
Achaemenid objects the ruins of an Ionic-type building and sculptures in a Greek style, some of which treat subjects dear to the Persians, such as processions and in a relief found in the area hunting scenes.
Achaemenid art also exerted an influence in Anatolia. Besides the gold objects of Persian manufacture found in tombs (at Sardis and at Magnesia, now Manisa), mention should be made of the fire altar at Nunyan near Kayseri in Cappadocia. A carved sphinx from Labranda, used as the capital of an anta, seems to have been a Hellenized adaptation of a prototype comparable to that in the Palace of Darius at Persepolis. In Caria, too, the storeyed buildings of Halicarnassus, of Alinda (Alexandria of Latmos), and of the sanctuaries of Artemis at Amyzon and of Zeus at Labranda, are influenced by the palace at Persepolis and foreshadow Pergamum. The Palace of Mausolus had enamelled brick walls in the Achaemenid manner.
The Hellenistic Period
Starting from Macedonia, Alexander the Great naturally began his exploits with the conquest of Anatolia which he integrated into the Hellenistic world. In the spring of 334 B.C. he crossed the Dardanelles at the head of an army of 40 000 men. From the shoresfof the Granicus (in Troad, now Cancayi) to the plain of Issus in Cilicia, taking in Gordion where he cut the famous knot, his advance was marked by a series of victories which opened the way to Syria and Egypt. Pushing right into the heart of Persia, he defeated Darius III Codomanus, the last of the Achaemenids. At the conclusion of the struggle between Alexander’s generals for the remnants of his empire after his death in 323 B.C., King Lysimachus of Thrace obtained the western and central regions of Anatolia. But Philetaerus, the man whom he had trusted to guard them, appropriated them with the help of the Seleucids of Syria and made them the core of what was to become the Kingdom of Attalus of Pergamum. To the south, Lycia and Pamphylia were joined to the Egypt of the Ptolemies which they supplied with the timber needed for building its fleet. The east of Anatolia, from the Caspian Sea, and the south-east became part of the Seleucid kingdom that had its capital at Antioch.
In the north of Asia Minor and on the high plateaux of the centre independent states grew up. To the north-west, the Kingdom of Bithynia which was settled by a people of Thracian origin, had as its main cities Nicaea, Nicomedia and Prusa. Its kings were called Nicomedes or Prusias. The kingdom of the Pontus to the east including Amastris, Sinop, Amisus, and Trebizond on the coast was ruled by an Iranian dynasty whose princes were called Mithridates or Pharnaces. To secure their position these two kingdoms called for help on the warlike Gallic bands that had come down into the Balkans; these were the Galatians who settled farther south in what was formerly Phrygia and whose advance was halted by the Attalids of Pergamum. The Celtic language survived among them until the time of St Jerome (second half of the 4th century A.D., beginning of the 5th). The worship of Cybele continued to thrive there, and it was from Pessinus in the west of Galatia that the Romans in 205 B.C. brought the “black stone”, the symbol of the goddess, in order to calm the anxieties caused by the advance of the Carthaginian armies during the Second Punic War and to place Scipio’s expedition to Africa under favourable auspices. Cappadocia, bordering on Galatia in the south east, was ruled by the Iranian dynasty of the Ariarathes but was more or less under the dominion of the Seleucids.
Still farther south-east, between Cilicia and the Euphrates, Commagene had been under Seleucid rule, but was turned into an independent kingdom in 162 B.C. by its governor, Ptolemy, who rebelled against his masters. Its capital was Samosata.
Osroene, beyond the Euphrates, with its capital at Osroe (rechristened Edessa by the Macedonians, now Urfa) had freed itself earlier from the Seleucids (ca. 132 B.C.).
With some original variations, Hellenistic Anatolia had the characteristic features of a civilization characterized by the establishment of monarchical regimes in subject lands and by growing commercial relations in an expanding world. Numerous towns were founded, reorganized, or renamed, e.g. Pergamum, Alexandria in the Troad, Attaleia, various Antiochs, Arsinoes, Apameas, and Laodiceas. Large, sumptuous even outsize temples were built in the Ionic tradition (Temple of Artemis Leucophryene at Magnesia, the Didymaion of Miletus). Sculptors’ workshops were busy at Pergamum, Priene, and Smyrna and in Bithynia, working to satisfy the demand for luxurious, realistic, and impressive objects.
The Roman Period
When the Romans set out to conquer the Mediterranean world they were called to the Aegean Orient by the Aeolians of Greece and the people of Pergamum and Rhodes to oppose the Macedonians and the Seleucids. The legend of the Trojan origins of Aeneas gave a sentimental support to this policy of expansion. In 190 B.C., at Magnesia on Sipylus, their armies under the command of the Scipio brothers (one of whom was Scipio Africanus, the conqueror of Carthage) defeated those of king Antiochus III of Syria with whom Hannibal had taken refuge. By the treaty of Apamea the Romans took from the Seleucids their possessions in Asia Minor which they gave to the Attalids and the Rhodians. They made Armenia until then a dependency of the sovereigns of Syria an independent kingdom.
The Romans became masters of western Anatolia when Attalus III, the last king of Pergamum, died without an heir in 133 B.C. and bequeathed to them his kingdom which they transformed into the province of Asia. But for over two years they had to deal with the revolt of Aristonicus, a natural son of Eumenes II, who had collected an army of malcontents, slaves, and down-and-buts. In 88 B.C. they met with a much more serious rebellion, both national and social in character, led by the last King of Pontus, Mithridates VI Eupator (ca. 132-63 B.C.), a Hellenized Iranian in whom complex traditions were combined. Mithridates had an ally in Tigranes II the Great, the King of Armenia. Everywhere the rebellion met with the sympathy of the populations whom the Romans had alienated by the taxes they exacted, and it spread to Delos and to Greece. It was repressed with some periods of intermission in turn by Sulla, Lucullus and Pompey who defeated Mithridates in 66 and reorganized Anatolia. To the provinces of Asia and
Cilicia (that haunt of pirates, which had become Roman in 101 B.C.) they added that of Bithynia which had been bequeathed to the Romans in 74 B.C. by its last king Nicomedes III and to which they joined the western part of the Kingdom of Mithri dates.
To the east, from the Black Sea to the Euphrates, the Romans faced the growing danger of the Parthian Empire founded ca. 250 B.C. by the Arsacids in Iran and Mesopotamia. There Pompey built up buffer kingdoms which he made clients of Rome: Paphlagonia, Galatia, Cappadocia, and Commagene. The first two were turned into Roman provinces under Augustus, the others under Tiberius and Vespasian. In the 1st century B.C., a Graeco-Iranian civilization flourished in Commagene: its most imposing monuments are the colossal statues at Nimrud Dag and the reliefs of the monumental tomb of Antiochus I (69-34 B.C.), a sovereign who was Greek in name and education and who boasted that he was descended from the Achaemenids. On the other side of the Euphrates, Osroene under the dynasty of the Abgars, maintained a controlled autonomy while to the north-east the kingdom of Armenia, which had submitted to the Romans, continued to lead a difficult existence under the Arsacids of Parthian origin. The territory of the Lycian League
which had remained independant, was united with Pamphylia into a single province under the Emperor Claudius (41-54 A.D.).
Rome had understood that the civilization of its Empire rested on two fundamentals: to the east, Hellenism, to the west Latinity. In Anatolia, it favoured the Hellenes, not without first meeting with their reserve and even hostility, as we can see from some speeches of Dio Chrystostom’s (Dio of Prusa). This made possible the spread of Graeco-Roman civilization into the interior of the country-the Temple of Rome and Augustus at Ankara and the Baths of Hierapolis in Phrygia are splendid examples of this. Rome also realized how much Asia Minor had to offer that would satisfy the Roman desire for luxury: great or sumptuous works of art, fabrics, wines, translucent marbles, slabs of alabaster, mica, precious stones, silver, and lead, not to mention timber for ships.
In 20 B.C. Augustus visited Anatolia, and as a sign of the importance he attached to it, he entrusted its government for a time to his closest collaborator, his son-in-law Agrippa. In his reign the construction of the highways leading from Ephesus began; the work was continued by his successors. These roads were kept in excellent repair and became important trade routes.
Anatolia shared in the general prosperity of the Roman Empire under the dynasty of the Antonines who from Trajan (97-117) and Hadrian (117-138) to Antoninus Pius (138-161) and Marcus Aurelius (161-180) were excellent administrators; It was the busiest and most flourishing province of the Empire.
Many religious and secular buildings have survived to testify to the wealth of the large cities: Ephesus, Pergamum, Miletus, Aphrodisias of Caria, Trales, Patara (at the mouth of the Xanthus), Myra, Termessus, Sagalassus, Attaleia (Antalya), Perge, Aspendus, Side, Aezani, Hierapolis of Phrygia, Ancyra (Ankara). There are more or less well-preserved ruins of the types of building that constitued the greatness of Roman cities and met the needs of social life: temples, theatres, odeons, amphitheatres, stadiums, gymnasia, baths, nymphaea, shops, porticos along the principal thoroughfares, aqueducts, etc. The cupolas that surmounted some of the baths and the mausoleums on a square ground-plan foreshadow those of the Byzantine churches.
Sculpture experienced a renaissance. The workshops of Aphrodisias of Caria, where excellent local marble was cut, remained busy from the time of Augustus to the 5th century A.D., and their artists were so renowned that they worked not only for their own town and other cities in Anatolia and Greece, but also for Rome, southern Italy, and Sicily. The reliefs on a monument to Marcus Aurelius discovered in the Library at Ephesus (now in the Museum at Vienna) demonstrate the survival of the style of Pergamum. Architectonic decorative sculpture developed considerably and showed a growing preference for a kind of carving tool that cut more deeply into the marble by a technique that was to be perfected in paleo Christian art. A great number of sarcophagi were produced. One of the most original types is the so called Sidamara sarcophagus named after the Lycaonian town where the oldest examples were found. The figures on this kind of sarcophagus were shown isolated between columns whose epistyles were deeply incised.
The centres for their manufactures were Ephesus and Smyrna. This style survived until the 5th century in paleo Christian art. In Pamphylia the carved sarcophagi had long sides decorated by garlands carried by cherubs or figures of Victory. The art of mosaic paving was widely practised, and a number of examples have still to be made public.
In the realm of Greek letters, the part played by Anatolia in the intellectual renaissance of the Roman Imperial era is illustrated by such men as Dio of Prusa, Arrian (a native of Nicomedia and governor of Cappadocia under Hadrian), Lucian of Samosata (whose mother tongue was Syriac but who perfected his Greek in the schools of Ionia), Aelius Aristeides, etc.
There were institutions of higher education, notably at Pergamum, Smyrna and Ephesus. At Miletus mathematical research was undertaken in the tradition of Euclid, and Isidorus of Miletus, one of the architects of Saint Sophia’s, was one of the last teachers at the school.
In medicine, original contributions were made by Anatolian scientists, such as Athenaeus of Attaleia, Soranus of Ephesus (undoubtedly the greatest gynaecologist of the ancient world), Aretaeus of Cappadocia and most famous of all Galen of Pergamum.
The deep hereditary religious sense of the Anatolian peoples together with their shrewd political sense made the country a fertile soil for the worship of the emperors. The first Temples of Rome and Augustus were built at Pergamum and Nicomedia, during the emperor’s lifetime.
On the other hand, the Christian gospel from Jerusalem and Antioch very quickly met with success in Asia Minor. In 45 A.D. Barnabas and Paul (born at Tarsus) sailed from Seleucia, the port of Antioch, to Perge and Attaleia of Pamphylia, and from there they went on to Antioch of Pisidia and to Lycaonia. In the course of his subsequent missions Paul moved slowly west and evangelized Galatia, North Phrygia,Mysia, and Ephesus, which he reached in 54 A.D. The Apostle Philip continued Paul’s work in Phrygia where he died and was buried, together with his daughters, at Hierapolis. St John spread the Gospel in the west of Phrygia and in the towns of the west coast, notably at Ephesus. Bithynia, Cappadocia and Galatia were evangelized by Peter. There is a legend about a correspondence between King Abgar of Osroene, who is said to have been converted, and Christ. The Christians were numerous in Asia Minor and showed an intense vitality and an unshakable faith that sustained them through persecution and martyrdom. At
the end of the 2nd century Proclus, a Phrygian, reproached the Roman Christians with being too lukewarm. Anatolian communities often accepted the Judaeo Christian doctrines and even gnosticism. They also often shared the hopes of the Millenarians for an early Second Coming of Christ who it was believed would then reign on earth for six centuries. This belief found warm support in Phrygia, where it had been propounded as early as the beginning of the 2nd century by Bishop Pappias of Hierapolis, and was elaborated in the 170’s by Montanus into a doctrine that spread throughout Anatolia and even beyond the Roman world.
Ancient Anatolian tradition persisted in the important role played in certain churches by women who taught, exorcised, baptized, and laid hands on the sick.
Christianity made swift progress in Anatolia, and it is estimated that the vast majority of the population was Christian by the end of the 3rd century.
Although Anatolia was less deeply touched than the other provinces by the serious economic, political, and military crisis through which the Empire passed in the 3rd century between the assassination of Alexander Severus by his soldiers in 235 and the reforms of Diocletian in 285, it nevertheless felt its effects. For the first time since the incursion of the Parthian king Orodes in 40 B.C., it was invaded on several sides; in the west, in 252-268, by the Goths who had settled in Thrace after crossing the Danube; in the north, by the Borani, neighbours of the Goths, and the Heruli who came down as far as Cilicia; to the east by the Persians under the Sassanid Shapur 1 (241-272) and Queen Zenobia’s Palmyrenes.
The requisitions of the Roman armies placed a heavy burden on the inhabitants. There was a revival of brigandage in the Taurus region among the Isaurians who ravaged Lycia and Pamphylia. After suppressing them, the Emperor Probus (276-282) settled veterans of the Roman army in the areas. The roads suffered increasing neglect and the only ones that were repaired were those of military (e.g. the road across Phrygia to Cilicia) or commercial (the road from Smyrna to Sardis) importance.
The severe reforms of Diocletian, the founder of the Tetrar-chy, retrieved the situation by creating institutions for an authoritarian and hierarchical empire governed by two emperors, aided by two Caesars, one dealing with the east, the other with the west. The preponderance of the eastern regions is illustrated by the fact that Diocletian took over their government himself, leaving the west to Maximian, and fixed his capital at Nicomedia in Bithynia. In his reign, as a result of the establishment of an authoritarian regime, the persecution of the Christians led by his Caesar Galerius was carried out in a systematic and vigourous manner, especially in the east. It was intensified when Galerius succeeded Diocletian in 305. But Galerius realized that this policy was harmful and undermined the cohesion of the Empire and, by the edict of Nicomedia of 30 April 311, granted the Christians freedom of worship.
