van Bremen, R

English

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The Classical Reviewhttp://journals.cambridge.org/CARAdditional services for The Classical Review:Email alerts: Click hereSubscriptions: Click hereCommercial reprints: Click hereTerms of use : Click hereThe Carian UplandsR. Van BremenThe Classical Review / Volume 55 / Issue 01 / March 2005, pp 223 ­ 226DOI: 10.1093/clrevj/bni123, Published online: 25 April 2006Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0009840X04004469How to cite this article:R. Van Bremen (2005). The Carian Uplands. The Classical Review,55, pp 223­226 doi:10.1093/clrevj/bni123Request Permissions : Click hereDownloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/CAR, IP address: 144.82.107.43 on 10 Sep 2012THE CARIAN UPLANDSP. D,E .V Ğ (edd.): Les hautes terres deCarie. With A. Bresson, P. Brun, R. Descat, K. Konuk (AusoniusPublications,Mémoires4.)Pp.329,maps,pls.,ills.Bordeaux:Di¶usionde Boccard, 2001. Cased, €73. ISBN: 2-910023-20-6.This splendid publication deals with a little known and underexplored region: thepart of Karia north of the Keramic Gulf, between Keramos and Idyma in the south,and Muğla, Pisye, and Panamara in the north, with a slight sideways bulge to the westto allow for inclusion of the site of Sekköy (equidistant between Mylasa andKeramos, and arguably belonging more to that western part of Karia in whichMylasa dominated than to our ‘hautes terres’). Visited by few travellers (on whom seeR. Descat, pp. 21–2) and archaeologically underexplored, these mountainous uplandsof central Karia are often dismissed as having no great historical interest because ofthe lack of major cities, the forbidding and steeply mountainous coast of theKeramic Gulf which makes access to its hinterland virtually impossible (see e.g. Fig.1 on p. 11; the photo on p. 3, Fig. 4, shows not the Karian Chersonnese in thebackground but the northern shore, i.e. it looks north, not south, with the Bay ofGökova on the right = east), the very few routes through to the Maeander Valley, andthe poverty of the small upland plateaus. The present book, the fruit of many yearsof systematic exploration and recording in the late 1980s and early 1990s by aFrench–Turkish team (P. Debord, A. Bresson, P. Brun, R. Descat, and K. Konuk allof Bordeaux University, joined by E. Varinlioğlu of Antalya University), does much todispel such notions and succeeds spectacularly well in bringing out the region’s density ofsettlement (even along the coast) and its complex infrastructure. Most of the evidence ispresented in two main sections, which together form the core of the book: 3: ‘Les Sites’,written largely by P. Brun with the collaboration of Debord, Bresson, and Descat onsome of the sites; and 5: ‘Inscriptions grecques et latines’, by A. Bresson with P. Brunand E. Varinlioğlu (4 contains a brief overview of the coinage found in the region byK. Konuk). The site descriptions are extensive, well-illustrated with excellentphotographs, maps and line drawings. Many of these sites have been seen anddescribed before, in particular by W. R. Paton and J. L. Myres (‘Karian Sites and   223The Classical Review vol. 55 no. 1 © The Classical Association 2005; all rights reservedInscriptions’, JHS 16 [1896], 188–236 and 260–1) and by P. M. Fraser and G. Bean(The Rhodian Peraia and Islands [Oxford, 1954]), but the Bordeaux team improves inalmost all cases on those earlier descriptions, either by seeing more (e.g. at Bağyaka,pp. 50–1: where Paton saw a tower on a hill above the village, our team found afortress consisting of three separate structures, or at Aldıran Asarı, where theydescribe the spectacular fortified citadel with its circuit wall of 1000 m interspersedwith fourteen towers: pp. 27–9), or because they describe and illustrate in detail whatpreviously had only been noted (e.g. the extraordinary fortiµed complex on thecitadel at Sarniç near the coast: pp. 57–64). There are entire sites not previouslyknown (at and around Sekköy, which, it is argued, was the location of a city of someimportance: pp. 68–71 and 224–7).The epigraphical section conµrms this picture of a region at last yielding itstreasures: of the approximately 100 texts, about half are published here for the µrsttime (these, too, with excellent photographs of the stones, squeezes, or, in a few cases,facsimile drawings). I list below the most important new texts and a few majorrepublications:1. Thisis in many ways the linchpinof theentire book andcrucial forunderstandingthe region’s history and development (see below): a long list of subcribers, foundrecently at Yeşilyurt, the site of ancient Pisye. It lists µnancial contributions from anumber of local communities to the building of  dockyards on the coast at Akbük(ancient Pladasa, some of whose citizens had formed a koinon with the Pisyetai: pp.101–3), referring speciµcally to this koinon in l. 5. The date is probably the mid-thirdcentury .., and the text raises questions about the involvement of Rhodes, an issuewhich the crucial but damaged µrst lines cannot resolve. One could restore, in ll. 2–3,where the purpose of and reason for the subscription are announced, υ ξ ’Σοδ ψξafter δ νψι: Rhodian interest in the establishment of dockyards at Akbük are surelyhighly likely (control of this headland together with Kedreai on the opposite side ofthe Gulf—clearly visible across the water—meant control of the entrance to the Gulfand implicitly access to the main route up to the Maeander valley: who other than theRhodians would have been able to control these twin harbours?). 1–30 are all from thesurroundings of Pisye/Yeşilyurt (a useful map on p. 26), showing the major importanceof this koinon within the region: cf. the approximate boundaries of the larger koinasuggested on the map on p. 87). 31, from Tinaz, lists a number of smaller koina, severalpreviously unknown. 36: a long honoriµc decree for a Rhodian issued by the smallkoinon of the Leukoideis, based at Çırpı (c. 107–80 ..?) a koinon whose main o¸cialwas a λψν0σγθΚ (note that the neighbouring koinon of the Londeis—thus farunknown—had archontes: cf. discussion at no 39; republication of IStratonikeia 8). 38:dedication of the Leukoideis for a Rhodian, who, among other things, had held theo¸ce of ο ξουαν αΚ of the koinon. 48: republication of ILabraunda 3.2, 42: afourth-century judgement of Eupolemos concerning the—then still—polis of Pladasawith extensive discussion of the city’s history by A. Bresson. 55,f r o mT a şyeniçe(Thera?): a list of Rhodian names (late third century or somewhat later) inscribed on arockface underneath a niche: a dedication? 61: a third-century subscription found atAkçaova, north of Muğla and attributed to the koinon of the Tarmianoi by the eds.Long discussion of the nature of that koinon and its constituent communities on thebasis of this text and of 62, which lists the same communities, and has been redated byA. Bresson to the µrst century .. 84 and 98: republication of two decrees for thePanamaran priest Leon, issued by the Kallipolitai and the Laodikeis respectively;discussion of the latter’s identity and possible location. 90 and 91: republication of twomajor inscriptions from the time of Mausolos, found at Sekköy, and discussion of the224   numerous small Karian poleis listed in them. On the major importance of these textssee also P. Debord, L’Asie Mineure au IVe siècle (412–323 a.C.) (Bordeaux, 1999),pp. 19–181; 92A and B: list of contributors followed by a decree of theanonymous citylocated at Sekköy—both Hellenistic.‘The uplands of Karia’. Before this book had even seen the light, John Ma (‘TheEpigraphy of Hellenistic Asia Minor: A Survey of Research (1992–1999)’, AJA 104[2000], 113) had already questioned the meaning of its—provisional—title: ‘What doesthe Turco-French team mean when it speaks of “[les hautes terres de] la Carie duSud”?’ We µnd an answer of  sorts in the introduction to §5. Here, on p. 81, AlainBresson (having already taken notice of Ma’s comments, such is the speed of modernacademic exchange: see p. 81 n. 1) gives two answers: µrst, although mountainousthroughout, in this central part of Karia the mountains are higher than those in thewest, and this alone would justify the use of the term ‘hautes terres’. But there is apolitical reason too, for during a large part of antiquity this region was more or lesspermanently under the control of Rhodes, a situation that has given rise to the nowconventional designation of ‘Rhodian Subject Peraia’, a term µrst used by Fraser andBean in their book of the same title. The region around Sekköy in the west was never,however, subject to Rhodes other than for a brief interval between 188 and 167/166,and so, for the sake of neutrality, it was decided to opt for the designation ‘hautesterres de Carie’. So far Bresson. One might object that it was, of course, a deliberatechoice to include the region around Sekköy in the µrst place, even though both in apolitical and in a physical sense it belongs more happily within another set-up (seeabove). The neutrality of the title, then, may be political in a di¶erent sense, in that it isone way of conveying a view of the extent of this region’s ‘Rhodian-ness’ that di¶ersmarkedly from those of earlier scholars, in particular Fraser and Bean, and ofdistancing oneself from the equally ‘political’ title of that earlier book (for a criticalview of the Fraser–Bean view of Rhodian ‘control’ see most recently V. Gabrielsen,C&M 51 [2000], 129–83).Let me be more speciµc. Of the just over 100 entries in §5 (the inscriptions), abouthalf either refer to Rhodians speciµcally or do so indirectly (e.g. 55 contains a list ofRhodian names; 26 is a dedication to Zeus Atabyrios). If we take out the fragmentarytexts, milestones, simple dedications, etc. the proportion becomes greater still. Theneoria subscription discussed above is crucial. If Rhodes was behind the building ofthe dockyards at Akbük, then the location of the inscription itself, at Pisye, some 30km away, is noteworthy (see the maps on pp. 19, 86, and 87). This text is in fact theearliest to refer to the fact that the Pisyetai had formed a koinon with (some of) thePladaseis on the coast. Therefore, Rhodian involvement in the formation of thatkoinon is a possibility. This in turn raises questions about the extent and date ofRhodian control over large areas of this part of Karia. This was certainly a region ofkoina, large and small: no cities developed in the course of the Hellenistic period, eventhough several  of its larger poljés,  or  upland  plains (on the word see Debord’sintroductory pp. 11–18), had all the attributes to achieve polis-status: so, for instance,the large plain of Muğla with that city’s impressive acropolis, or the region aroundPisye, modern Yeşilyurt (Fig. 18, p. 26), or Yerkesik (Fig. 30, p. 33). It is often repeatedthat the koinon (a loose federation of village settlements with a common political andreligious structure) was a typical Karian phenomenon which somehow sprouted fullyformed from the region’s physical geography. But elsewhere, similar groupings ofvillage settlements did turn themselves into poleis and developed polis institutions.That parts of Karia were already well on the way to adopting polis structures is shownin the fourth-century Sekköy inscriptions referred to above. In the ‘hautes terres’, this   225stunted development, as Alain Bresson convincingly suggests (p. 81), must therefore beseen as the direct result of Rhodian control: the status of koinon was essentially one ofdependency; within the wider Rhodian federation (if that is what it was), the only polisand demos acknowledged were those of Rhodes itself.This is a major feature of this entire region and one whose interest goes well beyondthe merely political in that it must have had an e¶ect on the economic, religious, andinstitutional functioning of a network of communities. Given all this, onewould like toknow in particular what was the impact of the Rhodian state, of whose controllingmechanisms we only catch glimpses in the inscriptions (strategoi and/or hagemonesare explicitly referred to in four inscriptions: 58, 63, 69, and 70), on the physicaldevelopment of these communities: the presence or lack of monumental buildings; thenature and location of any monumental structures; or the region’s infrastructure.At this  point,  one turns to  the section containing  the site  descriptions. It ishere, however, that the Rhodian question is approached with some considerablecircumspection. Many of the—excellent—descriptions, drawings, and photographsshow fortiµcations: walls, towers, entire fortiµed complexes, such as the acropolis atAldiran Asari, part of the koinon of the Pisyetai (pp. 27–8), the citadel at Yerkesik(pp. 33–5), the fortresses at Çirpi whose strategic position vis-à-vis the adjoiningterritory of Stratonikeia is emphasized (pp. 44–5), the tetrapyrgia at Yeniköy(pp.  46–7),  the  fortress at Bağyaka (pp. 50–1), and in particular the string offortiµcations along the valley of the Koca Çay, one of the access routes into theinterior from Akbük on the coast (pp. 52–64). The dating of these structures isproblematic and di¸cult, and to date and attribute conµdently where there is nocertainty would have been wrong; much more work would need to be done to developa proper chronology. Even so, it is hard to escape the impression that, whereverpossible, a Rhodian context or even Rhodian use and expansion of earlier structures isdenied or doubted. So, for example, on the string of fortresses and watch towers alongthe valley of the Koca Çay, which Paton and Myres and Fraser and Bean assumed tobe Rhodian or at least to have served Rhodian purposes, or the structures at Bağyakawhose ‘paternité rhodienne parait di¸cile a admettre’ (p. 51). Why? The fortress atHayıtlı which Guidi had dated to the Hellenistic period is here tentatively attributed totheclassical period (pp. 45, 48). For the large complex at Sarniçwhose date isuncertainbut which could be mid-fourth century and thus Hekatomnid, or could be mid-thirdcentury and thus Rhodian, the argument given is that even though the work of thewalls and structures resembles closely that of the acropolis at Loryma and Amosin theincorporated Peraia, ‘il paraît di¸cile de penser que les Rhodiens construisaient unemuraille à Sarniç . . . au IIIe siècle, alors qu’ils ne contrôlaient pas encore la région’(p.62). The existence of the new dockyard inscription surely casts doubt on this assertion.Fraser and Bean had suggested a military use for this site (Rhodian Peraia p. 76:‘clearly intended to defend the boundary of Rhodian territory in this direction’, i.e.towards the west and Keramos), and thought most of the walls were Rhodian or, ifearlier, reused; the authors of HTC do not accept this (pp. 62, 63).My only real criticism of this otherwise fascinating and scholarly book is that a dis-cussion of the ‘Rhodian question’and a head-on engagement with what earlier scholarshave (rightly or wrongly) assumed about the nature and the impact of Rhodian controlon this region would have o¶ered a µrmer framework for readers and authors alike toassess the abundant and extraordinarily interesting evidence presented here.University College London R. VAN BREMENdoi:10.1093/clrevj/bni123226   

The Carian Uplands: P. Debord, E. Varinlioglu (edd.): Les hautes terres de Carie. With A. Bresson, P. Brun, R. Descat, K. Konuk (Ausonius Publications, Mémoires 4.) Pp. 329, maps, pls., ills. Bordeaux: Diffusion de Boccard, 2001. Cased, €73. ISBN: 2-910023-20-6.

The Carian Uplands: P. Debord, E. Varinlioglu (edd.): Les hautes terres de Carie. With A. Bresson, P. Brun, R. Descat, K. Konuk (Ausonius Publications, Mémoires 4.) Pp. 329, maps, pls., ills. Bordeaux: Diffusion de Boccard, 2001. Cased, €73. ISBN: 2-910023-20-6.

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