Asia minor4/6/2023 ![]() ![]() Local languages might cease to be inscribed, but casual references show that some at least were spoken until well into the Roman imperial period. The hegemonic powers, whether Greek king or Roman emperor, imposed fundamental changes on Asia in its culture and its physiognomy.ĤBut these changes, even when they amounted to Hellenization or Romanization, did not obliterate the local cultures that had thrived before. Wealthy individuals added priest of the imperial cult, ambassador to the emperor, senator, and consul to their aspirations. The cities of Asia vied for the title of neokoros (“temple-warden”) and for a bevy of honorary titles bestowed by the emperor at the expense of their neighbors. The Ionians particularly embraced the cult of the emperor. The Romans brought not only their military might, whose traces can be read in the roads that interlaced the peninsula, but also new sets of political institutions and new aspirations. And Greek political, social, and religious institutions took root and flourished at the same times as the kings, successors to Alexander, exerted greater authority. Greek names supplanted some local ones for towns, physical features, and people. Greek became the lingua franca for public business, displacing the many local languages that had vied with it as late as the third century BC for the right to be inscribed on stone in official documents. Persian satrapal boundaries continue to be reflected in political – and sometimes cultural – subdivisions. Well into the Roman imperial period persons with Persian names appear in the record, and fire-temples are known from many sites. First, its various conquerors left their mark. The second century BC saw the incursions of the Romans, the start of a process that ultimately brought most of Anatolia under their control.ģThe unification of political authority, however, did not spell the end to the great cultural diversity of Asia Minor. The campaigns of Alexander the Great brought down the great Persian Empire, and opened Asia Minor up to Greek penetration the phenomenon of Hellenization (which began in Persian territory long before Alexander’s conquests) has been a continuing subject of research and discussion. Athenian and other mainland Greeks’clashes with the Persian Empire in Asia Minor in the fifth and fourth centuries BC were mere border skirmishes. The Persians succeeded in conquering most of the peninsula and imposed their own style of administrative unity on its peoples. The Hittites lie outside of our period, but the achievements of the Persians in the sixth century BC echoed throughout the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Yet outside political suzerains often aimed at, and sometimes achieved, bringing great swaths of Asia Minor under their control. Greek settlement came much later to the interior, in the aftermath of Alexander the Great and particularly with the Roman conquest.ĢIt occasions no surprise, given the topography, that Asia Minor never achieved unity in any political or cultural sense. The interior presented a very different face: high plateaux, hot in summer and freezing in winter, with salt lakes and deserts, occupied by herders and yet the home to great pre-Hellenic civilizations like the Hittites and the Phrygians. On the west coast the great river valleys, including the Kaikos, Hermos, and Maiandros, provided access to the interior this was more difficult on the south and north coasts, where mountains sometimes reached to the sea, and communication by any means but water was hard and time-consuming. The west and south coasts, which enjoyed a Mediterranean climate of hot dry summers and wet winters that could support the cultivation of grains, vines, and olives (the so-called “Mediterranean triad”), attracted Greek settlement from the second millennium BC eventually, a string of colonies marched along the coast from Byzantion to Tarsos, interacting with the local populations of Karians, Lykians, and others who were already there, occupying often practically adjacent sites. 1Ancient Asia Minor, which was more or less coterminous with modern Turkey, was a land of enormous topographical and cultural diversity. ![]()
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