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    The Cities of Pamphylia
    The Cities of Pamphylia
    The Cities of Pamphylia
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    The Cities of Pamphylia

    By John D. Grainger

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    Pamphylia, in modern Turkey, was a Greek country from the early Iron Age until the Middle Ages. In that land there were nine cities which can be described more or less as Greek, and this book is an investigation of their history. This was a land at the margins of other great empires - Hellenistic, Roman, Arab and Byzantine - and is still off the beaten track, though Aspendos, Perge and Phaselis are all visited for their archaeology. Only one ancient source, Strabo, discusses the area at any length, and John Grainger therefore has to bring together a wide variety of exiguous and fragmentary sources to tell the cities' story. His focus is not only regional - he is interested in the impact of outside forces on a particular civic culture. He considers the processes of city foundation, settlement, urbanisation and evolution, and the cities' mutual relations. Coastal piracy drew Pamphylia into the Roman empire, and finally, in the seventh century AD, the Arabs destroyed the cities in their wars with the Byzantine empire.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOxbow Books
    Release dateJul 30, 2009
    ISBN9781782972952
    The Cities of Pamphylia
    Author

    John D. Grainger

    John D. Grainger is a former teacher turned professional historian. He has over thirty books to his name, divided between classical history and modern British political and military history. His previous books for Pen & Sword are Hellenistic and Roman Naval Wars; Wars of the Maccabees; Traditional Enemies: Britain’s War with Vichy France 1940-42; Roman Conquests: Egypt and Judaea; Rome, Parthia and India: The Violent Emergence of a New World Order: 150-140 BC; a three-volume history of the Seleukid Empire and British Campaigns in the South Atlantic 1805-1807.

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      Book preview

      The Cities of Pamphylia - John D. Grainger

      Other Books by John D. Grainger:

      Ancient History:

      The Ancient Sea (forthcoming, Hambledon Continuum)

      Alexander the Great Failure (Hambledon Continuum, 2008)

      The Cities of Seleukid Syria (Oxford 1990)

      A Seleukid Prosopography and Gazetteer (Brill, 1997)

      Seleukos Nikator (Routledge, 1991)

      Hellenistic Phoenicia (Oxford 1991)

      The League of the Aitolians (Brill, 2000)

      The Roman War of Antiochos the Great (Brill, 2002)

      Nerva and the Imperial Succession Crisis, AD 96–99 (Routledge, 2002, paperback 2004)

      Modern History:

      Cromewll Against the Scots (Tuckwell, 1997)

      The Battle of Yorktown 1781: a Reassessment (Boydell, 2005)

      The Amiens Truce, Britain and Bonaparte 1801–1803 (Boydell, 2004)

      The Royal Navy in the River Plate (Navy Records Society, 1996)

      The First Pacific War, Britain and Russia 1854–1856 (Boydell, 2008)

      The Maritime Blocade of Germany in the Great War (Navy Records Society, 2004)

      The Battle for Palestine, 1917 (Boydell)

      Published by

      Oxbow Books, Oxford, UK

      © Oxbow Books and the individual author, 2009

      ISBN 978-1-84217-334-3

      EPUB ISBN: 978-1-78297-295-2

      PRC ISBN: 978-1-78297-296-9

      This book is available direct from:

      Oxbow Books, Oxford, UK

      (Phone: 01865-241249; Fax: 01865-794449)

      and

      The David Brown Book Company

      PO Box 511, Oakville, CT 06779, USA

      (Phone: 860-945-9329; Fax: 860-945-9468)

      or from our website

      www.oxbowbooks.com

      Grainger, John D., 1939-

        The cities of Pamphylia / by John D. Grainger.

          p. cm.

        Includes bibliographical references and index.

        ISBN 978-1-84217-334-3

        1. Pamphylia (Turkey)--History. 2. Pamphylia (Turkey)--History, Local. 3. Cities

      and towns, Ancient--Turkey--Pamphylia. 4. City and town life--Turkey--Pamphylia-

      -History. 5. Political culture--Turkey--Pamphylia--History. 6. Pamphylia (Turkey)-

      -Social conditions. 7. Pamphylia (Turkey)--Politics and government. 8. Greeks--

      Turkey--Pamphylia--History. I. Title.

        DS156.P27G73 2009

        939'.29--dc22

      2009024735

      Printed and bound by Hobbs the Printers Ltd,

      Totton, Hampshire

      Contents

      List of Figures

      Abbreviations

      Introduction

      Pamphylia is that part of modern Turkey which faces south into the Mediter ranean and is hemmed in by mountains in all other directions; its main centre is now Antalya, the former Attaleia. To the west are the Lykian Mountains; to its east are the hills of Rough Kilikia, and these two highland areas are joined to the long high range of the Taurus Mountains on the north. The sea, the Bay of Antalya, or Pamphylian Sea, is to the south. On the map, especially a contour map, the region looks well defined, and this is also the case on the ground, where the mountains rise abruptly from the plain; its eastern and western boundaries along the coast are not so clear; ancient writers never agreed on where they were.¹

      These boundaries were dictated not so much by the actual definition of Pamphylia as by the contexts of the writers. Hekataios in the sixth century BC, as reported by Strabo in the time of the Emperor Augustus, included the whole coast from Cape Gelidonya to Syedra,² but the author now referred to as ‘Pseudo-Skylax’, who composed a periplus (a set of sailing directions) in about 360 BC referred to the western coast, which trends almost due south-north, as Lykian, and the coast from its turn to the east (just west of modern Antalya) as Pamphylia – for sailors who were sailing north along the coast the point at which it turned was the important item of information.³

      The geographical bounds were not in fact crucial for defining the land, for it was the cities and their territories which constituted Pamphylia, and the allocation of cities to it varied with political events. So at times Phaselis was counted as Pamphylian, but at other times it was reckoned to be Lykian; at the other end of the Bay, Syedra could be thought of as Pamphylian at times, but was normally Kilikian; Korakesion (modern Alanya) is only just part of Pamphylia.

      Within this area, which is about two hundred kilometres from west to east, and at most fifty kilometres inland from the coast to the hills, there were seven substantial cities in the ancient world; it is these which are my central subject (Map 1). From east to west the cities were: Korakesion (modern Alanya), on a high, steep hill, where the coastal plain is virtually non-existent; Side, also on the coast, at the mouth of the Melas River, close to the hills of Rough Kilikia; Aspendos, Sillyon, and Perge in the Pamphylian plain, all on flat, steep-sided hills a few kilometres inland from the coast, and spread roughly equidistantly along the plain where it is at its widest; south of Perge, directly on the coast, and with a small harbour, was Attaleia, founded much later, now the large city of Antalya; on either side of Attaleia were two smaller settlements, Olbia to the west and Magydos to the east, both near or on the coast; Phaselis is to the south, directly on the coast where it trends almost due south, blocked in by the Lykian Mountains. There were also several other small settlements, most of which are barely known, Idyros, Syedra, Hamaxia, Kibyra – called Kibyra Minor – Seleukeia, Ptolemais, and some others.

      Four main rivers flow through the plain from the Taurus mountains: the Katarrhaktes (the modern Duden), the Kestros (Aksu-chai), the Eurymedon (Kopru-chai), and the Melas (Manavgat-chai), respectively reaching the sea in the neighbourhoods of Attaleia and Magydos, Perge, Aspendos, and Side; other rivers, or rather mountain streams, flow out of the Kilikian and Lykian hills. The valleys of the Kestros and the Melas rivers provide important routes out of Pamphylia towards the north and the north-east, but they were, and are, by no means easy to travel along. The main route was north along the Kestros valley and then by the steep, ten-kilometre climb through the pass called Gubuk Beli towards the Turkish Lake District to the north; the route along the Melas valley led from Side east and north-east into central Anatolia and Lykaonia. A third route led westwards along the Yenice bogaz in front of and below the Pisidian city of Termessos, towards Isinda and Kibyra Major, and the cities of Ionia and Karia; again the route climbs through an awkward pass, Golcuk Beli. Despite these several passes, by land Pamphylia was not easy to reach. Within Pamphylia there was just one main road, running parallel to the coast, as it still does, linking the cities, and reaching eastwards towards Lykia and westwards along the Kilikian coast. Pamphylia was well isolated.

      Map 1. The Cities of Pamphylia

      It might be thought that the sea would provide a more congenial method of communications out of Pamphylia and between the cities, but it is not quite so useful as might appear from a glance at the map. Several of the Pamphylian cities were actually situated inland, and only those to the east (Side, Korakesion) and west (Attaleia, Magydos, Olbia, Phaselis) were directly on or close to the coast. Their harbours are generally small and exposed to storms out of the sea from the south, and the coast is made even less approachable by an uncomfortable westward-flowing current. The sea was of less importance in Pamphylia than for many other areas of the ancient Mediterranean.

      In the western half of the country the land rises from the coast in shelves of limestone,⁴ over which the Katarrhaktes falls twice, and the Kestros once. At the Taurus Mountains the land rises steeply and abruptly and the mountains are forested where not too steep (Plates 1, 13). To the east fingers of hilly limestone extend southwards across and through the lower plain, separating the alluvial plains of the rivers into varying-sized sections (e.g., Plates 17, 18); at Antalya a limestone shelf reaches the sea as cliffs, and the Katarraktes falls directly into the sea between that city and Magydos. The sea level has fluctuated somewhat in the last 10,000 years, and the sea has receded for some distance along the middle part of Pamphylia; on the other hand, at Phaselis some of the quays of the ancient city are now under water.

      The land is well watered (by Mediterranean standards) by the streams and rivers from the Taurus, so much so that it has a tendency to waterlogging in winter and spring, and without drainage some parts degenerate into marsh. It is generally fertile, but there are areas of poor soil, notably of sand along the coast, and low jagged limestone hills stick up out of the plain here and there, especially in the eastern half; the eastern coast is sandy, with an area of dunes penetrating some way inland. The natural vegetation ever since the climate stabilized after the Ice Age is Mediterranean scrub and conifers, with some deciduous and more pine forests in the hills; the generally flat terrain also encourages marshy vegetation. All of this has been much modified by man’s activities, of course.⁵

      Pamphylia is therefore a relatively well-defined geographical region which in the ancient world contained a group of cities regarded as distinctive largely because of their geographical situation. The cities and the regions were not, however, central to Greek history at any time. The region was isolated by the sea and the hills, and those dominating hills were also inhabited by non-Greek peoples – Lykians, Pisidians, Kilikians – who accepted Greek civilization and Roman authority, but who were never seen as Greek. Pamphylia was thus an island of Greek cities on the frontier of Greek society, a close neighbour to non-Greek lands, and was also somewhat isolated from the Greek and Roman mainstream.

      One result of the area’s political isolation is that it has been relatively little studied. There is, for example, only one (very short) book discussing the history of the area,⁶ though there are accounts of some of its cities. In any general account of Asia Minor Pamphylia necessarily suffers by comparison with the better sources available for other regions, and by their greater centrality in wider affairs. It was one of the targets for western travellers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Captain Beaufort, Charles Robert Cockerell, Lieutenant Spratt, and others in the early nineteenth, and the diligent Count Lanckoronski at the end of that century, and Freya Stark in the mid-twentieth. That Freya Stark could, in the 1950s, embark on an ‘exploration’ of the area is a telling indication of its isolation even then. The brevity of past investigations means that the account of the elaborate archaeological explorations of Count Lanckoronski in the 1880s is still useful,⁷ though more recent excavations have now rendered it rather less so than it was.

      This region is therefore both well defined and neglected, yet it was the scene of a continuing society of cities and their citizens for two thousand years. Being small and compact it provides a field of study where it is possible to follow through its history for the whole of that lengthy period, from the origins of the cities to their final extinction; in other areas the overwhelming number of sources tends to force a concentration on much shorter periods. So this is what I am attempting here: to reconstruct the history of this small area, which indeed happens to have some quite remarkable ancient remains, but which was never important in affairs at any time. The aim is, besides teasing out the regional history, to consider the effects of outside forces on the society of the cities: it seems to me that these are crucial elements in the region’s history. It follows that a more or less strict chronological approach is needed, but the effects of the local geography will be constantly borne in mind.

      There is no ancient account of the region apart from Strabo’s brief description. The written sources available for the study of the region are largely accounts of occasional outside interventions, for example by Alexander. The result is like a series of intermittent lights being shone on the region, separated by rather longer periods of darkness and silence. These sources can be supplemented by the collections of ancient inscriptions gathered by explorers, notably in the early twentieth century, of which some are now being re-edited into more conventional publications.⁸ Archaeologists have also been busy, particularly at Perge and Side, but it cannot be said that any of the other cities have been properly investigated, and this goes double for the countryside. Numismatists have collected the coins of the cities, but the study of them, as with the written sources, is intermittent and partial. The study of the area thus requires repeated switches between these various sources.

      The physical remains of the ancient cities are the main reasons for visiting the region. Aspendos and its theatre, Perge and its street and gate and theatre and stadium, Side and its walls, Phaselis and its street and harbour and theatre, are all places worth travelling great distances to see and examine. These are all sites where a good deal of excavation and investigation work has been and is being done as the value of such places for attracting tourists is realized. The excavation results are variously well reported, but mainly in fairly obscure journals, some of which have had only a brief life, while others are only occasional, and not all of them are easy, or even at times possible, to locate. The words of G. E. Bean in 1968 are still relevant: ‘there is hardly anything for the English reader outside the learned journals’.⁹ Further, the investigators’ attention has been largely concentrated on those cities, and little has been done to investigate the countryside, while the remains in the cities, largely of Roman date, prevent much investigation of earlier periods of occupation. Pamphylia is still, that is to say, off the beaten track, a judgment which applies to its archaeology as well as to its history and geography.

      ¹ A map, showing the varying definitions, is in RE XVIII.3.355–356, ‘Pamphylia’.

      ² Strabo 14.41–2.

      ³ Ps.-Skylax, GGM, 100.

      ⁴ Bean, TSS, 21: ‘steps’.

      ⁵ For a detailed description of the geography of the region, cf. X. de Planhol, De la plaine pamphylienne aux lacs pisidiens, Paris 1958, ch. 1.

      ⁶ C. E. Bosch, Studien zur geschichte Pamphyliens, Ankara 1957.

      ⁷ F. Beaufort, Karamania, London 1817; C. R. Cockerell, Travels in Europe and the Levant, 1810–1817, London 1903; T. A. B. Spratt and E. Forbes, Travels in Lycia, London 1947; Count K. Lanckoronski, Städte Pamphyliens und Pisidiens, Vienna 1890; F. Stark, The Lycian Shore, London 1956, and Alexander’s Path, London 1958.

      ⁸ E.g., I. Perge, I. Side.

      ⁹ Bean, TSS, vii.

      1

      The Arrival of the Greeks

      The name ‘Pamphylia’ signified, in Greek, ‘many tribes’, or even ‘all tribes’, or perhaps ‘all languages’,¹ and implies a land inhabited by a much-divided, mixed population, composed of Greeks and other peoples. The settlement of Greeks in Pamphylia is traditionally dated to the post-Bronze Age migrations,² but they arrived in a land that was already settled by non-Greeks, and they were only ever part of the population.

      Evidence for the sort of settlement and population which existed before the Greeks’ arrival is very scarce. Such excavations as have taken place – usually at the sites of the Greek cities – have found little archaeological evidence for occupation before the Iron Age. The cave at Karain, in the mountains on the western side of Pamphylia, looking over the plain (Plate 1), has revealed a long sequence of intermittent occupations dating back deep into the Holocene, and the skull of a Neanderthal child has been found there;³ the grave of a child of the Chalcolithic period and some flint arrowheads have been found on the acropolis of Perge, which has also produced graves and pottery of the Early Iron Age; there is a single Early Bronze Age sherd from Sillyon.⁴ These are the only archaeological evidences of early occupation, but the region certainly had a human population throughout prehistory. Linguistic evidence indicates that peoples speaking a Luwian language – the ancestor of the later Pidisian and Lykian – gave names to several places, including Perge and the major rivers, and from this it may be inferred that people speaking that language were already present when the Greeks arrived.⁵

      The evidence of earlier occupation is therefore discontinuous, and yet the area was surely attractive to settlers. It is flat, well-watered, and agriculturally rich, especially by contrast with the surrounding mountains and the dry Anatolian interior. Farmers had occupied all the lands around from at least the seventh millennium BC, perhaps even earlier – the age-old sites of Catal Hüyük and Hacilar are just north of the mountains. Presumably people moved into the lower Pamphylian lands as they became available with the increase in the temperature as the Ice Age released its grip, and as farming techniques improved, but little has yet been found. Perhaps it is merely the result of a lack of research, on the assumption that archaeologists tend to find what they are looking for, and so it is widely assumed that there is little to find. But it may be more than that, for, if early occupation had been really extensive, then the evidence would be obvious, in the form of tells, pottery scatters, and occasional finds, which would become known. Possibly there was too much water for ease of agriculture. Strabo, as late as the first century AD, notes a lake near Aspendos, Lake Capria,⁶ and parts of the land are marshy even now, especially in the winter and spring. The techniques of farming on the dry plateau may not have suited the wetter lowland.

      Historical rather than geographical reasons may also have limited occupation, but some written evidence for it does exist. In the second millennium BC the Anatolian plateau was organized as a series of kingdoms, of which the Hittite state became the most powerful. For a long time researchers ignored Pamphylia, leaving it as a blank on maps of the region.⁷ More recently, the discovery of more Hittite records has led to the theory that Pamphylia was for a time part of a sub-kingdom of the Hittite empire called Tarhuntassa.⁸ This was both a territory and a city, set apart for governing by a younger son of the Hittite Great King in the thirteenth century BC – the word is in the genitive, and so would translate as ‘Tarhunta’s land’, that is, it was named from the man placed in command or perhaps from a god’s name, though the two are not mutually exclusive; this suggests that it was not a recognized geographical area with a name of its own until then.

      One of these Hittite sources describes the boundaries of the sub-kingdom. These have been located so as to encompass not only almost all Pamphylia and part of the Taurus mountain area to the north, and including much of the future Pisidia, Isauria to the north-east, and part of Rough Kilikia to the east.⁹ The western boundary ran along the Kastaraya river, plausibly interpreted as the later Kestros (the present Aksu-chai); a place called Parha is mentioned and is interpreted as the old name for Perge – it is thus left outside Tarhuntassa, being west of the river. (Its naming in the description implies that a settlement existed there; the archaeologists have not yet found it; this is not the only puzzle about Perge.) Several other places are named – notably ‘Sallusa, Sanhata, and Surimma’ – but their exact positions are unknown; they may have been small places on the coast to the east of the later Side, perhaps in Rough Kilikia – one, possibly Sanhata, may be the later Syedra.

      There is therefore a gap in the recorded settlements between Parha in the west and the eastern coast, covering the region where the later cities of the plain were. The line of the coast of Pamphylia between Side and Attaleia has changed over the millennia, but the actual shore has never been worth settling. It is now sandy and marshy, and probably was always that way; only holiday hotels, to whom the beaches are of use, reach the shore nowadays; working villages and towns are invariably set back from the coast amid their fields, and away from the agriculturally unusable coastal strip. This was the case in the Greco-Roman period, and there is no reason to suppose that the situation was different in the Bronze Age, though the coastline was then some distance north of its present position. So the gap may well represent reality: there was probably little settlement between the Kestros and the Melas Rivers.

      The purpose of the establishment of the sub-kingdom of Tarhuntassa was for it to act as a buffer between the Hittite realm proper, which reached south to the Taurus and into Kilikia and northern Syria, and the ‘Lukka Lands’, whose location would seem to be mainly in Lykia.¹⁰ Parha/Perge therefore was left in the Lukka Lands, and this would fit with the influence of the Luwian language, which has been detected in the later Greek inscriptions.¹¹ The Tarhuntassa boundary along the Kestros looks very like the work of a group of negotiators who chose the river as a clear and unambiguous boundary line after a war – which we know had happened – in which neither side could claim an overwhelming victory. Behind the boundary (that is, to the east), the Pamphylian parts of Tarhuntassa may well have been largely empty space, an area which, in combination with the formidable mountains, was deliberately kept clear as a buffer separating the main Hittite polity from the awkward and hostile Lukka Lands.

      The location of the city of Tarhuntassa – ‘Tarhunta’s city’ – from which the principality was ruled, is not known; all too often it is placed vaguely somewhere in the mountains, usually marked by a large dot on a small-scale map. The most serious attempt to locate it has suggested a site somewhat to the south of Konya, close to the mountains’ northern side. This would place it close to the route along the Melas River, which connects the inland plateau, the heartland of the Hittite state, and Pamphylia.¹² This location, while by no means certain, fits in very well with the concept of Tarhuntassa as a buffer state between the Hittite kingdom and its enemies in Lykia. An invasion force from the Lukka Lands would have a long hard march through country with few supplies – the mountains will have had few, even if Pamphylia was productive – before it reached any vital Hittite interests. The sub-king in the city of Tarhuntassa – a prince called Tarhunta, presumably, at least at the beginning – would thus have plenty of time to prepare to meet the invaders with his full force, perhaps by an ambush in the mountains.

      All this leads to the necessary conclusion that Pamphylia was surely inhabited in the Late Bronze Age as well as earlier, that it was a land with which the Hittite empire had relations, and that its people were in contact with the people of the hills to the north, their landward neighbours, and with the Lykians to the west. They were also in contact by sea with other lands, for Bronze Age shipwrecks have been discovered off Cape Gelidonya, their cargoes implying a voyage from east to west.¹³ And this is so even if the precise archaeological evidence from within Pamphylia is not yet available. It also suggests that it was only a thinly peopled land, partly because it was obviously a fought-over buffer between the Lukka Lands and the Hittite kingdom, but also because it does not appear to figure, by name, in any of the sources except as Tarhuntassa. Thus there are reasonably convincing historical explanations for the absence of evidence, as well as geographical and political reasons. It may also be that the land was difficult to cultivate with Bronze Age methods and tools; the soil is heavy and at times the land is waterlogged; other areas are sandy; neither would be easy to farm with the light Bronze Age agricultural implements.

      The fact that there is little or no evidence for habitation in Pamphylia in the Bronze Age is, however, also due to the fact that such settlement has not been seriously looked for. Excavations have been largely confined to the cave sites and the Greek cities. The cave sites by definition tend to be located in land not easily cultivable – Karain is 150 metres above the plain, a stiffclimb (Plate 1). Many of the cities are on rocky hills which would not be the first choice of farmers as places to inhabit (Plates 4, 8, 11, 19); their Greek and Roman remains are both substantial and impossible to remove, for good aesthetic and tourist industry reasons, and so it is difficult to excavate deeply into them. Other investigations have been generally superficial surveys, which have concluded that there is nothing to find.¹⁴ That conclusion has discouraged further investigations, which makes the surveys’ conclusions more of a self-fulfilling prophecy than the result of scientific investigations. Recently some extra-civic surveys have been made, as in the neighbourhood of Sillyon, but they have done little more than detect Roman-period farmsteads.¹⁵ It is not reasonable to believe that the land has been empty at any time since the arrival of farmers in the region. The evidence is surely there; it has just not been found yet. We must conclude that Pamphylia was probably occupied throughout the Bronze Age, and for several millennia before that, but that the occupation was only ever thin and rural – even the superficial surveys are unlikely to have missed a Bronze Age city.

      The post-Hittite population was thus already in place when the Greek settlers arrived. They were the descendants of people who had inhabited the land in the centuries following the disappearance of the Hittite Empire; that is, they were the descendants of the Bronze Age population, the subjects of the brief kingdom of Tarhuntassa. The Hittite state was destroyed by the invasions of its myriad enemies at some time after 1200 BC (the last Great King that we know of seems to have succeeded some six or seven years earlier than that, but how long he lasted, or if he had a successor, we don’t know).¹⁶ The capital Hattusas was burned, and is later seen to be occupied by the Kaskas, old Hittite enemies from the northern hills. The centre of Anatolia was subsequently divided among several local kingdoms, and in the south the Kilikians formed the separate kingdom of Que.¹⁷ The situation in Pamphylia is once more quite unknown, but there is no reference to any kingdom in the area at any time after the disappearance of Tarhuntassa. This is not to say that one did not exist, but one would certainly have expected a reference to it somewhere. It is, however, reasonably safe to assume that the inhabitants were speakers of a Luwian language or dialect.

      The basis for this conclusion is a set of studies of the names of people who are recorded much later, in Greek and usually in inscriptions, plus the general conclusions to be drawn from the history of the area. The studies show a spread of non-Greek personal names throughout Pamphylia and the surrounding lands, and all these areas show the same selection of names.¹⁸ In other words, these names are those inherited by and used by the populations of all three areas from before Greek naming conventions arrived. The name given to this language, and so to the people who used it, is Luwian, from the name of the whole southern coastal region given in Hittite records. With this as a clue it can also be seen that the gods worshipped in the area in the later period were in fact the gods and goddesses of the area in pre-Greek times. They are usually portrayed in Greek guise, or are assimilated to the standard Greek gods: Zeus Solymos at Termessos is probably the Luwian god Tarhunt;¹⁹ Wanassa Preiia, the ‘Lady of Perge’ is assimilated as Artemis and was portrayed on Pergean coins as a barely human shape, so she was not originally a Greek goddess.²⁰ Many of the place names show signs of being pre-Greek as well – the names of several of the cities, for example, and at least one of the rivers, the previously noted Kestros/Kastaraya. That is, these studies show that the Greeks of Pamphylia arrived to settle in a land already populated by a sedentary Luwian-speaking population which had its own set of personal names and its own names for the rivers and hills of the country. The Luwian names, and therefore the Luwian-speaking population, survived and even predominated after the arrival of the Greeks.

      This, of course, has so far begged the question of the time at which the Greeks actually arrived. Tarhuntassa was a thirteenth century BC kingdom, and it vanished in the post-imperial chaos of the early twelfth century. The earliest record of Greeks living in Pamphylia is archaeological material of the Geometric period, which has been found at Sillyon.²¹ This is pottery first made in Greece in the early ninth century BC; it will have reached Sillyon some time later, say, in the latter part of the ninth century. This is assuming that it was actually used by Greeks, of course, and not simply bought by native Luwians from traders, but at all events it puts Sillyon in touch with Greece at that time. So we may say that Greeks arrived in Pamphylia some time after the end of the Hittite kingdom and by the time of the Geometric period, between perhaps 1190 BC and about 800 BC. It remains to be seen if something less vague can be achieved.

      The Greeks are traditionally said to have arrived to settle amongst the older inhabitants of Pamphylia in the aftermath of the Trojan War, though actually the migration took place as part of the much wider movement of peoples which marked the end of the Bronze Age, a rather looser and longer period of time. This would put their arrival in Pamphylia well into the migration period, but also well after the Trojan War (which is to be dated late in the thirteenth or very early in the twelfth century); that is, Greeks reached Pamphylia in the twelfth century BC, according to this theory. Stories link the Greeks of Pamphylia with supposed individuals who participated in the Trojan War: Amphilochos, Kalchas, Mopsos (all of them seers, curiously), and others.²² The occurrence of the name of Mopsos in that of the city of Mopsuhestia in Kilikia, and a reference in a local eighth century inscription in Phoenician to ‘Bt Mps’ (taken to mean ‘House of Mopsu’),²³ are claimed to validate these myths. Mopsos is also identified with a king of ‘Lydia’ who is supposed to have reigned at the time of the Trojan War.²⁴

      These details, in fact, do not provide any validation at all for the Mopsos theory. It is not an acceptable procedure to link such fragmentary and disparate items together into a coherent story; the gaps, both geographical and chronological, are far too wide. What is required to make a real connection is the discovery in Pamphylia of some clear and unambiguous archaeological evidence, firmly dated to the twelfth century BC, and connected with Mycenaean Greece. Even then this would be no more than an indication of a connection between these lands (like the Geometric pottery at Sillyon), and by no means a proof of the existence and historicity of Mopsos and his supposed activities.

      No such evidence exists. What the mythmakers did was to select likely heroes out of the old stories and appropriate them to their communities, so providing themselves with recognizable Greek lineages. This was invariably done after, and usually long after, the time the stories supposedly refer to. Modern theorists, using a great deal of wishful thinking, have at times fallen for this all too readily. The process continued for centuries; at Phaselis, for instance, which we know

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