The Greek and Latin Inscriptions of Ankara (Ancyra): Vol. II Late Roman, Byzantine and other texts

338 Pages·2019·9.153 MB·English

by  Stephen Mitchell, David French

The Greek and Latin Inscriptions
of Ankara (Ancyra)

Vol. 2
Late Roman, Byzantine and Other Texts

Edited by
Stephen Mitchell and David French †

1
Table of Contents

Preface and acknowledgments

1 Ankara in Late Antiquity and Byzantium

2 Bibliography

3 Inscriptions of Late Roman and Byzantine Ankara (315 bis–504)

3.1 The fortifications of Late Roman and Byzantine Ankara (315 bis–328)
3.2 Imperial inscriptions from Constantine to Arcadius (329–333)
3.3 Building in Late Roman Ankara (334–346 bis)
3.4 Exempla Biblica (347–349)
3.5 Funerary inscriptions from the late third to the early fifth centuries (350–364)
3.6 Large funerary monuments of the late fifth and sixth centuries (365–423)
3.7 Small funerary monuments of the late fifth and sixth centuries (424–496)
3.8 Middle Byzantine inscriptions in the imperial temple and other churches (497–504)

4 Further inscriptions of the second and third centuries (505–545)

5 Ancyrans abroad

5.1 Inscriptions for Ancyrans and Galatians in Athens (A1–A73; Gal. 1–Gal. 11)
5.2 Other Greek inscriptions for Ancyrans outside Ankara (G1–G17)
5.3 Latin inscriptions for Ancyrans outside Ankara (L1–L21)

6 Addenda and corrigenda to I. Ankara 1

7 Epigraphic indexes

7.1 Personal names
7.1.1 Greek
7.1.2 Latin
7.2 Geographical names
7.3 Rulers, officials and military units
7.3.1 Emperors
7.3.2 High officials
7.3.3 Governors of Galatia (Prima)
7.3.4 Civic aristocracy
7.3.5 Military units
7.4 Professions
7.5 Festivals and contests
7.6 Biblical, ecclesiastical and liturgical
7.7 Funerary
7.7.1 Imprecations and fines
7.7.2 Funerary prayers
7.7.3 Burial
7.8 Dates and chronology
7.9 General vocabulary
7.9.1 Greek
7.9.2 Latin
7.10 Phonetic features, vocalisation and graphic confusion
7.10.1 Greek
7.10.2 Latin

8 Concordance of publications

2
Figures

1. 18th Century Dutch Painting of Ankara in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
2. Map of Ancient Ancyra
3. Plan of Ankara Citadel
4. Inscriptions 324-326
5. Known only to God
6. Sixth-century grave cover in Ankara Kale

Figure credits:

Arslan, M.: 477-483.
Atesoğulları, S.: 392, 486-87, 490-96, 512.
DAI Istanbul: 377, 429, 429a, 489, 505, I. Ankara 1, 108, I. Ankara 1, 162.
Domaszewski (1885): 334.
Görkay, K.: Fig. 2, 333, 520.
Kadıoğlu, M.: Fig. 2, 344, 536.
Mango, C.: 348, 363.
Mongeri, G.: 315 bis.
Peschlow, U.: Fig. 3, 316, 502.
Varinlioğlu, E.: 427, 439, 452, 459, 462.
Macpherson archive: 378, 424, 430, 436, 440, 443, 446.
Perrot (1872): 324.
Rijksmuseum Amsterdam: Fig. 1.
Wiener Scheden: 504.

All other illustrations are by S. Mitchell.

3
4
Preface and Acknowledgements

The second volume of Greek and Latin inscriptions of Ankara appears six years after
its predecessor. Most of the texts date from the Late Roman and Byzantine periods
between the late third and the tenth centuries, but we have added a further batch of
inscriptions of the Imperial period, which had been excluded from volume one, or
came to light after its completion, and some significant addenda and corrigenda to the
inscriptions published in volume one. We have also added a chapter to include
inscriptions from other parts of the ancient world which refer to Ancyrans or to the city
of Ancyra.

In addition to the debts which we acknowledged in the preface to volume one, we have
other colleagues to thank for their help in preparing volume two. The staff of the
Museum of Anatolian Civilizations at Ankara have continued to provide practical
support. Stephen Mitchell completed his work on the museum collections in September
2014 and would like to thank the Museum’s assistant director Halil Demirdelen,
Mehmet Akalın in charge of the collection at the Roman Baths, Aynur Talaakar at the
Akkale depot, and Nilgün Sinan at depot D in the museum itself, for their help. Above
all he is grateful to Melih Arslan, museum director from 2011 to 2013, who has
provided information and photographs of several inscriptions that have come to light in
recent years at Ankara, including texts that had not been recorded since the nineteenth
century. Kutalmıș Görkay and Musa Kadıoğlu of Ankara University have again
supplied invaluable details about inscriptions they have recorded as well as
unpublished information from archival material relating to the archaeology of Roman
Ankara. Mitchell is also indebted to Dr Sedat Bornovalı of Nisantaşı University for
providing the photograph of 315 bis, derived from a virtually inaccessible publication
of the Italian architect Giulio Mongeri.

Mitchell completed part of the work on this volume between April and July 2012 as a
guest professor at the University of Cologne, by invitation of Professor Walter
Ameling, supported by a grant from the Alfred Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach
Foundation, and has drawn on advice and suggestions made by Walter Ameling,
Jürgen Hammerstaedt and Gregor Staab. All scholars working on the Greek
inscriptions of Late Antiquity and the Byzantine period owe an immeasurable debt to
Professor Denis Feissel (Collège de France), whose own work has placed the
epigraphic study of these periods on an entirely new footing. This will be clear from
our innumerable citations of his work. Mitchell was privileged to present the unique
‘theological’ inscriptions from Ankara (347-349) at Feissel’s seminar in Paris in
January 2012, and preparation and discussion during that seminar made a large
contribution to the reconstruction of these difficult texts. We have also benefited from
specific suggestions made by Jean Gascou, Jürgen Hammerstaedt, Constantin Klein
and Vadim Wittkowsky. Denis Feissel himself read a draft of the whole manuscript
and made many corrections and improvements.

Professor Urs Peschlow (Mainz) has made vital contributions to the final preparation
of the work. During his stay in Cologne, Mitchell was advised by Hansgerd
Hellenkemper that it would be valuable to contact Professor Peschlow, who was
working intensively on the archaeological and architectural remains of late Roman and
Byzantine Ankara. This new contact led to another intensive and fruitful exchange of
information, and has been especially valuable for interpreting the inscriptions relating
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to Ankara’s fortifications and to the chronological development of the city between the
late Roman and middle Byzantine periods. Peschlow’s study of the architectural and
archaeological remains of ancient Ankara (Peschlow 2015) has appeared in time for
cross references to it to be included in the present volume. We hope that our
collaboration will help to integrate the archaeological and historical study of late
Roman and Byzantine Ankara. It is a tragedy that Professor Peschlow became severely
ill and died of cancer in March 2018, and thus was unable to see this volume in its final
form, although he contributed so much to the final stages of its evolution.
Most of the photographs in this volume were taken by Mitchell, helped by Oya Dinler
in 2010. We have used Ender Varinlioğlu’s photographs of funerary tiles housed in the
METU Museum and those taken by Saner Ateşoğulları of several of the funerary tiles
in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. We have also obtained illustrations to
complete our own records from the archive of I. W. Macpherson (which was given to
Mitchell in the early 1980s but is now deposited at the Museum of Classical
Archaeology, Cambridge University), from the archive of the Deutsches
Archäologisches Institut at Istanbul, now digitally available on the University of
Cologne’s Arachne web-site (http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/drupal), and from colleagues
who have recorded inscriptions in Ankara: Cyril Mango, Melih Arslan, Kutalmıș
Görkay, Musa Kadıoğlu, and Urs Peschlow. The last three also made available their
maps of ancient Ankara and the Ankara citadel.

The preparation of the final text has benefitted from close scrutiny and a critical
reading by Rudolf Haensch and Christof Schuler at the Kommission für Epigraphik
und Alte Geschichte in Munich, and by Dr Filippo Battistoni and Isabelle Mossong for
the Vestigia Redaktion. Both the format and the contents of the manuscript have been
greatly improved by their comments and suggestions. We are privileged that the
volume appears in the series Vestigia.

David French died at the age of eighty-three on 19 March 2017. His own direct
contribution to this second volume of the Ankara corpus had been smaller than to its
predecessor, as he devoted most of his time between 2011 and 2016 to producing ten
volumes of inscriptions and commentary in the series Roman Roads and Milestones of
Asia Minor, which have appeared as on-line publications of the British Institute at
Ankara, a project which had dominated the second half of his academic career. He was,
however, able to read and comment on the entire manuscript in the autumn of 2016. I
would simply conclude with the remark that it has also been an extraordinary privilege
for me to have collaborated in publishing Ankara’s inscriptions with a great
archaeologist and scholar who made the city his home for almost half his life.

Berlin, April 2018 Stephen Mitchell

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1 Ankara in Late Antiquity and Byzantium

This second volume of inscriptions from ancient Ancyra contains texts which
mostly date between the end of the third and the tenth century. During the early
part of late antiquity Ankara was a large and flourishing city of the eastern Roman
Empire. It was the most important military and political centre on the land route
from Constantinople to Antioch, the imperial power hubs of the eastern Roman
empire. The bulk of the inscriptions collected in this volume date between the
third and sixth centuries. The city was captured by the Sassanians in 622 and
probably suffered serious damage at their hands. From the middle of the seventh
century Ankara was exposed to Arab raids and attacks, which continued until 838,
when the city fell to the forces of the Abbasid caliph al Mu‘tasim. The events of
this period are only reported briefly in Greek and Arab chronicles, and cannot be
confirmed by epigraphic or archaeological documentation. The construction of the
citadel in 859 by the emperor Michael III and his spatharocandidatus Basil marked
a crucial turning point in Ankara’s history and transformed it into the most
powerful fortress of northern Anatolia. Inscriptions recorded in the church that
occupied the former imperial temple and the church of St Clement are evidence
that the city became more secure and prosperous in the ninth and tenth centuries.
Late Roman and Byzantine Ankara is the subject of an influential and important
study published in 1977 by Clive Foss. He supplemented this extensive synthesis,
based on the literary and the archaeological evidence, with a closely documented
but shorter account translated into German in 1985 for the Reallexikon für Antike
und Christentum, and these two studies have laid the framework for modern
understanding of the post-Roman city.1 Foss’s work was preceded by Marcel
Restle’s article ‘Ankyra’ for the Reallexikon zur Byzantinischen Kunst in 1966 and
supplemented by Klaus Belke’s invaluable documentation of Ankara’s history
compiled for the Tabula Imperii Byzantini in 1984.2 Wolfram Brandes has offered
a modern summary of the evidence from the seventh to ninth centuries,3 and Paul
Wittek surveyed the later Byzantine and Seljuk periods in an article written in the
early 1930s.4 Critical episodes in the city’s late Roman and Byzantine history have
been the subject of special studies.5 Much information about the antiquities,
natural resources and economic life of ancient Ankara can be gathered from
accounts of travellers to the Ottoman city between the sixteenth and nineteenth
centuries, and these have been extensively used by Semavi Eyice, the Turkish
byzantinist, in his commentary on an 18th century Dutch painting of an eastern
city, which he was able to identify as Ankara (Fig. 1), and also from a brief history
of the city written by two American scholars who were based in Ankara for many

1 Foss 1977; Foss 1985, reprinted 2001.
2 Restle 1966; TIB IV, 126-30.
3 Brandes in Peschlow 2015 I, 259-68.
4 Wittek 1932.
5 The persecutions, Mitchell 1982; Julian and the situation of pagans and
Christians in the later fourth century, Mitchell 1993 II, 88-95; the building of the
citadel by Michael III, Grégoire 1927/28 and 1929/30.
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years.6 A recent large-scale survey of Ankara’s history from its origins to the
present day makes use of some of this detailed scholarly work.7

[Insert Figure 1 around here]

The archaeology of post-Roman Ankara owes most to Père de Jerphanion’s
remarkable work in the 1920s, which was carried out during the years when
Ankara was being rebuilt as Turkey’s modern capital. Jerphanion wrote
comprehensive accounts based on his own field work of the citadel fortifications
and the Church of St Clement, and also published many newly discovered
inscriptions.8 Ernest Mamboury produced a very detailed and informative guide
book to Ankara in 1934,9 and observations on the transformation of the temple of
Augustus into a church form an important part of Krencker and Schede’s
publication of the imperial temple.10 During the 1930s and early 1940s
excavations by members of the German Archaeological Institute led to the
discovery of a section of a Roman street and late Roman chamber tombs,11 and
Turkish archaeologists undertook the large scale clearance of the main city bath
building, which was in use through late antiquity.12 Thereafter, with the exception
of Nezih Fıratlı’s excellent but neglected study of Ankara’s ancient aqueducts,13
little new archaeological work was done in the city until the 1990s, when
archaeologists from the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations undertook a number of
rescue excavations which have thrown light on the streets and fortifications of the
Roman city. The results have been accounted for both in Susan Cooke’s
unpublished Bilkent University MA thesis,14 and in Görkay and Kadıoğlu’s recent
study of the archaeology of the Roman city.15 A sixth-century cemetery can now
be added to these discoveries.16 Urs Peschlow’s study of the remains of the Roman
and Byzantine city now provides a full critical appraisal of Ankara’s archaeology,
especially regarding the architecture and buildings.17

Since H. Grégoire’s ground-breaking studies in the late 1920s of the inscriptions
related to the Byzantine citadel,18 Ankara’s late Roman and Byzantine inscriptions
have received relatively little attention. E. Bosch’s collection of sources for the
history of Ankara in antiquity was not concerned with the period after Constantine,
and the later texts have not been gathered or considered as a whole, although many

6 Eyice 1970; Cross – Leiser 2000; see also Eyice 1996.
7 Aydın et al. 2005, 103-29.
8 Jerphanion 1928.
9 Mamboury 1934; cf. Mamboury 1949.
10 Krencker – Schede 1936.
11 Dalman – Schneider – Bittel 1932; Akok – Pençe 1941.
12 Akok 1955.
13 Fıratlı 1951.
14 Cooke 1998.
15 Görkay – Kadıoğlu – Mitchell 2011.
16 Arslan – Aydın 2010.
17 Peschlow 2015.
18 Grégoire 1927/28 and 1929/30; note also his contribution to Krencker – Schede
1936, 59-60.
8
are cited in Foss’s historical surveys. Moreover, a much larger number of
inscriptions from the period between 300 and 600, compared with those of the
early empire, has remained unpublished, and this volume accordingly contains a
higher proportion of new material than its predecessor did.19 The majority of these
texts are funerary, and their most important contribution is to throw light on the
Ankara’s social and cultural history, above all its characteristics as a Christian
community in the eastern Roman empire. A smaller number of public inscriptions,
relating to the city fortifications, to Roman emperors and to local benefactors,
illuminates Ankara’s secular civic history and its place within the political and
administrative structures of the empire.

Ankara and imperial politics in the fourth century

After the tetrarchic period Ankara became one of the most significant eastern
power centres of the later Roman empire. The reason for this lay primarily in its
geographical location. The city occupied a mid point on the overland route from
Constantinople to Antioch, and was also the hub of a network of major roads that
ran north to Paphlagonia and the Black Sea, north-east towards the Pontic
provinces and the upper Armenian frontier, south-east to Caesarea in Cappadocia
and the Euphrates, as well as south towards Lycaonia and the Taurus regions, and
south-west towards Phrygia and the old province of Asia. Many of these roads
were documented in the ancient itineraries. They can be traced on the ground, and
they have produced a rich crop of Roman milestones.20 These routes carried heavy
military traffic, which is abundantly documented for the second and third centuries
by the large number of Roman military inscriptions, the majority in Latin, that
have been found at Ankara.21 There can be no doubt that the volume of military
units, officials, and individual or small groups of soldiers passing through the city
in the fourth century was at least as great as it had been in the second or third
centuries. but the number of military inscriptions was sharply reduced. Only one
late Roman inscription from Ankara explicitly mentions a soldier, the fifth or sixth
century epitaph of Tarasis, who came from the Tauric regions of southern Asia
Minor and was described as being a member of the ‘first cohort of infantrymen’
(385), a unit which may have been stationed at Ankara at this period.22

19 10% of the texts in volume 1 were unpublished (31 from 315), compared with
55% of the Late Roman and Byzantine inscriptions in volume 2 (105 from 190).
20 See Mitchell 1993 I, 124-36; I. Ankara 1, p. 6. The milestones are now fully
documented in the fascicles of David French’s Roman Roads and Milestones of
Asia Minor 3 (RRMAM), published on-line by the British Institute at Ankara.
RRMAM 3.2 contains the milestones of Galatia; see also the itinerary on papyrus
published by Noordegraaf 1938 (= SB 26, 16607).
21 See I. Ankara 1, 22-27.
22 This excludes the gravestone of very uncertain date set up by the protector
Ursinus for his infant son (359). Ursinus might be a soldier, but may also be
classified as one of the protectores who formed part of sixth-century land-owning
class.
9
The city in the fourth century was the capital of Galatia, later Galatia Prima,
identified in the Verona list of provinces of 314.23 In 313 Constantine and
Licinius, building on the work of the tetrarchs, had developed the administrative
structure of the empire, dividing it into twelve dioceses, each comprising several
provinces, under the control of a vicarius of the praetorian prefect,24 and a number
of sources show that Ancyra now became the seat for the vicarius of Pontica.25
Pontica at this date comprised the provinces of Bithynia, Paphlagonia, Galatia,
Diospontus (later renamed Helenopontus), Pontus Polemoniacus, Cappadocia and
Armenia Minor.26 Galatia itself was subdivided when the western province of
Galatia Salutaris, including the Phrygian region around Pessinus and Amorium,
was created around 399.27

The inscriptions which throw most light on the strategic and political importance
of the city in the fourth century are the texts that relate to emperors. These are
headed by the three dedications for Constantine which were erected respectively
by his praetorian prefect, Fl. Constantius (329 and 330), and the vicarius of the
diocese of Pontica, Lucilius Crispus (331), almost certainly in October/November
324 soon after Constantine’s final victory over Licinius, when he became sole
ruler of the empire. All three monuments involved the use of existing statue bases
that had to be re-inscribed, and it is likely that they had previously supported
statues of Licinius himself or of rulers of the tetrarchic period. They do not show
that Constantine visited in Ankara in person at the time, but the fact that two of
them were put up by the praetorian prefect for the East, Constantine’s most senior
civilian official in the territories formerly ruled by Licinius, underlines Ankara’s
predominant position among the cities in the interior of Asia Minor. It was at
exactly this time that Constantine reached an initial decision to hold the first
ecumenical Church Council at Ancyra, before the location was switched to Nicaea
(331 comm.). Constantine is likely to have passed though Ankara in the early part
of his career when he served as a military commander in the east, being attached to
the officer circle around Galerius during the invasion of Persia in 297/8,28 and to
that around Diocletian during the imperial visit to Egypt in 301/2.29 During this
period he must have spent considerable periods of time in the imperial
headquarters at Antioch. However, Constantine stated himself that he had been in
Nicomedia at the moment in February 303 when Diocletian issued his first edict of
persecution against the Christians,30 and the normal route between Antioch and
Nicomedia passed through Ankara. It is also possible that in the thirteen years of
Constantine’s monarchy from 324 until his death in spring 337, during which he

23 Barnes 1982, 201-3.
24 Zuckermann 2002.
25 Foss 1977, 33-4 n. 19; and inscription 433 comm.
26 See the map in Mitchell 1988, 107.
27 See Foss 1977, 33 n. 18; Belke in TIB IV, 55-56 n. 70; Mitchell 1993 II, 160.
28 Constantine, Oratio ad sanctos 16.2, p. 177, 1-4, in the edition of I. A. Heikel,
Eusebius’ Werke I (Griechische Christliche Schriftsteller 7, Lepizig 1902), 151-92.
29 Eusebius, VC 1. 19. For Constantine’s service under Galerius and Diocletian,
see Barnes 2011, 51-6.
30 Oratio ad sanctos 25.2, p. 190, 24-9.
10