Discovering Rome's Eastern Frontier: On Foot Through a Vanished World 9780192843425, 0192843427

Citation preview

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

DI S C OV E R I NG ROM E’ S E A S T E R N F RON T I E R

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

Passage of the Antitaurus (Patricia Mitford, September 1963)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

Discovering Rome’s Eastern Frontier On Foot Through a Vanished World

T I MOT H Y BRUCE M I T FOR D

1

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Timothy Bruce Mitford 2021 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020952420 ISBN 978–0–19–284342–5 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843425.001.0001 Printed in Great Britain by Bell & Bain Ltd., Glasgow Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

For my brave and gallant wife Patricia and in memory of my father Terence Bruce Mitford FBA Knight of the Silver Cross with Swords of the Royal Order of George I

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

FOR E WOR D by Norman Hammond

Half a century ago I was exploring the towers of Trebizond when a passing Turk, seeing my antiquarian interest, showed me a Roman legionary tombstone lying in his friend’s back garden. It was well carved, well preserved and with a clear inscription to T. Aurelius Apolinarius, a soldier of the Legio XV Apollinaris ‘from Caesarea, who had served for six years in a vexillation of that legion’. I duly recorded it: only later, back in England, did somebody mention that Timothy Bruce-­Mitford was doing research on that Roman frontier in eastern Anatolia and might find it useful. Thus began my long-­standing though tangential relationship with his work: I had worked on the Roman frontier in north Africa, trying to trace an important road of the Limes Tripolitanus, and had then done archaeological survey further east, beyond the limits of the Roman Empire in Afghanistan, but in Turkey I had been just a traveller in an antique land. Still, Tim’s attempt to document the web of military roads, forts and supporting settle­ment across the dramatic mountain terrain of Anatolia, so different from the gentle semi-­desert of the Gebel Nefusa in Libya and Tunisia, fascinated me: running south to north for almost five hundred miles, climbing the Euphrates valley from the fringes of Mesopotamia up through the Taurus and Antitaurus ranges, then across the Pontic mountains to the sea at Trebizond (Roman Trapezus), it was testament to Imperial determination. It was, as Glen Bowersock remarked in the TLS [8 February 2019: p. 33], ‘a world utterly alien to Roman taste and architecture’ with ‘a complex indigenous culture’ within which ‘a vivid picture emerges of the constant shifting of legionary forces in support of imperial campaigns in the East, above all the Armenian and Parthian wars of Trajan’ in ad 114–17, with a reinforcing visit by Hadrian to Trapezus around ad 129 when he improved the harbour works. Tracing this complex frontier involved a similarly Roman resolve. Over a century ago, as Mitford notes, the scholar-­explorer D. G. Hogarth had concluded ‘It is impossible to suppose that an existing road can ever have run down its entire length . . . the Euphrates itself . . . emerging from one frightful gorge only to enter another, is a natural barrier, needing but a very thin line of human defence’. Not many people went to challenge this: not many have been able to. The wild, remote terrain which von Moltke in 1838 described as imaginably marking ‘the end of the world’ was riven by political unrest. The Armenian massacres of 1895 and 1915, the 1916 Russian incursion, the war with Greece and exchange of populations in 1922, the Kurdish revolts of 1921 and 1937 and more recent Kurdish–Turkish ethnic conflict have made field research along the Euphrates frontier impracticable. Change and destruction, from the obliteration of Armenian sites to the construction of a series of massive dams from the 1960s onwards, have utterly changed the cultural landscape. Tim Mitford was probably the last person to experience this vanished world; crucially, he was also probably the only person to combine scholarly knowledge with sufficiently high-­level contacts inside the Turkish government apparatus to get the best out

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 viii FOR EWOR D

of it. Almost a quarter of a century before the collapse of the Iron Curtain he also went east of Trabzon into Soviet Armenia and Georgia, to explore the Abkhazian Wall and Sebastopolis (now Sukhumi), last in the chain of anchorages protected by forts that stretched for almost 250 miles along the Black Sea coast, down from the high passes of the western Caucasus. The Euphrates frontier from Samsat near Adıyaman, where the lowlands leading to Mesopotamia begin, north across the high ranges to the Black Sea at Trabzon, spans some two hundred miles (320 km) as the crow flies, but more than twice that along the river and over the mountain passes. Its purpose was to protect the rich lands of Asia Minor from potential enemies including the powerful Parthian state to the east and its Sassanian successor. Initiated under Claudius and Nero, and consolidated by that consummate soldier Vespasian in ad 71, the Romans constructed a network of military roads for more than a thousand miles (1,600 km), large sections surviving as cobbled roadbed and with masonry bridges at river crossings. The defences were anchored on four legionary fortresses at Samosata (now Samsat), Melitene (Eski Malatya), Satala (Sadak), and Trapezus (Trabzon), interspersed with smaller forts held by auxiliaries along the roads. My own small contribution, the tombstone of Apolinarius, apparently helped to establish the presence of a powerful garrison at Trapezus in the second century, probably a rotating detachment from the legion based at Satala to the south. Apolinarius himself is so far the only known recruit from Caesarea (probably from Mazaka, the capital of Cappadocia, now Kayseri), opening another narrow window into how legionary manpower was procured. The routes across the Taurus and Antitaurus, the Pontic ranges, and the rugged uplands of Armenia Minor were not just used by the Romans: much of what Tim Mitford was able to trace was helped by the accounts of travellers along Ottoman caravan tracks. Four centuries before the Roman Empire was born, the Greek general Xenophon describes in Book IV of the Anabasis his fighting retreat from Mesopotamia to the Black Sea across these same mountains: one of the enduring thrills of Mitford’s adventures, and of this book, is how in 1996 he and his local guide determined the high-­level frontier road followed by Hadrian in Xenophon’s footsteps, and found the place where the Ten Thousand finally saw the sea and crying thalassa (or thalatta) built a cairn of shields and stones to mark the spot. The cairn is still there: just seeing Mitford’s pictures of it sends shivers down my spine. Mitford mined the Classical sources, employed the historical ethnography of Ottoman times, and followed in part of his route the travels of D. G. Hogarth in 1894 and Franz Cumont in 1900, but bringing it all together with the plethora of scattered and shattered remains of the Roman frontier works has been his own signal achievement. When he began almost half a century ago, much of rural Anatolia had a way of life little changed since antiquity: villages inaccessible by road, where mules, oxen, and water buffalo were the means of transport and traction. Roman coins, found in the fields, were used as small change in semi-­barter exchange. Local governors assigned soldiers from the jandarma to help Mitford, while villagers were a constant source of information and hospitality. His experiences and his photographs can never be replicated: four great dams on the Euphrates have brought construction traffic and road access, drowned large tracts of fertile land and obliterated numerous ancient sites such as Zeugma, with its famed (and now relocated) mosaics; the same has happened further east on the Tigris with sites such as Hasankeyf. Mitford’s explorations, by Volkswagen until the chassis fractured, by local

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

FOR EWOR D 

ix

bus thereafter, on foot where the roads ran out, and even by goatskin raft where the footpaths ended, were in a past country where things were done differently. Tim was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in March 1974 (coincidentally on the same ballot as me, we later discovered) for frontier fieldwork carried out while also a full-­time naval officer. He continued to interpolate naval service, including a stint at Turkish naval headquarters in Ankara, with months of exploration along the Euphrates. After leaving Crown service he was able to complete his magnum opus East of Asia Minor, winner of the British Academy Medal in 2018: its densely-­ packed archaeological and epigraphic detail was leavened by his account of how the work had been done, and the present volume brings that experience to the foreground. It shows how he filled one of the great gaps in our understanding of the ancient world, and especially in Roman frontier studies: it has the resonance of great travel writers like Freya Stark and Patrick Leigh Fermor, and is a poignant reminder of a world we have lost.

Professor Norman Hammond, FBA, is a Senior Fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge University, a Research Associate at the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, and Archaeology Correspondent of The Times since 1967. He is co-­editor of The Archaeology of Afghanistan (1978, rev. edn. 2019).

B C

Turhal

Vesirköprü

D

M ap 1.  Eastern Turkey (1942)

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

A E

Ir. Yıldız

1

F

G H

I

0

0

Silvan

J

Arzen

Tatvan

Horasan

K

200 km

100 miles

L

1

Doğubayazıt

M

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

PR E FAC E ‘Far beneath us we now glimpsed the Euphrates in its narrow gorge, the river that the mightiest Roman emperors envisaged as the natural frontier of their immeasurable empire. The whole environment is so wild, the further river bank so bereft of any trace of cultivation, and the mountains so trackless, that one can imagine that they mark the end of the world.’ Looking down on the Euphrates at the Keban crossing in March 1838, Captain von Moltke, military adviser to Hafiz Pasha at Eski Malatya, and later field marshal, evokes the whole content of this project. It started in 1962, when Sir Ian Richmond, matchless in humanity and learning, and Professor of the Archaeology of the Roman Empire, urged me to search out Rome’s imperial frontier along the upper Euphrates in eastern Turkey, in an attempt to fill one of the great gaps in our knowledge of the ancient world. This account is the product of half a century of research and exploration along the great river, across Armenia Minor and the Pontic mountains to the Black Sea, and into Soviet Armenia, Georgia, and the Caucasus passes.1 My father took a keen interest, shrouded in silence. From SOE school graduating ‘a fine shot and good in silent killing’, he and Jack Hamson arrived in Crete in October 1940 to set up the resistance with Pendlebury, and open a sabotage school on Suda Island, base for their caique raids on Italian installations on the islands of the southern Aegean. ‘Past the Venetian fort and down to the water in the night, brilliant, with a full moon picking out the snows of the White Mountains, we went in silence with equipment and rifles and bombs and knives through the ruins of other wars, to face new peril.’ Defending Rethymno airfield against the German parachutists, and snatched from Crete in the final hours by the Royal Navy, he established an SOE station in Aleppo. He was D/H 45, and his mission was to organize SOE work for eastern Turkey. After years of epigraphic work in Cyprus he spoke Turkish. The Aleppo prison was full of convicted murderers. From it he recruited a band of Kurds and Armenians, a small private army, twenty-­four strong, which he named ‘Kalpaks’, with the cover-­name ‘Trans-­Jordanian Scouts’, and trained to sabotage the Turkish railway route from the Caucasus, by Malatya, into Syria and Iraq, in the event of Turkey joining the Axis powers. Patrick Leigh-­Fermor remembered ‘watching the Kalpaks drilling very smartly at the school of irregular warfare on Mount Carmel above Haifa, with your father. I think he was instructing in demolitions. I was weapon training instructor with, I think, Nick Hammond. The Kurds were a very spectacular lot, all tall, scowling and fiercely whiskered and very soldierly with impeccable battledress and sheepskin kalpaks worn dead straight. They were to form a resistance force’ (Fig. 0.1). In November 1942, William Jordan recalled in Cairo, ‘Bruce Mitford was a member of our organisation, or “the Firm” as we called it, and currently concerned with some cloak-­and-­dagger work with a pack of cut-­throat looking Armenians, whom he kept hidden away most of the time in Transjordan’ (Fig. 0.2). In a file in the National Archives, ‘a less gently mannered age than this would have called these enthusiastic thugs. We politely say they showed a marked disrespect for the sanctity of human life.’

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 xii 

PR EFACE A

B

2

D

C

PONTUS EUXINUS

TRAPEZUS CERASUS

S 1

O

P

P

COLONIA

OU

LYC U S

SAB

RIN

ISEN

E

A D

4

I A

EUP

Malatya

HRA

P

L

T

E

ES

SE

H

TES

IA

E

N

NE

Eski KâhtaV E

E

N E E A G

Solalı

Karakaya

NE

A AR

R

M

ES

Siverek

AMIDA

OP

Adıyaman

O

M

M

DOLICHE

O TA

SAMOSATA

OS

TIG

RIS

MIA

Atatürk

RH

Birecik

ZEUGMA

OE

DARA

EDESSA

NE

CARRHAE

RESAINA

EU PH

R

0

AT

E S

I A R S Y

S

U

Palu ARSAMOSATA ?

Harput

UAV I N

CHABINA

RHANDEIA ?

PERRE

GERMANICIA

C

N

O

MELITENE

A

E

N ARSA IAS

Keban

SINIS COLONIA

Topalı Yazı Köy Elbistan

EN

DASCUSA

S

C

IS

AT E S

Arabkir

ARCA

THEODOSIOPOLIS

PY

S R U

MELAS

IL

ELEGEIA ? Aşkale

UR

T

I

A

T

AC

i m r s

e

D

a.

VARUCINTE ?

Kemah

Kemaliye

U

O tlukbeli D

Kop Gd.

R

A

ZIMARA

TEPHRIKE

SATALA

Erzincan

S

X

P P C A A

HARIS

M IR ETN IC O R E

ORB

3

N

NE

Refahiye

HAI

ZARA

LA

PSI

GYMNIAS ?

ENE LISS

O

LY S

SEBASTEIA

6

ORBA

ARM E NIA

2

5

Kelkit

AM

R AT

AIT

NICOPOLIS

HA

AC

PH

S

Hadrak

U

CU

R

D

A

Y

R

E

E

LY

T

Gümüşhane

N

A

S

U

)(

NEOCAESAREA

0

50 miles 100 km

M ap 2.  Euphrates Frontier: northern Syria to the Euxine (Ancient and Modern Names)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

PR EFACE 

xiii

F ig . 0.1  ‘Kalpaks drilling on Mount Carmel in 1942’ (Patrick Leigh-­Fermor, 2002)

F ig . 0.2  Transit Camp near Baghdad 1943. Kalpaks, D/H 45, and, right, Bob Bury, SBS hero killed near Volos

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 xiv PR EFACE

Seizing the high passes of the western Caucasus in September 1942, the German army was expected to transit through eastern Turkey in May 1943, mainly by train en route to Syria. Plans for resistance and sabotage were ready. ‘To go on an operation was the honest ambition of every worthwhile officer in The Firm’, but my father would not, he once confided, have lasted for more than a few weeks. But the German advance stalled with winter and disaster at Stalingrad. As Turkey remained neutral, there was no chance, Franz Maier wrote, of performing Lawrentian feats. Taking his devoted assassins, instead, into 1st SAS (Special Air Service) in early 1943, he invaded Sicily, and raided in the Dodecanese with SBS, leading a patrol in a minute caique to capture the holy island of Patmos with a crew of four. He later returned to SOE, parachuting by night into the Omalo plain in the heart of the White Mountains, as liaison officer to ELAS.2 It was his particular task in 1942 and early 1943 to know about eastern Turkey, about routes across the Taurus, and about the Dersim beyond the Euphrates; and, as it transpired, my privilege to explore them. For it was through this region, beside the upper Euphrates, and across the northern mountains, that the Roman frontier passed, closely documented by the ancient geographers. The Peutinger Table (Fig. A2) preserves a detailed road map. Ptolemy (Fig. A3) gives us the names and positions of dozens of cities in Cappadocia and Armenia Minor. The Antonine Itinerary (Fig. A1) lists routes marked by forts and stations.3 The emperor Claudius too knew the geography of the Taurus gorge, and reckoned the length of Armenia from Dascusa, on the Euphrates in furthest Cappadocia. During Nero’s Armenian wars, Corbulo guarded his vital supply route from Trapezus (now Trabzon) across the Pontic mountains, rushed camels laden with corn over the Taurus, and witnessed the horrors of the Armenian winter. Roads and facilities established by ad 69 enabled the rapid march of Virdius Geminus and some two thousand legionaries from Syria to Trapezus, to put down turmoil in the eastern Black Sea. Concerned by the incessant raids of coastal barbarians, Vespasian moved two Syrian legions, with a full establishment of auxiliary cohorts and cavalry, into Cappadocia in ad 71, under a consular governor; and annexed Commagene and Armenia Minor. The basis of a permanent frontier had been created under Nero and Corbulo. It was now consolidated.4 From Samosata, Vespasian’s frontier stretched for nearly 500 miles to Trapezus. Seven times the length and climbing to seven times the altitude of Hadrian’s Wall, the line was confronted by four great ranges: the Taurus and Antitaurus, through which the upper Euphrates, at a median altitude of about 3,000 feet, has carved enormous gorges; north of the river, the fractured mountains of Armenia Minor; and the high Pontic ranges tower­ing abruptly above the Black Sea. The road network covered more than 1,000 miles in the frontier region. Over and around each range were two routes, and the northern support road from Ancyra divided at Nicopolis into three, leading eastward over the mountains, and south and south-­east to the Euphrates. To ensure the allegiance of the coastal tribes, a chain of forts and strategic anchorages extended eastwards from Trapezus for 240 miles to Sebastopolis, below the foothills and the high passes of the western Caucasus. This vast and remote project was driven by the imperative to protect the ancient wealth and civilization of Asia Minor, against potential enemies and established powers

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

PR EFACE 

xv

not encountered in other sectors of the imperial frontiers: in northern Mesopotamia, the Parthian and, from the third century, the Sassanian empires; in the east the Armenian kingdom and their conflicting interests; and in the north barbarians, Pontic tribes, and the movement of whole peoples pressing across the Caucasus. This, beyond the Euphrates, was arguably the most vital region for Roman security. The frontier was guarded ultimately by four legions, their fortresses at Samosata (Samsat), Melitene (Eski Malatya), Satala (Sadak), and Trapezus; and by a large and permanent auxiliary army, cavalry comprising more than a third, stationed in up to 29 intermediate forts and positions linked by a military road or by sea. Known in large part from the Galatian and Cappadocian diploma of March ad 101, and from inscriptions, from the account of Arrian, governor of Cappadocia under Hadrian, and from the Notitia Dignitatum, the garrison was to endure for 500 years. All had remained hidden from scholarship. Only Hogarth and Yorke had looked for the frontier, riding north from Samosata in May 1894, through a land ravaged since Roman times by nearly 300 years of Arab raids, the onslaught of the Selcuks in the eleventh, and the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The devastation is plain to see in the raised ground level within the Selcuk walls of Melitene, where the legionary fortress lies buried beneath 8 metres of destruction layers: Byzantine, Islamic, and Turkish. Moving rapidly to avoid cholera and quarantine cordons, and fearful of arrest, Hogarth took five weeks on horseback to reach the Black Sea. The sheer distance across mountainous and virtually unexplored country rendered his observations hurried and incomplete. Indeed, by bad luck or judgement, he failed to record any certain trace of a military roadway or forts, or any sure evidence for an organized frontier outside the legionary fort­resses: ‘if it were not for the remains of bridges over the Angu (Arabkir) Chai and Kara Budak, we could say that we had found nothing certainly Roman between the Taurus and Satala’. Reflecting on his journey, just completed, Hogarth wrote from Trebizond in June 1894, ‘We have seen too much of the (Euphrates) valley with our own eyes and asked too many questions of the natives, to have missed an existing road. Looking to the mountainous character of the Euphrates valley, again and again narrowing to a mere fissure with rocky walls, backed by snow-­clad peaks, it is impossible to suppose that an existing road can ever have run down its entire length.’ There was, in summary, no formal frontier: ‘the Euphrates itself, an absolutely unfordable river, flowing at a rate of seldom less than five miles an hour, in one long succession of dangerous rapids, never less than two hundred yards, and often quite a mile broad, emerging from one frightful gorge only to enter another, is a natural barrier, needing but a very thin line of human defence’.5 Fortunate in his timing, Hogarth’s conclusion has remained largely unchallenged. Worse was soon to follow. The Armenian massacres in 1895 and 1915, the Russian advance through Pontus and Armenia Minor in 1916, the expulsion of the Pontic Greeks in 1922, Kurdish revolts in 1921 and 1937, enduring and increasing sensitivities about Kurds, and wild, remote mountains accessible only on horseback or on foot: all these, and a difficult language, insulated the frontier from further research. The emergence of the PKK in August 1984 added a further burden. Eight hundred miles from the Aegean, this is a remote and desolate region. More than a century ago, Yorke wrote: ‘Our journey [from Samsat] as far as Trebizond was made entirely on horseback. . . . It is not possible to cross the districts through which we travelled, except for very short distances, in any other manner. . . . It is a rare exception in this part of Turkey

Y

C

A

O

ICONIUM

L

N

A

T

T

C

A

I

I S LY

HA

AAV E N E

SCYLAX

N

R Y

T

LYCU S

U

CERASUS

I

L

A

COMANA PONTICA

C

SEBASTEIA

O

TARSUS

I

A

NICOPOLIS

ZEUGMA

S

0

0

EDESSA

SAMOSATA

N E E G A M

I A R S Y

C

M DOLICHE

O

GERMANICIA

C I A )( I

FAUSTINOPOLIS

P

I A

S

C A P PA D O C I C U S A D R

POLEMONION

PONTUS EUXINUS

B l a c k S ea

E

AR COLOPENE M MI E N I A E N N SE O R IAN L AV

D

O

IRIS

ZELA SEBASTOPOLIS

SAR

P

TYANA

A

Cilician Gates

C Y A N

CYBISTRA

KANA

IA

A

P

GAZIOURA

A

NEOCAESAREA

AMASEIA

D

U S R A U R SEN U MO GA IC (U A E CAESAREA L SAR )R T I IM GA EU P I EN C RS MELAS E ARGAEUS M. T MELITENE AU RI MELI N A TENE ARCHELAIS I A A COMANA CAPPADOCICA N O A T S A C S U R I U COCUSUS T

L

M

OX ?

A NT

A

TAVIUM

YS AL

H

P

M ap 3.  The West: Galatia and Cappadocia (Ancient and Modern Names)

4

3

G

H

PA D

IA

M. US

ANCYRA

ON

AMISUS

G A L A T I C U S

A

PH EU

MA N

2

AG

C

L

O

P

SINOPE

O

M

E

B

IA N

S U C

1

C

RA

PA P H L

P

T ES

CA

H

A

S

100 km

50 miles

AMIDA

SATALA

E

3

TRAPEZUS

F

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 xvi PR EFACE

TE RA

Melas

P

I

AR

S S HO

PI

Süphan Da.

N

Hasankeyf BEZABDE

E S TI

L.

ES

DARA NISIBIS

IS

S

LY CH NI TI S L.

ES

AX

Areni AR

N S

)( Derbent

Baku

C A SP IUM / HYR C A N IUM MARE

F

O

0

Mt Kerefto 0

A

DI P

ME

Karjagino

A

E

N

E

4

200 km

100 miles

CLAUSTRA CASPIARUM ?

L B A N I A Büyük Taş

Nedz

PHRAATA ?

Tabriz

R

A

O

Büyük Degne

Salavat )(

M

A T

L.

GR TI

D

M ap 4.  The East: Pontic Coast, Armenia, Iberia, Albania, Mesopotamia, Atropatene (Ancient and Modern Names)

S

E

u c NE hi

ZABDICEN

A

A M CASTRA MAURORUM I A IAB EN E S Y R I A

OT

Van

Mt Ararat

N

S

RU S

CY

GORNEAE ARTAXATA

Aparan

di E

OP

rd

T ILENE S GU M R I NSolalı R Z A N A E N E HizanO U MARTYROPOLIS Siirt G O Arzen AMIDA RD TIGRANOCERTA ? M YE Ca

A SAN I

M

EUPHRAT E S

U

I B HARMOZICA E R I A

S

E

PR EFACE 

A

A

)( Darial

A

D

AN

SAMOSATA EDESSA ZEUGMA RESAINA CARRHAE

T

Dersim

R P A H E Harput N E

SO

A

D

C

RAUGONIA ? KAINEPOLIS CHADAS ? ANDAGA ? Iğdır THEODOSIOPOLIS

A

SATALA Erzincan

Y

S

SI

MP

A AC

E

IS

PHASIS

CH

U

M I AT

4

R

NICOPOLIS

A

R

APSARUS

PHASIS PETRA

CHOBUS

L

A

C

M ar

MELITENE

3

2

HYSSOU LIMEN TRAPEZUS

PONTUS EU XINU S

B l a c k S ea

O

C

abakh

S

K ar

E U PH RA TE

1

PITYUS SEBASTOPOLIS

B

C S

A

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

xvii

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 xviii PR EFACE

for any road to be practicable for wheels.’ The line of the frontier is still largely untouched by modern roads and tracks. Beside the Euphrates in Cappadocia only a single road was open to vehicles in the 1960s. There was no equivalent in the Taurus, in central Armenia Minor, or over the Pontic mountains. Villages, without electricity or tractors, were linked by mule tracks. They preserved the pattern and spread of population; and animals and the land preserved a way of life unchanged in essence since Roman times. Sadak (Satala) was crowded with vast herds of water buffaloes. There was no sign in the east of the YSE programme, beneficial but disastrous for antiquity, to bring road, water, and electricity to every village. Ancient artefacts, inscriptions, and coins had yet to find commercial value, and the evidence was still on the ground. Inscriptions survived in houses. Roman coins were still in use around Agı̆ n as a form of barter currency: the watchman on the Keban bridge had a pocketful of denarii. The Euphrates valley was intact: the great dam at Keban was marked in outline on the rocks, but the Karakaya in the Taurus and the Atatürk below Samosata were not yet contemplated. It was a time of richer local interest, by now almost extinguished. Local guides were crucial for Xenophon. So have they been for me. They knew the ancient tracks between villages and over the mountains, knew where to look for coins and pottery and written stones. For this was not the fleeting, cocooned fieldwork of landrovers, day trips, and hotels, or the confined archaeology of the green fields and building sites that offer up the minutiae of Roman life in northern Europe. In truth, it was not regular archaeology at all. My task in essence was exploration, across a huge and untouched canvas starting 400 miles east of Ankara, under skies of crystal clarity, and against a background of cheerful discomfort and the unexpected. Bears lurked in the remote oak forests of the Taurus and the tangled ravines of Armenia Minor and the Pontic mountains; cubs played one day under the seats of my elderly bus, bound for Melitene. Boars large as small donkeys. Villages of mud-­brick houses, walls caked with drying ox-­dung, windows narrowed to postcard size in some, torn by blood feuds. Threshing floors and wooden ox-­drawn sledges studded with flints, unchanged since the Eclogues. Men harvesting in white tunic and şalvar below the Samosata aqueduct. Families of Zaza Kurds living in Roman tower and tombs below the Taurus. Women shrouded in black from head to toe, with latticed eyes, gliding through the evening darkness in Kemaliye, and horses at dawn bearing long sheets of unleavened bread reaching almost to the ground on either flank. The menace of scorpions, shepherd dogs, and village guards, and the hazards of heat stroke, altitude sickness, trachoma, and bus crashes during countless overnight journeys from Ankara. Death threats and parties of armed Kurds in the Taurus gorge. Arrests as an Armenian or other form of spy. Churches converted into homes. Goatskin rafts. The last caravans, camels laden with cooking pots and hollow beehive logs, high on the frontier road across the Antitaurus. Beekeepers rich in local knowledge, alert for hungry bears and the dreaded but lovely song of bee-­eaters, wheeling so often above Roman roads. Carpets of crocuses among snowfields below the Zigana pass, blizzards at 9,000 feet in Armenia Minor. A beating by washerwomen, and a mile-­long queue of water buffaloes steaming in the dawn frost at Pontic Sebastopolis, drawing carts with huge wooden wheels, piled high with sugar-­beet. Lignite smoke billowing from the rail tunnels below the Munzur Dağları. The weekly train from Kars, my small Volkswagen manhandled through the Iron Curtain from a Turkish to a waiting Armenian flat truck surrounded by Kalashnikovs, to Leninakan; and thence to Eçmiadzin, Tiflis, and the Darial pass, down the awful Terek gorge to Vladikavkaz, and to Sukhumi. Jeeps and red-­legged partridge shoots. Special Teams of jandarma, chasing birds fiercely uphill. Bronze Age settlement mounds, with skulls and fragments of fine pottery. Roman

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

PR EFACE 

xix

coins used for barter, inscriptions used as doorposts, steps, or hearths. Prayers in place of food during Ramazan in the Taurus gorge. Great trays perched on the legs of stools turned upside down and crowded with communal bowls: yogurt, bulgur, beans and bean soup, tomatoes, cucumber, peppers and pickled peppers, yufka, figs, mulberries, honey, eggs, chicken, geese, goat, and occasional dynamited fish. Quilts laid on hard earth floors. Tea and interminable conversations, of crops, religion, money, gold, Armenian treasure, football. Old men who remembered the caravans, and the passage of the Armenians down to the Syrian desert. Adulation in 1966 of Bobby Charlton, and conviction in the Taurus gorge that the Queen is Elizabeth Taylor. All has changed. The agricultural credits of the later 1960s swept away the ancient way of life. Ox and water-­buffalo were slaughtered to make way for tractors and a need for money to operate them. The arrival of electricity brought television and bills, and a subsistence economy based on an almost feudal social structure was eroded by development, and undermined by escalating drift to the cities of the west. A large part of the frontier itself has disappeared: the once-­great city and fortress of Samosata and its surrounding valley, the bed of the Taurus gorge, the Euphrates crossing and the plains that stretched beside Melitene, the rich pastures around Dascusa, and the bed of the Antitaurus gorge, all have vanished under water. There has been political instability too. This project began before the violence and suspicions of the 1970s, resumed after the restoration of law and order by the military in 1980, and with their support continued through the early years of PKK turmoil in the south-­east. But by the 1990s, in many of the vilayets along the frontier, the window of permission was closing again. Despite my still rudimentary Turkish, the 1960s were thoroughly productive. I held a Fellowship at the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara. My survey permit covered most of the eastern vilayets. Except in the Caucasus, fieldwork was on foot. Armed with Cumont’s epigraphic notebooks, I was vigorously encouraged by Michael and Mary Gough, and generously supported by the Royal Navy; which, beguiled by National Service as a Midshipman RNVR in a destroyer and a mine-­sweeper in the Mediterranean, and towards the height of the Cold War, I rejoined in September 1965. Then and later the Navy required interpreters, and gave me time in 1966 to walk over the Antitaurus, in 1967 to revisit Dascusa, and in 1972 to clamber through the great gorge of the Taurus: and so to complete my thesis. But further work ground to a halt. Plans funded by the British Academy in 1974, to pass through the gorge by raft, were vetoed by the British Ambassador, and he confined me to Istanbul during three months of language training in 1976. In 1981, I returned to Ankara as British National Representative in the Headquarters of the Turkish Navy. This brought Turkish support at the highest levels: an admiral on the National Security Council, and Kâmran İnan, younger son of Simko, and until 2002 Minister for the South East and Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in the Turkish Parliament. The Turkish Navy had no problem with a hobi like archaeology, and permission came rapidly: ‘to carry out research on the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire, and on the classical inscriptions of north eastern Anatolia, in the vilayets of Adıyaman, Malatya, Erzincan, Gümüşhane, Trabzon, Sivas, and Tokat, to take photographs and measurements, and to copy inscriptions in and outside museums’. This was generous, comprehensive, and without time limit. Fieldwork resumed, and with the vigorous support of the British Ambassador continued during the later 1980s. By then I found myself the chief military interpreter in Turkish, and was attached in 1991 to the Royal Marines in northern Iraq (Operation Haven) (Fig. 0.3).

F ig . 0.3  Lunch with Abdurrezay Germari, tribal leader of 21,000 Berwari Kurds trapped on a mountain top above the Great Zab (May 1991)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 xx PR EFACE

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

PR EFACE 

xxi

The largest challenge was Armenia Minor, lying mainly in the vilayet of Erzincan: prickly with memories of the Armenian massacres, friction between Sunni Turks and Alevi Kurds, and brutal interactions between jandarma and PKK groups infiltrating across the Euphrates. With a permit from Ankara, I also required local permission. In 1987, and again in 1989, a tough jandarma Master Sergeant, Ahmet Demirtaş, was assigned to guide and protect me. In the latter year I sensed an increased nervousness, and it took the Security police a day and a half to penetrate ‘Salata’, an unfortunate corruption of Satala in their secret instructions from Ankara. My affairs were handled by a formidable Superintendant, nervous of my intentions. Where and what was this ‘Salad’, she asked, this codeword? My research was conducted under almost continuous and usually armed escort, with a variety of vehicles hired where roads permitted, and one night by tractor when they did not. To keep up momentum demanded a constant mental and physical effort. We visited countless villages. Surrounded by a large, benevolent crowd in one, close to the Euphrates, I was denounced as an Armenian spy by a man out of place in a suit, a police informer, and we were both arrested at gunpoint. Two other villages, Ahmet confided guardedly, had been attacked by the PKK in 1988, and more than a dozen of his colleagues were gunned down. In 2000, with a tireless Representative, I was escorted by highly trained jandarma and Special Teams, and twice by a small army complete with belt-­fed machine guns on tripods. I would address and encourage them before the day’s programme. We followed mountain tracks which they patrolled at night; transit routes used, they knew, by the PKK infiltrating from the Dersim. One morning a score of figures appeared like Apaches on surrounding hilltops. Shepherds, we thought. But they were village guards, armed with Kalashnikovs by the Turkish State, and about to open fire. My Turkish Army maps were coveted by commanders for their old place-­names; and by treasure-­hunters, who knew they showed me where to dig for Armenian gold. An undeclared task of my escorts, and of my three Representatives from the Department of Antiquities, was to report my activities. They were interpreted by suspicious minds. Arrived from Erzincan in 1988, I was followed by police from the bus station in Sivas, and confronted angrily in the museum; and in 1989 men in a white Murat, identified by my Representative as MIT, attempted from a great distance to keep me in sight in the Taurus. Something was going wrong. In late 1992, the Director General of Security reported that several foreigners were using research as a cover for espionage. Milliyet, an equivalent, perhaps, of the Daily Telegraph, carried his list on the front page. One searching Mount Ararat for Noah’s Ark claimed to have found anchors. These, the DG revealed, were in fact Armenian tombstones. Another had collected ‘Armenia bugs’ and ‘Kurdistan bugs’. Heading the list, I had investigated terrorist incidents, and used a map which, hateful word, ‘divided’ Turkey into two. The incidents, presumably, were the villages visited by the PKK. The map was my own, shown to valis, police, and jandarma to explain my purpose and the Euphrates frontier. The damage was severe and lasting. The route for survey permits now lay through the Turkish Embassy in London. Successive ambassadors were enthusiastic, and I was pleased with my applications. They were headed ‘Corpus Christi College Centre for the Study of Greek and Roman Antiquity’, and were in Turkish. But in six years out of eight they were found ‘inappropriate’ in Ankara. In 2002 I showed my last, failed application to Talat Saral, once Under-­Secretary at the Ministry of Finance. He could see at a glance that I was supported by a Christian

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 xxii PR EFACE

agency sympathetic to Greeks. The substance was irrelevant: it is widely suspected that some researchers have private agendas hostile to Turkey. Sighting the first page, any official would jump to the same conclusion. What, they would ask, have I really been doing in a part of Turkey that once had a large Christian (Armenian and Greek) population? What is my real interest in this Roman (this Rum, or Greek) frontier? Anyway, as a Turkish speaker, I must be a spy. So it took until 1996 to obtain a permit to work even in tranquil Gümüşhane. Only once, in 2000, was I allowed to work again in the vilayet of Erzincan, covering much of Armenia Minor. My permit that year gave me twenty-­eight days. But during my formal call, the Director of Ancient Monuments and Museums arbitrarily reduced my time to eight days; even these salvaged only when I produced a personal letter to me from the Minister of Culture. In that year MIT was again my shadow. 2002 was another bad year. Kâmran İnan wrote to the Prime Minister, Bülent Ecevit, on my behalf. There was no reply. In the summer, I was advised by the British Embassy, ‘powerful support in the MFA [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] was overruled, and the decision was taken by others, citing a considerable amount of concern from local, security and other authorities about my previous studies, that it would be inappropriate, again, to agree my application that year, or in the future’. Permits, even applications, to look for Romans in sensitive vilayets, particularly in Armenia Minor, had brought me too close to the apparatus of officialdom. After so much time, effort, and support, it was a pity to be treated by some not as a long-­time friend, but as an enemy of Turkey. My frontier project had advanced too far to be abandoned. Important gaps remained. New regulations made me too old to direct myself in my solitary survey. The permit game was well and truly up. Wasting no more time with applications, so readily derailed by malice or misunderstanding, I worked differently, travelling with officially approved companions, and sustained by the extra­ or­din­ary decency of countless villagers. The vali of Gümüşhane had assigned Oktay to guide me in August 1996, when together we discovered the cairn of the Ten Thousand. Three years later, the vali of Trabzon had instructed Taner to accompany Professor Valerio Manfredi, with me, to the cairn. They were inspired choices. An ardent hunter, Oktay knew the mountains above Gümüşhane in astonishing detail. Taner was a state-­registered guide accredited to the Ministry of Tourism, recently combined with Culture, and drove tourists around the east of Turkey. He had never been to Erzincan, let alone to the tangled mountains of Armenia Minor, or vilayets further south. But he brought status and the anonymity of an Istanbul number plate, he had served as a jandarma commando, and he was resourceful and ready for anything. I too was a tourist, a retired colonel writing a book; a hobi, if a strange one, which meant tracing the Silk and caravan roads on foot. I spoke Turkish because I had served with the Turkish Navy. Police and jandarma, he knew, only bring complications, so we called instead on muhtars, and took local guides. Divining our hidden purpose, and keen to sight my map and share the treasure, villagers welcomed us with eager respect and bemused tolerance. It was a refreshing change to be greeted as a treasure hunter rather than a spy, and a relief to escape from the fetters of permits: from the frustrations of bureaucratic and operational boundaries, time frittered away in travel and conversations with vilayet authorities, weekends and endemic lethargy, and sometimes the ill-­concealed contempt aroused, alas, by the presence of a Representative. Taner, in contrast, could go anywhere at any time, and he had a remarkable ability to converse sensitively with anyone, to assess

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

PR EFACE 

xxiii

their credibility and motivation. Calling himself my asistan, he was glad to share constant activity. So in 2002 we looked again for The Sea from the Xenophon cairn, and searched for a high-­level route along the central ridgeway of Armenia Minor. Over eleven long days in June 2003, across a vast and mountainous area between Trabzon and the Euphrates Gates in Commagene, we covered 1,700 miles in his old car, more than 100 miles on foot, and many more combined, to explore or revisit many of the remaining uncertainties; and my hair turned grey. So to my project. In space, it covers much of eastern Turkey, and extends to the foothills of the Caucasus and the Caspian shore. In time, the chronological limits extend from the first century before Christ to the repairs and campaigns of Justinian and beyond. For although an organized frontier was established under Vespasian, and was to endure without substantial modification for five centuries, Roman involvement along the upper Euphrates began a generation before Caesar landed in Britain, and continued for two centuries after that distant, minor province was abandoned. The main military road can be traced nearly all the way from Commagene to Trapezus. From Severus’ great bridge over the Chabina, a cobbled roadbed, generally 8 metres wide and remarkably preserved in the mountains, leads for 150 miles directly over the Taurus, up the Euphrates valley through Cappadocia, and over the Antitaurus into Armenia Minor. In the great gorges of the Taurus and Antitaurus, both now flooded by dams, tortuous military routes could also be determined beside the river. Northwards from the Euphrates, the road system in Armenia Minor and Pontus is arduous and complicated; and it was from high in the mountains above Trapezus that Hadrian and Arrian, in the steps of Xenophon, looked down on The Sea. The main road preferred to follow high ridgeways, where summers were cool, and rivers small and few. But at a lower level some, draining the mountains, could not be avoided, and their crossings are marked by the ruins of four large bridges. Other bridges have vanished. The Euphrates itself could be navigated downriver for 150 miles, from Armenia Minor to Melitene. This was supply traffic, by raft; routine, if in places dangerous. In Cappadocia and Armenia Minor the line of the frontier was crossed by natural routes of the highest importance. At these crucial positions Vespasian placed his legions, at Melitene (Eski Malatya) already eight centuries old, and at Satala (Sadak). The latter fortress alone survives. The others, at Melitene, and later at Samosata and Trabzon, have not been precisely located. Between the legions, auxiliary forts guarded crossings and vulnerable points. Only two can be identified with remains on the ground: Sabus below the Antitaurus, and Suisa at old Erzincan. The positions of the others can be closely determined. East of Trapezus isolated forts were ranged along the Black Sea coast. Epigraphic clusters survived: modest at Direk Kale (Lacotena) in the Taurus, at Melitene, and at Pingan (Zimara) in Armenia Minor; important at Nicopolis, Satala, and Trapezus, and in the Caucasus at Artaxata, Kainepolis, and Harmozica. But inscriptions along the line of the frontier are at high risk: many once preserved in Armenian churches and now vanished, others smashed to find hidden gold, concealed, or sold on the an­tiqui­ ties market. Cumont’s milestones are lost. Several dozen Roman coins, mainly from Direk Kale, and in use as barter currency around Dascusa, include three of Nero and Titus, and point to periods of activity under Trajan, and during the early third and fourth centuries.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 xxiv PR EFACE

In Ottoman times the strategic purpose of Vespasian’s legionary fortresses is apparent in the two great routes which carried caravans of immense size from Constantinople and Smyrna. Combined until Tokat, the ‘High Constantinople Road’ to Mosul and Baghdad diverged there to the south-­east, to pass through Sivas and Eski Malatya (Melitene), cross the Euphrates at Tomisa, and continue below Harput and over the Ergani pass to northern Mesopotamia. The northern route, to Erzerum and northern Persia, con­tinued eastwards, passing below the crumbling walls of Sadak (Satala). A third, if minor route followed the Euphrates valley northwards from Aleppo, through Eski Malatya and Sadak to the Black Sea at Trebizond. Along and west of the frontier these routes were essentially Roman, but constant use has everywhere been destructive of antiquity. The northern caravan route was followed by several European travellers. They do not mention passage across the Roman frontier. Accounts of archaeological value have been left principally by Brant (in 1835) and Taylor (in 1861–3 and 1866), both consuls at Erzerum, by Hogarth and Yorke (in 1894), and by Cumont (in 1900). Hogarth and Munro planned to explore the Euphrates in 1891, but accident and cholera obliged them to abandon. Later with Yorke, Hogarth was the first, and indeed the last, to journey along the frontier itself, with the specific but vain purpose of identifying and documenting its remains. Von Moltke passed through the Taurus gorge by raft in 1838 and 1839; and in the course of two voyages in the spring and summer of 1901 Huntington followed the Euphrates all the way from Eğin to Gerger. His careful accounts are im­port­ ant, for the riverbed has by now been almost completely submerged. Satala itself was carefully investigated and excavated by Biliotti, vice-­ consul in Trebizond, in 1874; and in 1900 Cumont recorded a mass of Greek and Latin inscriptions. But from that year, for more than two generations, the ancient frontier remained without visit or research. Its details lay undisturbed, and, for some, doubt continued to surround its very existence.6 Hogarth and Cumont passed through a land where the earliest beginnings of Christianity had taken root, and flourished for nearly sixteen centuries; through villages of Armenians and Greeks with an affinity for and an interest, soon to be extinguished, in the ancient world. Many villages preserved ancient place-­names, and Greek and Latin monumental inscriptions and architectural fragments survived as structural curiosities in houses and churches; notably below Harput, at Sadak, and in Trebizond. In the Taurus gorge Armenian villages alternated in reasonable harmony with villages of Zaza Kurds, and along the Euphrates valley with Turkish. In the 1960s, the same villages survived, their inhabitants replaced by Turks. But many of the place-­names, some preserved from Roman times, were in the process of deliberate change, and memories of the old were already beginning to disappear. This, therefore, is an account of travel and discovery. It describes the frontier broadly from south to north, following the direction in which the empire expanded and the legions advanced. It prefers the old names, recorded by travellers, preserved on Turkish Army maps revised from Ottoman surveys, and still used by villagers. It is set against a background and glimpses of a disappearing world encountered in the long process of academic exploration.7 I am very grateful to the many who have encouraged this streamlined account; in particular to Sir Timothy Daunt, Professor Stephen Harrison, Vice Admiral Sir Nicholas Hill-­Norton, Sir Fergus Millar, the Revd John Miller, Professor Stephen Mitchell, Sir Stephen Oliver, Dr Nicholas Richardson, Barnaby Rogerson, and Professor Richard Talbert. I thank especially Professor Norman Hammond for so many years of interest and guidance, and for his Stakhanovite effort with the proofs, Dr Anthony Comfort for his

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

PR EFACE 

xxv

generous advice in Commagene, Robin Seeley who pored over the manuscript with discerning and critical eye, Sean Goddard for his remarkable patience and skill in preparing the maps and cleaning my old photographs, Malcolm Todd, eagle-­eyed prince of copy-­ editors, and Karen Raith, Charlotte Loveridge, Jenny King, and Emma Slaughter, my ever-­helpful and responsive editors in Oxford University Press. Crucial have been the understanding of the Royal Navy, and since 1974 the unfailing support of the British Academy. I owe a great debt to those assigned to accompany me: the redoubtable jandarma sergeant Ahmet Demirtaş in the mountains of Erzincan in 1987 and 1989; and my Representatives, Adil Evren in several vilayets in 1989, Atalay Bayik in Gümüşhane in 1996, and Fahriye Bayram, with the radiant muhtar of Melik Şerif, Süleyman Polatlı, and Special Teams of hugely impressive jandarma, in Erzincan in 2000. Four friends in the east, assigned or recommended to me by kaymakam or vali, have provided crucial as­sist­ance: Mehmet Özer, the much respected agricultural technician at Kemaliye; the headmaster of Satala, Dürsün Göz, whose antiquarian interests were matched by great energy and kindness; Oktay Okur, my incomparable guide in Gümüşhane; and Taner Demirbulut, jandarma commando and master of every situation. Most of all I thank the countless villagers who welcomed an unexpected visitor with wonderful hospitality, and made fieldwork along the remote frontier an adventure and a constant delight. Centre for the Study of Greek and Roman Antiquity Corpus Christi College Oxford NOT ES 1. von Moltke, Briefe 210f. For a fuller account of the frontier, of its climate, history, geography, garrison, coins, and inscriptions, my East of Asia Minor: Rome’s Hidden Frontier. 2. Jordan, Conquest without Victory, 26 and 28, ‘had one of them (Armenians) as a chauffeur on my Syrian trip (in November 1942) and he refused to go to one village for the good reason that the last time he had been there he had killed a man’ (National Archives, WO 201/2836). Hamson, Liber in Vinculis, 26. The German assault on the Caucasus, pp. 379–81 and n. 26. TBM obituary (British Academy 1983) by Franz Maier, gravely wounded in Russia. T.  E.  Lawrence too was at Jesus College. Patmos, in Lodwick, The Filibusters, 86–8. 3. Peutinger Table, c. ad 130–50 (for Commagene, Cappadocia, Armenia Minor, Pontic coast, and Armenia); Ptolemy, Geographia, c. ad 150 (but perhaps written under Marcus Aurelius); Antonine Itinerary, ad 211–17. See Annex A. 4. Claudius: Pliny, NH 6, 128 and 27. Corbulo: Tacitus, Ann. 13, 39, and 15, 12; and for winter, 13, 35. Virdius Geminus: Tacitus, Hist. 3, 47f.: detachments, perhaps, from IV Scythica and XII Fulminata. Vespasian: Suetonius, Vespasian 8, 4. 5. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896), 317–35 and 453–72. Hogarth, Wandering Scholar 105–52, and Athenaeum 3481, 73. 6. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 187–223, and 10 (1840) 341–434. Taylor, JRGS 35 (1865) 21–58, and 38 (1868) 281–346. Hogarth and Yorke, n. 5. Cumont, SP II. von Moltke, Briefe 307 and 519ff. Huntington, GJ 20:2 (1902), 175–200. Biliotti, in Mitford, AS 24 (1974), 221–44. 7. The use of historical names such as Armenia and Kurdistan is unavoidable, and has no modern implication.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

C ON T E N T S List of Mapsxxix List of Figuresxxxi Ancient Sources List of Abbreviations Conventional Signs on Maps

xxxix xli xliv

Introduction1 1. Samosata and Northern Commagene

4

2. Over the Taurus to Melitene

31

3. Through the Taurus Gorge

45

4. The Malatya Plain, the Euphrates Crossing (Tomisa), Dulluk Tepe, and Melitene 5. North of Melitene: Ciaca and Keban

75 98

6. The Arabkir Çay and Dascusa

112

7. Sabus, and over the Antitaurus

124

8. Through the Antitaurus Gorge

140

9. From the Antitaurus to the Karabudak: Zimara, and the road to Nicopolis

169

10. Per ripam to Erzincan and Satala

190

11. Across the Mountains to Satala

225

12. Satala (Sadak)

259

13. From Satala to the Upper Harşit287 14. Through the Pontic Mountains to Maçka

301

15. Over the Pontic Mountains to Maçka

313

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 xxviii CONTENTS

16. Maçka to Trapezus (Trabzon)

340

17. The Pontic Coast

361

Annex A Geography and Climate

385

Annex B Chronology

403

Annex C Glossary of Latin and Turkish Words

409

Annex D Travellers

415

Bibliography421 Index 1: Place Names

431

Index 2: Personal Names

465

Index 3: General

485

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

L I S T OF M A P S Conventional Signs, Symbols, and Abbreviations (based on GSGS 4193, 1:200,000, 1942) are listed on page xliv. MODER N 1. Eastern Turkey (1942)

x

(War Office 1942 (1:4,000,000), first edition, in NID, Turkey I) A NCI ENT WOR LD M A PPI NG CENT ER (Map base © 2011, Ancient World Mapping Center: www.unc.edu/awmc) 2. Euphrates Frontier: northern Syria to the Euxine xii 3. The West: Galatia and Cappadocia xvi 4. The East: Pontic Coast, Armenia, Iberia, Albania, Mesopotamia, Atropatene xvii TOPOGR A PH IC (Harta Genel Müdürlüğü (‘Turkish Army’) 1946–8 (1:200,000, except Maps 5, 16, and 24)) 5. Commagene: Samosata to Zeugma (from GSGS No. K 502, 1:250,000 (NJ37-­10, Urfa), published by the War Office, Edition 1, 1956) 10 6. Commagene: Samosata towards the Taurus gorge, and to Perre and the Chabina bridge 16 7. Taurus: over the mountains from the Chabina bridge to Melitene 30 8. Taurus gorge: per ripam from Charmodara to Heba and Arsameia 48 9. Taurus gorge: per ripam from Arsameia to Claudiopolis 52 10. Taurus gorge: per ripam from Claudiopolis to Metita and the Malatya plain 62 11. Cappadocia: from Tomisa to Melitene, Ciaca and Sartona 76 12. Cappadocia: from Sartona to Dascusa and Sabus 102 13. Cappadocia: over the Antitaurus and per ripam from Sabus to Zimara 130 14. Armenia Minor: per ripam from Zimara towards Kemah, and through the mountains towards Nicopolis and Haris (Melik Şerif)168 15. Armenia Minor: per ripam from Kemah to Suisa (Erzincan), and towards Haris (Melik Şerif)200 16. Dersim (from GSGS 2555, Asia 1:1,000,000 (North J. 37, Erzurum), based on MDR 1/1701, revised and reprinted by 512 Fd. Survey Coy, RE, M(iddle) E(ast), Aug. 1942) 202

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 xxx  LIST OF M A PS

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Armenia Minor: from Zimara to Nicopolis, and east from Nicopolis 184 Armenia Minor: from Zimara and Nicopolis towards Haris (Melik Şerif)  228 Armenia Minor: from Kemah to Haris, and from Haris to Ad Dracones 242 Armenia Minor: from Suisa (Erzincan), and Ad Dracones to Satala 216 Armenia Minor: from Satala to the Harşit286 Pontic Mountains: from the Harşit to Zigana and Pylae 302 Pontic Mountains: roads descending to Maçka, and Trapezus 303 Pontic Coast, Colchis, Armenia, Iberia (from GSGS 2555, Asia 1:1, 000,000 (North K.37 Batum and K.38 Tiflis), compiled at the RGS under the supervision of the GSGS, drawn and printed at the War Office 1916, Provisional Edition. Abkhazian Wall outlined from Pachulia, 120, with Deutsche Heereskarte (Russland-­Kaukasus) (K-­37-­XII Ssuchum) 1:200,000, January 1943) 360

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

L I S T OF F IGU R E S Figures are arranged broadly from south to north. Landscapes and scenes lost through flooding or destruction are marked*. Some sketches, photographs, and site plans are reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (with Shelfmark and page or folio number), and of other copyright holders. Some, out of copyright, are reproduced without Shelfmark, with the permission of the Sackler Library. Images supplied by DAI Rom are identified, for Trajan’s Column, by Cichorius scene/cast number, and photographer; and for Marcus’ Column, by Petersen scene/tafel number and photographer.

Photographs, except where attributed, were taken by me. .1 0 0.2

‘Kalpaks drilling on Mount Carmel in 1942’ (Patrick Leigh-­Fermor, 2002) Transit Camp near Baghdad 1943. Kalpaks, D/H 45, and, right, Bob Bury, SBS hero killed near Volos 0.3 Lunch with Abdurrezay Germari, tribal leader of 21,000 Berwari Kurds trapped on a mountain top above the Great Zab (May 1991) 0.4 Map Key: Coverage of Maps 5–232 1.1* Samosata, and the road from Adıyaman: the mound, and faint traces of the city walls (May 1965) 1.2* ‘Ferry at Sumeïsát’: beyond the Euphrates, the mound (Chesney, March 1836; from Euphrates Expedition, p. 45) (BOD Hist.d.33, vol I) 1.3* ‘Preliminary topographic survey plan of the citadel-­mound and city fortification wall of Samosata’ (Goell, 1967; from NGS Research Reports, 1967 Projects, 86–7, 2) (BOD Per. 2017 d.805) 1.4 Legionaries in four files cross the Danube on a bridge of boats, ad 170 (Marcus’ Column iii/9B–10B: n/a, Neg. D-­DAI-­Rom 55.760, detail) 1.5 Harapkarkır bridge over the Göksu (Singe), view north (September 1988) 1.6 Harapkarkır bridge: approach ramp and abutments, view south-­west (September 1988) 1.7 ‘Bir(ecik) Passage Boat’, Chesney, March 1836; from Euphrates Expedition, p. 47 (BOD Hist. d. 33, vol. I) 1.8* Aqueduct tunnel at Herdiyan (May 1965) 1.9* Euphrates, east of Herdiyan (May 1965) 1.10* Collapsed arch, east of Herdiyan (May 1965) .11* Kocan: Zaza Kurds and John Miller (May 1965) 1 1.12* ‘Brücke bei Perre’ (Humann and Puchstein, June 1883; from Reisen in Kleinasien und Nordsyrien, p. 401, 59) (BOD Sac. F. vi. 89) 2.1 Severus’ bridge over the Chabina (Cendere Su) (September 1988) 2.2 Direk Kale: ‘a. Lageplan der Ruinen von Direk Kale mit Ergänzungsvorschlag für die Gebäude A, B und C’; and ‘b. Skizze des Gebietes von Kommagene’ (Hoepfner, September 1965; from Ist. Mitt. 16 (1966), 159, Abb. 1) (by permission of the Federal Republic of Germany)

xiii xiii xx 2 5 7

8 9 12 12 15 19 19 20 21 26 32

34

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 xxxii  LIST OF FIGUR ES

Direk Kale: general view, north-­west, towards Akdağ (May 1965) Direk Kale: vaulted structure by the sanctuary entrance, and John Miller (May 1965) 2.5 Direk Kale: western tower, and Kurdish families (May 1965) 2.6 Zigzag descent to Miasena and the crossing of the Şiro Çay: beyond right, Basmezraa; centre, ridgeways carry the frontier road towards Şakşak Dağ (October 1989) 2.7 Rock cutting on the descent from Şakşak Dag: above İnal, Dulluk Tepe; and faint along the northern horizon, the Antitaurus and Munzur Dağları (September 1999) 3.1 Alidam, view south-­east (June 2004) 3.2* Ruins of Juliopolis (?): view south-­east, towards Taraksu and the Gerger Çay, right, joining the Euphrates (October 1972) 3.3* Kayik crossing, between Ninyat and Killik (October 1972) 3.4* Killik (Barzalo), below Ziyaret Tepe, view north (August 1987) 3.5* Killik, peppers drying, and the ripa above Barzalo: view east-north-east towards Çermik (August 1987) 3.6 Haburman school (October 1972) 3.7 Zaza Kurds cooking pekmez at Haburman (October 1972) 3.8 Adiş church (October 1972) 3.9 Adiş: preparing the feast (October 1972) 3.10 Midye: our hosts for lunch (October 1972) 3.11 Rock-­cut track descending south-­west to Midye (October 1972) 3.12 Above Midye: Hasan rides past a woman carrying brushwood (October 1972) 3.13* Euphrates gorge observed, southwards, from the watch post at Kerefto (October 1972) .14* Plan of the watch post at Kerefto (October 1972) 3 3.15 Zaza family at Husukani (October 1972) 3.16* Children near Mezraa: the Euphrates 2,000 feet below (October 1972) .17 View north-­north-­west from the muhtar’s summer house below Bekiran: 3 ancient track climbing in steep zigzags from the Değirmendere bridge towards the Akuşağı cemetery (June 2004) 4.1* East of Ağıyabuşağı: Euphrates about to curve abruptly into the Taurus gorge (October 1963) .2* Jandarma guard post by the Kömürhan bridge: above the officer, Hızırtaşı, 4 site of the Urartian predecessor (April 1965) 4.3* From east of Ağıyabuşağı: view west, towards Hızırtaşı, Caferhan (Corne), and İzolu (Tomisa) (October 1963) 4.4 Bridges of boats across the Danube, at the start of the First Dacian war, ad 101 (Trajan’s Column iv–v/12–16: Anger, Neg. D-­DAI-­Rom 91.148, detail) 4.5* Hızırtaşı: Omma (?), ‘Künstlicher Durchblick an der die Keilinschrift Sardurs tragenden Felsenfeste’ (F. Frohse, June 1899; from Lehmann-­Haupt, Armenien Einst und Jetzt, p. 484) (BOD Sac. 225. L. 28, vol. I) 4.6* View east from Ağıyabuşağı hüyük: above the spotted cap, Hızırtaşı and the Durchblick; beyond, Kömürhan (April 1965) 2.3 .4 2

34 35 36

39

43 51 53 54 55 56 57 58 60 61 64 65 65 66 67 68 69

72 77 78 79 81

83 84

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

LIST OF FIGUR ES 

4.7* 4.8*

4.9 4.10 4.11 5.1* 5.2 5.3*

.4 5 5.5* 5.6 .7 5 6.1 6.2* 6.3* 6.4 6.5* .1 7 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 .7 7 .1* 8 8.2*

xxxiii

From Pirot hüyük: Pirot, the ‘İzolu ship crossing’, and, on the opposite bank, İzolu (Tomisa) (April 1965) ‘Euphrates Ferry-­boat’, at Kadi Keui, opposite Pirot, view south-­west: beyond, Şakşak Dağ (Percy, September 1899; from Highlands of Asiatic Turkey, p. 109) (BOD 206 d.39) Dulluk Tepe, and the frontier road from the south: uninscribed milestone (?) outside the east gate of Melitene (April 1965) Battalgazi, Tarihi Surlar (‘Historic Walls’) (c.1989, supplied by the Mayor of Eski Malatya, October 1989) Eski Malatya, western gate, showing the raised ground level inside the fortress, and İnal (April 1965) Kırkgözköprü, and the line of the frontier road from Melitene, view north (September 1963) Kara Baba Kaya: beyond the flooded Euphrates, Muşar Dağ, with, on the summit, Mihal Kilisesi (October 1989) ‘View of the Euphrates looking south towards Taurus from Kilisik’ (Viscount Encombe, May 1894; from Hogarth, Wandering Scholar, facing p. 128) (BOD 2060 e.7) Çermik Mahallesi, below Morhamam—Aziz and the old shepherd (October 1989) View over the Gâvur Dere and distant Sartona, now flooded, from the escarpment above Morhamam (October 1963) Frontier road rounding the cliff edge above the Söğütlü Dere: view south-­east, across the flooded Euphrates above Sartona (October 1989) ‘Kebann Madenn’ (J. Laurens, September 1847) (ENSBA EBA 2302) Ahmet Kara, with Münür, points to the agger descending to Körpinik hüyük: beyond, the Dersim and Munzur Dağları (October 1963) Bridge over the Arabkir Çay, at Bahadın: eastern abutment, view south (October 1963) Kara Mağara Köprü, over the Arabkir Çay, with Mehmet and Münür (October 1963) Research team at Hastek Kale, high above the Arabkir Çay: standing centre, Ahmet Kara; and right, Münür (October 1963) ‘Pağnık Öreni 1970’ (R. P. Harper; from AS 21 (1971), 11, 3) (by permission of the BIAA) Bademli: rock-­cut sarcophagus, and Sadettin Özden (October 1963) Plan of Çit Harabe (Sabus) (September 1963) Çit Harabe, western end of the south wall (September 1963) Antitaurus road above Ösneden: Mehmet Özer and guide (July 1966) Bend of the frontier road on the cliff edge high above the Arabkir Çay, with Mehmet Özer (July 1966) Yürük tents and türbe above Gemho: Mehmet Özer and guide (July 1966) Roman road climbing the northern slopes of the Antitaurus: riding ahead, Mehmet Özer (July 1966) Plan of the Kalecik fortlet (September 1963) Çit Çay, a ‘very old bridge’, Ahmet Kara and helpers (October 1963)

84

85 88 93 94 99 100

103 104 106 107 110 113 115 117 118 120 125 127 128 133 134 136 137 141 142

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 xxxiv  LIST OF FIGUR ES

8.3* 8.4 .5 8

.6 8 8.7 8.8* .9* 8 .10* 8 8.11* 8.12* 8.13

8.14*

8.15 8.16* .17 8 9.1 9.2 .3 9 9.4 9.5 9.6

9.7* 9.8* 9.9*

Arnavut Han and the araba road of Abdul Hamid, view north; beyond the further mountainside, the Hapanos Çay (September 1963) 145 Haci Kemal Tuncay, clutching his posy of ıhlamur, below Ergü (June 2004) 147 ‘L’Euphrate à Keban-­Maden’, the town out of sight, right (J. Laurens, September 1847; from Hommaire de Hell, Voyage, planche 38) (BOD Mason Z.128, vol. IV) 150 Geruşla aqueduct and Mehmet Özer (October 1989) 151 ‘Egin’ (F. Frohse, July 1899; from Lehmann-­Haupt, Armenien Einst und Jetzt, p. 495) (BOD Sac. 225. L. 28, vol. I) 153 Kemaliye: the bakery (September 1963) 154 ‘Pont sur l’Euphrate à Eghinn’ (J. Laurens, September 1847; from Hommaire de Hell, Voyage, planche 39) (ENSBA EBA 2333) 155 Venk köprüsu with mule train c.1880, view north (June 2004) 156 Venk köprüsu c.1900, showing, left, rounded flood-­arch on the right bank (June 2004) 156 Venk suspension bridge: foundation courses beneath the eastern abutment (September 1963) 157 Apollodorus’ bridge over the Danube, with stone flood-­arches, left, and ashlar piers supporting a wooden superstructure; praetorian signiferi with wreathed standards, and Trajan sacrificing, winter ad 105/6 (Trajan’s Column xcviii– xcix/258–61: Faraglia, Neg. D-­DAI-­Rom 31.387) 158 ‘Délik Tasch; route dans les montagnes du haute Euphrate’, view north (J. Laurens, September1847; from Hommaire de Hell, Voyage, planche 38) (BOD Mason Z.128, vol. IV) 160 Above the Antitaurus gorge, from the slopes below Şirzi, view north (September 1963) 161 The Antitaurus gorge, view downriver (September 1963) 164 Abrenk: threshing floor with flint-­studded sledges (döven) and long winnowing forks (July 1966) 166 Burmahan bridge: collapsed arch, and, in the background, Burmahan village and the north-­eastern foothills of the Antitaurus (July 1966) 170 A source of the Pyxurates (Munzur Su), near Ovacık (Colin Boswell, The Garlic Farm, June 2009) 171 Turkish Zımara: arrival of corn for threshing (July 1966) 172 Pingan (Zimara): gardens, and the Euphrates, view west (September 1963) 174 Pingan, on the north bank (July 1966) 174 Pingan, dust rising over a threshing floor beside the Euphrates: a woman guides an ox-­drawn sledge, two men relax among saddles, a boy plays. The house beyond is on the opposite bank (September 1963) 175 Construction of our kelek below Lordin: Mehmet Özer and kelekcis (September 1963)178 A pause in the Bağıştaş gorge, to collect brushwood for breastworks; kelekci keeps the skins wet (September 1963) 179 Entering the Antitaurus gorge: kelekci steering, and Mehmet Özer ready for keklik, red-­legged partridges (September 1963) 179

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

LIST OF FIGUR ES 

9.10 9.11

9.12 0.1 1

10.2 10.3 0.4 1 10.5 10.6 10.7 0.8 1 10.9 10.10 10.11 10.12 10.13 10.14 10.15 11.1 11.2 11.3 1.4 1 11.5 11.6 11.7

xxxv

Frontier road descending eastwards towards Dostal and the Karabudak (July 1966) 180 Decius’ bridge over the Sabrina (Karabudak), view north: remains of bridge abutments, with the approach ramp and building inscription (in a panel above the triangular spur of white bedrock) (July 1966) 181 Plan of Nicopolis (August 1964 and August 2006) 186 The frontier and caravan road climbing above Hasanova (Analiba), view west: beyond the Kuruçay, hidden in its trench, the ridge above the Karabudak (August 2000) 192 Gâvuroluğu plain, marble gates: looking west towards Boyalık (out of sight), and the distant ridge rising to Armudan (August 2000) 194 Marble road, above the Kürtler Dere (August 2000) 195 Marble Road and Special Team, above the Kürtler Dere (August 2000) 196 Kürtler Dere: destruction of the Sultan Hamid bridge (August 1987) 198 İhtik, the ‘Italian City’: ruined church, and, beyond right, Rumsaray (October 1989)199 Sağ (? Carsaga), and, above, track leading up to ruined church, view south-­east (October 1989) 204 ̆ Ruined church above Sag, and Ahmet Demirtaş (October 1989) 205 Above Ardos, view north: the upper lake (Analibozora (?)), below Kara Dağ; the foreground once clustered with Armenian houses (August 2006) 208 Plan of Erzincan kalesi (Suisa) (June 2003 and June 2004) 213 Erzincan kalesi: beehives, beside the cores and some internal facings of the western wall; beyond, left, the Munzur Dağları (June 2004) 214 Ancient track zigzagging up from Vazgirt and the Mecidiye gorge, hidden right (June 2004) 217 Bekçi kasabası, beside the frontier road; overlooking the plain of Erzincan and distant Mercan Dağ (June 2004) 218 The frontier road climbing north towards Mecidiye (out of sight) and the distant Sipikör pass (June 2004) 218 The frontier road descending to the upper Sadak Çay, view north: Taner Demirbulut and Ahmet Keleş (August 2006) 220 Deve Boynu boğazı: Roman road descending to the crossing of the Kuruçay (August 2006) 229 The frontier road climbing north-­east towards the Sinibeli pass, with Taner Demirbulut (June 2003) 230 Ancient track above Savaşgediği, leading north towards the Kerboğaz (October 2002) 235 Clambering up the Kerboğaz, with Taner and Ali (August 2006) 237 Ancient track, with treasure hunters, leading south from Diştaş to Kazancık and the Kerboğaz (June 2003) 240 Diştaş: picnic with Ali Arslan, left, Fahriye Bayram, and Süleyman Polatlı, right (August 2000) 241 The higher track, climbing from Horopol (obscured), view south: beyond, Kerz Dağ, left, and Gulan Dağ (August 2000) 245

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 xxxvi  LIST OF FIGUR ES

11.8

The great rock below Cengerli: view south, down the Menek Dere; in the distance, Gülan Dağ (August 2000) 246 11.9 Melik Şerif: cooking pekmez (August 2000) 248 11.10 Roads, briefly combined, descending south towards Melik Şerif: beyond, the support road to the Euphrates climbs steeply through the forest on the eastern slopes of Kurtlu Tepe; the frontier road diverges right, below them (August 2000) 249 ̆ 11.11 Evening over the Munzur Dagları, from the head of the Çardaklu pass (August 1964) 250 11.12* Cemetery beside the support road at Kökseki: view west, towards distant Nicopolis (October 1989) 253 11.13 Çimen Dağları: the frontier road running west towards Kurugöl, centre, and İkisivri, left (August 1987) 255 11.14 Çimen yayla, view north-­west: supposed site of Ad Dracones (October 1989) 256 11.15 Above Cemallıkomu: the combined frontier and support road climbing west towards the Çimen yayla, with Ahmet Demirtaş (October 1989) 257 12.1 Satala: basilica, and, on the hill beyond, Sadak. The conspicuous white house stands on the south-­east corner tower (August 1964) 260 12.2 Sadak: cart, hens, and children (August 1964) 266 12.3 ‘Satala. Kurzbericht über die geophysikalische Untersuchungen und den Survey im August 2004’ (Hartmann, August 2004) (by permission of Dr Martin Hartmann)268 12.4 Satala: eastern wall of the fortress, from the site of the south-­east corner tower (August 1964) 269 12.5 The headmaster, Dürsün Göz, and helpers on the southern wall of the fortress, view south-­west: the cistern, out of sight, is on the low plateau above; the tall trees, right, point to the summit of Mantartaşı (August 1964) 270 12.6 Satala, view south: stelae of XV Apollinaris, arranged beside the threshing floor of Ahmet Yiğin (July 1984) 271 12.7 Satala: armed epigraphy, Serkan Nahir, and the Gallienus inscription (July 1996) 272 12.8 Sadak: İşmail’s cheese, kurut, drying in the sun (July 1996) 273 12.9 Satala: pressure junction for water pipes (July 1996) 275 12.10 Satala: head of Aphrodite (? Anaitis) (© Trustees of the British Museum, image AN384321001) 277 12.11 Sadak: bath house and bakery (November 1972) 279 12.12 Sadak, threshing floor outside the fortress: ox-­drawn threshing sledge (döven), left; yoked water-­buffaloes, centre rear; cart (araba), right (August 1964) 282 12.13 Sadak: araba and threshing machine (August 1965) 283 13.1 Kızılbaş children in the steps of Hadrian, above Kılıççı (October 2002) 289 13.2* ‘Ruines d’un Poste militaire’ (Cumont, June 1900; from SP II, p. 352) 290 13.3 A child in Cinderek (August 1996) 291 13.4 The frontier road descending north-­east towards Havcış: Atalay Bayik and boar hunters (July 1996) 292 13.5 Yurtlar Dere: agger and beekeepers (July 1996) 294 13.6 Plan of Zindanlar (September 1999 and August 2000) 298

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

LIST OF FIGUR ES 

13.7 14.1 14.2 4.3 1 15.1 15.2 15.3 15.4 15.5 15.6 5.7 1 15.8 15.9 15.10

15.11 15.12 16.1* 6.2 1 16.3

16.4* 16.5 6.6* 1 16.7* 16.8 17.1

xxxvii

Baghdad bridge over the Harşit, view north: central pier with wedge-­shaped cutwater, and Taner Demirbulut (June 2003) 299 Tekke, on a rocky promontory high above the Harsit, view south-­west: beyond, the eastern slopes of Köse Dağ (August 2000) 305 The winter and caravan road climbing north to the Zigana pass, seen beyond the pine trees, above (June 2004) 309 Zifin, below the Zigana pass (June 2004) 311 Şon Kale: Oktay Okur scrambling down towards Aşagı̆ Kermut (August 2000) 316 Narrow causeway carrying the summer road east, towards the head of the Kermut valley (August 2000) 318 Rock-­cut gates carrying the Roman road down to the Ağyarlar ridge: Oktay Okur, and, beyond, Deveboynu Dağ (August 2000) 319 Ağyarlar: woman carrying brushwood (August 2000) 320 Karayayla: hay baling, summer huts, and, beyond, the higher slopes of Çakırgöl Dağ (August 1996) 322 Karayayla—children (August 1996) 323 Maden hanları: hazel nuts laid out to dry (September 1999) 324 Zigana Dağ, where the Ten Thousand saw The Sea. Taner Demirbulut in the steps of Hadrian, with the calculated line of the distant horizon (May 2002) 328 Cairn of the Ten Thousand, with Valerio Manfredi (Giorgio Fornoni, September 1999) 330 Karakaban, on the ridgeline, left; the frontier and caravan summer road, foreground right, continuing north, broadly on the horizontal line of the modern track; beyond, the Değirmendere valley (August 2006) 335 The frontier and caravan summer road descending steeply north to Meşeiçihanı, and climbing, right, around the forest base (July 1996) 336 ‘Plan of Hortokop Kalesi’ (Crow and Bryer, 1993; from Dumbarton Oaks 51 (1997), after p. 284, 6) 338 ‘Trebisonde’ (Tournefort, 1701; from Voyage du Levant III, p. 79) (BOD Wardr. 20. 10–20) 343 Sketch plan of Trapezus/Trabzon (as at c.1937)344 Trireme, escorted by two biremes (one with furled sail): Trajan sails by night from a harbour town to cross the Adriatic, June ad 105, for the Second Dacian war (Trajan’s Column lxxix–lxxx/208–12: Anger, Neg. D-­DAI-­Rom 89.754, detail)347 ‘Section of old Transit Road trodden by Xenophon and his Ten Thousand’ (from Sir Denis Wright, c.1939)348 Rock-­cut descent on the western slopes of Boztepe (October 2002) 348 ‘Trebizond, Molos’ (Sir Denis Wright, c.1942)350 ‘Trebizond’, showing the Molos, and, in the distance, the Hieron Akron (Hepworth, May 1897; from Armenia, p. 52) (BOD 20601 e.4) 351 Roman foundation courses (position 14), below the north-­west corner of the Ortahisar (August 2000) 353 ‘Plan of the Fortress of Apsarus’ (Lekvinadze, before 1961; from VDI 108:2 (1969), 77, 2) (by permission of Professor Ivantchik, Chief Editor) 366

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 xxxviii  LIST OF FIGUR ES

17.2* Phasis: ‘Plan du Fort antique placé à l’ancienne embouchure du Phase, près de Poti’ (Dubois de Montpéreux, June 1833; from Voyage, Atlas, Series 1, Pl. XVIII) (BOD Mason Y. 65) 369 17.3 Plan of the Abkhazian Wall (after Pachulia, May 1963, and Deutsche Heereskarte K-­37-­XII and XVIII, January 1943) 372 17.4 Sea tower at the northern end of the Abkhazian Wall, south of Sukhumi: the sea, left, and beyond, Sukhumi (August 1965) 373 17.5 ‘Panorama de l’Abkhazie et du Caucase occidental’ (Dubois de Montpéreux, June 1833; from Voyage, Atlas Series 2, Pl. VII, described I, 301–6) (BOD Mason Y. 65)374 17.6 ‘Sebastopolis: plan of the Roman castellum’ (after Lekvinadze, c.1959; from VDI 108:2 (1969), 83, 6) (by permission of Professor Ivantchik, Chief Editor) 375 17.7 ‘Plan of Pitiunt (find spots, marked x, of tiles with legionary vexillation stamps)’ (Kiguradze, before 1987; from VDI 181:2 (1987), 90, 5) (by permission of Professor Ivantchik, Chief Editor) 376 A1 Antonine Itinerary: Commagene, eastern Cappadocia, Armenia Minor, and Pontus (Cuntz, paras 176–217) 386 A2 Peutinger Table: Commagene, eastern Cappadocia, Armenia Minor, and Pontus (Miller, segments IX and X) 387 A3 Ptolemy: Commagene, eastern Cappadocia, Armenia Minor, and Pontus (Nobbe 5, 6, 1–18, and 5, 7, 1–12)) 388

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

A NC I E N T SOU RC E S Ammianus

Ammianus Marcellinus, Rerum gestarum libri qui supersunt, ed. W. Seyfarth (Leipzig 1978) Antonine Itinerary Itineraria Romana 1: Itineraria Antonini Augusti et Burdigalense, ed. O. Cuntz (Leipzig 1929) Appian Appianus of Alexandria, Mithridatica Arrian Flavius Arrianus, 2 Scripta Minora et Fragmenta, ed. A.  G.  Roos (Leipzig 1967–8) Ektaxis Parthica Periplus Caesar, Bell. Alex. Julius Caesar, Bellum Alexandrinum Dio Cassius Dio Cocceianus, Historiarum Romanarum quae supersunt, ed. U. P. Boissevain (Berlin 1955) Diodorus Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica, ed. Fr. Vogel (Stuttgart 1888) Herodian Herodiani ab excessu divi Marci libri octo, ed. K.  Stavenhagen (Stuttgart 1967) Herodotus Herodotus, Historiae Josephus, BJ Flavius Josephus, De bello Judaico, ed. O. Michel and O. Bauernfeind (Munich 1959–69) Notitia Dignitatum Notitia dignitatum omnium tam civilium quam militarium, ed. O. Seeck (Berlin 1876, repr. Frankfurt 1962) Peutinger Tabula Peutingeriana, ed. K. Miller (Stuttgart 1916) Pliny, NH Pliny (the Elder), Natural History (Historia Naturalis), ed. C. Mayhoff (Leipzig 1892–1933) Plutarch Plutarch, Vitae Parallelae Procopius Procopii Caesariensis opera, ed. J. Haury (Leipzig 1963/4)   Aed. De Aedificiis   Bell. Goth. De Bello Gothico   Bell. Pers. De Bello Persico Ptolemy Claudii Ptolemaei Geographia, 2, ed. C. F. A. Nobbe (Leipzig 1913) Sapor, RGDS Res Gestae divi Saporis, ed. A. Maricq (1958) SHA Scriptores Historiae Augustae, ed. Ch. Samberger and W.  Seyfarth (Leipzig 1965) St Basil, Ep. St Basil (Bishop of Caesarea ad 370–9), Epistulae, ed. R. J. Deferrari (Harvard and London 1950–3) Steph. Byzantinus Stephani Byzantii Ethnicorum quae supersunt, ed. A. Meineke (Berlin 1849, repr. Graz 1958) Strabo Strabo, Geographica, ed. A. Meineke (Leipzig 1915–25) Suetonius Suetonius

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 xl  A NCIENT SOURCES

  Domitian   Gaius   Nero   Vespasian Tacitus Tacitus   Ann. Annales   Hist. Historiae Theodoret Theodoret (bishop of Cyrrhus ad 423–66), Historia Ecclesiastica, ed. L. Parmentier (Paris 2006 and 2009) Vegetius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, Epitoma rei militaris, ed. M. D. Reeve (Oxford 2004) Virgil Virgil, Eclogues Xenophon Xenophon, Anabasis, ed. G. P. Goold, with translation C. L. Brownson (Loeb Classical Library, London 1980) Zosimus Zosimi comitis et exadvocati fisci Historia Nova, ed. L Mendelssohn (Leipzig 1887)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

A BBR E V I AT ION S I NSTIT UTIONS A N D AGENCI ES BIAA The British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara DAI Deutsches Archäologisches Institut DSİ Devlet Su İşleri (State water works) ELAS Hellenic People’s Liberation Army (Communist) ENSBA École nationale supérieure des Beaux-­Arts (Paris) FO Foreign Office GAP Güney Doğu Anadolu Projesi (South-­East Anatolia Project) GSGS Geographical Section, General Staff (the cartographic arm of the WO) JUSMAT Joint US Military Aid to Turkey (Ankara) MIT Milli İstibarat Teşkilatı (National Intelligence Organization) NGS National Geographic Society (Washington) NID Naval Intelligence Division (London) PKK Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan (Kurdish Workers Party) PRO Public Record Office (= National Archives), London RGS Royal Geographical Society SBS Special Boat Service SOE Special Operations Executive USARIEM US Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, (Natick, MA) WO War Office YSE Yol Su Elektrik (road, water, electricity)

BOOK S A N D JOU R NA L S American Journal of Archaeology (New York 1897–) Asia Minor Studien. Forschungsstelle Asia Minor im Seminar für Alte Geschichte der Westfälischen Wilhelms-­Universität Münster (Bonn 1990–) Anal. Boll. Analecta Bollandiana (Brussels and Paris 1882–) ANRW Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt: Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Speigel der neueren Forschung, 2: Principat (Berlin and New York 1972–88) Antiquity Antiquity (Gloucester 1927–) Arch. Journ. The Archaeological Journal (London 1844–) AS Anatolian Studies. Journal of the BIAA (London 1951–) Athenaeum The Athenaeum: Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, Music and the Drama (London 1830–1914) BAGS Bulletin of the American Geographical Society (New York, 1869–1915) BAR British Archaeological Reports, International Series (Oxford 1974–)   71 (1980) W. S. Hanson and L. J. F. Keppie, Stirling 1979 (Oxford 1980)   156 (1983) S. Mitchell, Swansea 1981 (Oxford 1983) AJA AMS

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 xlii A BBR EV I ATIONS

  392 (1988)   553 (1989)   1717 (2007) BCH Belleten BMC CAH CAH2 CIL CR Dacia

D. H. French (Oxford 1988) D. H. French and C. S. Lightfoot, Ankara 1988 (Oxford 1989) A. S. Lewin and P. Pellegrini, Italy 2005 (Oxford 2007) Bulletin de Correspondance héllenique (Paris 1877–) Belleten/Türk Tarih Kurumu (Ankara 1937–) British Museum Catalogue (see Walters in Bibliography) Cambridge Ancient History (1932–65) Cambridge Ancient History, second edition (1992–2005) Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (Berlin1862–) The Classical Review (London 1887–) Dacia: Revue d’Archéologie et d’Histoire ancienne, new series, Académie romaine (Bucharest 1957–) Deutsche Heereskarte Deutsche Heereskarte, ausgabe no. 3, herausgegeben vom Oberkommando des Heeres (1:200,000, 1 January 1943) Dumbarton Oaks Dumbarton Oaks Papers (Cambridge, Mass. 1941–) EAM Mitford, East of Asia Minor: Rome’s Hidden Frontier (Oxford 2018) EGR Eastern Geographical Review (Doğu Coğrafya Dergisi) (Erzincan University 1986–) EHHR English Heritage Historical Review (London 2006–) Eng. Hist. Review The English Historical Review (London 1886–) GJ The Geographical Journal (London 1893–2001) Historia Historia: Zeitschrift für alte Geschichte (Wiesbaden 1950–) IGLS Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie, 1: Commagene et Cyrrhestique, ed L. Jalabert and R. Mouterde (Paris 1929) IGR Inscriptiones Graecae ad res Romanas pertinentes, ed R.  Cagnat (Paris 1906–27) ILS Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae, ed. H. Dessau (1892–1916) Iraq Journal of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq/British Institute for the Study of Iraq (London 1934–) Ist. Mitt. Istanbuler Mitteilungen: Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Abteilung Istanbul (Istanbul, Tübingen 1933–) JHS Journal of Hellenic Studies (London 1880–) JRA Journal of Roman Archaeology (Michigan 1988–) JRAS Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (London 1834–) JRCAS Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society (London 1931–69) JRGS Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London (London 1831–80) JRS The Journal of Roman Studies (London 1911–) JSMS The Journal of Slavic Military Studies (London 1993–) Klio Klio: Beiträge zur alten Geschichte (Leipzig 1906–) Latomus Latomus: Révue d’études Latines (Brussels 1937–) Limes Akten des Internationalen Limeskongress   10 D. Haupt and H.-G. Horn, Xanten 1974 (Cologne 1977)   11 J. Fitz, Budapest 1976 (Budapest 1977)   12 W. S. Hanson and L. J. F. Keppie, Stirling 1979 (Oxford 1980)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

A BBR EV I ATIONS 

  13   15   17   18   23 Med. Hist.

xliii

C. Unz and D. Planck, Aalen 1983 (Stuttgart 1986) V. A. Maxfield and M. J. Dobson, Canterbury 1989 (Exeter 1991) N. Gudea, Zalâu (Napoca) 1997 (Zalâu 1999) P. Freeman, Amman 2000 (Oxford 2002) C. S. Sommer and S. Matešić, Ingolstadt 2015 (Mainz 2018) Medical History (Welcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, London 1957–) Mus. Helveticum Museum Helveticum: Schweizerische Zeitschrift für klassische Altertumswissenschaft (Basel 1944–) PBSR Papers of the British School at Rome (London 1902–) Rev. Hittite Revue hittite et asianique (Paris 1930–80) RGDS Res Gestae divi Saporis, ed. A. Maricq (Paris 1958) SEG Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum (Lyons and Amsterdam 1923–) SP Studia Pontica (I, Anderson 1893; II, Cumont 1906; III fasc. 1, Anderson, Cumont and Grégoire, 1910) Structural Engineer The Structural Engineer (London 1923–) Syria Syria: Revue d’art oriental et d’archéologie (Paris 1920–) TAPA Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association (Hartford 1870–) Travaux Travaux et Mémoires: College de France, Centre de Recherche d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance (Paris 1965–) VDI Vestnik Drevnei Istorii (Moscow 1937–) WH War in History (London 1994–) ZAE Zeitschrift für allgemeine Erdkunde (Berlin 1853–65)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

CONVENTIONAL SIGNS ON MAPS 5 – 23 Railway (station and tunnel) Road – metalled, asphalt Road – unmetalled Tree-lined road Road partly constructed Cobbled road Village road Cart track Bridle track Path Telegraph line Telephone line Electrical power line Bridge Dry ditch Mosque (cami), tomb (türbe), cemetery Church (kilise), cemetery Monument Water mill (değirmen) Pen, fold Mine, mine disused Stony ground Rocky ground

ABBREVIATIONS Aş. (aşağı) Bğ. (boğaz) Br. (burun) Bü. (büyük) Ç. (çay) Çif. (çiftlik) Çş. (çeşme) D. (dere) Da. (dağ) Dğ. (değirmen) G. (göl) Gç. (geçit) Gd. (gediği) Hb. (harabe) Hr. (harap) Hü. (hüyük) Ir. (ırmak) İst. (istasyon)

lower gorge promontory large river farm fountain stream mountain mill lake (river) crossing, pass narrow pass ruin ruined settlement mound large river station

Rocky sided valleys Landing ground Meteorological station

Contours (metres) Stream

)(

Precipitous terrain

spring castle village bridge jandarma barracks well small rock quarter mine hamlet, field large river spring ridge hill, prominent peak summer pasture upper

OVERPRINTED SYMBOLS & ANNOTATION

Rocks of unusual formation

Triangulation points Spot height Ruined, partly ruined village Sand Hill (hüyük), gorge Deciduous trees Coniferous trees Olive grove Orchard Vineyard Single trees Scrub Meadow Rushes Reed Kitchen garden

Kay. (kaynak) Kl. (kale) Kö. (köy) Kp. (köprü) Krk. (karakol) Ku. (kuyu) Küç. (küçük) Ky. (kaya) Mah. (mahalle) Md. (maden) Me. (mezraa) N. (nehri) Pn. (pınar) Sr. (sırt) T. (tepe) Y. (yayla) Yk. (yukarı)

Fortress – location known, probable Fort/station – location known, probable Fortlet/watch tower – location known, probable City – location known, probable Town – location known, probable Modern town/city Roman road with surviving road-bed Roman road – known & probable course Ottoman road – known & probable course Aqueduct – known & approximate course Mountain pass Roman bridge Modern bridge Signal station Dam Town or village mentioned in text

TRAPEZUS Zindanlar

PONTUS C OLOP EN E

Ancient place name Modern place name Province, Kingdom District

Hen io ch i

Tribal name

LYCUS

River name

Kelkit Ç.

ANTITAURUS 12

Modern river name Mountain name Adjacent map number

Dry water course Water filled ditch Well (kuyu), dry well Fountain (çeşme), dry fountain Well with bucket Artesian well Well with pump Irrigation pump Spring (pınar) Sacred spring Rice fields swamp

TOPOGRAPHIC KEY FOR MAPS 2–4 below Sea Level Sea Level - 100m (330 ft) 100 - 200m (330 - 660 ft) 200 - 300m (660 - 990 ft) 300 - 600m (990 - 1980 ft) 600 - 1500m (1980 - 4925 ft) 1500 - 3000m (4925 - 9850 ft) over 3000m (9850 ft)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

Introduction The line of Vespasian’s eastern frontier is described from south to north,1 beginning at Samosata in northern Commagene, passing through Cappadocia and Armenia Minor, crossing the Pontic mountains, and ending on the Black Sea shore at Trapezus, the modern Trabzon (chapters  1–16). The chain of protected anchorages, extending east and north along the coast to Sebastopolis (Sukhumi) below the Caucasus and known largely from Arrian, is described without personal knowledge, other than a brief visit to Sukhumi and the Abkhazian Wall in August 1965 (chapter 17). A NCI ENT A N D MODER N PL ACE-­N A M ES (L OCAT ED I N I N DEX 1) Principal ancient names of places, rivers, and mountains mentioned in the text are marked on: Map 2 Map 3 Map 4 Map 24

Euphrates Frontier: northern Syria to the Euxine The West: Galatia and Cappadocia The East: Pontic Coast, Armenia, Iberia, Albania, Mesopotamia, Atropatene Pontic Coast, Colchis, Armenia, Iberia

(In these maps, ‘Fl.’ (Flumen) = ‘river’ and ‘M.’ (Mons) = ‘mountain’.) Principal modern names are marked on: Map 1 Map 24

Eastern Turkey Pontic Coast, Colchis, Armenia, Iberia

(In these maps, ‘Çay’ = ‘river’, ‘Dağ’ = ‘mountain’, ‘Su’ = ‘large river’.) Ancient and modern names along the line of the frontier are highlighted in Maps 5–23, marked (except Map 5) with 10 km grid squares. T U R K ISH PL ACE-­N A M ES Place-­names are complicated. In the accounts of nineteenth-­century and earlier travellers, pronunciation is often the best guide to the identity of an Ottoman place-­name with a modern Turkish spelling: for example, Chaouqueu for Çay Köy (Tavernier); Giamouho for Gemho (Hommaire de Hell); Jemishee for Cevizlik (Kinneir); Rufaie for Refahiye (Brant); tschai for çay (Humann and Puchstein). Turkish consonants are pronounced as in English (except c = j, as in ‘jam’; ç = ch, as in ‘church’; ğ = y, as in ‘yet’, or = gh, as in ‘through’; and ş = sh, as in ‘shot’); and vowels as in German (except ı = i, as in ‘dirt’). The stress falls more or less evenly over the syllables. Many names familiar to travellers have changed, generally as a part of the national concern encouraged by Atatürk to replace non-­ Turkish names (ancient, Armenian, Discovering Rome’s Eastern Frontier. Timothy Bruce Mitford, Oxford University Press (2021). © Timothy Bruce Mitford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843425.003.0001

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 2 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER PONTUS EUXINUS TRAPEZUS

23 23

CERASUS

22

NEOCAESAREA

AC

S

SEBASTEIA

SAB

R IN

SATALA

20

Refahiye

1 8 19 14

A

Kemaliye

15 1 5

R ATES

17

S

S

Erzincan

PH

Y HAL

PSI

21

LYCUS

NICOPOLIS

AM

U

CU

E

LY

Gümüşhane

Kemah

13 13

PY X U

RA

TES

Arabkir Keban

Harput

MELITENE Malatya

ARSA

Palu

NIAS

11 11 EUP

CHABINA

HRA

TES

7

Karakaya

Pütürge

9

AMIDA

Eski Kâhta

TIG

RIS

Adıyaman GERMANICIA Atatürk

SAMOSATA

5

DOLICHE ZEUGMA

EDESSA

Birecik

EUP HR

A

TE

S

F ig . 0.4  Map Key: Coverage of Maps 5–23

0 0

50 miles 100 km

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

INTRODUCTION  3

Greek, or Kurdish) with Turkish. Old and new maps are difficult to relate. The process was accelerated by the Provincial Administration Law No. 5442 of 10 June 1949, which introduced for places of settlement the provision that ‘village names which are not Turkish shall be changed as soon as possible by the Interior Ministry after receiving the opinion of the Provincial Permanent Committee’. From that date, particularly in Armenia Minor, the names of many towns, villages, and hamlets, and of geographical features such as passes, mountain peaks, and rivers, were replaced: a continuing and disruptive process now put into partial reverse. Villagers still almost invariably use the old names in daily life and conversation. Used by travellers, they are always more valuable, and they are marked on the 1:200,000 Turkish Army maps, drawn from Ottoman surveys and still the largest scale available. Names unconnected with Turkish are clearly very old indeed, and some retain elements of the ancient: for example, Samsat at Samosata, Berzelo at Barzalo, (Eski) Malatya at Melitene, Samuka at Hittite Samuha, Zımara near Zimara, the twin Tapurs perhaps at Tapoura, Pürk (from the Greek pyrgos, ‘tower’) at Nicopolis, Sağ perhaps at Carsaga, Sadak at Satala, Mochora at Mochora, Zigana near Zigana, and Trebizond/Trabzon at Trapezus. Local government and officials, however, use the new names: sometimes restyling the old, as Diyarbakır ( . . . ‘copper’) for Diyarbekir, Erzurum for Erzerum, Ahmetli for the ̇ Ahmediye pass; but generally pseudo-­descriptive and trivial. Izolu is now Kuşsarayı, ‘bird palace’; Pingan is Adatepe, ‘island hill’; Zımara is Altıntaş, ‘gold stone’; the Tapurs are Gümüşlü, ‘silvery’; Melik Şerif is Yurtbaşı, ‘home head’; Pürk (at Nicopolis) is Yeşilyayla, ‘green pasture’. Renamed after the Selcuk hero, Eski Malatya is Battalgazi. On new maps, particularly vilayet maps, the result can be highly confusing; and on historical geography the cumulative effect is devastating. The Adıyaman sheet, for example, ­effectively encrypts the geography of the north-­eastern corner of Commagene. The ̇ could not make sense of his new, large-­scale operational jandarma commander in Iliç map, and asked for a copy of my old 1:200,000 sheet. The old names are therefore used throughout. NOT E 1. The route from Samosata to Zeugma is described downriver, along the Euphrates (pp. 11–14).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

ONE

Samosata and Northern Commagene (Maps 5, 6, 7, 8, and Figs. A1, A2)

SA MOSATA (SA MSAT) In a position of great strategic and commercial importance in the north-­eastern corner of Commagene, beneath a long escarpment fringing the very bank of the Euphrates, Samosata (modern Samsat) guarded a major crossing point on a principal route from northern Mesopotamia. There the Roman military road coming up from Syria divided, to lead directly over the Taurus, or, with much difficulty, through the Euphrates gorge, to Cappadocia, Armenia Minor, and the Euxine.1 Travellers crossing the escarpment in antiquity were confronted by a sudden and astounding scene (Fig. 1.1). A huge citadel mound rose nearly 200 feet above the Euphrates, to a flat summit 250 metres from north to south and 85–150 metres wide, surrounded by a retaining wall now disappeared. Its southern flanks washed by the river, the mound stood in the eastern side of the city, 1,500 feet above sea level. Bands of rock show that its base was natural; and on the north-­eastern side two springs of cold water gushed from limestone outcrops. Attesting millenia of occupation, superimposed layers reveal material dating to 3500 bc. Among them have been found traces of the Greek Fire, naphtha, for which Commagene was famous: the source, perhaps, in the oil fields a day to the north, near Perre. On the summit stood a Hellenistic palace occupied, it seems, for nearly 250 years, from the time of Antiochus IV until the overthrow of the dynasty in ad 72; and the walls of a mediaeval castle were preserved at its southern end. At the foot of the mound on the landward side sprawled the lower city, probably established in Hittite times, and brought into the great Assyrian Empire c.1000–612 bc.

Historical Outline After the death of Alexander, the region was incorporated in the kingdom of Seleucus; but Ptolemaeus, governor-­satrap, seceded, to form an independent kingdom and dynasty. His son, Samos, established Samosata in his name c.150 bc as the royal residence and capital of Commagene. The Hellenistic kingdom of Commagene, enriched by fertile lands on the north and west bank of the Euphrates, and by the forests which covered its mountains and produced the oak-­galls widely used for tanning and dyeing, was fully developed under Mithridates Callinicus (c.96–70 bc). After the destruction of Tigranocerta in 69 bc, his son, Antiochus I Epiphanes (69–32 bc), submitted to Lucullus, and five years later was recognized as a client king by Pompey. The banks of the Euphrates and the crossing at Samosata were thus placed under the control of a vassal of Rome, and Pompey secured a forward defence for Cilicia. Antiochus’ reign marked the golden age of Commagene, with the construction or

Discovering Rome’s Eastern Frontier. Timothy Bruce Mitford, Oxford University Press (2021). © Timothy Bruce Mitford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843425.003.0002

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

SA MOSATA A ND NORTHER N COM M AGENE  5

F ig . 1.1*  Samosata, and the road from Adıyaman: the mound, and faint traces of the city walls (May 1965)

enhancement of important buildings: the tumulus tomb of his wife, Isias, at Karakuş; an  apparent cult centre at Direk Kale; the fortress at Arsameia above the Euphrates, ­commanding access to Commagene from the east; the royal sepulchral sanctuary for his father, and his own summer palace and citadel at Arsameia by the Nymphaeus, on a lofty, cliff-­lined peninsula hanging above Eski Kâhta, commanding access from the north-­east; and high above, on the conical peak of Nemrud Dağ (7,240 feet), a monumental tomb for himself. There on the eastern terrace sat a statue of the deified king among gods of colossal size, backed by reliefs of his ancestors, his edict claiming descent on his father’s side from Darius, and on his mother’s from Alexander the Great.2 The dynasty survived until ad 17, when Tiberius annexed the kingdom and added Commagene to the province of Syria. With the annexation of Cappadocia in the same year, direct Roman rule was extended to the upper Euphrates. Gaius and Claudius restored the throne to Antiochus IV, who had ‘inherited great wealth and was the richest client king of all’. An effective ally of Rome, he founded cities and extended the influence of Hellenism in Commagene. Accompanied by his valiant elder son, Epiphanes, he brought troops to assist Titus in the siege of Jerusalem during the Jewish revolt in ad 69–70; and was among the first to swear allegiance to Vespasian, who annexed Commagene once again in ad 71, when a new civic era was inaugurated. But in ad 72 both were accused by Caesennius Paetus, governor of Syria, of plotting to abandon allegiance to Rome and ally themselves with Parthia. With a legion and Syrian levies, Paetus entered Commagene in a campaign identified as the bellum Commagenicum. Allowing Samosata to be occupied by Roman troops, Antiochus fled to Cilicia, but his two sons, Epiphanes and Callinicus, stood firm until their troops refused to fight on. Both sought refuge with the Parthian king, Vologaeses. The redoubtable centurion, Velius Rufus, was dispatched to Parthia to accept their surrender, and escorted them to Vespasian in Rome.3

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 6 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

With its four city territories, Samosata, Perre (Pirun, near Adıyaman), Germanicia (Maraş), and Doliche (near Gaziantep), Commagene was incorporated in the province of Syria, thus now for the first time contiguous with Cappadocia. With the simultaneous annexation of Armenia Minor, the entire eastern frontier from Syria to the Euxine was under the direct control of Rome. At Samosata a legion, perhaps initially a detachment of VI Ferrata, now guarded the crossing and the Euphrates bank. A trading centre astride several key routes and a meeting point of east and west, the city became a metropolis and added Flavia to its name. The involvement of III Gallica in construction work beside the Euphrates in ad 73, between Samosata and Zeugma, suggests that a strategic road was built soon after the annexation. It continued north across the Taurus to Melitene, and on to Satala. Along it Trajan advanced from Syria early in ad 114. From the time of Hadrian the permanent garrison was XVI Flavia Firma, transferred from Satala at the end of Trajan’s Parthian war: its presence at Samosata confirmed by abundant tiles bearing the legionary stamp, and under Commodus in the career of its legate, Fabius Cilo; and implicit in the reconstruction of Severus’ great bridge over the Chabina.4 The city and the Euphrates crossing were of first importance during the Mesopotamian campaigns of Trajan and Septimius Severus. But after the annexation of Osrhoene and conquest of Mesopotamia in ad 195, after the absorption under Caracalla of the kingdom of Edessa in ad 212/3, Samosata ceased to be a frontier city. Aware of the strategic issues as legate of IV Scythica at Zeugma some fifteen years before, Severus declared that he had added a vast territory to the empire and had made it a bulwark of Syria. On the contrary, Dio observed, his conquests were a source of constant wars and expense. With the eclipse of the Parthian empire in ad 224, the Persian wars soon brought turbulence. Ardashir invaded Mesopotamia in ad 230, and again in ad 238. Valerian seems briefly to have established his headquarters at Samosata in ad 255, to defend the crossing and the road from Edessa. Next year the garrison was withdrawn, and the city was captured by Sapor in his second campaign—to be plundered again in his third, after the capture of Valerian in c. ad 260. Samosata was the birthplace of the philosopher and satirist Lucian (c. ad 120–92), who wrote in Greek; and of St Lucian, martyred at Antioch in ad 312. In the later fourth century St Basil, bishop of Caesarea praised the city councillors and their steadfast council, and corresponded regularly with the bishop of Samosata, Eusebius. A successor, Rufinus, attended the Council of Chalcedon with the bishop of Perrhe in ad 451. Under Diocletian or Constantine, Commagene had been included in the new province of Euphratensis, which was invaded in ad 531 by Persian cavalry, and in ad 542 by Chosroes I.5

Remains Captured by the Arabs in ad 637 and in the twelfth century by the Selcuk Turks, Samosata was destroyed by the Mongols. Knowledge of its layout, even of its overall shape, has advanced little since the visits of scholars a century ago. The location of the legionary fortress remains unknown. Early in 1836, Ainsworth saw a few fragments of marble columns. The ruins were visited by Humann and Puchstein in 1883; and in early May 1894 for two or three days by Hogarth and Yorke, who crossed the river, swollen by melted snow, by ferry (Fig. 1.2), ‘a boat of strange build—a primitive craft, nearly flat-­ bottomed and very broad in the beam. Square low bows admitted of the embarkation of

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

SA MOSATA A ND NORTHER N COM M AGENE  7

F ig . 1.2*  ‘Ferry at Sumeïsát’: beyond the Euphrates, the mound (Chesney, March 1836; from Euphrates Expedition, p. 45) (BOD Hist.d.33, vol I)

horses, and her stern ended in a high poop and antediluvian rudder.’ The ferry was dragged by ropes for half a mile upriver, and the two bowmen used bladeless poles as oars. From finds of an altar and two tiles inscribed ‘Legio XVI Flavia Firma’, Hogarth reckoned ‘the modern village appears to occupy the situation of the legionary camp’. Samsat was then a miserable Kurdish village: ‘scarce a hundred huts huddle in one corner of the old city, marked now by the line of the Roman fosse, by a ruined river wall, and by gaunt fragments of rubble’. Of the city nothing remained. Within the walls ‘fertile fields, rough with the rubble of destroyed building materials’ were strewn with broken Roman pottery, and the straggling village of Samsat lay towards the southern corner. In ̆ with eyebrows and moustache May 1965 I stayed with the mayor, a tall, fierce-­looking aga dyed black. There were still, he declared, 20–30 Armenian families. In 1980 the population, soon to be relocated, was officially 2,214. On the narrow plain below the citadel, the clear trace of the ancient walls formed a ‘complete, bow-­shaped circuit’ 3½ miles long, enclosing an area of some 135 hectares, the size of Roman London (Fig. 1.3). The original wall was up to 2 metres thick, and with later additions on the outside survived in places to a height of 9 metres. Built with limestone rubble and small blocks with concrete joints, the facings and foundations plundered as a quarry, the walls have been dated to the reign of Domitian. Structures beside the Euphrates should be associated with the crossing, probably a pontoon bridge; with provision for an opening to allow the passage of interlocked logs and of rafts bearing grain and stone from the Taurus gorge, and designed to be rapidly dismantled to deny use to an advancing enemy. On Marcus’ Column, a bridge of boats,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 8 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 1.3*  ‘Preliminary topographic survey plan of the citadel-­mound and city fortification wall of Samosata’ (Goell, 1967; from NGS Research Reports, 1967 Projects, 86–7, 2) (BOD Per. 2017 d.805)

their decks fitted with blocks to support crossbeams and made safe with railings, was wide enough for legionaries to march in four files across the Danube. Above the crossing was the Edessa gateway: a massive mortar and rubble core still standing to a height of 6.65 metres, flanked by walls of rubble and concrete. Through it passed the bishop of Samosata, exiled by Valens in the mid fourth century: ‘when (Eusebius) had reached the bank of the river, for the Euphrates runs along the very walls

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

SA MOSATA A ND NORTHER N COM M AGENE  9

F ig . 1.4  Legionaries in four files cross the Danube on a bridge of boats, ad 170 (Marcus’ Column iii/9B–10B: n/a, Neg. D-­DAI-­Rom 55.760, detail)

of the city, he embarked on a boat and told the oarsmen to row to Zeugma. When it  was  day, the bishop had reached Zeugma, and Samosata was full of weeping and ­wailing. . . . Then all the congregation bewailed the removal of their shepherd, and the stream was crowded with voyagers (to Zeugma).’ The structures on the Euphrates bank below the mound do not imply a harbour for traffic up and down the Euphrates. But navigation was clearly important below the cataracts above Samosata, and Eusebius’ boat and the following flotilla were obviously able to row back upriver from Zeugma. Boats and transport barges, similar to those carrying troops on Marcus’ Column (Fig. 1.4), undoubtedly passed under oars along the Euphrates between Samosata and Zeugma. But against the current, regular navigation cannot have been easy, and in autumn and spring barely possible. No continuous towpath existed between Zeugma and Samosata to drag even unladen boats upriver. North of Samosata, below the fields of Kilisan, rock-­cut chamber tombs were hewn in the escarpment above the Euphrates; and the ridge of the western hills, riddled with rock-­cut tombs, was said to be the source of six colossal limestone sarcophagi, two of which in 1967 still stood beside the road to Adıyaman. Excavations reported in 1974 were conducted by Theresa Goell, and rescue excavations were undertaken by Nimet Özgüç over nine seasons, from 1978 to 1987, with up to 150 workmen. They focussed mainly on Byzantine, Selcuk, and mediaeval levels, but on the mound and in the lower city revealed citadels, official buildings, palaces, and the main character of royal and Roman Samosata. The size of the site, the spread of occupation over six millennia, funding difficulties, and delays in obtaining public ownership f­rustrated

7

6

5

E

IC H

DO L

M AR

S

S

EA RO BE

ZEUGMA

URIMA ?

Horum

Ehnes

Habeș Habes

M

O

EUR OPO S

Birecik dam

APAMEA

Kalemeydan

.

CAPERSANA

Rum Kale

ARULIS ?

O

MSUGGA ?

C

A

S

SELEUCEIA ?

D

G

Yuvacık ?

CANABA ?

R

H

Eski Hisar

TARSA

E PER

F

RE

E

E

4

3

DOLICHE

GERMANICIA

2

1

B

NG

C

SI

K

Ç. su Gö k

Bğ .

O

0

E

0

E

Atatürk dam

N

G CAP A D OX

en k

A

6

I

5

20 km

10 miles

Kızılburç

ED ESS A

E

EDESS A

SAMOSATA

IN MEDIO ?

N

H

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 10  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

YA

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

SA MOSATA A ND NORTHER N COM M AGENE  11

full achievement of the project. It was halted after the 1987 season on the advice of the DSİ. The city and mound survived intact in 1988, and disappeared beneath the lake of the Atatürk dam soon after its completion in 1991.6 TH E ROA D TO TH E SOUTH-­W EST TO ZEUGM A The Roman road per ripam from Samosata to Zeugma, in Pliny 72 miles downriver, is depicted in the Peutinger Table (Fig. A2). It crossed the river Capadox, bridged the Singe, and passed the intermediate stations of Singe, Arulis, and, unmarked, perhaps Urima. Its course, followed in 1901 by Chapot, is marked by sporadic remains beside or close to the west bank of the Euphrates. There is no trace of fortifications, and the positions of Arulis and Urima are uncertain. The lower course of the road, and the lower parts of Zeugma itself were flooded by 2000 by the Birecik dam.7 From Samosata the road followed the river bank as far as Hayas. Here, at the mouth of the Çakal Dere, perhaps the ancient Capadox, the Euphrates entered a deep gorge that continued as far as Ehnes. About two miles below the Atatürk dam, and close upriver from the bridge carrying the new road from Adıyaman to Urfa, the massive buttresses of the Roman frontier road have survived largely undisturbed beside the Euphrates. Five metres wide and 100 metres long, the road was cut around a cliff 100 feet above the river. The ‘Euphrates Gates’, preserved by French in spectacular photographs, still hang above the river, but the southern side was destroyed during construction of the dam. The marks of ancient chiselling are clear. At the western end, beside the road, a panel evidently contained a great rock-­cut inscription, reminiscent of Trajan’s inscription beside the Danube at the Iron Gates. Unpublished, it has been effaced, not least during the building of the dam; and possible traces survive only of a few scattered letters.8 Chapot was forced to strike inland from Hayas, along the west bank of the Çakal Dere, and westwards over Karababa Dağ to Turuş, where a large necropolis of rock-­cut tombs marks Tarsa, 19 miles from Samosata on the Peutinger road to Doliche. Turning south-­ west, and at the site of a Roman tower, evidently Burç, turning south, he followed, an hour and a half from Turuş, a mile-­long section of an ancient road, 3 metres wide and with kerbs of larger stones on each side, leading towards the Göksu, the ancient Singe. The river was a serious obstacle. Travelling from Aintab to Samsat in April 1894, Yorke was advised to follow the left bank of the Euphrates ‘to avoid being stopped by the Gyuk Su (Singa fl.)’. Chapot was unaware of the great Roman bridge, 2 miles above the junction with the Euphrates and some 24 miles from Samosata (Figs. 1.5, 1.6). Marked on the Turkish Army map as the Harapkarkır köprü, the huge central arch, it was said in 1988, ‘was blown up 80 years ago’, during a blood feud between villages on opposing banks. The bridge is described by Le Strange: ‘The neighbouring Sanjah river, which appears to be that which the Greeks called Singas, had on its banks the small town of Sanjah, near which the stream was crossed by a celebrated bridge, built of dressed stone, with well-­set arches of beautiful workmanship. This bridge, the Kantarah Sanjah, was one of the wonders of the world according to Ibn Hawkal.’

◀  M ap 5  Commagene: Samosata to Zeugma (from GSGS No. K 502, 1:250,000 (NJ37-­10, Urfa), published by the War Office, Edition 1, 1956)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 12 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 1.5  Harapkarkır bridge over the Göksu (Singe), view north (September 1988)

F ig . 1.6  Harapkarkır bridge: approach ramp and abutments, view south-­west (September 1988)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

SA MOSATA A ND NORTHER N COM M AGENE  13

In scale and magnificence rivalling Severus’ bridge over the Chabina (Cendere Su), and in all probability reconstructed at the same period, around ad 200, by XVI Flavia Firma, the legion at Samosata, the Göksu bridge carried the strategic military highway from Syria and Zeugma to Cappadocia: a huge investment which underlines the im­port­ ance of the route. Continuing north and east through Turuş (Tarsa), and north-­east to Perre, where it was joined by the northbound road from Samosata, the road crossed the Cendere bridge, and climbed beside Direk Kale, also embellished under Severus, towards the high passes of the Taurus. West of the Göksu, Chapot saw further traces of the same ancient road, close to the Euphrates and continuing westwards for 10 miles across the foothills of Kızıl Dağ. Shortly before Akbudak, now Süpürgüç and perhaps the ancient Sugga, a minor road diverged southwards to cross the Karasu by a Roman bridge at Habeş, close above its junction with the Euphrates. In the cliffs above, a rock-­cut inscription records its construction by IIII Scythica, the legion at Zeugma. Chapot heard tell of this bridge, intact and still in use, but served by dreadful roads.9 Following the west bank southwards until it became impassable, this ancient road was used by caravan traffic, which evidently crossed the Euphrates by ferry, and at low water possibly on foot by a bank of gravel, to the east bank at Ayni. Carved near the top of the cliffs on the right bank, and above the end of the gravel bank, are an Assyrian relief and inscription of Shalmanezer III, overlooking the ford crossed by his army in 857–855 bc; the sculptured relief of a reclining Roman river-­god, Euphrates, holding an urn; and beneath it a rock-­cut inscription recording construction of an opus cochliae ‘water snail’, by III Gallica, at local expense, under Vespasian and Titus after March ad 73. This is normally explained as an Archimedes screw, designed in some fashion to raise water to the top of the ridge: where, just below the relief of Shalmanezer, was ‘a structure which may well be a cistern or reservoir’, and the head of a narrow channel winding down the slope for c.75 metres towards the Euphrates. The proximity of the river god suggests a different explanation: that the water channel, fed from the reservoir, was itself the cochlia, constructed by a detachment of the legion to serve some local, lustral purpose. The Euphrates was venerated as a divinity. A mosaic 60 miles south of Zeugma shows King River Euphrates, a river-­god similarly reclining. Crossing at Tomisa in 69 bc, Lucullus sacrificed a sacred heifer to the Euphrates. Likewise, before leading his Syrian legions across the river by a bridge of boats in ad 34/35, Lucius Vitellius sacrificed a boar, a ram, and a bull on the bank of the Euphrates to propitiate the river. Interpreted by the locals as an omen of a prosperous passage, but by others as a portent of initial but transient success, the level was rising to an immense height, without any violent rains, and white foam was curling into circles like a diadem. Following the custom of naming ships after great rivers, a trireme of the Misenum fleet was named Euphrates.10 At Akbudak the road from Turuş and the Harapkarkır bridge divided: west for Germanicia, and southwards around the Euphrates’ bend for Zeugma. Descending, it crossed the Karasu 3 miles above Habeş, by a larger, four-­arched Roman bridge, dated to the second century, perhaps even Trajanic. From the bridge the ancient road climbed southwards over Kara Dag.̆ Almost at once, Chapot was able to follow its traces. After half an hour he recorded a group of at least two very large milestones, 2.35 metres tall, uninscribed or illegible; and, a mile further, at least five similar columns. The fourth mile was marked by a large number of broken shafts, ten minutes from Elif, celebrated for its large mausoleum and the site, perhaps, of Arulis, on

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 14  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

the plateau at the eastern end of Kara Dag.̆ From the rim steep cliffs fell to the Euphrates. There Chapot saw a large number of cisterns. Known as Sultan Murat Caddesi, a name so often attached to once-­Roman roads, the main road to Zeugma continued through Sarılar. Below the mediaeval castle of Rum Kale, investigated by T.E. Lawrence and now submerged, the piers of a Roman bridge survived close to the mouth of the Merzumen, Pliny’s Marsyas, which flows into the Euphrates 16 miles upriver from Zeugma. But the main road descending from Sarılar probably crossed the Merzumen by another bridge, now lost, close to Mesırı; site of an ancient city marked with the remains of Roman towers, at the western end of a deep gorge, some 3 miles from the junction with the Euphrates. The road then evidently climbed inland to the summit of the escarpment, nearly 1,000 feet high, that cuts across the base of the eastward loop of the Euphrates. Below the lip, traces of the road could be followed for 350 metres, ‘massively built up on the down-­hill side and includ[ing] two sharp bends. The width of the road at the first turn was 3.10 metres, with the height of the embankment about 2 metres both below and above the turn.’11 On the escarpment, the road divided. To the south-­west, traces of an ancient roadway known as Top Yol, ‘gun road’, led evidently to Zeugma. To the south-­east a route descended past ancient cisterns directly to the Euphrates and the Roman quarries at Ehnes. Inscriptions cut in the quarry walls record work by vexillations of IV Scythica during the second and third centuries. South of Ehnes the roads reunited. Buried, it seems, under several metres of river silt, the combined road followed the bank of the Euphrates to Zeugma, passing beside the Roman watch-­tower at Yukarı Çardak, and below the hüyük of Horum, perhaps Ptolemy’s Urima, where the remains of evidently Roman quays, squared stones tied with metal cramps, were ‘visible at times of low water for considerable distances along the banks’. Similar quays probably existed at İmamoğlu, adjacent to Melitene.12

Zeugma (Belkis) At Belkis, 7 miles north-­west of Birecik and now flooded, Zeugma, ‘bridge’, was transitu Euphratis nobile. Here the Euphrates was maxime pervius. The city stood opposite Apamea, and Seleucus built a bridge, no doubt of boats, between them. The bridge at Zeugma was moored by a rusty iron chain apparently still visible in Pliny’s day, and shown to visitors as the chain used for this purpose by Alexander the Great. On his journey from Tarsus to Mardin in c. ad 1471, Barbaro crossed the Euphrates by ‘un navilio del Soldano (Sultan) ilqual portava da sedice cavalli, et questo navilio era molto strano’. The sustained importance of the Birecik crossing in Ottoman times is reported by Chesney: ‘one of the most frequented of all the passages into Mesopotamia’, and ‘about 16 large passage boats are kept at (Bir), in a state of repair, for the use of the caravans, which occasionally number 5000 camels on the great line from Aleppo to Úrfah and Diyár Bekr’ (Fig. 1.7). In ad 49 Gaius Cassius Longinus, governor of Syria, escorted Meherdates to the bank of the Euphrates and encamped at Zeugma to await the arrival of the Parthians. Transferred from Moesia to form part of the army of Syria from c. ad 56/57, IV Scythica marched over the Taurus to the vicinity of Melitene to join Caesennius Paetus in the disastrous invasion of Armenia in ad 61/2. Attesting the great strategic importance of this section of the frontier in northern Syria, the legion was based at Zeugma perhaps

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

SA MOSATA A ND NORTHER N COM M AGENE  15

F ig . 1.7  ‘Bir(ecik) Passage Boat’, Chesney, March 1836; from Euphrates Expedition, p. 47 (BOD Hist. d. 33, vol. I)

from ad 66. It constructed the bridge at Habeş and the castellum at Eski Hisar in Osrhoene, and is attested at Samosata on the tombstone of the soldier Sulpicius Proculus. A signifer, Aurelius Carus Silvanus, is known at the Ehnes quarries. IV Scythica is mentioned in Armenia Minor on the tombstone of an unknown legate at Nicopolis, and in ad 116 erected a huge inscription at Artaxata, on the conclusion of Trajan’s Armenian war. The legion was commanded in c. ad 180 by Septimius Severus. In 1988, tiles stamped leg IIII Sc(ythica) were lying among pistachio trees in the fortress. Rescue excavations 1993–2000 revealed spectacular mosaics dating from the late second and first half of the third century ad.13 ROA DS I N OSR HOEN E: TO EDESSA A N D A PA M E A From the crossing at Samosata a road led through Osrhoene to Edessa (Urfa) (Fig. A1). Some two or three hours from Urfa, Chapot saw long sections of an ancient road, in places preserved almost intact, 3 to 4 metres wide between apparent kerbs of large blocks of basalt. A second road, much shorter than the road per ripam and preserved in sections as a ‘narrow paved road’, led directly south-­west, to reach the Euphrates opposite Yukarı Çardak, and continue down the east bank to Apamea, opposite Zeugma. At about the half way point, on the highest hilltop of a plateau, a building inscription at Eski Hisar records the construction of a castellum by a vexillation of IIII Scythica in ad 197, during Severus’ second Parthian campaign: a small, square fort orientated north and south,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 16  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER B

A 0

C 5 miles

0

D

7

6

10 km

1

Karakuş ABI CH NA

2

PERRE 8

3

CARBANUM ?

S

4

R

CA PA DO

A

TE

5

X

E

?

SAMOSATA 5

U

PH

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

SA MOSATA A ND NORTHER N COM M AGENE  17

with  outer walls of 33 and 34 metres, each protected by rectangular corner and two intermediate towers, and a praetorium ‘in almost complete form’. A tile fragment bears the stamp leg. IIII Scyt(hica). The Roman fort was excellently preserved in 1911, but by 1979 there was ‘virtually nothing left of the whole construction’. Six miles to the east were two later watch-­towers. From Apamea an important military road, constructed perhaps on the brief annexation of Osrhoene in ad 116–18, and aligned 4 or 5 miles north of the modern road from Birecik, led through Canaba, perhaps Yuvacık, ‘little nest’, and In Medio, perhaps Mağaracık, ‘little cave’, to Edessa. A mile north-­west of Kızılburç, ‘red tower’, about 11 miles due west of Edessa, a boundary stone was erected in ad 195 on ‘a broad, paved road’ by the procurator of Osrhoene, Iulius Pacatianus, to mark the limits of Severus’ new province of Osrhoene and of the kingdom of Abgarus; and a milestone, erected at mile 48 by a successor, Aelius Ianuarius, in ad 205, recorded the evident reconstruction of the road from the Euphrates. In the village were the remains of a watch-­tower.14

TH E ROA D TO TH E NORTH-­E AST

The Samosata Aqueduct, and the Road per ripam Samosata was supplied with clear water by an aqueduct more than 27 miles long, now submerged. The total descent over this distance was approximately 230 feet. Its remains were reported by Ainsworth in 1840: ‘from (the mouth of the Kâhta Çay) to Someisat the remains of an aqueduct which carried the water of the Kakhtah river to that place are every now and then visible. Its lofty arches, supported either by strong walls or piers, must have been a work of some importance.’ In 1894, Hogarth followed the aqueduct eastwards with increasing difficulty as far as the Kâhta Çay: ‘The stream flows mainly through tunnels, but is carried on arches across the mouths of numerous ravines running down to the Euphrates.’ The remains, Yorke wrote, ‘begin to be visible about 6 miles north of Samosata. Near Alakeupri (four hours from Samosata) these bridges assume very large proportions. Originally their arches were wide, and built of squared stones of considerable size—work of the third century ad—but later, in order to strengthen the waterway, the arches were almost wholly closed in with coarse masonry of small stones.’15 The aqueduct started 7 miles up the Kâhta Çay, about a mile upstream from the small Kurdish village of Hallan, probably by a siphon from the Narince Çay which springs from the southern roots of Nemrud Dağ: cool, fresh water making Samosata altogether more pleasant in antiquity than its successor at Samsat. Its line could be followed throughout its length. While the Kâhta Çay dropped gradually towards the Euphrates, the channel maintained its height until, above the mouth of the Kâhta Çay and the village of Kocan, it ran just below the crest of a steep escarpment more than 200 feet above the river. Curving to the west, it was carried, over a distance of some 20 miles,

◀  M ap 6  Commagene: Samosata towards the Taurus gorge, and to Perre and the Chabina bridge

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 18  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

through tunnels and by spectacular arches across the gullies and ravines that fed into the Euphrates. The 4-­mile section west of Alaköprü Köy passed along and through a steep and difficult part of the right bank, which in many places fell in sheer cliffs into the river. There the path along the ripa was narrow and tortuous. But the escarpment thereafter drew back from the Euphrates. A few shallow streambeds ran down to the river, and the aqueduct bridges were lower and much longer than before. The section near Bilimen (Biriman) stretched for 450 metres. From there the channel descended across undulating corn fields, to flow gently into Samosata at the level of the base of the mound. The channel, generally c.1.40 metres wide, was lined with plaster and covered with slabs. Exploiting natural contours, it was cut wherever possible from the rock—notably on the escarpment high above Kocan—or tunnelled through it. In less stable ground a trench was lined with blocks and plaster. With John Miller, two guides, a horse, and two donkeys, I followed the aqueduct north-­east from Samsat in May 1965. Along this remote section of the ripa small, mud-­ brick villages were linked by a rough track. Most depended on meagre springs and wells. But Koşan and Kocan drew water from the Euphrates. The villagers, welcoming Kurds, knew of no inscriptions or other works associated with the aqueduct. Theirs was a lurid reputation for violence and blood feuds. At Acıhalılan the ağa invited us to breakfast. Nine of his close relatives had been thrown into prison in 1962 for murder, while the vilayet prison in Adıyaman was reputed to contain 1,000 violent criminals. This was a matter of much local pride. In Herdiyan the muhtar received us with an airless lunch. In the heat of approaching summer, he had blocked up his rear windows against incoming sticks of dynamite. On the left bank opposite Alaköprü six people had been killed in a feud that ravaged Mirazim in 1964. From Samsat as far as Herdiyan the hills stood far back from the Euphrates, and shallow streams flowed down between flat fields of corn. Beside the school at Bilimen, 5 miles east of Samsat, the track passed across the first significant trace of the aqueduct; and, a mile beyond, ran beside the long Bilimen bridge over a tributary of the Euphrates. Three miles to the east a complete arch spanned a dry tributary before Herdiyan. There the hills closed in, and fell steeply down to the Euphrates. Immediately east of Herdiyan, the aqueduct emerged from a short tunnel, cut through the bluff which overlooked the village and plunged into the Euphrates 110 feet below (Fig. 1.8). To the east the channel skirted around rock faces high above the track, which at first followed a flat shelf beside the Euphrates. Half a mile east of Herdiyan a single arch spanned a ravine, and the track turned inland to avoid cliffs rising sheer from the river. The channel cut straight through them in a long tunnel. Nearly two miles east of Herdiyan, the track returned to the ripa to cross the bed of a deep ravine (Fig. 1.9). In the western cliffs high above was the mouth of a long tunnel, leading from a single huge arch, long collapsed. Its sides and abutments still stood to a height of 20 metres, hanging like a vast, torn curtain across the ravine, and suggested two distinct building phases in antiquity. The first was of large ashlar blocks, reddish brown in colour, perhaps quarried higher up the Euphrates and floated down on rafts. Foundations in the bed of the ravine suggested a lost central pier, and the spring of its arch was visible. No doubt to repair collapse or destruction, the original structure was roughly filled, in a second phase, with white local stones, set in a rough core of concrete. The south-­western end was narrower than the north-­eastern, and tapered from a width at the base of 1.75 metres to little more than a metre at the top, in steps which perhaps supported timber props for a later arch (Fig. 1.10).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

SA MOSATA A ND NORTHER N COM M AGENE  19

F ig . 1.8*  Aqueduct tunnel at Herdiyan (May 1965)

F ig . 1.9*  Euphrates, east of Herdiyan (May 1965)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 20 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 1.10*  Collapsed arch, east of Herdiyan (May 1965)

For 2 miles the track followed a narrow ledge above the Euphrates. Opposite Mirazim, a very long section of aqueduct spanned a wide valley; and, after half a mile, across flatter hillsides, the track passed a spectacular section before Alaköprü Köy, ‘many coloured bridge village’, its name taken from a dozen arches spanning a shallow valley 250 metres across.. From his spotless house the muhtar could look down the Euphrates to Herdiyan and beyond. In fields below, men were toiling in white shirts, or waistcoats hanging over white linen smocks, and white baggy trousers. This difficult section of the ripa, the 4 miles between Herdiyan and Alaköprü Köy, contained nothing to suggest the passage of a military road. After Alaköprü Köy, remains of the aqueduct fringed the cliff-­lined escarpment above the Euphrates for 2 miles to Koşan, reached by a track above cliffs falling straight into the Euphrates. For 2 miles it led across flat, fertile cornfields, a quarter of a mile wide, cramped below the base of the escarpment, to the small village of Kocan poised on the very bank of the Euphrates by the mouth of the Kâhta Çay: in all about five and a half hours, some 18 miles, along a difficult track from Samsat (Fig. 1.11). Almost 100 metres wide, the river flowed slowly in May. There was no kayik, and boys were crossing on skins. We were grateful for a swim, and dined on dynamited fish, washed down with ‘Fırat Su’. The Euphrates, Goell observes, supplied drinking water for the fortress of Samosata in ad 951, when the main Samosata aqueduct was clearly no longer in use.16 The aqueduct curved abruptly around the steep escarpment above Kocan, and for six miles its line could be sighted running high above the Kâhta Çay. But a mile below Hallan, and for the two miles remaining to its source, all trace had been obliterated by erosion as it crossed the lower slopes. The aqueduct must have started, at an altitude of approximately 1,730 feet, about a mile above the village. At this point the river, about

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

SA MOSATA A ND NORTHER N COM M AGENE  21

F ig . 1.11*  Kocan: Zaza Kurds and John Miller (May 1965)

30 metres wide, flowed sluggishly and was easily crossed in late May by an old man on a donkey. The bed of the Kâhta Çay offered no suitable position or rock face to carry the aqueduct head, and the water was not clean. But on the opposite, eastern side, the Narince Çay, which springs at nearly 6,000 feet from the base of the southern cliffs of Nemrud Dağ, 20 miles away, tumbles rapidly south past numerous water mills, and pours into the Kâhta Çay. A reliable and constant supply of cool, purer water, this was the purpose and justification of the vast project. The aqueduct head may have been constructed opposite the junction, to gather the incoming flow. Probably, however, it drew from the Narince Çay itself, by a siphon or low-­pressure pipes buried beneath the Kâhta Çay. The Side aqueduct in Pamphylia offers an engineering parallel of similar length. Into its head, carved along the western cliffs of the Manavgat gorge, a vast spring gushes from the foot of the eastern precipice. Lacking inscriptions, the date of the aqueduct is a matter of conjecture. Hogarth and Yorke assigned the large arches to the third century. But the ashlar masonry above Herdiyan and in the section at Alaköprü Köy recalls the construction of the great bridge rebuilt by XVI Flavia Firma over the Cendere Su (Chabina) in ad 200, and suggests the middle or later second century. The second phase in the curtain bridge above Herdiyan may represent reconstruction after Sapor’s raid in ad 256, or after, perhaps, the earthquake which ravaged Armenia in ad 498/9.17

The Minor Aqueduct to Kocan Throughout the length of the Samosata aqueduct, there was no trace beside the Euphrates of an ancient road, or structures. Much quarrying had been done, and the

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 22 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

village of Herdiyan in particular had been constructed from the remains of a small span directly above it. But three miles north of Kocan and three south of Hallan, the remains of a single-­arched bridge spanned a narrow gully running down from the escarpment to join the Kâhta Çay. At the northern end of the bridge the remains suggested an ancient road, some 5.20 metres wide: the same as the overall width of the Cendere bridge. For such a road the valley of the Kâhta Çay yielded no further evidence. The top of the bridge, badly damaged, was much narrower, and carried a minor aqueduct. A line of stones and mortar, clearly visible in ploughed fields below the escarpment, marked its southwards course towards Kocan. The remains of the main Samosata aqueduct could be seen 150 feet above, crossing a ravine in the flank of the escarpment. To the north, a mile further up the Kâhta Çay and two miles below Hallan, an aqueduct head, a short tunnel about 0.60 metres in diameter, was cut through a low cliff in the very bed of the river. The level of the minor aqueduct, the overall length of about 4 miles, and the labour involved in its construction show that it supplied an important site close to the mouth of the Kâhta Çay.

Charmodara The low promontory at Kocan, a day from Samosata, overlooked the Euphrates valley in both directions. With no trade route leading across the Euphrates, a remote civil settlement was undeserving of a minor aqueduct. The position served a military purpose: to guard the eastern approaches to Samosata, to protect its vital aqueduct and water supply, and to command the Kâhta Çay and access from the kayik crossings beyond. The river could be crossed by a ford close to its mouth: in late April Hogarth took half an hour, ‘with great difficulty and some danger’, but later in the summer, Yorke heard, it was shallow enough. A late Hellenistic and Roman site, identified in the vicinity of Kocan by Mehmet Özdoğan in 1977, should be identified with Charmodara, the first fort on the Peutinger road (Fig. A2) leading through the Taurus gorge to Melitene.18 ROA DS TO TH E NORTH: TO TH E CEN DER E BR I DGE The great number of villages crowding the undulating plain between the Euphrates, the Taurus, the Ziyaret Dere, and the Kâhta Çay attests the rich fertility of northern Commagene. The plain was crossed by important roads. From Samosata the road to the north ran straight up the escarpment, and at the top, in the vicinity of Horno, divided for (Eski) Kâhta and for Perre. Both led ultimately to the Severus bridge over the Chabina (Cendere Su). The first, a direct and easy line followed by the ‘Old Samsat Road’, led east of north across a sterile, undulating plateau, via (Yeni) Kâhta and Karakuş. It avoided the obstacles of the Ziyaret Dere, Ali Dağ, and the Kalburcusuyu, but water was scarce and unreliable. The second, a longer route preserved in the Antonine Itinerary, led initially north-­ west, passed east of Adıyaman, formerly Hüsnümansur, and continued to Perre (Pirun), 3 miles beyond. There it joined the strategic highway from Zeugma and Turuş, and turned eastwards beneath the abrupt foothills of the Taurus, source of many springs and

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

SA MOSATA A ND NORTHER N COM M AGENE  23

rivers. The route is marked by the foundations of two bridges, over the Ziyaret Dere beside Pirun and over the Girik Çay near Kömür, and is confirmed by the milestone of Marcus and Verus at Bibo, 5 miles west-­south-­west of the Chabina bridge; to which the journey on foot from Pirun through Kömür took, it was said, between seven and eight and a half hours. For travellers between the Antiochene palaces at Samosata and Arsameia ad Nymphaeum, above Eski Kâhta, and between the legionary fortresses at Samosata and Melitene, the direct route via (Yeni) Kâhta and Karakuş is shorter by almost a day than the route through Perre. But the latter was the main frontier road from Samosata.

The ‘Old Samsat Road’ to (Yeni) Kâhta and Karakuş Of an ancient road via (Yeni) Kâhta and Karakuş no trace survives. But the ‘Old Samsat Road’ to and from (Eski) Kâhta in all probability preserved broadly the line of an Antiochene and Roman predecessor. In 1882 Humann and Puchstein followed this road from Karakuş to Samsat. Its course was explained by Recep Ertan, born in Samsat and chairman of the Doru Yol, ‘True Path’, Party in Yeni Samsat. The road to (Yeni) Kâhta at first led north over flat and featureless uplands, well above the level of the Atatürk lake and covered now with vast fields of cotton and tobacco. It passed through or beside half a dozen small villages set among patches of melons and vines. But along the whole route water was scarce. Even the population of Yeni Samsat, relocated from flood-­nourished fields, once yielding sixty- or seventy-­fold, to sterile and unwelcome uplands, drinks water pumped from the Atatürk lake. North from (Yeni) Kâhta, the escarpment above the Kâhta Çay offers a natural, almost level route to the conspicuous mound at Karakuş, hierothesion of Isias, wife of Antiochus I Epiphanes, and of their daughter Antiochis and grand-­daughter Aka. Below the mound in June 2003, Taner Demirbulut and I followed clear traces of an ancient road, 4 metres wide, zigzagging down to the depths of an eroded ravine, well to the west of the modern road to Eski Kahta. From the crossing, the road climbed gradually northwards, to join the line of the main frontier road at the foot of its descent below Bibo and Keferme.19

The Frontier Road from Samosata to the Ziyaret Dere Yorke followed the road to Perre (Pirun), across ‘pleasant and tolerably fertile’ country sloping gradually up to the foothills of the Taurus. Of the ancient road, the ‘Silk Road’, he found no trace, and none survives. From Horno it must have run along the low ridges above the east bank of the Ziyaret Dere, and past Eski Hüsnümansur, perhaps Carbanum known only in the Peutinger Table; following broadly the line of the ‘Old Samsat Road’ from Adıyaman, ‘a town of about 10,000 inhabitants, Turkish and Armenian’, through which Yorke passed about 24 miles north of Samsat. An Ottoman track suggests that the ancient road descended to cross the Ziyaret Dere, some 20 metres wide, by a shallow ford below the western slopes of Ali Dag;̆ and ran steeply up the Adıyaman escarpment, passing east of the sprawling outskirts of the modern city. On the escarpment the road divided. The road to Perre continued north-­west, towards the Taurus. The ‘Old Adıyaman Road’, to and from Karakuş, turned east and descended to cross the Ziyaret Dere.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 24 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

The ‘Old Adıyaman Road’ from the Ziyaret Dere to Karakuş Four miles south of the foothills of the Taurus, an old road between Adıyaman and Karakuş ran east-­north-­east, almost directly towards the glittering peak of Nemrud Dağ. Remembered from his father and grandfather, this, the Old Adıyaman Road, was described in reverse direction by Ramazan Korkmaz at Karakuş. From the mound, he said, it passed, almost in a straight line, through Markik, Kilisik, and Abuzergafanı türbe, and it was used by mules and donkeys. Indeed, looking west from the summit of the mound, a long section can be seen receding through the shallow valley below Markik. Evidently carrying caravan traffic from the west and from Hüsnümansur (Adıyaman) to  Eski Kâhta and Eski Malatya, this was the probable route of an Antiochene road to  Karakuş, Arsameia ad Nymphaeum, and Nemrud Dağ. After the annexation of Commagene, the same line would have commended itself to Vespasian. From the escarpment east of Adıyaman, the old road descended steeply north-­east to an important and ancient crossing point in the deep bed of the Ziyaret Dere: west of the Cendere Su and Kâhta Çay the largest river flowing south from the Taurus in this north-­ eastern corner of Commagene. Beside the modern bridge, the remains of an Ottoman bridge rest on an older abutment, 8 metres long, on the right bank. The arch, some 7  metres wide, has collapsed. On the left bank are foundations of a yet older bridge, a concrete core 5 metres long and 3.35 wide. It seems certain that a Roman road crossed here, probably with a single large arch. From the crossing the old road climbed steeply to pass beside the türbe of Abuzergafarı (the brother of Mahmut-­el-­Ansarı, his türbe nearby: both contemporaries from Horasan, in Hyrcania, of Şeyh Hasan Baba el-­Kirzi in Armenia Minor), a place of pilgrimage much used for picnics and sacrifice. Its line, without clear trace of an ancient road, continued north-­east, rising through Kınıklar to a low pass known as Tetros, and descended through cornfields to the shallow Kalburcusuyu. Beyond the river at Kilisik, a poor village of six houses taking its name, erroneously, from a small but remarkably preserved Byzantine or Selcuk bathhouse, Abdullah Darakcı produced a small bag of coins dug out of the surrounding fields. All badly worn, two were perhaps of Aurelian, the rest Byzantine: ­everything in reasonable condition he had evidently sold. As a professional treasure hunter, Abdullah was keen to discover the secrets of my Turkish Army map, and paced eagerly along the ‘Old Adıyaman Road’; used, his grandfather aged 110 had told him, by camels and mules. Above Kilisik the road climbed long slopes rising eastwards towards Bezbaba Tepe. Beyond, its line is readily determined, descending gently and running along the shallow valley below Markik, straight towards Karakuş.20

The Frontier Road from the Ziyaret Dere to Perre From the division of roads above the Ziyaret Dere, the line of the road to Perre continued west-­north-­west for nearly three miles, following the escarpment above the right bank and passing the conspicuous jandarma barracks perched high above the river.

Perre (Pirun) At Pirun, the ancient Perre, three miles north-­east of Adıyaman, and a mile north of the rock-­cut necropolis, Humann and Puchstein saw only wall foundations in 1882, and a

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

SA MOSATA A ND NORTHER N COM M AGENE  25

water channel arched in ashlar blocks, with two rectangular water pipes discharging after 100 paces into a round basin some 8 metres in diameter. This was the magnificent arched fountain, probably of the second century, in the centre of Pirun, fed from a cold spring and cistern, now built over, some 250 metres uphill. Similar water pipes survived until recently at Satala. At Pirun, Yorke reached the junction of routes from Samsat, Birecik, Aleppo, and Elbistan. Already in a hurry, he noted ‘considerable remains of antiquity’, and copied ‘two or three late Byzantine inscriptions in the rock-­cut tombs which abound near the site’. From the vicinity of the necropolis comes a dedication by a soldier to the god of Doliche. Meagre evidence for the history of Perre—the fountain and a fifth-­ century mosaic floor, the necropolis, and results of excavations since 2001—are discussed by Erarslan and Winter. The majority of the coin finds are concentrated between c. ad 330 and the end of the fourth century. In the fifth century Perre was the northernmost bishopric in the province of Euphratensis. In ad 451, Athanasius attended the Council of Chalcedon, with the bishop of Samosata.21

The Frontier Road from Perre to the Severus Bridge East of the Ziyaret Dere the foothills of the Taurus hang like a wall, 20 miles long and in places 500 feet high, above the plain of northern Commagene. At its foot, a dozen small villages, the densest concentration in any part of the frontier, cluster around springs; their populations Alevi Kurds, as shirts, waistcoats, caps, and divided moustaches proclaim. Through or below them the ancient road from Perre undulated eastwards for a whole day, leading almost directly towards the summit cone of Nemrud Dağ, and rising slowly to the col above Bibo and Keferme before the long descent to the Kâhta Çay. This was the track which Yorke followed from Pirun in May 1894. It led to (Eski) Kâhta, and after 28 miles reached the Severus bridge over the Cendere Su. He saw ‘no signs of antiquity except some more rock-­cut tombs to the left of our road’; tombs already noticed by Humann and Puchstein, who followed the route from Perre, by the bridge over the Ziyaret-­tschai and Bibo, to the Roman bridge near (Eski) Kiakhta. Five years after Yorke’s journey, Percy saw no traces of the military road. But this, as Yorke suggested, was the course of the Roman road from Perre to Melitene; and the entire route can readily be followed. Skirting along the base of the Taurus, and passing presumably through Kömür, it crossed many small streams flowing south towards the Euphrates. A new asfalt, opened in 2003, runs broadly along the line of the ‘Caravan Road’, and east of Bibo was laid on top of the mule track once linking the villages.22 Leaving the centre of Pirun, close to the fountain, the ‘caravan road’ descended slowly past rock-­cut tombs to cross the Ziyaret Dere, half a mile away, by a tall, narrow bridge some 19 metres long and not more than 3.30 metres wide, close upstream from the Pirin Yılmazlar Restoran: ‘the remains of a fine three-­arched aqueduct’, and, clearly visible alongside it, ‘the Roman military road’, reported by Percy in 1899. Carefully sketched by Humann in 1882 (Fig. 1.12), three arches of unequal size survived almost intact in 1945; but by 2004 had been destroyed and replaced by a flat concrete roadbed 11 metres above the river. The left bank is lower than the right, so that the eastern end of the bridge is approached by an artificial ramp, on which traces of cobbles lead up to the concrete. The western abutment, built on bedrock and bedded against a high cliff reaching almost up to the level of the ancient road, is so covered with creeper that only two large,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 26 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 1.12*  ‘Brücke bei Perre’ (Humann and Puchstein, June 1883; from Reisen in Kleinasien und Nordsyrien, p. 401, 59) (BOD Sac. F. vi. 89)

inaccessible ashlar courses are visible at the top. From it sprang the main arch, 7.3 metres long, over the Ziyaret Dere. Two much smaller arches were supported on narrower piers bedded on a high rock outcrop on the left bank. Position and construction suggest that the bridge was perhaps contemporary with the earlier bridge restored over the Cendere Su by Severus.23 From it the road climbed eastwards below the Taurus escarpment, across broad fields full of straw and unexpected Nodding Donkeys. Oil extracted in small quantity may point to a source of the mineral pitch, the Greek Fire found at Samosata.24 Camels were remembered to have passed south of the new asfalt below Şimili. But the mule track from Pirun passed through the village itself; easier and in winter less muddy, it was said, than the camel route, for there was no bridge at Şimili. Of its eastward line the caravan route has left no trace. Below Kalburcu, which Hüseyin, our guide, reckoned was some three to three and a half hours on foot from Pirun and four or five hours from the Severus bridge, the Girik Çay bursts from the Taurus through a narrow gorge, and becomes, downriver, the Kalburcusuyu. At the mouth of the gorge a bedrock spur on the east bank marks the position of a long-­used crossing. The present concrete bridge, Hüseyin declared, was the seventh constructed in this important position. In the western abutment, approached by a stone ramp of no great age, ten courses of evidently old stone blocks rise above the river, to a height of 2.50 metres. The lowest course, 3.30 metres wide, protrudes, and appears much older. There is no trace of an arch, but if one existed, the span must have been large, some 22 metres. This was the winter route. In summer the caravan road, used by camels, took a more direct route. After a slow descent past Piriz Baba Türbe, on the crest below Girik, it crossed the river by a shallow ford, a mile south of the bridge. From a family of brigands and no friend of the Turkish State, Hüseyin revealed the site, beside the türbe, of a massacre of deported Armenians, buried by Turks: as at Tepehan unhappy proof that this was a main transit road, from the north to the Syrian desert. Combining again close south of Kömür, the largest village below the foothills of the Taurus, the old road veered to the east, again heading directly towards Nemrud Dağ. Rising steadily, it skirted briefly south around outcrops of white rock and oak trees, and after three miles, running now beneath the asfalt, passed below Bibo, where was found the milestone of Marcus and Verus of ad 161–9. An ancient Ottoman cemetery lies beside the ­caravan road.25

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

SA MOSATA A ND NORTHER N COM M AGENE  27

The col east of Bibo was inevitably crossed by the Roman road, before the steep descent towards the Kâhta Çay, nearly 1,000 feet below. Winding down long slopes between scattered oak trees, and emerging from beneath the new asfalt only in shortcuts, the caravan road passed half a mile north of Keferme. Over tea with the muhtar in June 2004, elders of the Tarikan tribe recalled trains of ten or twenty camels passing along the road, laden with salt from Sivas. Three miles below Bibo, the caravan road joined the line of the asfalt from Yeni Kâhta to the Severus bridge. The muhtar and elders of Seküyan, close above the bridge, confirmed the overall course of the caravan road from Pirun. Climbing again from the asfalt, it passed directly across their small plain and through their village, before descending to the crossing of the Cendere Su. After a full day’s journey from Perre, at the last corner above the Cendere Su (Chabina), travellers along the military road burst upon a scene of unexpected and unparalleled splendour. Marking the transition between the comforts of Syria, and the passage of the Taurus, with heights and perils beyond, Severus’ enormous bridge was a powerful and reassuring symbol of vis imperii.

The caravan crossing of the Kâhta Çay At Kalan, opposite the long descent from Keferme and 2 miles downstream from the Severus bridge, a large building complex stands on a low-­lying spur between the Kâhta Çay (Nymphaios) and the Cendere Su at a point where both rivers could easily be forded in summer and autumn. The standing ruins of a large courtyard building, 58 metres long by 46 metres wide, much larger than a han and evidently an enclosure for camels and pack animals, and a detached bath house, set in a walled enclosure, are associated with caravan traffic from Samsat and Adıyaman. In a short cut avoiding the Severus bridge, the crossings led directly through Kalan towards Eski Kâhta, and on through Tepehan and Pütürge to Eski Malatya.26 NOT ES 1. The position of Samosata is described by Strabo, 16, 2, 3 (749). The Persian Royal Road, leading in the fifth century bc from Sardis to Susa, Herodotus 5, 52f., crossed the Euphrates not at Samosata, but at Tomisa, north of the Taurus. 2. Greek Fire, n. 24 below. Tigranocerta at Siirt or Arzen, EAM 605–8. At Arsameia ad Euphraten, Gerger kalesi, seven inscriptions cut in the rock beside the path to the second gate honour Antiochus’ ancestors, IGLS 46f. The king describes himself as Philorhomaios and Philhellen, and repeats much of the language found in inscriptions around the tumulus on Nemrud Dag,̆ IGLS 1–36. Above Eski Kâhta, Arsameia ad Nymphaeum and the Eski Kale are described by Dörner and Goell, Arsameia am Nymphaios 29–35, and Wagner, Ist. Mitt. 33 (1983) 183ff. 3. The annexation, Suetonius, Vespasian 8, 4. Evidently while primuspilus of XII Fulminata at Melitene, Velius Rufus, missus in Parthiam, Epiphanem et Callinicum, regis Antiochi filios, ad imp. Vespasianum cum ampla manu tributariorum reduxit, ILS 9200, Baalbek. 4. VI Ferrata, Josephus, BJ 7, 7, 1 (225 and 230). III Gallica, perhaps stationed at Zeugma, constructed the opus cochliae above Ayni, ILS 8903. Fabius Cilo, legate of leg. XVI Fl. f. Samosate, ILS 1142, Rome.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 28 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

5. Dio 75, under ad 196. Sapor, RGDS 10–19 and 19–34. St Basil, Ep. 183. Later Persian incursions, Procopius, Bell. Pers. 2, 20, 17 and 20. 6. Ainsworth, Euphrates Expedition 194–6. Humann and Puchstein, Reisen 182–4. Hogarth, Wandering Scholar 111f.; and a similar ferry, 103ff., with Yorke, GJ 8 (1896), 321ff. Inscription and tiles, EAM 513f., nos 1–4. Eusebius’ voyage, Comfort and Ergeç, AS 51 (2001) 23 and 33, quoting Theodoret. Mid way between the Edessa gate and the southern corner of the lower city, a marble block carrying nine lines of a Latin inscription has been reported in reuse in construction of the wall. Goell, NGS (1974) 90–102. 7. To guard the Euphrates frontier in northern Syria, IV Scythica was transferred from the lower Danube to Zeugma in c. ad 56/57. When Vespasian annexed Commagene some fifteen years later, Samosata marked the southern limit of his extension of the frontier to the Black Sea, and of this account. The road is accordingly discussed from east to west. Chapot, Frontière 270–5. Routes beside and across the Euphrates, and the Roman bridges across tributaries between Samosata and Zeugma, are discussed by Comfort, AS 50 (2000), especially 113–17, and, with excellent maps, AS 51 (2001), especially 33–40. 8. French, BAR 156 (1983), 91, and plates 7.2a and 2b. 9. Turuş also shares its consonants with Tharsa in the Antonine Itinerary, 13 miles from Samosata on the road to Germanicia. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 321. Accessed by finely constructed approach ramps, on the eastern bank 60 metres and on the western 30 metres long, the main structure of the Göksu bridge was c.83 metres long overall. The central arch measured c.35.30 metres between the abutments, and rose perhaps 20 metres above normal water level. The surviving roadway is 5.65 metres wide. Le Strange, Lands of the Eastern Caliphate 123–4, quoting the Arab geographer, Ibn Hawqal of Nisibis, in The Face of the Earth (ad 977). The Habeş bridge and legionary inscription, Comfort, AS 50 (2000) 117f. and Figs 15f. 10. Taşyürek, Iraq 41.1 (1974) 47–53. The opus cochliae, ILS 8903, Ayni: the legion perhaps then stationed temporarily at Zeugma. Comfort, AS 50 (2000) 115f. Cumont, Études Syriennes, 247–56. Lucius Vitellius, Tacitus, Ann. 6, 37. 11. About 85 metres long and 6.40 metres wide, the Karasu bridge, Comfort, AS 50 (2000) 114, fig. 11 is wider than the five Roman bridges in and north of the Taurus. Chapot, Frontière 271f. For Elif, and the Merzumen bridge, near Yarımca, Comfort, AS 50 (2000), 117f. and Fig. 19; and AS 51 (2001), 33, 37 and 46; and Chapot, Frontière 272, n. 2. Lawrence, Crusader Castles 57f. 12. The Top Yol, Comfort, AS 51 (2001) 34f. The Ehnes quarries, IGLS 67–81, Cumont, Études syriennes 151–66. 13. Alexander’s bridge, Pliny, NH 5, 86 and 34, 150. For Zeugma, Cumont, Études syriennes 119–42. Barbaro, Viaggi in Persia 28. Chesney, Euphrates Expedition 46. Cassius Longinus, Tacitus, Ann. 12, 11f.; and invasion of Armenia, 15, 7. At Ehnes, IGLS 67f. Nicopolis, EAM 527f., no. 36. Artaxata, Reynolds, JRS 61 (1971) 141. Severus, Millar, Roman Near East 118–19. Mosaics, Dunbabin, Theater and Spectacle 57f., 95–6, 102–7, 110f. 14. North of Urfa, Chapot, Frontière 308, n. 9, and 311. At Eski Hisar, about 28 miles from Samosata and 22 miles from Apamea, Wagner, BAR 156 (1983) 108f. and 112f.; and, the road to Edessa, 110, and 113–16. 15. Ainsworth, JRGS 10 (1840) 329, and Euphrates Expedition 195f. Hogarth, Wandering Scholar 112f. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896), 323.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

SA MOSATA A ND NORTHER N COM M AGENE  29

16. Goell, NGS (1974) 92f. 17. In the earthquake, a martyrion called Arsamosata, 45 miles east of Elazığ, collapsed, and a great multitude were crushed beneath it (Trombley and Watt, Ps.-Joshua 35). At Nicopolis, metropolis of Armenia Minor, the entire city wall collapsed at midnight, all within was wrecked, and the inhabitants were buried alive with their domestic animals, oxen, and camels. Only the bishop survived, with two of his acolytes, sleeping behind the altar of his church (Cumont, SP II 308). 18. The bridge foundations, nearly 5 metres wide, were constructed with large ashlar blocks, and above was a core of smaller stones, set in concrete, and standing to an average height of 5.50 and a maximum of 6.70 metres above the gully bed. Hogarth, Wandering Scholar 114. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 323. Özdoğan, in Blaylock, in Matthews, Ancient Anatolia 101. 19. Humann and Puchstein, Reisen 147f. At Karakuş, IGLS 50. A statue remembering a second daughter Laodike and the royal cult are discussed by Wagner, Ist. Mitt. 33 (1983) 196–8 and 208–18. With Taner I followed the ‘Old Samsat Road’ in June 2004. 20. The tombs of the two holy men were noticed by Ainsworth, JRGS 10 (1840) 327. With Taner I followed the ‘Old Adıyaman Road’ in June 2003. 21. Humann and Puchstein, Reisen 124f. and 401f.; Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 322. Results of excavations since 2001, Erarslan and Winter, AMS 60 (2008) 179–87. God of Doliche, Blömer and Facella, AMS 60 (2008) 189–200, and EAM 515, no. 8. Coin finds, Facella, AMS 60 (2008) 207–26, include two Hellenistic issues of the kingdom of Commagene; twenty Roman provincial, including a silver tetradrachm of Vespasian of ad 69–71, perhaps from Antioch, and bronzes mainly from there and from Samosata; twenty-­eight Roman imperial, the earliest of Valerian, the latest of Theodosius II, with a gap of fifty years between c. ad 280 and ad 330; and two large bronzes of Justinian. 22. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896), 322. Humann and Puchstein, Reisen 125f. With Taner I followed this section of the frontier road in June 2004. 23. Percy, Asiatic Turkey 101f. Humann and Puchstein, Reisen 401, fig. 59. Of the Pirun bridge, the main pier, 2.83 metres long and almost square, has five surviving courses, each 55–60 cm high, of large old blocks. On the eastern face are traces of the spring of a second arch, with a span of 3.64 metres to a more slender pier, 1.68 metres long, with seven large courses similar in dimensions to those of the main pier, without mortar. This pier seems to have been rebuilt in antiquity. A third arch, with a span of c.3.82 metres, has been blocked up with coarse stones. 24. In a discussion of natural fire, Pliny, NH 2, 235, relates, ‘In the city of Samosata, in Commagene there is a marsh that produces an inflammable muddy petroleum tar, called maltha. When this comes into contact with anything solid, it sticks; moreover, when people touch it, it actually follows them as they try to get away. In this way they defended the city walls when besieged by Lucullus: his soldiers were burned by their own weapons. It even burns downwards with water. Experiments have shown that it can only be put out by earth.’ Dio, 36, 1b, 1, confirms that Lucullus in fact besieged Tigranocerta, where Greek fire, naphtha, was used by Tigranes to burn the Roman siege engines. Glutinous like bitumen, and called ‘naphtha’ by the Persians and ‘Medea’s oil’ by the Greeks, it was mixed in pots with sulphur and bitumen, and set on fire. 25. Bibo Milestone, Wagner, Limes 11 (1977) 683, and EAM 515, no. 9. 26. Blaylock, in Matthews, Ancient Anatolia 108.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 30 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER A

B

11

Şa

kş

ak

C

10

D

7

. Da

1 Kubbe T.

9 2

MIASENA ?

Akdağ

at

.

Ç

Ç

3

Sincik Gates

Nemrud Da. 4

LACOTENA 8 ARSAMEIA AD NYMPHAEUM Cende

re Su

CHAB INA

5

Karakuş 0

6

8

0

5 miles 10 km

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

TWO

Over the Taurus to Melitene (Maps 7, 11, and Fig. A1)

GEOGR A PH Y OF TH E TAU RUS From Boz Dağ (11,800 feet) south of Malatya, the Taurus descends eastwards in three long ridges, forcing the Euphrates in a great loop around them. The southern ridge is framed with a savage line of cliffs hanging over the Gerger valley, and culminating at each end in a pyramidal peak: to the west Nemrud Dağ (7,240 feet), and to the east Ziyaret Tepe (6,560 feet). The central ridge separates the confused headwaters of the Cendere Su and Şiro Çay, and rears up to the isolated peak of Gopal Tepe (6,820 feet), separated from Nemrud Dağ by the deep and precipitous valley of the upper Kâhta Çay. The ridge descends above Tepehan, and continues high behind Pütürge to plunge abruptly into the Euphrates by the site of the Karakaya dam. The northern ridge runs eastwards in a colossal wall, Şakşak Dağ (7,450 feet), to the north falling abruptly to the Malatya plain, and to the east dropping in cliffs into the jaws of the Kömürhan gorge. These fractured mountains have not been satisfactorily explored. But across them the Roman frontier road from Samosata to Melitene can be traced almost continuously; while the location of Arsameia ad Nymphaeum above Eski Kâhta, and the remains of large hans in the deep valley of the Kâhta Çay below Tepehan, at Tepehan itself, and on the northern descent from Şakşak Dağ all show that an important route has indeed existed across the Taurus for at least two millennia. Below the eastern cliffs a tortuous mule track followed the Euphrates, its line once linking a string of frontier forts in the Taurus gorge. F ROM TH E SEV ERUS BR I DGE TO GOPA L T EPE At the first point offering foundations of solid rock on either bank, 22 miles upriver from the Euphrates, the great bridge over the Chabina was repaired a solo, from its foundations, and the crossing was restored by Severus and XVI Flavia Firma in ad 200.1 (Fig. 2.1) The bridge has long been seen as the point of departure of the main frontier road in the passage of the Taurus. Hogarth, indeed, reported that ‘the roadway can be seen running from the eastern end of the bridge up into the mountains’. That a direct and relatively easy route led across these savage mountains is clear from Corbulo’s forced march from Commagene to the crossing point at Tomisa to rescue Caesennius Paetus, in the late sum-

◀  M ap 7  Taurus: over the mountains from the Chabina bridge to Melitene

Discovering Rome’s Eastern Frontier. Timothy Bruce Mitford, Oxford University Press (2021). © Timothy Bruce Mitford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843425.003.0003

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 32  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 2.1  Severus’ bridge over the Chabina (Cendere Su) (September 1988)

mer of ad 62; day and night, with an army and a great train of camels laden with corn. This was no doubt the ‘way of peace’ mentioned to Hogarth and Yorke in 1894, ‘an easy path still much used as a route from Adiaman and (Eski) Kiachta, to Malatia’. But native guides led them too far to the west, ‘by a hill-­track, often so narrow that our packhorses had to be unloaded and led across bad places and reloaded again; and it was rendered still more difficult at this season (May) by treacherous snow bridges across the gullies’. Also unsuccessful was Earl Percy in 1899. From the Cendere bridge he took eighteen hours to reach Malatia, noting ‘No two travellers follow the same track over the hills, for there are so many.’ Hogarth’s route was roughly followed during his remarkable travels in 1945 by Kılıç Kökten, who passed through Sincik and crossed the deep valleys and high crests of the Taurus with great difficulty and danger during his return to Malatya. Von Moltke, however, stationed with the Turkish army at Eski Malatya in 1838, and concerned to move troops and guns to the plain of Samosata, preferred to pass through the Taurus by raft.2 So the problem has remained: to determine how the strategic road continued north from the bridge and passed over the Taurus to reach the legionary fortress at Melitene. In the middle of the Taurus the crossing of the Şiro Çay is the key. Two long ridges descending towards each other on either bank above Başmezraa, ten miles upriver from the modern road from Malatya to Pütürge, provide the answer. From the Chabina bridge the northern horizon is blocked by a long wall of cliffs barring passage into the Taurus, at each end falling abruptly into the deep valleys of the Cendere Su and Kâhta Çay. They are broken only at a narrow cleft hanging above Direk Kale: the Sincik Gates.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

OV ER THE TAURUS TO MELITENE  33

At Eski Kâhta in May 1965 ruins were reported at Direk Kale. With John Miller I climbed into the Taurus to investigate. Between the Cendere bridge and the Gates, the ancient road has left no trace. A caravan road was said to have run up a shallow valley overlooked by Çatbahçe, formerly Kadelik (vilayet), fertile and once famous for its giant olive tree, unique in the area, its trunk more than two metres thick, ‘as big as a mule’. The track to Bahçe, ‘garden’, was marked by old bridges, built with stones brought from Arsameia and Direk Kale. As it approached Direk Kale, about two and a half hours on foot above the bridge and three hours from Eski Kâhta, the road probably curved eastwards around its base; and climbed across severely eroded hillsides to pass the saddle that protrudes from the eastern foot of Değirmen Tepe (4,950 feet), the conical peak towering above Direk Kale.

Direk Kale (Lacotena) Conspicuous below the Sincik cliffs, Direk Kale, ‘pillar castle’ (4,450 feet), commands the northern end of the Bahçe valley, and to the west falls steeply into a tributary of the Cendere Su. Above rears Değirmen Tepe. Surrounded by steep, reddish screes dotted with holm oaks, it dominates the northern lip of a valley distinguished by the monuments of the kings of Commagene, at Nemrud Dağ, Arsameia and Karakuş, and by Severus’ great bridge over the Chabina. The extensive ruins are identified as Lacotena, through which Constantius II passed in ad 360 on his journey from Caesarea, from Melitene following the Antonine route to the Samosata crossing and Edessa (Fig. 2.2). The remains of an entrance gateway on the southern rim of Direk Kale lead to a shallow amphitheatre of fields, about 100 metres wide and 400 metres long, strewn with tile fragments and sloping gently towards the bed of a dry stream. Here were two rectangular buildings. Squared blocks in situ indicate the dimensions of the first (Hoepfner C), 19 × 8 metres. Unfluted column drums and fragments of a capital and frieze, perhaps of the third century, survive from a small temple. On a low rise in the centre of the amphitheatre, stepped foundation walls preserve the second building (Hoepfner B), 22.20 by 11.70 metres, with three sunken rooms, perhaps a century earlier. The eastern room, narrow, rectangular, and massively constructed at least 2 metres below ground level with enormous ashlar blocks, was secure with a single entrance and a flat ashlar ceiling. It was used by shepherds, and a deep layer of accumulated earth concealed the floor. On the south side of the ruins a fragment of frieze in high relief carries garlands of ribbon and fruit, borne by eagles with outstretched wings. Above stand small Cupids, hands reaching out with wreaths towards the eagles. In the stream bed an unfluted column drum, cut with dowel holes, has clearly found its way from this building. The surviving crypts suggest a small platform temple, entered through a porch with two columns between the ends of the outer walls, and containing the treasury recalled on an inscription found on the slopes of Değirmen Tepe. Four hundred metres north of the gateway, a pile of Ionic and Corinthian column drums marks the front of a larger temple (Hoepfner A), facing south-­east and set on a fine terrace, among olives. The foundations were 23.60 metres long by 14.20 metres wide. The columns had collapsed inwards, but four bases, one in situ and three scattered close to their original positions, allow reconstruction of a façade of four columns, each

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

F ig . 2.2  Direk Kale: ‘a. Lageplan der Ruinen von Direk Kale mit Ergänzungsvorschlag für die Gebäude A, B und C’; and ‘b. Skizze des Gebietes von Kommagene’ (Hoepfner, September 1965; from Ist. Mitt. 16 (1966), 159, Abb. 1) (by permission of the Federal Republic of Germany)

F ig . 2.3  Direk Kale: general view, north-­west, towards Akdağ (May 1965)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

OV ER THE TAURUS TO MELITENE  35

incorporating at least sixteen drums with an overall height of perhaps 10 metres. In the rubble pile, a fragment of a small Corinthian capital, carved with a female head flanked right by a lyre and left by a flame or wreath, is the only indication of the interior design of a building. Fragments of red tiles show the style of the roof. At the rear of the temple were sections of pilasters. Hoepfner dates the temple between the middle and the end of the first century. The terrace was bordered by a sanctuary wall (Fig. 2.3), 100 metres long and probably contemporaneous; the centre marked by square, projecting structures. The eastern is almost intact, a room measuring internally 3.20 by 2.75 metres and extraordinarily high, 4.20 metres below a thick, barrel-­vaulted ceiling (Fig. 2.4). The south-­western corner of the wall was guarded by a two-­storey tower still standing to a height of some 10.50 metres. The lower room, 4.25 metres square and 3.35 metres high beneath a massive barrel vault, was home in May 1965 to four Zaza Kurdish families, about 40 people in all, living among the ruins (Fig. 2.5). An ice-­cold spring, flowing year round, was more than sufficient for their needs. They would move above the Sincik Gates in August, and descend to winter about Yeni Kâhta. At the south-­eastern corner, wall traces suggest the presence of a similar tower. But the wall does not seem to have continued on the other sides: steep hillsides no doubt rendered this superfluous. Immediately behind the temple complex, the cone of Değirmen Tepe, ‘mill peak’, rises steep and pathless for nearly 500 feet. Its flat summit, 20 metres across, is strewn with a mass of tumbled blocks, some huge; and in May 1965 treasure hunters had been at work. There had stood a statue of Zeus and an ancient altar, rebuilt by (Tiberius

F ig . 2.4  Direk Kale: vaulted structure by the sanctuary entrance, and John Miller (May 1965)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 36 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 2.5  Direk Kale: western tower, and Kurdish families (May 1965)

Claudius) Candidus, Severus’ great general and conqueror of Adiabene in ad 195: seemingly in response to, rather than for ‘the oracles of Apollo’. Half of his dedication, two metres long and carefully cut with very large letters, vanished shortly after my visit with John Miller: smashed or rolled down the eastern screes. Below the peak a narrow ridge runs down to the east, falling on either side in precipitous screes. But the western slopes are littered with architectural and epigraphic debris: the base of a statue of Apollo Epekoos, and fragments of a long metrical inscription mentioning a treasury, and construction by priests of Zeugma. Candidus’ rebuilding, more or less contemporaneous with the reconstruction of the Chabina bridge, suggests a coherent programme to organize and assert Roman presence in this remote corner of Commagene. The Kurds showed us coins of Antoninus Pius, Commodus and Severus. Constantius’ visit shows that the complex survived into the later fourth century. A burned layer and fire-­damaged stones in the main temple show that the end was violent: whether during the incursions of Chosroes I in the mid sixth century, or an earthquake. A life-­size female statue was reportedly found in c.1970. At the bottom of a steep valley several hundred feet west of and below the site, and close above the Cendere Su, at Kaplıca, a small, thermal spring, smelling of gunpowder, is reputed sometimes to cure rheumatism. If the Candidus inscription implies the presence of an oracle, the spring, as at Lydian Hierapolis, and the existence of potentially hallucinogenic gas, as suggested at Delphi, may perhaps be associated.3

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

OV ER THE TAURUS TO MELITENE  37

Sincik Gates and Gopal Tepe Returning to Adıyaman in August 1987, I called on the Director of Security, İdris Gökçay. Son of a tobacco smuggler, he was a graduate of the FBI, and spoke excellent English. With his unstinting support, the Deputy vali gave me written permission, with no constraints on my movements or activities. The task was to seek out the Roman road from the Cendere bridge to the crest of the Taurus. Revisiting Direk Kale, I was guided by Sevket Ünlü, imam at Çatbahçe. Behind his father’s house, close below the entrance gate, huge granite boulders had been split by recent lightning. The father, disconcertingly, had teeth of solid silver. From the saddle below the eastern ridge of Değirmen Tepe, the ancient road has vanished as it climbed across fiercely eroded hillsides to pass directly through the Sincik Gates. There used to be a stepped staircase, 15 or 30 metres long and 2.50 metres wide. But it was dynamited in 1965 during the building of the modern track, below which traces of the ancient road can be seen. Across the small plain hanging above the Gates, the remains of a cobbled road, with kerbs 4.90 metres apart, runs directly north-­east towards the hamlet of Avbi Mezraası, nearly a mile south of Avbi. Most of the stones have been removed for building. Beside the road are small Ottoman cemeteries. The elders of Avbi claimed to take three hours to reach the Şiro Çay. In fact, the journey was probably twice as long, for it took me two and a half hours to reach the summit of Gopal Tepe (6,820 feet), marked as Ziyaret Tepe on modern maps. This was not an easy route, especially in winter, when snow lies 2 metres deep for two to three months, and the villagers, as in antiquity, used snowshoes. During Trajan’s Armenian campaign Bruttius Praesens, legate of VI Ferrata, ordered native guides to show him their winter route across the mountains. Fitting circles of willow withies to their feet, they trampled down the snow, in many places 16 feet deep, to provide easy passage for the legion. Likewise above Dioscurias (Sebastopolis), Strabo describes how travellers passed through snow and ice by tying to their feet plates of untanned ox-­hide or small wooden discs, fitted with spikes. The road above Avbi was infested with bears, and there was no han until Tepehan.4 Known to many elderly villagers as Sultan Murat Caddesi, this route was disused by 1987. Bekir Yağmur offered to guide me along it, with a mule. Above Avbi, the ancient road passes a very old ‘church’ cemetery, Kilisik Mezarı, and curves slowly round to the north-­ west; then turns north-­east again towards the high shoulder of Gavusa Tepe. This is the long, whalebacked mountain, once covered in large oak trees, which stretches along the northern horizon seen from the summit of Nemrud Dağ (7,240 feet). Passing a spring, the last before the summit of Gopal Tepe, the road curves slowly north, with kerbs clearly visible for 400 metres as it climbs a steep spine rising towards the ridge. Beside the road is an ancient cemetery, and far below can be seen the altar platform on Değirmen Tepe, above Direk Kale. Beyond the ridge, to the north-­west, fiercely eroded mountainsides tumble down to the upper reaches of the Cendere Su. Until this point the ancient road was followed and in places obliterated by a forestry road built in c.1985. Bekir was able to point out the precise line of Sultan Murat Caddesi as it climbed the ridge, and described where he had helped to dig forestry trenches across it. But once on the long ridge, the bulldozer could

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 38 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

go no further. Its traces clearly visible in shallow cuttings, but now with no sign of kerbs and badly eroded, the ancient road climbs steadily north-­east over a series of flat saddles and up the crest of the long ridge rising to Gopal Tepe; until, after an hour and with increasing steepness, it approaches the peak, at over 6,800 feet the most conspicuous summit north of Nemrud Dağ. Vertiginous screes to north and south force the road to climb towards the rocky crest. Only among the highest outcrop of rocks is all trace of the ancient road lost. It was constructed, perhaps, on an artificial ledge, now vanished down the southern screes, which fall relentlessly to the upper Kâhta Çay. From the summit Tepehan can be seen far below, some 3 miles to the east; and spread out in the eastern distance is the lower course of the Şiro Çay. Along the northern horizon stretches Şakşak Dağ and the conspicuous peak of Kubbe Tepe, in clear line of sight to Dulluk Tepe above Melitene. Gopal Tepe lent itself to long-­range signalling, but on the summit there is no trace of a beacon platform. Gopal (Kopal) Tepe is the dominant feature north of Nemrud Dağ, and marks the vilayet boundary between Adıyaman and Malatya. Villagers could not explain the name, neither Kurdish nor Armenian: a relic, perhaps, of the name of Corbulo himself, whose camels must have passed this way in ad 62. The peak was perhaps also the ancient boundary between Commagene and Cappadocia. Far above the tree line, bleak and exposed, it rears almost to the same height as the opposing summit of Nemrud Dağ, where snow can lie from mid October to late April, and in some years to May or even June. Climbing high above the Sincik Gates, avoiding the heat and dangers of the valley of the Kâhta Çay, and descending by Tepehan to the Şiro Çay, its high ridgeways offer the only ­practicable route through the gorges and abrupt mountainsides of the southern ridges of the Taurus. F ROM GOPA L T EPE TO TH E CROSSI NG OF TH E ŞI RO ÇAY Between Gopal Tepe and the Şiro Çay I was guided up from Başmezraa in October 1989 by Ahmet Aykan, a tough young Kurd about to start military service. It was a good thing he had come, he reassured me, because of all the hungry wolves, the boars and occasional bears. From the summit of Gopal Tepe the ancient road descended in steep zigzags for half an hour to a small plateau on the north-­eastern shoulder. The road then continues steeply down again, its trace once more faintly preserved along a bare ridge. The northern flanks fall almost precipitously for more than 1,000 feet to the Şiro Çay, flowing east and north-­east from Boz Dağ in a deep, straight valley. The road passed north and above Aliçeri, a Kurdish village unaffected by the population loss afflicting the Turkish: few houses are derelict, and 120 children attend the primary school, with three teachers. There Ahmet had to wait behind: his legs were tired. The ancient road climbs again eastwards along the watershed above Tepehan. There, two hours below Gopal Tepe, it was joined by the later caravan route coming up from the Kâhta valley.

Tepehan At Tepehan, ‘hill han’, after Pütürge the largest settlement south of the Şiro Çay, I was shown the ruins of Sultan Murat Han, 200 metres east of the village centre. Unusually

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

OV ER THE TAURUS TO MELITENE  39

large, 46 metres long by 25 metres wide, the han, a guide recalled, had been his primary school in 1972. By 1989 most of the roof had collapsed. It marked the Ottoman caravan route from Adıyaman and Eski Kâhta to Pütürge and Eski Malatya, climbing with much difficulty past hans in the scree-­threatened riverbed of the Kâhta Çay to join the line of Corbulo’s direct route to Melitene. Close by, and unexpected, was an unmarked mass grave from the time of the Great War. Convoys of Armenian women, deported from Samsun, Amasya, Tokat, Sivas and other places in summer 1915, crossed the Tohma Su to assemble at Malatya, and ‘were going to Kiakhta, and Urfa’. The grave confirms that Tepehan lay on a main route of passage from Cappadocia, down the Euphrates ­valley to Syria.5 Much of the section immediately above Tepehan has been destroyed by forestry and a modern track. But the ancient road can be traced again as it curves gradually northwards from the ridge, among pine trees, and plunges in a ladder of well engineered zigzags down the spur, studded with oak trees, that falls steeply for an hour and a half to the Şiro Çay (Fig. 2.6). Descending at first at 15º, the gradient increases below Maman to some 25º, passable by Corbulo’s camels, but probably too steep for wheeled traffic; and eases again just before the hamlet of Aşağı Tahnıç, huddled on a bare promontory between the Tahnıç Çay and the Şiro, ten minutes above the crossing. An old cemetery confirms the passage of a caravan route, which ran down a gentle slope to reach the riverbed. In the 11 miles from the summit of Gopal Tepe to Tahnıç, nearly 4,000 feet below and in reverse direction nearly four hours of arduous climbing, there is no source of water beside the ancient road.

F ig . 2.6  Zigzag descent to Miasena and the crossing of the Şiro Çay: beyond right, Basmezraa; centre, ridgeways carry the frontier road towards Şakşak Dağ (October 1989)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 40 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Tahnıç (Miasena) The crossing of the Şiro Çay lies about mid way between the Chabina bridge and Melitene, some ten hours from each. It seems inevitable that an intermediate station stood in the vicinity, probably at the base of the long spur below the Tepehan ridge, on the gentler southern bank. Aşağı Tahnıç, with narrow fields devoid of remains—or memories—on the south side of the Şiro Çay, is probably the site of Miasena. As at Kilisik in the Malatya plain, all may have vanished in the troubles of 1895 and 1915.

The Crossing of the Şiro Çay Below Tahnıç, the Şiro Çay narrows to a width of about 200 metres, channelled between a continuation of the long spur on the south bank and red, sandstone cliffs, 200 feet high, on the north. It was easy to wade across the gravel bed in late October, knee-­deep; the water at its lowest, before the autumn rains and spring floods of melted snow. Then the river is impassable. The Şiro Çay was thus the widest and most difficult river crossing, and presented perhaps the largest engineering challenge on the entire frontier: inviting a multi-­arched equivalent of the Kırkgözköprü, the ‘forty eyes bridge’ across the Tohma Su (Melas) north of Melitene. But the bridge, even the abutments, have vanished without trace. This was certainly the crossing point in Roman times. On the south side of the river it was observed by a mound 6 metres square. On the north side a zigzag path leads up the cliffs to a semicircular platform, 80 metres long by 36 metres wide, about 80 feet above the river. Signs of worked rocks, and some rough pottery, suggest that this may have been a quarry for a bridge. The path continues upwards to Battalgazi Ziyareti, just below the top of the cliffs, where the Selcuk hero watched his army cross: a place once of pilgrimage, now of digging. Ahmet recalled that gold had been found there in 1987. The cliff face has been cut in a semicircle and smoothed. There are no inscriptions. ˘ F ROM TH E ŞI RO CROSSI NG TO ŞA K S A ̧ K DAG From the crossing point below Başmezraa, ‘head pasture’, a position perhaps occupied by one of Ptolemy’s cities inland from the Euphrates in Laviniane, long slopes, offering a meagre living to a score of isolated villages, rise in gradual folds, deeply eroded by ravines, towards the high ridge of Şakşak Dağ (7,450 feet); and the frontier road climbed almost straight to the lowest pass, at Kubbe Tepe (5,800 feet): a distance, at a rapid pace, of about five and a half hours from the north bank of the Şiro Çay.6 The whole journey from Başmezraa to Malatya was said to have taken six or seven hours: in fact, it probably took ten. Here I was guided in 1989 by the muhtar, Hasan İnanç, met two days earlier, trudging to a wedding with friends, shotguns, and a dead crow. The festivities were supposed to last for several days, and my Representative, Adil Evren, by now had tired legs. Hasan claimed a remarkable family history. All the surrounding villages shared with him a common ancestry in the Konya region in the time of Cem Sultan, ‘about 1420’. Aged 32, Hasan had eight children. The road weaves its way up a series of five natural steps, short plateaux linked by cols and ridges, sometimes steep. It has fallen into disuse since the opening of new roads in 1978, and has in many places been carried away by landslides. By 1989 much of its

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

OV ER THE TAURUS TO MELITENE  41

course, especially in the two lowest steps for 2 miles below and above Ali Baba Ziyareti, had been destroyed by deep ploughing and roads for forestry. Hasan recalled how the road, the principal route from the upper Şiro basin to Malatya, was in constant use before 1978 by caravans of camels and pack animals. The road passes no villages, and the only water above Başmezraa is a small spring close to the summit. From the top of the cliffs that hang above the north bank of the Şiro Çay, the ancient road winds for half an hour to reach the spine of the knife-­edge ridge, studded with oak trees, a mile above and west of Başmezraa. There it is marked with a long section of agger. Too distant to have been associated with this road, a han was reported at Alakışyazı, 4 miles to the east and just above the Şiro Çay. An hour above Başmezraa, the road reaches the first plateau, already at the same altitude as the col above Aliçeri, some 3 miles away across the Şiro Çay, and vanishes for 20 minutes among deep ploughing for forestry. Its trace can then again be clearly seen, climbing to the second plateau. Perched on the lip it passes Ali Baba Ziyareti, a conspicuous place of pilgrimage overlooking the Şiro valley, and allegedly desecrated by Armenians. For nearly a mile the ancient road continues to climb, following a shoulder rising towards the north-­north-­west, and overlaid by the forestry road. The Kurdish village, Kanigol, ‘spring flower’, lay to the east. Above Zerdiğ Deresi, a half-­mile trace can clearly be seen, running beside and cutting across a bend of the new forestry road. Forty minutes above Ali Baba Ziyareti, the ancient road turns sharply north-­west, climbs over a low summit, and descends steeply north-­west to run northwards along the spine of a narrow ridge. On the incline, too steep for the modern road, the agger can be clearly seen; but along the ridge it has been overlaid. At the neck of the ridge the forestry road joins a larger modern road coming up from Budalauşağı, 2 miles to the east. But the Roman and caravan road continues north straight across it, towards an ancient ­cemetery half a mile west of Hoşgördi (Hüsgören). Here Hasan and I were were watched from far away by men in a white Murat, later identified by Adil as MIT. The ancient road curves north-­west, half an hour above the junction of the modern roads and now above the level of villages, to pass across the steep screes that fall eastwards from the low summit known as Şeyh Ömer Yamaçı or Zeynel Dağ. A clear trace curves to the west around the shoulder, and from a col descends into a shallow valley, where alpine pastures are watered by a small spring: an hour above the junction with the Budalauşağı road, and the first water actually on the caravan road since the Şiro Çay. Above the spring the road ascends steeply for fifteen minutes among black and red rocks stained with iron, to pass along an extraordinary rock-­cut trench, in places no more than a metre wide, hemmed between low summits. Then it descends abruptly, 300 feet of sharp zigzags amid black and purple screes, into a narrow side valley which runs west to join the continuation of the road from Budalauşağı, converging once more after a loop far to the west. Beside the modern road the ancient turns sharply north again, following a stream and passing Çet Mevki, a scattering of summer houses among the highest pastures, on the tree line 700 feet below the ridge of Şakşak Dağ. Here Hasan too felt tired, and made his excuses to visit a relative. The caravan road climbs steeply up beside the Budalauşağı road, cuts straight across the new asfalt, built c.1975, from Malatya to Pütürge, and continues steeply up the western crags to pass along and over the rocky, dome-­like crest (c.5,800 feet) which gives its name to the pass, Kubbe Geçidi. Beneath the eastern crags passes the old Pütürge road, followed in October 1972 in an antique bus, pursued by an archaic fire-­engine hurrying from Malatya. Both arrived to find wooden-­fronted houses, once crowded

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 42 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

above paved streets, still smouldering from a disastrous fire. The newly appointed ­kaymakam had not arrived from Istanbul, his nerve, it was whispered, unequal to his posting. Both old and new asfalts traverse dangerous screes avoided by the ancient road. Directly in view from the summit of Kubbe Tepe are Gopal Tepe some 10 miles and nine hours to the south, and to the north Dulluk Tepe, above Melitene: key points, no doubt, in a long-­range signalling system across the Taurus. ˘ TO TH E M A L AT YA PL A I N F ROM ŞA K S A ̧ K DAG A N D M ELIT EN E Below Kubbe Tepe, the ancient road descends the long spur that runs, north-­westwards, straight towards Melitene. Dropping steeply down to the point, marked by a roadside lokanta where the old and new roads from Pütürge converge again, it enters a wide meadow half a mile below the summit ridge. There the passage of the caravan road is marked by the ruins of two small hans set in sloping summer pastures, before it diverged from the ancient road to descend by the western ridge above the dry valley falling to the Malatya plain. From the hans the Roman road continued north across the modern road, and reappears on a short saddle, precipitous to the east, and marked by a Muslim shrine. From it can be spied for the first time the eastern triangle of the Malatya plain, the Euphrates, and, in the far distance, the crossing point at Pirot. From the shrine the Roman road winds down the eastern ridge to Keklik Pınar Mevki. In a mile-­long section descending diagonally across the steep hillsides, 500 feet above the asfalt from Pütürge, the cobbled surface and kerbs were splendidly preserved in September 1988, and I was able to walk steeply down the ancient roadbed without a break for 3 miles. Directly ahead, travellers could see, in the far distance, Dulluk Tepe above Melitene. A farmer recalled how his grandfather knew this section as the Caravan Road. For a revisit, I returned in September 1999 with a simple letter for the vali of Malatya. In it I explained that I had served in the Turkish Navy Headquarters, and was writing a book about the Roman Empire in Anatolia; and requested his permission to investigate, research, and photograph Roman remains. With happy memories of Bath, and in less than an hour, Mehmet Polat gave me unconditional consent. and his home and mobile phone numbers in case of difficulty. Brushing aside the Tourism Director’s hesitations, about a need for written permission from the Interior Ministry (which in fact the vali represents), Mehmet Bey asked him to arrange a car at a fair price with a reliable driver. As a few days before in Gümüşhane, I was free, and without police. I walked down the ancient roadbed with İnal. Much had, unfortunately, by then been removed with a grader, to build an approach road to the farmhouse at Keklik Pınar. Below the farm road the ancient road passes through a rocky outcrop in a shallow cutting some 3 metres wide, the outer edge in places built up with blocks (Fig. 2.7). Then it crosses the modern road, and for the next mile zigzags are interspersed with long sections of crudely cobbled roadbed. The final mile plunges steeply down in a ladder of carefully engineered and clearly preserved zigzags, at first following the eastern ridge and then tending towards the centre of the dry valley, right down to the very edge of the Malatya plain. There it rejoined the line of the caravan road descended from the western ridge. Passing close by a large, well preserved han, Halikhan, 45 metres long by 27 metres wide, some 12 miles from Eski Malatya, the ancient road continued through

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

OV ER THE TAURUS TO MELITENE  43

F ig . 2.7  Rock cutting on the descent from Şakşak Dag: above İnal, Dulluk Tepe; and faint along the northern horizon, the Antitaurus and Munzur Dağları (September 1999)

the broad valley of the upper Yazıcıhan Dere. All trace is lost to agriculture until it ­reappears close west of Furuncu hüyük, passing through the jandarma camp on the modern road from Elazığ. From Furuncu I was guided by Mahmut, who lived beside the ancient road and knew it as the Baghdad Road, used by caravans from Adıyaman and Diyarbekir. Crossing the Elazığ road in the vicinity of the Türgüt Özal Tip Merkezi, a large, modern hospital, it crossed long fields to pass about a mile east of Kırman Tepe.

Kırman Tepe (Karamıldan) Rising 200 feet above the eternal fires of the Malatya rubbish dump, the flat summit measures nearly 3 hectares, and is capped by a layer of soft rock, sloping slightly towards the east, and bounded on all sides by limestone cliffs rearing above steep screes. Three rock-­cut cisterns, with narrow necks a metre across, but widening inside to a diameter of 4 or 5 metres, and evidently lined with plaster, suggest the presence of an important if arid site. Virtually without water and surrounded by cliffs, the site is wholly unsuitable for Roman military occupation. On the northern side, worked rocks, some cut square, others with long rectangular grooves, suggest a quarry for ashlar blocks of a size much larger than any surviving on the summit. They were probably transported to Melitene.7 Followed from Tepehan and Pütürge by the main caravan road from Eski Kâhta, the frontier road from Samosata passed below Kırman Tepe, which in Hellenistic times may have served to protect or control traffic passing northwards from the Taurus. Winding north between poplars and tangled bushes along the west bank of the Yazıcıhan Dere,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 44 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

the caravan road rose across a low saddle beneath the steep eastern flanks of Dulluk Tepe, discussed below, and headed directly towards Eski Malatya.8 Five minutes from the fortress, a tall granite column, the size of a milestone and bearing an Ottoman inscription, stands in the cemetery of Karahan Mahallesi. There the main frontier road was joined by the road from the Taurus gorge and the Euphrates crossings. The column may once have marked the combined line of the ancient road. To the west, stony fields drain into the Pınarbaşı Dere, which flows beneath the eastern walls of the fortress. On the slopes of a long bank to the east were said to have been found the military stelae in the Malatya Museum. There is no trace of an ancient cemetery. But the slopes, and the distance from the fortress, resemble the provenance of similar legionary tombstones revealed by deep ploughing at Satala. Converging on the Pınarbaşı Dere, the road crossed the river and entered Melitene through the east gate. There is no trace of an ancient bridge. NOT ES 1. I covered the southern part of the Taurus in May 1965, with John Miller, and in August 1987; the northern in October 1989 and September 1999. Described by Humann and Puchstein, Reisen 393–7, and Atlas, Tafeln 41–3, the Cendere bridge is 119 metres long overall, and 5.18 metres wide, and crossed the Cendere Su in a single span, 34.15 metres long and 17 metres high above normal water level. The roadbed was c.4.75 metres wide. Inscriptions, EAM 515ff., nos. 10–13. The date, Leaning, Latomus 30 (1971) 386–9. Visited by Hogarth, Wandering Scholar 116f., and Percy, Asiatic Turkey 102f. There is no trace of a Vespasianic inscription imagined by Hogarth on the north-­eastern column. 2. Tacitus, Ann. 15, 12. Hogarth, Wandering Scholar 117–22, and Athenaeum 3477 (1894), 780. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896), 324f. and 463ff. Kökten, Belleten 11 (1947), 458ff. Percy, Asiatic Turkey 106–8: his route cannot be reconstructed. Von Moltke, Briefe 288–92 and 360–3. 3. Constantius’ visit, Ammianus 20, 11, 4. The site and architecture of Direk Kale are discussed in careful detail, with plans and fine reconstructions of the main temple facade, by Hoepfner, Ist. Mitt. 16 (1966), 157–77 and Tafeln 30–35. Inscriptions, EAM 517f., nos 14–15. 4. Arrian, Parthica frag, 85. Strabo 11, 5, 6 (506). 5. The ruins of large bridge abutments and sections of an old, paved road were said in Pütürge in October 1972 to survive at Peraş Kale, south-­east of Tepehan: traces evidently of the main caravan route from Eski Kâhta, via Pütürge, to Eski Malatya. Bryce, Armenians 307. 6. Cities, Ptolemy 5, 7, 10. 7. I cannot confirm, from observation in April 1965, the brief description of a much larger fortified settlement, from surface finds evidently Hellenistic and perhaps early Roman, in Sevin, BAR 553 (1989) 437–60. With Taner, I followed the road from Halikhan to Eski Malatya in June 2003. 8. Dulluk Tepe, and its importance for the legionary fortress, are discussed in chapter 4.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THREE

Through the Taurus Gorge (Maps 8, 9, 10, 16, and Fig. A2)

GEOGR A PH Y A N D T R A NSIT From Samosata the Peutinger Table shows a road close beside the Euphrates, lined with forts and leading to Melitene. It may be taken as certain that a continuous route, often narrow and difficult, led along the ripa and through the Taurus gorge in Roman times. Driven eastwards by the three ridges of the Taurus, the Euphrates has carved an immense canyon in places more than a mile deep. From Kömürhan the river cascaded for 43 miles, four days on foot, between vertiginous mountainsides, scarred by ravines and cliffs, to the Çünküş ferry. The gorge is not lined with the huge perpendicular cliffs of  the Antitaurus, but the walls are high, almost everywhere steep, often precipitous. Villages, mostly small but some of substantial size, are sited in a continuous chain, an  hour or two apart, where water and meagre fields allow. Many in the north once Armenian, and south of Tillo speaking Zaza—a Persian dialect intermingled with Armenian—and broken Turkish, they perch high above the river, and cluster on the right bank only towards the mouth of the Şiro Çay, and south of Tillo. There, and above the Çünküş ferry, the mountains recede, until, after the Gerger Çay, the river cuts through the last foothills of the Taurus in a narrow gorge with perpendicular limestone walls 450 feet high. Thereafter, until the junction of the Kâhta Çay, the Euphrates, free at last from the mountains and rapids—Pliny’s cataracts—was joined by several small tributaries from the left bank. The gorge could be traversed on foot, albeit in places with much difficulty. Villages were linked by a rough mule track, a continuous switch-­back that climbed across shoulders hundreds of feet above the Euphrates, and dropped towards its bed at the mouths of torrents. Rafts could pass through the gorge from the vicinity of Eski Malatya, as von Moltke and Huntington describe. But the many rapids made navigation very dangerous, and fearful eyewitnesses told me that one at least in its churning descent was as high as a two-­storey house. The worst section, according to the Admiralty handbook, was ‘where the river breaks through the main axis of the Taurus between the İsmetpaşa (Kömürhan) bridge, and the Çünküş ferry. In April, when the river is in high flood, these rapids are quite impracticable; at low water in November they are extremely difficult, if not impassable.’ In Ottoman times, minor caravan routes, from Diyarbekir bound via Ergani for Eski Malatya, and from Harput (above Elazıg)̆ bound for Eski Kâhta and Adıyaman, passed across the Euphrates south and north of the central ridge of the Taurus, by the Çünküş ferry and below Keferdis. The former, a ship to carry across pack-­animals and men, was used in flight by Ammianus in ad 359. Kayik crossings existed in several places where the current allowed. Along the eastern bank. there was no satisfactory line of communications.

Discovering Rome’s Eastern Frontier. Timothy Bruce Mitford, Oxford University Press (2021). © Timothy Bruce Mitford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843425.003.0004

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 46 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Foreseeing the hydro-­electric and GAP projects with remarkable prescience, Ellsworth Huntington, who for four years from 1897 taught at Euphrates College in Harput and travelled assiduously, noted that ‘When the Euphrates river is properly controlled, it will serve two great uses: it will be a great producer of power, and it will accomplish the vastly more important work of irrigating Mesopotamia.’ With the construction of twenty dams in the Euphrates and Tigris basins, linked by enormous tunnels, visible in the early 1980s, to carry water from the Euphrates towards Urfa, the south-­east Anatolia Project (GAP) has realized both these visions. The Birecik and Atatürk dams have come at great cost to the archaeological heritage of Commagene, and the Karakaya and Keban dams have ravaged the Euphrates valley north of the Taurus. Most of the bed of the Taurus gorge has been flooded: from 1987 by the Karakaya dam in the middle of the Taurus, and from 1990 by the Atatürk dam below Samosata. By 1991 only a short section ­survived for a few miles below Karakaya.1 Early use of a route through the Taurus gorge is suggested by Pliny, who describes the course of the Euphrates in a dramatic account, drawing, it seems, on the emperor Claudius himself; and who notes as a reference point Claudiopolis, evidently founded by him, if  not  under Tiberius. The durability and military purpose of the route are shown by Ammianus, who knew that the swollen Euphrates could be crossed at Barzala and Laudias, two ­garrisoned forts, and who fled from Amida, via the Çünküş ferry, to Melitene.2

Travellers Of a road beside the Euphrates little evidence has been found to compare with the almost continuous trace of the main frontier road over the Taurus. Few travellers have even approached the gorge, and none have passed through the full length. In 1839 Ainsworth intended to follow the course of the Euphrates southwards from Malatya. The disturbed state of the Kurds rendered this journey impracticable. They had only lately been attacked by Hafiz Pasha, to little avail, in their mountain strongholds at (Eski) Kâhta and Gerger Kalesi, once Arsameia ad Euphraten. The former was still in open rebellion, and the kaimakam of (Eski) Malatya refused to lend horses or to assist Ainsworth with guides. After the difficulty and danger of fording the Kâhta Çay in May 1894, Hogarth abandoned, ‘owing to the height of the tributary streams, the project of following the right bank of the Euphrates through the Taurus’. Earl Percy was dissuaded at Eski Kâhta in 1899 from ‘exploring the eastern bend of the Euphrates’, believed to be ‘impassable for horses’, but reported that he had ‘talked to more than one educated native who had travelled through the villages on the eastern [sic] bank between Gerger and Malatia, and they all agreed that there were no traces of anything of the kind [Roman roads], and that a French scientist had made a careful but fruitless investigation a few years before’.3 In August 1962 Freya Stark travelled with mules up the ripa between Gerger and Tillo, where she left the river to strike north-­west to Pütürge, and reach Malatya by jeep. I flew through the gorge in a light aircraft in August 1966, but saw no trace of antiquity, nor possible line for a formal road. In October 1972 with a muleteer, Hasan Atmaca, engaged at Pütürge, a town of 4,000 Kurds and Turks above the Şiro Çay, I walked south through the gorge for a week, from Keferdis to Venkuk beneath Gerger Kalesi, at the southern limit of the Taurus. But there the violent onset of autumn rains prevented onward travel towards Samosata. Hasan’s local knowledge was good, but he spoke little Turkish. Worse, he was too reserved for the robust conversation that encourages villagers

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE TAURUS GORGE  47

to offer information. Exhausted by the Ramazan fast, he rode listlessly on his mule for much of the way. During Ramazan, Tozer found officials ‘quarrelsome and out of temper . . . In the summer, when the interval between sunrise and sunset is long, and the heat of the sun exhausting, the rigour of the fast is very oppressive, since neither food nor drink nor smoke is allowed to pass the lips during all these hours.’ That year in the Ziraat Bank in Malatya, a functionary was at hand to lick stamps for the manager. In June 2003 and June 2004, Taner and I investigated the northern part of the gorge, from the Elazığ road at Kömürhan to Halleberik above the Şiro Çay.4

Navigation and Rafts Routine navigation was impossible. Much of the upper Euphrates, Pliny knew, was used for down-­river traffic by raft in Roman times, from Zimara, through the Antitaurus gorge, to Melitene and as far as the mouth of the great gorge at Kömürhan. But in its passage of the Taurus the river was saxosus et violentus, not navigable between the entrance of the gorge, past Claudiopolis, and as far as the cataracts 40 miles upriver from Samosata. In 1963 the Taurus gorge was considered very dangerous by the kelekciler, the ‘raftsmen’, of Kemaliye. It was they who spoke of rapids twice the height of a house, and refused even to try. At Kömürhan in 1835 Brant noted that ‘this part of the (Euphrates) is never passed by rafts of any kind’. Only between Kömürhan and Keferdis was there regular traffic. Building a very solid raft, kelek, of sixty skins at Palu on the Murat (Arsanias), with four vigorous oarsmen, von Moltke passed through the gorge, and as far as Birecik, in July 1838, hoping to find the river suitable for the passage of guns for the army of Hafiz Pasha. He was forced to dismantle everything below Keferdis, and abandoned a second attempt in the following spring, when the waters were high and the rapids and waterfalls more dangerous. But as a result of his reconnaissance, ‘it was the uniform practice of Hafiz Pasha to embark his stores on rafts (near Malatiyah) and float them down at least to Sumeïsát’ during the campaign of 1839. Ainsworth reported twin rapids above and at the junction of the Şiro Çay, and a small rapid above and more small rapids about ten miles below Gerger Kalesi.5 In April 1901, at Akhor on the Murat east of Harput, Huntington engaged two kellekjis and a kelek, steered with spoon-­shaped walnut paddles. The people of this village, Armenians, make a business during the winter of floating down the river to Kemur Khan on rafts of skins, fishing as they go. . . . [At Kömürhan] the rafts are taken to pieces, and together with the fish loaded on donkeys sent by land across the neck of the river’s bend to meet them. The fish are sold at Harput, and the rafts are taken back to the village, whence they start again. The Euphrates was abundant in fish, weighing up to 17 okes [roughly, kilos], and 1.20 metres long. The making of the kellek took some time, although in the evening a number of entire sheepskins had been well soaked and left wet so that they might be pliable and ready for immediate use. In the morning they were inflated by blowing through the necks, the legs being securely tied so that no air could escape. At first the mouths of the blowers were at a distance of 8 or 10 inches from the necks of the skins, but as the latter became fuller and more difficult to inflate, the men’s mouths were brought nearer until they touched the skins. . . . A light frame of saplings was tied together with ropes, and under this were tied the skins, about thirty in number, with the legs up [evidently 5 rows each

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 48 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER B

A

7

C

D

9

8

E

ARSAMEIA AD EUPHRATEN Nemrud Da. 1

7

ARSAMEIA AD NYMPHAEUM

2

CH

AB

IN

HEBA ?

A De

m

ği

en

r

3

D.

Kepir T.

Sitma T. Kavuçer 4

6 CHARMODARA 5

0 0

5 miles 10 km

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE TAURUS GORGE  49

of 6 skins: my kelek in the Antitaurus gorge was larger, with 6 rows of 7 skins]. They were packed together so closely as to make the kellek watertight. Thirty skins seemed to us very few for five people, but the fishermen’s rafts consist of only six, and two men sit on one such kellek. The fishermen always go in pairs on long fishing trips. A kellek moves in the easiest, most delightful way that can be imagined. There is no jar or shake. The buoyant skins and pliant saplings adapt themselves to every movement of the waves. . . . The kellekjis gathered a great quantity of weeds which they spread over the raft, partly to protect the skins from injury by our feet, but still more to protect them from drying in the sun and cracking. Every hour or two they threw water over all exposed portions of the skins.6

With Professor Norton, US Consul at Harput, Huntington floated down the Murat to join the Kara Su (Euphrates), coasted through the Malatya plain, and passed through the Taurus gorge as far as Gerger: a journey of 120 miles. ‘As the spring of 1901 in Turkey was unusually dry, the river was comparatively low, being about halfway between the extremes of flood and low water.’ Several rapids could only be negotiated by portage. From the junction of the Kara Su to the beginning of the Malatya plain, a distance of 35 miles, Huntington took six hours; and ten and a half hours each to cover the 45 miles from the junction to Kömürhan (the distance from the mouth of the Tohma Su to Kömürhan is about 25 miles), and the 60 miles from Kömürhan to Gerger. The gentlest descent of the Euphrates was in the Malatya plain, 100 feet in 55 miles; the steepest was in the Taurus gorge, near the big rapid just below Tilek, south of Keferdis, 100 feet in 6 miles.

Tracks Thus forts built beside or high above the river cannot have been linked by regular navigation. They must, instead, have been connected by a road or track of whatever quality. In contrast to the direct road over the Taurus, the route through the gorge is marked by a chain of villages, linked by a path, in places a track, which follows the only practicable route: south of Tillo passing close above the river, and further north tortuous, in places difficult, and almost everywhere high above the Euphrates. The ancient route was obliged, by default, to follow the same line. Modern villages show the spread and level of population. Unchanging geography suggests that their sites are likely to preserve the pattern of occupation in Roman times. F ROM TH E K Â H TA TO TH E GERGER ÇAY Between the Kâhta Çay and Gerger Kalesi (Arsameia ad Euphraten), I was unable to investigate the course of the frontier south of the Taurus before the Euphrates was flooded above the Atatürk dam.

◀  M ap 8.  Taurus gorge: per ripam from Charmodara to Heba and Arsameia

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 50  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Heba (? Akcaviran, near Tille) The road from Samosata crossed the Kâhta Çay close to its mouth beside Charmodara, and evidently followed the ripa as far as Kişik, below Gerger Kalesi. Here Pliny’s cataracts ended, and the Euphrates, at last flowing gently, was easily crossed. In this vulnerable section of the frontier, the Peutinger Table marks a fort at Heba. For its undetermined site, or proximity, perhaps at Akcaviran, rescue excavations at Tille provide important evidence: large numbers of tiles stamped by ala Flavia Agrippiana, one of several auxiliary units supplying picked cavalry for service in Mesopotamia, probably during Verus’ Parthian war in ad 164/5. Close by, south of the village, local survey work revealed three small watch-­towers standing on the bank of the Euphrates.7 This account of the great gorge starts at the remote village of Alidam, reached with some difficulty in June 2004. The modern vilayet and road map of Adıyaman is grossly misleading, and its renamed villages confuse an ancient geography clearly laid out in earlier maps.

Alidam and Gerger Kalesi Perched on a huge rock outcrop 1,500 feet above the Euphrates, between the ­southern spur of the Taurus and the long crags that lead to Gerger Kalesi, Alidam (Fig. 3.1) is  very large, with a population of 2,000 Sunni Kurds: an importance explained by the mule track, forced upward from the ripa by the cliffs of Arsameia. A band of PKK had been killed on the ridge above Alidam a few years before, and the people were suspicious. Fortunately, the head village guard, Abüzer Dede, offered himself as a guide. Abüzer was born in Kişik, the point, he recalled, at which the old mule track from the south-­west, confronted by the Gerger cliffs, left the Euphrates bank, 7 miles north of Tille, and climbed north for three hours to pass over the crest a mile east of Alidam. He pointed out its course ascending across fields and hillsides far below the village. Lost among oak trees and the ruins of abandoned houses, the track re-­ emerges a mile below the crest; in places 2.5 metres wide, without kerbs, and towards the summit climbing in broad zigzags. On a saddle among the crags, Puchstein saw the foundations of a square tower, reported by Ainsworth: ‘this pass was defended by a wall, now in a ruinous condition, and also by two square towers, quite dilapidated’. Close below Gerger Kalesi a steeper path led down to the Euphrates, descending through a deep limestone glen, ‘both sides being almost vertical, . . . while the Euphrates rolled below. The road winds down the side of the precipice, and at times the descent was an actual staircase’: recalling the stepped staircase in the Sincik Gates. Abüzer’s mule track is the only possible line for the main Peutinger road per ripam from Samosata. Its onward course traversed north-­east below the cliffs flanking Arsameia,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE TAURUS GORGE  51

F ig . 3.1  Alidam, view south-­east (June 2004)

and passed through Venkuk, a Zaza village surrounded by gardens, fields, and goats, with 150 houses and two teachers. Here too windows had been reduced to postcard size for fear of incoming dynamite. This, alas, is where my journey through the Taurus gorge stalled with the onset of heavy autumn rains in October 1972. Below Venkuk the ancient track descended steeply to cross the Gerger Çay close to its mouth. The northern side of the Gerger valley is blocked by an immense wall of cliffs, stretching from the flanks of Nemrud Dağ to Ziyaret Tepe, above Bibol and the Euphrates. The great massif crowned by Gerger Kalesi, where his raft journey ended, is described by Huntington: where the Euphrates passes through the last outlying ridge of the Taurus mountains, we find one of the narrowest gorges . . . a narrow canon with perpendicular walls 450 feet high. The hard limestone mountains rise over 2,000 feet above the river, the north side of the ridge being bounded by a long line of cliffs 400 or 500 feet high, from the base of which there is a much more gentle slope to Petterge Chai (the Gerger Çay). The south side slopes off gradually (towards Kişik) in well-­rounded gentle hills which can be traversed with great difficulty because of the rough pits and sharp edges into which the limestone weathers, and which have been denuded of soil because of the deforesting which has taken place.8

5

4

3

7

.

Ça

tÇ

2

A

10 B

8

K

Ç.

o ef t er

Ç.

oÇ

.

0

0

BARZALO

Karakaya Dam

10

CLAUDIOPOLIS ?

D

JULIOPOLIS ?

H e s ki n

ARSAMEIA AD EUPHRATEN

C

Till

1

E

9

10 km

5 miles

Çünküş Ferry

F

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 52  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE TAURUS GORGE  53

F ROM TH E GERGER ÇAY TO K I LLI K Two miles beyond the Gerger Çay, the track continued to Taraksu, visited in 1972, low on the very brink of the Euphrates: seventy mud-­brick houses, inbuilt with large ashlar blocks said to come from ruins nearby. Drinking water came from the river. There was a kayik crossing, and Theresa Goell embarked here for her downriver journey, easy enough, to Samsat in August 1967. Constructed by a kelekci from Kemaliye, her raft was ‘composed of 26 inflated skins supporting an open grid platform of poplar trunks covered by leafy tree branches’.

Juliopolis (near Taraksu) Half a mile from the Euphrates, a rock outcrop rises nearly 50 feet above the surrounding cotton fields. On the summit are the remains of a rectangular building 8 metres long and 4 metres wide, with fine ashlar facing on a core of rubble and concrete (Fig. 3.2). This was probably the Hellenistic watch-­tower seen by Freya Stark. The construction is similar to the tower at Direk Kale, evidently dating from the second century. All around, over a radius of 150 metres, spread the foundations of buildings, and the fields are full of pottery. The ruins do not appear to be military. They may be identified as Ptolemy’s Juliopolis: the name suggesting foundation, as a contemporary of

F ig . 3.2*  Ruins of Juliopolis (?): view south-­east, towards Taraksu and the Gerger Çay, right, joining the Euphrates (October 1972)

◀  M ap 9  Taurus gorge: per ripam from Arsameia to Claudiopolis

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 54 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Claudiopolis, in the decades preceding the establishment of Vespasian’s frontier; perhaps even during the short-­lived annexation of Commagene under Tiberius. The wide valley of the Gerger Çay, Ptolemy’s Aravene, is the most open and fertile part of the ripa within the Taurus, and would invite the foundation of a civil settlement: to serve as the point of collection and departure for raft traffic carrying grain from the small plains beside the Gerger Çay, and for timber from the mountainsides, to the fortress at Samosata.9

F ig . 3.3*  Kayik crossing, between Ninyat and Killik (October 1972)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE TAURUS GORGE  55

Killik (Barzalo) Continuing close above the Euphrates, the track passes a kayik crossing (Fig. 3.3), and runs down a shallow ramp, about 4 metres wide, cut in the bed rock for 100 metres at the base of low cliffs above the river; undoubtedly a section of ancient road, and almost certainly Roman. It led directly to Killik, eighty Zaza houses packed tightly together on a rocky promontory jutting into the Euphrates, at the extreme end of the southern range of the Taurus (Figs. 3.4, 3.5). This was the first village south of Pirot, opposite Tomisa, to stand on the river bank itself. Below to the north lay rich fields, and in others a copious spring welled up 500 metres behind the village. In 1972 the area in general was called Berzelo Cem, ‘the field of Berzelo’, and the spring was known as Berzelo çesmesi; and in 1987 the muhtar confirmed that the area around Killik was known universally as Berzelo. There were cut stones in the houses, and in one house a well a metre across and 4 or 5 metres deep. I was shown a worn bronze coin of Antioch, perhaps of Trajan, and a Byzantine copper, both found in the village. After prayers in the gloom of the misafıroda, the village ‘guest room’ where Hasan and I stayed, a large group of elders talked of coins dug up, inscriptions found and buried, and a rock tomb with three undisturbed graves and many bones; of mass graves containing hundreds of skulls near the school, foundations located nearly everywhere beneath the village and in its fields, and earthenware water pipes set in concrete, 40 cm long, they reckoned, and 15 cm in diameter—similar in size and description, if larger in diameter, to pipes reported at Çit Harabe (Sabus) and Hasanova (Analiba), and sighted at Satala. Two piers, too massive to survive from a church, reared up in a field 150 metres west of the village. Still standing to a height of 4 metres, 2 metres long and 3 metres wide,

F ig . 3.4*  Killik (Barzalo), below Ziyaret Tepe, view north (August 1987)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 56 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

they showed traces of the original facing on all four sides, around a core of concrete and some bricks; 16 metres apart, and aligned between the spring and the village, they evidently survived from an aqueduct fed by Berzelo çesmesi. Two or three hours above the village, on a huge rock outcrop conspicuous from below, is said to be a castle with walls and rock-­cut inscriptions. High above Killik looms Ziyaret Tepe, ‘pilgrimage peak’ (once Girfe, 6,560 feet), a huge pyramid visible from a great distance in the plain north of Urfa, a twin to the peak of Nemrud Dağ at the opposite end of the same range. Travelling west from Diarbekir in June 1882, Humann and Puchstein climbed to the summit from Bibol, in three hours. On it they reported nothing, but the view in all directions was stupendous. The muhtar had climbed to the summit on several occasions. He too reported it bare: as, indeed, it had appeared from the air in 1966. So it was not, I had speculated, an undiscovered Nemrud Dağ. The Euphrates, 150 metres wide, swirled rapidly past the Killik promontory. Once brown and warm, the water in August 1987 was blue and ice cold, the product of the Karakaya dam two days upriver. The muhtar expected his village, and much of the ripa, to be drowned by the Atatürk dam by 1989. But returning by Hercules from northern Iraq in mid 1991, I could see that this had not yet happened. Killik seems too cramped to have been a civil settlement. Its purpose was military, and important. The coincidence of the name and evidence for Roman occupation leave little doubt that this is the site of Barzalo: one of Ammianus’ castra duo praesidiaria, where the Euphrates was shallow and easily crossed. The fort guarded a minor crossing point readily approached from the north-­east, controlled the southbound route which crossed the Euphrates by the ferry below Çünküş and passed beneath the southern flanks of the Taurus, and blocked the north-­eastern approaches to Commagene. Here the flow was

F ig . 3.5*  Killik, peppers drying, and the ripa above Barzalo: view east-north-east towards Çermik (August 1987)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE TAURUS GORGE  57

calm, unprotected by chasm or whirlpool, and the bank of the Euphrates was acutely vulnerable. In ad 359 tribunes were sent to defend it against Persian attack, with forts and guard posts, palisades of sharpened stakes, and artillery wherever suitable.10 F ROM K I LLI K TO T I LL O A mile west of the village, the narrow Killik Çay was spanned by a graceful Ottoman bridge carrying a minor caravan route from Gerger to the Çünküş ferry, Ergani, and Harput. Caravans followed the low bank of the Euphrates towards a semicircle of dark cliffs below Ziyaret Tepe. Plunging almost straight into the Euphrates, they force travellers down to within a few metres of the riverbed. Cut around the base, a short paved section evidently continued the ramp seen in the approaches to Killik, and in origin was probably Roman. Here the Euphrates ran slowly through a short gorge, 200 metres wide. On the eastern cliffs in 1972 were marked the outlines of the Bibol dam, since abandoned; and the strata on the left bank formed concentric circles around a huge ­volcanic blowhole.11

The Terrace on the Right Bank: the Çünküş Ferry The mountains then draw back from the right bank, leaving a high terrace lined with fields and villages hanging about two hours apart above the Euphrates. The track passes Hamamlık, site of a hot spring; Deyro, above a kayik crossing, an Alevi Kurdish village, poor, dirty, and unwelcoming, with seventy houses and abundant water, but no school;

F ig . 3.6  Haburman school (October 1972)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 58  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

and Haburman, set in fields and gardens. Below, the terrace falls away steeply, without fields, for nearly 1,000 feet to the river. In 1972 the village had 100 houses, and a school with two devoted teachers assigned for şark görevi, ‘eastern duty’, and 67 children in five classes (Figs. 3.6, 3.7). Five children went to the Ortaokul, the Middle School in Çünküş. Conferring in Zaza, the elders reckoned that Haburman was eight hours from Gerger, and talked of two old coins, since sold. It is cold for a month in winter, but there is little snow.

F ig . 3.7  Zaza Kurds cooking pekmez at Haburman (October 1972)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE TAURUS GORGE  59

A mile north of the village, and far below, was a kayik crossing, clear of rapids. Here in Ottoman times was the important Çünküş ferry, which carried the only caravan route to pass diagonally through the southern Taurus: mule traffic from Harput through Ergani to Adıyaman, and from Diyarbekır (Amida) to Eski Malatya. The crossing was below the rapids encountered by Huntington who, moving at the rate of 8 miles an hour, passed through the gorge below Tillo for 18 miles to Chunkush, ‘through a continuous succession of bed-­rock rapids, many of them larger than those around which we had made portages’. In a long rapid 2 miles above Chunkush he ‘encountered one of the dangers that we had most feared. The raft stuck on a hidden rock in such a position that the waves would soon have battered the skins till they leaked and the raft went to pieces; but we got off by shifting the load first to one side and then the other, thus, as it were, prying the raft over the stone.’ The original ferry was far older. A ship had long since carried pack horses, mules, and men daily across the Euphrates, when it was used by Ammianus in flight from Amida in ad 359. On his way to the crossing, he and his companions had found a shaft so deep that they could not descend into it. Tearing their clothes into strips, they made a great rope, and in the lining of a helmet drew up sufficient water to drink. Their puteus, it seems, was Maunsell’s ‘cavity between 400 and 500 feet deep with deep water at the bottom’, on the final section, which he dated to the Roman period, of the route from Diyarbekir to Çünküş, about 6 miles west of Çermik and 9 miles east of Çünküş. There was a sequel. In 1915 Çünküş was a large and flourishing Armenian town of 5,000 inhabitants. One of the ruddy-­faced and pretty missionary children seen by Burnaby in Sivas in 1877, and then an American missionary in Harput, Riggs recounts: ‘Rumour has it that the people were driven out in a body to a point about ten miles away where a famous cavern drops vertically downward several hundred feet. The entire population of the town were said to have been driven to their death in this cavern.’ Riggs knew of but a single survivor. Crossing the Euphrates by the Çünküş suspension bridge, 115 metres long, we were generously received in Adış, two miles west of the town, by a Zaza family (Fig. 3.9), and stayed in a fine Armenian church converted into a house (Fig. 3.8), the altar ingeniously reconfigured as a lavatory. Until the bridge was built in August 1968, three hours on foot east of Tillo, a mule track, in places paved, led up from the ferry and passed below Zengeto, thirty houses clustered among trees and terraced fields overlooking the Euphrates, with tobacco and peppers spread out to dry on their flat roofs. Above the village the track climbs rapidly for 500 feet to reach foothills studded with oak trees, and maintains its height for nearly two hours to Tillo: in October 1972 in constant use and crowded with laden mules coming up from the suspension bridge. Ammianus must have followed this route in his flight from Amida.12

Tillo (? Claudiopolis) Some eleven hours from Killik, perhaps 25 miles, Tillo is a large, compact village of 300 houses, with a new mosque built above a spring, and a primary school with two teachers. Set amid fertile and abundant fields of wheat, it is an important administrative centre, accessible from west, south, and east. In 1972 it was utterly remote: eight hours, it was said, from Pütürge by a mountain track closed by snow for up to five months, and much

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 60 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 3.8 Adiş church (October 1972)

longer, if unaffected by winter, along the Euphrates bank from Gerger. Indeed, from Tillo Freya Stark took two days on her mule to reach Pütürge, passing over Soğuk Dağ, ‘treeless and naked and dangerous’: the route, it seems, taken by Ammianus to Melitene. The primary link with the outside world is through Çünküş, four hours away on the far side of the Euphrates, and 3 miles upriver from the ferry. There was no trace of antiquity. Marking the most easterly point reached by the great river in its passage of the Taurus, a square promontory juts out below the last spurs of the central ridge. Around it, in a

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE TAURUS GORGE  61

F ig . 3.9 Adiş: preparing the feast (October 1972)

space of 6 miles, the Euphrates bends sharply from north-­east, through south-­east, to  south-­west. Perhaps from Claudius himself, the source of extraordinarily detailed information about the proximity of the Arsanias and the headwaters of the Tigris, in Lake Gölcük (Hazar Gölü) some 20 miles north-­north-­east of Tillo, at Claudiopolis in Cappadocia, Pliny knew, the Euphrates turns its course towards the setting sun. The name, and so the early date, suggest, at least initially, a civil settlement. Later as Laudias it was certainly military in purpose, like Barzalo a castrum praesidiarium, where the Euphrates was narrow and easily crossed, as the kayiks show at Deyro and Haburman. Here, on the south-­west side of the Tillo promontory, was the site of the most important crossing in the Taurus. So the promontory had commercial advantages, and Claudiopolis was probably founded here, close to the point where minor trade and access routes crossed the Euphrates to enter the furthest corner of Cappadocia. But from the west Tillo is the remotest region on the entire frontier. For the narrow Tillo valley is enclosed by the scrub, the woods, and the higher mountains through which Ammianus fled to Melitene. This was therefore a strategic position of the first importance, isolated and exposed to infiltration from across the Euphrates. The legions at Samosata and Melitene were each at least four days away. Claudiopolis must have held a powerful garrison, with a crucial strategic purpose: to control the route leading north-­west from Amida, via the Çünküş crossing, towards the Şiro Çay and Melitene, and to guard the south-­eastern approaches to Cappadocia. Pliny and geography insist that the Tillo promontory contained the site of Claudiopolis. The advantages which encouraged the presence and prosperity of Tillo suggest that Claudiopolis lies beneath or close to the modern village.13

4

3

7

11

2

1

TOMISA

CORNE ?

AD ARAS

Sis Kale

B

7

D eğ

i

re de en

C

9

METITA ?

D

H e s ki n

0

Ç.

0

Ç. to ref e K

oÇ

.

Karakaya Dam

Kerefto

10 km

10

5 miles

CLAUDIOPOLIS ?

E

Till

A

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 62  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

rm

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE TAURUS GORGE  63

F ROM T I LL O TO TH E ŞI RO ÇAY A journey through the Taurus gorge from Tillo to Keferdis can be accomplished in two long and difficult days, across the most broken part of the entire ripa. In places no more than a meagre path, the track clings precariously around bare, convex mountainsides falling steeply into the Euphrates. From Tillo the main track to Pütürge skirts above the Tillo Çay. After ninety minutes a track diverges to the north, much smaller than below Tillo, and as far as Keferdis passable only by mules. Fording the narrow Tillo Çay, it climbs to the hamlet of Hirso, twenty-­five mud-­brick houses clustered beneath 2,000 feet of unstable screes. We stayed with the muhtar, Cemal Ay. His responsibilities included all the surrounding villages. From Hirso a faint, little-­used track traverses up to a high, waterless ridge (5,775 feet), covered with thick scrub and a forest of stunted holm-­oaks, and haunted by bears. Cemal explained that the ridge, which forms the modern vilayet boundary, is a linguistic ­frontier: Zaza is spoken to the south, and to the north Kermanji. The track disappeared. The forest was perhaps a source of manna. About 60 miles to the north-­east, close above the Murat and east of Palu, Brant entered mountains likewise covered in oak forests at a similar altitude, in July 1838. None of the timber was large. One variety produced the gall-­nut, the other manna: described by Chesney, passing through Kurdistan in 1831 and 1832, as ‘delicate white’ in colour and known as Kudret-­halvasi, ‘divine sweetmeat’; found on the leaves of dwarf oaks, and occasionally on sand, rocks, and stones, in early spring and late autumn when dew is abundant. People go out before sunrise, spread cloths beneath the oak trees, and shake manna from the branches. The collection lasts six weeks, and manna is carried in goatskins to the market in Mosul, and sold in lumps, to be made into a kind of paste-­like honey.14 From the ridge, the northern slopes fall through scrub and oak trees in a difficult scramble, four hours in all from Hirso, to reach the Heskin Çay, which has carved a deep, narrow gorge into the Euphrates, and is spanned by a precarious bridge of tree trunks, 100 feet above the water. There the path starts again, a rough, difficult track leading steeply up for ninety minutes to Midye. From the village communications run north, and people seldom have reason to venture south to Tillo. Four men armed with Kalashnikovs were hurrying down the path in 1972. Troubles were beginning, it was said, between left and right, and between Turks and Kurds, and martial law had been imposed in fifteen eastern vilayets, perhaps including Diyarbakir. It was a nervous moment, but they were too busy to stop or converse. At the junction of the Heskin Çay, at the bottom of an almost inaccessible gorge below Tilek, and 18 miles above Çünküş, Huntington encountered the biggest rapid yet seen. While his kellekjis carried the light baggage over ‘the quarter-­mile chord of the great boulder-­strewn fan which caused the rapid’, Huntington, paddling hard, enjoyed ‘a long, swift exhilarating shoot over a tilting stretch of water, . . . among dashing waves which seemed to be 10 feet high . . . The kellek stood the passage perfectly.’ He spent the night on a tiny ledge overhung by cliffs, his kellekjis afraid that ‘if we sleep here, the bears will come to the top of the precipice and throw stones at us’.15

◀  M ap 10  Taurus gorge: per ripam from Claudiopolis to Metita and the Malatya plain

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 64 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Midye (? in Medio) A large village of 120 houses (Fig. 3.10), Midye nestles in a valley a mile across, hanging high above the Euphrates, its small, fertile fields crowded among groves of walnuts, mulberries, and fruit trees. Onto this happy scene the sun is reflected down by a northern semicircle of crags and screes, 2,000 feet high. Midye is the most isolated village on the entire frontier: five and a half hours from Hirso, and four and a half from Haşkento; and it occupies the only significant expanse of level ground between them. Facing south-­east with abundant water, the position must have attracted attention in Roman times. A villager wrote out an alternative spelling for me: Mediye, suggesting an ancient derivation, and recalling the station In Medio between Zeugma and Edessa. But there was no sign of antiquity: no coins, no pottery, no masonry in reuse, none of the rumoured inscriptions. From the village a direct path leads across the mountains, diverging to reach Keferdis in six hours, and Pütürge in eight. When these routes are closed in winter, for at least one or two months, villagers use the track through the Euphrates gorge, taking a day, and a day and a half, respectively. A steep path leads down to a kayik crossing far below. From the left bank of the Euphrates a vertiginous path can be seen climbing in zigzags up 2,000 feet of rocks and cliffs: offering a difficult short-­cut, perhaps, from Pütürge to Adış and Çünküş. North-­east of Midye the track crosses a millstream, threads carefully up a long, steep fault in the cliffs (Figs. 3.11, 3.12), and for an hour curves at the same altitude high above the Euphrates, dipping through the hamlet of Kerkinos, ten houses subsisting on mulberries, vines, almonds, and a few wild goats. Then it climbs to a treeless promontory, surrounded by cliffs rising almost sheer for nearly 3,000 feet above the river. At a height of around 4,900

F ig . 3.10  Midye: our hosts for lunch (October 1972)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE TAURUS GORGE  65

F ig . 3.11  Rock-­cut track descending south-­west to Midye (October 1972)

F ig . 3.12  Above Midye: Hasan rides past a woman carrying brushwood (October 1972)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 66 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

feet, the highest point on the track through the Taurus gorge, the promontory commands a fine view south across the Heskin Çay towards the Tillo valley. In an hour the track reaches a bare ridge 2,000 feet above the site of the Karakaya dam, hidden in the gorge below. From the ridge the watch-post at Kerefto is clearly visible to the north, but there is no trace of a signalling mound. The track then descends, ever more steeply, and after a precipitous hour reaches Haşkento, a pretty Kurdish village spread among poplars and mulberries in a bowl overlooking the Euphrates. We stayed with the muhtar, Derviş Muslu. After prayers, he received me on his verandah looking up the Euphrates, and advised me not to continue south to Midye, for I would be shot. He knew of no antiquities. An hour and a half of steep, in places headlong descent leads down from Haşkento to the Euphrates. The track skirts northwards just above the river, and drops into the very bed, below flood level, to cross the mouth of the Kerefto gorge (Fig. 3.13). Now no more than a path, the track at once climbs abruptly up friable rocks to a conspicuous natural promontory 50 metres long, 400 feet above the left bank of the Kerefto Çay. On the narrow neck are the remains of a fortlet or watch tower, a solidly built structure 7 metres square, its walls 75 cm thick, faced inside and out with ashlar, and constructed without concrete: a smaller version of the fortlet at Zabulbar, north of Dascusa. On the tip of the promontory, aligned with it and set among natural slabs, were the remains of a rectangular structure 8 metres long and 3 metres wide, with a dividing wall (Fig. 3.14). From here the left bank of the Euphrates could be observed for a mile upriver, and 2 miles to the south. There is no evidence for date, but the commanding position suggests that it was a watch-­house with a small auxiliary detachment, to observe the opposite bank, and to guard the crossing of the Kerefto Çay.

F ig . 3.13*  Euphrates gorge observed, southwards, from the watch post at Kerefto (October 1972)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE TAURUS GORGE  67

F ig . 3.14*  Plan of the watch post at Kerefto (October 1972)

At Tilek, on the eastern bank opposite Kerefto, von Moltke was obliged to abandon his second raft journey in spring 1839. Sulphurous hot springs, little visited on account of their inaccessibility, but seen by Huntington in July 1900, ‘rise on both sides of the river below high-­water mark, . . . reputed very beneficial for skin and rheumatic diseases. The favourite method of treatment is to bathe the patient half an hour, and then bury him up to the neck in the hot river sand for two hours, repeating the process four or five times a day.’ Near Tilek the Euphrates turns more directly south, flowing between almost perpendicular walls nearly 400 feet high. ‘Above is a terrace, from which green wooded upper walls rise less steeply to the mountain-­tops a mile above our heads.’16 The path follows the neck of the promontory, and climbs steeply away from the deep valley of the Kerefto Çay, which tumbles down from the very crest of the Taurus. Perched above its left bank, with no flat, or even sloping ground, Kerefto, a hamlet of nine houses, offered no trace of antiquity. But, heading south, I was advised to ask about ‘written stones’ in Midye. Climbing above Kerefto for an hour, the track levels at last, directly opposite the Ekrek Su flowing from the east bank, and continues high above the river for a further three hours, curving slowly to the left, to Tilman, fifty houses, known for its almonds and grapes. The gorge curves further to the north-­west, and after an hour the track reaches the first of the two small Kurdish villages of Husukani (Hostukuşağı). It was time for prayer, and Hasan propped his Koran on an American Aid tin of powdered milk (Fig. 3.15). A narrow promontory divides the twin village, nearly 1,500 feet above the bend of the Euphrates. On it are several Ottoman graves similar to the groups scattered along the frontier road north of Melitene; and on the tip is a natural mound some 50 feet high. Traces of crude structures, with no straight lines, and no pits, can be discerned on the top.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 68 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 3.15  Zaza family at Husukani (October 1972)

It is an unparalleled vantage point, inviting a signalling position. The right bank below Keferdis can be clearly seen. Across the northern horizon stretches the long, ­distant crest of Şakşak Dag,̆ sparkling with snow in October, its southern slopes car­r ying the caravan road from Pütürge to Eski Malatya, its eastern end marked by a mound high above Kömürhan. But to the south the view is obstructed by the flanks of the Euphrates gorge. Far below, the Euphrates changes direction sharply, to flow south-­east, then south through dangerous rapids (Fig. 3.16), and ‘enters an immense crooked transverse cañon, the last and longest of the great gorges, 30 miles long and 5000 feet deep’. Below Uslu(köy), on the eastern bank opposite Husukani, was ‘a rapid worse than any we had yet shot, or around which we had made portages. . . . The kellekjis wanted to make another portage, but we insisted on shooting the rapid. Although we made the passage safely, the men’s nerves were so completely unstrung that when we landed soon after . . . they absolutely refused to go on.’ One was sent to find men and animals to help in making a portage, but did not dare to enter a village ‘because, as he said, if the Kurds knew that we were encamped beside the river, they would come and rob or even kill us during the night’. The other Armenian, full of superstition and in terror, said ‘If I ever set foot on that kellek again I know that I shall die.’17 An hour further to the west was the small Turkish village of Mezraa. On a promontory below, a cemetery contained a stone said to bleed on Fridays. There were also said to be pots, 5 feet tall and full of coal. But here too were no cut stones.

Keferdis In forty minutes the track reaches Keferdis, formerly Şiro, a large village once Armenian: from Midye more than a day through the gorge, and six hours across the mountains. In

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE TAURUS GORGE  69

F ig . 3.16*  Children near Mezraa: the Euphrates 2,000 feet below (October 1972)

1972 there were seventy children and eight courteous teachers. They showed me a d ­ enarius probably of Augustus. In the village centre an arched bridge, perhaps Byzantine but by 2004 demolished to make way for a grand public garden, confirmed the passage of a minor caravan route carrying traffic from Harput. Descending westwards into the gorge, caravans crossed the Euphrates by a ferry at Ayvas, ‘St Basil’, climbed up to Keferdis, and continued to Pütürge, Eski Kâhta, and Adıyaman. Some caravans from northern Mesopotamia and Diyarbekir seem to have passed by the same crossing to Eski Malatya: a difficult short-­cut avoiding Harput, the Çünküş ferry, and the main passage of the Taurus. Huntington relates how ‘near Aivose (Ayvas), just below the ferry where the road from Harput to Shiro crosses the river at the head of a dangerous rapid, . . . thirty or forty of the

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 70  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

villagers tried to prevent us by force from going further, but were soon persuaded to take up our craft and carry it a quarter of a mile around the rapid. They could not understand why anyone should make such a dangerous journey, and especially why anyone should take notes all the time, and so, with oriental logic, they concluded that we had some secret purpose which must be opposed to their interests. . . . The people here . . . asserted that no one had ever navigated or could navigate the river from Aivose to Chunkush.’ At Jilan Degirmeni, ‘snake mill’, close to Huntington’s rapid, von Moltke was obliged to dismantle his kelek.18

Mamaş (? Metita) Remote, vulnerable, and two long days from the legion at Melitene, the vicinity of Keferdis invited a powerful garrison, to guard the crossing of the Euphrates, and to control the mouth and the wide valley of the Şiro Çay. In the Notitia Dignitatum, a cohort of mounted archers at double strength, cohors III Ulpia miliaria Petraeorum eq(uitata) sag(ittariorum), was stationed at Metita, known to Ptolemy and marked on the Peutinger Table, with the strength to guard outlying positions, the mobility to move rapidly along difficult tracks, and weapons to command from above the bed of the Euphrates. The fort was probably sited close to the mouth of the Şiro Çay: Mamaş a likely location. Of a bridge or abutments there have been no reports. The gravel banks, at risk to violent flooding from the huge catchment area of the Şiro Çay, were unsuitable for a permanent structure. Close to the Euphrates, the river flowed too deep for a low, temporary wooden bridge, too rapid for a pontoon. There was probably a long timber structure, frequently repaired and replaced; and when it failed, a ford. The latter was no obstacle for trained soldiers taught to swim. The muhtar of Bekiran, met below, confirmed the course of the track from Keferdis, from which it also carried the post: teams of two men and three mules taking the shortest route via Mamaş to cross the Şiro Çay close to its mouth below Şekeran, perhaps once Şeker han, now submerged. There was no bridge, but knowledgeable locals were on hand to guide them for a fee, the men ­sitting on their mules as they swam across the fiercely flowing river. F ROM TH E ŞI RO ÇAY TO KÖMÜ R H A N The route from the Şiro Çay led through the northern end of the Taurus gorge: the winter route linking a string of Sunni Kurdish villages poised above the Euphrates, to reach Kömürhan; the summer passing 1,000 feet above, around the eastern flanks of Şakşak Dağ. From the Şiro Çay and Şekeran, the muhtar continued, the post road climbed steeply up past Kolakuşağı below Halleberik, perched high on the south-­eastern corner of the Taurus. There Fail Öztürk, aged 71, explained how the mule track came up from Keferdis. It took three hours, following at first the minor caravan route to Eski Malatya and Pütürge; and at Damlı turning north, to descend through Mamaş (the lower village), and cross the Şiro Çay to Sekuler. Then it climbed steeply up to Halleberik.

Bekiran Above Halleberik, the old route curved north-­east above Karahüseyin (Hüsrevuşağı) and (Aluçlu)Bekiran, until the way was blocked by the huge, precipitous ravine of the

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE TAURUS GORGE  71

Değirmendere, descending from Şakşak Dağ south of Akuşağı. This is the most difficult natural obstacle in the transit of the Taurus gorge. With Taner, I followed the narrow mule track steeply down from Bekiran to visit the muhtar, Zeyner Bürütekin, in his summer house, perched on a narrow shelf amid gardens laden with figs, winter and summer apples, cherries, apricots, and ‘honey mulberries’ which do not turn brown in store. With him was Mehmet Birsen, who had served for three years in Korea and receives every year a New Year letter of congratulation from the President. Zeyner had been muhtar of Bekiran for twenty years. Shaken by minor earthquakes throughout 2003, the village was once called Aluçlu and was attached to Keferdis: and his office had previously embraced all the surrounding villages, including Akuşağı, high above. Zeyner described the course of the old mule road from Pütürge and Keferdis to Kale and Pirot. From Halleberik the track passed through Uzunhüseyin and Karahüseyin, to which Hüsrevuşağı is attached, and through their yayla uplands known as Horan, to Bekiran. Above the village, snow lay more than a metre deep in winter, and for three months the post used to pass through snow tunnels. This was the natural and obvious continuation of the long-­distance route through the Euphrates gorge. Mule traffic from Malatya continued until the 1970s, in former times carrying money to the nahiye at Keferdis, and coal, salt, and gas bottles for the villages; and returning with cotton destined for Harput. From Bekiran the ancient mule track was forced to descend steeply into the depths of  the ravine, to cross the Değirmendere by the demirköprü, an old ‘iron bridge’ rather more than a mile from the Euphrates. The southern wall of the ravine, in places almost precipitous, is covered with gardens and tall poplars. A narrow concrete bridge, 10 metres long, has recently replaced the original iron bridge, and crosses the river in a single span. Beside it the core of a much older abutment stands on bedrock on the southern side. The opposite bank offered no solid footing, and the northern abutment has been swept away by landslides. The width of the earlier bridge was about 2 metres, and the single span was about 16 metres, some 5 metres above the riverbed. The construction appears to be Ottoman; and if of timber, it must have been exceptionally long. This was an important crossing, for without a bridge the Değirmendere ravine was virtually impassable in winter. It seems certain that a Roman predecessor stood on the same site. Leading up from the bridge on the northern side, bare with outcrops of rock, the old road is finely preserved. About 1.2 metres wide, sufficient for one mule, and in places once cobbled, it rises in steep zigzags, short at first, for 1,000 feet up to the Akuşağı cemetery (c.4,450 feet), and from it traverses diagonally up to the conspicuous oak tree described by Zeyner and an ancient cemetery on the skyline (c.4,550 feet), the ridge above the Değirmendere ravine.

To the Malatya Plain From the cemetery, the winter route, closely followed by the earth road bulldozed through the northern gorge in c.1985, led down through Çayıruşağı, Burustun, Tahtikân, Arapuşağı, and Hanado, poised high above the gorge. Hayrullah Temur, whom I met in the Malatya plain near Kale, had followed this route many times to and from Keferdis.19

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 72  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 3.17  View north-­north-­west from the muhtar’s summer house below Bekiran: ancient track climbing in steep zigzags from the Degĭ rmendere bridge towards the Akuşagı̆ cemetery (June 2004)

The track, 4 or 5 metres wide, was used by mules and donkeys, but not by camels. A probable continuation, much eroded, descends for 100 metres towards the narrow Tahtikân ravine. Across it there is no trace of a bridge. On the northern side a section of the track, evidently very old, perhaps even Roman, and buttressed by several revetments, the largest 20 metres long, traverses across a cliff face for some 200 metres towards Tahtikân. Rockfalls made it impossible to approach. North of Hanado, proud of its new mosque, a section of the mule track, more than a mile long, traverses steeply up to the summit of the final ridge that runs down from the long crest of Şakşak Dağ to the Kömürhan bridge. Little wider than 2 metres, this was certainly the winter road from Keferdis, and clearly preserves the line of the Roman route through the gorge. Beyond the ridge the northern course of the ancient road is lost to forestry. It descended by Hırsız Taşı, ‘robbers’ rock’, to join the modern road from Elazığ close to Sultan Murat Han, now vanished, Butan, and Ağıyabuşağı, perched above the Euphrates 2 miles south-­west of the Kömürhan bridge. The route described by Hayrullah, and established by three important traces of the ancient road in the gorge between the Şiro Çay and the Kömürhan bridge, directly continues the line and style of the road, in places no more than a mule track, followed high above the Euphrates south of Keferdis. The road through the Taurus gorge thus continued north from Keferdis, passed around the eastern tip of Şakşak Dağ to the very tip of the Malatya plain, and traversed the entire length of the plain, from its apex at the mouth of the Taurus gorge, to approach the fortress of Melitene from the east.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE TAURUS GORGE  73

Floating far below the ribbon of villages, Huntington passed through this remarkably straight gorge 12 miles long and nearly 4000 feet deep. The dark, steep gloomy walls of basalt and metamorphic shale are terraced at an elevation a few hundred feet above the river, and on each terrace or nestled in each tiny valley are one or two houses and a patch of bright green fields. In some cases the fields are on slopes so steep that it seems as though the sower could scarcely find a footing. Far above the fields white patches of snow contrast strongly with the black and green walls of the cañon.

After two portages, climbing 1200 feet up the steep slope, . . . a raft of logs passed us manned by two almost naked Kurds, with wooden tridents in their hands and strings of gourds around their necks for life-­preservers. They carry wood from Izoghlu through the Kemur Khan gorge to Kefferdis. . . . Through the whole length of the gorge we went at an average rate of 5 miles an hour, between walls of solid rock which came down sheer to the narrow stream, and are broken only by precipitous gullies . . . bounded by jagged cliffs with needle-­like points.

While letting the kelek down by ropes past a frightening rapid close to the mouth of the Mamaş (Şiro) Cay, the Kurds on the wood-­raft overtook us. Lying flat on the logs, they shot through, not over the rapid, going into wave after wave with 4 or 5 feet of water over them, and coming out at the bottom with a triumphant yell.20

NOT ES 1. Pliny, NH 5, 83ff. The dams, Facella, Dinastia degli Orontidi 41–6. I walked through the main gorge in October 1972, and with Taner visited Alidam in June 2004, and covered the northern part in June 2003 and 2004. 2. Barzala et Laudias, castra duo praesidiaria, Ammianus 18, 7, 10 and 19, 8, 9. 3. Ainsworth, JRGS 10 (1840) 323 and 330–2. Hogarth, Athenaeum 3477 (1894), 780. Percy, Asiatic Turkey 102ff. The scientist was not Chapot, who travelled west and south from Samosata in 1901. 4. Stark, Rome on the Euphrates 170f. Travelling with her, Mark Lennox-­Boyd noticed near Taraksu ‘a small Hellenistic ruin overlooking the beginning of a steep gorge: probably a watch tower for the gorge’. The pilot had sighted bridge abutments, perhaps those reported to me near Tepehan and Peraş Kale (chapter 2, n. 5). Jacopi, Dalla Paflagonia alla Commagene 26, was prevented by rains in November 1935 from proceeding beyond (Eski) Kâhta. Tozer, Turkish Armenia 254. 5. In the Taurus, rocky and violent, Pliny, NH 5, 84f. The cataracts, rapids, were probably those mentioned by Ainsworth, about 10 miles south-­west of Gerger Kalesi. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836), 210. von Moltke, Briefe 288–92, 307 (July 1838), 519ff. (spring 1839), and n. 16 below. Chesney, Euphrates Expedition 45. 6. Huntington, ZE 33 (1901), 183–209, and GJ 20:2 (1902), 175–200. Fish, Cuinet, Turquie II, 339. For keleks, Figs. 8.12, and 9.7–9.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 74  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

7. My plans in 1974, to explore the ripa between the Kâhta Çay (reached from the west in 1965) and Venkuk (reached from the north in 1972), and to follow Huntington through the Taurus gorge, were frustrated. Stamped tiles, 178 of Ala Fl(avia) Ag(rippiana) and a dozen of leg XVI F(lavia) f(irma), were found at Tille, French, AS 32 (1982) 170; and fragmentary tiles of XVI F(lavia) f(irma) were sighted in an unidentified village 3 miles to the north, perhaps Akcaviran, a Roman site, French, BAR 156 (1983) 75. Ala Agrippiana, ILS 2724, Macedonia: probably raised by Iulius Agrippa II, king of Batanaea and Trachonitis, who joined Titus’ assault on Jerusalem in ad 70, Tacitus, Hist. 5, 1. Blaylock, in Matthews, Ancient Anatolia 122. 8. Gerger Kalesi, the Antiochene fortress high on the southern horizon above the lower reaches of the Gerger valley, is described by Ainsworth in 1839, JRGS 10 (1840), 329ff., and Travels and Researches I 276–9 and 281f.; and, with its reliefs and seven inscriptions cut in the rock beside the path to the second gate, by Puchstein in 1883, Reisen 353–67, and 130. Huntington, GJ 20:2 (1902) 198. 9. Recording no details of her voyage, Goell, NGS (1974) 106–8, concluded that the enclosed Gerger valley, close to the exit from the Taurus gorge, could not be seen as a significant source of food for Samosata, set amid vast and fertile plains. 10. Humann and Puchstein, Reisen 142f. Ammianus 18, 7, 10 and 6. 11. The road per ripam descended again into the bed of the Euphrates only for a short section at the mouth of the Kerefto Çay, two long days to the north. 12. Caravans, NID, Turkey I 178. Huntington, GJ 20:2 (1902) 197. Ammianus 19, 8, 8f., and Maunsell (Route 199), quoted by Dillemann, Mésopotamie 130. Burnaby, Asia Minor 148. Riggs, Armenia 57f. 13. apud Claudiopolim Cappadociae cursum ad occasum solis agit (Euphrates), Pliny, NH 5, 85, and 6, 128. 14. Brant, JRGS 10 (1840) 369f.; Chesney, Euphrates Expedition 120–8. 15. Huntington, GJ 20:2 (1902) 196ff. 16. von Moltke, Briefe 360ff., and n. 5 above. Huntington, GJ 20:2 (1902) 194 and 180. 17. Huntington, GJ 20:2 (1902) 193f. 18. Huntington, GJ 20:2 (1902) 192. The name recurs below Niksar, where St Basil has lent his name to the acclaimed mineral water, Ayvaz suyu. 19. For Hayrullah, chapter 4, n. 2. 20. Huntington, GJ 20:2 (1902) 191f.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

FOUR

The Malatya Plain, the Euphrates Crossing (Tomisa), Dulluk Tepe, and Melitene (Maps 3, 10, 11, 16, and Fig. A2)

TH E M A L AT YA PL A I N The legionary fortress of Melitene lay at the base of the long, narrow triangle of plain tapering to the east between the abrupt flanks of Şakşak Dağ and the Euphrates. Reaching (Eski) Malatya in about five hours on horseback from the crossing at Isolu, von Moltke reckoned the plain to be of the greatest strategic importance, for it commanded the ancient crossing of the Euphrates at Tomisa. These eastern approaches to Melitene reflect a long history of destruction. If little was preserved at the time of Yorke’s journey, practically nothing has survived the first decades of the twentieth century. Despite the certainty that a Roman road passed through the Malatya triangle, a long walk in June 1965 and subsequent visits revealed virtually no trace of Roman occupation in the plain or along the bank of the Euphrates. By 1987 much of the latter was submerged beneath the Karakaya lake. Flanking the plain for more than 20 miles, the bed and banks of the Euphrates were mainly of gravel, and the river was too deep for fords, too wide and too shifting for a bridge constructed of stone. The current was strong even several miles upriver, where the Euphrates widened to nearly half a mile at the junction of the Tohma Su (Melas). A pontoon bridge must have served for Lucullus in 69 bc, and for Paetus in ad 62; and must have been among Corbulo’s preparations the following year. But at almost any point east of Melitene the river could easily be crossed on rafts or skins. In 1965 I saw kayik crossings at Pirot, Kuluşağı, and Kilisik. In Ottoman times there seems to have been a wooden bridge east of Pirot, confirmed by Huntington from local recollections as he passed through the Malatya plain. The Euphrates, as it winds through the Malatia plain, flows slowly and divides into a network of channels, enclosing islands of sand or gravel nearly level with the flood-­plain. The latter, often half a mile wide, is bounded by bluffs from 30 to 50 feet high, cut in the alluvial deposit which forms the Malatia plain. Villages, especially on the left side, are numerous and prosperous, being usually beyond the flood-­plain, although some lie at its edge. . . . The reedy, bushy islands, or the banks of shingle between the branches of the river, are the resort of all kinds of water-­birds—ibis, black divers, storks, bustards, herons, cranes, and many smaller birds. The current was slow and the voyage mon­ot­on­ ous as we floated past the mouth of the Kuru Chai, . . . and past the large Tohma Su from Gurun and Darende, until we reach Pirot, where the road crosses the Euphrates. Here the mountains again approach the river, leaving on either side a strip of smooth green

Discovering Rome’s Eastern Frontier. Timothy Bruce Mitford, Oxford University Press (2021). © Timothy Bruce Mitford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843425.003.0005

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 76  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER A

B

Yeni Çermik

SARTONA ?

1

12

C

D 0

11 5 miles

0

10 km

CIACA ?

2

3

SE

BA ST E

IA

AS MEL

AD ARAS 4

CA

ESA

RE

A

MELITENE

5

Kırman T.

10

6

7

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE M A L AT YA PL A IN, THE EUPHR ATES CROSSING, A ND MELITENE  77

fields dotted with trees and houses. Behind this on the right rises the first ridge of the Taurus, from 4000 to 5000 feet above the river, and green clear to the snow-­line, where verdant wheatfields lie close to snow-­filled valleys from which shining little brooks tumble down the steep slope. . . . For 6 miles we skirted the base of the mountains, which, approaching gradually nearer the river, cause it to become more narrow and swift. Near Kemur Khan, on the left side, is a cuneiform inscription recounting an expedition of Tiglath-­Pileser, and speaking of a certain bridge, presumably over the Euphrates. Just up-­stream from the inscription is a fairly narrow place in the river, with low cliffs on either side which might readily serve as piers of a bridge. As we passed this point, our kellekjis volunteered the information that they had heard from their fathers that in old times there was a bridge here, of which they—the fathers—had in their youth seen a few stones.

As the river narrowed the bank became less and less accessible, and the current swirled faster and faster until it plunged round a huge whirlpool and turned abruptly south, by Kömürhan, into the Taurus (Fig. 4.1). Here, Pliny records, the Euphrates was called Omma, ‘eye’. For kelekcis, swept around the great bend at Kömürhan, the sudden aspect of the gorge opening into the Taurus might indeed resemble an eye cut in the enormous brow of Şakşak Dağ. But a better explanation lay shortly upriver.1

F ig . 4.1*  East of Ağıyabuşağı: Euphrates about to curve abruptly into the Taurus gorge (October 1963)

◀  M ap 11  Cappadocia: from Tomisa to Melitene, Ciaca and Sartona

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 78  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ROM KÖMÜ R H A N TO PI ROT Now submerged, the Kömürhan (İsmetpaşa) bridge hung across the jaws of an immense gorge. Here the river was 100 metres wide and 12 metres deep, and flowed at almost 6 knots. Beyond was a jandarma guard post, and the commander invited me to stay (Fig. 4.2). The narrow spit between the bridge and Pirot showed meagre signs of earlier ­occupation. Close to Agıyabuşağı, 2 miles south-­west of the bridge, the road from the Taurus gorge descended into the tip of the Malatya plain. For 4 miles, past Agıyabuşağı and its hüyük, and as far as Zeyikhan, where seventy children were nourished in 1965 by an annual allowance of 150 kilos of American powdered milk, the right bank rose steeply to a shelf, crowned with low hills about 150 feet above the Euphrates (Fig. 4.3): no place for a pontoon bridge, except perhaps in late summer, while even kayiks could not risk a regular service. Thereafter for 4 miles to Pirot, the bank was low and accessible. Above Kale I was most fortunate to meet Hayrullah Temur, a retired Kurdish pol­it­ ician aged 70, resting in his apricot orchards in June 2003; and to find him tending them again in June 2004. Hayrullah had been the principal adviser on the council of the vali of Malatya from 1984 to 1990. As a part of his political duties he had travelled assiduously, and achieved the elevation of Kale to the status of ilce, or kaza. A most charming man, he volunteered knowledge and memories of great importance.

F ig . 4.2*  Jandarma guard post by the Kömürhan bridge: above the officer, Hızırtaşı, site of the Urartian predecessor (April 1965)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE M A L AT YA PL A IN, THE EUPHR ATES CROSSING, A ND MELITENE  79

F ig . 4.3*  From east of Agı̆ yabuşagı̆ : view west, towards Hızırtaşı, Caferhan (Corne), and İzolu (Tomisa) (October 1963)

Cafer Kale (? Corne) In the plain west of Zeyikhan and the Hallan crossing, and a mile east of Pirot, Hayrullah remembered a castle at Caferhan (Caferler), and carefully described the remains of a large stone fort, Cafer Kale, about 700 metres from the Euphrates. It stood on a low hill above the Hayırsız Suyu, ‘good for nothing stream’, flowing from the higher slopes of Şakşak Dağ: good enough for drinking but useless for irrigation, he recalled, it supported the fort. The thick walls were 100 or 200 metres long, and 4 or 5 metres high, built with stones which looked very old, Selcuk or Ottoman. Hayrullah could not remember whether the walled enclosure was square or rectangular. Sections had collapsed into the stream. The inside of the fort was full of stones, and so were the surrounding fields. Below to the south passed a very wide road, leading from Zeyikhan to Eski Malatya, and 200 metres in the direction of Pirot stood a large han of Sultan Murat. Cafer Kale was significant enough for its title to be transferred to the district centre, the then nahiye at Kale, 2½ miles to the south-­east: where, Hayrullah explained, no castle had ever been constructed. Climbing from Pirot directly up to Sis Kale on the slopes of Şakşak Dağ, and down to Zeyikhan in 1965, I failed to visit Caferhan. In 1987 the latter was submerged.2 A day’s march east from Melitene, the crossings at Hallan and Pirot marked the most important sector of the entire riparian frontier. Located between the two villages and astride the route leading from the Taurus gorge, Cafer Kale must be considered the probable site of the fort of Corne: the name derived, perhaps, from the horned shape of the Malatya plain.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 80 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

TOM ISA A N D TH E A NCI ENT CROSSI NGS The Euphrates crossing at Tomisa has been of paramount strategic importance since the earliest times. Here the river was nearly 500 metres wide. The crossing was guarded in Urartian times by a post or fort at Habibuşagı̆ , opposite Agıyabuşagı̆ . If, as seems likely, the site was reused as a Persian strong point, the crossings at Hallan and at İzolu offered the obvious transit of the Euphrates, and a low, easy ascent to the plain of Harput for the Persian Royal Road, which in the fifth century bc led from Sardis, residence of the satrap of Lydia, to Susa, administrative capital of the Persian Empire: a journey of ninety days. Tomisa was evidently the name of the fort, on the site of a Urartian predecessor, and gave its name to the district on the left bank of the Euphrates, in the region now known collectively as İzolu, and to the crossing which it guarded. Tomisa itself was known to Eratosthenes, head of the Alexandrian Library in c.200 bc. Writing under Augustus and in the first years of Tiberius, Strabo described Tomisa as an important fort belonging to Cappadocia, on the further, left bank of the Euphrates; as a district in Sophene on or near the Euphrates; and, from Samosata, as a point on or near the (northern) edge of the Taurus on the limits of Cappadocia. Calculating the extent of the Earth from east to west, from India to the Pillars of Hercules, Pliny found the land route more certain than the sea. From the Ganges it led to the Euphrates, on to (Caesarea) Mazaca in Cappadocia, and westwards to Spain and the ocean: the Euphrates was clearly a reference point for the measurement of large distances, and the road to Caesarea led from the Tomisa crossing.3 The great importance of the bridgehead is clear from the continuing value placed by Rome and her enemies on control of Tomisa and Sophene. One of the kings of Sophene paid 100 talents to acquire the fort from the Cappadocian king. In 69 bc Lucullus gave Tomisa to a successor, Ariobarzanes, as a reward for his part in the war against Mithridates. Four years later, Pompey’s settlement of eastern Asia Minor assigned Sophene itself to Ariobarzanes, so ensuring Roman control of the crossing and of the invasion routes to southern Armenia and northern Mesopotamia. Successive kings evidently retained the crossing, until Cappadocia was annexed on the death of Archelaus in ad 17. The crossing was the springboard for momentous events. Here, in the summer, Lucullus crossed the Euphrates with a large army, before the battle at Tigranocerta. In a quasi-­miraculous omen, the river level dropped overnight so low that, to the astonishment of the inhabitants, islets appeared in it. Not far upriver from İzolu were indeed six permanent islets, between the Tohma Su and the old railway bridge over the Euphrates. But temporary or shifting islets are shown on the Turkish Army map to have formed only further to the north, where the river, below Ciaca and Kara Baba Kaya broadened to about a mile in width. Among initial dispositions for his Armenian campaign, Nero secured the Euphrates bridgehead by installing a client king in Sophene. Here, by a bridge (of boats), Caesennius Paetus entered Armenia with two legions in ad 62; here Corbulo, hastening to the rescue from Commagene with his legions and camels laden with corn, met the routed soldiers on the Euphrates bank; here he entered Armenia in the following year in the footsteps of Lucullus, with a large army concentrated at Melitene; and here Trajan crossed the Euphrates to invest Arsamosata. Xenophon and the Greeks crossed the Tigris in 401 bc by a pontoon bridge, built with thirty-­seven boats, bound together. The Roman army, Dio explains, was expert in their

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE M A L AT YA PL A IN, THE EUPHR ATES CROSSING, A ND MELITENE  81

F ig . 4.4  Bridges of boats across the Danube, at the start of the First Dacian war, ad 101 (Trajan’s Column iv–v/12–16: Anger, Neg. D-­DAI-­Rom 91.148, detail)

construction. Over large rivers like the Euphrates, flat bottomed boats are anchored upstream. The first, close to the near bank, is floated down and held in position by a cable attached to a wicker basket filled with stones and thrown into the river. Each boat is loaded with planks and bridgework, and decking is immediately laid to the landing place. Boats are then floated down in sequence, anchored a short distance apart, and the bridge is extended to the enemy bank. The last boat has towers and a gate, with archers and catapults. The design is apparent on Trajan’s Column. Richmond describes the pontoon bridge over the Danube, crossed by Trajan’s army in ad 101 (Fig. 4.4): The boats face up-­stream, with rudders fastened in position. Each boat carries amidships a stout pier of short vertical logs held firm by horizontal slats. These are the main piers of the bridge; but in addition, a pontoon floats between each pair of boats and is built of closely-­fitted planks, heavily nailed, the whole being crowned by small railings parallel with the road which it supports. Thus, anyone could stand on the pontoon to execute running repairs without difficulty. The roadway structure is of three thicknesses of timber, but the detail is not clearly discernible. Stout railings are fixed to uprights and diagonal cross-­spars with very large nails. Where the bridge comes to land, it is carried on vertical struts, braced by cross-­spars parallel with the roadway.4

The Ancient Crossing at Hallan The caravan road from Eski Malatya to Harput, Hayrullah recalled, used to cross the Euphrates just west of Zeyikhan, at Hallan, where there was a huge, pre-­Ottoman ceme­ tery. This, he said, was the oldest and shortest crossing. It was probably used by the Assyrian king, Shalmanezer III, who in c.836 bc passed from the headwaters of the

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 82  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Arsanias to reach the Euphrates ‘in front of the land of Melid’. Nearly a century later, in c.752 bc, the crossing was used with his army by the Urartian king Sardur II, advancing from his heartlands east of Lake Van. On the left bank, at Hızırtaşı, ‘heaven-­ sent stone’, foothills crowded above the Euphrates, and a conspicuous rocky outcrop ran steeply down almost to the river, 500 metres west of Habibuşağı, about a mile west of Kömürhan, and 6 miles east of İzolu. On the eastern side, a rock inscription, now flooded, was carved facing the Euphrates, in a rectangular panel 3–4 metres above ground level. This, a large plaque with thousands of small wedge marks, was sighted by von Moltke in March 1838 to the right of his westbound path to the Euphrates’ crossing; and was described by Percy, ‘about fifty lines cut on a panel six feet high by four broad on the face of a rocky bluff five hundred yards from the river’. In the cuneiform text, photographed by Huntington, Sardur proclaimed ‘Haldi went forth, his weapons smote the king of the city of Militia, and threw the country at the feet of Sardur. . . . The Euphrates was (…), no king had set up camp there (before). I prayed to Haldi, the Lord. . . . The gods listened to me, they opened the way for me, I set up camp with (my) soldiers in front of the city of Militia.’ Sardur also annexed ten frontier fortresses, including Tomisa. The position of the rock carrying the inscription was carefully described by Lehmann-­ Haupt in June 1899. It was very strategic. Between Kömürhan and İzolu, the left bank of the Euphrates was flat. Hızırtaşı was the only rise, and it allowed observation of both banks as far as the crossing point and beyond. Cut in the rock and also facing the river, step-­shaped foundations and cisterns (Lehmann-­Haupt’s ‘Chaldian stairs and subterranean, partly winding shafts’) attest the presence of a Urartian fort or guard post, commanding the defile carrying the approach to and from the crossing, and controlling access into Urartu, of which the Euphrates formed the western frontier. Through the southern end of the cliff below the inscription, and close above the river, a circular window (‘an artifical lookout point carved into the rock’) had been cut in antiquity. Sketched by Frohse, accompanying Lehmann-­Haupt, this artificial window, about 1.5 metres in diameter, is the ‘eye’ preserved in Pliny’s local name of the Euphrates (Figs. 4.5, 4.6). The crossing was used by Sultan Mehmet II, the Conqueror, and continuously by caravans from Sivas and Diyarbekir. In Ottoman times the westbound caravan road from Harput descended to the large, ruined han, Kömürhan itself, lying in the bed of a tributary north of the bridge. Sultan Mehmet, Hayrullah said, had built 365 hans, and this was his favourite. Caravans from the east were then forced down to the left bank, steep and narrow, to pass beneath the rocky spur and site of the Urartian fort. The caravan road from Kömürhan, Hayrullah knew, was 15 metres wide, with an intensity of traffic attested by thousands of tombs on either side of the Euphrates. He remembered seeing small caravans of five or ten camels passing every day, to and from Harput. Sometimes the caravans were much larger.5

The Crossing at İzolu At İzolu, the collective name given to the whole region opposite Pirot, the foothills recede, and on a gentle slope running down to the river bank stood the large village, once Armenian, of Kadıköy. The easiest crossing was between İzolu and Pirot. Here the Euphrates could be approached from both banks without difficulty, and the river was still wide enough to flow at a gentle pace. From Kadıköy, the map shows, a cart

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE M A L AT YA PL A IN, THE EUPHR ATES CROSSING, A ND MELITENE  83

F ig . 4.5* Hızırtaşı: Omma (?), ‘Künstlicher Durchblick [visible in Fig. 4.6] an der die Keilinschrift Sardurs tragenden Felsenfeste’ (F. Frohse, June 1899; from Lehmann-­Haupt, Armenien Einst und Jetzt, p. 484) (BOD Sac. 225. L. 28, vol. I)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 84 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 4.6*  View east from Ağıyabuşağı hüyük: above the spotted cap, Hızırtaşı and the Durchblick; beyond, Kömürhan (April 1965)

F ig . 4.7*  From Pirot hüyük: Pirot, the ‘İzolu ship crossing’, and, on the opposite bank, İzolu (Tomisa) (April 1965)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE M A L AT YA PL A IN, THE EUPHR ATES CROSSING, A ND MELITENE  85

F ig . 4.8*  ‘Euphrates Ferry-­boat’, at Kadi Keui, opposite Pirot, view south-­west: beyond, Şakşak Dağ (Percy, September 1899; from Highlands of Asiatic Turkey, p. 109) (BOD 206 d.39)

road, araba yolu, led down the left bank for half a mile, and crossed the Euphrates by the İzolugemisi geçidi, the ‘İzolu ship crossing’ (Fig. 4.7). Travelling from Harput to Malatiyah in 1835, Brant passed the ruins of Kömürhan, and crossed the Euphrates at a ferry called Eiz Oghlu, from the name of the district. In 1899 Percy crossed at Kadıköy. The ferries were ‘great flat-­bottomed hulks, with prows nearly level with the water and sterns arched up overhead at a height of some twelve feet or more above the stream, propelled by poles the size of a small poplar stem’ (Fig. 4.8). There were similar ‘ships’ at lesser crossings, in the Taurus at Çünküş, and in Cappadocia at Keban, and Pağnık. The muhtar of Bekiran, a day to the south, knew of the crossing at Pirot; where, before the Kömürhan bridge was built, a large kayik, sometimes a huge kelek able to embark two or three mules at a time, crossed the Euphrates to Kadıköy. Hayrullah had used the ferry many times. Hayrullah recalled that there used to be a wooden bridge over the Euphrates between Pirot and Kadıköy. It rested on piers, and was wide enough for two laden mules to pass. His father had crossed it frequently, but the Euphrates used to flood, if infrequently, in spring, and the bridge was carried away in the great flood of 1938. An earlier bridge had been swept away in an earlier flood, c.1870.6

Pirot From the crossing, the continuation of the cart road from Kadıköy passed straight up the right bank about five minutes west of Pirot: an unusually large and once entirely Armenian village, with a population in 1965 of 1,125 adults and 140 children, and three teachers. A han lay buried beneath the village school, and beside it, Pirot hüyük, Percy’s ‘circular mound, obviously artificial’, rose 25 metres above the Euphrates washing around its base. I stayed in 1965 with the headmaster, Şinası Karaman, like all his colleagues in other villages welcoming and well-­informed. He showed me two coins from a raised mound 200 metres south of the hüyük: a copper of Valentinian, and an aes of Elagabalus

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 86 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

from the mint of Caesarea. No structural remains survived at Pirot, and the village was submerged in 1987. F ROM PI ROT TO M ELIT EN E A L ONG TH E R IPA A rough track led west beside the Euphrates, in antiquity no doubt a movement and supply line between fortlets and lookout positions. Two miles from Pirot, a mound on a low summit above the river revealed the foundations, it seems, of a watch-­tower. Two miles further west, Meydancık lay at the foot of the twin Şişman hills, descending from Yorke Dağ: the name taken, sadly, not from Hogarth’s companion in 1894, but, Hayrullah suggested, from the Kurdish for ‘nothing’, perhaps ‘bare’; or from yürük, ‘nomad’. Bisected by the Kirmehmet Dere, the two hills formed a natural barrier nearly 1,000 feet high across the plain, and fell steeply into the Euphrates. Close to the west of the hills, the Erzurum–Malatya–Diyarbekir railway, completed in 1935–9 and of crucial importance in early 1943, crossed the river by a concrete viaduct 350 metres long. Following broadly the course of the Persian Royal Road from Eski Malatya, the line climbed through İzolu towards Harput. West of the railway bridge, poor villages stood an hour apart on a low platform above the river bank. Once Armenian, their populations were two or three hundred: Kurds in Kuluşağı, the remainder predominantly Turks. One in five were children. In each village was a school, with a cultured and overworked teacher. They knew of no coins, pottery, or inscriptions. Around the villages were figs and pears. Stony, infertile fields produced a good crop of poppies, and every second year of grain. At Kuluşağı (population 500, with 86 children), beside İkizhüyük, Dulluk Tepe above Melitene came first into sight, and its conspicuous summit could be seen thereafter from most points further west along the ripa. In April 1965 the kayik crossing was suspended: the Euphrates, more than half a mile wide, too full with melted snow. Only between Kuluşağı and Rustuşağı were traces of anything older: scattered on a low hill 200 metres from the river, magnificent Selcuk sherds, dating perhaps to the thirteenth century. At Rustuşağı (population 180, with 40 children in the school) the headmaster, Yılmaz Ertugr̆ ul, suggested they marked what had once been an Ottoman town. Kilisik too (population 300, with 42 children) had a kayik crossing. Here indeed had once been a fine Armenian town. The headmaster, İlyas Alp, led me to a flat promontory immediately above the river. On it had stood a large church from which the village took its name. All had been cast into the Euphrates half a century before, and only the foundations remained, marking the limits of a tomato field.

İmamoğlu: the Military Port for Melitene Continuing along the low shelf above the Euphrates, the track passed another hüyük, Değirmen Tepe, and 2 miles west of Kilisik reached İmamoğlu (population 260, with 49 children), where the long curve of the Euphrates reached its closest point to Eski Malatya, 6 miles to the south-­west. Clearly following an ancient, natural line, a cart road led directly to the fortress. The road and the location, on the very brink of the Euphrates, have suggested that İmamoğlu marked a crossing point, close to Melitene. The position should be associated rather with river-­borne supplies for the legionary fortress. During Nero’s wars in Armenia, navigation was developed to carry supplies, grain and wood,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE M A L AT YA PL A IN, THE EUPHR ATES CROSSING, A ND MELITENE  87

down the Euphrates to the fortress. At İmamogl̆ u must be located the military port, perhaps no more than a long landing stage, for keleks and their cargoes, and for rafts of timber, where the current, diverted by shifting islands, pressed against the western bank. Everywhere in the empire ‘the slightest possibilities offered by watercourses were exploited, for floating logs down rivers, and for navigation’; and ‘overland transport is alleged to be ten times more expensive than by river, and about sixty times more expensive than by sea’. İmamoğlu too was marked by a hüyük: Bronze Age settlement, attested in the hüyüks at Pirot, Kuluşağı and Değirmen Tepe, was drawn to the river bank by the attractions of downriver raft traffic. İmamoğlu was clearly the embarkation point for the passage of guns through the Taurus gorge for the army of Hafiz Pasha, defeated near Zeugma in June 1839. In 1965 the headmaster knew of no evidence of antiquity. All had evidently been swept away by floods. İmamoğlu itself was submerged in April 1987.7 F ROM PI ROT TO M ELIT EN E TH ROUGH TH E PL A I N Crossing the Euphrates in the vicinity of Pirot, westbound traffic did not follow the ripa. Instead, the caravan road, known varioulsy as the Silk Road, the Baghdad Road, and Sultan Murat Caddesi, climbed through the Şişman hills, and ran directly through the plain to Eski Malatya. In June 2003 Taner and I followed the caravan road westwards from above Pirot. Rising gently westwards to meet and follow the line of the old asfalt from Elazığ, at the top of low hills it diverged to the north-­west along a natural passage through the Şişman hills. Curving slowly west, clear traces of the road ran easily down to the east bank of the Kırmehmet Dere, crossed by a shallow ford, and climbed through apricot groves; to pass beside the small Şişman han, 28 metres long and 31 metres wide, remarkably preserved 100 metres from the river bank, and surviving just above the level of the Karakaya lake. Avoiding the village of Şişman, the line of the road can be followed as it climbed and descended to pass between Kuluşağı and Hakverdi. To the west the plain is stony and arid, overlooked almost everywhere by Dulluk Tepe. Its villages revealed no trace of antiquity, but the course of the caravan road is clear. In June 2003, Basrı Hakverdi, aged 60, remembered from his father that it had been used by horses, donkeys, mules, and camels. Reaching Yarımca Han, the road descended through the village of Yazıcıhan to cross the Yazıcıhan Dere, and climbed again to wind along a low ridge and pass westwards, its course confirmed by Gündi Kiraç, aged 73, to descend, a mile north-­west of Dulluk Tepe, to Karahan Mahallesi and the east gate of the fortress of Melitene.

Dulluk Tepe An isolated pyramidal peak, Dulluk Tepe (3,440 feet) rises steep and conspicuous above a confused group of lower hills 2½ miles south-­east of Melitene. It is known locally as Gelincik Tepe, ‘poppy hill’, or Mağrıp Tepe, ‘the west’ or ‘setting sun hill’; description perhaps of the aspect for travellers approaching from the direction of the İzolu crossing. The summit, an hour’s fast walk and scramble from Eski Malatya, rears more than 500 feet above the saddle crossed by the ancient road from the south (Fig. 4.9); and offers a

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 88 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 4.9  Dulluk Tepe, and the frontier road from the south: uninscribed milestone (?) outside the east gate of Melitene (April 1965)

spectacular view of the course of the Euphrates from the hills south of Deregezen to the old railway bridge by the Şişman hills, and of much of the right bank between. As a vantage point it is unrivalled on the frontier. Its potential as a signalling station is apparent. Roughly circular, about 50 metres in diameter, the summit platform slopes gently towards the east. It contains two deeply sunken rectangular pits. The larger, 18 metres long, 8 metres wide, and 5 metres deep, is lined internally with large squared stones set in mortar, its lining walls sloping slightly outwards. Twenty courses survive, in workmanship closely resembling the walls of Melitene. The smaller pit has not been wholly cleared, but is at least 10 metres long, and 4 metres wide. Around the southern rim of the summit are substantial traces of a supporting wall, which may have extended all round. To the west, overlooking Melitene, the platform rises to its highest point, and in bedrock on the very top have been cut five shallow, saucer-­shaped depressions, each about 2.5 metres in diameter. From below these on the western side a line of steps has been cut up to a small artificial platform, from which Melitene, but not the Euphrates, is visible. The saucer depressions on the summit must have been scooped out to form containers or supports. They resemble the steps and platforms of the Urartian fire temple on the summit of the huge rock below Cengerli in Armenia Minor, and suggest association with Arslantepe, below Dulluk Tepe to the south-­west. Their random arrangement does not suggest the foundations of a single, unified structure. They are explained as the base stands for a group of signal beacons, stacked ready to be ignited. For such a purpose their size is well suited: to hold small versions of the log piles on Trajan’s Column, stacked beside signal towers along the Danube.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE M A L AT YA PL A IN, THE EUPHR ATES CROSSING, A ND MELITENE  89

The twin pits, dug out and carefully lined with blocks, are shown by their construction, with courses of stone and bricks, to be older than Ottoman, and probably Roman. Far too large to be cisterns, with no trace of plaster lining, and the summit too small to collect rain water to fill them, they are explained as wood stores, to support long-­range signalling. From them beacons could be stacked and resupplied in the saucer depressions at the highest points of the hill. To sustain a continuous signalling function, small buildings for watch personnel must have shared the summit, a few metres south of the pits. The height, the visible structures on the summit and its unique topographical advantages suggest for Dulluk Tepe a major controlling role in the frontier system. Marking from afar the position of Melitene, the commanding peak was perhaps a decisive factor in the siting of the legionary fortress. It should be seen as a main signalling node, fire by night and smoke by day, to relay warnings and instructions between the legion and intermediate auxiliary forts. In Armenia Minor, a similar function is suggested by shallow pits on the summit of Kurtlu Tepe, and may be surmised for Mantartaşı, above Satala.8 M ELIT EN E (Eski Malatya) Melitene, the fortress of XII Fulminata, lay beneath the ruins of Eski Malatya (2,460 feet) on the low west bank of the Pınarbaşı Dere, 6 miles north-­north-­east of the modern city of Malatya.

Position On the hill of Arslantepe, south of Eski Malatya, the city known as Milid, Militia, and Meliteia in Urartian and Assyrian records was important nine centuries before the arrival of Rome. In c.836 bc, Shalmanezer III received the tribute of the Melidian king. Above the Euphrates crossing in c.752 bc Sardur II proclaimed ‘I beseiged the city of Militia. . . . The king prostrated himself and kissed my feet. I carried away gold, silver and beasts.’ Melita, Pliny records, was founded not far from the Euphrates by Semiramis. The city was founded on the natural route leading directly east to the Euphrates crossing, and onward below Harput and over the Ergani pass to northern Mesopotamia. The legionary fortress was sited at Eski Malatya to control this crucial route. Its strategic purpose and the geographical and military advantages of its position are attested by an unending sequence of destruction and reoccupation. Eski Malatya, Maunsell reported, was a trading town of great importance, reckoned as the half way station on the Samsun–Baghdad post road, one of the principal arteries of trade of the Ottoman empire. In late Ottoman times, a Nizam (regular) battalion of the 4th Army in Erzincan was stationed on the north-­west side of Malatya. In 1943 the adjacent railway bridge over the Tohma Su (Melas) was seen to be crucial for the defence of the whole of eastern Anatolia against an expected German advance from the Caucasus. The headquarters of the Second Turkish Army was transferred from Konya to Malatya in the later 1980s.9

Early Contacts with Rome In the early first century, Strabo wrote, Melitene was the name given to the whole region, celebrated only for its fruit trees, olives, and Monarite, a wine to match the Greek. The

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 90 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Melas (Tohma Su) is supposed to have given its name to the district and town. In the eighteenth century Eski Malatya was famous for its vineyards and orchards, and especially for its apricots, peaches, and large grapes producing an excellent wine; and was surrounded by magnificent gardens served by canals drawing their water from the many springs in the town: gardens so highly developed, Brant recorded, that the walled town of Eski Malatya was gradually becoming deserted, inhabited only during the winter months. The plain around Eski Malatya is still conspicuously fertile. Gigantic cabbages grow and vines flourish. But the olives have gone, and only oleasters remain.10 Despite centuries of stable occupation by an unchanged legionary garrison, and the vast remains surviving at Eski Malatya, little is preserved of the history, let alone epig­ raphy of Melitene in classical times. Writing under Justinian, Procopius knew of a square fortress built long ago for a legion, with sufficient space for the soldiers’ barracks, and as a depot for their standards.11 During Nero`s Armenian campaigns, every detail of the Melitene triangle must have become familiar to Roman commanders, every site suitable for a legionary camp reconnoitred and assessed. The position of Eski Malatya had pre-­eminent natural advantages. Supplied with clean water from the Pınarbaşı Dere, it stood on the line of the northbound frontier road, almost in the shadow of Dulluk Tepe, of integral importance for long distance signalling. Adjacent was the bend of the Euphrates at İmamoğlu, des­tin­ ation of raft traffic carrying grain, wood, and supplies for the fortress.

Installation of a Legionary Garrison After service with varying fortunes in Syria, culminating in the siege and capture of Jerusalem c.26 September ad 70, XII Fulminata was moved by Titus from Raphaneae, about 100 miles south of Antioch, to Melitene, beside the Euphrates on the border of Armenia and Cappadocia. The deployment should be dated to spring ad 71, and linked in time with Vespasian’s arrangements, probably in the same year, to upgrade the status of Cappadocia to a consular command with the introduction of two legions.12 XII Fulminata was to remain permanently in garrison for more than three centuries. But its presence is attested epigraphically only on a single tile bearing the legionary stamp. Veterans settled around the fortress, and under Marcus, a veteran colony, probably founded by Hadrian, seems to have existed at Arca, at the western end of the Malatya plain. Melitene was raised to city status during Trajan’s advance from Syria to Satala in the initial stages of the Armenian campaign of ad 114, and it became a metropolis for the surrounding population. A glimpse of the development of Melitene may be provided at Aquincum (Budapest), where Hadrian’s residence points to the preparation for Trajan of similar quarters beside the Euphrates. Melitene may have provided a principal seat for the governor of Cappadocia. Procopius records how the city overflowed the small confines of the original fortress, and continued to expand in size and population. In the surrounding plain were the shrines and the archons’ houses, the agora with its shops, all the streets and stoas, baths and theatres, and all the attributes of a large city.13

Sapor At the time of Sapor’s destructive offensives in the mid third century, Melitene must thus have been among the richest prizes in eastern Asia Minor. But it is not listed among the

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE M A L AT YA PL A IN, THE EUPHR ATES CROSSING, A ND MELITENE  91

thirty-­seven Roman forts and cities, including Satala, which he claimed to have burned and sacked in Syria and Cappadocia in his second offensive in ad 256; or among the further thirty-­six cities, including Samosata, Comana, and Sebasteia, burned and sacked in both provinces and in Cilicia, in his third offensive in c. ad 260. Whether successfully defended, or remote from the main thrusts of Sapor’s campaigns, the fortress survived. In ad 359, Ammianus eluded Persian cavalry after the siege of Amida, crossed the Euphrates in the Taurus gorge, and found refuge in Melitene.14

Christianity From the second century Christians served in the legion. In a battle against the Quadi in western Dacia in ad 172, the Rain Miracle answered, it was said, the prayers to the true God of Christian soldiers of, and deployed from the legion named Fulminata by Marcus. Diocletian’s Great Persecution in ad 303 was provoked in part by a revolt in Melitene, instigated, it was said, by Christian soldiers. Procopius relates that during the persecution of Licinius c. ad 320, Christian Roman soldiers serving together in a cohort of XII Fulminata, stationed in times of old in Melitene, were left naked on the ice of a frozen pond and tempted by baths of hot water on the bank: to be celebrated in the Orthodox Church on 9 March as the Forty Martyrs of Sebasteia. Melitene was represented by its metropolitan bishop at Councils in the fourth and fifth centuries.15

Later Dispositions In c. ad 502, during the Persian wars, Anastasius started the construction of walls to surround for the first time the city and its public buildings. Completed in great strength by Justinian, they were not long to remain intact. Only the massive cores and some of the facings may in places survive, with extensive later repairs. The city was burned by Chosroes I in ad 575. Captured by the Arabs in ad 656/7, it was used as a base for their summer campaigns against the Byzantine Empire. Thereafter, for nearly seven centuries, destruction, rebuilding, and further destruction followed in rapid sequence, as Arabs, Byzantines, Selcuks, Mongols, and Mamelukes fought for possession of the strategic fortress. In 1835, Brant noted, Malatiyah (Eski Malatya) contained about 3,923 Turkish and Armenian families, who for seven months moved to Aspuzu, now Malatya, ‘amidst a forest of fruit trees’, and returned for five in winter. ‘Plague, cholera, and Kurdish depredations have been gradually causing a diminution of the population; and the extensive and fertile plain of Malatiyah is nearly reduced to an uncultivated waste.’ In the town ‘not a living creature was to be met, and the streets were overgrown with grass. The ancient walls are in ruins, and in most parts have fallen down.’ Four years later Ainsworth found Malatiyah largely deserted by its inhabitants, and with the opening of a bazaar a new town developed in the gardens at Aspuzu. Eski Malatya was unhealthy with summer fevers, and very unhealthy in the autumn, when ‘out of a brigade of 3000 troops, as many as 400 were lost’ at the time of its occupation by Turkish troops in 1839 under Hafiz Pasha. In 1838 Hafiz, polite and distinguished, had received Brant with great style below Harput, his extensive harem and suite accommodated in the palace of an earlier Pasha

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 92 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

decapitated by Reshid Mohammed. But Ainsworth had witnessed his defeat by Ibrahim Pasha and the Egyptian army in the battle of Nizib, near Zeugma, in June 1839, and had shared his retreat back to Malatiyah: Hafiz had ‘so little gallantry as to say that the ladies of Malatiyah lay under the mulberry trees to let the ripe fruit fall into their mouths’. The town had been visited in 1873 by a severe earthquake, and in May 1894, Yorke found it almost completely deserted. There were enormous graveyards, ‘probably the result of the great mortality at the town when the Turkish army was stationed here’.16 R EM A I NS The vast surviving walls of Eski Malatya enclose a huge fortress 800 metres long to west and south, but on its other sides constricted by the course of the Pınarbaşı Dere into an irregular rectangle, enclosing an area of c.55 hectares. Flanked by towers, rectangular measuring 5 × 3 metres, pentagonal not more than 4 metres across, and all impossible to date, the circuit can be followed almost in entirety. The western and southern walls meet at right angles, and extend initially in straight lines for 680 and 400 metres respectively. This south-­western corner of Eski Malatya, Gabriel suggested, was the location of the legionary fortress, allowing, until the walls were interrupted by later gates, a length of up to 500 metres, and a width of 370 metres: an area of 18.5 hectares, only slightly larger than the fortress of Satala. A new plan (Fig. 4.10), a meticulous survey at a scale of 1:2000, was presented to me in 1989 by the Mayor of Eski Malatya, renamed Battalgazi after the Selcuk hero. Rather squarer in outline, it shows marked sinuations in the lines of all the walls except in the south-­west corner. The walls and towers, coursed rubble facings on mortared rubble cores almost certainly based on constructions under Anastasius and Justinian, may date from the sixth century and later, but are ‘more likely to be mediaeval’. With the huge kervansaray, Karahan, in the northern corner, what remains appears, indeed, to be mainly Selcuk. But the lower, ashlar courses of the eastern wall and a tower above the Pınarbaşı Dere evidently belonged to an earlier building phase, close above the river and, despite Procopius, date perhaps to the third century. Arrangements for the water supply remain a mystery. It must have been very substantial. Eski Malatya was well supplied by springs, but no trace has ever been discerned of an aqueduct or of pipes leading from the upper Pinarbaşı Dere, to meet the requirement for a large and constant volume of water, flowing into the fortress and city some 10 metres above the level of the river. Towards the southern end of Eski Malatya, the Ulucami mosque has been restored on the recent advice of a holy man; and in 1988 villagers had excavated beside it a large pit to contain an underground lavatory, larger than a tennis court and 4 metres deep. Two elderly workmen were digging away at the bottom, their pockets full of coins, and up to their ankles in pottery and bones. Roman drains stuck out of the sides. I have sighted no other coins at Eski Malatya, too close to the antique dealers of Malatya. The Director of the Malatya Museum, Bakı Yiğit, spoke of occupation layers at the Ulu Cami: 2 metres Byzantine, 4 metres Islamic, and 2 metres Turkish. Raised by destructions, the ground level inside the walls is indeed several metres above that of the surrounding fields (Fig. 4.11).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE M A L AT YA PL A IN, THE EUPHR ATES CROSSING, A ND MELITENE  93 N Alaca Kapı Pinarba I Dere

Sıptınız Kapısı

c.55 ha

0

100

200

300

400

500 Metres

F ig . 4.10  Battalgazi, Tarihi Surlar (‘Historic Walls’) (c.1989, supplied by the Mayor of Eski Malatya, October 1989)

The mayor’s staff recalled that the five Roman tombstones, probably of the second century, and now in the Malatya Museum, had been found under a wall footing in a pre-­ Selcuk cemetery, a mile east of Eski Malatya; on the slopes of the low hills above and east of the stream beside Karahan, ‘black han’, Mahallesi. They were in fact evidently found rather closer to Eski Malatya. The birthplace of Sidi Battals, buried near Konya in ad 743, Eski Malatya had just been renamed Battalgazi in his honour, in 1988.17

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 94 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 4.11  Eski Malatya, western gate, showing the raised ground level inside the fortress, and İnal (April 1965)

ROA DS The fortress was sited at the intersection of routes of the highest strategic importance: the main military road linking Syria with the Euxine; and support roads from Ancyra, via Caesarea and Sebasteia, continuing eastwards across the Euphrates to northern Mesopotamia. South-­west of Melitene there is no evidence for an ancient predecessor of the modern road, followed by the railway, leading up from the Cilician plain. Traffic from Cilicia joined the support road from Caesarea at Cocusus (Göksun), and shared the last four or more stages to Melitene.

The Road from Caesarea Melitene was the caput viae of the great road leading east for over 200 miles from Caesarea (Kayseri), capital of Cappadocia, constructed at least in part and evidently by XII Fulminata under Titus with Domitian in ad 80 or 81 by [Caesennius Gallus], and under Nerva in ad 96 by Pomponius Bassus. Its course is marked by long sections of roadbed, and by at least 129 milestones numbered from Melitene. They record rebuilding under a dozen em­perors, and attest the great importance attached to this road in particular, throughout the third century: from the Severi, their earliest milestone of ad 198, especially during the years ad 220–50, to Diocletian, Maximian, and Constantius Caesar. In 1891, Hogarth traced the roadbed eastwards from Comana Cappadocica, through Cocusus, to a point east of Elbistan. It can be seen again 30 miles further east, beside the massive remains of Sultan Murat Han: the Roman road reused by the Ottoman caravan route,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE M A L AT YA PL A IN, THE EUPHR ATES CROSSING, A ND MELITENE  95

and attributed to Sultan Murat IV (1623–40). A further section may be discerned at the summit of Develi Dağ, ‘camels’ mountain’, the name pointing, as elsewhere, to a caravan road, just before the modern road from Kayseri descends to the western extremity of the Malatya plain. The ancient road probably passed through Akcadağ (Arca, the last station before Melitene) and Malatya, to reach the upper Pınarbaşı Dere, and enter the fortress by the southern gate.18 The abrupt ravine of the Sultan Su, 3 miles after Akcadağ, was a principal obstacle. I have found no evidence for a crossing, but the steep descent of the modern road from Kayseri may preserve the line of the ancient. In April 1965, with a ticket already bought, I missed an overnight bus from Ankara. The driver, dozing, failed to negotiate the sharp turn at the top of the ravine. My later bus next morning passed wreckage strewn down the precipitous slopes, and Malatya saw seven funerals.

The Road from Sebasteia The road from the north-­west, from Sebasteia, 140 miles by the modern road, was second in importance only to the road from Caesarea. No trace of the ancient road has ever been reported. Followed by the Ottoman caravan route from Constantinople to Diyarbekir and Baghdad, it converged on the frontier road at the crossing of the Melas (Tohma Su). Twelve miles before the bridge, Brant reported ‘a column of stone, which marks the half distance between Constantinople and Baghdad’. Marked also by the remains of several hans, this was the wagon route from Sivas, taken by convoys of Armenian women, some from Tokat, in 1915, a fearful sight as they approached the bridge over the Tohma Su.19

The Route into Armenia To the east, and crossing the Euphrates to Tomisa, lay the route into southern Armenia and northern Mesopotamia. It has left no trace. In the vicinity of Gorbilon, the fifth station 46 miles east of the Euphrates, were erected the three inscriptions of Corbulo and III Gallica, found in the Armenian church of St Mamas at Kesrik in the plain 5 miles south of Harput. From this vicinity, the site of a putative Tropaeum Neronis, Caesennius Paetus in flight covered 40 miles in a single day to the Euphrates.20

The Frontier Road The direct frontier road from Syria passed through the fortress, entering Melitene through the south-­east gate, and leaving presumably through the north. The road is documented, not well, by milestones: in northern Commagene, at Bibo, of Marcus and Verus of ad 161–9; in Cappadocia, 2 miles north of Melitene, of Constantinus junior, Constantius II, and Constans, of ad 337–40; and in Armenia Minor, in the Refahiye valley, of Domitian and Hadrian, of ad 92–4 and ad 129, and above Melik Şerif, of Vespasian, of early ad 76. It was carried by dated bridges, over the Cendere Su (Chabina) of ad 200, and over the Karabudak (Sabrina) of ad 250–1. Very substantial, cobbled traces of the roadbed itself, 8 metres broad, can be followed in the northern descent from the Taurus towards Melitene, and, almost unbroken, from Deregezen, over the Antitaurus and as far as the ridge east of the Karabudak.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 96 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

NOT ES 1. von Moltke, Briefe 216. Through Malatya in 1915 were funnelled the Armenian de­port­ ations from the north and north-­west. In remarkable endorsement of the selection of Melitene as the site for the legionary fortress, the Malatya triangle was of crucial im­port­ ance in 1943 for the defence of the whole of eastern Anatolia, in the event of a Russian collapse in the Caucasus and an expected withdrawal of Turkish neutrality (pp. 379–81 and n. 26). Plan Wonderful (‘Plan for the Delay of a German advance through Anatolia. Involving demolitions in the Taurus and Malatya region’) envisaged the capture and destruction, by a glider-­borne or parachute force, of the lattice-girder railway bridge, 74 metres long, over the Tohma Su (Melas), a focal point for communications, to delay the movement of victorious German armies, expected in early May, to Syria and Iraq. The attackers, evidently Kalpaks trained for such a purpose, were to find their own way back to Syria, on foot (National Archives, WO 201/1121 and 1237). Tacitus, Ann. 15, 7 and 26. Huntington, GJ 20:2 (1902) 188ff. Pliny, NH 5, 83. 2. Hayrullah’s family had lived in Butan for 2,000 years, and once owned the whole region of Pirot and İzolu. His grandfather, a tribal chief and binbaşı, ‘major’. had protected Atatürk, and had been the mayor, nahiye müdürü, of Kale. 3. The Royal Road, Herodotus, Historiae 5, 52–4 and 8.98; the route by the Tomisa crossing, Dillemann, Mésopotamie 147–57. Strabo 12, 2, 1 (535) and 14, 2, 29 (663f.). Pliny, NH 2, 242ff. 4. Plutarch, Lucullus 24. Tacitus, Ann. 13, 7, and 15, 7 (Paetus); and 15, 12, with 16 and 26f. (Corbulo). Xenophon, Anabasis 2, 4, 24. A deep tributary, it was suggested, might be crossed by 4,000 hoplites at a time, on a bridge of 2,000 skins taken from sheep, goats, cattle, and donkeys, inflated, tied together, and piled with earth and brushwood, Anabasis 3, 5, 8–11. Pontoon bridges, Dio 71, 3. Richmond, PBSR 13 (1935) 5f. 5. von Moltke, Briefe 216. Percy, Asiatic Turkey 109. Shalmanezer, Taşyürek, Iraq 41.1 (1974) 53. Sardur, Salvini, Testi Urartei 431–3 (A 9–4), and van Loon, in Anatolian Studies Güterbock 187–94. Lehmann-­Haupt, Armenien Einst und Jetzt 483f. Huntington, ZE 33 (1901), 197 and fig. 23, in EAM 153, Fig. 90. 6. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 210f. Percy, Asiatic Turkey 108ff. Hayrullah’s was evidently similar to the bridge photographed by Gabriel across the Arsanias at Pertek. 7. Navigation, Pliny, NH 5, 84. Corbier, CAH2 XII 417. 8. The larger pit is divided into two unequal parts by a transverse wall no more than 60 cm thick, standing on a foundation wall, 2.5 metres high, of bricks set in mortar. Half way down the lower slopes on the northern side, the upper surface of a rock outcrop has been levelled, and a square, shallow trough, with sides about 2.40 metres long, has been incised to a depth of 5 cm. In the centre of the trough is a circle 2 metres in diameter, inset a further 5 cm. Military signalling, Vegetius 3, 5, 11f. Webster, Roman Imperial Army 254ff. 9. Shalmanezer and Sardur, n. 5 above. Pliny, NH 6, 8f. Maunsell, Military Report IV (1904) 125f. and 149ff. Eski Malatya is described by Gabriel, Voyages archéologiques I 264–8. The railway bridge, and Kalpaks, n. 1 above. 10. Strabo 12, 1, 2 (534), and 12, 2, 1 and 6 (535 and 537). Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 211. Ancient olive presses have been seen further north, near Ağın and at Bademli. 11. Procopius, Aed. 3, 4, 16–20.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE M A L AT YA PL A IN, THE EUPHR ATES CROSSING, A ND MELITENE  97

12. Josephus, BJ 7, 1, 3 (18). Cappadociae propter adsiduos barbarorum incursus legiones addidit (Vespasianus), consularemque rectorem imposuit pro equite Romano, Suetonius, Vespasian 8, 4. Elements of the legion, returning from the Pontic coast and victory over Anicetus some eighteen months before, Tacitus, Hist. 3, 47f., may have remained in Cappadocia to prepare the site. 13. At Arslantepe, a tile of leg. XII F(ulminata), EAM 518, no. 18. Excavations at Aquincum, provincial capital of Pannonia Inferior, similarly garrisoned by a legion, have revealed a military town nearly a mile long, with great legionary baths, a large military ­amphitheatre, and the residence of the governor: in ad 106, Hadrian himself. A mile to the north was the smaller, civil town, served by an aqueduct from nearby springs. The principal streets contained a theatre, a portico with rows of shops, market buildings, a bath and a basilica. In the forum was a sanctuary. Among the smaller streets were two further public baths, two Mithraea, a sanctuary of Fortuna, the ruins of houses and workshops, and the headquarters of the Collegium Centonariorum, the guild of textile dealers, and the municipal fire brigade; to which in ad 228 a hydraulic organ, a bronze plaque proclaims, was presented by its prefect and councillor of the colony (Hyde, TAPA 69 (1938), 392ff.). Outside the walls was a smaller amphitheatre. Procopius, n. 11 above. 14. Honigmann and Maricq, RGDS, text, paras 13 and 26. Ammianus 19, 8, 9. 15. Rain Miracle, Dio 72, 8–10. Forty Martyrs, Procopius, Aed. 1, 7, 3, and Cumont, SP II 225, n. 1. Bishops, EAM 174. 16. Procopius, Aed. 3, 4, 19f. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 211, and JRGS 10 (1840) 366. Ainsworth, JRGS 10 (1840) 320–2 and 335–9, and Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 326–8. 17. Inscriptions, EAM 518ff., nos. 17–23. I have visited Eski Malatya and the Malatya Museum many times between 1963 and 2003. The potential for epigraphic discovery at Eski Malatya is suggested at Syrian Apamea, where Tower 15 in the Arab castle was systematically dismantled in 1986–8 to reveal 110 inscriptions, mainly of soldiers of the legion II Parthica, transferred to the east by Caracalla in ad 215, Van Rengen, in Le Bohec and Wolff, Légions de Rome 407. 18. Milestone of Titus with Domitian, ad 80 or 81; reused by Nerva, ad 96, at mile 18 from Caesarea, French, Milestones no. 569. Also of Domitian, ad 81, 22 miles south-­west of Caesarea, on the road to the Cilician Gates, SEG 61 (2011), 1331. Hogarth, ‘Military Road’ 678 ff., with CIL 3, 6904–55, and 12, 162–211. 19. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 211f. Bryce, Armenians 307. 20. CIL 3, 6741ff. and ILS 232. St Mamas, protector of shepherds and curer of their flocks, martyred in Caesarea c. ad 274. The church was destroyed in 1915. Tacitus, Ann. 15, 16.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

FIVE

North of Melitene: Ciaca and Keban (Maps 11, 12, 16, and Figs. A1, A2)

F ROM TH E M EL AS TO CI ACA

The Bridge over the Melas (Tohma Su) From the legionary fortress the Roman road ran directly north for 4 miles to the Tohma Su, the ancient Melas. The line of the road was marked, half way to the river, by a milestone of Constantinus junior, Constantius II, and Constans, of ad 337–40. The crossing itself is marked by the Kırkgözköprü, the ‘forty eyes bridge’, about 4 miles from the Euphrates. The largest tributary on the right bank of the Euphrates, the Tohma Su drains a huge basin between the Taurus and the Antitaurus, and flows steadily throughout the year. The gravel bed was about 100 metres wide at the bridge, the water shallow in summer and autumn. The north bank was low, and the southern offered barely adequate foundations. The Kırkgözköprü was also low (Fig. 5.1). Brant’s description in August 1835 suggests a wider arch or arches in the centre, carried away and replaced with twenty-­three small arches, the ‘forty eyes’: ‘a causeway on arches is united to either end of the bridge, extending across the valley in which the stream flows, and indicating an occasional great rise of the river’. Probably of late Selcuk construction, the bridge was crossed in July 1839 by Ainsworth, fleeing north from Malatiyah, and in the 1960s was still used by the modern road from Malatya to Sivas and Arabkir. On the north bank, beside the bridge on the upriver side, were traces of an older abutment, and, aligned directly with it, the remains of four massive stone piers, 2 metres square and 9 metres apart, of indeterminable date. The riverbed had shifted some 50 metres to the south, leaving them high and dry. Clearly the remnants of an earlier bridge, they probably supported a timber superstructure, perhaps Roman, for a long crossing over shifting riverbed and uncertain banks. Immediately after the bridge, the Sivas road branched north-­west towards Hekimhan, while the Ottoman carriage road continued west of north towards Arabkir. But the older caravan road to Arabkir and Trebizond, clearly following the line of the frontier road, diverged north-­east to pass over a low promontory and descend towards the Euphrates. The 15-­mile section from the Tohma Su as far as the Gâvur Dere below Yeni Çermik well illustrated the description per ripam of the road from Melitene to Satala in the Antonine Itinerary. In its reconstruction, Yorke’s account and map are essential. For by August 1987 the ripa was flooded almost up to the 683-­metre contour by the Karakaya lake, the ripa had vanished, and I failed until 1989 to identify the southwards divergence of the Roman from the modern road above the Söğütlü Dere.

Discovering Rome’s Eastern Frontier. Timothy Bruce Mitford, Oxford University Press (2021). © Timothy Bruce Mitford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843425.003.0006

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

NORTH OF MELITENE: CI ACA A ND K EBA N  99

F ig . 5.1*  Kırkgözköprü, and the line of the frontier road from Melitene, view north (September 1963)

Yorke’s map shows that he followed the line of the caravan road from the Tohma Su, and reached the ford over the Kuru Çay, close to its mouth, in an hour and thirty-­five minutes on horseback. The ‘dry stream’, known in 1835 as the Chamurlu Su, ‘muddy river’, drained a large basin below the Antitaurus, and the upper reaches flowed through a deep, narrow valley followed by the road from Eski Malatya to Sivas, the ‘high Constantinople road from Diyarbekr’. About 3 miles south of Hekimhan, Brant crossed by a ford in August, when ‘the water was girth deep; in the spring it is both difficult and dangerous to cross, and it is seldom that any persons but Tatars make the attempt’. From the Kuru Çay Yorke’s path lay close to the right bank of the Euphrates; and he clearly, but unwittingly, rode along the caravan and Roman road beside the ripa, until about a mile north of the Eleki Çay, which flows below Morhamam. That he does not mention the road suggests that the surface, as elsewhere, had been obliterated by constant caravan traffic. Important confirmation of the existence of a direct route beside the Euphrates comes from Ainsworth’s flight after the defeat of Hafiz Pasha at Nisib, near Zeugma, 24 June 1839, and their retreat together to Malatiyah. From there the direct route through Sivas to Samsun, and then by sea, was the fastest and safest way to Constantinople. But the road to Sivas was shut by disaffected Kurds. Leaving his host, Ainsworth altered his escape route and fled north ‘with a guard of about thirty men, over the bridge of the Tokhmah-­Su and by the bank of the Euphrates, sleeping a few hours at Mor Hamam’, the first stage on his diversion up the Euphrates, and then via Arabkir and Divrigĭ to Sivas.1 In October 1989, the Tourism Director in Malatya invited me to dinner in his flat, and in the morning assigned a guide. Aziz Aydoğmuş, an energetic Kurd born in Bilâluşağı, on the east bank opposite the Kuru Çay, was an inspired choice. Together we walked south from Yeni Levenge. His detailed recollections proved that the caravan road indeed followed the very bank of the Euphrates. Aziz could remember the precise course of the road. He had seen camels crossing the promontory above the Tohma Su ‘twenty years ago’, bringing salt from Kemah. From the Kırkğözköprü they turned towards the Euphrates, and the northbound caravan road descended west of Sinanlı, below which was a kayik crossing, and through Eğribük to

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 100  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 5.2  Kara Baba Kaya: beyond the flooded Euphrates, Muşar Dağ, with, on the summit, Mihal Kilisesi (October 1989)

follow the ripa northwards to the Kuru Çay. Caravans followed the river bank itself, except for a half-­mile stretch by the mouth of the Kuru Çay. There, directly opposite his village, was another kayik crossing. At the Kuru Çay, some 12 miles from Eski Malatya, Aziz had seen bridge abutments, close to a watermill lying just beside the Euphrates at Çiftlik. They were about 3 metres square at ground level, and 50 or 60 metres apart. The same had been reported to me in September 1963, but I failed to investigate. Whether abutments or surviving piers, they almost certainly belonged to a Roman bridge over the Kuru Çay, close to its mouth. The gravel bed was too wide, and the banks too infirm for anything but a low, multiple-­pier bridge similar to the Kırkğözköprü. North of the Kuru Çay, the caravans passed beneath Karahisar, ‘black castle’, east of Karasar; and then, hanging above it east of Mamhor, Kara Baba Kaya, the great promontory of black rock which reaches out towards Muşar Dağ (6,520 feet) on the east bank, and forces the road down to the very brink of the Euphrates, about 16 miles from Melitene (Fig. 5.2). All of these places were probably too close to Melitene, and too enclosed, to have been the site of a riparian fort. But the narrow passage on the ripa between Kara Baba Kaya and the Euphrates was certainly a place to be controlled by a guard post.

Muşar Dağ Opposite Kara Baba Kaya, the precipitous flanks of Muşar Dağ, like a gigantic black walnut glistening in the sun, deflect the course of the Euphrates in a great semicircle from west slowly round to the east. Huntington described the western slopes and summit:

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

NORTH OF MELITENE: CI ACA A ND K EBA N  101

At Kala, close to the most western point of the great bend (of the Euphrates), there is, on the left side of the river, a large rock, which the Haldis, or Naïri (the indigenous people of the Armenian highlands), long ago fashioned into a castle by excavating platforms and steps, and building walls. Behind the village, on the steep slopes of Mushar mountain, are situated several famous holy places. The first, 400 feet above the river, is a raised platform of stone and mud, said to be the grave of an Armenian girl who cared for the great church on the top of the mountain.

Around her are privileged to be buried the Aghas of the Kuzzilbash village at the foot of the mountain, although the common people must lay their dead near the village. Close by is a large bush with fluttering rags. . . . Such holy trees or bushes are found everywhere by the roadside or on hilltops, as also are great piles of stones, on which the pious traveller throws a pebble and thus gains credit in heaven. . . . Five hundred and fifty feet higher is found a Turkish holy place, the grave of a man called Hassan, in a small cave . . . . Outside is a great square altar of rough stones, all covered with the gore of the scores of sheep and goats, which are brought as sacrifices by both Christians and Mohammedans, and which are cooked in huge copper cauldrons hung from great beams. The horns of the offerings are piled on another altar, and the meat is often eaten in the holy place itself. . . . The shrine has no guardian, but it is regarded with such veneration by men of all religions that the most valuable of the offerings are perfectly safe from pilferers. The third, and least visited, holy place is an old well-­built church with massive buttresses and arches, located on the bleak mountain-­top, 2400 feet above the river. . . . The view from Surp Abaron, as the Armenians call the church, or Mushar Kilise, as the Turks call it, is very extensive, including the snow-­capped Dersim and Antitaurus mountains on the north, the western extension of the Harput mountains on the east, the Taurus mountains on the south, and on the west the broad brown expanse of the Malatia plain, bounded on the east by the blue network of the Euphrates, and on the west by the range of Aghaja Dagh, cut by the V-­shaped cleft of the Tohma Su.2

Confirming Huntington’s account, Aziz knew that the ruins conspicuous on the summit were indeed the remains of an enormous Armenian church, Mihal Kilisesi, the church of St Michael. On a spur high above Kale Köy, and 1,600 feet below the church, is the türbe of Abdülwahab. Four miles after Kara Baba Kaya the ancient road reached the Eleki Çay, about 20 miles from Melitene, some seven hours on foot. The largest tributary between the Tohma Su and the Arabkir Çay, and the only generous, year-­round source of good water, it cuts a gap through the long escarpment above the Euphrates: an important access route, approached from across the Euphrates and leading into the northern tip of the Malatya plain. Yorke’s map marks the river as the Murhammam Chai, but he does not mention its crossing, lined with gravel, and evidently a ford. In Roman times there was perhaps a bridge similar to that over the Kuru Çay to the south. A mile west of the ripa and the frontier road, the large village of Morhamam lies in the escarpment gap, on the north side of the Eleki Çay. Until recently the carriage road to Arabkir passed through it. There are no cut stones or trace of the antiquity implied by the very name, ‘purple bath’. Villagers recalled that Morhamam had been captured c. ad 1200—in fact much earlier—by Battal Gazi. On a rocky spur surviving as an island in the

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 102  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER A

B

1

Handeresi

D

C

13

12

E

nç

SABUS

E

it i CÇ

.

SAMUHA

2

Çi t Ç

. Tan u

sa

3

Kilise Yazısı Tepe Pağnık Öreni

16

DASCUSA

Tepnik

Kara Mağara Kp. Körpinik hüyük

4

Keban Dam

5

6

Yeni Çermik

SARTONA ?

0

11

0

5 miles 10 km

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

NORTH OF MELITENE: CI ACA A ND K EBA N  103

F ig . 5.3*  ‘View of the Euphrates looking south towards Taurus from Kilisik’ (Viscount Encombe, May 1894; from Hogarth, Wandering Scholar, facing p. 128) (BOD 2060 e.7)

Karakaya lake was a prehistoric site, and a mediaeval stone building, evidently a church, supplied the name, Kilise Tepesi, to a place known locally as Battal Gazi Kalesi, ‘the castle of Battal Gazi’.

Kilisilik (? Ciaca) The fort of Ciaca stood in all probability close to the mouth of the Eleki Çay, guarding the minor crossing points and controlling access from the north to the Malatya plain: the position commended by a reliable supply of water. In the Notitia Dignitatum, Ciaca was garrisoned by ala I Augusta Colonorum, a cavalry unit well suited to the open, undulating country of the right bank. The apparent site is Kilisilik, the ‘place of the church’, known only from Yorke’s table and map, on the ripa immediately south of the mouth of the Murhammam Chai (Eleki Çay). Lying evidently on the caravan and frontier road, its church no doubt shared the fate of the Armenian church at Kilisik east of Eski Malatya. The name should be equated with Kilisik, where Hogarth camped, and from which a fine sketch by Viscount Encombe (Fig. 5.3) looks south towards the Taurus, clearly showing the low shelf on which the frontier road ran beside the Euphrates, and the towering black crag of Kara Baba Kaya.3 F ROM CIACA TO K EBA N M A DEN Not far beyond the Eleki Çay, the Malatya plain reaches its northern limit at the cliffs lining the exit from the Keban gorge. From it the Euphrates ‘flows slowly and divides into a network of channels, enclosing islands of sand or gravel, nearly level with the flood plain. The latter, often half a mile wide, is bounded by bluffs 30 to 50 feet high, cut in the alluvial deposit which forms the Malatya plain.’ The islands are marked on the map as temporary and shifting.

◀  M ap 12  Cappadocia: from Sartona to Dascusa and Sabus

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 104  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Throughout its long curve around the foot of Muşar Dağ, the Euphrates spreads sluggishly to a width of nearly a mile. Six kayik crossings between the Keban gorge and the Tohma Su underline the vulnerability of this section of the ripa: one was immediately north of the mouth of the Eleki Çay. The Euphrates, Huntington observed, skirts the base of the western extension of the Harput mountains, entering but slightly the great Malatia plain which stretches 20 miles to the west. The inhabitants on both sides are for the most part Kurds, those on the left of the river being largely Zaza, those on the right, north of the Kuru Chai, being Kizilbash [i.e. Alevi], and those on the right, south of the Tohma Su, Kurman; while the area between the Kuru Chai and the Tohma Su, very fertile, but not easily irrigated, is practically uninhabited. . . . The Kizilbash, in the district near Malatia, unlike their brethren in Dersim, are peaceable, well-­behaved agriculturalists, most of whom have entirely given up nomadic life, . . . industrious when work is necessary, and faithful when they have given their word, although very ready to rob and even to kill those to whom they are under no obligation.

Ascent from the Ripa From the mouth of the Eleki Çay the caravan road seems to have followed the ripa northwards for about a mile and a half, and then started to rise gradually beneath the eroded and precipitous escarpment above Morhamam. Its trace emerges from the Karakaya lake to wind between low hills and cross a dry riverbed.

F ig . 5.4  Çermik Mahallesi, below Morhamam—Aziz and the old shepherd (October 1989)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

NORTH OF MELITENE: CI ACA A ND K EBA N  105

Here was the mud-­brick house of an old shepherd, who had lived all his life at Çermik Mahallesi, a hamlet by the southern end of the Gâvur Dere (Fig. 5.4). His recollections confirmed Aziz’ description of the ripa. As a lad in about 1930 he had watched the caravans pass along this section of the road leading north from Kara Baba Kaya. It was the Aleppo or Sultan Murat’s Road. In places there was paving or cobbles, a kaldırım long since removed for building. Beside Kara Baba Kaya stood an old village and ruins, now drowned. There were no inscriptions. Camels, horses, and mules, but no cloven-­hoofed animals or carts, came up from Aleppo, laden with sugar, grapes, and manufactures for Arabkir and Erzincan. The caravans passed continuously, in all weathers. In summer, day and night made no difference. In winter they sheltered for the night in hans, at Mutmur a mile and a half south of Kara Baba Kaya, and at Salkı Çiftlik: and they probably stopped too at Karahisar, sheltered from the north wind by Kara Baba Kaya, and perhaps in the village and ruins beside it. In a half-­mile stretch visible from where he stood, the old man could picture four or five different caravans, each with five or ten, forty or fifty animals. Shallow, almost dry, and flanked by low hills, the valley of the Gâvur Dere is a remarkable natural conduit leading gradually up from the ripa (Fig. 5.5). The name, ‘Infidels’ Valley’, recalls the Gâvuroluğu, the ‘Infidels’ Passage’ above Boyalık in Armenia Minor: a distant section of the same road, carrying the same traffic, Christian and Muslim. The caravan and Roman road follows the bed of the Gâvur Dere for an hour on foot, curving slowly north-­east below the escarpment, to pass west of Yeni Çermik, built to resettle the vil­la­gers of Yorke’s Chermuk, an hour to the north-­east.

Sartona Drowned by 1987, Çermik stood on the ripa below wide, fertile fields, at the mouth of a small stream, dry in summer, an hour south of the exit of the deep gorge carved by the Euphrates as it flows south-­west from Keban. A mile above the village was a kayik crossing, giving access to the steep and difficult country of the left bank; by the name of its destination on the further bank, Hüyük Köy, far older than Vespasian’s frontier. There, Yorke noted, the river was certainly not less than a mile in breadth, and dotted with numerous islands. At Çermik he observed ‘a piece of a stone conduit which may possibly be of Roman date, and be all that is left of Ciaca’. The name itself, ‘hot spring’, suggests an attraction for a Roman site. Too far from the frontier road, its location, on the very bank of the Euphrates, lent itself not to a fort, but to navigation, and rafts. It was, it seems, Pliny’s Sartona, 50 miles by river below Dascusa, and 24 miles above Melitene: nearly 18 miles to İmamoğlu, evidently the military port, some 6 miles from the fortress. Indication of water conditions on the Euphrates below Sartona comes from Maunsell’s description of the Tigris: About the middle of November the rain causes the first rise in the river and the navigation improves. In January, February and March the rain keeps the river full, although the frost and snow in the mountains may lower it sometimes. In April the snows up-­ country begin to melt, and the river to rise. In May the river is highest. In June, July and August, the river falls gradually as the snows on the higher ranges take some time to

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 106  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 5.5*  View over the Gâvur Dere and distant Sartona, now flooded, from the escarpment above Morhamam (October 1963)

melt. In August, September and October the river is at its lowest The current in the low season is very slight, and in flood the swiftest is about 4 miles an hour.

Between Zimara and Dascusa the size of rafts was limited by rapids. But from Dascusa, and particularly from Sartona, much larger rafts could navigate without difficulty towards Melitene. Near Çermik, Hogarth watched ‘a naked Kurd . . . navigating on a distended goat-­hide. . . . Slipping a loop of hide over his head . . . he sprawled forward on the belly of the float . . . and was soon no more than a black speck on the yellow sea. . . . The Kurds carry their grain in this fashion.’ Sartona may be seen as a part of arrangements to supply the legion: a centre for the collection of grain and agricultural produce from the northern reaches of the Malatya plain, to be embarked and shipped down the Euphrates to Melitene. Beyond the Euphrates, the slopes of Muşar Dağ were no doubt a valuable source of timber. ‘The whole of this country, except the plains,’ Huntington assessed, ‘seems to have been well wooded before the Christian era.’ But by 1900 the mountains were bare, ‘except in the remoter districts of Shiro (Keferdis) and Dersim, where there are so-­called forests, which consist mostly of oak scrub, with some large oak trees’.4

Towards the Söğütlü Dere From the head of the Gâvur Dere, the onward trace of the frontier and caravan road is almost continuous, running up a shallow valley virtually in a straight line to the north-­ east, and passing two miles west of Malyan Çiftlik, now submerged.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

NORTH OF MELITENE: CI ACA A ND K EBA N  107

F ig . 5.6  Frontier road rounding the cliff edge above the Söğütlü Dere: view south-­east, across the flooded Euphrates above Sartona (October 1989)

Close to Taşbaşımalyanı, deep ploughing in 1989 had brought to the surface the whiter stones of the agger, some 5 metres wide and offset about 20 metres east of the caravan road. Half a mile west and above the road, a low but prominent hill is crowned with the remains of what was evidently an important lookout and signalling position, almost circular, 16 metres in diameter and over a metre high, with collapsed walls of small, rough stones. It commands a remarkable view over the bend of the Euphrates, but to the south Dulluk Tepe is concealed behind the great mass of Muşar Dağ. The Roman road rises up to and along a vertiginous rock-­cut shelf, cobbled, 70 metres long and 4 metres wide, hanging on the very lip of the cliffs that fall into the Euphrates, 500 feet below, at the exit from the Keban gorge (Fig. 5.6). The shelf curves sharply to the north, and the road runs down gentle hillsides in long zigzags, traces of the agger visible from below in the shadows of the setting sun, to converge on the Ottoman and modern road to Arabkir. This had taken a long, arid course, veering to the west behind the Morhamam escarpment. The route taken by the frontier road from Melitene was much shorter, following the ripa and ascending gradually from the very bank of the Euphrates, as the river curves to the south below the Morhamam escarpment. Almost reaching the Arabkir road, the ancient road descended north-­east for half a mile, immediately below the rising cliffs of the escarpment above Yeni Levenge. The remains of an 8-­metre road survived in 1963 in a cemetery on the right bank of the Söğütlü Dere, its sheltered fields and clear water making its bank ‘the favourite halting-­ place for travellers going from Arabkir to Malatya, or from Hekim Khan (Sivas road) to the ferry across the Euphrates at Keban Maden’.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 108  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Crossing of the Söğütlü Dere ̆ tlü Dere at the mouth of a short, cliff-­lined gorge, The ancient road crossed the Sögü where the river breaks through the escarpment below Yeni Levenge, and flowed as ‘a broad, muddy, but shallow stream’ into the Euphrates. By the mouth was a kayik crossing, and a second kayik crossed a mile and a half upriver, below Levenge, the first point below Keban at which it was possible to descend to the riverbed. Here the Euphrates, still no more than 50 metres wide, flowed west out of the long Keban gorge. This second crossing was the Söğütlü ferry, which avoided the steep and difficult descents to the crossing at Keban. It carried an alternative road, in 1893 passable by wheels, to Harput, and was used by some traffic from Sivas, and from Arabkir via the road to Eski Malatya. It also served traffic westbound from the valley of the Arsanias, along the northern side of the Harput mountains and into the northern tip of the Malatya plain. Others preferred the Keban ferry. Leaving the Sivas road at Hekimhan, von Moltke in March 1838, in places at a gallop, elsewhere on foot, and Tozer in August 1879 followed the eastward route past Arguvan, 10 miles west of the Söğütlü Dere, through the Deregezen valley and up to the watershed to join the Keban road from Arabkir.5 Of the ancient crossing of the Söğütlü Dere nothing survives. Some 70 metres wide, the river flows below muddy banks two metres high. The gravel bed and left bank are too eroded to preserve piers or abutments. To secure solid foundations, the ancient road may have turned briefly into the gorge, towards the Euphrates. I returned to investigate in September 1999. The low cliffs lining the right bank reveal no trace, and the left bank is no more than a heap of gravel, low and eroded. The river was too wide for a single arched bridge, and was probably crossed by a version of the Kırkgözköprü. The village of Yeni Levenge, a cluster of a dozen mud and stone houses, including some opulent in appearance, with two satellite aerials by June 2004, reveals no trace of antiquity. The bridge remains reported in 1967, about half a mile upstream from the modern bridge carrying the Arabkir road, are remote from the observed line of the ancient road.

The Roman Road in the Deregezen Valley ̆ tlü Dere all trace of the road is lost. It has not For a mile and a half beyond the Sögü served as a quarry, for there is no han, and the nearest villages, Yeni Levenge and Deregezen, had a closer source of building material. It seems, rather, that the agger has simply been eroded, and in parts buried in a shifting confusion of streams and small fields. On the bank of a small gully, the terrain changes, and on firmer ground the trace at once reappears. The Roman road was remarkably preserved in September 1963, and remains in fine condition. A low agger, with edges and centre spine clearly visible and up to half a metre high, can be followed continuously on foot for eighty minutes, winding upwards along shallow ridges towards Deregezen. Seven metres wide, much of the kaldırım, the cobbled surface, survives, in places in situ, elsewhere strewn on either side of the road as it passes through fields empty of stones; flanked by ancient cemeteries, in which even Ottoman graves have been opened and stones smashed by treasure hunters. This was the road followed by Hogarth and Yorke, who three hours beyond Çermik ‘followed for an hour the remains of a made road running by the side of our path. These consist of stone foundations about 16 feet in width, with a well-­marked seam or ridge running down the middle. We found no milestones or other evidence to prove the road

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

NORTH OF MELITENE: CI ACA A ND K EBA N  109

to be Roman, and its breadth seems to be too great to admit of its being of Roman date.’ Eight hundred feet above the Deregezen valley looms Kara Tepe (3,950 feet), an isolated, pyramidal peak close above Mutmur, five miles north of Yeni Levenge: visible from Dulluk Tepe, and in all probability a link in a long-­distance signalling system.6 Passing close beside Deregezen, a small, poor village of roughly built stone houses, with little water and no sign of ancient material, the road continues north-­east up the flat valley, nearly half a mile wide. Low hills rise on either hand, to the east merging into the escarpment high above the Keban gorge, lined for 18 miles with unbroken cliffs. The carriage road closely followed the Roman, crossing and recrossing the lines of kerbstones which in the 1960s could be followed almost continuously along the floor of the Deregezen valley for nearly 7 miles. Here the kerbs were about 8 metres apart, with no trace of cobbles or paving. Much has by now disappeared with the arrival, primarily, of tractors and deep ploughing. At the head of the valley, the ancient road climbed by a zigzag ramp, in places half a metre high, to pass between twin mounds rising conspicuously from the watershed and skyline. Commanding the Deregezen valley and in sight of Kara Tepe, to the north-­east they look down on Körpinik hüyük above the mouth of the Arabkir Çay. The northern mound, slightly higher, is a natural formation. The summit, strewn with pebbles, almost flat and measuring some 30 by 75 metres, commends itself for signalling, but there is no pottery, no evidence for such use. On the top of the southern, perhaps also natural, is a slab-­lined grave. The frontier road from Melitene continued directly over the watershed, and descended into the valley of the Arabkir Çay.

The Keban Gorge Τhe gorge below Keban added a natural barrier, impassable from the left bank, to the defences of the frontier. Through it Huntington passed twice by raft in 1901. The passage through the real gorge, beginning at (Keban) Maden, occupies four hours with a swift current, and in spring some good rapids, which are scarcely noticeable in the lower water of summer. The limestone walls tower very steeply 1000 feet or more, and above that height the mountains rise another 1000 or 2000 feet. Hundreds of pinnacles and peaks rise like countless castles separated by gigantic clefts. Here a little tributary comes at the same level through a cañon with perpendicular walls; there a sheer cliff rises 500 feet; close by, the massive strata are crumpled like paper or are set at various angles by great faults. Where the strata are horizontal, the wall is benched with terraces from 20 to 60 feet high, each bearing on its top a strip of beautiful green grass in delightful contrast to the prevailing buff grey of the mountains and intense blue of the sky. Almost the only inhabitants are big-­horned ibex and wild blue pigeons, which make their home in the numberless inaccessible caves which honeycomb the limestone from top to bottom. In the intense heat of summer, when everything dries up and the cañon is like a furnace, even these are not seen. Near the lower or south-­ west end of the gorge the walls grow steeper as they decrease in height, until the river passes out into the Malatia plain from between perpendicular limestone walls, here only 40 or 50 feet high.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 110  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

The Euphrates Crossing at Keban Maden In Ottoman times a busy route from Arabkir ran south-­east along the watershed above the Arabkir Çay, then descended steeply to the Keban ferry, about two hours below the junction of the Murat (Arsanias). This was the route used by Reshid Mohammed Pasha for the construction of a military road for the transport of his artillery from Samsun to Diyarbekir; and followed by Brant in July 1835. There Brant crossed the Euphrates, ‘the stream about 120 yards wide, deep and rapid. There are three boats clumsily constructed but adroitly managed.’ In March 1838 von Moltke crossed the Euphrates on strongly constructed boats. Approaching Keban, he observed, Far beneath us we now glimpsed the Euphrates in its narrow gorge, the river that the mightiest Roman emperors envisaged as the natural frontier of their immeasurable empire. The whole environment is so wild, the further river bank so bereft of any trace of cultivation, and the mountains so trackless, that one can imagine that they mark the end of the world.

Barkley found the Euphrates ‘ran like a mill race’, swollen by autumn rains in December 1878. Approaching also from Hekimhan in August 1879, Tozer reckoned the river about 300 feet wide, with a rapid current in the centre. The ferry-­boat could carry four horses. It was an extremely rude and primitive construction, . . . some 30 feet long by 15 feet wide, flat-­bottomed, with sides formed by upright beams about 10 feet high. The sides sloped upwards from front to back, and the forepart descended nearly to the level of the water,

F ig . 5.7  ‘Kebann Madenn’ (J. Laurens, September 1847) (ENSBA EBA 2302)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

NORTH OF MELITENE: CI ACA A ND K EBA N  111

so as to allow of horses and merchandise being embarked and disembarked; and here also were the oars by which the vessel was propelled, one on either side, and each worked by two men, nothing more than planks with a handle. At the back or upper end stood a rough kind of poop, from which projected a long pole with a rudder attached, the whole thing being nearly as long as the boat itself.

The ferry slid gently down river, and to return was taken across and then ‘paddled upstream in the lee water’. Recalling the Çünküş ferry, and the ‘ships’ at Pirot and Pağnık, the Keban ferry was replaced by 1945 by a bridge at the narrowest point. It was here that Hommaire de Hell ended his brief voyage in September 1847. The crossing was not easy. But it gave direct access, through its north-­western corner, to the whole of Sophene south of the Arsanias; and was much used by horse and mule traffic from Sivas, bound for Harput and onward to Diyarbekir and northern Mesopotamia: a shorter and more direct, if more difficult alternative to the main route via Eski Malatya and the İzolu crossing. The town and silver mines of Keban Maden were situated in a narrow ravine half an hour from the ferry (Fig. 5.7). The climate, Brant reported, was ‘extremely hot in summer, and a good deal of snow falls in winter’: for five months in summer, Hommaire de Hell observed in September 1847 (Fig. 8.5), the heat was so severe that almost all the inhabitants were affected by fevers. Most of the population were Greeks, natives of the mountains between Gümüşhane and Trebizond (the miners), with some Armenians (artisans) and Turks (directors of various departments): in all about 400 or 500 families. The mine was of argentiferous lead, and ‘would appear to be a very unprofitable concern’. Mines constructed by Austrian engineers in 1843 were at first highly productive. But by 1847 they were largely abandoned; and in 1878 only one furnace, short of wood, remained in working order.7

NOT ES 1. Milestone, EAM 520, no. 24. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836), 211f. Ainsworth, JRGS 10 (1840), 339. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896), 328f. 2. Huntington, GJ 20:2 (1902) 188; and, the Armenian church, ZE 33 (1901) 196, fig. 21. In the cuneiform inscription near Kömürhan, Haldi, the Lord, made a way across the Euphrates for Sardur II of Urartu and smote the king of Militia. 3. Kilisilik, Yorke, GJ 8 (1896), 333, and Hogarth, Wandering Scholar 128. The fate of ‘a valuable series of water-­colour drawings’ remains undetermined. 4. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 328f. Maunsell, Military Report I (1893) 270. Huntington, BAGS 34:4 (1902) 306. 5. Maunsell, Military Report IV (1904) 149. Hogarth, in Le Strange, JRAS 27 (1895) 744. von Moltke, Briefe 210f.: his later translation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was not accepted for publication. Tozer, Turkish Armenia 205f. Four miles north-­ east of Arguvan, Karahüyük is widely held to be a rich source of coins and pottery. 6. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896), 329, with Hogarth, Athenaeum 3481 (1894), 73. I have not investigated Kara Tepe. 7. Huntington, GJ 20:2 (1902) 186. Barkley, Armenia 314ff. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 206. von Moltke and Tozer, n. 5 above. Hommaire de Hell, Voyage I 417–21.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SIX

The Arabkir Çay and Dascusa (Maps 12, 16, and Figs. A1, A2)

F ROM K EBA N TO DASCUSA Draining the southern flanks of the Antitaurus and curving around Eski Arabkir, the Arabkir Çay flowed south-­east along a deep, cliff-­lined valley, emerged from the Hastek gorge into a wide amphitheatre of rolling hills, and glided gently into the Euphrates 6  miles north of the junction of the Murat (Arsanias). By 1973 the entire ripa had ­vanished beneath the Keban lake. In 1963 the kaymakam of Ağın assigned two well-­respected companions to guide us, my co-­explorer and myself, throughout October: Ahmet Kara, assistant manager of the Ziraat Bank, full of local knowledge and eager to show off his strength and his jeep; and Münür, hyper-­active veteran of the Turkish brigade in Korea. They were joined on occasions by the elderly Mehmet Kapısız, antiquarian and watch repairer, who had built a small pistol into his fountain pen, and kept his crazed son in a byre beneath his house. Forty years later Nürettin Atalay, met again by chance near Ağın, asked after my wife, the ‘eye doctor’—orthoptist then too difficult to explain—who had treated an increasing throng of eye complaints caused by dust and heat. Village memories are long and accurate. Climbing out of the Deregezen valley between the twin mounds on the skyline, the Ottoman caravan route from Eski Malatya to Trebizond joined the road coming up from the Keban crossing. The latter’s course is confirmed at Denizli by a small Selcuk han, 27 metres long by 18 metres wide, described by Taylor and in 2003 still wonderfully preserved, with Arabic inscriptions over the entrance. At the junction, caravans turned north-­west, high above the valley of the Arabkir Çay, to Arabkir, ‘fifteen caravan days [about 270  miles] from Aleppo’, Brant noted in 1835, ‘and only eleven [198 miles] from Trebizond; the route to Trebizond is the more secure’. There, the climate was ‘severe on account of its elevation, and much snow falls in winter. The summers are cool; the ­harvest was reaping [12 July].’ The Roman frontier road took a different course, passing Seracık hüyük, strewn with Neolithic sherds: the only settlement mound remote from the bank of the Euphrates in the entire course of the frontier. A slab-­lined tomb had been cut into the top. There I left my co-­explorer one afternoon with Münür, and returned a few hours later to find him brandishing a skull. Crossing the caravan road, the ancient road followed the long ridge which descends slowly from Denizli towards the mouth of the Arabkir Çay. Riding from Harput and the Keban crossing in December 1878, and eager to reach Trebizond before the onset of winter, Barkley followed this line, turning north-­east from the Arabkir road probably at Denizli, and heading directly towards Ençiti, near Aşutka, to reach the Antitaurus gorge, and Eğin.

Discovering Rome’s Eastern Frontier. Timothy Bruce Mitford, Oxford University Press (2021). © Timothy Bruce Mitford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843425.003.0007

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE A R A BK IR ÇAY A ND DA SCUSA  113

F ig . 6.1  Ahmet Kara, with Münür, points to the agger descending to Körpinik hüyük: beyond, the Dersim and Munzur Dağları (October 1963)

A half-­mile section of cobbled kaldırım, perhaps sighted by Yorke, survives on the ridge above the Arabkir Çay. Heading directly towards Körpinik hüyük, the agger is remarkably preserved, a metre high and 8 metres wide, with a heavy centre spine and large kerbstone blocks 60 cm long (Fig. 6.1). Known locally as Sultan Murat Caddesi, and evidently in recent use as a quarry, it ceases abruptly, close above the hüyük.1

Körpinik Hüyük Half a mile above the village of Körpinik, on the bank of the Arabkir Çay, the hüyük rises very steeply 120 feet above the ridge and towers 600 feet above the Euphrates, at the geographical hub of the lower Arabkir basin: a natural formation rather than a settlement mound. From the flat summit the view is unsurpassed in all directions. Here, near the junction of the Murat, Hogarth ‘found remains of a fort which may have been Sabus’. Measuring 137 by 55 metres, the summit is littered with fragments of fine red pottery, and a few large cut blocks. Traces of a wall, now completely levelled, may be seen on the northern edge. The eastern face is buttressed some 6 metres below the summit by a revetment about 5 metres long, carefully built with about eight courses. Towards the north-­eastern corner a depression still about 5 metres deep was blocked with stones. From it a tunnel was widely believed to lead under the Euphrates to Süderek. Mehmet claimed once to have followed it into a natural cave with signs of artificial ­working, but blocked after a short distance. It was evidently a cistern.2 Körpinik hüyük was locally renowned as a prolific source of antiquities; and in particular of large quantities of Roman coins. Several were shown to Yorke, and in the 1960s they

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 114  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

were still in local use as barter currency. The majority were bought by dealers from Malatya, but several were sighted in circulation in 1963. The watchman at the Keban bridge, Hasan Efendi, claimed to have collected about eighty coins from the depression on the summit, the source of many of the thirty coins in his pockets: one, an aes of Titus  issued in ad 71–3 to commemorate the capture of Jerusalem, joins the meagre body of evidence for Flavian activity on the frontier. Other coins suggest continuity of use: a rare aes of uncertain attribution, perhaps Augustan or Claudian, bearing the Greek words Strategos Reglos, and coins of Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius, Severus Alexander, and Constantine II.3 In 1963 there were reports of three inscriptions. Two were sighted on the summit in 1957 by Mehmet. His descriptions suggested statue bases, about a metre high and 60 cm wide. Their indented waists carried approximately ten lines of writing, sometimes resembling modern Turkish characters and sometimes not: a standard description of Greek. The third was seen near the top on the eastern side in about 1960 by the hoca of Körpinik: a rectangular slab, a metre long by 70 cm wide, inscribed on both sides in letters which were certainly not Arabic or Armenian, and again resembled modern Turkish. If they existed, the stones have disappeared: smashed, removed for sale in Malatya, used as building material, or buried under the large stone piles gathered on the summit. A search of the latter revealed only a crude stele of Aquila, poorly carved in Greek. Its close association with the military road and the coin finds indicate that the frontier builders took advantage of this prominent site: an exceptional vantage point commanding the entire basin of the Arabkir Çay, a long stretch of the Euphrates, and the approaches to the left bank. In line of sight with the twin mounds on the southern ridge, the Bahadin bridge to the west, and Tanusa and the ridge above it to the north, the hüyük represented an ideal signalling position. The flat summit was large enough for a small detachment. In the distance, beyond the foothills of the Dersim, rose the snow-­covered peaks of the Munzur Dağları, glittering like a giant saw laid along the north-­eastern horizon. Below Körpinik hüyük the ancient road had vanished. But in 1945 Kökten saw the old kaldırım, with stone kerbs, descending below Kolpinik (Körpinik hüyük) to the Arabkir Çay. About 20 metres wide, the river flowed steadily even in the driest months, August and September. In 1963, I was told that beside the village of Körpinik, two miles from the river mouth, the abutments of an ancient bridge lay beneath its concrete successor. From the Körpinik crossing, an old road ran across gently sloping fields directly towards Ağın and Vahsen, about 5½ miles away; broadly the line, obscured by crops and cut by fields, likely to have been taken by the frontier road.4

Bahadın Bridge Two miles upriver from Körpinik, the Arabkir Çay was crossed by a large Roman bridge. The pools below were a popular place for barbecues, with fish courtesy of Münür and dynamite acquired in a nearby quarry. Two massive abutments survived, constructed with very large blocks, carefully tooled,  minutely fitted together, and bedded on solid rock, ‘without inscription, but unmistakeably Roman when judged by the finely squared masonry at the spring of its single arch’ (Fig. 6.2: co-explorer’s height 1m 70). Their faces, 5.2 metres wide and 31 metres apart, were linked by a single arch, long since collapsed: comparable in width and span to the Severus bridge in Commagene, and suggestive of second-­century work.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE A R A BK IR ÇAY A ND DA SCUSA  115

F ig . 6.2*  Bridge over the Arabkir Çay, at Bahadın: eastern abutment, view south (October 1963)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 116  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

The bridge did not carry an extension of the agger leading down to Körpinik hüyük. It may mark an earlier period in the design of the frontier; and, in poor condition, even collapse, may have required restoration so extensive that it was found easier to alter the line of the frontier road itself. Precisely aligned with the bridge, a long promontory on the left bank carried the remains of a structure some 40 metres square, littered with fragments of pottery and tiles: evidently a guard post.5

Kara Mağara köprü A mile upstream from Bahadın, the Arabkir Cay was crossed at Kara Magă ra, ‘black cave’, by a slender, single-­arched bridge, dated to the sixth century or later (Fig. 6.3). Carved in large letters on the arch blocks on the eastern side is the final verse in Greek of Psalm 121. The bridge carried the direct road in spring and summer, Taylor reported, from Harput and (Keban) Maaden to Aşutka and Eggin (Kemaliye); connecting Melitene to the Silk Road which runs east from Eski Arabkir, below the escarpment of the Antitaurus, towards the Antitaurus gorge. The Byzantine road by-­passed both Eski Arabkir and Ağın. At either end of the bridge its course could not be traced for more than a few metres. Three miles upriver, a mediaeval refuge was burrowed into the cliffs at Hastek Kale (Fig. 6.4). A rock-­cut inscription guarding the grand tomb of Athenais attests occupation at an earlier period. In the bed of the Hastek gorge below, small fields were irrigated by an enormous waterwheel, fully 60 feet high, its creaking litany echoing eerily around the encircling cliffs.6

Ağın At the westernmost limit of Armenia, extrema Cappadocia well describes the remoteness and strategic importance of this region. But if Corbulo wintered here, tales of his hardships were embellished by the time they reached Tacitus. Yorke passed through Ağın in May 1894, a large village of about 150 Turkish and 20 Protestant Armenian families, with a small bazaar. In 1963 the town, the district administrative centre, was renowned locally for its mild winter climate. Its grapes, picked in late October and stored in unheated sheds, kept fresh and unspoiled until the spring. The olives celebrated by Strabo at Melitene have disappeared. But in the sheltered valley above Ağın wild olives grow, and a weight from an olive press lying in fields above the town, with two others at Bademli, suggest cultivation in antiquity.7

Pağnık (Dascusa) Dascusa, lying beside the river, was among the earliest and most important positions on the Euphrates frontier. The Regulus coin from Körpinik hüyük may point to the presence of a fort, or settlement, under Claudius. From Dascusa Claudius reckoned the length of Armenia to the Caspian at 1,300 miles: about 600 miles on the map, twice as far on the ground. Drawing on the eyewitness accounts of Corbulo and Licinius Mucianus, Pliny knew it as a reference point in navigation of the Euphrates, 75 miles below Zimara, 74 above Melitene.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE A R A BK IR ÇAY A ND DA SCUSA  117

F ig . 6.3*  Kara Mağara Köprü, over the Arabkir Çay, with Mehmet and Münür (October 1963)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 118  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 6.4  Research team at Hastek Kale, high above the Arabkir Çay: standing centre, Ahmet Kara; and right, Münür (October1963)

The garrison at the end of the fourth century was a cavalry unit, ala Auriana. The adjacent forts also held mounted garrisons: to the south, at Ciaca at least eight hours away, ala I Augusta Colonorum; and to the north, at Sabus about six hours distant below the Antitaurus escarpment, equites sagittarii, mounted archers.8 The distances suggest that Dascusa lay close to the mouth of the Arabkir Çay, on or close to the ripa itself. Here the main frontier road approached the Euphrates, briefly and for the last time before crossing the Antitaurus, to pass about a mile and a half from the river and head directly towards the foot of the Vahsen ridge. In this vicinity the fort could guard against any approach from the strategic route leading westwards, along the valley of the Arsanias (Murat), from central Armenia, the vicinity of Rhandeia and the plain of Harput, and the Euphrates crossings at Pağnık and Keban. Dascusa was thus the principal defensive point of this vulnerable and important section of the frontier. It can be located with certainty at the village of Pağnık, lying beside the Euphrates on a low platform at the mouth of the Ağın Çay, in the centre of the Arabkir basin. For a fort concerned with river traffic, the position was eminently suitable. In the 70 miles below Zimara, at Pingan beyond the Antitaurus, Pağnık was the first village to be sited on the ripa itself. The platform was bounded to the north by the Ağın Çay, and to the west and south-­west by the steep, rocky slopes of the promontory separating it from the Arabkir Çay. On slopes rising steeply above the village a necropolis has been dated by coins from Trajan to Commodus to the second century, and in the valley of the Ağın Çay were Roman tombs and a third-­century granary. The water supply was reliable,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE A R A BK IR ÇAY A ND DA SCUSA  119

the extensive fields around Ağın invited the cultivation of grain, and the hills behind were a source of timber. Rafts passed down the Euphrates to Pağnık. Embarking at Eğin (Kemaliye) in September 1847, Hommaire de Hell floated past Pahnik, ‘village turc assez grand’ three hours above Keban Maden. Huntington travelled by raft from Eğin to the Malatya plain in the summer of 1901, observing ‘on the Kara Su below Erzinjan only one dangerous rapid occurs, 15 miles below Eğin (in the deep gorge below Aşutka), and it is dangerous only because of the great number of stones in the middle of the channel’. Navigation below Pağnık was safe and routine to Melitene, 74 miles downriver, and without significant rapids as far as the Kömürhan bridge at the mouth of the Taurus gorge.9 ̆ ık was an important crossing point. Heading for Kültepe Hüyük at Pulur, five At Pagn miles to the east, and Çemişgezek in 1945, Kökten crossed the Euphrates by a flat-­ bottomed ferry, the bows low, the stern high and ­covered, operated by long poles. Known by the villagers as a gemi, a ‘ship’, its construction recalled Tozer’s ferry at Keban, and its name the İzolugemisi at Pirot. People from Agı̆ n crossed here for Ehme, a well known source of coins, and for Çemişgezek, where Taylor noted ‘an old Roman road’. More importantly, there was a ford, the Süvari Geçidi just north of the Ağın Çay and Pağnık: the only ‘cavalry crossing’ of the Euphrates marked on the Turkish Army map. To protect and exploit the ford was clearly a main task of the garrison of Dascusa. The Roman army was adept at fording large rivers. The technique is described by Vegetius. Two lines of cavalry, one upstream to break the current, the other below to rescue any swept away, protected infantry and baggage. Here the river was about 300 yards wide, but Taylor ‘at this season (11 September) forded it—although after considerable delay, occasioned by our baggage mules—easily, the water being only up to the animals’ bellies’. In 1963 regular contact with villages beyond the Euphrates was assured by a perilous suspension bridge, recently constructed and wide enough for a donkey, at Süderek, half a mile below Pağnık. We used bridge rather than ford, but I waded across the Euphrates without difficulty at Tanusa, 3 miles further north, in mid October. The position of Dascusa was of great geographical importance. The crossing gave access to the wide slopes of the southern Dersim, and to an important natural route leading north beyond the Euphrates. In Ottoman times this was the winter route followed by pack animals from Harput to Kemah and Erzincan. The Dersim invited observation, and mounted patrols, perhaps even outlying garrisons pushed forward towards Çemişgezek and Pertek. But for Roman activity beyond the Euphrates there is yet no firm evidence.10 NORTH WA R DS F ROM DASCUSA

Pağnık Öreni ̆ ık Çay with the young Zafer Gençaydın, In October 1963 we walked down the Pagn moderately fluent in English. At Pağnık the schoolmaster and an old man of 75 mentioned a ‘Romali Imperator’, and an old city just north of the village. There a small fort, Pağnık Öreni, ‘ruins’, stood on a narrow promontory falling steeply into the Euphrates. The ruins of a curtain wall, protected by eleven projecting semicircular towers and pierced by four gates, the largest facing the Euphrates (Fig. 6.5), are dated to the early fourth century,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 120 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 6.5* ‘Pağnık Öreni 1970’ (R. P. Harper; from AS 21 (1971), 11, 3) (by permission of the BIAA)

contemporary with the mass of coins of Licinius and Constantine circulating in the neighbouring villages in the early 1960s. A mortared wall jutted out and ran down to the Euphrates bank as though to protect a spring below: the adequacy of its supply is not recorded. The fort formed an irregular rectangle measuring 135 by 85 metres, not much larger than the summit of Körpinik hüyük. This was not Pliny’s Dascusa, and it was half the size required for a cavalry garrison. But it is the only fort excavated on the entire frontier, and the internal buildings and towers have produced a mass of small finds, notably coins, dating from Nero to Theodosius II, of ad 402; with fragments of inscriptions plundered from nearby sites for urgent rebuilding, and much pottery and glass. The coins include a denarius of Nero, minted in Caesarea c. ad 60 to commemorate victory in Armenia, and recalling the success evidently proclaimed by the Corbulo inscriptions in the plain of Harput; an aes of Titus and the governor of Cappadocia (Neratius) Pansa of ad 79–80; and a worn coin of Antoninus Pius of ad 144, also from Caesarea. On the rim of a small fine-­ware bowl is scratched, in Greek, ‘Marcellus’, the name recurring on a rock-­cut tomb two hours to the north. In a tower were found, in bronze, nine conical weapon points. A fragment of a Latin inscription indicates the construction of a military building under Caesennius Gallus, ad 81–2: probably at nearby Pağnık.11

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE A R A BK IR ÇAY A ND DA SCUSA  121

Vahsen Destination of the frontier road from the crossing of the Arabkir Çay, Vahsen, a small village of some fifty houses almost hidden in a gully, clusters around the largest fountain in the district. The proximity of an ancient site is suggested by a stele in semi-­barbaric Greek, erected by Bato, perhaps an auxiliary soldier from Pannonia; and by ten imperial coins, including a denarius of Trajan of ad 98/9, and a large bronze, perhaps also of Trajan, bearing the countermarks LXV, the stamp of Legio XV Apollinaris at Satala, and two separate and distinct standing figures. The coin was evidently reissued by the legion, perhaps for local use in military establishments. Small hillocks on either side of the gully commanded a clear view from north, through east, round to south-­west. The southerly, source of Bato’s stele, looks up towards Körpinik hüyük and the distant mounds on the skyline above Seracık; and suggests a signalling purpose.

Tanusa During eager discussions in neighbouring villages, local memory recalled that five, some claimed seven ancient Armenian churches once stood on the flat, fertile promontory of Tanusa, almost a mile square, jutting out into the Euphrates immediately below Vahsen. Tanusa was a source of large numbers of coins and, it was said, of ­buried (Armenian) treasure. Elsewhere, notably at Sabus and Zimara, population and churches have been seen to occupy sites of an earlier significance. But, in 1963 there was no trce of them at Tanusa, no trace even of pottery. They doubtless shared the fate in 1915 of the church at Kilisik, on the ripa east of Melitene. The north side of the promontory was bordered by a deep ravine, through which ran a small stream. Caves had been dug in the surrounding cliffs, and through them a single gully led down to the Euphrates, flowing swiftly and about 100 metres wide, but shallow enough for me to ford in October. The south-­eastern tip of the Tanusa promontory falls steeply down to the Tanusa Çay and the Euphrates, 100 feet below. On it lay the sloping site of Kilise Yazısı Tepe, ‘church’s writing hill’, where Turkish excavators revealed irregular fortification walls up to a metre high, with rectangular and inwardly projecting towers. Coins and pottery suggested occupation during the second and third centuries. With Körpinik hüyük in full view, the promontory commanded the right bank, mid way between the Arabkir and the Çit Çay: a position to control a vulnerable section of the frontier.12

Division of Roads North of the Vahsen gully the frontier road divided, confirming the alternative routes in the Itineraries. Both included Sabus, the adjacent fort north of Dascusa. One route continued northwards to cross the Çit Çay at Zabulbar. Followed by Barkley in December 1878, and by Yorke, it led directly towards Aşutka, ‘six and a half hours distant from Aghin’, and there descended abruptly into the Antitaurus gorge. The other, the main frontier road, turned abruptly north-­west towards Kara Dağ, its  course well preserved as it climbed steadily up the prominent ridge between the Vahsen gully and the Çit Çay. Rising above Tanusa and the division of roads, the ridge is

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 122 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

remarkably suitable for lookout and signalling: a possible site above its south-­eastern extremity is in direct view to the south of the mounds on the skyline above the Deregezen valley, of Körpinik hüyük and the ripa around Pağnık (Dascusa); and to the north of the ripa beyond the Çit Çay, of Aşutka and of the mound on the hill top overlooking the ruins of Çit Harabe (Sabus). Walking alone down the Roman road one evening, I was accompanied by two wild boars almost as large as donkeys, moving silently through the oak trees. The division of roads is confirmed by Brant. Travelling south in 1835 from Hasanova, north of the Antitaurus, he was told of two onward routes. One, which he followed, crossed the Euphrates by the Khostu ferry, climbed over the difficult western shoulder of the Munzur Dağları, and crossed again by a long wooden bridge to Eğin (Kemaliye). This, south of Eğin, was the Antonine road, which followed the Euphrates per ripam, all the way from Melitene to the plain of Erzincan. The other route did not cross the Euphrates: ‘there was said to be a better, though a longer road by keeping along the right bank of the river . . . avoiding Eğin and k­ eeping at a distance from the river’. This was the Peutinger road, which climbed over the Antitaurus. It seems to have fallen into disuse by the time of Taylor`s journey in 1866.13 NOT ES 1. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 310. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 205. ‘We came on the foundations of an old road’, Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 330. Barkley, Armenia 314ff. 2. Hogarth, Wandering Scholar 137, and Athenaeum 3481 (1894) 73. 3. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 330f. Aes of Titus, EAM 504, no. 13. Other evidence for Flavian activity along the frontier is confined to an aes (ad 77/8) of Neratius Pansa, EAM 504f., no. 14, and a building inscription (ad 81–2) of Caesennius Gallus, Mitford, JRS 64 (1974) 172f., both from Pağnık Öreni; and to the milestones (early ad 76) of Pompeius Collega, ILS 8904, and (ad 92–4) of Domitian, above and 6 miles south-­west of Melik  Şerif, EAM 534, no. 55. Collega, Pansa, and Gallus were successive governors of  Cappadocia and Armenia Minor. Regulus, magistrate or praetorian governor, EAM 504, no. 11. 4. Akulas (Aquila), EAM 522, no. 27. Kökten, Belleten 11 (1947) 462. 5. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 330. Hogarth, Wandering Scholar 133. 6. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 313f. Athenais, IGR 3, 1444. ‘The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore’, Psalm 121, 8. Rescued from the Keban lake, the inscribed stones lay in June 2003 in a forlorn heap in the garden of the Elazığ Museum. From this Byzantine inscription the Arabkir Çay, Taylor reported, was known as the Gâvur Yazı Su, ‘river of infidel writing’. 7. Tacitus, Ann. 13, 8 and 35, and 15, 6. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896), 332. Strabo 12, 2, 1 (535). 8. Pliny, NH 5, 83f., and 6, 27. The tombstone of a decurion of ala II Ulpia Auriana at Pingan (Zimara), ILS 2535, has encouraged misplaced speculation about the site of Dascusa, Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 466. 9. Hommaire de Hell, Voyage I 412, and IV 257. Huntington, GJ 20:2 (1902) 185. Serdaroğlu, AS 21 (1971), 49. 10. Kökten, n. 4 above. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868), 315. Vegetius 3, 7. A similar cavalry crossing is marked on the Murat, four miles south-east of Pertek.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE A R A BK IR ÇAY A ND DA SCUSA  123

11. Harper, AS 19 (1969), 4; 20 (1970), 4ff.; and 21 (1971), 10ff. Coin of Nero, EAM 504, no. 12. Pansa and Gallus, n. 3 above. 12. Bato, EAM 522, no. 28, perhaps associated with ala II Auriana, evidently raised on the upper Danube under Vespasian. Countermarked aes, EAM 506, no. 21. Kilise Yazısı Tepe, Serdaroğlu, n. 9 above. 13. Unaware of the division of roads, and of the existence of the Sultan Murat Caddesi over the Antitaurus, Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 332 and 334, followed in part the route taken by Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 203ff. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 308–10.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SEVEN

Sabus, and over the Antitaurus (Maps 12, 13, 16, and Fig. A2)

F ROM DASCUSA TO SA BUS Crossing the southern shoulder of Kara Dağ, not far below the summit, the main frontier road turns north, and winds steeply down to join the high, narrow ridge separating the valleys of the Arabkir and the Çit Çay. Above Bademli (3,600 feet) ran a particularly clear trace of the Sultan Murat Caddesi, 8 metres wide and 60 cm high, with a marked centre spine. This cobbled roadbed, clearly a continuation of the agger at Deregezen and above Körpinik hüyük, was wonderfully preserved in October 1963, but disappeared in the construction, ten years later, of the new access road to Ağın. From the small town my co-­explorer and I rode up one morning with Zafer Gençaydın on three fine horses. Maddened by a fly, her horse reared above the kaldırım and rolled right over her. She emerged with bruises, and a close view of the Roman road. Beside the road, 30 metres to the west, stands a conspicuous example of the artificial mounds that seem to have served as signalling and lookout points. Twelve metres in diameter, and 1.60 metres high, it offers an unobstructed view to the north and east, from Aşutka round to Çemişgezek and the Dersim.

Bademli In 1963 the road from Malatya ended at Agı̆ n. Bademli lies an hour and a quarter on horseback, about 4 miles, to the north-­west, high on the eastern slopes and about half a mile below the crest of the ridge: a rich village, with a population of about 200, fertile in its gently sloping fields, bees, and the almonds from which it takes its name. Bademli is cool and pleasant in summer, but cold between December and February. The muhtar, Sadettin Özden, muscular and clear sighted, demonstrated the blind contortions with which he begged in Istanbul. Above the village, a Byzantine site perches 1,200 feet above the Euphrates, on sloping terraces strewn with coarse red earthenware and fragments of large jars, traces of wall foundations, two huge limestone blocks, evidently weights for olive oil presses, and at least eleven rock-­cut tombs. A rock-­cut sarcophagus decorated with sculptured garlands, dating perhaps from the second or third century, suggests the presence of a prosperous and confident community (Fig. 7.1). In 1963 I was shown a worn aes, perhaps of Severus Alexander, from the mint of Caesarea, two coins of Constantine I, a fragmentary Christian inscription praying in Greek for the soul of Maria, a crude capital, and several small architectural mouldings. Together with a variety of Byzantine antiquities, all had been brought down to the village. By this date, such items were starting to find their way to dealers in western Anatolia.

Discovering Rome’s Eastern Frontier. Timothy Bruce Mitford, Oxford University Press (2021). © Timothy Bruce Mitford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843425.003.0008

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SA BUS, A ND OV ER THE A NTITAURUS  125

F ig . 7.1  Bademli: rock-­cut sarcophagus, and Sadettin Özden (October 1963)

The site was clearly occupied by the mid third century, and perhaps as early as Severus. It was evidently civilian, owing its existence to trade and the needs of travellers, not ne­ces­sar­ily military, along the frontier road.

The High Ridge between Bademli and the Antitaurus The frontier road passed northwards along the ridge above Bademli. In June 2003, Taner and I followed its path for about 14 miles on the high watershed between the Çit Çay and the much deeper valley of the Arabkir Çay. Widening, the ridge slopes gradually upwards to the base of the Antitaurus, and now carries the modern road to Ağın, constructed just before the town was cut off from the south by the rising waters of the Keban lake. Above Bademli the Roman road has been obliterated by the modern, and most trace of its northwards course has been lost to agriculture. But three long sections survive. Just north of the boundary between the vilayets of Elazığ and Erzincan, a narrow section, 4 metres wide without kerbs or centre spine, wound its way up for nearly a mile around a rocky spur above and west of the modern road. Opposite Tepte, a vineyard owner revealed a clear trace, 7 metres wide with kerbs and intermittent centre spine, rising across broad fields half a mile east of the modern road, and descending to pass below low cliffs. And high above Çit Harabe, a family from Şepik shared a picnic in their fields and showed a fine length of paved road, 8 metres wide with kerbs and centre spine, running along the crest for some 300 metres among scattered oak trees. Rising beside the road and in clear sight of Çit Harabe, a prominent mound 30 metres in diameter and 6 metres high resembles many similar, identified as lookout or signalling stations. Still following the high watershed, the frontier road runs directly across the Arabkir–Aşutka

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 126 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

road at its highest point, about 2 miles west of the Çit Çay, and climbs straight up the Antitaurus escarpment.1 Below the escarpment to the west a scattering of villages clings to the steep ascent from the Arabkir Çay. Riding east from Arabkir in January 1877 along the line of the caravan road to Eğin, Burnaby found this section of the track narrow, precipitous, and very dangerous. It took him three hours from Arabkir to reach Shephe (Şepik), just below the watershed. Predating wheeled traffic, and identified in Kemaliye as the Silk Road, its line from Eski Arabkir probably survived in essence from Roman times. The Silk Road was replaced late in the nineteenth century by the araba road reported by Barkley and Yorke.2 In this vicinity, a day north of Dascusa and south of the escarpment, must be sought the adjacent fort of Sabus: the name perhaps linked with the small village of Samuka, some three hours south-­east of Çit Harabe and close above the Euphrates: seemingly the Hittite Samuha. From the fort this was the closest point of access to the ripa below the Antitaurus gorge. To the east, long slopes run down to the Çit Çay, bursting through the escarpment in a narrow gorge; and at the mouth the Aşutka road crossed by a ‘good stone’ Ottoman bridge with a single arch. In the village of Tarhanik, on the slopes of the escarpment a mile west of the bridge are said to be two white columns, not of marble. Smooth and about 3 metres long, they apparently rested on inverted capitals. A mile south of the bridge the Çit Çay enters a second, cliff-­lined gorge, which increases in depth as it approaches the Euphrates at Zabulbar. Known to Burnaby as the Erman Su (evidently Ermeni, ‘Armenian’), the river flows constantly with clear water. From it, between the gorges, a ‘broad, well-­cultivated plain’ and fields rise gradually towards Aşutka. Close above the village, the Silk Road climbed over a low saddle and plunged in perilous zigzags right down to the bed of the Euphrates.

ÇIT H A R A BE (SA BUS) About 400 metres south-­east of the Ottoman bridge and 3 miles south-­west of Aşutka, the extensive ruins of Çit Harabe stand among ilex trees on a low shelf above the left bank of the Çıt Çay. Burnaby did not visit the ‘ruins of a large city (which) lay heaped up by the river’s banks. This was the site of Hara [Harap, “ruin”] Bazar, an Armenian town, which flourished long before either Arabkir or Egin were built.’ His guide informed him that ‘the débris consists of enormous stones. These are the wonder of the villagers who generally build their houses of mud. They cannot conceive what manner of men were their ancestors who had taken the trouble to bring such massive slabs from the distant mountains.’3 From Pağnık, the supposed site of Dascusa, the distance to Çit Harabe was about 20 miles via the main frontier road, and no more than 18 miles by the Antonine road per ripam, The distance to Pingan (Zimara), 75 miles upriver in Pliny, was shorter by road: 67 miles in Peutinger, and 60 in Antonine. Both agree that Sabus lay roughly a quarter of the way from Dascusa to Zimara, while other, intermediate stations lay  further north: Antonine lists one, Teucila; Peutinger shows two, Vereuso and Zenocopi.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SA BUS, A ND OV ER THE A NTITAURUS  127

Ruins In September 1963 the ruins lay on an open, uncultivated plateau shaded by scattered oak trees. Guided by Mustafa Uslu and Mehmet Özer, I had no difficulty in following well preserved traces of walls all round the irregular perimeter of the fort. Outside the ruins of the north wall ran a track, probably already old when Çit Harabe was revered by Armenians, careful custodians of the past. But in 1988 shrubs and trees were starting to reclaim the site; and over much of it, by August 2006, leakage from irrigation channels had encouraged impenetrable thickets of brambles, while the fine remains of the south wall were choked with swamp and trees. The walls are shaped like a square surmounted, at the eastern end, by a triangle: in all, about 275 metres long by 195 metres wide, enclosing about 4 hectares (Fig. 7.2). The sides of the square measure about 165 metres, and the south and west walls meet almost at right angles. In the western wall are traces of a gate about 4.60 metres wide, and beside it to the south the foundations of a tower 6.40 metres square. A second gate of the same size was let into the north wall, and large mounds of rubble extending inwards suggest that this too was flanked by towers of undetermined shape and dimensions. There are no traces of gates to south or east, and no evidence for external, projecting towers. Absence of the latter may suggest an early date. At the western end of the south wall, above the river, a well preserved section of the original outer facing, 18 metres long, still stands to a height of 3.70 metres (Fig. 7.3). The facing resembles surviving portions of the walls of Eski Malatya, dating perhaps from construction under Justinian: suggesting that his work extended to Çit Harabe, and implying earlier occupation, seen in the different construction of the lower courses. Level with the lowest, a drain approximately 30 cm square runs out of the fort. Consensus among experts participating in the BIAA tour of the Euphrates limes in September 1988 assigned the lowest courses and drain to the second or third century.4 F ig . 7.2  Plan of Çit Harabe (Sabus) (September 1963)

N Tower ? Rubble

c.4. ha

Sacred spring Standing walls Drain Çit Çay 0

100

200 Metres

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 128 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 7.3  Çit Harabe, western end of the south wall (September 1963)

The irregular, pentagonal shape of the enclosure, recalling the much smaller fort at ̆ ık Öreni, seems too large to represent the original ground plan of an auxiliary fort. Pagn The south and west walls may represent, in length and in their relation to each other, the surviving sections of a first- or second-­century fort. Based on them, a rectangular fort would measure no more than 130 by 160 metres, approximately two hectares—a size well suited to an ala quingenaria (512 strong). That a cavalry unit formed the second-­

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SA BUS, A ND OV ER THE A NTITAURUS  129

century garrison is suggested by the later presence at Sabus, in the Notitia Dignitatum, of equites sagittarii. The equivalent in strength of an ala milliaria (some 850 strong), these would require up to the four hectares which an enlarged and irregular Çit Harabe provides. The ruins are in all probability the remains of their fort.5 No inscriptions or coins are known from Çit Harabe. But a mass of coarse pottery lies strewn across the interior, suggesting an even spread of buildings. Among it are rounded segments of what appear to be hypocaust tiles; and fragments of roof tiles, without stamps, recall second-­century tiles preserved at Melitene and Satala. Low on the river bank, visibility is restricted. On the summit of the rounded hill overlooking the ruins, a large mound, about 30 metres in diameter and 3 metres high, probably served as an observation and signalling point.

Armenians There is no trace or memory of a church at Çit Harabe, but an inscribed cross has been reported from the site, and an extraordinary picture of reverence and crypto-­Armenian pilgrimage has emerged purely by chance. In 1988, I met a picnic party in the ruins. It was 15 August. Every year until about 1973, they said, three truckloads of Christians used to drive out from Arabkir to picnic there on that day, the Feast of the Assumption. In 1835 Arabkir was already a large town, with 6,000 houses. The Armenian part of the population, 1,200 houses, Brant reported, was ‘principally engaged in manufacturing cotton goods from British yarn . . . and there are now nearly 1000 looms at work’. In September 1866 Taylor stayed in Arabkir for a week, received by ‘a venerable old man, ostensibly a Dervish of the Bektashee order, a sect favourable to the Kizzilbash’. There were 7,000 houses, of which 1,500 were Christian. Among the latter, ‘although all are well off, are some very wealthy men’. Before the massacres of 1895, almost half the population of Arabkir was Armenian. After the killing of 2,000 males in June 1915, the survivors escaped forced migration by converting to Islam. In 2006 a decrepit car found its way through the tangled lanes, and I was joined among the ruins, now barely penetrable with brambles, by an elderly man and three women tramping through undergrowth and clutching plastic bottles. Where, they asked, was the source of healing water, the cure for aching joints? Above the southern walls a cool spring wells up between ashlar blocks, old, perhaps even Roman. The drain at the foot of the wall probably carried it out of the fort. Until recently, Mevlud Göldağı explained, this holy water, the sacred Armenian spring and pool, were the destination in August of whole busloads of Armenians from France. Above the ruins in 1998 he had dug up pipes, about 30 cm long and 10 cm in external diameter, fitted together and leading towards the fort, evidently from the direction of Aşutka and the stream running down to the Çit Çay from the escarpment above. Mevlud’s pipes recall the ‘milk pipes’ reported at Satala, similar pipes reported above Hasanova, and water pipes sighted at Zabulbar. His friend Mustafa Uslu spends the summer with his family in a small house just outside the ruins, amid well-­ watered fields bearing fruit and vegetables of every kind. Mustafa remembered my visit in 1963. A wonderful example of Turkish enterprise and virtue, he worked for Arcelik, then ran his own business, and now owns seven apartments near the Lara Oteli in Antalya and others in Istanbul. The vines of Çit Harabe, he said, are special. Inherited from Armenians, they are of the finest quality, and their grapes are bought by Kavaklidere in Ankara. Nearby Ençiti and Ün (İn), he explained, were Armenian villages, and from

ZENOCOPI ?

?

Burmahan bridge

Pingan

VEREUSO ?

Ortaköy

ARZIYA ? ZIMARA

C

14

12

Handeresi

Acarlar

TEUCILA ?

Kale

D

SABUS

0

0

E .

CAPOTES MONS ?

E

it i nç

5

4

3

Ça l t ı Ç

2

1

LY CU S

.

B

SAMUHA

F

13

16

10 km

5 miles

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 130  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

CÇ

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SA BUS, A ND OV ER THE A NTITAURUS  131

them people used to come to Çit Harabe. A church still stands at Ençiti, but the one at Ün has been destroyed. As at Zimara, churches appear to be an indicator of more ancient sites along the Euphrates. The tradition of Christianity suggests that the identification with Sabus is likely to be correct. But although there are early features, the overall impression is certainly of lateness.6 Visibility from Çit Harabe is restricted by its position low on the river bank. But the fort is dominated by two of the conspicuous mounds frequently associated with the military road: one rising above the frontier road, high above and a mile to the west, the other on the summit of the rounded hill nearby to the south-­east and overlooking the ruins. It is about 30 metres in diameter and 3 metres high, and covered in stones. Both mounds probably served as observation and communication points. The south-­ easterly mound commands a clear view of the military road climbing up the Antitaurus escarpment, and of the col beyond Aşutka. TH E A NT ITAU RUS From above Sabus (Çit Harabe) at the foot of the escarpment, the main frontier road was forced far to the west, over the Mamahar pass (6,000 feet); and led to Zimara, beyond the Antitaurus, a distance of some 45 Roman miles. As in the Taurus, this high mountain route follows essentially a series of ridgeways. Along them, the Roman road is a remarkable monument to Roman engineering skill, and its preservation is in places spectacular (Fig. 7.7). Except for a two-­hour section in the southern approaches to the pass, its course can be traced, almost without a break, from the Arabkir–Aşutka road to the bridge over the Çaltı Çay at Burmahan. With Mehmet Özer I walked south over the Antitaurus in July 1966, staying at Gemho and Ösneden: a journey of two full days, in all of fourteen or fifteen hours. But the Antitaurus does not resemble the fractured Taurus. The mountains climb steadily from south and north, and reach their highest point towards their centre. The gradients are easy, long sections of the road are relatively straight, and water and shelter may be found at several points. The ancient road was used by caravans, and later by ­drovers and travellers on foot, until the early 1970s. Yet the Antitaurus was still too difficult to permit even a rough track for modern wheeled traffic. In 1966 a journey from Kemaliye to Bizmişen took three hours on foot, but by jeep required a long detour: east across the Euphrates, north to Bağıştaş again across the Euphrates, west through Pingan, and south across the Çaltı Çay. So the high Roman road has not been obliterated by a modern equivalent, or used as a quarry; and it lay beyond the limit of the Russian advance in 1916. Above the Arabkir road and the escarpment, cornfields give way to summer grazing and high yaylas, and the population is pastoral and nomadic. Villages lie far below, in valleys draining into the Arabkir Çay, the Çit Çay and the Euphrates. Water is scarce. The first source, just above the escarpment, is a meagre spring at Karapınarbaşı, ‘black spring head’, sufficient to fill a trough for animals. The next spring is an hour away at Handeresi,

◀  M ap 13  Cappadocia: over the Antitaurus and per ripam from Sabus to Zimara

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 132  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

‘han stream’. For the next three hours in summer there is no significant source, until the mule track descends briefly to Çanakcı on the left bank of the upper Çit Çay. But above Çanakcı the valley curving up to the Mamahar pass is dry. On the northern slopes, there is no water until Ortaköy, and beyond it until the great spring at the Yürük camp above Gemho; and the smaller spring, Canlı Çeşme, above the Çaltı Çay.

Course of the Frontier Road Passing along the high watershed to the foot of the Antitaurus, about 2 miles west of the Çit Çay, the frontier road, clearly preserved and 6 metres wide, crosses the modern road from Arabkir, and, 200 metres uphill, a much older road about 2.75 metres wide, with kerbs and centre spine. Running eastwards below the escarpment towards Aşutka, this was evidently the route followed by Burnaby. Known locally as the Silk Road, and in construction clearly resembling Armenian roads near Aşutka and sections preserved in the Antitaurus gorge, it had used the Roman road as a quarry: in 1966 the ancient roadbed had vanished in the approaches to the crossing.

Handeresi From the Silk Road, the frontier road ran straight up the escarpment, climbing steeply to the spring at Karapınarbaşı, and turned west for nearly 3 miles, its trace intermittent across three low ridges, to Handeresi, ‘han stream’, half way between the Silk Road and Çanakçı. Sheltered in the centre of a deep hollow lie the ruins of a rectangular han, robbed of its facing stones, and the front vanished. It was served by a small spring and, except in summer, by a stream running through a gully down towards the Arabkir valley. Fragments of coarse red pottery lie in the hollow, and especially around the walls.7 No other han survives in the Antitaurus. It was probably constructed from an earlier building, older than the caravans; a refuge, perhaps, or a guard post, supported from Sabus or from Vereuso, evidently at Çanakcı. Two hans of similar size remained in use on the northern side of the Sipikör pass above Erzincan, until the 1939 earthquake. The ancient road climbed from the hollow by a single zigzag, and for 2 miles rose north-­westwards across broken hills, to a low summit. Snow was said to lie from November until May, too deep for horses, but passable in emergency on foot. From it the road ran down a narrow, flat-­bottomed valley to the south-­east corner of a flood plain high above Ösneden (Fig. 7.4).

An Alternative Route From the plain, a track diverged north in a headlong descent to the upper valley of the Çit Çay, 1,000 feet below. Perched on a low cliff above the left bank, a massive triangular core of river stones, set in mortar and faced with four surviving courses of small squared blocks of the type found at Eski Malatya and Çit Harabe, was evidently the abutment of a bridge, Roman or late Roman; a predecessor of a slender, Ottoman bridge close upstream. This bridge carried an alternative, minor route from Arabkir to Eğin (Kemaliye), a route more direct than the Silk Road through the Antitaurus gorge. I have not followed this difficult track. The short distance, about 5 miles, from the Çit Çay to the pack-­mule

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SA BUS, A ND OV ER THE A NTITAURUS  133

F ig . 7.4  Antitaurus road above Ösneden: Mehmet Özer and guide (July 1966)

village of Pegir (3,770 feet) on the upper Kemaliye Çay, required sharp climbs to altitudes of 5,840 and 6,450 feet, and a fierce descent. The position and purpose of the village confirm that significant traffic, off-­loaded from the Silk Road at Eğin, at least in summer passed up the valley of the Kemaliye Çay, to turn south to the Ösneden plain. Mules also turned north. On the abrupt slopes a mile after Pegir a track diverged, to climb between cliffs over the high southern ridge (6,150 feet) of Harmancık Dağ, and descend to Bizmişen and the northern slopes of the Antitaurus. The ancient bridge abutment on the Çit Çay suggests that both these tracks were used in antiquity, to link the fort of Teucila, beside Kemaliye, with the main frontier road: above Ösneden for traffic southbound towards Sabus and Dascusa, and above (Türk)Arege for traffic northbound towards Zimara. A second pack-­mule village at Sandık supported similar traffic over the northern ridge of Harmancık Dağ.

Continuation of the Frontier Road From the western edge of the plain above Ösneden, the main frontier road climbed steadily towards the watershed between the Çit and the Arabkir Çay. A mile above the plain is the steepest section in which the 8-­metre roadbed and kerbs can be traced in the passage of the Antitaurus. There are traces of wheel ruts, 1.85 metres apart, not found on any other surviving section of kaldırım, notably on the northern slopes of the Antitaurus. They imply irregular, more recent use: perhaps the urgent passage of supplies and guns towards the Russian front in 1916, activity recalled at Boyalık, above Hasanova, by Colonel Ali.8 Rising to a high ridge, the agger, finely preserved, skirted along the very lip of the precipice above the Arabkir Çay (Fig. 7.5). Here Trajan and three legions, advancing from

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 134  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 7.5  Bend of the frontier road on the cliff edge high above the Arabkir Çay, with Mehmet Özer (July 1966)

Melitene in mid ad 114, looked vertiginously down on Eski Arabkir, far below. After two miles, the road descended towards the small village of Çanakçı. The Sarıçiçek, ‘yellow flower’ yaylas, the high mountain pastures stretching eastwards across the Antitaurus towards Kemaliye, provide summer grazing for Kurds from as far away as Malatya. Above the Ösneden plain, a tribe from the Arguwan district used to rent a yayla from the authorities in Arabkir, for 600 Turkish Lira a year. They had been coming there for fifty years. But several other tribes move to the yaylas as summer migrants: Dirican and Sinanlı Kurds above Ösneden; Kereçoğlu, and further to the north-­east Parcıkan between Ortaköy and Kemaliye; and Kormazlı above the Çaltı Çay. Squabbles over land are inevitable. In July 1966 this precipitous section of the frontier road was crowded with camels and dejected families of Kurds, evicted from the Sarıçiçek Dağları, and heading west and south towards Malatya. Sighting a group of Kurds astride the Sultan Murat Caddesi five minutes ahead of us, our local guide took fright and turned back to Çanakcı; leaving us to walk on with a ragged party, their mules and camels laden with sheep and bedding, huge copper cauldrons, bee-­hive logs, and portable stockades for their tents.

Çanakçı (? Vereuso) Six hours from the Aşutka road, Çanakçı (4,420 feet) stands on the tree line at the foot of a wide valley leading up to the Sarıçiçek yaylas, and serves as an advanced market and supply centre. This is the highest village on the southern slopes of the Antitaurus. Two dozen squalid houses cluster beneath a huge rock, barely 100 metres beyond the point where the military road crosses the upper Çit, known here as the Çanakçı Çay. Ignoring

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SA BUS, A ND OV ER THE A NTITAURUS  135

its clean water, the inhabitants prefer to draw from a foul-­smelling and inadequate fountain. Below the village, the Çanakçı Çay passes into the dark gorge which forces the frontier road up to the sharp ridge and precipices above the Arabkir valley. Çanakçı appears no longer to be a regular staging point for traffic along the Antitaurus road: in summer at least, most travellers pass without stopping. But this is the most suitable position for a station south of the pass: a centre for the mountain pastures, with water and control of the military road. Below the village there is no level ground; and above it, after less than a mile, the valley narrows into a steep ravine which climbs almost to the main Antitaurus pass. Although we sighted no coins, pottery, or building material to suggest an antiquity older than Turkish, Çanakcı has a strong claim to be the site of Vereuso. In the ravine above Çanakçı the frontier road disappears, carried away by erosion and landslides. The road is said to have followed the tortuous left bank of the upper Çanakçı Çay; to have crossed the river to climb for a mile above the right bank; and then to have ascended the bare, narrow valley, in a long curve from west round to north, towards the gap in the crest of the Sarıçiçek Dağları, two and a half hours above Çanakçı. The final approach rises in a broad, easy sweep to the Mamahar pass (6,000 feet).

Guard Post at the Antitaurus Pass The Antitaurus pass, a deep, narrow col some 10 miles south-­west of Kemaliye, is the watershed between the upper Çit Çay and the Çaltı Çay, and marks roughly the mid point of the journey between the forts of Sabus and Zimara. At the top had once stood a small structure, from which several hundreds of squared, white limestone blocks now lie scattered in confused piles down the south side. No foundations, no traces of cement or wall cores were visible in 1966. The position must imply a guard post, to police and control traffic passing along the military road.

Ortaköy On the northern slopes, a mile and 900 feet below the pass, the road descends through a wide, sheltered hollow known as Paşa Mezraası, the ‘pasha’s hamlet and pasture’ (5,100 feet). In the centre is Ortaköy, ‘middle village’: a handful of primitive houses, despite their altitude inhabited throughout the year by half a dozen families, amid well watered fields. The names suggest a military purpose: a staging post where soldiers and travellers might break their journey in the middle of the Antitaurus, about nine hours from Sabus, and seven and a half from Zimara. From Ortaköy the military road ran down the long ridge, barren and exposed, which marks the watershed between the Çaltı Çay and the Euphrates. A cobbled road follows the ridgeline for 2 miles (Fig. 7.7), almost straight, and ending with a sharply cornered zigzag some two hours above Gemho (4,820 feet). It was this section which Taylor identified in September 1866, on his journey from Turkish Zımara to Arabkir: after Gemho ‘an ancient paved road, attributed as usual to Sultan Murat, but evidently Roman, once led along the top of this range going to Melitene from Divrigi. From the remains extant, it seemed to have been solidly and ingeniously constructed.’9 The finest surviving section of the entire frontier road, the agger is uniformly 8 metres wide, and mainly 60 to 90 cm high, between kerbs carefully defined by large squared blocks, with the centre line marked by a neatly constructed spine. The roadbed was formed with large cobbles hammered into position, now displaced by frost and the passage of time.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 136  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Yürük Camp (Zenocopi?) Ninety minutes below Paşa Mezraası, the frontier road reaches an Ottoman cemetery, and beside it a spur road turns down from the ridge to cross the shallow valley in which Yürüks from Divriği set up camp in July and August, at nearly 5,000 feet. A copious spring is more than sufficient for about 200 nomads and their animals. In July 1966 the hollow was crowded with thirty brown, south-­facing tents, each surrounded by stockades of stakes and pine branches. Above the hollow is a türbe. Sultan Murat slept here, just as Battalgazi sat in the ziyaret which bears his name, and watched his army cross the Şiro Çay (Fig. 7.6). The valley is thus both in tradition and in practice a place where travellers might spend the night. It is the only sheltered site close to the frontier road on the northern slopes of the Antitaurus: above it and below, the road follows the summit of the ridge. The spring is about five hours from both Çanakcı and Pingan (Zimara). There is no trace of an­tiquity, whether walls or pottery. A most suitable site, the Yürük camp is the only position north of the pass that could be identified with Zenocopi.

Convergence with the Road per ripam Heading northwards, the spur road climbs quickly out of the tented valley, curves to the east, and after forty minutes rejoins the ridge and frontier road at the convergence of mule tracks leading via Bizmişen from Kemaliye, and turns sharply north again. Several sections of the agger are preserved, with fine kerbs and centre spine (Fig. 7.7). Hereabouts, south of Gemho, Taylor encountered ‘many small encampments of Kizzilbash Koords;

F ig . 7.6  Yürük tents and türbe above Gemho: Mehmet Özer and guide (July 1966)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SA BUS, A ND OV ER THE A NTITAURUS  137

they were constantly pressing us to alight for refreshments, their women even rushing out from the tents, holding wooden bowls of Yaourt, stopped us in the road, and as we could not accept their hospitality they did not allow us to pass before tasting their contents’. An hour north of and below the junction, the road drops briefly to pass through a small, shallow valley, with at its centre Canlı Çeşme, ‘living spring’, the last source before the Çaltı Çay. Traces of low walls form a rectangle some 140 metres long by 65 across; a compound, perhaps, in which caravans might temporarily halt, above Gemho. There is no trace of ancient pottery, or tile fragments. At Gumkhoy village (Gemho) Taylor found the natives were extremely inhospitable, assailing our people with such epithets as ‘Kaffir’ [infidel], ‘Deensiz’ [godless] &c, and at length proceeded to violence. It was with the utmost difficulty that a species of peace was at length restored. I never saw such a set of savages in my life, although the greater part of the men, as at Arraga, had passed their lives at the capital [Constantinople]: their women, however—perfect furies— outvied them; jumping on to the backs of my men, clawing and biting them about their heads, faces, and necks, to prevent them using their hands in self-­defence. My party certainly got the worst of it, as their clothes were torn to pieces, and some of my money plundered in the skrimmage. We insisted, however, in passing the night there, and so far gained the victory, unsatisfactory though it was.

Mehmet and I were received in the village (population 360) with lavish hospitality in July 1966, but no mule was available for hire because all were needed for the harvest.10

F ig . 7.7  Roman road climbing the northern slopes of the Antitaurus: riding ahead, Mehmet Özer (July 1966)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 138  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Mound above Arege Twenty minutes below Canlı Çeşme, a particularly fine section of the roadbed runs down towards a small, prominent hill. On the summit, 30 metres above the road, a  mound about 30 metres in diameter and 8 metres high, similar to those above Bademli and Çit Harabe but much larger, looks towards the mountains north of the Çaltı Çay, Kurtlu Tepe above Melik Şerif, and the more distant ranges of Armenia Minor. So prominent a location suggests association with signalling or lookout, probably a strategic relay ­station. Here the Peutinger road was joined by the Antonine road per ripam, via Dilli, from Kemaliye. Below was Arege, to which Taylor rode up in an hour and a half from ‘an old massive khan called Urumia’, Burmahan beside the Çaltı Çay. At the end of August, ‘the hamlet (Arege) proved a very miserable place, gardens and cultivation being parched up for want of water’. Nearby was ‘an old Armenian Ziaret dedicated to Arakel’.11 The frontier road descends steadily along the crest of the ridge. A mile south of Çiftlik a section about 7.60 metres wide, with kerbs and centre spine, was very clearly preserved in 1963. Identified by Mehmet as the work of Sultan Murat IV, it continues past Çiftlik and for 2 miles runs almost due north beside the modern track, towards the ancient Armenian cemetery that stands on the lip of the deep trench carved by the Çaltı Çay. Down the steep sides the ancient road dropped, probably by zigzags now eroded, to the bridge at Burmahan. NOT ES 1. At Bademli, EAM 507, no. 28, and 522, no. 28. 2. In Eski Arabkir, his name recalling Pomponius Bassus, governor of Cappadocia ad  94–100, Pomponius remembered his daughter, beside the entrance of a rock-­ cut tomb, EAM 523, no. 29; and a mosque was said to have been built by Mehmet II, the Conqueror, ad 1451–81. Burnaby, Asia Minor 181f. Barkley, Armenia 321f. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 332f. 3. Burnaby, Asia Minor 182. 4. The core of the southern wall projects above the facing for a further 85 cm. The upper courses are constructed with squared blocks about 45 cm long, set in regular courses 30 cm apart and bonded on a core of concrete and river stones. One block has traces of three horizontal lines, suggesting reuse. The lower courses are built with larger ashlar blocks 30–60 cm long, set in courses 27–33 cm high. The longest block measures 78 cm, the highest 36 cm. 5. Early forts were almost always of playing-­card shape, with a normal area of about 1 to 1.6 hectares, for a garrison of 500 to 1,000 men. It was only in the fourth century that forts, often irregular in plan, covered a larger area, of 2 to 4 hectares, Collingwood and Richmond, Archaeology of Roman Britain 25–7. 6. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 205. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 310–12. Bryce, Armenians 4f. 7. The foundations are 18 metres wide by 24 metres long, divided longitudinally by two internal walls 5.5 metres apart, to leave long, narrow aisles to east and west. Towards the front, the wall cores survive to a height of 2 metres, uniformly 1.20 metres thick, built of concrete and rough stones about 25 cm in diameter.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SA BUS, A ND OV ER THE A NTITAURUS  139

8. 1.85 metres is the track of two-­wheeled carts, drawn by oxen or water buffaloes, described by Maunsell, Military Report IV (1904) 36. 9. Riding south, Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 309f., strayed from the line of the road. Turning west before the Mamahar pass, he descended to find his way painfully to Arabkir. Every Turk living along the Euphrates knows that the Roman road was built, in fact, by Sultan Murat IV (1623–40). 10. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 309. 11. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 308f. I did not hear of the Ziyaret: Arakel, a common Armenian name meaning ‘apostle’, Bryer and Winfield, Pontos 336.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

EIGHT

Through the Antitaurus Gorge (Maps 12, 13, 16, and Fig. A1)

˘ I N) F ROM TH E ÇIT ÇAY TO K EM A LI Y E (EG

Zabulbar and Kalecik Passing across the base of the Tanusa promontory north of Dascusa, traces of a kerbed road 2 metres wide led around the Agı̆ n hills, which ran right down to the Euphrates to leave a narrow passage for traffic following the ripa northwards towards Zabulbar and the Çit Çay. This, it seems, was an extension of the Ottoman or Armenian road, normally 2.5 to 3 metres wide and known generally as the Silk Road, of which fine traces are ­preserved further north at Ençiti and Aşutka, and below Hapanos in the kızıl kaldırım, the ‘red cobbled road’ which led high above the Euphrates gorge to Eğin (Kemaliye). In September 1963 Mehmet Özer, from Kemaliye, and I stayed with his elderly friend in Zabulbar, on the right bank of the Çit Çay, close to its junction with the Euphrates. There was no trace of a bridge. My host displayed a small collection of terracotta water pipes. Certainly Roman, they pointed to the nearby presence of a Roman site. Half a mile east of the village, a conspicuous promontory on the right bank falls steeply into the Euphrates, where it flows briefly east and bends sharply again to the south-­east. On it stood a small square structure, known as Kalecik, ‘little fort’ (Fig. 8.1). The northern portion had collapsed into the river. But the other three sides, without trace of a door, were well preserved, each about 23 metres long, and still standing in places more than a metre high. On the eastern wall, traces of facing survived on a rubble core nearly 3 metres thick. In its commanding position resembling the watch-post at Kerefto in the Taurus gorge, this much larger structure was unmistakably military in purpose; in effect a fortlet or guard post, garrisoned from the fort at Dascusa. It looked northwards up the Euphrates towards the Samuka church, Kemik Tepe, and the Munzur Dagl̆ arı far in the distance beyond. To the south the view was blocked by the Tanusa promontory.

From Zabulbar to Aşutka Beyond the Çit Çay low undulating hills, extensively cultivated, rise between the river and the Euphrates. Reckoning 18 miles or six and a half hours from Ağın to Aşutka by the direct route, Yorke passed in late May 1894 through country which was ‘fertile and well populated, and the villages are chiefly Turkish’. The Euphrates ‘here flows in a ­serpentine course. The stream is swift and deep red in colour, and is generally about 200 yards broad.’ A clear continuation of the Antonine road per ripam follows the natural line that rises gradually towards Aşutka. An agger 7 metres wide and 45 cm high, with kerbstones and

Discovering Rome’s Eastern Frontier. Timothy Bruce Mitford, Oxford University Press (2021). © Timothy Bruce Mitford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843425.003.0009

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE A NTITAURUS GORGE  141

N

e

p

n ba

k

dr

op

ping into Eu p Conspicuous promontory

hr

at

es

S

te

EUPHRATES

End lost Facing blocks preserved Rubble cores

Zabulbar 800 m

Moder

n tra c

k

Overall height 1.50 m

Vahsen

High ground

0

30 Metres

F ig . 8.1*  Plan of the Kalecik fortlet (September 1963)

a pronounced central spine, runs for three-­quarters of a mile along the top of the ridge west above Maskir and Ençiti, about 10 miles from Vahsen. Taking a lower route below the ridge, Yorke did not see this important section. On a conspicuous hill on the ridge, about 150 feet above the agger and with excellent visibility in all directions, the foundations of a small rectangular structure, internally 5 metres long and 2.75 metres wide, suggest a watch or signalling tower; but may have been an Armenian chapel. In the valley of the Çit Çay below Mendürgü, 2 miles west of Maskir, the rock-­cut tomb of Marcellus recalls the name found at Pağnık Öreni. Ahmet Kara knew, and took us to a ‘very old bridge’ (Fig. 8.2). It turned out to be a recent, dilapidated construction. To make amends, he lifted a large donkey to show off his strength. At Ençiti much pottery of indeterminable date, and a curiously worked column, give a flavour of antiquity. A rectangular block bears a dozen random, apparently Latin letters, crudely scratched: ION, SC, AES, letters perhaps seen and copied from a more interesting stone. From the village an easy route continues north-­west for 6 miles,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 142  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 8.2*  Çit Çay, a ‘very old bridge’, Ahmet Kara and helpers (October 1963)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE A NTITAURUS GORGE  143

towards Aşutka. Riding north from Keban Maden in December 1878, Barkley stayed at Ençiti, and reached Eğin the following day.1 From Ençiti a long, flat valley runs down to the Euphrates at Samuka, the first village on the ripa below Pingan and the Antitaurus gorge. An Armenian church, dating perhaps from the fifteenth century, was poised on the very bank; and two miles to the north, prominent above a hot spring beside the Euphrates, Kemik Tepe, ‘bone peak’, was said to have a castle on the summit. It was, perhaps, a signalling position. In 1963 I saw nothing to suggest earlier occupation. But in July 1969, Koşay discerned an evidently ancient site, early Bronze Age and Byzantine pottery in fields, and cyclopean stones on their bound­ar­ies. Although he saw no trace of Hittites, this, he suggested, may have been the site of Samuha, an important cult centre and the administrative capital and frontier of the Hittite province known as the Upper Lands, ravaged by the Azzians in c.1400 bc. For invaders from the far north, the barrier of the Antitaurus was indeed a natural frontier. In a Hittite letter, it was to Samuha that ‘ships brought the food supplies from Pittiyariga’. The water was low, and some of the cargo of loaves, spelt and grain had to be off-­loaded to a second ship. A further consignment was brought in a small boat from Arziya. The site of Samuka is an obvious destination for raft-­borne supplies from beyond the Antitaurus. Koşay quotes a report that raft traffic between Kemaliye and Ençiti con­ tinued in the summer months until 1972. If this is the Hittite Samuha, Arziya may be identified, the name suggests, with Zimara (Pingan), and Pittiyariga was perhaps the hüyük settlement some 4 miles east of Pingan. Sharing a partial coincidence of name with the adjacent fort of Sabus, about 9 miles away, Samuka was probably its embarkation point for corn and timber in the downriver traffic implied by Pliny.2 There are few other villages, and reports of antiquities are meagre. Hinge, 4 miles north-­west of Ençiti and 2 miles east of Aşutka, produced a coin of Licinius, and reports of a statue head and uninscribed tombstones retrieved from an ‘old village’ now in the gardens of Hinge, half a mile to the north-­west. By 1963 all had been destroyed. The muhtar of Hinge, met again by chance on a bus in 1989, recalled how my co-­explorer had gone into his barn in search of inscriptions twenty-­five years before, and had emerged with black, squirming socks, to delighted cries of pire pire, ‘fleas’. Fine traces of paved roads are preserved at Ençiti and Aşutka. Near the former, about 8 miles south of Aşutka, Yorke followed for half an hour a paved road about 2.5 metres wide, laid over some marshy ground: ‘large stones regularly laid, with gutters cut across them at intervals of about 20 yards’. Clearly a continuation of the Ottoman or Armenian road, it ‘seems only to have been laid over this piece of bad ground, as we lost all trace of it soon after getting on to a higher level’. Passing Aşutka, which he noted was ‘almost entirely Turkish, consisting of about ninety families, . . . a half way house between Eğin and Arabkir’, with a copious spring and fountain, the Antonine road from Dascusa joined the line of the Silk Road from Arabkir.3

The Silk Road to Eğin Believed variously by locals to be either Byzantine, or from the time of Mehmet II, the Conqueror (1451–81), or to have been built by Murat IV (1623–40), the Silk Road carried important caravan traffic northwards from Eski Malatya. Crossing the main frontier road on the watershed above Sabus, it climbed east from the bridge over the upper Çit Çay. Half a mile north-­east of Aşutka, a section of the roadbed, 2.5 metres wide, with blocks laid hap-

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 144  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

hazardly between carefully aligned kerbs, rose in 1963 for 600 metres towards a low saddle (4,000 feet). This was a dangerous place in winter. Travelling from Arabkir to Egĭ n in March 1839, von Moltke struggled through deep, blinding snow; and in January 1915 Riggs found the roadside, in snow, slush, and mud, ‘littered with the carcases of donkeys, horses, mules and camels’ which had dropped out of the forced ­supply train to the Russian front.4 In the natural defences of the frontier, the saddle was a point of great strategic im­port­ ance, overlooking the eastward bend of the river, and commanding the main exit from the Euphrates gorge. To north and south, cliffs rise ever higher and more steeply. Until the building of the araba road, the Ottoman carriage road, through the southern part of the Antitaurus gorge, a difficult route to Eğin (Kemaliye), suitable only for pack animals, passed along and then high above the right bank, scoured by ravines and lined with precipices falling in places sheer into the river.5 The northern part of the gorge, from Kemaliye almost to the Çaltı Çay, is walled on either side with huge cliffs rising vertically from the water for many hundreds of feet. Routes to the north were obliged to climb high behind the gorge to join the main frontier road above the Çaltı Çay; or in Ottoman times to cross and recross the Euphrates. From Arabkir the Silk Road, reworked by the araba road, passed straight over the Aşutka saddle. On the first spur below are the remains of a watch tower or guard post, sited to command the ascent from the bottom of the gorge. My bus stopped in 1989 for me to measure rounded foundations 8–9 metres in diameter, and 1–1.5 metres high. The revetted line of the araba road, reused and widened by the modern, plunged in a  series of zigzags down vertiginous slopes for more than 1,200 feet, to the very bed of the Euphrates. In the upper stages whole sections of the caravan road can still be clearly traced, falling in long zigzags 200 metres to the south-­east of the Ottoman. Sections further to the north show that the Silk Road used by caravans followed a Roman predecessor. Beside the Euphrates the northern part of the Silk Road was described by Brant, travelling south from Eğin in July 1835: ‘instead of following the windings of the stream, more or less obstructed by rocks and shoals, we crossed several steep mountains and deep valleys’ above the river for about 15 or 16 miles. The road was followed by von Moltke in March 1839, when the mule track, hewn out of the rock above the river, was in winter the only route from the south to the Armenian highlands. In mid January 1877 Burnaby followed this path. It was ‘cut out of the solid rock. In some places the track was not above four feet wide. No balustrade or wall had been made to keep a horse or rider from slipping down the chasm.’ In the gorge he saw ‘some fishermen seated in a boat apparently made of basket-­work. It looked like a Welsh coracle, but was of much larger dimensions. They were engaged in fishing with a sort of drag-­net. “Beautiful fish are caught here”, said his guide. “Some are 100 okes in weight (about 260 lbs). The people salt, and eat them in the winter.” ’6 In December 1878, Barkley was the last traveller to pass through the Antitaurus gorge by the ancient Silk Road: ‘nowhere was the path more than six feet wide, often less than two, . . . and in places . . . made in steps. The path zigzagged up and down the hills, there often being but ten to twelve feet between the turns, and when near the river it often ran along the edge of the precipices, and was so narrow that there was nothing under one’s right stirrup but the rocks and water from ten to two hundred feet below.’ The Silk Road was replaced less than twenty years later by the araba road followed by Yorke. Some sections survived in the 1960s, 50 or 100 metres long and barely wide enough for two laden mules to pass each other, cut narrowly along the cliffs 100 feet above the araba road.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE A NTITAURUS GORGE  145

F ig . 8.3*  Arnavut Han and the araba road of Abdul Hamid, view north; beyond the further mountainside, the Hapanos Çay (September 1963)

Three miles from the Aşutka descent, Arnavut, the ‘Albanian’ Han, small, primitive, and ancient, lay on a narrow platform just above the river (Fig. 8.3). Graffiti scratched on some of its stones in Greek—A ANA and ANA IO—dated probably from the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. There was no sign of older material built into the structure. Nearby were the remains of an Armenian church. Some 500 metres north of the han, the Silk Road road passed around a cliff-­lined bend where, at a higher level, now stands the ‘metal bridge’ over the Euphrates, named after Recep Yazıcıoğlu, the illustrious vali of Erzincan. But the riverbed beyond was blocked by cliffs, which forced the Silk Road to climb away from the river, winding, Burnaby recorded, ‘still higher amidst the mountains’. Its upper course was described in 2004 from a spectacular viewpoint below Hapanos, a rich village perched on the lip of huge cliffs, by the courteous muhtar, Hasan Kızılkaya, and three elderly friends. They knew that the carriage road through the gorge had been built by Abdül Hamid in c.1905; but the Silk Road was much older. Curving up the right bank of the Hapanos Çay, it crossed the river by the Hanönü Köprüsü, ‘bridge before the (Albanian) han’, to what they called the Hapanos yarımada, ‘peninsula’. The bridge is now submerged, and of it no record survives. In 2006 I revisited Hasan. A highly educated man, he recalled that von Moltke had climbed far above the Euphrates to spend the night in Hapanos, just below the snow line. With Fikret, his successor, he remembered the bridge clearly. It was 8 metres long, 2 metres wide without sides, and 4 metres high; and the arch was rounded, specifically not kırık, ‘pointed’. The road bed was cobbled, a kaldırım. The bridge dated from the time of the caravans, and looked old, perhaps Selcuk. There was an identical bridge at Şirzi, on the left bank of the Euphrates opposite Kemaliye.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 146  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Hasan’s description is largely confirmed in Laurens’ sketch of the Şirzi bridge, but in the latter the narrow arch is pointed. The Hanönü Köprüsü, curiously unmentioned by travellers, may date from a rebuilding in the early 1800s, but the rounded arch remembered by Hasan points to Roman work. Comparison with the ashlar bridge, evidently Ottoman, near Musağa, where the Silk Road from Eğin crossed the Venk Çay in its ascent to the high shoulder of the Munzur Dağları, suggests, however, that the Hanönü bridge was much later than Roman.7 Above the bridge, at the mouth of a cave on the left bank of the Hapanos Çay, the road emerges miraculously from the Keban lake in short, steep zigzags: a spectacular, densely cobbled section known as the kızıl kaldırım, the ‘red cobbled road’, 2.50 metres wide with smoothly worn steps two paces apart. Buttressed against a huge, jagged rock, it turns sharply north. In course, appearance, and construction the roadbed looks essentially Roman, if probably refurbished in Ottoman times. The ancient roadbed continues to climb below, and in places along the crest that rises from the Hapanos peninsula. Some short revetments survive, but erosion has carried much down the south-­western slopes. This, it seems, was a Roman road in reuse by caravans. Beneath power lines the Silk Road converged on the new Kemaliye asfalt, opened in 1967; close to the track which from Hapanos ran down the eastern side of the peninsula to the Ottoman carriage road and the suspension bridge, now submerged, that once gave access to Başvartinik. From the convergence, more than 1,000 feet above the bed of the Euphrates, the newly constructed asfalt broadly adopts the line of the Silk Road, of which a section 100 metres long can be followed below the first corner. Both roads run up to the ridge below Hasan’s viewpoint; and the course of the Silk Road road, conspicuous with piles of gravel, can be broadly traced as far as the modern turning for Hapanos. Here it diverged from the asfalt, and seems to have descended, to loop far below Ergü. All trace is lost in huge rock slides, until the Silk Road reached and followed a narrow shelf leading below and above impassable cliffs towards the south bank of the Ergü Dere, about 200 feet above the level of the Keban lake. Hacı Kemal Tuncay offered to meet below Ergü shortly after dawn in June 2004. A sprightly 75, he arrived punctually on a white mule, carrying a posy of ıhlamur, ‘white lime’ blossom. Villagers were descending into their orchards with sieves, elek, to collect mulberries. He confirmed the course of the caravan road from Aşutka: down to the Euphrates, along the riverbed, now submerged, below the metal bridge and past the Albanian han, up from the lake beside a cave on a promontory, along to the hill with gravel dumps, and from it down to the Ergü Dere (Fig. 8.4). Hacı Kemal revealed the remains of a well-­constructed mule track, in places torn up by wild boars as large as dogs and with thirty or forty piglets, and in other sections lost, running for more than two hours across slopes crowded with orchards and oak trees, and traversing horizontally below rock spurs, high above the vertiginous cliffs that once plunged 1,500–2,000 feet, Hacı Kemal reckoned, into the Euphrates. von Moltke followed this path, and Burnaby relates how ‘the sound of bells made us aware that there was a caravan approaching. . . . about 100 mules, all laden with merchandise could be seen coming towards our party . . . . The track was not wider than an average dinner table.’ Just above the ravine of the Ergü Dere, known to Hacı Kemal as the Köy Dere, his ‘village stream’, are traces of a zigzag descent, and at the bottom the remains of a

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE A NTITAURUS GORGE  147

F ig . 8.4  Haci Kemal Tuncay, clutching his posy of ıhlamur, below Ergü (June 2004)

collapsed bridge about 2.4 metres wide, with a span of 3.7 metres. Bedrock gave solid foundations for abutments of semi-­squared blocks, three courses on the south bank and four on the north. The height of the road was perhaps 11 feet above the riverbed, level with remains of the caravan road on either bank. Up the northern bank climbed a roadbed similar to the section above the Hanönü Köprüsü, 2.5 metres wide between bedrock and kerb, with steps and large cobbles. Traversing northwards, it descended after a mile to cross the Hanı Deresi, the name suggesting the presence of a vanished han, by a larger, collapsed bridge, also standing on bedrock. The road surface must have been 20 feet above the river. Of the southern abutment five courses survive, curving inwards,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 148  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

as though to support an arch. They are unusually wide, some 4.20 metres. The northern abutment, almost inaccessible, had collapsed, but appeared to be narrower. The span was about 5 metres. Evidently surviving from an early period, neither bridge resembles the Muşağa, or Hasan’s description of the Hanönü Köprüsü bridge; and the later superstructure of the first, perhaps of both, was probably wooden. The width and possible arch of the second bridge point to Roman construction. Above the second bridge were further clear traces of the caravan road, with steps two  paces apart. Rounding a promontory above the lake, a clear section of kaldırım, 2.5 metres wide, cobbled between kerbs, and stepped, started to climb north-­west. As it rose steeply above mulberry gardens the surface of the surviving mule track had been washed away to reveal further remains of a stepped kaldırım. About 500 feet above the lake the track levelled off for nearly a mile, then started to climb again more steeply towards the asfalt and the high ridge above Gemirgap. In his summer house clinging to the mountainside below the caravan road Hacı Kemal entertained Taner and me with walnuts, grapes, and white mulberries picked from his balcony. Turning briefly west along a shallow side valley, the caravan road passed an ancient, ashlar fountain house, Acarlar Çeşme, ‘spring of the enterprising’ (?). A small spring flows from the rear wall of a vaulted chamber. This, and much of the upper façade, built with rough, grey stones, people say were Armenian. But the lowest four courses flanking the entrance are of very large ashlar blocks, lighter in colour and finely squared. The dimensions and structure recall the second-­ century fountain house at Perre, near Adıyaman. The original doorway, and the spring, are probably Roman. The size of the ashlar blocks suggests second-­century work. From Acarlar Çeşme the Silk Road climbed north again across the asfalt, and followed a further section of stepped kaldırım in two long, revetted zigzags to reach the ridge beneath the highest electricity pylon (5,150 feet), close once more to the Kemaliye asfalt, and high above the cliffs that hang sheer over the Euphrates. The northern slopes have been ploughed for forestry, destroying further trace of the Silk Road. Proclaiming the importance of the line of the Silk Road, a castle perched on the clifftop above Gemirgap guarded the southern approaches to Eğin (Kemaliye). Selcuk, even Byzantine in location and style, it was perhaps constructed on the site of a Roman watch tower. The Silk Road, from which von Moltke saw Eğin far below, descended in steep zigzags through Gemirgap to the Geruşla ravine, about 2 miles south of the centre of Kemaliye. Forced to climb more than 2,300 feet above the Euphrates, the Silk Road was snowbound from late November until mid March. In mid January 1877 Burnaby continued ‘for some miles over the waste . . . in the realms of snow’.8

The Araba Road beside the Euphrates The caravan route fell into disuse when the araba road was constructed for wheeled traffic by Sultan Hamid (Abdül Hamit II, 1876–1909). Initially following the same line, its construction eradicated all but a few traces of the Silk Road between the Aşutka saddle and the Albanian han. The carriage road was driven northwards with great difficulty, blasted and embanked along the water’s edge, to follow the bottom of the gorge for almost 13 miles to Geruşla. The engineering challenges were extreme.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE A NTITAURUS GORGE  149

Two miles north of the han, and beside the suspension bridge over the Euphrates below Hapanos, the carriage road had been blasted and hacked out of the base of low cliffs. Around their top, 100 feet above the river, a trench had been cut for an older road. It could be traced at the same height for 100 metres, where cliffs above had preserved it from erosion: 2.4 metres wide and 60 metres long, with some cobbles showing signs of wheel ruts. The main Silk Road had already climbed up and across the narrow valley of the Ηapanos Çay. This was probably an alternative, climbing steeply from the vicinity of the suspension bridge along the line of the track to Hapanos. Continuing along the winding bed of the Euphrates, the araba road rose in a long revetted ramp hanging perilously above the river, to skirt around the base of the huge black cliffs which plunged almost vertically into the Euphrates over a distance of more than a mile; and below Geruşla broke suddenly into the lush valley of Eğin. In 1894 Yorke found the new road impassable for carriages. It had been washed away by the Euphrates in many places, and trade at Eğin, ‘owing to the absence of wheeled traffic and the insecurity of the roads’, was practically non-­existent. This entire section, tortuous and difficult, has been submerged.9

Rafts and Navigation The river itself offered an alternative to the ardours of the Silk and araba roads. Pliny’s summary of downstream navigation below Zimara (Pingan) is confirmed in the accounts of a handful of intrepid travellers. Below Eğin, Brant saw in 1835, ‘the course of the river is more or less obstructed by rocks and shoals, and it is not used as a channel of communication, except for rafts of timber for the mine at Keban Maden’. But it was navi­ gated in September 1847 by Hommaire de Hell. A kelek was constructed for him beneath the Venk bridge with thirty-­seven inflated sheep skins, bound together to support a surface more long than wide, a grill of branches on which were placed several planks. Holes were quickly repaired with small pieces of wood, round or oval, with a groove cut around them to locate the string that tied the skin. His raft was steered by two men, with branches. At their destination the skins were deflated and loaded onto two horses to return to the starting point. Floating past Guemirgua (Gemirgap) and Guérichla (Geruşla), and passing at first between enormous cliffs to left and right, giving way after seven hours to hills, Hommaire de Hell leaves no significant account of his journey to Keban Maden. It took nine and a quarter hours to reach Zaouk (Savuk, opposite Zabulbar), and a further five hours to Keban (Fig. 8.5). His Itinéraire details many falls and some three dozen rapids, some small, many large and dangerous. The worst was below Ergü, seventy-­five minutes from Eğin: long, narrow, sinuous, and studded with huge boulders, waves, and whirlpools. In the summer of 1901, Huntington floated down the Euphrates from Eğin to the Malatya plain. Of the passage of the Antitaurus gorge he leaves little record, observing merely ‘the mountains are soon left behind, and the old limestone falls lower and  lower, until at last it forms a wall but 10 feet high. . . . On both sides of the river the land rises 1,000 feet or more in broad irregular terraces to a partly dissected plain’ (the plains running south from the Antitaurus and the Dersim). In 1964 Colonel Robert Perry and Lt Colonel John Yarbrough from JUSMAT in Ankara navi­ gated the entire length of the Euphrates by raft, from the vicinity of Erzincan to the Persian Gulf.10

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 150  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 8.5  ‘L’Euphrate à Keban-­Maden’, the town out of sight, right (J. Laurens, September 1847; from Hommaire de Hell, Voyage, planche 38) (BOD Mason Z.128, vol. IV)

Teucila (? Geruşla) The ravine beside Geruşla is crossed by a tahta köprü, an old ‘wooden bridge’, 6 metres long and 2.5 metres wide, constructed with seven long logs, cantilevered on four more, and carrying a paved surface. Resembling the bridge remains below Ergü, in Ottoman times it carried a road, 3 metres wide on its southern side, identified locally as the Silk Road. The piers, constructed with large ashlar blocks, are probably much older. There is no trace of an arch.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE A NTITAURUS GORGE  151

F ig . 8.6 Geruşla aqueduct and Mehmet Özer (October 1989)

Beneath the bridge, a short aqueduct, its head vanished under tumbled boulders in the steep ravine, cuts through the base of a cliff in two short tunnels, carefully tooled and each about 7 metres long. An ancient channel, 25 cm wide and 40 cm deep, still brings clear, cold water, flowing rapidly throughout the year, to the fertile gardens of Geruşla (Fig. 8.6), The gardens served by bridge and aqueduct stand on a flat shelf 100 metres wide and 450 metres long, poised above the now flooded bed of the Euphrates and about 200 feet above the submerged araba road from Aşutka. This is the only significant area of level ground in Kemaliye, and the most fertile part of the entire ripa north of Melitene. Above the gardens, the houses of Geruşla cluster around an old fountain. They are built mainly with ashlar blocks, and scattered fragments of columns. The aqueduct and tunnels, evidently Roman, suggest the presence of a fort. The position commanded the bed of the Euphrates, and the line later followed by the Silk Road. About seven hours from Sabus by the Silk Road, and from Zimara ten hours over or around the Harmancık Dağ above Kemaliye, the intermediate station, Teucila, should be located in these flat, well-­watered gardens, mid way between Aşutka and the Çaltı Çay.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 152  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

The position had tactical value. In July 1966, a lieutenant colonel of jandarma was sent from Erzincan to restore order among Kurdish tribes in the mountains behind Kemaliye. The Sarıçiçek Dağları are too rugged and desolate to be policed effectively on foot. With a small force of cavalry, thirty men, he rode at dawn up the Kemaliye Çay. Next evening on the Roman road below Çanakcı I saw the result, rapid and effective: the exodus of a party of evicted Kurds. An earlier expedition recounted by Hogarth was less fortunate. A colonel and 200 men were sent from Erzincan in 1893 ‘to collect arrears of dues from the outskirts of the Dersim’, where ‘at the last the Kurds gathered on the cliffs of a narrow gorge with their long rifles and with poised rocks, and began the work of death, and no man of the detachment, officer or private, ever returned to Erzinjian’. Above the northern end of the Geruşla shelf a small cliff looks northwards up the Euphrates, and on it stands an ancient Armenian church, seemingly the earliest surviving structure in Kemaliye. As at Sabus, its presence may indicate a pagan predecessor. Below the church, a narrow Selcuk bridge, with a 6-­metre arch, carried the Silk Road across the Kemaliye Çay, in summer a small stream. The upper courses, 3 metres wide, are of small, reddish sandstone blocks. But the two lowest foundation courses of each abutment are wider, and are built with large ashlar blocks of white limestone, set without mortar on solid rock. On the south side of the western abutment the corner blocks, also of white  limestone, survive from the next three courses, and show the beginning of an ­earlier arch. Unmistakably Roman in origin, the Geruşla bridge confirms that a Roman road preceded the Silk Road, and continued towards the later site of Eğin and the great bridge over the Euphrates.11 ˘ I N (K EM A LI Y E) EG Where the Euphrates bursts from the cliffs of the main Antitaurus gorge, at an altitude of 2,800 feet, the small town hangs high and steep above the river, in a rich, fertile bowl 2 miles long, tree-­lined and sheltered on three sides by enormous cliffs (Fig. 8.7). Except to the south, all is entirely enclosed by mountains snowbound in winter for four months. Through the western cliffs the Kemaliye Çay tumbles down from the Sarıçiçek Dağları. In Ottoman times Eğin was the largest town between Malatya and Trabzon: 98 miles from Eski Malatya both by the caravan and modern road via Arabkir, and by the Antonine road via Ağın and Aşutka. Below the centre of the town the Silk Road crossed the Euphrates and climbed over the shoulder of the Munzur Dağları to İliç and Kemah. Brant never saw so remarkable a valley. The mountains rise from the banks of the river by a steep slope, which is terminated by abrupt precipices; the whole height of the mountains may be about 4,000 feet, and the valley is so narrow that they seem quite to hang over the town. Very little grain is cultivated in the valley for the want of level ground, and the whole is occupied by gardens. The trees are the white mulberry, the fruit of which is eaten fresh; it is also dried, and then converted into brandy.

Although the Harmancık cliffs reflect heat on to the town in summer, it is ‘agreeably cool from the abundance of trees and water,’ and the winter climate is mild. ‘Snow seldom lies on the ground, but the higher mountains are then impassable, and it often

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE A NTITAURUS GORGE  153

F ig . 8.7  ‘Egin’ (F. Frohse, July 1899; from Lehmann-­Haupt, Armenien Einst und Jetzt, p. 495) (BOD Sac. 225. L. 28, vol. I)

happens that all communication is, for weeks together, cut off between the valley and places beyond the mountains.’ In 1835 the town contained 2,700 houses, ‘2,000 of  which are Mohammedan and 700 Armenian. Many of the villages contain 400 or 500 houses.’ Eğin became a significant locality c.1830: the (local) Armenian capital, seat of an archbishop, and the most beautiful town von Moltke had seen in Asia. Described by Hommaire de Hell in 1847, it was backed by Jurassic cliffs, a semicircular precipice 1,500 feet high, and was built in the form of an amphitheatre, filled with greenery, and surrounded by mills and vineyards. Extraordinarily fertile gardens ran in steep terraces right down to the Euphrates. Every type of fruit grows in them, and in late summer the mud and pebble-­packed roofs, the only level spaces until replaced from the 1970s with galvanized iron, were carpeted with the rust and golden patches of mulberries drying in the sun. A seventeenth-­century mosque, Orta Cami, stands beside the huge Kadıgölü spring which gushes ice-­cold from the slopes of Harmancık Dağ, and supplies the oldest part of the town, filling the streets with brooks and canals. This was the source of the name Eğin, called in Armenian Akn, ‘spring’. Burnaby stayed there in 1877, visiting the Armenian church, and noting that most of the population lived not by trade but by agriculture. In the early 1890s the town had some twenty banks, and supported five mosques, eleven medrese (Muslim theological colleges), twenty-­one Armenian churches, eighteen textile mills, seven tanneries, nine furriers and eight dye shops. ‘The streets are slippery ladders’, Hogarth observed, ‘and the roof of one house is a courtyard for the one above’. Huntington found Eğin, ‘thanks to the great springs, . . .  completely hidden in trees, so that the contrast between the green city and the bare

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 154  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

mountains is most striking’. Eğin was celebrated for its silk and distinctive carpets. Yorke was fortunate to pass through the town before the 1895 massacres, when a large bribe paid to a Kurdish chief secured some immunity for the population. Nevertheless, in Eğin, Gemirgap, Pingan, and the surrounding villages, 3,000 died and nearly 2,000 houses were burned. One of the largest churches to survive in Anatolia bears the grim inscription Kemaliye Türk Halı Şirketi y Tesisi 1915. On the departure of its congregation ­converted into the ‘Turkish carpet company and factory’, and later reused as a prison, it is now a cultural centre and ethnographic museum. Around the church magnificent Armenian mansions perch one above the other, witness to a vanished prosperity. The first town in Anatolia to offer support to Mustafa Kemal at the period of the Congress of Erzerum in 1919, Eğin was renamed Kemaliye by Atatürk in 1926. We arrived there unexpected in September 1963, and were received with great kindness by the kaymakam, Namik Günel, later vali of Rize and Konya. He assigned his agricultural technician, Mehmet Özer, to be our guide, grave, knowledgeable, and everywhere respected. We stayed in Kemaliye for a month; initially, with a host of black scorpions, in the small hospital below the Harmancık cliffs, and then with Mehmet in his tall, wooden house close to the Armenian church. Above the hospital, a memorial remembers Colonel Atilla Altıkat, the defence attaché murdered by Armenian terrorists in Ottawa on 27 August 1982. The ancient market was destroyed in a disastrous fire in February 1988: 125 wooden shops and houses were consumed (Fig. 8.8), and a once prosperous and lovely town is progressively abandoned. Huge numbers have migrated to Istanbul, and by the year 2000 the population had dwindled to 2,227.

F ig . 8.8*  Kemaliye: the bakery (September 1963)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE A NTITAURUS GORGE  155

The Euphrates Bridge Below the town was a kayik crossing, and an old and important monastery, Venk, stood close upriver, low on the narrow east bank. There was also a huge bridge of stone and wood, Venk Köprüsü. The Euphrates, Burnaby reckoned, was ‘about 40 yards wide’. Here caravans between Eski Malatya and the Euxine crossed the Euphrates to pass over the western shoulder of the Munzur Dağları. The bridge attests the importance of the Silk Road. Much used by travellers and soldiers in the nineteenth century, and followed southwards in 1915 by deportation convoys from Gümüşhane and Erzincan, it offered a shorter, more direct route to and from Kemah and Erzincan than the line taken by the main frontier road. Crossed by Brant in 1835, the ‘Pont sur l’Euphrate à Eghinn’ was sketched in 1847 by Jules Laurens, looking north (Fig. 8.9). The western pier, constructed with ashlar blocks, appears to be some 25 feet high, with, on the left, a small, pointed flood arch. The bridge, crowded with mules, reappears in c.1880 in a fading photograph, out of focus but unique and important, in the collection of Fehmi Balcı. Stone piers constructed, he said, with indestructible Horasan mortar, supported a remarkable wooden span, in length, the photograph suggests, about 30 metres between the abutments (Fig. 8.10). A later photograph, c.1900, shows that the western pier was a massive, ashlar construction on a rubble core, bedded on rock at the river edge, and extended on the down-­ river side in a wedge shape to streamline the flow of water in conditions of flood; and was buttressed by a stone ‘flood-­arch’ which was clearly rounded (Fig. 8.11).

F ig . 8.9*  ‘Pont sur l’Euphrate à Eghinn’ (J. Laurens, September 1847; from Hommaire de Hell, Voyage, planche 39) (ENSBA EBA 2333)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 156  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 8.10* Venk köprüsu with mule train c.1880, view north (June 2004)

F ig . 8.11* Venk köprüsu c.1900, showing, left, rounded flood-­arch on the right bank (June 2004)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE A NTITAURUS GORGE  157

The eastern end of the bridge rested on an ashlar abutment bedded high above the river on the side of an enormous cone of rock rising sheer from the Euphrates. The three lowest courses are of great interest. Large ashlar blocks, evidently of limestone, resemble Roman workmanship apparent in the abutments of bridges over the Arabkir Çay, Kemaliye Çay, and Harşit (Fig. 8.12).

F ig . 8.12*  Venk suspension bridge: foundation courses beneath the eastern abutment (September 1963)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 158  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

The Venk bridge was described by Barkley in December 1878: ‘on each side of the river, a stack of long, squared baulks of timber was placed, each layer projecting three or four feet beyond the one beneath it, in the direction of the stream—the whole forming an erection like a flight of steps turned upside down. When the steps had extended well over the river from each side, long baulks spanned the intervening space, and the bridge of rough planks was placed over all.’ The Euphrates, 12 to 20 feet deep, flowed beneath with the speed of a torrent, and here was the first of the rapids. The bridge was destroyed more than a century ago, and a suspension bridge, also called Venk Köprüsü, was built on the same alignment in c.1935, for pack animals. It survived until 1973, when it was submerged, to a depth of 60 metres, by the Keban lake.12 The foundation courses of the eastern abutment suggest that a Roman crossing indeed existed at Kemaliye, with the Venk bridge repaired or rebuilt above them to carry the Silk Road. The huge bridges over the Göksu and the Cendere Su in Commagene show that the span between the opposing abutments may have been possible for a single-­arched bridge in stone. But sketch and photographs show no trace of an arch, and suggest the overall height was insufficient. More likely was a timber bridge supported on the ashlar buttress and pier, perhaps associated in date with military work under Trajan at Zimara. The rounded flood-­arch and timber superstructure in the 1900 photograph bear a striking resemblance to Trajan’s great bridge built over the Danube in ad 105/6 before the

F ig . 8.13  Apollodorus’ bridge over the Danube, with stone flood-­arches, left, and ashlar piers supporting a wooden superstructure; praetorian signiferi with wreathed standards, and Trajan ­sacrificing, winter ad 105/6 (Trajan’s Column xcviii–xcix/258–61: Faraglia, Neg. ­D-­DAI-­Rom 31.387)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE A NTITAURUS GORGE  159

Second Dacian war (Fig. 8.13). Described by Dio, twenty piers of squared stone, each 60 feet broad and 150 feet high above the foundations, were set at intervals of 170 feet and connected by (timber work) arches.13 ˘ I N: TH E SI LK ROA D TO I˙LIÇ NORTH-­E AST F ROM EG From the Venk bridge the Silk Road rose in long zigzags, turned above the appalling canyon below Venk Kale, and climbed eastwards, high above the left bank of the Venk Çay, through the confusion of high, rock-­girt ridges and peaks that mark the western endings of the Munzur Dağları. I have followed this route only as far as the Davul Köprüsü, ‘drum bridge’, 3 miles east of Musağa, a village once half Turkish and half Armenian. There my guide was İsa, aged 74. His bridge has a slightly pointed single arch, 6 metres in span, 2.9 metres wide, and about 4 metres above the river. The roadbed is cobbled, with steps and low walls. With no trace of earlier foundation courses, the Musağa bridge is certainly Ottoman. It was used by horses and mules, but not by camels. İsa could not remember caravans, but confirmed the recollection of Hasan Kızılkaya, muhtar of Hapanos, that the Silk Road continued up the long valley of the Venk Çay, climbing north-­eastwards for 10 miles to the Hostabeli pass (5,970 feet). There Burnaby stayed, at Hasta Khan, ‘a house built on the road-­side for travellers, . . . kept by an old Turk’. North below the lofty ridge of the Khosti Bel a mule track descended to cross the Euphrates by a bridge below Makhut, opposite İliç. Riding south through Hasanova in 1835, Brant crossed the Euphrates, rapid, wide, and not fordable, by ‘the ferry of Khostu’: the name showing its purpose, to serve the Silk Road over the Khosti Bel (Hostabeli) pass to Eğin. This route was used by northbound traffic for Refahiye; via Kuruçay, or in summer by mules via Hasanova, Boyalık, and the high Kerboğaz pass. From Hasanova some caravans continued east, to follow the right bank of the Euphrates to Erzincan. But the main caravan route to Erzincan, the Silk Road, continued high above İliç, followed the left bank, and crossed the Euphrates at Kemah. ˘ I N: ACROSS TH E EU PH R AT ES NORTH F ROM EG TO PI NGA N There was an alternative onward route from Egĭ n. Below Venk Kale, a track diverged from the Silk Road, descended to the bottom of the canyon to cross the Venk Çay by the Şirzi bridge (seen in Laurens’ sketch (Fig. 8.14), and wantonly destroyed in 2001), and climbed by steep zigzags towards Şirzi, crossed high over the western shoulder of the Munzur Dağları, and descended to the Euphrates. At Pingan Taylor reported a ferry in 1866. In May 1894 Yorke crossed there by a wooden bridge: the river ‘not more than 50 yards broad’. This route was followed southwards in September 1847 by Hommaire de Hell, in some peril; and was used northwards by Yorke. Hearing reports that ‘the route which leads to Pingan on the right bank was very difficult’, and ‘advised to take a route on the further side of the river’, he followed the continuation of the araba road constructed from Eğin towards Kemah ‘for about two hours in the direction of Pingan’. When it ceased, he took ‘a path which crosses some high shoulders of the Dersim range and

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 160  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 8.14*  ‘Délik Tasch; route dans les montagnes du haute Euphrate’, view north (J. Laurens, September1847; from Hommaire de Hell, Voyage, planche 38) (BOD Mason Z.128, vol. IV)

mounts to the height of 5913 feet. Subsequently the path gradually descends and inclines towards the river (Fig. 8.15), which we reached after about seven hours’ travelling at Pingan.’ The country between Eğin and Pingan was very sparsely inhabited, and ‘during the whole of this day’s journey we did not meet with a single human being’. Near the summit and towards the end of the constructed road, Yorke probably passed by Cankurtaranevi, ‘life-­saving house’, evidently a high-­altitude refuge. Far above, the  remains of an Armenian causeway curved around and over the western shoulder

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE A NTITAURUS GORGE  161

F ig . 8.15  Above the Antitaurus gorge, from the slopes below Şirzi, view north (September 1963)

(at 6,230 feet) of Çal Dağ, and led down to an important monastery, Surp Tavor, standing in ruins at Manastir Harabe above İliç: evidently an extension of the long causeway which, below Sandık, descended steeply to the Euphrates at the exit from the cliffs of the great gorge. Crossing by an unreported bridge or ferry, the causeway climbed steeply from the left bank to join and briefly constitute the line of Yorke’s constructed road, offering a link to his onward path to Pingan. From Teucila to Zimara, the route by the Venk and Şirzi bridges, and above the left bank of the Euphrates, was easier, shorter by at least three hours, and lower by 1,000 feet than any route over Harmancık Dağ and along the right bank, discussed below. Yorke’s ‘high shoulders’ (5,150 feet on the Turkish Army map), about three hours above Pingan, lay below Çal Dağ (7,450 feet), the long westward extension of the mountain called Capotes by Corbulo and Licinius Mucianus, 12 miles above Zimara; known from and crossed by a route (evidently) used in Roman times.14 ˘ I N: TH E A NTON I N E NORTH-­W EST F ROM EG ROA D PER R IPA M (?) Maunsell reported that ‘rough tracks follow the right bank of the river from Egin and meet a route from Divrik to Kuruchai at Zimarra’. Pack-­mule villages at each end of Harmancık Dag,̆ at Pegir and Sandık, point to service in Ottoman times of different northbound routes. Converging above Arege, they descended to the Çaltı Çay and turned left for Divrigĭ and Sivas, and right for Pingan, Armudan, and eventually the Black Sea at Giresun.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 162  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

From Kemaliye three difficult mule tracks passed high around or over the red cliffs of  Harmancık Dağ, each rising 1,000 feet higher than the routes which crossed the Euphrates to İliç and Pingan. Two descended to Bizmişen, where they crossed the small Bizmişen Çay by a fine stone bridge, dated by two Arabic inscriptions to AH 1305, ad  1888. There was no sign of earlier foundations. The date implies an intention to extend the araba road from Eğin northwards towards the Çaltı Çay. But Harmancık Dağ was not to be crossed by wheeled traffic. The third track, through Sandık and Dilli, ­carried the most significant traffic in Ottoman times. From Kemaliye it was said to take four and a half hours, walking rapidly up from the town, over Harmancık Dağ, and through Bizmişen, to reach the junction with the main frontier road, above Canlı Çeşme. The kaban yolu, through Dilli, would take about five hours to the junction above Arege. Both routes meant a long and strenuous day’s journey, about ten hours, from Teucila to Pingan, the site of Roman Zimara. For long-­ distance traffic these were not practicable alternatives to the main frontier road over the Antitaurus. Until the jeep road was extended to Abrenk, in a laborious detour through Bağıştaş, Pingan, and Çaltı, all three routes leading west and north from Kemaliye were important for the administration of the large portion of the kaza that lies beyond Harmancık Dağ. No more than tracks for pack-­animals, the same routes across these mountains, too ­difficult for wheels, were undoubtedly used in Roman times.

1.  Through Pegir and Bizmişen Passing a scattering of villages, a difficult route from Geruşla climbed the valley of the Kemaliye Çay tumbling down from the Sarıçiçek Dağları. The pack-­mule village at Pegir (3,770 feet), destination of a difficult route from Arabkir and the Ösneden plain, confirms that significant traffic, carrying goods off-­loaded from the Silk Road at Geruşla and Eğin, passed constantly, at least in summer, northwards through the Antitaurus. On the abrupt slopes a mile south-­west of Pegir, a track climbed between cliffs to the narrow southern ridge of Harmancık Dağ (6,800 feet), descended directly to Bizmişen, and continued to join the main frontier road an hour on foot south of Canlı Çeşme. This was a route used by pilgrims from Egĭ n to, near Arege, ‘an old Armenian Ziaret dedicated to Arakel, a favourite resort for the devout Armenians from Eggin, Divrigi and Arabkir’.15

2.  Over Harmancık Dağ, and through Bizmişen In the centre of Harmancık Dağ an old track leads up very steeply behind the hospital, by steps cut in a natural gap in the cliffs. From the clifftop 800 feet above Kemaliye, mountainsides climb for a further 2,500 feet to the high ridge (7,050 feet) of Harmancık Dağ, seemingly connecting the Sarıçiçek Dağları with the shoulder of the Munzur Dagl̆ arı, but broken by immense cliffs where the Euphrates breaks through the Antitaurus. Intermittent sections of a built road survive to a point about a mile north-­east of the summit, honeycombed with a confusion of rocky outcrops separated by glacial plains and deep pits: the haunt of bears and wolves. Mehmet reckoned these sections were a köy yol, a ‘road to villages’ beyond Harmancık Dağ, and were not old. Blocked in winter by snow and ice, the track winds steeply down from the ridge and across hills to Bizmişen. To the village this was the standard way from Kemaliye. It took me three hours.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE A NTITAURUS GORGE  163

3.  Through Sandık and Dilli An ancient route, much used in late Ottoman times, led around the northern end of the Harmancık cliffs. At the furthest corner of the Kemaliye valley, an extraordinary ladder of ‘52 steps’, short, buttressed zigzags, much sharper than those sketched at Delik Taş (Fig. 8.14), carried a road about 2 metres wide, still cobbled in places; rising very steeply directly above the new Şirzi bridge and the mouth of the tunnels cut in recent years along the western side of the karanlık boğazı, the ‘darkness gorge’ of the Antitaurus. ‘The cañon at Egin’, Huntington reckoned, ‘is one of the finest in Turkey. Two miles above the town the narrow stream flows between solid walls of hard limestone 400 feet high, which even, when looked at from a distance, appear to be really perpendicular. Above these perpendicular walls the steep rough limestone rises 4,000 feet on the west side in a distance of only 4 miles, and on the east side 8,000 feet in scarcely 8 miles. Trees and vegetation are almost lacking, and the landscape is all brown and grey; yet, in spite of the bareness, it is grand.’ The gorge is more than 5 miles long, and the sides are e­ stimated in Kemaliye to rise almost vertically for nearly 2,200 feet. At river level in the gorge itself, the base of the enormous cliffs revealed in September 1963 no trace of artificial work at any period: no ledges, no mooring places, no rock-­cut panels, no inscriptions (Fig. 8.16). The modern tunnels attest the continuing importance of a route northwards from Kemaliye, and the immense labour involved in cutting a road through the gorge itself. The Taşyolu, ‘stone road’, project was defined in the 1870s, when the araba road from Aşutka ended in the town. Work started in 1949 with sacrifices, and continued intermittently until 1960. It was resumed in 1983, and by 2004 a narrow, in places frightening road had been opened as far as Navril.16 The lowest ‘steps’ were blasted away during construction of the new Şirzi bridge. At the top, the road passes through a cutting 2.5 metres wide in the cliff hanging above the Euphrates, and turns south to traverse across steep slopes behind the southernmost ridge of Harmancık Dağ. Two metres wide with sections paved with large cobbles, the kaban yolu rises slowly to Sandık (3,950 feet): ‘hill’, the muhtar explained—but ‘rough’ in Armenian. On the northern, opposite side of the Sandık valley, and evidently linked at the village with the kaban yolu from Eğin, a finely engineered and buttressed Armenian causeway ran straight down to the Euphrates, evidence of a crossing, long disused, at the exit from the enormous canyon. Its continuation led, close to the highest point, to Yorke’s path to Pingan, and onward to Surp Tavor. In Sandık, Turan, the young muhtar, recalled in 2004 that the primary business of the village, once Armenian with pretty stone houses and a church nearby, had been to supply and operate pack-­mules, under a firman, a licence granted by Yavuz Sultan Selim (Selim I, 1512–20). Turan’s grandfather, Kara Ali Akogl̆ u, owned seventy-­eight mules. In trains of forty or fifty, the Sandık mules could cover 25 miles a day, and carry 250 kilos of wheat, barley, carpets, animal skins, and general trade with Giresun on the Black Sea coast: goods brought north along the Silk Road as far as Egĭ n, and there off-­loaded. They returned with sugar, cloth, and hazel nuts. In summer mules and horses passed continuously, day and night. But the track was closed by snow between December and the end of March. Below Sandık were traces of terraced Armenian fields, now unworked; and above the village, the map shows, were vineyards. But, Turan explained, the village now has few  fields or gardens, and subsists on grazing, while the population has dwindled to

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 164  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 8.16*  The Antitaurus gorge, view downriver (September 1963)

forty-­three. The kaban yolu was the only route from Kemaliye until a stabilized road was bulldozed to Sandık in c.1983. A ‘stone road’, taşyolu, was said to climb gradually up the broad valley above the village. Passing Hotar yayla, it crossed the northern spine of Harmancık Dağ, and descended steeply through Dilli to Bizmişen, four hours away. Turan did not mention the Armenian causeway, evidently irrelevant to the former ­business of his village; and I failed to ask him where it led, what it carried, even whether there was a ferry or, unlikely, a bridge. In style and construction the kaban yolu and the Silk Road are very similar. But the latter passed through Eğin specifically to cross the Euphrates, and on the left bank

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE A NTITAURUS GORGE  165

c­ on­tinued, Turan said, through Hosta(beli) and İliç. Some of the Sandık mules were probably engaged for this route, open, evidently, in the early sixteenth century. The main purpose of the kaban yolu was different. The ‘52 steps’, and the pack-­mules, show that an important route continued through Sandık, over the northern ridge of Harmancık Dağ and high above the right bank of the Euphrates. Recalling the zigzag descent to the Şiro Çay in the Taurus, the steps and the kaban yolu are in all probability Roman in origin, and are likely to preserve the line of the Antonine road per ripam from Teucila to Zimara. Used by men on foot, and by the large numbers of pack-­animals, here mules but probably not horses, which supported the Roman armies, it offered direct, if  difficult, access to the high slopes around Abrenk and Navril, and joined the main frontier road, the Peutinger road, above Arege.17 With Taner I revisited Sandık in August 2006, to follow Turan’s taşyolu; to climb remorselessly uphill for three hours to the summit of the high ridge (6,900 feet) of Harmancık Dağ, and gaze down on Dilli and Bizmişen nearly 2,000 feet below. My guide was Hamid Yailan, a retired teacher aged 64, on a sturdy horse, ‘Türkmen’ by name and breed. Recalling that an English general and his wife had investigated the archaeology of Kemaliye 30 years before, Hamid was happy at last to meet him. I was pleased with my unmerited promotion, and the implication that no substantial survey work had intervened. Through poplars and holm oaks the taşyolu, a broad, stony path, climbs steeply up from Sandık by zigzags and short, straight sections, to the bluff hanging 600 feet above the village: not a built track, but clearly very old. From the crest, the path continues less steeply uphill, about 1–1.5 metres wide, marked occasionally with some traces of cobbles, generally unmade, and often hard to follow. Hamid knew it was built in 1853 by Abdül Mecit (1839–61), as far as Hotar yayla, 75 minutes above Sandık. There a copious spring rises beneath huge willow trees, the haunt of bears, wolves, foxes, and porcupines. There are birds too, vultures and some eagles, the latter reduced in numbers by chemicals sprayed against locusts. Riding uphill, Hamid travelled twice as fast as I did on foot; good indication of the value of cavalry. Above Hotar yayla an important track, once much used but too difficult for laden horses, led north over the ridge of Harmancık Dağ to Dilli, two to two and a half hours away on foot with laden mules; and continued to reach in six hours the remote village of Abrenk (Fig. 8.17). Deliciously received with omelette, honey, and rice, I had stayed there in 1963 with Mehmet’s friend, Hussein. Source of a silver hemidrachm of Hadrian of ad 120, and in direct view of Pingan (Zimara), Abrenk commands the valley of the Abrenk Dere, the only approach to the Euphrates between the Çaltı Çay and Kemaliye. Another, even more difficult track led from Sandık directly to Navril, yet more remote, poised 2 miles north of Abrenk on the very lip of the Euphrates canyon. Forced by nightfall and a violent thunderstorm to moor our kelek at the mouth of the gorge, Mehmet led me and my gallant co-­explorer, soaked to the skin, up 1,000 feet of ver­tigin­ ous path to Navril, to stay with his cousin, Faik. He lent her his old pyjamas. From Hotar yayla the main path, for laden mules and men on horseback, follows a long, rocky spine climbing south-­west through bands of marble and scattered bushes. A shortcut, used by unladen mules, climbs more steeply to the right, passing dry springs in two diminutive plains, and forty minutes below the ridge rejoins the main path as it curves slowly towards the west. Beyond the summit, steep mountainsides fall away to the ­north-­west. The mule track, Hamid explained, continued down to Dilli, in the valley of the Bizmişen Çay, an hour away both on horseback and on foot. There the track turned left to reach Bizmişen in

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 166  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 8.17  Abrenk: threshing floor with flint-­studded sledges (döven) and long winnowing forks (July 1966)

two hours, or right towards the Çaltı Cay. The latter was the shorter and more important route. Curving west, it joined after an hour the line of the main frontier road above Arege. The day was too short to continue, and we turned back down the s­hortcut to the Hotar spring. There beneath the willows Taner fell asleep on a pile of stones. That evening we were approached in the Bozkurt lokantası in Kemaliye by a ‘friend from Trabzon’ and two colleagues: the jandarma commander, it transpired, in plain clothes. For an hour Taner fielded inquisition with great skill. However dangerous, we had seen no PKK on Harmancık Dağ, and politely declined an invitation to tea the following morning.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE A NTITAURUS GORGE  167

NOT ES 1. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 332. Marcellus, EAM 523, no. 29. Barkley, Armenia 317. 2. Garstang and Gurney, Geography of the Hittite Empire 33–6. Koşay, Belleten 36 (1972) 463–8. Pliny, NH 5, 84. The Turkish Army map marks Samuka Harabeleri: suggestive, as at Çit Harabe, of an ancient site; or, as at Çakmalı and Pöşür Harabeleri near Refahiye, of an abandoned village. 3. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 332. 4. von Moltke, Briefe 356f. Riggs, Armenia 12f. 5. I followed the line of the araba road in the bottom of the gorge with Mehmet Özer in 1963 and 1966, and the higher part of the Silk Road with Taner Demirbulut in 2004 and 2006. 6. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 205. von Moltke, Briefe 357. Burnaby’s account, Asia Minor 184ff., confirms the broad line reconstructed for the Silk Road. Barkley, Armenia 321f. 7. The Şirzi bridge, Hommaire de Hell, Voyage I 403f., and IV 254, and Planche 38 ‘Delik Tasch: route dans les montagnes du haut Euphrate’. The bridge spanned the Venk Çay, at the foot of a great zigzag descent into the Talektasch (Deliktaş) gorge, described by Hommaire de Hell; 35 minutes from Shirze and 90 minutes from the Euphrates bridge, it carried mule traffic from Pingan. 8. von Moltke, Briefe 358. Acarlar Çeşme: the chamber, 4 metres long, 2.5 metres wide, and 2.3 metres high; the entrance, 1.29 metres wide. Barkley’s route, Armenia 322, evidently led to the same point, above Gemirgap, described by von der Osten, Explorations 110. 9. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 332f. 10. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 205. Hommaire de Hell, Voyage I 410ff. Huntington, GJ 20:2 (1902) 185f. The intrepid colonels have left no recoverable account of their voyage. 11. Hogarth, Wandering Scholar 129. 12. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 204. von Moltke, Briefe 358. Hommaire de Hell, Voyage I 404–9, and Planche 39. Burnaby, Asia Minor 186–90. Hogarth, Wandering Scholar 138. Huntington, GJ 20:2 (1902) 185. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 333. Barkley, Armenia 322ff. Massacres, Bliss, Turkey 437 and 445, and Hewsen, Armenia 231; and, more generally, Kinross, Ottoman Centuries 557–61. 13. Dio 68, 13, 1, discussed by Richmond, PBSR 13 (1935) 32–4, and Lepper and Frere, Trajan’s Column 149f. and 286. A Roman bridge at Kemaliye supposes another bridge over the Euphrates, north of the Munzur Dağları, to rejoin the Antonine frontier road per ripam. Associated with the Silk Road, there were bridges at ‘Pingen, below Makhut, the Shaitan Keupri below Avshin and Kemakh itself’, Maunsell, Military Report IV (1904) 150. Şeytan köprü, the ‘Devil’s bridge’ near Gullubağ, was said in 1987 to be popular for suicides. 14. Burnaby, Asia Minor 190–5. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 204f. Hommaire de Hell, Voyage I 399ff. and 405. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 334. Pliny, NH 5, 83f. Capotes may be identified with Munzur Dağ, culminating in Ziyaret Tepe (10,460 feet), 20 miles ESE of Pingan. 15. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 309. 16. The Taşyolu, 8,520 metres long, consists of 4,722 metres of tunnel, and 3,798 metres of revetted road. Huntington, GJ 20:2 (1902) 185. 17. For pack animals used in antiquity over short and medium distances, Corbier, CAH2 XII 417, and Lepper and Frere, Trajan’s Column 268.

4

3

2

1

17

SC

Pingan

LADANA ?

IS

CU

S?

ANALIBA

Eski Kozkışla

Deve Boynu

INA

ON

BR

SM

SA

B

PITTIYARIGA ?

D OR

BUBALIA ?

TAPOURA

ARZIYA ? ZIMARA

A C

13

18

marble road

D

0

0

SINERVAS

19

Kuru Kp.

E

10 km

16

15

14

5 miles

F

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 168  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

NINE

From the Antitaurus to the Karabudak: Zimara, and the road to Nicopolis (Maps 13, 14, 16, 17, and Figs. A1, A2)

TH E ROM A N BR I DGE AT BU R M A H A N From the Armenian cemetery at the base of the long ridge leading down from the Antitaurus, the frontier road descended to the bed of the Çaltı Çay, a large river, perhaps the Lycus known to Corbulo, draining the northern flanks. Here, 4 miles from the Euphrates, ‘near an old massive khan called Urumia’, Burmahan, the ruins of a large bridge stand on the right bank. A short distance upriver, and evidently out of sight, Taylor forded the Tchalt Su at the end of August, ‘deep, reaching up to the horses’ ­bellies, and about 20 yards broad, confined to the side of the gorge; in spring, however, it occupies the whole with its impetuous torrent’. The remains of an arch, 12.50 metres long and 5.20 metres wide, are identical in width with the western abutment of the Bahadın bridge over the Arabkir Çay. Eight courses of large cut blocks, each about a metre long and approximately 51 cm high, are laid on a core of large river stones set in concrete (Fig. 9.1). There were probably three more arches, or piers, of greater span and height, extending between them to an overall length of about 70 metres. On the left bank, high and eroded by floods, there is no trace of an abutment or artificial roadway. Over the wide gravel bed, the overall length of the bridge and its approach ramp on the right bank was about 100 metres. The Burmahan bridge is undated. The large ashlar courses, undoubtedly Roman, ­suggest the second or third centuries; the overall width that the bridge over the Çaltı Çay was a part of the early frontier system.1 F ROM TH E ÇA LT I ÇAY TO PI NGA N The military road followed the left bank downriver from the bridge, and curved ­northwards and around the Euphrates ripa towards Pingan (Zimara). An uninscribed column, perhaps a milestone, stands beside the Roman road, which passes about a mile inland of the village, an hour and a half from the crossing of the Çaltı Çay.2 In this vicinity should be sought the fort of Zimara, 49 miles from Sabus by the Peutinger road over the Antitaurus, and 44 miles by the Antonine road through the gorge. To the north-­east, some five hours away on foot, was Analiba.

◀  M ap 14  Armenia Minor: per ripam from Zimara towards Kemah, and through the mountains towards Nicopolis and Haris (Melik Şerif) Discovering Rome’s Eastern Frontier. Timothy Bruce Mitford, Oxford University Press (2021). © Timothy Bruce Mitford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843425.003.0010

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 170  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 9.1  Burmahan bridge: collapsed arch, and, in the background, Burmahan village and the north-­eastern foothills of the Antitaurus (July 1966)

Pliny knew Zimara as a reference point in measuring the navigable length of the Euphrates. Its source had been reported to him by eyewitnesses: Corbulo, and the legionary commander Licinius Mucianus. According to the latter, the Euphrates, named at first Pyxurates, rose beneath the roots of the mountain which they call Capotes, 12 miles above Zimara. The river must be the large Munzur Su, which wells up below the southern flanks of the Munzur Dağları (Fig. 9.2) at Ziyaret, some 19 miles south of Kemah, and flowed into the Murat (Arsanias) north-­east of Elazığ. The mountain must be the Munzur Dağları, of which the western shoulder, crossed by Yorke’s path from Eğin to Pingan, is indeed about 12 miles south-­east of Zimara.3 Zimara certainly lay north of the Antitaurus. It was utterly remote, nearly two weeks from routine, and at least five days from urgent, support from the legions at Melitene and Satala. As a navigational reference point, it must have stood beside the Euphrates, somewhere among the low hills between the Çaltı Çay and the Kuruçay below the exit from the Gullubağ gorge. Clean, reliable water was essential. Here only the steep-­sided Karabudak (Sabrina) flows strongly throughout the year, but its junction with the Euphrates, like that of the Çaltı Çay, is cramped by hills. There are two minor streams, the Zımara Dere at Pingan, and the Şeker Suyu, 4 miles to the north-­east, falling through low cliffs into the Euphrates. The Euphrates itself was not a source. Even before clean water was brought to every village in the 1970s, very few, all in Commagene, relied on Fırat su. North of the Antitaurus the river is filled in spring and autumn with a muddy soup of rain and melting snow: in October 1989 the water level in the Keban lake had fallen by several metres, to reveal the once lovely gardens below Kemaliye already caked with a thick brown layer of mud. The ripa offers few suitable locations. Only Pingan, on the very bank of the Euphrates, meets the geographical requirements for Roman Zimara.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

FROM THE A NTITAURUS TO THE K A R A BUDA K A ND NICOPOLIS  171

F ig . 9.2  A source of the Pyxurates (Munzur Su), near Ovacık (Colin Boswell, The Garlic Farm, June 2009)

Turkish Zımara Its presence in this vicinity is confirmed by the survival of the ancient name in the Turkish village, once Armenian, three hours north-­west of Pingan. Beside the track leading up to it, along a ridge high above the Sultan Murat Caddesi, the frontier road, a mound similar to and in sight of the mound above Arege was evidently a signalling position. Turkish Zımara is 2,000 feet above the Euphrates, and much cooler in summer; with an abundant fountain said to run cold in summer and hot in winter; and a fine variety of fruit trees. There in August 1866 Taylor saw only ‘the remnant of a Roman wall’ on the rock at the back of the village, the ruins of an Armenian ziyaret, and coins found elsewhere. The village was large, and evidently important, the population almost exclusively Armenian. ‘During the evening a Zabtee arrived in hot haste, demanding reinforcements for his chief; who, it appeared, had surrounded a party of Kizzilbash brigands from the Deyrsim, in a small valley close to. They had resisted and wounded the sub-­officer, who, fearful of losing his prey, now urgently demanded volunteers from Zimmara to secure his game. The Christians readily responded to his call, and returned during the night, reporting the entire capture of the band, and death of the chief from a pistol shot of the sub-­officer wounded.’ As the road to the south was within reach of other Deyrsim plunderers, a party of villagers, on horseback and on foot, next morning accompanied Taylor, who saw the dead body of the chief brigand carried past on a horse for interment in his village. Yorke heard tell in 1894 of 200 Armenian houses, but saw no evidence of an­tiquity. In July 1966 too there was little evidence of antiquity. Neither village nor

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 172  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 9.3  Turkish Zımara: arrival of corn for threshing (July 1966)

cemetery contained cut stones. Walking up alone from Pingan, I stayed with the muhtar, Hasan Demir, who claimed to be related to Atatürk, for his grandfather had come from Salonica. But he was preoccupied by the murder of a villager two nights before, and had heard reports only of a few Byzantine pots.4 Turkish Zımara is a rich agricultural centre, in antiquity no doubt a source of supply for a fort beside the Euphrates, and of grain to be transported down the Euphrates by raft (Fig. 9.3). The name was presumably transferred to a civil settlement, a natural retreat, when decay overtook the frontier system and traffic along the military road and river declined.

Scordiscus and Garlic To the north-­east above Zımara rears the vast rock whaleback of Sarmısak Dağ, perhaps Ptolemy’s Scordiscus Mons, conspicuous on the northern horizon from the Antitaurus pass, and visible far in the south-­west from Kurtlu Tepe and the mountains above Refahiye. Scordiscus, in Greek, shares with the Turkish Sarmısak the meaning ‘garlic’: the name perhaps, like Zimara, preserved from Roman times by a pre-­Turkish population. It may refer to the shape of the mountain. Proximity to the Dersim, the modern vilayet of Tunceli, suggests, however, a further explanation. In June 2010, Colin Boswell, owner of the Garlic Farm, established the presence of allium tuncelianum, regarded as the wild ancestor of modern garlic, near the source of the Munzur Su. The locals gather it, to eat and sell. Colin became the target of a proposed kidnapping. Reckoning, however, that no one would pay much for a mere farmer, the PKK waited for a German party to arrive a fortnight later, and held them for three months.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

FROM THE A NTITAURUS TO THE K A R A BUDA K A ND NICOPOLIS  173

Pliny ascribed to garlic ‘great power, great uses against changes of waters and places’. Its smell repelled snakes and scorpions, and it offered remedies for a wide variety of re­spira­tory and other disorders. Garlic, Virgil wrote, was believed to give courage to soldiers in battle, and strength to harvesters in the midday sun. These properties were echoed by Dioscorides, a Cilician Greek enlisted as a trained physician in Nero’s legions, and brought thus by service and travel into contact with many useful plants. His treatise on herbs, surviving in a Byzantine copy, describes more than 600 species of medicinal value, with directions on their preparation and uses, and on the side effects of their drugs. The accompanying drawings were probably based on originals not far removed from coloured sketches of plants, with descriptions and their medicinal uses, by Crateuas, botanist and physician to Mithridates VI Eupator (111–64 bc), who described the plants of his kingdom, and knew more about poisons and their antidotes than anyone else in his day. Garlic was prescribed for many ailments. Dioscorides lists the remarkable properties of allium. ‘Being eaten, it drives out the broade wormes, and draws away the urine . . . It is good, as none other thing, for such as are bitten of vipers’, and is ‘layd on upon such as are bitten of a mad dogge, . . . being dranck with decoction of Origanum, it doth kill lice and nitts, . . . and kept in the mouth it doth assuage the paine of ye teeth’. If, as is likely, Dioscorides saw service under Corbulo, he too may have seen the Dersim, Zimara, and Scordiscus. If wild garlic, undoubtedly allium tuncelianum, grew in abundance above the fort, the garrison could count itself fortunate indeed.5 PI NGA N (ZI M A R A) In September 1847, Hommaire de Hell reached Piguian (Pingan), a small Armenian town on the left bank, with a bridge over the Euphrates. From there he had planned to descend the Euphrates by raft to Eğin. But his inhospitable hosts advised him of real dangers: ‘le risque d’être assaillis par des voleurs, qui, placés en embuscade, crèvent à coups de fusil les outres par lesquelles est soutenu le radeau du voyageur imprudent, attendent ce dernier dans un passage où il y a peu d’eau, et le dépouillent impitoyablement’. Instead, he passed southwards over a perilous chaos of jurassic mountains and rocks, with an escort of five armed serudjis (drivers) and five armed Armenians as guides and rear guard, and his own weapons for the first time at the ready. At Pingan, Taylor reported in 1866, but did not sight, ‘a ferry over the river, on the Eggin and Arabkir road’. In May 1894 Yorke crossed the high shoulders of the Dersim, descended to Pingan after a journey from Eğin of seven hours (much faster than was possible along the difficult tracks above the right bank), and crossed the Euphrates, ‘here not more than 50 yards wide, by a wooden bridge’. He reported a large population, about 200 families, all Armenian. Yorke’s path probably followed the mule track to Kemaliye, of which I was told at Pingan in September 1963. Several villagers recalled a legend that a wooden bridge was built over the Euphrates to replace an older bridge which collapsed ‘328 years ago’: the time of Sultan Murat IV (1623–40). There is no trace of abutments. But it may be that the Euphrates, about 50 metres wide, was spanned here by a Roman predecessor, ­timberwork supported on one or two intermediate piers. Below the salient of the Munzur Dağları, at the north-­western tip of Armenia, this was a significant c­ rossing point.6

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 174  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 9.4  Pingan (Zimara): gardens, and the Euphrates, view west (September 1963)

F ig . 9.5  Pingan, on the north bank (July 1966)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

FROM THE A NTITAURUS TO THE K A R A BUDA K A ND NICOPOLIS  175

In 1936 the town was partially demolished to make way for the railway to Erzurum, and many of the inhabitants, now Turkish, moved across the river. There, opposite the station, a cluster of houses now stands on a narrow ledge at the mouth of the Zımara Dere (Figs. 9.4, 9.5). The stream provides drinking water for a population of about 150, and adequate irrigation for their modest gardens. West of the stream the right bank was almost bare of buildings, and was covered with richer gardens and vineyards. A low, flat-­topped spur, known locally as the ‘hill of the Three Holy Children’, runs down to the Euphrates. The southern slopes, lined with terraces supported by rough stone walls, are a prolific source of building stone. In 1963 two very large squared blocks, perhaps statue bases, were arranged to form a gate; and many uninscribed tombstones in the Armenian cemetery look like stelae in reuse. There is much coarse and undated earthenware, and some ­fragments of reddish tiles, perhaps auxiliary. The spur was also a rich source of Latin, ­therefore military, inscriptions. Two survive in the outer walls of houses, and others may have their inscribed faces turned inwards, as Cumont found at Satala and as seems to have happened there again. A fragment, still prized in the aga’s house, indicates military activity under Catilius Severus, Trajan’s governor during the annexation of Armenia Major. A small altar was dedicated to Jupiter. Below crags at the western end of the gardens, on the brink of the Euphrates, two ancient Armenian churches, the larger of St Ange, impart an aura of antiquity noticed also at Geruşla and Samuka.

Fig. 9.6  Pingan, dust rising over a threshing floor beside the Euphrates: a woman guides an ox-­drawn sledge, two men relax among saddles, a boy plays. The house beyond is on the opposite bank (September 1963)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 176  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Mid way between Melitene and Satala, bridge or no bridge, the position was guarded by the fort of Zimara. No garrison is assigned to it in the Notitia Dignitatum. One is supplied by the tombstone, now lost, of a decurio of ala II Auriana, an auxiliary regiment assigned instead to Dascusa. Iulius Quartus commanded a troop of thirty-­two cavalrymen, well suited to the low foothills extending along the ripa for several miles to west and east, and the steeper climb to the western shoulder of the Munzur Dağları.

Navigation Zimara was important for navigation. The name, in part, and the site recall Arziya, from which, in a Hittite letter, a small boat brought supplies to Samuha. From what seems to have been a more important source, ‘ships brought the food supplies from Pittiyariga . . . to Samuha’. The water was low, and some of the cargo of loaves, spelt, and grain had to be off-­ loaded to a second ship. If Arziya was later the Roman Zimara, at Pingan, Pittiyariga is perhaps to be identified with the hüyük settlement 4 miles to the east, above the Şeker Suyu. Pingan is the last village before, a mile to the west, the Euphrates turns abruptly south into the Antitaurus gorge. The next villages sited on the ripa itself were Samuka, and beyond it Pağnık, the probable site of Dascusa. The navigational detail given by Pliny, quoting distances from Zimara established and reported during campaigns in the Dersim under Corbulo and Licinius Mucianus, later to become Nero’s last governor of Syria, can only be explained if rafts were loaded there, at Pingan, in Roman times, and floated down the Euphrates to Dascusa (75 miles), Sartona (50 miles) close above Ciaca, and Melitene (24 miles). From Pingan the Euphrates was indeed navigable as far as Kömürhan, Pliny’s Elegea, 159 miles downriver from Zimara. To Kömürhan, at the mouth of the Taurus gorge, a raft would take about twenty-­five hours in the spring, when the river was full; and thirty-­six hours in the summer. Indeed, before the coming of the railway, the river was the only means of transporting produce in bulk from this remote area. This was safe and frequent traffic, and it continued until the building of the dams. At Kemah, Brant noted in 1835, ‘there is sufficient water in most parts of the (Euphrates) to navigate it with boats, but rapids, rocks and shoals frequently occur’. Maunsell reported that ‘from Erzincan to Kömürhan there is only one rapid—16½ miles below Eğin (Kemaliye)— that offers the least difficulty at low water (in summer), even at night’. Near the Kuruçay, Taylor heard that ‘logs of pine timber are floated down to Eggin during spring, as also fire wood to that place and Gumish Maaden (Keban) on the Euphrates’. Wood cut in the mountains was also floated down in spring from Kemah, where ‘the inhabitants live by cultivating the neighbouring valleys and by transporting wood to Keban Maden’. In antiquity too timber was no doubt floated down to İmamoğlu, for Melitene; and Zimara itself was evidently a centre for the collection of corn and other produce from the fertile hills rising gently from the right bank of the Euphrates.7 F ROM PI NGA N TO TH E K A R A BU DA K

The Şeker Suyu and Pittiyariga (?) Passing across the base of the hill of the Three Holy Children, and about a mile north-­ east of Pingan, the frontier road curved slowly to the right, behind steep hills flanking

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

FROM THE A NTITAURUS TO THE K A R A BUDA K A ND NICOPOLIS  177

the Euphrates and cut by the deep Bagı̆ ştaş gorge. In the middle of the gorge the cliffs recede on the north bank, where the Şeker Suyu, flowing south from Bağlıca, has worn a narrow gap and plunges into the Euphrates through a short, barely passable ravine. The military road runs half a mile to the north, across the edge of a fertile amphitheatre. In the centre rises a late Bronze Age hüyük, attesting settlement from the earliest times in the benign fertility of this small enclave of broad slopes and undulating plain beside the Euphrates. Although the ripa is barely accessible, here, perhaps, was the Hittite Pittiyariga. The Euphrates valley offers no other candidates. To the south, the nearest hüyüks were 75 miles away, clustered beyond Samuka on the southern slopes above the Arabkir Çay. Upriver to the east, the nearest neighbour was Altın Tepe, almost 100 miles away, at the furthest end of the plain of Erzincan. Beneath low cliffs where the Şeker Suyu falls into the Euphrates, our kelekcis landed briefly to cut scrub for breastworks, useful in rapids.

Lordin Crossing the Şeker Suyu, the military road continued eastwards behind the precipitous Bağıştaş gorge, its trace clearly visible for more than an hour, to pass north of Lordin, a small cluster of mud-­brick houses 200 metres from the Euphrates, at the mouth of the gorge. There a rusty iron bridge carries an animal track across the Euphrates from the railway station at Bağıştaş. Lordin is perilously short of water. There is no memory of water pipes, and no trace of antiquity is preserved in the village or its fields. The next village on the ripa itself is eleven hours to the east, at Çerkesin Mahalle, opposite Kemah.

Rafts Before the building of the Keban dam, rafts were assembled close above the iron bridge, and floated down the Euphrates to Kemaliye, calling at Pingan in September to buy corn stacked ready for loading (Fig. 9.6). Our kelek was constructed before our eyes, with forty-­two goatskins, transported in two sacks on our bus: in Ottoman times a task for a pack animal. Inflated by mouth in less than an hour, the skins were lashed together with willow poles in six rows of seven skins, to make a square, flexible and virtually unsinkable craft (Fig. 9.7). Navigated by two kelekcis sitting at the front with wooden sweeps, the kelek easily carried several passengers, including a hitch-­hiker in the Bağıştaş gorge, and a ton of grain embarked at Pingan. The Euphrates, swollen by heavy rain overnight in the Munzur Dağları, flowed rapidly, the colour of liquid chocolate. Cargo, passengers, and crew were kept dry, except in rapids, by gunwales of brushwood collected from the sides of the Bağıştaş gorge (Fig. 9.8). Omitting an enforced overnight stop at Navril, the southward voyage from Pingan to Kemaliye took two and a quarter hours: a fraction of the time required for overland travel, and with a cargo of substantial size and weight (Fig. 9.9). Brant saw similar rafts on the Murad (Arsanias) in summer 1838, ‘composed of boughs, supported by inflated skins, and charcoal was stacked on them. A man at each

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 178  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 9.7*  Construction of our kelek below Lordin: Mehmet Özer and kelekcis (September 1963)

end with a paddle directed the raft.’ Rafts on the Tigris below Diarbekir are described by Maunsell. They varied in size from 50 to 300 skins. The largest could, by extension, probably carry about four tons of cargo. Hommaire de Hell was seduced by his smaller raft, built for him at Egĭ n: ‘c’est une surface plus longue que large, composée d’un grill­age de branches d’arbres sur lequel se placent quelques planches, le tout soutenu par trente-­sept outres de peaux d’agneau reliées ensemble, qui donnent au radeau une légèreté incomparable . . . le radeau se recourbe comme un serpent de mer, et semble être attiré par un aimant invisible au fond des eaux’.8

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

FROM THE A NTITAURUS TO THE K A R A BUDA K A ND NICOPOLIS  179

F ig . 9.8*  A pause in the Bağıştaş gorge, to collect brushwood for breastworks; kelekci keeps the skins wet (September 1963)

F ig . 9.9*  Entering the Antitaurus gorge: kelekci steering, and Mehmet Özer ready for keklik, red-­legged partridges (September 1963)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 180  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Dostal A quarter of a mile behind Lordin, the frontier road diverged from the Euphrates to follow a shallow valley parallel with the ripa, but hidden behind the high, rounded hills opposite Bağıştaş. Walking alone in July 1966, I followed its continuous trace as far as the Karabudak. Climbing slowly, the road rose after an hour to a prominent ridge, on which a stone-­ strewn mound, 20 metres long and 4 metres wide, probably marked a signalling pos­ ition. To the west the mound looks towards the Armenian cemetery that hangs above the Çaltı Çay at Burmahan; and to the east looks up to Boyalık. Continuing, the military road passed a mile north of Dostal (Fig. 9.10). A hundred houses lie on low hills a mile and a half from the Euphrates, and the same distance west of the Karabudak. In 1966 the village drew its water from wells. Hogarth and Yorke found no trace of antiquity, but the cemetery contains many old stones. In 2006 the muhtar’s daughter, with unexpected poise, introduced me to a sprightly old man, aged 80. He could remember caravans of horses, mules, and camels, passing continuously above the village in the 1930s and 1940s. An hour east of the mound, the frontier road descended into the valley of the Karabudak, and turned north to follow the right bank upstream for a mile. Its trace leads directly to the western abutment of the Karabudak bridge, about four hours on foot from Zimara.

Decius’ Bridge over the Sabrina (Karabudak) Of the bridge only the abutments survive, firmly bedded on a volcanic outcrop, a foretaste of the geological desolation encountered on the way to Kemah. Jagged spines of

F ig . 9.10  Frontier road descending eastwards towards Dostal and the Karabudak (July 1966)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

FROM THE A NTITAURUS TO THE K A R A BUDA K A ND NICOPOLIS  181

rock stride across the valley like a broken dam, offering the first solid foundations above the junction with the Euphrates, three miles away. The foundation of the abutment on the right bank is about 3.60 metres above the level of the river. The left bank was built up artificially into a sloping ramp, in places carved out of the rock, to carry the road, now about 1.80 metres wide. In antiquity it was probably much wider, for the bridge foun­ dations that sprang from the ramp, to judge from ancient steps cut in the rock to support them, were 7 metres wide. Above the road at eye level, about 5 metres from the abutment, a rock-­cut panel proclaims that Decius restored the bridge over the river Sabrina, in ad 249–51 (Fig. 9.11). The single arch, of which no trace survives in the riverbed, was about 30  metres long; rather shorter and less high than the bridge restored a solo by Severus over the Chabina in Commagene. The original bridge over the Sabrina was perhaps built in the second century, a contemporary of the original bridge over the Chabina, and of the Bahadın bridge over the Arabkir Çay.9 Crossing the river, the military road passed along the rock-­cut shelf beneath the Decius inscription, and followed the bank of the Karabudak downstream for half a mile. Turning then north-­east, it climbed straight and steeply up a long spine of rock, a solid foundation between screes falling from the ridge above; and an hour from the bridge reached the watershed between the Karabudak and the Kuruçay. Traces of the ancient road were still cobbled in 1966, held in place by kerbs uniformly 7 metres apart. Until this point, the remains of the main frontier road have been well-­preserved, with kerbs and centre spine: a kaldırım known everywhere as Sultan Murat Caddesi, ‘Sultan Murat’s Highway’. Seen descending the northern slopes of Şakşak Dağ, long sections can be followed for nearly 150 miles from Melitene: approaching the Söğütlü Dere, through the Deregezen valley, down to Körpinik hüyük and the Arabkir Çay, high above the Çit Çay, over the Antitaurus and above Dostal.

F ig . 9.11  Decius’ bridge over the Sabrina (Karabudak), view north: remains of bridge abutments, with the approach ramp and building inscription (in a panel above the triangular spur of white bedrock) (July 1966)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 182  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Division of Roads On the summit of the ridge above the Karabudak, the frontier road to Satala divided, and the character and construction of the ancient road changed abruptly. The Antonine route per ripam continued east beside the Euphrates to Erzincan, and turned north; with a kaldırım seen only in a short section over the low Pelitsirti pass east of Kemah. The Peutinger route diverged north-­east, to pass through the mountains to the Refahiye valley, and over the Çimen Dağları; with a kaldırım preserved only, and intermittently, over the Sinibeli pass, and leading down the eastern slopes of the Çimen Dağları. The abrupt change in character cannot everywhere be explained by wars, erosion, or quarrying. Hasanova, 3 miles east of the ridge, lay on the boundary between the vilayets of Sivas and Erzincan. Descending to the Karabudak in 1866, Taylor was ‘now in the Divrigi Kuzzaa, a district of the Siwass Pashalik’. When Yorke entered the vilayet of Erzincan at Hasanova, he risked eleven days’ detention in quarantine, amid rumours of cholera, and hastened on, ‘fortunately without being perceived by the official to whom this part of the frontier had been entrusted’. Officialdom was more alert in 2000. My permit covered Erzincan, and the İliç jandarma and my Representative would not allow me to revisit nearby Pingan, attached to Sivas. For the same geographical reasons the ridge above the Karabudak may in antiquity have marked an important boundary: not provincial, between Cappadocia and Armenia Minor, but military, a command boundary, equidistant between the legions at Melitene and Satala. The change in character occurs precisely where the Roman road builders were confronted for the first time with significant choices of route.10

F ROM ZI M A R A TO N ICOPOLIS A third road, preserved only in the Peutinger Table (Fig. A2), led north from Zimara to Nicopolis. Combined initially with the frontier road until the divergence above the Karabudak, it continued up the ridge to Küçük Armudan, once almost entirely Armenian, on the edge of a high plain, broad and fertile, but snowbound from December to March. An alternative, much shorter route led almost directly from Zimara to the plain; a difficult mule track rather than a road, which crossed the Karabudak 5 miles upriver from the Decius bridge; by, I was informed in 1963, a second bridge.

Armudan (? Ladana) At the northern end of the plain, Büyük Armudan (4,500 feet) was by far the largest village in the district of Kuruçay, listed in the archive of the province of Erzerum in1642. In c.1900 it was an important administrative centre, with 30 Turkish and 550 Armenian households. Riding north from İliç to Zara in June 1906, Sykes passed through Armudan, evidently the ‘two wealthy Armenian villages, with well-­made roads, fine new houses and beautifully cultivated gardens’, on his way to Tut (Tuğut), 5 miles to the  north-­west. This too was mainly Armenian. Nine years later, on 15 June 1915, detachments of gendarmerie arrived at the villages with Armenian populations in the district of Kurucay: at the Armudans, and at Tut and Hasanova. Their populations, in

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

FROM THE A NTITAURUS TO THE K A R A BUDA K A ND NICOPOLIS  183

all about 3,000, were deported and murdered. In 2000 only sixty houses remained in Büyük Armudan. Of the churches and a reported han there was no trace. I saw no sign of antiquity, heard no memories of coins or inscriptions. The Turkish Army map explains the special significance of the town, at the crossing of routes from Zimara to Kuruçay, and particularly from İliç to the upper Karabudak; while other tracks descended to the broad, here fertile bed of the Karabudak and the Armudan bahçeleri, ‘the gardens of Armudan’. A large karakol implies that Armudan still lies on a significant transit route. With my small army from Kuruçay, I was received with tea and cakes by the jandarma commander, surrounded by his charming and enthusiastic men. His courteous welcome, however, precluded any hope of searching for a probable northward continuation, towards the upper Karabudak, of the ancient route towards Nicopolis. The once predominantly Armenian population, described around Çit Harabe, and apparent at sites occupied by forts on the frontier road per ripam (at Pingan, Hasanova, İhtik, Sağ, and Ardos), may point to the presence on this upland plain of an ancient site, perhaps Ptolemy’s Ladana. The line of the Peutinger road from Zimara to Nicopolis, about 76 miles, was broadly followed, in reverse direction, by Taylor in August 1866. Travelling south from Aşkar, which gave its name to the long plain below Nicopolis, he climbed to a high ridgeway passing over Karakutuk Tepe (7,700 feet), crossed the Halys (Kızıl Irmak) 6 miles east of Ümraniye (İmranlı), and entered the valley of the upper Karabudak, ‘appearing, from the vast accumulation of igneous rocks thrown up to a great height on all sides and in every shape, more like a bit from Pandemonium than the habitable abode of living beings. Yet here and there oases were discernible in the general wreck, containing villages and isolated Tchiftliks.’ A short gorge contained ‘at this season the dry bed of a torrent that, during spring and early summer, is filled with an impetuous dangerous stream’. Taylor then climbed over a mountain spur to descend the upper valley of the Kuruçay. Of the ancient road almost all trace has vanished. Only at Aşkar, three hours on horseback south-­east of Nicopolis, is the line clearly marked, with the mileage 7 (duplicated in Greek), by a Hadrianic milestone of ad 129. Here in 2006 Cemal Şimşek and a large group of elders outside the tea house recalled that the stone had disappeared about fifteen years before. In the village was a han, on the Silk Road, they explained, from Giresun and Şebinkarahisar, and leading to Zara and Sivas; a road used by mules and horses, but not by camels. Onwards from here, Taylor ‘could not discover any traces of an artificial road’. I was equally unsuccessful, but the route may offer two clues.

Tapur (Tapoura) and Babsu (? Caleorsissa) At the foot of tangled hills extending north for 6 miles below Armudan, the twin villages of Büyük and Küçük Tapur stand at opposite ends of a broad plain. The 1642 archive of the province of Erzerum lists seven Muslim households in each. Recalling the survival of the name Zimara, the Tapurs appear to preserve Ptolemy’s Tapoura. Two hours to the north-­west, in a plain beside a small tributary of the upper Karabudak, the large village of Babsu Köy (5,080 feet) is distinguished by great quantities of large ashlar blocks in mosque and houses. Discussion explained their presence: the belief that the village was founded 460 years ago, with churches, mills, and 1,000 houses. A century later, the archive lists a rather smaller population, seventeen Muslim households. From Babsu the

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 184  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER A

B

C

LY C U

1

17

D

S

NICOPOLIS

2

r Aşk a

Su

3

MESOROME ?

18

DAGALASSOS ? Kızıl

Irma

k

4

HALY S

OLEOBERDA ?

5

CALEORSISSA ?

6 0 0

5 miles 10 km

14

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

FROM THE A NTITAURUS TO THE K A R A BUDA K A ND NICOPOLIS  185

journey to the railway at İliç used to take eleven hours on foot. The village was perhaps the site of the second station, and perhaps Caleorsissa, on the road from Zimara, about three hours further away; with the first, intermediate, at Armudan.11

Nicopolis (Pürk) Descending from the high ranges north of the Halys, the ancient road from Zimara, now combined with the Antonine strategic road from Ancyra and Sebasteia (Sivas), passed through Aşkar and turned west along the edge of the plain to Pürk, on the site of Nicopolis, 4 miles south-­east of Susehri (Enderes). The name, Cumont supposed, derived from the Greek purgos, ‘tower’; referring to the legend of the Forty-­Five Martyrs, imprisoned in one of the northern towers of Nicopolis. Pürk was destroyed in June 1915, and the large Armenian population departed. Repaired in part by Turks resettled from Thessalonica, the remains of the city were again devastated in the 1939 earthquake. By 1964 a small population had returned, to live in conditions of great squalor. Below the village large gardens of water melons and fields of maize were guarded against wild boars and hyenas. Here, on the field of his victory over Mithridates in 66 bc, Pompey founded a city, with a Greek constitution and civic institutions, for his discharged veterans. The position was most fortunate, on a raised platform beneath wooded mountainsides from which flowed water in abundance. Below stretched the Aşkar Ova (3,100 feet), a plain of great fertility, 18 miles long and 4 miles broad, rising gradually to the east. It was, Taylor noted, ‘studded with 33 prettily wooded villages . . . The cultivation is extensive and ­various, consisting of grain of all kinds, cotton, hemp and oil seeds.’ Throughout antiquity, Munro noted, Nicopolis was ‘the most important civil and strategic centre in this region’. Its importance grew with the annexation of Armenia Minor in ad 71, and the development of military roads to support the frontier. On the principal road leading eastwards from Ancyra, capital of Galatia, milestones attest repairs conducted under Domitian, Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian. East of the Halys, the road divided. A southern route, listed in the Antonine Itinerary, passed through Tavium and Sebasteia; the northern, more important passed through Amaseia, below Neocaesarea, and up the Lycus valley. At Nicopolis they converged, and continued, combined, to Satala. While the fortresses of Melitene and Satala became the guardians of the eastern frontier, Nicopolis, Cumont observed, remained the advanced outpost of Greek culture. The metropolis of Armenia Minor and a veteran colony, the city was governed by a Greek assembly. Coins were issued, and an elected Armeniarch presided over the imperial cult. Returning from Trapezus, via Satala, Hadrian may have passed the winter of ad 129/30 in this remote bastion of Hellenism. His presence is suggested by a flurry of honorific activity in Armenia Minor and eastern Pontus: two milestones of ad 129, south and east of Nicopolis; the assumption at Nicopolis, Neocaesarea, and Amaseia of the Greek title Hadriane; and priestly foundations at Sebastopolis.

◀  M ap 17  Armenia Minor: from Zimara to Nicopolis, and east from Nicopolis

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 186  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Christianity took early root. After questioning Eustratius at Arauraca in c. ad 303, Lysias, the dux Armeniae, was confronted on arrival in Nicopolis by a mob of legionaries, declaring themselves soldiers of Christ. The Forty-­Five Martyrs were put to death during the persecution of Licinius in c. ad 320, their glory conferring on Nicopolis an exceptional importance and celebrity in the Christian world. The population spoke Armenian; used, it is related, by one of the martyrs wishing not to be understood by Roman officers. The first bishop appears in c. ad 372 in the letters of St Basil. In September ad 498/9, Nicopolis was destroyed by a terrible earthquake, which ravaged the whole of Armenia Minor. At midnight the entire city wall collapsed. All within was wrecked, and the inhabitants were buried alive, with their domestic animals, oxen, and camels. Only the bishop survived, with two of his acolytes, sleeping behind the altar of his church. Evidently salvaging what remained of the buildings and monuments of Roman Nicopolis, Justinian restored the city, reconstructed the walls, and built churches and the monastery of the Forty-­Five Martyrs. In Byzantine times, Nicopolis was still the seat of a bishop. With the dwindling of the Greek population, the metropolitan of Colonia (Şebinkarahisar) assumed the title of archbishop of Nicopolis, a title which ­persisted during Cumont’s visit in 1900. In August 1866 Taylor reported extensive remains: a large, thriving place, inhabited by Armenians . . . imbedded in pretty gardens of fine apricot trees, and boasts two neat churches, built among the ruins of the old Nicopolis of Pompey. . . . Massive fragments have been extensively used in the construction of modern buildings, revealing in their squalor and these solid remains significant tales

Roman City

Roman City

N

R a v i n e

c.11 ha

Cistern

̆

Roman City

Village Eskişehir

Muhtarlık

t? duc ue q A Temple ?

0

100

200

300

400

500 Metres

F ig . 9.12  Plan of Nicopolis (August 1964 and August 2006)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

FROM THE A NTITAURUS TO THE K A R A BUDA K A ND NICOPOLIS  187

of  present decrepitude, as contrasted with the magnitude and magnificence of the ­former city. Some insignificant confused heaps faintly suggest the sites of temples and other public buildings, but the remains of the old wall are not to be mistaken. They enclose a quadrangular space, whose sides, 1100 feet long, face the cardinal points with square bastions at each corner, and pierced on three of its sides by two gates in each, 70 feet wide. . . . Fragments of sculptured columns, with portions of Corinthian capitals, are constantly found . . . and mutilated statues occasionally exhumed in the corn fields enclosed by the old walls. The Vandals of the village constantly break them to see . . . whether they contain gold, and consequently the fragments of fingers, heads and feet of these antiquities are alone to be met with.

The Roman town (Fig. 9.12) evidently extended far beyond the walls. On the slopes below, terraced fields were strewn with fragments of pottery, bricks, and marble. In August 1964 traces of the eastern walls survived. But in the village, I saw scant traces of antiquity: two Corinthian capitals and a few Armenian gravestones, but no inscriptions and no coins. A tunnel 9 metres long led to an underground cistern, vaulted with small stones; perhaps all that remained of the cistern sighted by Grégoire in 1907, and dated to Justinian’s reconstruction: a cistern in a perfect state of preservation, vaulted, 100 paces long, and built with stones set in Byzantine mortar. It was probably supplied by the aqueduct reported by Taylor, some 9 miles long, and drawing from a stream in the southern hills. In August 2006 I was given an extensive tour by the muhtar, Zikar Koç, accompanied by several friends eager to learn the best places to dig for treasure. No one cared to crawl into the tunnel behind his office. A short distance above the village centre, an inscription was found and smashed about fifteen years before. Zikar remembered it well, for he had helped to see if there was gold inside. Two or three years ago, he continued, a second inscription was built into the corner of the outer wall of the lavatory outside the mosque, and concealed beneath green cement. Below the corner, traffic passes over the marble lid of a sarcophagus. A fragment of architrave decorated with garlands and heads was built into the foundations of a nearby house. Propped against a garden wall, on the northern edge of the village, is a large rectangular statue base, with mouldings on each side and a single foot-­hole above: evidently to be mounted on a pillar. More than a dozen inscriptions are known from Pürk and nearby villages. They include a legate of IV Scythica, a prefect of ala I Britannica, a dedication to Iulia Domna, and several Christian. All but one are now lost.12 DIST R I BUT ION A N D SIGN I F ICA NCE OF A R M EN I A N POPU L AT IONS For more than 1,000 years before their victory over the Byzantines at the battle of Manzikert in ad 1071, and the arrival of the Selcuk Turks in Anatolia, the town of Pürk, on the site of Roman Nicopolis, has represented the pre-­eminent example in Armenia Minor of the long survival of an indigenous Armenian population. The Christian inhabit­ ants suggest a continuity of occupation, probably before and effectively ever since the foundation of Nicopolis by Pompey. There are many other examples. In the districts of Kuruçay (now of İliç) and of Gercanis (now of Refahiye), comprehensive village records in the archive of 1642 afford a view of the distribution of the Armenian population. Attached to Kuruçay were

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 188  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

sixty-­nine entirely Muslim villages, and seven villages with a mixed population of Muslim and predominantly non-­Muslim, that is Armenian, households. These included Büyük and Küçük Armudan, Tut, and Köçgiri (Koçkiri). One village, Hasanova, was entirely Armenian. Attached to Gercanis were thirty-­eight Muslim villages, and five villages, some large, with a mixed population: Gercanis itself, with Ezirins (Melik Şerif), Gokseki (Kökseki), and Çatak, and evidently Horopol. Few in number, these mixed, partly Armenian villages were situated in key locations: some, Gercanis and the Armudans, on broad and fertile plains; others, Hasanova, Gökseki, Çatak, and Melik Şerif, on routes used by Ottoman caravans, routes once part of the road system of the Roman frontier. The Armenian villages offer a startling link with antiquity. Many, perhaps all, occupied sites once apparently Roman. These, it seems, were Ptolemy’s cities, and forts or stations listed in the Antonine Itinerary and the Peutinger Table. In other districts of central and southern Armenia Minor, lying largely within the vilayets of Erzincan and, in part, of Sivas, such detailed records are not available. But, throughout, the spread of the Armenian population was evidently similar. In some villages, this occupation can be traced back to Roman and Byzantine times. Armenian was spoken in the early fourth century at Nicopolis and Arauraca (Ardos). Bishoprics are attested at Nicopolis in the fourth century and in Byzantine times; at Analiba (Hasanova) in the seventh; and at Arauraca in the ninth century.13 Travellers passing through these regions in the nineteenth and early twentieth cen­tur­ ies recorded the presence of prosperous Armenian populations which had evidently survived there, for the most part unmolested, for nearly two millennia; and vestiges of the Roman frontier preserved in their villages. At Pürk, Pingan, and Melik Şerif were military inscriptions and other significant remains. But, following the sudden disappearance of virtually the entire Armenian population from these locations in June 1915, most of their churches and dwellings, together with monuments of a Roman past, were destroyed. The wrecked churches at İhtik and Sağ are indicators of other sites to be a­ ssociated with the road per ripam.14 The annexation of Armenia Minor in ad 71, 1,000 years before Manzikert, absorbed an Armenian population already long established: in 66 bc Mithridates had sought refuge at Sinoria (at İhtik). The builders of the Roman frontier exploited both the main Armenian centre at Pürk (Nicopolis), and Armenian towns and villages situated astride pre-­existing routes, or prosperous in their own fertile surroundings. In a pattern suggested pre-­eminently at Çit Harabe (Sabus), the former presence of an Armenian population is, in short, a compelling indicator of the likely presence of a site occupied in Roman times. It is striking that each of the Antonine forts located close to or beside the Euphrates in the Antitaurus gorge and Armenia Minor is marked by the immediate proximity of an important Armenian church, some surviving (Teucila, Zimara, and Analiba), some in ruins (Sinervas and Carsaga), some vanished (Arauraca and Suisa). NOT ES 1. The Lycus, Pliny, NH 5, 84. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 308. 2. French, Milestones no. 928.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

FROM THE A NTITAURUS TO THE K A R A BUDA K A ND NICOPOLIS  189

3. Euphrates . . . oritur sub radicibus montis quem Capoten appellant, supra Zimaram XII p(assus), initio Pyxurates nominatus, Pliny, NH 5, 83f. The source of the Munzur Su is described by Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 326ff. 4. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 307f. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 335 and 454. 5. magna vis, magnae utilitates contra aquarum et locorum mutationes, Pliny, NH 20, 23. Virgil, Eclogue 2, 11. Gunther, Greek Herbal of Dioscorides II 182, and Pliny, NH 25, 8 and 62. 6. Hommaire de Hell, Voyage I 2, 399ff. and 405. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 308. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 334f., and 465ff. Pingan is also described by Hogarth, Wandering Scholar 136f. 7. Samuha, chapter 8, n. 2. Inscriptions, EAM 523ff., nos. 30–1. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 203 and 205. Maunsell, Military Report IV (1904) 151f. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 306. 8. Brant, JRGS 10 (1840) 368. Maunsell, Military Report I (1893) 270. Rafts on the Tigris were ‘made of a framework of brushwood and poles, usually thin poplars, 25 to 30 feet long, resting on rows of inflated sheepskins, secured underneath. A raft of 150 skins measures 26 by 16 feet’, evidently 15 rows of 10 skins. Hommaire de Hell, Voyage I 410f. For rafts of inflatable skins, Hornell, Antiquity 19 (1945) 72–9. 9. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 456 and 467f. EAM 525, no. 32. 10. Throughout Armenia Minor, Roman roads reused by caravans have everywhere been reduced to much-­worn tracks. Of this the ascent past Boyalık, close east of the Karabudak ridge, is a striking example. Varying in width from 1.5 to several metres, and without defined edges or surface, the Roman road has been effaced. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 307. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 456. 11. Armudan, Cuinet, Turquie I 219. Sykes, Caliph’s Last Heritage 372. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 301–7. At Aşkar, Cumont, SP II 314f., and EAM 526, no. 34. Archive of 1642, Başıbüyük, EGR 27 (2012) 91–3. 12. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 298–301. Cumont, SP II 304–14. Munro, ‘Roads in the Vilayet of Sivas’, 725. St Basil, Ep. 121 and 130. Procopius, Aed. 3, 4, 11–13. Grégoire, BCH 33 (1909) 34. Inscriptions, at Aşkar, EAM 526, no. 34; at Pürk, 526–30, nos. 35–45; in the Aşkar Ova, 530–2, nos. 46–51. 13. For villages and routes in the district of Gercanis (now of Refahiye), chapter 11. For Hasanova, and villages (on the sites of forts) in the Kemah district, chapter  10. The 1642 archive, n. 11 above. 14. Ardos was visited by Taylor in 1866; Pingan and Hasanova, by Hogarth and Yorke in 1894; Melik Şerif, by Cumont in 1900; the Armudans and Tut, by Sykes in 1906; and Pürk, most recently, by Grégoire in 1907. Other villages, Gercanis, Kökseki, Çatak, Horopol, İhtik, Sağ (Kömür Köy), and Ermelik have been visited only by me. Roman forts evidently existed at Pingan, Hasanova, İhtik, Sağ, and Ardos; and extensive road traces survive at Horopol, Melik Şerif, Kökseki, and Çatak.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

TEN

Per Ripam to Erzincan and Satala (Maps 14, 15, 16, 20, and Fig. A1)

The Euphrates flows west-­south-­west from Erzincan in a barren trench 100 miles long and more than a mile deep. North of the river the harsh mountains of Armenia Minor form an almost unbroken and impenetrable wall from the Kuruçay to Keşiş Dağ above Erzincan. To the south loomed the huge ridge of the Munzur Dağları. For Taylor, ‘nothing can be more arid, bleak and bare, than this lofty range: it is a single mass of rock devoid of vegetation of any sort but a few dwarf shrubs, and composed of a hard, blueish-­ grey rock. . . . The real Deyrsim fills up the space behind.’ Hogarth and Yorke rode from Pingan to Erzincan beneath ‘a rampart of black rock needles and white domes, broken by black clefts and blue glacier hollows’: a fearsome succession of cliffs, peaks, and gorges even in midsummer pocketed with snow, almost uninhabited and barely penetrable. Only at Kemah and south-­east of Erzincan can routes lead up from the Euphrates to cross the Munzur Dağları into the Dersim, and continue arduously to the Murat. I was extremely fortunate in Erzincan. In August 1987 and October 1989 the vali, Metin İlyas Aksoy, assigned, as my guide and escort, a tough and resourceful senior jandarma Sergeant, Ahmet Demirtaş.1 Directly continuing the road per ripam northbound from Melitene in the Antonine Itinerary, the course of the frontier road along the Euphrates valley is broadly preserved in the line, dictated by geography, of a clearly defined caravan road. Known now between İliç and Kemah as the ‘Caravan Road’, and over the Sipikör pass as the ‘Old Russian Road’, marked by the remains of hans and local memories of caravans, it can be traced eastwards more or less continuously along the right bank of the Euphrates to the plain of Erzincan, then northwards over the high Sipikör pass (7,870 feet) to Satala. Excepting the pass ̆ , and the short but steep Sipikör pass, (5,550 feet) above the high plain of the Gâvurolugu this was a low-­altitude route, clear of snow for eight months of the year.2 The hans, and perhaps the name Gâvuroluğu, ‘infidels’ passage’, show that the road along the Euphrates valley has been in use for several centuries. Long sections of an eroded roadbed between Boyalık and Kemah, the marble road east of the Gâvuroluğu, and a mile of kerbed and cobbled road over the low Pelitsirti pass (4,000 feet) east of Kemah, are almost certainly Roman; and probably late Roman are the narrow bridge abutments on a small tributary 2 miles east of Kemah. North of Erzincan, long sections of road preserved on either side of the Sipikör pass are also apparently Roman. But only the remains at Pelitsirti offer any trace of the construction techniques, the kaldırım, found between Melitene and the Sabrina (Karabudak). No milestones or inscriptions, and only a handful of coins at Hasanova, have been reported from the classical period. There is evidence for Roman occupation at Hasanova, and a probability at Ardos and Erzincan; and the ‘Italian City’, high above the caravan road at İhtik, can confidently be identified as an ancient site.

Discovering Rome’s Eastern Frontier. Timothy Bruce Mitford, Oxford University Press (2021). © Timothy Bruce Mitford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843425.003.0011

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

PER RIPAM TO ER ZINCA N A ND SATA L A  191

F ROM TH E K A R A BU DA K TO TH E KÖMÜ R ÇAY The frontier road per ripam continued straight over the ridge above the Karabudak, and descended across 2 miles of gentle slopes, all trace destroyed by agriculture, to the Kuruçay. The gravel bed, 80 metres wide and in summer almost dry, was crossed no doubt by a timber bridge resting on piers, long since swept away. Clear traces of the caravan road below Boyalık show that the ancient road climbed gradually east, past Hasanova. Between İliç and Kemah, a distance of 42 miles by the modern asfalt, newly opened and in places driven several miles north of the river, the Euphrates valley becomes rapidly deeper and more difficult. From shortly east of the mouth of the Kuruçay, opposite İliç, and as far as Gullubag,̆ the right bank is impassable. The river has carved a deep and narrow gorge, with perpendicular sides in places hundreds of feet high. East of Gullubağ the valley opens again, but there are sections of great difficulty where mountainsides, eroded and devoid of vegetation, cascade directly into the river. Here the Erzurum railway, completed towards the end of 1939, encountered fearsome engineering challenges. On the south bank, thirty-­three tunnels were cut between İliç and Kemah, with twenty-­two in the Gullubağ gorge alone. Between Kemah and Erzincan, there are not more than a dozen. The gorge and riverbed were no place for the ancient route, which, like the main frontier road over the Antitaurus, was forced to choose an easier line, climbing high above the Euphrates in a long detour to the north. Above Hasanova the road is well preserved. At  the summit above Boyalık, the road passes through extraordinary natural gates of white marble, before descending slowly into the high valley of the Kürtler Dere. Remains and engineering closely resemble the roads across the Çimen Dagl̆ arı beyond Refahiye. But between the Kürtler Dere and, beyond İhtik, the Zekri Dere, the road has largely ­vanished, the result mainly of erosion, partly, it seems, of the Russian advance in 1916. The existence of a route per ripam from Zimara to Kemah was reconstructed by Strecker, Artillerie-­Officier, Instructeur der anatolischen Armee zu Erzerum in c.1860, from several sources of conflicting accuracy: his informants two Majors, a muhtar, three peasants, and an Armenian soup seller, all evidently consulted in Erzincan. Yorke saw no sign of any ancient road between Hasanova and Kemah, a journey on horseback of eight and a half hours.3

Hasanova (Analiba) From the crossing of the Kuruçay the caravan road, known as the Padişah Yolu, ‘Sultan’s road’, climbed away from the Euphrates towards Hasanova, perched on an escarpment high above the new asfalt to Kemah and tall poplars, noisy in August with the regal song of dew-­fed cicadas; and continued up to Boyalık and the highest section of the route to Erzincan. In Ottoman times Hasanova was doubly important. Its fields were extensive enough for thousands of animals, and caravans used to stop there and set up a huge market lasting for up to a month. Moreover, it lay on the administrative boundary between the vilayets of Sivas and Erzincan, Yorke found, and ‘eleven days quarantine had been imposed on all travellers coming from the former province’. In July 1966 I had walked alone to Hasanova. But in August 2000 my Representative and I were met there by two Lants (Landrovers), with an escort of seventeen heavily

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 192 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 10.1  The frontier and caravan road climbing above Hasanova (Analiba), view west: beyond the Kuruçay, hidden in its trench, the ridge above the Karabudak (August 2000)

armed jandarma, and two belt-­fed machine-­guns. The short walk through the village to the muhtar’s house was protected by a moving oval of camouflage and automatic weapons. The population, in 1642 entirely Armenian, was once, the muhtar advised, 500 or 600, with two Armenian churches, one destroyed in 1915, the other preserved as a mosque. Yorke saw beside his path ‘some signs of an ancient site in some columns and capitals, probably of Byzantine date, lying in a ruined hut’. In several visits since 1966 I have found no trace of antiquity in the village itself. But below it, wide fields some 200 metres square stretch back from the lip of the escarpment. In them are said to lie the foundations of houses, built with hard mortar reckoned locally to be pre-­Armenian. They are likely to be Roman. Covering four hectares, this level area is more than sufficient for a cohort. There is no trace of a fort. Among a scattering of fragments of Roman roof tiles, and sporadic second- and third-­century coarse pottery, I found a single piece of Samian. Silver coins are rarely unearthed. But bronze are often dug up by mice and moles on the long slopes north-­east of the village. In 2000 a youth, Erkan Gürbüz, produced a badly worn aes found in a garden the previous day, and an illegible bronze from the fields. Yorke found Hasanova a wretched village, ‘notorious in this part of Asia Minor for its bad water’; bitter water for which it is locally still notorious. Earthenware pipes, 15 cm in diameter, are said to have been found over a length of more than a mile above the village, close to the Boyalık road, evidently drawing from the gully below Boyalık, and running down to the fields below Hasanova. They recall the ‘milk pipes’, unmistakably Roman, bringing water to the fort at Sabus, and, by tradition, to the fortress at Satala. Brant offers important confirmation of the continued use of the ancient route southwards over the Antitaurus. From Hasan O’vah, ‘situated in a very productive valley’, he

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

PER RIPAM TO ER ZINCA N A ND SATA L A  193

crossed the Euphrates, ‘rapid and wide, and not fordable’, in July 1835, by ‘the ferry of Khostu’. On the left bank were ‘some women reaping the corn, and armed men watching near to prevent the Kurds from carrying it off’. To shorten the road to Eğin, he crossed the mountain range, the western shoulder of the Munzur Dağları, from the vicinity of Bağıştaş; following, it seems, the line of the modern road. But ‘there was said to be a better, though a longer, road by keeping along the right bank of the river’. In Eğin too ‘there was stated to be a better road (to Arabkir) from Hasan O’vah, avoiding Egin and keeping at a distance from the river’. This was the route to Arabkir later followed by Taylor, along the Roman road through Pingan and along the kaldırım ­leading up to the crest of the Antitaurus. The first station east of Zimara, Analiba (Analibla in Ptolemy) was garrisoned, perhaps as early as the mid second century, by cohors IV Raetorum, which in ad 135 was present in Arrian’s army under Daphnis of Corinth. Its purpose was evidently to guard the mouth of the Kuruçay valley and the crossing of the Euphrates below İliç, destination of the route from Eğin over the shoulder of Capotes Mons; and, perhaps, to mount patrols in the north-­western corner of the Dersim. Analiba was later to become an independent bishopric: Georgius, bishop of the territory of Analibla in the region of greater Armenia, attended the Third Council of Constantinople in ad 680–1. The remains, the proximity of the Roman road, and the commanding position on the escarpment above the Kuruçay endorse Yorke’s identification with Prolemy’s Analibla (Fig. 10.1).4

Boyalık Above Hasanova, the Padişah Yolu climbed to pass below and south of Boyalık, in a mile- long section scoured out of the mountainside. The trace, particularly well preserved, varies in width from 1.5 to several metres. There are no kerbs or paving, but in style it precisely recalls eroded sections of the main frontier road in the Sarıçiçek Dağları west of Kemaliye. Boyalık, a well-­established village, has 2 mosques, 80 houses, a population of 380, and, in August 2000, 45 village guards. Here lived Colonel Ali Hasan Nürel, encountered below. There is no trace of antiquity. A mile above Boyalık the road levels off at the mouth of a fertile valley lined with stunted oak trees. At the western end is a huge and frightening natural chasm, evidently a collapsed cavern, through which water is believed to flow to Boyalık. The valley leads up to the Gâvuroluğu. In 2000 the elderly in Boyalık confirmed reports heard in Hasanova, that mule traffic bound from Hasanova to Refahiye did not travel through Kuruçay, to which, a century ago, there was no road. Instead, it followed the Sultan Murat Caddesi, the Roman road as far as the western end of the Gâvuroluğu. There mules turned north to the Kerboğaz, Diştaş and Refahiye: a route discussed in the following chapter.

Gâvuroluğu The Gâvuroluğu, ‘infidels’ passage’, a high and narrow plain 2 miles long, runs east and west at 5,200 feet. The name recalls the Gâvur Deresi, ‘infidels’ valley’, leading up from the Euphrates bank north of Ciaca; and suggests that the plain, evidently Yorke’s

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 194  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

‘well-­cultivated upland plain’, has long been in use by Christians, that is, mainly Armenians. It offers a natural passage through the mountains, to the south pocked with a maze of deep, natural pits of white marble resembling those on the heights of Harmancık Dağ above Kemaliye, virtually impassable, and falling abruptly into the Gullubağ gorge. Choked with snow in winter, the plain is flooded in spring and marshy even in August. The caravan and ancient road ran in a straight line on firmer ground along its ­southern edge. With a reduced Special Team from Kemah and a vigorous sergeant, I walked east through the Gâvuroluğu that August. The jandarma amused themselves by running uphill to catch keklik, ‘red-­legged partridge’, in their bare hands. Distant figures appeared Apache-­like on the skyline behind us, above Boyalık: shepherds, the sergeant reassured, not PKK. But in the village next day, while most of the escort, a small army, devoured tea and biscuits beside the mosque, a different version emerged. The village guards, some paid, many simply volunteers, all issued with a ‘Kalesh’ by the State, had sighted a suspicious group, and were about to shoot. Just in time, credentials were verified by radio from Erzincan. Away from main roads, it seems, village guards present a more immediate danger than the PKK. From the eastern end of the Gâvuroluğu, an ancient road, 3 or 4 metres wide, winds up through white hillsides, narrowing to 2 metres between remarkable natural gates in a ridge of white marble (Fig. 10.2), just below the pass at 5,550 feet. This is the highest point on the entire route between Zimara and Erzincan. The caravan road continued over the pass and down a shallow valley, curving gradually eastwards above the cliffs and sterile screes that plunge for hundreds of feet down to the

F ig . 10.2 Gâvuroluğu plain, marble gates: looking west towards Boyalık (out of sight), and the distant ridge rising to Armudan (August 2000)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

PER RIPAM TO ER ZINCA N A ND SATA L A  195

F ig . 10.3  Marble road, above the Kürtler Dere (August 2000)

Kürtler Dere. A mile below the pass a spring bubbles up from the mountainside, treacherous and slippery on upturned marble strata. A further mile and the cliffs draw in, for­cing the road to traverse horizontally in an artificial cutting of white marble, 2 to 3 metres wide and 1,000 metres long (Figs. 10.3, 10.4). This extraordinary roadbed, recalling the narrower, rock-­cut trench below the summit of Şakşak Dağ in the Taurus, is unquestionably Roman. Further to the east a few brief sections survive, 3 metres wide, but the road is largely lost in marshy ground, and was almost obliterated in the devastating landslides that carried Nezgep away in the 1939 earthquake. This was the Turkish village of fifty houses, reached by Yorke in three hours and forty minutes from Hasanova. The muhtar of Atma, six houses perched 1,200 feet above the Kürtler Dere, confirmed in 2003 that there had once been a large han at Nezgep. His brother Mehmet, aged 77, recalled caravans of five, ten, or twenty camels descending from it two or three times a week, to cross the Kürtler Dere and climb via Kuru Köprü to Şikar Komları and Kemah. Nezgep once looked northwards over the Kürtler Dere. Rebuilt on safer ground, the village now commands a spectacular view in the opposite direction, towards the Euphrates valley and the Munzur Dağları. Descending slowly eastwards across undulating ridges, the caravan and Roman road turned north-­east above Helameti, perched on a high promontory overlooking the Kürtler Dere far below, and dropped straight down the mountainside for half a mile towards its forlorn cemetery. By 2000, Helameti itself had started to slide downhill, and had been dismantled. Below the cemetery a single long zigzag survives. There were probably others. The caravan road continued very steeply down the mountainside, now fractured by landslides as though with a giant plough, to  a  low, flatter, ridge, and passed through a grove of oak trees, leaving a clear trace 4.9 metres wide, down to the bed of the Kürtler Dere.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 196  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 10.4  Marble Road and Special Team, above the Kürtler Dere (August 2000)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

PER RIPAM TO ER ZINCA N A ND SATA L A  197

An old man, returned from Istanbul to spend the summer months in his fields, explained in October 1989 that Helameti had been abandoned by all but one of its inhabitants. In summer, he recalled, westbound caravans followed the ‘City of Baghdad road’ through Helameti and up to the Gâvuroluğu, to reach Boyalık in three hours.

Kürtler Dere The Kürtler Dere is the most difficult obstacle between Zimara and Erzincan, and presents one of the most formidable engineering challenges on the entire frontier. Fed from the frightening ridge and pinnacles above Diştaş and the Kerboğaz, the Kürtler Dere has cut an eroded trench nearly 1,000 feet deep between the opposing heights of the Gâvuroluğu and İhtik. Bordered on the west and south by treacherous mountainsides, lined with cliffs and screes and scoured by landslides, it allows no stable descent from the Gâvuroluğu. Its eastern bank is squeezed below the İhtik escarpment, cliffs collapsing on to steep screes eroded by gullies, across which the eastbound caravan road to Kemah must climb out of the valley. Below the escarpment, the Kürtler Dere is forced in a long curve to the south, and has carved a deep gorge virtually down to the level of the Euphrates itself, and at least 1,000 feet below the resited Nezgep. Below Helameti and the oak trees, the ancient road crossed the narrow river, almost dry in August, but raging in winter. The crumbling shale banks preserve no trace of bridge abutments. The road followed the left bank downstream for a mile to inviting gardens, a narrow oasis of walnut trees, vines, and small fields. Through these small fields was said to have passed the Baghdad or Caravan Road. Up a side ravine some camels used to climb steeply up to Korkup and İhtik, two hours above. Ten minutes below the gardens, traces of the caravan road could be seen in August 1987, running along a flat shelf on the left bank of the Kürtler Dere. Camels were remembered, thirty years before. Climbing from the bed of the Kürtler Dere, the caravan road curved around the base of the cliffs below İhtik, and after an hour of steep and dangerous upward traverse reached the bridge marked as ‘stone piers, wood’ on Yorke’s map. Below İhtik, the asfalt, a huge modern road from Kemah, was being carved to the west. Half way down to the Kürtler Dere the lead machinery reached Yorke’s bridge ten days before me, and had just destroyed it (Fig. 10.5). The bulldozer driver and a bystander drew sketches of a bridge, Kuru Köprü, ‘dry bridge’, across a narrow, dry ravine still filled with its remains. Neither sketch suggested an arch. A pile of long beams salvaged from the bridge, whether in original or in repair, revealed the structure. The abutments, about 2 metres wide and 3 metres high, were said to have been built with fine ashlar blocks up to 70 cm long, without tooled edges. The span was 5 or 6 metres. Certainly used by caravans, the bridge was probably Ottoman. The position suggests a Roman predecessor. No photographs or records had been taken.

Sultan Hamid Bridge In the vicinity of İhtik the Russian advance was halted, not least by the terrain, in 1916. Colonel Ali Hasan Nürel recounted in Boyalık in October 1984 how, as a boy, he had carried shells to the front each morning across a fine stone bridge 2 kilometres from Şikar Komları. He knew it as Sultan Hamid Köprüsü, and it was 30 metres high, 15 metres

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 198  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 10.5  Kürtler Dere: destruction of the Sultan Hamid bridge (August 1987)

long, and 8 metres wide, over a river below Atma. This, for there was no other across the lower Kürtler Dere, was Yorke’s bridge, magnified by the colonel in childhood memory, as he struggled uphill with shells for the Russian front. Climbing steeply, the caravan road passed before Şikar Komları, a desolate, half-­abandoned hamlet at the base of the savage red cliffs below İhtik.

İhtik, the ‘Italian City’ (Sinervas) On the very lip of the escarpment high above the Kürtler Dere, and a day’s journey from Hasanova, İhtik (5,360 feet) stands on the southern rim of an extraordinary hanging plain, rich and fertile. Far above reared Vank Dağ (7,875 feet), perhaps Dasteira: a vicious peak surrounded by precipices and radial gorges, and Gülan Dağ, feared by the jandarma as the ultimate, impenetrable refuge of PKK groups crossing the Euphrates from the Dersim. An ancient church, now in ruins, stood on a mound surrounded by coarse red pottery, and tile fragments similar to Roman (Fig. 10.6); and the formless remains of what is known as the ‘Italian City’ are spread all around and above it for hundreds of metres. In sight of the caravan road descending far to the west from the Gâvuroluğu, and to the east crossing the saddle below Marik Dağ, the mound overlooks the Euphrates. Half a mile above, a higher settlement, a ‘Greek Palace’, Rumsaray, is now abandoned. Several other churches were said to have stood in sight of each other, in and around the plain. Evidently destroyed in 1915, these are remarkable survivals of folk memory. Sinervas should, it seems, be located at the ‘Italian City’. The ancient name, remains, and position conspicuously recall Strabo’s description of Sinoria, protected by ravines and cliffs on all sides, and standing on a mountain called

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

PER RIPAM TO ER ZINCA N A ND SATA L A  199

F ig . 10.6  İhtik, the ‘Italian City’: ruined church, and, beyond right, Rumsaray (October 1989)

Dasteira in Acilisene, close to the Euphrates: the important fortress and immensely rich treasury in which, in the furthest part of his kingdom, Mithridates took refuge from Pompey in 66 bc, before his flight to Armenia and the Crimea; and which was captured, with huge underground vaults of treasure, by Manlius Priscus during the winter of 65/64 bc. The plain at İhtik was certainly large enough to support the king and his 3,000 men. Well watered, surrounded by cliffs and almost impregnable, the position was eminently suitable for a last stand, and for speedy flight into Armenia.5 The Italian City was probably approached in antiquity from the west via Korkup, from the ancient road running down the bed of the Kürtler Dere; and from the east by the deep ravine carrying a dangerous track through cliffs, frightening in 2006 with holes ready charged with wires and dynamite, climbing steeply up from Şikar Komları. Behind the plain a chaotic jumble of fractured, volcanic peaks rises to Diştaş Tepe (7,890 feet), Gülan Dağ, and Kerz Dağ (6,400 feet). East of the Greek Palace, the mountainsides are laced with long walls of granite and marble strata tipped on end, like the skeletons of immense fish. The frontier road was forced instead to skirt around the base of these mountains and continue, closer to the Euphrates, towards Kemah. Below İhtik unfolds an eroded maze of low hills, salt pans, and rocky valleys crumpled below the volcanic escarpment, red and treeless, that fringes Kerz Dağ. Not even the line of the ancient road can be recovered, until, at the mouth of a short gorge of the Zekri Dere, 2 miles upstream from the Euphrates, a clearly preserved section climbs in sharp zigzags. It traverses steep hillsides, just below the southern rim of the long valley climbing gradually eastwards, to a low summit below the jagged peak of Marik Dağ (6,400 feet). In sight of Kemah I was caught, like Yorke, in a violent thunderstorm. From this last summit, the caravan road ran down the long ridge that falls gradually between the modern road and the Euphrates. Traces survive intermittently for 3 miles. The road vanishes again as it approaches the Kömür Çay, the large tributary which flows into the Euphrates just above Kemah.

4

14

3

Ç.

CARSAGA ?

.

r mü Kö

2

19

El m

al

ıÇ

19

CHARAX ? CARSAGA

B 0

0

CA

Acemoğlu Kp.

C

R AT E S

16

NS

D

)(

Pelitsirti Gd.

MO ES

PH

T

EU

PO

20

ARAURACA ?

10 km

5 miles

E

SUISA

15  200 

1

A

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

. Gd ret a Ziy

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

PER RIPAM TO ER ZINCA N A ND SATA L A  201

K EM A H Situated on the left bank, in the deep gorge of the Euphrates, Kemakh, Maunsell reported, ‘is not a centre of routes, and none of this country is passable for wheels . . . . The route along the Frat valley has not yet been improved into a cart road, although a chaussée was begun some years ago and finished for a short distance. . . . A fairly easy track, but not passable for wheels, leads through Kuruchai to Zara.’ This was the Post Road followed by Brant in 1835, crossing mountains high above the Savaşgediği pass. ‘Another easy mule track leads up the valley of the Kumur Chai to Gerjanis (Rufaie, now Refahiye). These routes are generally used in winter in going from Erzingan to Sivas when the Chardaklu Bel is closed with snow.’ In 1835 Kemakh contained 400 Turkish and about 30 Armenian houses. Brant found it ‘a singular place: an elevated portion of the town is within a wall of very ancient structure, but commanded by mountains rising close to it. The remainder is situated on a slope amidst gardens ascending from the river’s banks.’ There Taylor saw numerous ­relics of antiquity, but in a careful and detailed description reported nothing older than a gate, which he presumed Byzantine, blocking access to the upper town. Entertained by the kaymakam, Burnaby stayed in Kemah in January 1877. ‘A high rock . . . stands immediately behind the town . . . about 500 feet in height, and a ruined citadel on the summit towers above the Euphrates and the town.’ There were 800 houses or about 4,000 inhabitants, and the town had been visited by ‘an English traveller [presumably Taylor] about five years previous’. Hogarth and Yorke stayed for two nights. Kemah was then a small town of about 1,500 houses ‘clustered around a precipitous rock which rises close to the left bank of the river, and on which there are remains of what must once have been an impregnable fortress. . . . The town must have been one of the strongest in the ancient world, built as it is entirely on the broad top of an isolated crag, rising sheer on all sides two hundred feet. No approach is possible except by zigzags or steps cut in the face of the rock.’ Hogarth searched in vain for remains of the Byzantine period. But in the Gülabi Bey Cami, built in 1454 in the centre of the town, nine of the tall wooden columns supporting the roof are supported on Byzantine column bases of white limestone. There is no evidence that the site was occupied during the early centuries following the establishment of Vespasian’s frontier; of which, on the further bank of the Euphrates, it can have formed no integrated part. I spent a busy night in November 1984 in the old karakol in the centre of Kemah. The jandarma have since been relocated to a massive new building high above the eastern approaches to the town. In full view, the escarpment on the far side of the Euphrates has become an uncomfortable place. A century ago the district of Kemah contained, mainly on the right bank of the Euphrates, eighty-­six villages with 3,076 houses. The inhabitants, Brant reported, ‘live by cultivating the neighbouring valleys, and by transporting wood to Keban Ma’den. There is sufficient water in most parts of the river to navigate it with boats.’

◀  M ap 15  Armenia Minor: per ripam from Kemah to Suisa (Erzincan), and towards Haris (Melik Şerif)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 202  A

17

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER B

18

19

C

D

20

16

1

Süvari Gd. )( Boğazvankomu Gd.

)(

14

C

NS MO S E O T )( Ziyaret Gd. AP

Katır Gd. )(

Ovacık Ziyaret

Mu

nz

2

ur

Darboğaz Su

13

Ergân

PYXU R A T E

İn

Tunceli

S

12 Pulur Aşvan

? Baleeshur ARSA NIAS

3

Akhor Kesrik

11

RHANDEIA ? Haraba ARSAMOSATA ?

Ergani Gd. )(

4 0

7

10

0

25 miles 50 km

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

PER RIPAM TO ER ZINCA N A ND SATA L A  203

Brant entered and quitted Kemakh ‘by a bridge of wood thrown over a deep chasm in the mountain through which the river [the Euphrates] has forced its way’. It was perhaps replaced by Taylor’s ‘fine modern wooden bridge’, the narrow wooden bridge at the eastern end of the gorge below the town; mentioned by Burnaby and Yorke, and described in 1911 by Molyneux-­Seel as ‘a picturesque log bridge constructed on the cantilever principle, the engineer being one of the local inhabitants’. It may have been constructed on the rock-­cut foundations, visible beside the modern, of a much older bridge, some 37 metres long: abutments supporting a timber superstructure, at the eastern end of the supposed route, later the Silk Road, which crossed the Euphrates at Kemaliye. A Roman predecessor, if one existed, no doubt resembled the longer Venk bridge at Kemaliye.

Routes through the Dersim Tracks led south from Kemah to the Murat and Harput. In summer, Maunsell reported, ‘a mountain track passing at a great elevation—the Ziyaret pass [9,200 feet]—leads over into Ovajik in Dersim, and forms the route by which the military occupation of that place is maintained’. North of Ovacik in September 1866 Taylor witnessed the violence of the Dersim, ‘a regular musketry fusillade’ between rival Kizzilbash tribes, politely suspended to allow him to pass unscathed; and recalled that the high road from the Black Sea to Harput and Diyarbekir used to pass through Pertek, beside the Murat. There are tantalizing glimpses of earlier activity. Two hours south of Hozat he sighted between Eyrgan and Een ‘a ravine . . . spanned by an old Roman viaduct’: evidently a predecessor, probably Byzantine, of the cart road from Ovacik and Hozat, via Pertek, to Harput. A winter route, Strecker reported, broadly followed the left bank of the Euphrates, and climbed over the western shoulder of the Munzur Dağları by the Hostabeli pass, along the Silk Road to Eğin.6

Ermelik (? Charax) Half way between Analiba at Hasanova, and Suisa at Erzincan, the ripa by the mouth of the Kömür Çay, opposite Kemah, was a position of prime importance. At Çornecil, 5 miles north of Kemah, the Kömür Çay flows from a cliff-­lined gorge. To avoid it, an ancient road, later the caravan road to Refahiye, climbed steeply up from the riverbed, and emerged through a cleft on to the fertile, elevated plain of Ermelik, ‘soldier saint’. On the very edge of the plain the road is flanked by a Selcuk cemetery, and its deeply eroded track, continuing northwards for half a mile, attests its constant use until the modern road was blasted through the gorge below. At around 5,000 feet, rather lower than İhtik, the plain is nearly 2 miles square, and slopes gently up from the west. Its rich fields and orchards support half a dozen villages. The large village of Ermelik lies a mile above and east of the caravan road, on ground rising towards the foothills of Üçkardeş Tepe (9,050

◀  M ap 16  Dersim (from GSGS 2555, Asia 1:1,000,000 (North J. 37, Erzurum), based on MDR 1/1701, revised and reprinted by 512 Fd. Survey Coy, RE, M(iddle) E(ast), Aug. 1942)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 204 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

feet), below Kara Dağ (9,950 feet). High in these mountains an important Armenian church is still much visited by pilgrims from Kuruçay, and from as far away as Sivas. Ermelik is a nervous place. In October 1989 Ahmet Demirtaş and I spoke to people gathered in the village centre, and I was denounced by a bystander, out of place in a city suit. If not a treasure hunter, he told the villagers, I must be an Armenian researcher. As we left, a squad of jandarma came running up the hill, brandishing sub-­machine guns, and surrounded our minibus. Their sergeant waved his revolver at Ahmet, and we were bundled off to the old karakol, a few huts on a hilltop surrounded by barbed wire, above the only approach to Ermelik. He had arrested not a terrorist, but a colleague and a friend. The man, he explained, was a police informer. There was much embarrassment and laughter, and we were escorted proudly back for lunch with the jandarma commander. There was good reason for local nervousness. The fifteen Armenian towns and villages of the Kemah district, which included İhtik, Sag,̆ Ermelik, and Ardos, had been attacked in early June 1915 by squadrons of irregulars some 200 strong; and their populations, in all about 6,400, were massacred where they were found, amid the most ghastly horrors: attested in close sight of Kemah itself by the shattered ruins of a large church, and of a smaller church and a chapel, conspicuous on a rocky outcrop above Sag,̆ on the left bank of the Kömür Çay (Figs. 10.7, 10.8). Once a prosperous Armenian town set, like Armudan and İhtik, in a fertile upland plain, Ermelik was no doubt one of Ptolemy’s cities inland from the Euphrates and among the mountains: perhaps, above the Kerz gorge, Charax.

Sağ (? Carsaga) Five hours east of İhtik, Sağ, now known as Kömür Köy, occupies an ancient and im­port­ ant site close to the Euphrates, amid fields strewn with a mass of pottery, mainly Selcuk,

F ig . 10.7 Sağ (? Carsaga), and, above, track leading up to ruined church, view south-­east (October 1989)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

PER RIPAM TO ER ZINCA N A ND SATA L A  205

F ig . 10.8  Ruined church above Sağ, and Ahmet Demirtaş (October 1989)

some much older, perhaps Bronze Age. The position is conspicuously suitable for one of the Antonine stations per ripam. The name itself may preserve part of Carsaga. At Monkare, a place-­name meaningless in Turkish, perhaps, if ‘mont carré’, an echo of three Crusaders captured in ad 1122 by the Emir Balak and imprisoned at Harput, the remains of an oval structure 10 metres long, 8 metres wide, and 1 metre high stand on the tip of a promontory high above the Kerz gorge, with a commanding view south to Kemah. Visited in August 2000 with the jandarma commander and a Special Team from the new karakol, this was evidently a watch tower or signal station. From it the valley of the Kömür Çay can be seen curving north-­westwards towards Çengerli. Local memory, and vestiges of the caravan and Salt roads, show that an ancient route followed this valley to Melik Şerif, and continued to Nicopolis. When snow in the high Çimen Dağları closed the direct road from Satala, the Kömür Çay offered a low-­level alternative, via Erzincan and the Euphrates valley.7 F ROM TH E KÖMÜ R ÇAY TO ER ZI NCA N Between Kemah and Erzincan a huge amphitheatre of peaks rises to Kara Dağ (9,950 feet), an almost impassable wall, contorted like crumpled paper, with rock outcrops and bare slopes stained red and grey, yellow and black by bands of minerals. All exit to the north was blocked, and traffic was obliged to pass along the Euphrates valley. It carried

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 206 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

a strategic route of particular importance. The river itself was shallow and in most places readily crossed: fordable even, Brant noted, in one or two places. Continuing eastward from Kemah, Taylor followed a road inland from the Euphrates, winding across the escarpment and the low spurs of Kara Dağ, through a country devoid of any cultivation. Along the right bank, in the main low, flat, and fertile, the intermittent remains of an ancient road can be traced all the way to the infamous Kemah boğazı, which channels access to the south-­west corner of the plain of Erzincan. The overall distance from Kemah to Eski Erzincan is about 35 miles. Beside the Euphrates in January 1877 Burnaby admired hundreds of cattle and sheep grazing on rich pasture lands, and green fields said in summer to be rich in corn and barley. He reached Erzincan in eleven hours, his horses showing ‘symptoms of being thoroughly exhausted’ by the time he neared the city. Hogarth covered the same distance in two days, about ten hours on horseback, following ‘an easy path which keeps closely to the right bank’ of the Euphrates; the latter generally between 80 and 100 yards broad, yellow in colour in early June, and flowing at about 6 knots. He ‘met with few human habitations, except khans, in the river valley’, and ‘saw no sign of any old road or other antiquities’.8 The Kömür Çay, towards its mouth about 20 metres wide and half a metre deep in November, flows swiftly in the centre of a much broader flood bed of stones and gravel. Gardens extend along its western side. Neither bank offers solid foundations for a bridge. Hogarth crossed by a ford, of which a treacherous successor existed as recently as 1984. Of an ancient crossing there is no trace. There was probably a bridge of timber supported on piers, swept away, or removed for reuse in Kemah during the Selcuk period. Timber was plentiful, floated down from the mountains by the Kömür Çay. Two miles east of the Kömür Çay, the caravan road crossed a gully, dry in November, by a ruined bridge, Köprü İbrahim, apparently late Roman. The western abutment is well preserved, and traces on the eastern bank suggest a road width of nearly 3 metres, a single span of 5 metres, and an arch height of about 4.50. Seven miles east of Kemah, a trace of a very old road passes over the base of the promontory from which the arched, late Ottoman Acemoğlu bridge crosses to the left bank of the Euphrates. This was the scene of a dreadful accident in April 1996. A truck skidded through the parapet, and fourteen jandarma were drowned. Seven bodies, it was said, were never recovered. East of the promontory are sporadic remains of an ancient road. Close west of Alp Köy, five ashlar courses and the rubble core of a substantial bridge abutment, 5.50 metres wide, stand on the east bank of a small stream. No trace of an arch survives. The streambed has been scoured out, leaving a scattering of rounded blocks suggestive of a central pier. The western abutment has been swept away. The superstructure was probably wooden. The foundation courses and the overall width suggest that the bridge was originally Roman, reused in Selcuk or Ottoman times by the caravan road. Alp Köy, a Sunni village, once of about 200 houses, many now abandoned, lies among rich gardens nearly a mile square, with fruit and vegetables of every type, about 15 miles east of Kemah. Water is now piped from a river some distance to the east. On the ridge to the east are traces of collapsed walls, not ashlar, about 100 metres square and of uncertain date, surrounding the flat summit of a promontory 300 feet above the Euphrates, with commanding views up and down the river. On a shelf below are trenches and firing positions from 1916, and the ruins of Hanarde, a small han

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

PER RIPAM TO ER ZINCA N A ND SATA L A  207

21 metres long by 11 metres wide, lie between the modern road and the railway. The han and memories at Alp köy confirm the passage of the caravan road. Between the forts of Carsaga and Suisa, positioned respectively opposite Kemah to guard the valley of the Kömür Çay, and at Eski Erzincan to control access to the plain, the north bank of the Euphrates, vulnerable and remote from reinforcement, demanded an intermediate garrison in Roman times, as now. The 1946 Turkish Army map marks a karakol on either side of Alp station. Sixty years later, two remained for the same purpose: a large barracks sited at the eastern edge of Alp Köy, and a road block near Dumanlı station close to the Kemah boğazı, to control traffic along the Euphrates valley. The newly elected muhtar of Alp Köy was suspicious in June 2004, and the task of the jandarma was real. In September1988 several of Ahmet’s colleagues had been gunned down in a PKK ambush near the village.

Ardos (Arauraca) Between Carsaga and Suisa, the fort at Arauraca is well documented. St Eustratius was born in the small town of the Arauracans, placed in the account of his martyrdom at two days’ march from Satala on the road, the winter road to Nicopolis, and close to a castrum. A cohort was present: in it Eustratius, a distinguished soldier, had served as a clerk for twenty-­seven years. Ordered by Diocletian to conduct a persecution among the garrisons of the frontier in c. ad 303, Lysias, the dux Armeniae at Satala, reached the fort near Arauraca in two days, with an army, and summoned Eustratius. Destined with four companions to become the Five Martyrs of Armenia, celebrated on 13 December, Eustratius deposited his official belt in the church at Arauraca. The Saints’ remains were to be buried there, in a place called Analibozora. Eustratius’ companion Mardarius and his wife spoke Armenian. The garrison in the Notitia Dignitatum was a large, part-­ mounted auxiliary regiment with foot archers, cohors miliaria Bosporiana. It is attested as I Bosporiana and I Bosporanorum in the eastern provinces from the time of Nero, under whom a prefect dedicated an inscription to Rutilius Gallicus, once governor of Galatia (ad  56–62), perhaps embracing Cappadocia during Corbulo’s wars, and was present under Lamprocles in Arrian’s army in ad 135. Elevated in the ninth century to a suffragan bishopric of Kemah, Arauraca was destroyed, Cumont supposed, by the Selcuks.9 The broad location of fort and bishopric is clear. The exceptionally powerful garrison, the administrative proximity of Kemah, and the onset of winter show that Arauraca lay close to the road beside the Euphrates: the only route from Satala open throughout the year to Nicopolis, when snow closed the direct route over the Çimen Dağları. Below Ardos, some 14 miles from Erzincan Kalesi, a wide, fan-­shaped bowl, bisected by a flood torrent, slopes down towards the Euphrates. The base is about a mile across, arid and strewn with boulders. At the narrow top, gently sloping fields and orchards, about 500 metres long and 200 metres wide, are overlooked by the ruined village of lower Ardos, recently abandoned; and are overshadowed to the east by the spectacular cliffs of Kalecik Tepe, ‘fort hill’, crowned with strata upturned in battlements and towers. About 500 feet above the ruined village, middle Ardos, known locally as ‘Ardosh’, lies in the foothills of Kara Dağ. Riding east from Kemah in September 1866, Taylor reached Ardose in five and a half hours, fifteen minutes uphill from the road to Erzincan. Beside it a round, shallow lake, 60 metres across, is ringed with rushes and swamps, mosquito-­ridden, and noisy with

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 208 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

karabatak, ‘smew ducks’. Once Armenian, there are now forty houses, all but a few occupied only in summer. They stand above the lake to the east, with poor fields and few animals.

Analibozora (? The Tears of St Eustratius) In August 2000, Timur Gıra, aged 73, led me uphill for half a mile from middle Ardos, to the upper lake, 200 metres in diameter, reported by Taylor. Fed by huge springs pouring out of Kırmızı Dağ, Büyük Göl, ‘big lake’, is full of roach, frogs, snakes, mosquitoes, and red-­headed ducks (Fig. 10.9). Beside is a huge, ashlar-­built cistern, 70 metres long and 20 metres wide, shaded by ancient willows and alive with bee-­eaters and hoopoes; and beyond it a round pool, 30 metres across, fed by innumerable springs and surrounded by the ruins of houses. Ranged along the low containing ridge on the south side are more ruins, overlooking the lake: about seventy houses said once to be Armenian, reoccupied after 1915, and abandoned before 1939. Here, in a garden at Ardose, Taylor pitched his tents, close to ‘a diminutive mountain lake, in the centre of an upland hollow surrounded by high hills. . . . Its margin was covered with gardens, and houses . . . The inhabitants, all Muslims, were some of them excellent marksmen, never failing to hit the wild fowl sailing on the lake with a single bullet 200 yards off, from the clumsy-­looking rifles they carried.’ Taylor’s description, but not the inhabitants, suggests the upper, larger lake. This, rather than the middle and lower villages, used to be Ardos.

F ig . 10.9  Above Ardos, view north: the upper lake (Analibozora (?)), below Kara Dağ; the ­foreground once clustered with Armenian houses (August 2006)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

PER RIPAM TO ER ZINCA N A ND SATA L A  209

At the eastern end of the ridge, and separated by a strange whaleback of stones some 150 metres long and 4.5 metres high, is an ancient cemetery, once evidently Armenian. But an official sign proclaims that an elaborately worked tombstone preserves the cultural traditions of the Akkoyunlu: Uzun Hasan, ally of the Comneni of Trebizond, ruled Erzincan from ad 1455 until his defeat by Mehmet II, the Conqueror, in the battle of Otlukbeli in 1473. This hidden crater lake, of extreme depth, is an extraordinary place, a geological curiosity unique on the eastern frontier. A ziyaret, a place once of Armenian pilgrimage and now a popular picnic destination for families from Erzincan, it has attracted Christian settlement and important Christian and Muslim burial for many centuries. Timur knew of churches among the foothills of Kara Dağ north of the lake: one was remembered as Meryemana, ‘Mother Mary’, another known as the ‘Italian church’, about 3 miles from lower Ardos, was 700 years old. The upper lake and ancient burial ground are a compelling candidate for the site of Analibozora. The word appears to be Greek, a combination of elements suggesting height, tears, and, perhaps, purity: it may be an indulgence to associate these with the many springs that feed the mysterious upper lake. They, the cistern, and the pool suggest a possible identification with Phreata, ‘cisterns’, captured with adjacent Suisa by Sapor in c. ad 256. In August 2006 Timur and his friends were sitting below poplars in middle Ardos. Engrossed in a game of cards, he despatched his wife, an unusual choice for a guide, to take me to the site of a vanished han, once standing in sloping fields, devoid of any  trace of antiquity, on the right bank of the torrent, 300 metres below lower Ardos, and the same distance above the asfalt. Among these fields are probably to be sought the fort and bishopric of Arauraca, preserved in part, it seems, in the name Ardos.10 Across the fan-­shaped flood plain below lower Ardos, there is no trace of the ancient or caravan roads. But 300 metres south of the asfalt and the Pelitsirti pass (4,000 feet), a narrow promontory juts into the Euphrates. Over it climbs a finely preserved section, nearly a mile long, of an ancient road known locally as the Kervan Yolu, the ‘caravan road’. In style and construction unmistakably Roman, the roadbed is 4 to 5 metres wide, and preserves traces of cobbling, kerbs, and a narrow central spine. From the west, cobbled throughout, it can be followed uphill for more than half a mile, at a uniform gradient of 1 : 9. Curving over the ridge and marked by a 20-­metre length of spine, the road descends at the same gradient—straight at first and then in zigzags over the mouth of the railway tunnel beneath the promontory—to disappear at its eastern base, about 100 metres from the Euphrates. The roadbed resembles the fine section of Roman road descending from the Taurus into the Malatya plain. Local memory recalled mules and horses passing along it, en route from Kemah to Erzincan. A mile and a half east of the Pelitsirti promontory, a side road leads north to Sürerek, a pretty village enclosed in a small triangular plain, well-­watered, at the head of a short, deep valley below the eastern slopes of Kalecik Tepe and the extraordinary, contorted strata that lie in coloured belts on Kuşak Tepe, ‘girdle hill’. There was said to have been a church. Sürerek is no site for a fort. But on either side of the valley mouth further sections of the ancient road are clearly preserved. Three miles further east, the modern road passes the small karakol at Dumanlı to enter the Kemah boğazı, a narrow defile beside the Euphrates. On the prominent hill above are trench systems from 1916.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 210  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Before the building of the railway, the Ottoman caravan road clearly followed the line of the Roman road. As at Zeugma, and below Samosata and the Atatürk dam, it was cut out of the cliff face, so close above the river that in June 1915 Armenian mothers deported from Erzincan were able to throw their children into the Euphrates. The modern road, which effaced the Ottoman, was recently the scene of lesser tragedy. The popular young Kaymakam of İliç, driving back at night from Erzincan with his wife, disappeared early in June 2003. After a search of several days their bodies were retrieved many miles downriver.11 From the Kemah boğazı the road entered the south-­west corner of the plain of Erzincan, and passed below Beş Saray, ‘Five Palaces’. From this point a road seems to have led north by east across the plain, directly towards the Bekçi Kasabası, ‘watchman’s hut’, conspicuous on the heights above Vazgirt, and onwards to the Sipikör pass. All trace is lost among wheat fields stretching towards the asfalt from Sivas. But 3 miles from Beş Saray and 2 miles south of the asfalt, an old and important road, continuing in the Kavakyolu, ‘poplar road’, and flanked by four new mosques, can be presumed to preserve the line of the caravan road for about 5 miles. It leads towards Gâvurun Bağı, ‘Infidel’s Vineyard’. Seen from the Bekci Kasabası, high above the northern edge of the plain, this single transverse road stands out clearly against the axis, roughly parallel with the Euphrates, of the grid pattern in which the city of Erzincan is laid out. ER ZI NCA N A N D TH E PL A I N The plain of Erzincan, the ancient Acilisene, 22 miles long and 6 miles wide, is bordered to the south by the low and exposed bank of the Euphrates, and framed by the white and grey marble wall of the Munzur Dağları, rising 6,000 feet almost directly from the river. To the north looms the huge, grey barrier of the Keşiş Dağları, culminating steeply in Keşiş Tepe (11,640 feet). The name of the mountain, Molyneux-­Seel affirms, evidently recalls the Armenian priest, Akh Mrtousa Keshish, who recovered from his murderers the head of Hussein, son of Ali and grandson of the prophet, severed at the Battle of Karbala in ad 680. Most of the inhabitants of the mountain villages surrounding Erzincan are kızılbaş, Alevi Kurds. The plain lies at an altitude of about 3,970 feet, some 2,000 feet lower than Satala. The climate is mild in spring and autumn, temperate and never severe in winter, and very hot in July and August. But, Strecker reported, it was unhealthy. Fevers and eye diseases were endemic, caused mainly by dust stirred up in violent winds, and by lukewarm drinking water piped from the mountains, for wells in the plain were saline. From June until the end of September, the temperature reached 30–38° Celsius in the shade, but for a few weeks in winter, mainly in January, it fell to 10–14° below freezing. In the mountain villages the air was fresher and more healthy. At the time of Brant’s visit in July 1835, the harvest was ready. The fields bore the most abundant crops he had witnessed anywhere in Asia Minor: the wheat, said to render twelvefold, heavy, and the straw much longer than in the Erzerum plain. The centre of the plain afforded pasture to a great number of mares, cows, and sheep. Extensive gardens around the villages at the base of the mountains on the northern side of the plain supplied fruit, including grapes and melons, in great abundance to districts as far away as Erzerum, Bayburt, and Gümüşhane.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

PER RIPAM TO ER ZINCA N A ND SATA L A  211

During Taylor’s visit in 1866, as today, the plain was extremely fertile: The fine plain slopes gently from north to south, acting as a kind of vast drain for the waters coming from the mountains at the north end and two sides, thus conveying them to the Kara Su (Euphrates). Otherwise it is a perfect level, free from stone or elevation of any kind, but some artificial mounds at the east corner. The soil is rich, producing grain, cotton, fruits, and melons in profusion. The town and villages contain, exclusive of the military, 12,000 houses, of which 2000 are Christian.

By the tenth century a fortress had been established, no doubt the predecessor of the Selcuk structures in Erzincan Kalesi, and the bishop had been elevated to the rank of metropolitan. A Persian writer, quoted by Blau (in Strecker), stated that Erzincan, rebuilt by the Selcuk Sultan Alaeddin Keykubad, had 10,000 houses in c. ad 1350, with beautiful market places, kiosks, caravanserais, Dervish tekkes, coffee houses, mosques, pure water, and healthy air. But passing through Arsengan in 1471, Barbaro reported ‘è stata gran città, ma di presente per la maggior parte è distrutta’. Across the Euphrates a bridge of seventeen arches ‘di pietra cotta’, evidently bricks, carried the roads, by Pülümür and over the Munzur Dağları by the Mercan pass, through the Dersim to Harput. The Ottoman bridge over the Euphrates was 56 metres wide. A sixteenth-­century miniature depicts a rectangular walled city extending equally on both banks of the river. It was largely destroyed by earthquakes in 1784 and 1939. Because of its great strategic significance, Erzincan was the Headquarters of the Fourth Army Corps during the visits of Yorke and Cumont: ‘the principal military outpost against Russia’, a rearward base to support Ottoman interests in the Caucasus, and a centre from which to extend security over an area largely populated by Kurds. From 1923 until the 1939 earthquake, and again in 1967, Erzincan became the Headquarters of the Turkish Third Army. The northern side of the city is now a vast barracks and ­training area.12 The plain was controlled by Pompey in 66 bc to secure his supplies. Here, at Eriza, had been the rich and unprotected sanctuary of Anaitis, with a golden statue. The sanctuary was sacked by Antony in 34 bc. Far from expiring, eyes and limbs seized by the numen, the veteran who had first violated the sanctuary, and had stolen the sacred statue of the goddess, used the proceeds to entertain Augustus in Bononia (Bologna). The cult had recovered by the time of Strabo. The slaves and slave girls were unremarkable, but the most distinguished Armenians used to give their daughters to the goddess before marriage. Known to Pliny as Anaetica regio, the plain invited cultivation as a granary for the legion at Satala. From the sanctuary must have been looted the bronze statue of Anaitis, displayed in the legionary fortress at Satala. The cult was abolished in the third century by St Gregory, the Illuminator, whose relics, with those of St Nicholas and a piece of the Ark, were placed in an important Armenian monastery, Surp Krikor Lusarovich, built over his tomb near Miğisi, on the direct road to Pülümür, in the hills 11 miles south-­east of Erzincan. Yorke saw no traces of antiquity. Inscriptions were mentioned to Taylor. He saw none. Only two, Christian and in Greek, are known, both dating perhaps from the sixth century: a sandstone box, which contained relics of the Four Martyrs, torn to pieces by Pagans, Burnaby records, near Sivas, and which mentions a bishop; and eight fragments of a mosaic pavement, probably removed from Satala.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 212  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

The 1939 Earthquake With a population reported to Yorke of 30,000 to 35,000, Eski Erzincan, south of the railway and closer than the modern city to the Euphrates, was destroyed by the1939 earthquake, and abandoned. The earthquake occurred at 2 a.m. on 27 December, during a blizzard when the temperature was only 2° Fahrenheit (minus 17° Celsius). The first shocks were the most violent, giving no time for the population to escape from their crumbling houses. Damage was widespread and catastrophic. The epicentre, somewhere in the Erzincan depression itself, set up stresses in the fault-­shattered zone which extends to the Black Sea coast. Blocks moved on most of the known faults, and new faults were formed. The devastated area covered 15,000 square miles of eastern Pontus and Armenia Minor, in a great arc extending from the Black Sea coast between Samsun and Rize, and embracing Sivas and Erzincan. Erzincan lost 80 per cent of its population, then 16,000 inhabitants carrying on a brisk trade in silk, cotton, and copper, and the town itself was reduced to ruins. Almost the only buildings to escape were the German-­constructed railway station, the Selcuk buildings in Erzincan kale, and two barracks situated on the mountainside away from the plain in which the town lies. Tokat, situated on one of the faults, with a population of 21,000, and important for its calico manufactures, was almost totally destroyed. So, too, was Sivas, population 41,000, an important route-­centre; and a relief train from Erzurum was held up by wreckage outside the town. Kemah and Amasya were reduced to ruins. Samsun, a port on the Black Sea coast exporting copper, timber, tobacco, and wool, was badly affected. Trabzon, as well as Niksar, Suşehri, Şebinkarahisar, Refahiye, and Gümüşhane, and Malatya to the south, also suffered severely. Within a few minutes hundreds of villages were destroyed—the houses, as today of stone cemented with mud, offering no resistance. Nezgep, high above the Kürtler Dere, slid down the mountainside. Snow drifts hampered relief work, and the ruins of some of the villages disappeared under the snow. Some villages were spared. In Sipikör, north of Erzincan, only two houses collapsed, but the hans on the road above were destroyed. There were antecedents for this disaster: earthquakes devastated Antioch in ad 115, and destroyed Nicopolis and Arsamosata in ad 498/9.13

Erzincan Kale (Suisa) The rich plain was a place to guard on the formation of the frontier. The Euphrates was not an effective barrier. Generally about 10 feet deep in spring and no more than 100  metres wide, the river flows slowly through the plain in summer, and is easily approached from the south. It could be crossed in various places. In a continuity of occupation to be compared with Eski Malatya, the city destroyed ultimately in 1939 stood in all probability on the site of a Roman fort: clearly at or in the vicinity of Erzincan Kale, which borders to the west the main road leading south from the railway station to the Euphrates bridge, a mile and a half away. Adjacent to the ruins of old Erzincan, and directly opposite the earthquake cemetery, Erzincan Kale consists of two huge structures, still faced with ashlar courses of dark basalt: a massive Selcuk gatehouse, Kale Kapısı, with courses of smooth stones; and an

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

PER RIPAM TO ER ZINCA N A ND SATA L A  213 N

Kale Kapısı

Taş Burç

Rubble cores Height c.5 m

0

100

200 Metres

Fig. 10.10  Plan of Erzincan kalesi (Suisa) (June 2003 and June 2004)

adjacent tower, Taş Bürç, ‘stone tower’, with eighteen courses of large, bossed stones. Incongruous in scale and position, both rear up in the north-­western corner of a large, quasi-­rectangular enclosure, some 335 metres long by 185 metres wide (Fig. 10.10). Said to be Selcuk, it is surrounded on all four sides by a wall, and outside it by a wide vallum. The ground level inside the enclosure is 2 to 3 metres higher than the surrounding plain. Strecker reported the fort as an irregular polygon, at most about 250 paces long and 120 paces broad, with very small external bastions about 20 paces (about 30 metres) apart. Of these there is now no trace. The walls were in places (Strecker must refer to the gatehouse and tower) 30 feet high, and 6–8 feet thick. To east and north the walls survive only as long mounds: the east articulated at a central gate 5 metres wide, above a deep, wet ditch beside the modern asfalt; the north obscured by dense vegetation. To west and south, significant cores are preserved, clearly much older than the twin Selcuk structures. Of the west wall two well-­preserved sections, standing to a height of about 3 metres (Fig. 10.11), are incorporated in houses; and between them, in the centre of the wall, opposite the east gate, are possible traces of a gate some 5 metres wide. Of a south-­west corner tower there is no visible trace. The south wall is the best preserved, but the facing has entirely disappeared. The core is constructed with rough river stones set in mortar, with scattered fragments of apparently Roman bricks 4 cm thick; and stands above a dry stream bed, possibly a vallum, 30 metres wide and 3 metres deep. There are no visible gates in the north and south walls. Across the centre of the enclosure a rough track links the east and the putative west gate, and from it, bisecting the

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 214  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 10.11 Erzincan kalesi: beehives, beside the cores and some internal facings of the western wall; beyond, left, the Munzur Dağları (June 2004)

e­nclosure, another track runs south to the centre of the south wall. The corn fields within the enclosure revealed no trace of buildings, or of pottery. In 1838 the governor made Boré wait for two days for permission to examine ‘les ruines de la citadelle, craignant que le people n’en prît ombrage et ne nous insultât’. The old fortress, Taylor heard, had been a source of inscriptions. In 1866 it was in course of demolition to furnish cut stone for the new barracks. The latter were a patchwork, constructed from the remains of far older edifices. The figures and inscriptions formerly reported as existing here had disappeared, and the only remains of antiquity which Taylor found in situ were fragments of Arabic and Armenian writing of no interest. ‘The walls have from time to time been repaired with ancient debris: thus we saw portions of columns with elegant capitals, finely-­chiselled ornamental blocks, fragments of old Cufic inscriptions, and elaborate Armenian crosses, mixed up with the massive stone blocks— having a rough boss in the centre—forming the walls.’ Clearly visible in outline on Google Earth, Erzincan Kale resembles in shape and broadly in size the late Roman fort of Sabus at Çit Harabe, which measures some 275 by 195 metres and was garrisoned by equites sagittarii; and in its raised internal ground level resembles Eski Malatya. Here in outline is preserved the site of the fort of Suisa. The garrison in the Notitia Dignitatum was a cavalry regiment, ala I Ulpia Dacorum. Recently conscripted, it had formed the rearguard in Arrian’s march to battle in c. ad 135. A prefect dedicated an inscription to his friend Aemilius Carus, governor of Cappadocia in ad 147–50. The internal area of Erzincan Kale, some 6 hectares, is twice as large as the early requirement for an ala quingenaria, and the early fort may have occupied the southern half of the enclosure. In c. ad 256 Sapor captured Suisa, together with Phreata (perhaps above Arauraca), Satala, and Domana, and their surroundings.14

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

PER RIPAM TO ER ZINCA N A ND SATA L A  215

F ROM ER ZI NCA N TO SATA L A The distance from Erzincan to Satala could be accomplished on foot in a single, long day. From the plain, the modern road to Trabzon, constructed in c.1955, climbs over the Ahmediye pass (7,550 feet), and continues northwards to Kelkit, Köse, and Gümüşhane. In October 2002 Taner and I drove south over the pass in darkness, and looked down on the plain of Erzincan. It was an unexpected and extraordinary sight, the surrounding mountains sparkling with lights from countless villages not long connected to electricity. Ten miles to the east, the Sipikör pass (7,870 feet) carried a much older route, marked by important caravan traffic, and evidently used in Roman times. Both passes served the Fourth Army Corps.

The Southern Side of the Sipikör Pass Passing the Headquarters and barracks of the Third Army, sprawling along Ordu Caddesi, the ‘Old Trabzon Road’ climbs steeply up the eastern side of the deep ravine carved by the Mecidiye Çay, and crosses the western flanks of Ahi Dağ to the Sipikör, known to Strecker as the Deveboynu, ‘camel’s neck’, pass, 12 miles above the plain. This was the old Post Road from Erzincan to Trabzon, and the carriage road under construction to Köse and Pirahmet in 1894; and it was remembered in June 2004 in Vazgirt and Mecidiye, an Alevi village once known as Rumsaray, ‘Greek palace’, as a cart road. Yorke followed it to reach the pass in nearly four hours. But its line was threatened by avalanches and erosion; and the central part of its course, resting on slippery strata opposite Mecidiye, has been scoured by terrible landslides. In the three years before 1987, huge swathes of mountainside above the road had moved, and any trace of an earlier road, if one existed, has been carried away. The Mecidiye gorge itself is almost impassable. In 2004 bulldozers had driven a rough track from Vazgirt up to Mecidiye, crossing and recrossing the torrent a dozen times to avoid huge screes of shale on either side. A dam had been planned, but abandoned: the walls of the gorge are too unstable. The muhtar of Vazgirt had cleared the track two weeks before our visit, but it was already blocked in places with stones and mudslides, and marked with bear droppings and the footprints of wolves. Avoiding these geological difficulties, two ancient routes climbed from the plain on the western side of the Mecidiye Çay. They were revealed by Yaşar Karayigĭ t, an energetic Sunni shepherd from Vazgirt, which lies among willows and poplars beside the bridge at the mouth of the gorge. Like many villages in the plain, Vazgirt was once Armenian, as were several large buildings close above the river, cotton mills which supplied uniforms for the Turkish garrison; recalling the hugely productive boot factory visited by Burnaby on the outskirts of Erzincan. Folklore, Strecker reported, believed Vazgirt to be the site of the ancient Eriza: a view commended by the abundance of water and its position on the route to the north, but discouraged by remoteness from the centre of the plain (Fig. 10.12). From the Vazgirt bridge, and past the deserted Armenian mills, a muleteers’ track leads up the narrow ridge above the river, climbing with steep zigzags, rock-­cut towards the top and crowned with cliffs, to the escarpment high above the plain. Ismail, a forester, claimed he could reach Mecidiye in an hour. It took Taner and me four times as long. After nearly an hour the track turns sharply behind the ridge and leads up to Vazgirt yayla, which Yaşar had once owned, but had sold for forestry. Here the track disappears, as so often, amid deep ploughing. But 2 miles higher to the north-­east,

2

19

5

4

3 KARA Da

n ya Çime

0

0

A

yla

10 km

5 miles

AD DRACONES

B

15

CUNISSA ?

C

HAZA ?

16

SUISA

ZIZIOLA ?

D 21

)(

SATALA E

AGA MONS

Eskiyol

Sadak

Ç su Ç .

)(

K

a ra

1

F

20

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 216  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

PER RIPAM TO ER ZINCA N A ND SATA L A  217

F ig . 10.12  Ancient track zigzagging up from Vazgirt and the Mecidiye gorge, hidden right (June 2004)

a trace some 5 metres wide weaves up a broad ridge to converge on another old road, 3 metres wide and identified by Yaşar as the Armenian or old caravan road, leading across the escarpment from the south-­west. The caravan road took a much easier route from the plain. A mile west of Vazgirt it climbed in broad zigzags from Gâvurun Bağı, ‘infidel’s vineyard’: a description associated elsewhere along the frontier with the passage of Christians. Here too, Yaşar said, had been infidels’ (Armenian) houses; and the road had been used by camels, and led over the Sipikör pass to Gümüşhane. Climbing at first steeply, with a gradient of 1:5 up the first shoulder, the road turned north-­ east to continue steeply up a spine, with scattered traces resembling Roman construction, and after fifty minutes emerged suddenly on the lip of the escarpment above Vazgirt, beside the Bekçi kasabası, the ‘watchman’s hut’, conspicuous from all points of the plain (Fig. 10.13). This was evidently the route followed by Strecker, who in c.1860 passed through and west of Vazgirt, and up the western side of the gorge, to descend to Rum-­Serai and climb again to the Sipikör pass; and perhaps by Barkley, who in December 1878 rode over the mountains in four hours ‘by a mule track, with snow and sleet falling’. The line of the caravan road can be clearly discerned, continuing above and east from the hut; and a section, 3 metres wide, curves around the very lip of the escarpment, just as the Antitaurus road high above Arabkir, towards the ridge and Yasar’s track above Vazgirt yayla. Far below could be heard the shouts, ‘Türk Öğün Çalış Güven’, roughly ‘Pride, Effort, Courage’, of marching soldiers.

◀  M ap 20  Armenia Minor: from Suisa (Erzincan), and Ad Dracones to Satala

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 218  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

The continuation across bare, undulating slopes rising to the north-­east was again lost in forestry ploughing. But approaching the gorge of the Mecidiye Çay, the old caravan road re-­emerges, and on it converges Yasar’s much steeper track leading directly up from Vazgirt, a short cut more suitable for pack animals. The road continues to climb north-­north-­east towards the Sipikör pass, and from a high saddle (c.6,300 feet; Fig. 10.14) poised 600 feet above the Mecidiye gorge, winds

F ig . 10.13 Bekçi kasabası, beside the frontier road; overlooking the plain of Erzincan and distant Mercan Dağ (June 2004)

F ig . 10.14  The frontier road climbing north towards Mecidiye (out of sight) and the distant Sipikör pass (June 2004)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

PER RIPAM TO ER ZINCA N A ND SATA L A  219

down in curves and zigzags towards Mecidiye, hidden behind tall cliffs. Beneath these the caravan road curves sharply to the east, crossing a large stream by a paved ford supported on an ancient wall, and rises again, about 3 metres wide, to pass the ruined huts of Rumsaray yayla. Then, descending steeply, it curves north around the base of the cliffs and disappears beneath the bulldozed track, which crosses the Mecidiye Çay by a ford a mile below the village. There can be no doubt that this, the road from Gâvurun Bağı, was the main road used by camels and caravans, and the main frontier road followed by Trajan and the legions. Throughout the Erzincan vilayet there is an underlying suspicion and mistrust between Sunni and Alevi, and Yaşar refused to enter Mecidiye. Worse was to follow. Returning, after a long day, with our guides to the tea house beside the Vazgirt bridge, only to be denounced as strangers walking in the mountains, Taner and I were suddenly surrounded by jandarma, bundled at gunpoint into separate trucks, and driven to their headquarters in Erzincan. Taner’s digital photographs of flowers and a wild goat beside the Silk Road suggested innocence, and the Public Prosecutor, after nail-­biting delay, decided there was no case to answer. Erzincan still gloried in its vali of 1999, Recep Yazıcıoğlu, a man of exceptional energy and ability. He had founded the Natural Sports Centre; and smiles, as before at Ermelik, were quickly followed by tea. Home to vast herds of goats and brown sheep, Mecidiye (6,550 feet) stands at the tree line on the west bank of the Mecidiye Çay. As in other high villages, the population, now Alevi, was once Greek: the origin of the name Rumsaray. Mecidiye, Strecker reported, was a pastoral village of some eighty Kızılbaş houses. But it was abandoned in winter twenty years ago, and is now inhabited only in summer. From Rumsaray, an oasis of greenery which he reached in rather more than two hours, Cumont climbed rapidly to the Sipikör pass, three hours on horseback from the plain. Above the village, water-­ meadows give way to long, sloping pastures, through which a clear trace of the caravan road rises north-­eastwards towards the Sipikör pass. Passing a ruined han 2 miles above Mecidiye, the road climbed in zigzags, its trace in places 7.60 metres wide, up to a small flood plain where, briefly, it joins the Post and modern road. Diverging almost at once, the caravan road climbs in longer zigzags, again rejoins the Post Road, and north of a large, undated Ottoman bridge carrying the Post and Old Russian Roads climbs once more in steep zigzags. Then, below electric power lines, it traverses for a mile along the eastern side of the valley, worn by snow and ice, that leads to the summit of the pass (7,870 feet), now crossed by the huge pipeline bringing natural gas from Azerbaijan. Two miles south-­east, the outlying peak of Ahi Dağ (9,875 feet) marks the western end of the long ridge of the Keşiş Dağları. Only 15 miles from Corbulo’s supposed operational base in the vicinity of Satala, and meaningless in Turkish, the name may, imagination suggests, preserve Mons Aga, reported to Pliny.15

The Northern Side of the Sipikör Pass Descending northwards, Strecker notes only that the road crossed the river near Sipikör, and followed it through Bandola, a settlement of six to eight houses, to Sadagh (Satala). His road was the caravan road, and it continued straight over the top of the pass. The ancient surface survives for several hundred metres, until the northern slopes, hanging above the village of Sipikör (5,900 feet), become much steeper. At this point, a short distance below the summit, began the carriage-­road reported by Yorke, in 1894 under

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 220 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

construction from Erzincan to a point (Pirahmet) on the Erzerum–Trebizond chaussée near Gümüşhane. Six years later Cumont rode down the chaussée constructed down the northern side of the pass, descending for 2,300 feet to Sipikör. This was the Post Road, known locally as the ‘Old Russian Road’. Its entire course is still preserved. Five to six metres wide, and cobbled in the centre, the upper section descends steeply for an hour by a series of long zigzags, bedded on conspicuous ashlar revetments, some standing more than 3 metres high and built with rough stones set in courses. It has followed and obliterated the earlier line of the caravan road, of which there is no trace beside or between the zigzags. Below the revetted road, the gradient eases gradually as the mountainsides sweep down to the Sipikör Dere and the upper valley of its northward continuation, the Sadak Çay (Fig. 10.15). Beside the road, the ruins of two old hans stand on small plateaux, an hour re­spect­ive­ly from top and bottom. Above the lower han the road surface is preserved, 7 metres wide, with large paving stones. The road passed a mile above Sipikör, which Cumont reached in about two hours. In reverse direction in August 1987, I took nearly three to climb to the top of the pass. The village was Turkish, Yorke and Cumont reported, 100 houses surrounded by fields of wheat. Only two houses were destroyed in the 1939 earthquake. By August 2006 many more had been abandoned. Desolate and dirty, Sipikör owns a community herd of some 200 cows. There I was guided by Ahmet Keleş, a sprightly 74-­year-­old. On the Post Road below the pass his father had operated one of the hans, busy until its destruction in the 1939 earthquake. They, and the ruined hans in the valley of the Sadak Çay leading to Satala, show that the late Ottoman road closely followed an older

F ig . 10.15  The frontier road descending to the upper Sadak Çay, view north: Taner Demirbulut and Ahmet Keleş (August 2006)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

PER RIPAM TO ER ZINCA N A ND SATA L A  221

predecessor. About 3 miles below the pass, and below the lower han, a well-­preserved continuation of the caravan road, followed by the Post Road, weaves down a low ridge, through fields belonging to Sipikör, in the long, shallowing descent towards the Sipikör Dere. The roadbed, some 4 metres wide, is now mainly of earth, with few stones, but some show the wear of two wheel-­tracks: perhaps of guns. A long section about a mile above the river has kerbs that are probably Roman. Ahmet revealed and was eager to guide me along a second ‘Russian road’, which, from shortly below the northern side of the pass, looped away from the Post Road in a long, shallower descent to the west, and rejoined it above his village. It was probably built for the easier haulage of guns, and does not follow a Roman predecessor.16 A mile north-­east of Sipikör, Taner and I were received with tea, bread, and honey in June 2004 by Dürsü Nezir, a 57-­year-­old bee-­keeper, who for the last twenty-­five years had brought his hives and bees up from Maçka by truck to the same spot, to dry, south-­ facing hillsides just above the ford across the narrow Sipikör Dere. Maçka is very damp, and his young bees catch kireç, lime disease, in May, turn white and die. There is no cure. But once the bees reach the heights of Sipikör the hives are healthy. There the only serious disease is varoa, which came from the east in c.1980, and is transmitted by mites. The honey season lasts for three months, and ends on 15 September. Dürsü had 120 hives, and for each paid an annual rent of about £2 to the muhtar of Sipikör. Each hive contains 20,000–50,000 bees. Yields vary by the year: 25–30 kilos of honey per hive is normal, but very good years can produce 100 kilos. He sells his honey for £4 to £6 a kilo. Produced from mountain flowers, Dürsü’s Erzincan honey is considered among the very best in Turkey. Bee-­eaters attack the hives in the evenings, and roost in poplars which the bees avoid, beside the ford. His friends’ hives have been regularly attacked by large bears, but the 2004 season had been the poorest yet for honey, and the bears had not appeared by the beginning of July. Wolves harass Sipikör, and wild boars attack their sugar beet. Dürsü’s local knowledge was encyclopaedic. The road on the lower slopes below the Sipikör pass, he explained, is certainly a continuation of the Post and the Old Russian Road. The Russians laid the pebbled surface, and it continued in use as the Old Erzincan Road until the Ahmediye pass was opened. It crossed the Sipikör Dere by a shallow ford—there was no bridge—to join the road from Sipikör, and continued northwards, passing through Bandola and Sadak, where it is known as the ‘Old Russian road’, and on through Kılıççı, ‘sword-­man’. Old men at Sipikör remembered the caravans. They had told Dürsü of signals, of fire, smoke, or white cloth, at certain points below the pass, to show that the road was safe from brigands for caravans southbound from Sadak (Satala). At the Sipikör pass the modern road to Kelkit turns east to seek a more gentle line down to the Sadak Çay. The Old Erzincan Road carries no traffic today. But it was once im­port­ ant and busy. Altitude made the route difficult: in 1984 the pass was already blocked by fresh snow at the end of October. This spectacular road is little more than a century old, an Ottoman road re-­engineered by the Russians in 1916 for the passage of guns. Most of what is visible on the northern side of the pass is almost certainly not Roman. But there can be no doubt that the line, particularly below the revetments, is essentially Roman.

‘Milk Pipes’ to Satala Dürsü told of earthenware milk pipes, 50 cm long and 5 cm in diameter, which ran to Sadak in Byzantine times, from his hives about two and a half hours away on foot, about

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 222 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

8 miles. They started in the mountainsides below the Sipikör pass, and above and south-­ east of Ağlık (6,550 feet); a very old village below thick woods of oak and poplar, in the region known as Devekorusu, ‘camel protecting’ yayla, where there was rich grazing for cows and sheep, and, it seems, shelter for caravans. Revisited in August 2006, Dürsü recalled that İşmail Savaşcı, met in June 2004 and now dead, had found in his field behind Eskiyol pottery ‘milk pipes’ about 40 cm long and 4 cm in internal diameter, fitted together in a concrete bed buried a metre deep. In 2006 his widow had no recollection of milk pipes. But İşmail’s brother had heard of them from their father. Broadly confirming Dürsü’s account, they started two hours away in Devekorusu yayla, where there used to be 200, 300, or 500 camels, and ran to Sadak, an hour and a half on foot from Eskiyol. Above the village there used to be associated traces of cement and mortar, now vanished. Dürsü’s account adds detail to a folk memory widely reported over the years in Satala, recalling similar reports of pipes above Hasanova (Analiba), and sightings above Çit Harabe (Sabus) and at Zabulbar. Discoloured with limescale, the deeply buried pipes evidently existed. They were presumably laid in several lines grouped together, to bring clean water, pressure relieved perhaps by a series of cisterns, to the civil settlement below the fortress of Satala: a solution vastly cheaper than an aqueduct, and protected against frost and attack.

The Caravan Road to Sadak From the ford a mile north-­east of the village of Sipikör, the river, now the upper Sadak Çay, curved north along a wide valley to pass below the fortress of Satala. With it the caravan road, mainly overlaid by the modern earth road, curved to follow the west bank past traces and memories of ancient cemeteries and hans. Long sections survive of a stone-­built road, 5.80 metres wide, running directly away from the Sipikör pass: certainly the Old Russian Road. The caravan route is revealed by the han marked on the Turkish Army map, 2 miles south of Bandola, renamed Dörtyol, ‘four roads’. In the vicinity of this vanished han, İşmail had found, and showed me in 2004, a fragment of Roman brick. He remembered a han, now also disappeared, at Bandola itself. Caravans used to stay there. This was an important crossroads, reached by Cumont in an hour from Sipikör. It is now controlled by a large karakol and a road block, which Taner negotiated with charm and sweets. There, little more than an hour from the fortress of Satala, the caravan road leading north from Erzincan to Trebizond was crossed by a minor route from Suşehri; from Bandola continuing eastwards across the Otlukbeli Dağları, scene of the great victory of  Sultan Mehmet II the Conqueror in 1473, to join the main caravan route from Constantinople to Erzerum and northern Persia. From Bandola, İşmail recalled in confirmation, caravan roads led south to Erzincan and (Eski) Malatya, west to Kayseri, east to Erzerum and Iran, and north to Trabzon. The road to the last was repaired by the Russians. It led to Sökmen, and on it was another han, below Sadak. Entering the village of Eskiyol, ‘old road’, half a mile north of Bandola, a clear trace of the Old Russian Road can be seen below low hills. Here 4.50 metres wide, it is surfaced with egg-­sized stones set between small, rough kerbs, in its construction entirely different from the Roman frontier road on the northern slopes of the Antitaurus, and much cruder than the section of the road per ripam over the Pelitsirti pass below Ardos (Arauraca). On either side of the approaches to Eskiyol are very old cemeteries. Wild

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

PER RIPAM TO ER ZINCA N A ND SATA L A  223

boars are everywhere, and some bears and wolves. Snow used to lie a metre deep from November to April. There İşmail Savaşcı, aged 73, remembered in June 2004 how the Post, with three to five horses, passed directly beside his house; and camel trains, forty- or fifty-­strong, passed continuously, day and night, summer and winter. There was also a han in the centre of Eskiyol, but it too had been destroyed. Laden camels from Trabzon stopped in  the fields, and were fed on bread made from flowers. İşmail did not mention the ­milk-­pipes, which, Dürsü later told me, he had apparently seen. Two and a half miles north of Eskiyol, the ruins of nine small hans stand above the Sadak Çay on a promontory called Alış Yer (buying place), seemingly a market similar to that at Hasanova; and a mile further north the caravan and frontier road briefly joined the caravan route from Erzerum, before the frontier road turned north-­west to climb up to the legionary fortress. From Erzincan to Satala, Yorke took about ten hours on horseback, and Cumont took nearly eight and a half. From Sipikör village, Yorke followed the carriage road along the left bank of the Sadak Çay, to reach Satala in a total of five and a half hours from the  summit of the pass; and Cumont in two hours came in sight of Satala. Walking south alone from the fortress in August 1987, I reached the pass in six and a half hours: suggesting perhaps as many as eleven hours on foot to Erzincan.17 NOT ES 1. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 332. Hogarth, Wandering Scholar 132f. and 143ff. I covered this section of the frontier in 1966 and 1984; and, in a vilayet made nervous by the PKK, with Ahmet Demirtaş in 1987 and 1989; with Fahriye Bayram, my Representative, in 2000; and with Taner Demirbulut in 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2006. 2. This was broadly the route followed but not identified by Hogarth and Yorke in May 1894, Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 456–60 and 467f.; and, from Erzincan, by Cumont in June 1900, SP II, 340ff. 3. Strecker, ZAE 11 (1861) 353f. and 358. In reverse direction, his road ran from Kemah to the Kürtler Dere, unfordable in spring (5½ hours); Nezgeb (½ hour); by a side road past Bojaly (Boyalık, 2 hours), lying ½ hour to the right; Hassan-­Owa (2 hours), on a river of the same name (now the Kuruçay); Dostal (6 hours) on the Karabutach-­Su; and Zimar (5 hours). Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 456f. 4. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 203–5. Archive of 1642 of the province of Erzerum, Başıbüyük, EGR 27 (2012), 92. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 456. 5. Yorke’s text, GJ 8 (1896) 457, does not mention the Sultan Hamid bridge. Strabo 12, 3, 28 (555). 6. Maunsell, Military Report IV (1904) 151. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 203. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 325f., 331, and 345. Burnaby, Asia Minor 195–7. Hogarth, Athenaeum 3481 (1894) 73, and Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 456ff. Cuinet, Turquie I 220. Molyneux-­Seel, GJ 44 (1914) 62. Strecker, ZAE 11 (1861) 276. 7. Bryce, Armenians 255. Jocelyn de Courtenay (Count of Edessa), Waleran, and Baldwin II of Jerusalem, Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 346, and JRGS 35 (1865) 34f.; and, more fully, Tozer, Turkish Armenia 219–21. At Sağ, known also as Büyük Kömürcü Köy, there was a working coal mine. Charax may also be located at Diştaş.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 224 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

8. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 203. Burnaby, Asia Minor 197f. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 458, with Hogarth, Wandering Scholar 145. Countermarks, EAM 506, no. 21. 9. Cumont, SP II 329. The prefect Aemilius Pius, to Rutilius Gallicus, ILS 9499, Ephesus. 10. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 332f. 11. The account of two Danish Red Cross nurses, Bryce, Armenians 247–52. 12. Molyneux-­Seel, GJ 44 (1914) 64f. Strecker, ZAE 11 (1861) 258–63. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 202. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 333. Cuinet, Turquie I 211. Barbaro, Viaggi in Persia 48. Cumont, SP II 337–40, and Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 459. 13. Dio 36, 48. Strabo 11, 14, 16 (532f.). Pliny, NH 5, 83, and, the veteran, 33, 82f. Inscriptions, EAM 525f., no. 33. Burnaby, Asia Minor 153. Earthquake, NID, Turkey I 392f. At Antioch, Dio 68, 24f. Nicopolis, Trombley and Watt, Ps.-Joshua 35. 14. 14 Strecker, ZAE 11 (1861) 259–63. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 333f. The prefect Iulius Crispus, to Aemilius Carus, ILS 1077, Rome. 15. Strecker, ZAE 11 (1861) 261 and 341f. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 459. Burnaby, Asia Minor 202f. Barkley, Armenia 334f. Cumont, SP II 340f., with map XXV. Mons Aga, according to Corbulo the source of the Euphrates, Pliny, NH 5, 83. 16. Strecker, ZAE 11 (1861) 344. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 459f. Cumont, SP II 342. 17. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 459f. Cumont, SP II 342.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

ELEVEN

Across the Mountains to Satala (Maps 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, and Fig. A2) ROUT ES F ROM TH E EU PH R AT ES TO M ELI K S¸ ER I F Above the north bank of the Euphrates in Armenia Minor, the fearsome range of Diştaş Tepe and Gülan Dağ rears up in a huge triangle of mountains between the Kuruçay and the Kömür Çay, opposite Kemah. Around or over the mountains three routes lead northwards to the Refahiye valley, roughly half way to Satala: a. the valley route leading north-­east from the Karabudak, through Kuruçay; b. the Kerboğaz ridgeway climbing north from the Gâvuroluğu, above Hasanova; c. the valley route leading north along the Kömür Çay, in Ottoman times carrying the low-­level winter route westward from Erzincan. The two valley routes, with short, steep passes, were used by caravans and camels. Between them, the Kerboğaz ridgeway, a track used by mules but not by camels, recalls the elevated line preferred elsewhere by the main frontier road. All three formed part of the Roman road network in Armenia Minor. The Kuruçay route carried the frontier road, depicted in the Peutinger Table, onward from Zimara to Satala. The Kerboğaz ridgeway, a difficult shortcut, is not documented. The Kömür Çay route carried the winter route, listed in the Antonine Itinerary, from Satala, via the plain of Erzincan, to Nicopolis. The Kuruçay and Kerboğaz routes converged on the long watershed rising to the south above the plain of Refahiye and leading towards the prominent cone of Kurtlu Tepe (8,860 feet). The Kömür Çay route divided below Kurtlu Tepe, to climb high over its eastern shoulder, and longer but lower, by the Ziyaret pass (6,400 feet), over the western. All but the last converged 10 miles east of Refahiye, at Melik Şerif: the point of departure for the ridgeway that leads over the high Çimen Dağları towards Satala.

Sensitivities and Caravans In a period of political insecurity, survey of these routes has been challenging. They pass through the three kazas and the three jandarma operational areas of İliç, Kemah, and Refahiye. Their contemporary strategic importance is underlined by the presence of no fewer than eight barracks, at these three district centres and between them at Armudan, Kuruçay, Ermelik, Alp köy, and Gümüşakar. All except Gümüşakar massively rebuilt in the 1990s, the karakols were established in the 1930s in the wake of the Koçkiri–Dersim uprising under Nuri Dersimi in 1921, when, on 7 March, Ümraniye (İmranlı) was captured, and the flag of Kurdistan was hoisted over the town. The revolt was suppressed in June. The demand of the tribal leaders, for the creation under Alevi Kurdish administration of a vilayet comprising the kazas of Koçkiri (near Zara), Divriği, Refahiye, Kuruçay, and

Discovering Rome’s Eastern Frontier. Timothy Bruce Mitford, Oxford University Press (2021). © Timothy Bruce Mitford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843425.003.0012

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 226 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Kemah, helps to explain the enduring sensitivity of the region; and may suggest the localized survival of an autochthonous Kurdish population requiring control in Roman times. In August 1987 and October 1989 the vali of Erzincan personally instructed me not to venture south of the Euphrates. In August 2000 his successor, Halil İbrahim Altınok, had studied in Bournemouth, and was interested and helpful. Assuring me that there was no security problem, provided I stayed north of the Euphrates, he did not mention that the adjoining province of Tunceli, embracing the Dersim, was still closed to non-­military traffic. Here I met my Representative Fahriye Bayram. Enthusiastic and fit, she brought the rare advantage of being able to talk to women. Our call on the police was oppressive with suspicion, but I obtained crucial permission to use Refahiye as a base. Before I  started work there, the kaymakam, Cahit İşik, a courteous and understanding man, engaged the muhtar of Melik Şerif, Süleyman Polatlı, as my guide and protector, with his minibus, and instructed me to be off the roads before sunset. Primitive armoured cars patrolled the main roads at dusk, and I was protected by successive teams of jandarma from Refahiye, Gümüşakar, Kuruçay, İliç, and Kemah. Their presence was of great value, for it was their duty and their experience to know the ground. Gradually the hunt for Roman roads began, as elsewhere, to focus on the higher ridgeways. Several sergeants remarked that my interests seemed to coincide with what they knew best, active PKK ‘transit routes’ leading northwards from Tunceli and the Munzur Dağları, the fierce mountains of the Dersim south of the Euphrates. Commanders and soldiers became increasingly nervous, and the daily escort became more formidable. Plans for the next day required approval each evening, and promulgation by the jandarma commander in Refahiye. Fahriye had to plead for permission to walk along the remote, high-­level route through Diştaş (Route B, below): agreement was reluctant, and required an escort of nineteen, including a Special Team of a dozen commandos, specially trained, that is, to hunt down and kill or capture PKK, with two belt-­fed machine guns and boxes of spare ammunition. The whole area was brittle, and it was clear that the PKK were still a real threat. One sergeant turned back near Diştaş, another refused to follow the Salt Road descending into a pine forest on the north-­eastern flanks of Kurtlu Tepe above Melik Şerif. The escort, varying daily, had often come straight from night patrols and ambushes. Maps bought years before in the Turkish Army Map Department in Ankara also invited suspicion. They showed the old village names, Roman, Armenian, Greek, and Kurdish. The commanders’ new maps, at a much larger scale, showed instead the unused and unrecognized modern names. The jandarma commander in İliç requested a copy of my map sheet covering his operational area. So did treasure hunters, who knew what they really showed, where to dig for Armenian gold. Important caravan traffic passed along each side of the triangle of mountains, but only in recent years have modern roads been constructed, frequently adopting radically different lines. On the western side a perilous road was opened in the 1930s between Kuruçay and Refahiye. On the eastern side, the Kömür Çay route has been of great strategic significance since ancient times, offering for traffic westbound from Erzincan to Refahiye a winter route, a low-­level alternative to the harsh Çardaklu pass (7,300 feet). On the southern side, along the Euphrates valley a winding track, little improved since the journey of Hogarth and Yorke and barely passable by vehicles, broadly followed some sections of the caravan road from İliç to Kemah. This track was still in use in 1989, but work had started two years before to exploit some of its line for a new strategic highway to link Erzincan and Sivas at a lower level, and to bypass the Çardaklu pass and the mountains

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

ACROSS THE MOU NTA INS TO SATA L A  227

west of Refahiye. By 2000, the new asfalt was open between İliç and Kemah. West of İliç it continues to Divriği. But plans seem to be in abeyance for its extension to the north-­ west, initially via the Kuruçay valley; from which a minor caravan road marked the line of the Roman route from the Euphrates to Nicopolis. A . NORTH-­E AST TH ROUGH K U RUÇAY: TH E F RONT I ER ROA D

From the Karabudak to Kuruçay The watershed above the Karabudak marked an important divergence. The Antonine frontier road per ripam to Erzincan and on to Satala continued straight over the ridge, to cross the Kuruçay and climb through Hasanova. The place-­names beside the Euphrates were forts garrisoned by auxiliary, mainly cavalry regiments. The Peutinger road, marked with a different set of place-­names, stations rather than forts, took a different course to Satala, through the mountains. Its course is marked initially by the route taken by caravans from Eğin and İliç, bound for Refahiye. They did not follow the Kuruçay, its bed overhung with unstable, shale screes. Indeed, it is only in recent years that a road, now asfalt, has been driven beside the river to the large village of Kuruçay. Instead, caravans climbed up to the ridge above the Karabudak. The clear trace of an ancient road curves slowly north along the ridge, and climbs for a mile beside the Ottoman road to Armudan and Kuruçay: via dolorosa in June 1915 to a charnel cave on the river bank op­pos­ ite what is now İliç station. Few managed to throw themselves into the Euphrates and escape. Below the first summit caravans diverged north-­east, to pass over a high shoulder falling into the Kuruçay; and descended gradually across the elevated plain, below the türbe of Mehmet Ali Bey from Horasan, and below Gemho, an Alevi village of thirty houses and the ruins of an Armenian church, to the Deveboynu boğazı, ‘camel’s neck gorge’. Through this narrow cleft, the old road, 3.6 metres wide, and solidly constructed with traces of paving, falls in spectacular zigzags, and a section half a mile long runs steeply down the mountainside to the bed of the Kuruçay and a ford, over a shifting, gravel flood-­bed about 200 metres wide (Fig. 11.1). Important confirmation of this route, followed southwards from the village of Kouroutchai, is provided by Hommaire de Hell, and Taylor. Travelling south-­west from the Refahiye valley in September 1847, Hommaire left the Kuruçay valley an hour south of Tchiftik, climbed the hill on the western side, crossed a small plateau with the Kurdish village of Giamouho (Gemho), and descended to the Karaboudak. Travelling south-­south-­ east from Nicopolis in August 1866, Taylor too left the Kuroo Chai valley near Tchiftlik village, some 4 miles south of Kuruçay, climbed to pass Kamakho (Gemho) at the extreme southern end of the upland, and descended to Tepta, where he pitched his tents in a garden, and to the Kara Booda. At this season there was little water in the Kuruçay, ‘dry river’, and neither mentioned a ford, or the ancient road leading up to the Deveboynu cleft.

Kuruçay (? Bubalia) Close south of Kuruçay the modern road similarly divides, for İmranlı and Refahiye. This important junction was controlled in 2000 by a substantial karakol, dismantled by 2003 and replaced by 2006 with a large new barracks. The red-­haired jandarma commander described in 2000 how the valley is plagued by increasing numbers of wild boars ­weighing up to 150 kilos.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 228  A

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER B

C

D 0

18

5 miles

0

10 km

OLOTOEDARIZA 2

nlı Su Çoba

3

17

19

CHORSABIA ? 4

5 Gümüşakar

ELEGARSINA ?

Sinibeli Gd.

6

Eski Kozkışla

14

)(

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

ACROSS THE MOU NTA INS TO SATA L A  229

F ig . 11.1  Deve Boynu boğazı: Roman road descending to the crossing of the Kuruçay (August 2006)

Kuruçay was once the administrative centre of the entire district. Destination of the Post Road from Kemah, it was formerly the seat of the kaymakam, now in İliç; and the kaza contained sixty-­one villages, with 1,799 houses. An important han, Taylor’s El Khan, residence of the Mudir and now destroyed, stood in the centre of the small town, and the main street is still lined with magnificent but decaying wooden houses. About 7 hours or 20 miles from Zimara, Kuruçay stood at the divergence of Ottoman caravan routes from İliç. One led to Ümraniye (İmranlı), Şebinkarahisar, and Giresun, the other to Refahiye, Sadak, and Trebizond. Both routes broadly followed the lines of ancient roads to Nicopolis and Satala. The divergence is an appropriate location for an ancient site: perhaps Bubalia, the first ­station, otherwise unknown, on the Peutinger road from Zimara.1

The Road from Kuruçay towards Refahiye Caravans for Refahiye passed through Kuruçay. Leaving the town, the road curved north-­east through a narrow ravine, and climbed gradually up the flat valley of the upper Kuruçay Dere, through fields fringed with poplars and willows. Deep side valleys open out to the north. But the southern side is lined by a wall of black screes, culminating in the enormous, bare rockface of Başdana Kaya. Below this fearsome crag the road passes directly beside the türbe of Şeyh Hasan Baba, a well-­funded and amply watered place of pilgrimage, at the site of Eski Kozkışla, nine or ten hours from Zimara. There is no trace of an ancient site, but the graves of travellers mark the passage of the caravan route.

◀  M ap 18  Armenia Minor: from Zimara and Nicopolis towards Haris (Melik Şerif )

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 230  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Two miles east of Eski Kozkışla, the main Kuruçay valley is blocked by the steep and eroded Sinibeli pass, thickly wooded. At the base, the valley of the upper Kuruçay turns south-­east, narrowing, and a rough track leads after 2 miles to the remote village of Kirzi, four hours from Kuruçay and nine from Refahiye: 100 houses standing on a platform high above the junction of two small streams. The population has now dwindled to 30 or 40. The imposing mosque was constructed with stones from an Armenian church at Bazgu, in the mountains 3 miles to the north. Below, in a grove of willows, is a second türbe of Şeyh Hasan Baba el-­Kirzi, also an important place of pilgrimage. A notice explains that El-­ Kirzi, a holy man, was sent from Horasan, and arrived in Kemah in  ad  1160 to invite non-­Muslims to convert: a process which took 300 years. The elders of Kemah sent him to Kirzi. Others from Horasan were Mehmet Ali Bey, above Kuruçay, and Abuzergafarı, and his brother Mahmut-­el-­Ansarı, resting in their türbes near Adıyaman. The position of Kirzi, and the ancient türbe, suggest the presence of a station on the frontier road. But the village is remote from its path in the approach to the Sinibeli pass. There is no trace or memory of antiquity, nor knowledge of the existence of any direct route climbing over the high ridge that rises south-­east of the pass, to lead through Bazgu to Mezraaıhan. An 85-­year-­old man remembered caravans of seventy or eighty mules and horses, and camels carrying clothing, passing along the Silk Road from Malatya and Kemaliye to Refahiye and Trabzon, evidently over the Sinibeli pass. The muhtar, aged 70 and known rather oddly to his wife as both Murat and Mustafa, had regularly travelled along the Silk Road before the building of the modern road over the Sinibeli pass in 1966, when he was first elected; and in June 2003 guided Taner and me along its course.

F ig . 11.2  The frontier road climbing north-­east towards the Sinibeli pass, with Taner Demirbulut (June 2003)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

ACROSS THE MOU NTA INS TO SATA L A  231

The Sinibeli pass (5,900 feet) is extremely steep on both sides, and perilous with erosion and landslides. From the direction of Eski Kozkışla the modern road runs straight up the approach, climbing dangerously along a series of treacherous ridges. On the pass snow lies up to 2 metres deep for five months, and was once cleared laboriously with shovels. Here, on the south-­western slopes, a winter bus crash in 2002 claimed seven lives. The caravan and ancient road took a different line, climbing equally steeply through oak woods (Fig. 11.2), and looping in typically Roman fashion along interconnecting ridges above and close south-­east of the modern road. About 4 metres wide, it can be traced on foot for about 6 miles. At the northern end of the pass, the caravan road descended a steep spur to the broad meadows below Mezraaıhan, two hours from Kirzi. Mezraaıhan lies close to the foot of the Sinibeli pass, like Kirzi, in a side valley a mile from the caravan road. Once an administrative centre with few Armenians, it was an important staging post for caravans, and in the middle of the village a han large enough to accommodate up to 200 animals now lies buried beneath the village threshing floor, and supports its western wall. A woman, said to be aged 115, was bent over the village fountain. Bakri Sustam, aged 75, recalled how, as a child, he could hear the deepest bells, carried by the largest camels, approaching southbound from as far away as Bekolar on the north side of the Arpayazıbeli (Bekolar) pass, and used to steal bags from the caravans. Horses, mules, and donkeys, and fewer camels, passed in groups of thirty-­five to more than fifty, day and night, summer and winter, along the Silk Road to İliç and Kemaliye. They would stay in Mezraaıhan, and camp along its well-­watered valley for up to five days, trading nuts from the Black Sea for apricots from Malatya. Recalling the caravan market at Hasanova (Analiba), Mezraaıhan was probably the site of an ancient station, Elegarsina: the second marked on the Peutinger road. From Mezraaıhan the caravans continued through the Aptal Boğazı, the ‘Fools’ Gorge’ notorious for robbers; and followed the predecessor of the modern road, beside the Şaşlıbaba Dere and below the Armenian church, long ruined, close to the karakol at Gümüşakar. Returned with me from the Kerboğaz for a twilight tea in August 2000, the sergeant in command, Ali Arslan, suddenly rushed out, cocking his machine pistol, to deal with reported PKK terrorists. The roadblock was later to be negotiated several times by Taner with skilful conversation and Topkek, irresistible packaged cakes. On the northern side, bare hillsides sweep up to Koçkiri, once a large Armenian village, perched on a promontory of the long ridgeway 1,000 feet above the karakol. Formerly a nahiye, it was the most important administrative centre between Kuruçay and Refahiye, five hours from each, and sharing its name with the entire region north of the Euphrates and the Çaltı Çay, as far as Divriği.2 Koçkiri is too high above the valley at Gümüşakar to have formed a part of the Roman road system. Caravans continued past the karakol, and half a mile to the east turned north from the modern road and the circuitous ravine of the Şaşlıbaba Dere, to pass through a narrow side-­valley leading towards Eskikonak, and climb a long spur below Gâvuryurdu, ‘infidel’s place’: a description elsewhere associated with the caravan and Roman road. The muhtar, Hüseyin Sevin, a man of great charm, had insulated his house with discarded threshing sledges studded with flints (döven). He remembered from his father the passage of caravans, and, in a violent thunderstorm, showed me their course along the spur. Three bears, Hüseyin said, lived in the woods below; and the caravan route led directly north to the gentle Arpayazıbeli pass (6,170 feet). Local knowledge confirmed that the main caravan route did not cross the pass, to follow the line of the asfalt, the modern road, in its steep descent past Bekolar towards

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 232  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Refahiye. Instead, a mile before the pass, caravans turned sharply south-­of-­east across the asfalt, to follow the prominent ridge, long and flat, that curves east and north-­east above the plain of Refahiye, at the distant head of a wide valley and meadows flanked by hills. At above 6,000 feet, the ridge forms a part of the watershed between the Persian Gulf and the Black Sea, and connects the two modern roads, from İliç through Kuruçay, and from Kemah, that lead towards Refahiye. Now disused as a route except for forestry, the ridge carries traces of a 4-­metre road, and was said to have been used by caravans. Above Amperi, an important ridge, separating the long valleys of the Şaşlıbaba Dere and the Kömür Çay and carrying the northern end of the route (Route B) from the Kerboğaz, converges from the south-­south-­west; and the main ridge and caravan route curved towards the tall cone of Kurtlu Tepe (8,860 feet). Before reaching the line of the asfalt from Kemah, the caravan road dropped easily down from the ridge into the rounded valley leading eastwards below Şahverdi.

Around the Northern Foothills of Kurtlu Tepe Crossing the Kemah road below Şahverdi and the Ziyaret pass over the western shoulder of Kurtlu Tepe, the caravan road curved around the base of its north-­western foothills, following a shallow valley above Çakmalı harabeleri, the ruins of a Greek village abandoned in 1922. Much of the valley is marshy, but a few traces can be seen of an old road. Above the ravine leading down to Sipdiğin, and above the road, Cumont found in the Greek church at Kondilia, evidently Cibolar, and recorded in his epigraphic notebook, a ‘pierre écrite . . . apportée récemment de Sipti pour construire l’église’: a milestone of Domitian (ad 92–4), reused by Hadrian (ad 129), and carrying the distances 3 and 45. Measured respectively, it seems, from the third station, evidently Haris at Melik Şerif, and from Satala, it marked the line of the Peutinger frontier road.3 Passing close below Cibolar, the valley broadens and descends in a straight line to the upper reaches of the Çukur Dere 2 miles west of Alacaatlı, ‘with pibald horses’. Caravans proceeded eastwards beneath the promontory sites of Greek churches now vanished, crossed the Çukur Dere in the vicinity of Alacaatlı, and continued north-­east to Melik Şerif.

The Plain of Refahiye The modern roads, from the south-­west from Kuruçay and İliç (50 miles), and from the south-­east from Kemah (49 miles), converge on the once-­rich plain of Refahiye (5,000 feet). Both routes were used by caravans in Ottoman times, when (Baş)Gerdjanis, overlooking the plain of Refahiye from the northern foothills, was the administrative centre and seat of the kaymakam. Formerly a large Turkish and Armenian village, now reduced to thirty-­five houses, Gercenis is believed to have been founded in 1690 by Murat IV (in  fact, 1623–40). Its fields are extensive and well-­watered. But they have become ­infertile, and because of banditry administration was moved to Refahiye in 1884. Much of the population perished in 1915. Snow covers the ground for six months. Cumont found Refahiye ‘certainement un des plus misérables chef-­lieux de canton qui nous aient herbergés’. Poor and squalid, the town has improved little over the intervening century. Other than a hamam, old but of uncertain date, behind the kaymakam’s office, there is no trace of antiquity, nor record of a han. By 2006 the hamam itself had been destroyed to create a hard-­standing for fire engines. The minaret of the Esat Muhlis Camı in the town centre was added in 1924, using ashlar salvaged from the Greek

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

ACROSS THE MOU NTA INS TO SATA L A  233

church at Pöşür Harabeleri 3 miles to the north-­east. Almost destroyed in the 1939 earthquake, the mosque itself was rebuilt, evidently from the same source, in 1942, under the supervision of Ali Usta from Diştaş.4 B. TH E K ER BOĞ A Z R I DGEWAY Between the valley routes from Kuruçay (Route A) and Kemah (Route C), the long watershed above the Kuruçay, the Kürtler Dere, and the Kömür Çay suggests the existence of an intermediate route, the shortest but also the highest, leading from the Euphrates to the Refahiye valley and Melik Şerif: as in the other main ranges, a high-­level route exploiting a structure of ridgeways and interlinking watersheds. For mule traffic from Eğin (Kemaliye), by the Silk Road and the Khostu ferry below Iliç, such a route could avoid the long, circuitous climb to the ridge above the Karabudak, and the perils of the Sinibeli pass. In August 2000, I was told in Hasanova, Boyalık, and Diştaş of a katır or katırcı yolu, a ‘mule’ or ‘muleteers’ road’, used by pack animals from Hasanova, and leading through the high Kerboğaz, ‘baby donkey gorge’, to Refahiye. From a variety of sources, some mistaken, Strecker reconstructed this route from Kemah to Sipdiğin, site of Domitian’s milestone and evidently a significant destination in the Refahiye valley. The Kerboğaz route has not been reported by travellers. Its existence is confirmed by long traces of an ancient road on both sides of the gorge. Except for the village of Diştaş, at the northern end of the mouth of the Kerboğaz, the ridgeways are far above habitation, desolate and remote. Quasi-­military and more simple journeys over the course of several years prove that the katır yolu offered a practicable and evidently well-­used route linking Boyalık with the Refahiye valley. Northbound traffic crossed the head of the Savaşgediği pass, climbed up the watershed to cross the posta yolu, the Ottoman ‘Post Road’ from Kemah to Kuruçay, and either descended by long zigzags to the bed of the upper Kürtler Dere, or continued along the ridgeway rising northwards to the western flanks of Elmalı Dağ. From there the main katır yolu did not pass along the high, waterless, and difficult ridges between Yumak Tepe, the Ceker saddle, and Kerboğaz, but turned east to descend briefly to the fertile valley of the Kürtler Dere at Sitemi, and from Ateşkomu at the head of the valley climbed vertiginously up to the Kerboğaz. Shortly below the summit there is some evidence for the existence of a built road. North from Diştaş the katır yolu is much easier. It can be followed almost continuously along descending ridges to the watershed above Amperi, where it joined the caravan route from Kuruçay (Route A). The task of tracing this route has been arduous. In August 2000, I followed the northern section, towards and from the top of the Kerboğaz pass, but the southern was barred by time, operational boundaries, and escorts. Both small armies, the Refahiye jandarma were guided up the wrong valley from Diştaş, posed for covert photographs beneath the Diştaş pinnacles, and nervously turned back; while the İliç jandarma refused to follow the track that leads northwards from Savaşgediği up to the posta yolu. I revisited this southern section in October 2002 with Taner, who left his car, an­onym­ ous with its Istanbul number plate, under the highest juniper above Savaşgediği, his ‘official guide’ card propped visibly inside. From there we walked north along the ­ridgeway for more than seven hours in still and cloudless weather, to a point high above the Ceker saddle and Hacıkomu, to gaze down on the Kerboğaz canyon, and up to the ferocious semicircle of cliffs that surround it.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 234  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

A gap of five difficult miles remained unexplored south of the Kerboğaz. Guided by three Diştaş villagers in June 2003, Taner and I climbed to the head of the Kerboğaz, and from it attempted in vain to find a route to the Ceker saddle. But the difficulty, even danger, was so great that the concept of an important high-­level route avoiding the ­valley of the Kürtler Dere cannot be sustained. In August 2006 I was at last able to confirm the main katır yolu, the mule track climbing with much difficulty from the upper Kürtler Dere and over the Kerboğaz. Rock falls and erosion had carried away all trace of a path, perhaps a zigzag track similar to the road above the south bank of the Şiro Çay. The reality was a fierce scramble, in places fraught with peril. Ali, our guide, knew this as the summer route. Long traces of a road, 3 metres wide, on the ridgeways south and north of Kerboğaz, suggest that in Roman times the muleteers’ road was used as a summer shortcut, open from June until early October, leading directly from the Euphrates, and the frontier road per ripam in the Gâvuroluğu, to Melik Şerif: an attractive route for men and pack animals. But the approaches to the Kerboğaz itself were too rough and too steep for camels, and too exposed to snow and avalanche, and cannot have carried the main frontier road from Melitene.5 From Çilhoroz, ‘cock partridge’, at the western end of the Gâvuroluğu, a rough track climbs over the low, rocky hills rising some 250 feet above the northern rim of the plain; and follows the ridge running straight down to the head of the Savaşgediği pass (5,150 feet), on the watershed between the Kuruçay and the Kürtler Dere. The track can be clearly seen from the ridge rising on the northern, opposite side of the pass. To the Kerboğaz the map suggests an easy route, by a series of interconnecting ridgeways about 8 miles long. On the ground it is more difficult: a full day, in three sections ever more difficult as the watershed rises and narrows towards the geological devastation of the pinnacles above Diştaş. The mule track appears to have fallen largely into disuse when a road was constructed along the valley of the upper Kürtler Dere in c.1985. Despite the nervousness of 2000, there was no sign of more recent use as a transit route by the PKK.

From Savas¸ gediğ i to Yumak Tepe From the Savaşgediği pass, the mule track from Boyalık climbs steadily northwards up the narrow watershed. After ninety minutes, swinging obliquely around the flanks of two rounded summits, the track crosses the posta yolu at its highest point (6,100 feet), and continues along the watershed: a switch-­back of rounded summits linked by narrow saddles thick with holm-­oaks, the lair of snakes and bears, and, traces suggested, of wolves. Curving steeply west around the first summit, the katır yolu descends past springs, then climbs steeply again for 500 feet and loops around four further summits. The same engineering practice is evident in the continuation of the same route north of Diştaş, and in many sections of the frontier road itself. Along this ridgeway are continuous traces of an unpaved road about 3 metres wide (Fig. 11.3), leading from the posta yolu for more than two hours, as far as the saddle (6,200 feet) on the western flank of the last summit, Elmalı Dağ (6,500 feet); a mile east of and below the prominent peak of Yumak, ‘ball of wool’ Tepe (6,700 feet), which towers on the tree line far above Kirzi. At the saddle, the mule track joins the track, still in occasional use, which links Sitemi on the upper Kürtler Dere, and Kirzi in the valley of the upper Kuruçay.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

ACROSS THE MOU NTA INS TO SATA L A  235

F ig . 11.3  Ancient track above Savaşgediği, leading north towards the Kerboğaz (October 2002)

High Level Route to Kerboğ az Climbing west for a mile, the track to Kirzi passes several springs as it traverses straight across the flanks of Yumak Tepe, four and a half hours from Savaşgediği. Along this way,  no doubt, passed Şeyh Hasan Baba el-­Kirzi in ad 1160. Reaching a high saddle (6,450 feet) below the peak, the nature of the road changes.

From Yumak Tepe to the Ceker Saddle While the main track crosses the saddle and descends towards Kirzi, the faint and intermittent trace of a little-­used mule track climbs northwards to the bare, knife-­edge ridge (6,650 feet), precipitous on its western side, that curves north-­ east and descends towards the saddle known as Ceker (6,460 feet), at the eastern head of the Kirzi valley. In August 2000 I had looked down on the Ceker saddle from the awful Diştaş pinnacles. Taner and I approached this second section in October 2002 by a difficult yayla road leading up from Kirzi and behind the huge crag of Başdana Kaya, and Kozkışla. There was much pessimism in Kirzi: the road above the village was impassable, carried away by a torrent. We built a short causeway, crossed with minor damage to Taner’s car but none to his enthusiasm. The faint track follows the crest of the ridge for an hour, until it is blocked by the first of a series of huge rock pyramids. Below them a narrowing path drops to the east and skirts across treacherous screes, curving gradually north, high above the Kürtler Dere. This path was not the katır yolu, for it ends in a precipitous scramble down to the Ceker saddle. The track, such as it was, must instead have dropped down the western side below the first pyramid, to take a more direct route to Ceker across steep and eroded ravines below the precipices. Of the track some sporadic traces

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 236  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

remain. Cows had been grazing on the saddle high above Hacıkomu. The northern end is choked with h ­ olm-­oaks.

From Ceker to the Kerboğ az From Ceker, time and daylight allowed little onward progress in October 2002. Above the saddle Taner and I saw no further trace of the mule track. If it continued, it must have clambered up the steep shale ridge, which curves clockwise towards the distant Kerboğaz pass (7,400 feet), nearly 1,000 feet above and perhaps four hours away. Some 500 feet above Ceker the way seemed to be barred by cliffs. But in August 2006, Ali, our guide met over lunch in Çalolar, pointed up from the bed of the canyon below the Diştaş pinnacles, and later west from the head of the Kerboğaz pass, to confirm that a difficult, high-­level route did indeed continue up from the Ceker saddle and around the curving ridge. It was used in winter by determined men and mules, perhaps climbing from Hacıkomu or Çalolar, to avoid avalanches in the canyon; passed on the further, western side of the canyon, just below the crest and above the precipices falling towards Kirzi; and linked with traces of an old track, now seemingly no more than a yayla track, running west along the ridge from the head of the Kerboğaz.

Low-­Level Route and Ascent to Kerboğ az Above the Savaşgediği pass, the track climbed to the posta yolu, and divided. A lower route turned east along the post road, and from it descended by long zigzags, clearly visible, to the bend of the upper Kürtler Dere (5,000 feet), a mile south of Sitemi (5,250 feet). A higher route, confirmed by traces of the 3-­metre katır yolu, continued north along the ridgeway to the Elmalı Dağ saddle, and from it descended steeply along the mule track from Kirzi, to the broadening valley at Sitemi itself. Rich in pastures and villages, the valley offered many opportunities for rest and refuge. Until 1915, the population south of the Kerboğaz was Armenian. Recollections at Hasanova and Boyalık that the mule track to Refahiye took the lower and easier line beside the upper Kürtler Dere, and passed through Sitemi, were confirmed by later discussions there and in Çalolar.

Kerboğ az I have not followed either of these descents. But from Sitemi, Taner and I traced the mule track northwards in August 2006, along the fertile valley of the Kürtler Dere to Çalolar. Here the modern track, barely passable, comes to an end, and we were entertained to a lavish, but protracted and inquisitive lunch by a suspicious family of Alevi Kurds. Divining my real purpose, Ali, a former village guard, offered to guide us up the mule track through the Kerboğaz: Armenians, he knew, had lived here, my map showed where to look, and the treasure was his. In an alarming development, he produced his cep, ‘pocket’ telefon to photograph me, Taner and number plate. But the lure of gold prevailed over duty. Ali did not transmit, at least in time; for the jandarma from Kemah did not arrive. Passing Ateşkomu (Ateşler), the track winds up the bed of the narrow canyon, sighted from far above in October 2002, and entered perilously in June 2003: one of the remotest and certainly the nastiest, most difficult place on the entire frontier. It took two hours to scramble to the head of the Kerboğaz pass (7,400 feet; Fig. 11.4).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

ACROSS THE MOU NTA INS TO SATA L A  237

F ig . 11.4  Clambering up the Kerboğaz, with Taner and Ali (August 2006)

At the northern end of the canyon the track is blocked by long screes cascading down from a maze of enormous, crumbling pinnacles. Undamaged in the 1939 earthquake, and little affected by a repetition in 1974, the track climbs very steeply up the Kerboğaz: below the westernmost pinnacle of the frightful, saw-­toothed crest, nearly 4 miles long and 7,600 feet high, that reaches out from Gülan Dağ and Diştaş Tepe (7,900 feet), towering above the village of Diştaş, ‘tooth stone’, to the north. Rock falls and erosion have destroyed any trace of a built road. But just below the summit, Ali showed where once had stood a mortared wall supporting a road more than 2 metres wide. Up this fearsome track he had driven cows as a boy, in c.1980. The Kerboğaz route thus ­certainly existed as a built road, used by cows, laden mules, and horses led on foot.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 238  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

The now vestigial track emerges suddenly on to a narrow saddle beside the westernmost tooth: at 7,400 feet the highest point on any route between the Euphrates and the Refahiye valley. To the east, strata rise vertically in a line of enormous, crumbling pyramids, the Diştaş pinnacles (7,550 feet), 50 feet above the crest of the ridge. The highest tooth is known as Eşkıya Taşı, the ‘brigands’ stone’, implying the proximity of a track used by pack animals. From a gap between two teeth, screes funnelled vertiginously between spines of fractured rock could be seen tumbling down to the Kürtler Dere, more than 2,000 feet below. Beneath the westernmost tooth a rock-­cut track seemed to disappear steeply south-­westwards around the last spine. But any notion of a practicable route leading down between the pinnacles and turning west below them into the upper Kürtler Dere was, it is clear, a chimera: a route far too precarious to have been Roman. The pinnacle-­studded crest marks the administrative and, for the jandarma, op­er­ ation­al boundary between the districts of Refahiye, Kemah, and İliç; the last visible in the far distance to the south-­west. From the teeth, huge boulders have rolled down the northern side and litter the slopes, steep and eroded, where still-­vertical strata form a fan of deep, converging valleys. No trace of any road survives among them, and none existed. After half an hour of difficult scramble, the valleys unite in a precipitous defile, the Kerboğaz itself, below the western end of the row of teeth. Returning to Ateşkomu, a pinnacle, standing in the bed of the canyon and topped with two gigantic rabbit ears, was obviously a pointer to buried treasure. Ali agreed, and stayed eagerly behind to investigate. Back at last at the asfalt, Taner admitted he was more frightened by Ali, unknown in weapons and intentions, than by the awful geography. At the summit of the Kerboğaz, Taner and I had stood with rival treasure hunters in June 2003. Three villagers, eager to sight my map and share the treasure, had guided us southwards from Dıştaş along the steep mule track, still in use, that climbs to the rim of the Diştaş yayla. From the rim a vertiginous path, used, they said, by mules and horses, plunges down to the head of the Kürtler Dere. This was the katırcı yolu, the muleteer’s road, leading up from Ateşkomu, a dangerous route passing west around the pinnacles. Cemal, my eager guide, could descend from the Kerboğaz in an hour to Cemolar, a mile north-­east of Sitemi. The track, he said, was too steep for driven animals, and had been largely neglected for six years because of the PKK. Now it was used by only three, five, or ten people in a month, on foot or on horseback. The treasure hunters confirmed that the track which we had followed from the south in October 2002 passed below the western side of the rock pyramids leading to the Ceker saddle. Tired and disappointed they turned back. We did not follow the mule track down to the upper Kürtler Dere, but attempted instead to find a usable, high-­level route to the point reached above Ceker in 2002. From the head of the Kerboğaz an apparent track ran westwards along the ridge. But after a mile both ridge and track vanished in a narrowing switch-­back, mortally dangerous, of pointed, crumbling strata rearing skywards like the backbone of a curled dinosaur. On the western side huge cliffs fall towards Kirzi. The eastern side tumbles in a bowl of horrific screes, slippery with stone marbles, into the canyon.

Descent to Dis¸tas¸ The northern side of the Kerboğaz did not surrender easily to investigation. After a long evening winning at batak (swamp), an arcane game of cards, in the karakol at Refahiye, the jandarma commander and kaymakam reluctantly allowed me in August 2000 to

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

ACROSS THE MOU NTA INS TO SATA L A  239

follow the route southwards from Diştaş to the Kerboğaz. The price was an escort of twenty-­two cheerful commandos, tripod-­mounted machine-­gun in front, followed by a spare box of belted ammunition, then the rest of the Special Team. The commander of the karakol at Gümüşakar, Ali Arslan, stayed behind in Diştaş, protected by a second machine-­gun, to work, he explained, on hearts and minds, but in reality to guard our rear. My small army was guided by an energetıc schoolmaster, Şamil Işıkcevahir, up the wrong valley: not to the Kerboğaz pass but to the Diştaş pinnacles, on which the jandarma army posed, Rambo style, for forbidden photographs. Şamil had designed and built his own ingenious biogas extractor. These contorted mountains, the forested ravines of Gülan Dağ, and the pinnacles meant PKK, and Sergeant Mustafa said it was too dangerous to linger at the top for long. Close below the head of the pass on the northern side, a large cemetery shows that the muleteers’ road had long been an important and dangerous route. Skirting from the pass above the small Diştaş yayla, the track zigzags steeply down a shale spine, marked with traces of bears, to reach the narrowest heart of the Kerboğaz: a clear rock-­pool, Kazancık, ‘little cauldron’, fed by a clear stream. The name recalls Kazan, at the narrowest part of the Iron Gates gorge where Trajan’s road was cut into the cliffs above the Danube. The short gorge is blocked with snow from October to April, May, or even June. Close above the stream, a narrow and very old track passes at the narrowest point of the gorge along a rock cutting, 20 metres long and about 1.20 metres wide (Fig. 11.5): a much narrower version of the marble road on the frontier road per ripam east of the Gâvuroluğu, 8 miles to the south as the crow flies. In the Taurus the frontier road passes through a similar cutting 2 miles below the summit of Şakşak Dağ, on the northern side of the Şiro Çay. Emerging from the defile, the katır yolu passes below the pointed hill of Poruk Baba Türbe with its wrecked circle of white stones on the summit, winds beneath the ziyaret, the shrine of Nesin Baba Kirzi, shaded by a huge pine tree spreading over the tall, sugar­loaf peak of Ambar Tepe, and leads down in fifteen minutes to the first house of Diştaş. There Ali Arslan was happily awaiting our return (Fig. 11.6).

Dis¸tas¸ (? Charax) Set in a bowl amid poplars and fertile, well-­watered fields draining steeply eastwards into the Gülan Dere and the distant Kömür Çay, the village of Diştaş (6,200 feet) and its outlying hamlets are dying. Where, formerly, there were thirty-­nine families of Alevi Kurds, now only nineteen remain in winter; and even in August, when families return on holiday from Istanbul, many houses remained shuttered and abandoned. Snow lies from November to May, and can fill the Kerboğaz until June. The muhtar and elders confirmed that the road continuing to the north was once the old road from Eğin (Kemaliye) to Refahiye, used a century before by pack-­animals, mules and horses. From Boyalık it passed through the Kerboğaz to reach Diştaş in five hours: in reality, the journey probably took seven or eight. South of the Kerboğaz the population used to be Armenian: hence the eagerness of treasure hunters. Diştaş, they continued, was once a kingdom, and a ‘king’s grave’ lies to the south-­east, perhaps on Diştaş Tepe. There was no church, han, or knowledge of coins or inscriptions. But the earlier name of Diştaş was Viranşehir, ‘ruined city’. If, as seems probable, this was a Roman route from Analiba (at Hasanova) to Haris (Melik Şerif ), Diştaş lay roughly at its half way point, manifestly appropriate for identification with Ptolemy’s Charax, ‘ravine’ (placed alternatively at Ermelik, far below).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 240 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 11.5  Ancient track, with treasure hunters, leading south from Diştaş to Kazancık and the Kerboğaz (June 2003)

The Northern Ridgeway The ancient road has left no sure trace as it traversed northwards across the shoulders and saddles above Diştaş, until, reappearing for a quarter of a mile, it winds steeply upwards and turns abruptly east along the knife-­edge ridge that, viewed from the north, hangs like a high curtain across the southern horizon. The ridge rises to a conspicuous summit (7,200 feet) crowned with the ruins of a gordin, a small, rectangular guard ­post measuring 6 × 10 metres, its ashlar walls about 1.20 metres high. A few faced stones survive in the lowest courses. There is no pottery, and it cannot be dated. It is unlikely

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

ACROSS THE MOU NTA INS TO SATA L A  241

F ig . 11.6 Diştaş: picnic with Ali Arslan, left, Fahriye Bayram, and Süleyman Polatlı, right (August 2000)

to be old. To reduce its potential for ambush, Sergeant Mustafa ordered his men to demolish what remained standing of the gordin: stark illustration of the vulnerability and casual fate of man-­made structures. To the east rears up the isolated peak of Çırabengi Tepe (7,220 feet), brooding over the forbidding gorge of the Gülan Dere tumbling down to the Kömür Çay. To the south, visible for the last time, lies Gülan Dağ and its jagged crest, stretched like another upturned saw along the horizon above Diştaş. To the north-­east the skyline is dominated by the huge pyramid of Kurtlu Tepe. Road and ridge descend in a long arc from east through to north-­west, and turn north and north-­east again above Derebaşı. There the ridgeway is crossed by a modern track linking the asfalts, uncompleted in 2000, from İliç and from Kemah to Refahiye. West and north of Derebaşı the intermittent remains of an old road, 3 to 4 metres wide, can be followed for about 4 miles in several sections, winding along saddles and around low summits in precisely the same way as its continuation south of Yumak Tepe, and as the frontier road north of the Şiro Çay in the Taurus. The trace continues north-­north-­east along a broad, undulating ridge to join the caravan route following the ridgeway above Amperi (Route A), a dozen miles from Diştaş. C. NORTH A L ONG TH E KÖMÜ R ÇAY: TH E A NTON I N E ROA D An important natural route leads north-­west from Kemah towards Refahiye, passing up the Kömür Çay, and climbing around the southern and western flanks of Kurtlu Tepe.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 242 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

A

C

B

0

D

19

5 miles

0

10 km

1

AD DRACONES

)(

yla n ya Çime

2

HARIS ?

18

20

CHORSABIA ? 3

al

ıÇ

.

CHORSABIA ? Çengerli

El

m

4

15

CHARAX ? CARSAGA

Kö

mü r Ç.

DASTEIRA MONS ? 5

14

CARSAGA ? 14

SINERVAS

15

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

ACROSS THE MOU NTA INS TO SATA L A  243

In winter it offered a safe, low-­level route, avoiding the Çardaklu pass, between Erzincan and Refahiye. ‘Durant tous les mois d’hiver’, Cumont noted, ‘la neige bloque la passe même du Tchardaklu et rend le massif que nous traversions à peu près impraticable. Il faut alors pour parvenir à Erzingiân faire un grand détour au sud par Kémakh.’ Strecker was informed of this route from Kemah: a total of twelve hours in winter, over the Ziyaret pass on the western shoulder of Kurtlu Tepe, to the vicinity of Refahiye. He was not told of the lower Salt Road, leading via Horopol, and over the eastern shoulder of Kurtlu Tepe, directly to Melik Şerif.6 The river takes its name from Kömür, a village with important coal and salt mines in a side valley 2 miles from the Euphrates. Two long traces survive of a caravan road, which in its southern reaches certainly preserves the line of the Antonine winter road from Satala, via the Euphrates valley, to Nicopolis.

The Caravan Road from Ermelik to the Elmalı Çay The route led north-­west from the Euphrates as far as the ascent to the plain of Ermelik, perhaps Ptolemy’s Charax. Avoiding the abrupt gorge of the Kömür Çay, the caravan road cut straight across the plain, and descended on its northern side to rejoin the riverbed where the valley curves to the north-­east. Beside the modern road lie the ruins of a han 22 metres long by 15 metres wide. Turning north-­west, caravans followed the Kömür Çay to the junction of the Elmalı Çay; 30 metres wide, it required a bridge. But there is no trace of an ancient abutment.

The Higher Salt Road: from Kömür to the Çimen Dağ ları Immediately before the crossing of the Elmalı Çay, the ‘Salt Road’ from the mines at Kömür diverged, to pass over the summit of the northern Kara Dağ (9,050 feet) and descend to the central yayla of the Çimen Dağları. Used only in summer, it followed the north bank of the Elmalı Çay, and climbed steeply upwards for nearly 4,000 feet, skirting around the cliffs that line the southern approaches to the Çardaklu pass. Above the cliffs, the clear trace of an ancient road can be followed northwards for an hour across uplands, desolate at about 7,000 feet, to the head of the pass. Walking south along it in October 1989, Ahmet Demirtaş instructed me to turn back before I ran into PKK terrorists. The Salt Road seems to have climbed above the pass in long zigzags, up the steep and fiercely eroded southern ridge, and almost to the very summit of Kara Dağ; passing close below the radio relay station, buried for half the year in 4–5 metres of snow. There the road turned to follow the eastern shoulder, and descended gradually for two hours along the crest of the long bare ridge which, at 8,000 feet, hangs precipitously over the Çardaklu gorge. On the ridge only a short section of ancient road survives. The Salt Road then turned sharply north, and descended by steep zigzags to reach in an hour the south-­western corner of the Çimen yayla. Cutting diagonally across the yayla to the ancient spring and probable site of Dracones, the Salt Road converged with the line of the Peutinger frontier road to Satala.

◀  M ap 19  Armenia Minor: from Kemah to Haris, and from Haris to Ad Dracones

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 244 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Villagers from nearby Mengüt, where Ahmet and I stayed with Hacı Yıldız in August 1987, confirmed that this route was used by caravans collecting salt from Kemah. The Salt Road thus offers a direct link between the Euphrates and the high ridgeway across the Çimen Dağları. But a vertical ascent of over a mile, sustained altitude, and sheer desolation make it difficult even in summer, and for nearly half the year the summit of Kara Dağ is snowbound. Resembling the muleteers’ road over the Kerboğaz, this can have been no more than a seasonal shortcut in Roman times.

The Upper Kömür Çay From the crossing of the Elmalı Çay the caravan road climbed through Elmalı, to reach the fertile uplands that extend above the gorge of the Kömür Çay, and continued north-­ westwards across them, through Koçevi. In both villages were said to be the ruins of hans. But both belong to the kaza of Kemah, and in August 2000 Sergeant Müzaffer, a champion marksman with half his stomach shot away by the PKK in the Dersim, could not proceed beyond the operational area of the karakol in Refahiye, and could not allow me to visit them. In the centre of Refahiye I was received with great dignity in the garden of his magnificent wooden mansion by Erdem Kumbaroğlu, introduced by his son, then Turkish vice-­consul in London. A retired schools’ inspector, Erdem recalled how he used to ride on horseback to Kemah after the railway arrived in 1939; in summer in a single day, but in winter stopping at Elmalı for the night.

The Lower Salt Road: from Horopol to Melik S¸erif Three miles north-­west of Koçevi, a second ‘Salt Road’ diverged northwards from the caravan road to pass through Horopol, crammed with few fields into a narrow valley beside the Horopol Çay. From the village, the road can be clearly seen as it approaches from the south. The name, evidently derived from the Greek horos and polis, and so, perhaps, ‘town on the frontier’, and the presence not only of abundant water, but particularly of a large church, a rare survivor of 1915, said to be Greek but evidently Armenian and now in reuse as a barn, suggest for Horopol an antiquity of which no trace survives. What is certain is that the village lies directly astride an important transit route. From Horopol two tracks lead north, over the eastern shoulder of Kurtlu Tepe, to the Refahiye valley. The lower track follows the deep, flat-­bottomed bed of the Horopol Çay, and at its head climbs steeply to reach the shoulder, in about two hours, at its lowest point (7,150 feet) beside the huts of a remote yayla. Müzaffer knew that the valley route from Horopol was used by the PKK. It seems unlikely that this route was Roman. But from the shoulder its character changes, as the track descends steeply northwards through dense pine forest, following a narrow spine between ravines, and heading directly towards Melik Şerif. Müzaffer had exercised his Special Team, seven elite Sualtı Taarruz (Underwater Attack) Commandos, impressive and highly trained men, by tipping them out of their Lant, ‘Landrover’, and ordering them to run steeply uphill behind it. Here there was some hesitation. They would not enter the forest in a group of less than four. So I tackled it from both ends. The road through the forest was the Salt Road, used by trains of up to 100 mules or donkeys, but not camels, passing constantly from June to October until as recently as 1955, and bound for Giresun and Gümüşhane. Now little used, the road, mainly 2 to 3 metres

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

ACROSS THE MOU NTA INS TO SATA L A  245

wide, is well preserved. Where the gradient is steeper than 1:5, it uses shallow zigzags reminiscent of Roman engineering on the south side of the Şiro Çay. After half an hour of rapid descent, it curves east and emerges on level ground at Düvermezraası Harabe. The remains of a round structure, some 15 metres in diameter and strewn with fragments of apparently Roman roof tiles, stand about 70 metres from the bottom of the descent; perhaps a guard post, from which a well-­marked track leads north-­west, straight to Melik Şerif. The higher, broad and well worn, climbs steadily from Horopol itself (Fig. 11.7), looping up the long ridge above the Horopol Çay in a style seen so often along the frontier road, to cross the shoulder of Kurtlu Tepe at a higher level (c.7,500 feet). From there a connection with the Salt Road is likely, but could not be demonstrated because of PKK-­induced nervousness. Continuing, this second track also descends through forest, further to the west and less steep. A broad track leads down to Alacaatlı. There it turns north-­eastward along the line of the frontier road (Route A), to Melik Şerif.

Cengerli (? Caesarea) Where the Salt Road diverged after Koçevi, the caravan road continued north-­west to pass below Cengerli (6,050 feet), a large and important village high on the southern foothills of Kurtlu Tepe, with a commanding view down the valley of the Kömür Çay towards Kemah. Many of the forty-­five houses are built with large ashlar blocks and some marble. The blocks were said to have come from a quarry a mile to the east, close to Horopol. In October 1989 Ahmet Demirtaş would not permit photographs in Cengerli: the village was too backward. This unwelcome view reflected an increased nervousness in the vilayet. The vali, Ahmet confided, had instructed him privately on no account to  allow me to venture south of the Euphrates, into the Munzur Dağları. He spoke

F ig . 11.7  The higher track, climbing from Horopol (obscured), view south: beyond, Kerz Dağ, left, and Gulan Dağ (August 2000)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 246 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

guardedly of two PKK ambushes, at Alp Köy and Balahor. There was less eagerness than in 1987 to let me out of his sight, to go into villages, or to allow photographs in them. The authorities seemed more on the defensive. Control outside Erzincan and the main roads was evidently eroding. In fields half a mile below the village, a huge free-­standing rock, Cengerli Kale (Fig. 11.8), is cut with the steps and platforms of an Urartian fire temple. During the Persian wars of ad 502–6, Armenians broke down the fire temples which had been built by the Persians in their land, and killed the magi. Cengerli Kale seems to be the Holy Rock, in the kaza of Refahiye, mentioned in the Erzincan Gazetteer (1999): ‘The Roman bonded warehouse found at the north side of the Holy Rock consists of three round buildings. Its origins date all the way back to the Hittites.’ Of such buildings I have seen no trace. From the platforms, a long section of the caravan route, in constant use before the Çardaklu pass was opened in winter, can be seen running up from the south-­east, passing close below, and continuing to the north-­west. Below the eastern face of the rock, a rect­ angu­lar area of level ground, measuring some 100 × 120 metres, is strewn with secondand third-­century pottery, and fragments of tiles: at 1.2 hectares (nearly 3 acres) perhaps just large enough for an infantry cohort. The well-­named muhtar, Salih Kutlu, ‘lucky’, showed me where he had found a stele, the tombstone of the son of a decurion, Sextilius Valens, troop commander of cohors I Thracum Syriaca, a part-­mounted infantry regiment, buried at the base of Cengerli Kale on the northern side, and transported to Erzincan. While awaiting permission there in 1989, I called on the Director of Culture in the Public Library. Face down in the grass outside was Salih’s inscription, transported from Cengerli three years before. Nothing was too much trouble for the Director: he helped with the squeeze. But once dry it was confiscated, and only returned when I pointed out that the Library was not a museum.

F ig . 11.8  The great rock below Cengerli: view south, down the Menek Dere; in the distance, Gülan Dağ (August 2000)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

ACROSS THE MOU NTA INS TO SATA L A  247

A stream, fed by a spring, flows down towards a cistern, 8 metres in diameter and lined with hard mortar, dug in the level ground below the rock. Salih recalled that copper coins and tiles with non-­Turkish writing had been found near the rock some fifty years before: a standard description of Latin, and probably auxiliary tiles. Once there had also been a mill, at the centre of what was believed to be a large city. In broad fields, sloping up beyond the stream towards the village of Cengerli, are further signs of occupation in Roman times: large, fragmentary quantities of earthenware pipes, and of roof, floor, and hypocaust tiles. Unlike neighbouring Horopol, Cengerli offers no evidence of Christianity. The position of Cengerli, astride the caravan route and close to Horopol, 2 miles away across spurs running down from Kurtlu Tepe, was highly suitable for a garrison. Here a part-­mounted cohort could control the upper part of the valley leading up from Kemah, and all traffic passing west or east of Kurtlu Tepe. The ancient name is elusive. Nearly six hours from the Euphrates, amid mountains dotted with small villages, Cengerli is one of few positions capable of supporting a substantial settlement. It may be Ptolemy’s Chorsabia, inland from the Euphrates among the mountains of Armenia Minor; or Caesarea, with Nicopolis and (H)aza, one of the three celebrated oppida in Armenia Minor known to Pliny.7 Two miles north-­west of Cengerli, the gently sloping uplands above the Kömür Çay come to an end, and a further trace of the caravan road can be seen, where it converges to join the more difficult line of the modern road driven along the riverbed. Both climbed to the broad Ziyaret pass (6,400 feet) over the western shoulder of Kurtlu Tepe, and descended gradually to cross or join the routes from Kuruçay and the Kerboğaz (Routes A and B) in the vicinity of Şahverdi. The pass carried the lowest route between Erzincan and the Refahiye valley. The map shows a carriage road leading down from the pass, through Refahiye, and over the hills to Karayakup. This was the direct route from Kemah to Suşehri in Ottoman times, and it passed some miles to the west of Melik Şerif. Traffic bound for the latter followed the Salt Road from Horopol, or crossed the lower Ziyaret pass and turned north-­east through Şahverdi, along the line of the Peutinger frontier road. The evidence for Roman activity astride the road at Cengerli suggests that the Ziyaret pass, less arduous than the Salt Road, may have offerred a brief variant of the Antonine road to Nicopolis.

Kurtlu Tepe A local tradition, strongly held in Melik Şerif and elsewhere, recalled the presence of marble structures and inscriptions on the summit of the huge peak of Kurtlu Tepe, ‘peak with wolves’ (8,860 feet). Following the track upwards from Alacaatlı in 1965, alone, I found neither. But the peak is a spectacular vantage point. It was probably used for observation and artillery spotting in 1916. In Roman times too, at least in summer, the peak is likely to have had a military purpose: an important long-­range signalling position linking Carsaga (? at Sağ, opposite Kemah), the station at Cengerli, and Haris (Melik Şerif ), ultimately with Dulluk Tepe above Melitene, and with Mantartaşı above Satala. Shallow pits, unlined, may be associated, as on Dulluk Tepe, with storage of timber for beacons. Below are spread the approaches of the three access routes from the Euphrates. Far in the south-­west distance rears the broken whaleback of Büyüksarmısak Tepe, above Turkish Zımara, and in sight, further still, are the ancient cemetery above the Çalti Çay, and the signalling mound above Arege.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 248 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

M ELI K S¸ ER I F A N D TH E R EFA H I Y E VA LLEY

Melik Şerif (? Haris) All three ancient routes from the Euphrates united at Melik Şerif (4,600 feet; Fig. 11.9). Ten miles east of Refahiye, the village sprawls beneath a huge red rock, at the mouth of a side valley in the western foothills of Kara Dağ. A large village of 106 houses, Melik Şerif is believed locally to be very old, named on the arrival of the Turks by descendants of Melikşah from Azerbaijan. Half collapsed in the cemetery in 1900 was an elegant octagonal türbe of white marble. In 1642 the name was Ezirins, with twelve Muslim and four Armenian families. In Ottoman times, Melik Şerif provided a group of twenty-­one villagers to maintain bridges, and to protect traffic passing in summer and winter along and across the Refahiye valley; and thus to secure exemption from tax. Inscriptions and reported remains confirm the importance of this position in Roman times. Here in 1838 Boré was well received by the bey, and wrote, without further comment, ‘Il est certain que j’y ai vu l’emplacement d’un fort et d’un édifice en marbre, qui devait être un temple.’ Despite ‘beaucoup de méfiance et hostilité’ on the part of the inhabitants, Cumont recorded in 1900 eight fragments, recently dug up and preserved in the Armenian church, of a white marble plaque dedicated to Severus in ad 198 by cohors I Lepidiana equitata civium Romanorum, and several large blocks of grey marble. Church and antiquities did not long survive. On 3 June 1915 Melik Şerif, with Gercenis and Horopol, was surrounded by irregulars, and the Armenian populations, nearly 1,600 in all, were killed on the spot.

F ig . 11.9 Melik Şerif: cooking pekmez (August 2000)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

ACROSS THE MOU NTA INS TO SATA L A  249

An hour above the village, a milestone of early ad 76, with the mileage 3, was found in the shallow valley, well marked by broad animal tracks, that leads north up to the ­narrow ridge between the Refahiye valley and the Zevker (Orcil) Dere (Fig. 11.10). Little more than four years after the annexation of Armenia Minor, the text records the completion of a section of the frontier road under Pompeius Collega, the earliest known consular gov­ ern­ or of the combined province of Cappadocia and Armenia Minor. Reaching the ridge, the road divided, turning east to continue the frontier road towards the Çimen Dağları and Satala, and west to carry the winter support road to Nicopolis. Between 1965 and 2006 I have visited and stayed many times in Melik Şerif. None has produced trace or recollection of any of these monuments. Even Süleyman Polatlı, the widely respected muhtar, assigned to me by the kaymakam of Refahiye in August 2000, knew of no ancient remains; and no coins or inscriptions have been found in recent years. This was a position of cardinal importance in the ancient road system of Armenia Minor. Here the Peutinger frontier road from the south, from Melitene and Zimara, crossed the Antonine support road from the west, from Ancyra and Nicopolis; the latter joining the Antonine road per ripam at Carsaga. Both roads led to Satala. The crossroads demanded a military presence. The course of the Peutinger frontier road is marked by the milestones at Sipdiğin and above Melik Şerif; and on it Melik Şerif should be identified with Haris, roughly half way between Elegarsina at Mezraaıhan, and Draconis high on the Çimen Dağları.8

F ig . 11.10  Roads, briefly combined, descending south towards Melik Şerif: beyond, the support road to the Euphrates climbs steeply through the forest on the eastern slopes of Kurtlu Tepe; the frontier road diverges right, below them (August 2000)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 250  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

The Winter Support Road from Haris to Nicopolis (Fig. A1) The Antonine road leading up from the Euphrates valley and Carsaga, and over the eastern shoulder of Kurtlu Tepe, turned west above Melik Şerif to follow the ridgeway high above the Refahiye valley. Eroded traces, climbing over or around small summits, survived in August 2000 for 7 miles towards Kürelik. Here the ancient road, rising to nearly 7,400 feet, was joined by the caravan road from Kemah, in winter climbing over the Ziyaret pass, and steeply up from Refahiye. But local memory recalled that most caravans from Kemah, and in summer from Erzincan over the Çardaklu pass, came via Melik Şerif. At Kürelik had been a han, now disappeared. Here a clear trace of the ancient road, traced in 2006, curved north-­west; to follow a natural line, confirmed by the Ottoman caravan route and the araba yolu, ‘cart road’, and passing through Alacahan and Handere, ‘han stream’, and above Yukarı Yeniköy. At both villages caravans were also remembered. Descending to cross the Çobanlu Su, a substantial river without trace of an ancient bridge, the Ottoman and cart road, overlaid by the modern, climbed to Karayakup. There it joined the main, northern support road, the Antonine road, from Nicopolis to Satala.The now combined road ran westwards for 5 miles to Ağvanis (evidently Olotoedariza, 24 miles from Nicopolis), marked by a milestone of ad 367–75; continued on through Sevindik, marked by a milestone, preserved in the cemetery of the Armenian church, with the mileage 16, of (?) ad 129; and, leaving no trace, passed along the southern edge of the rich plain, the Aşkar Ova, to Pürk (Nicopolis). This southern, winter route from the Euphrates was the road followed in December, in c. ad 303, by the dux Lysias, marching with an army from Satala, via Arauraca, to Nicopolis.9

The Refahiye Valley The geography of the mountains, the location of the legionary fortress at Satala, and engineering practice remarkable for economy with height and distance make it certain that the Peutinger frontier road did not follow the barren Refahiye valley east of Melik Şerif, to join the higher Salt Road (Fig. 11.11), and to climb with it close to the summit of Kara Dağ.

F ig . 11.11  Evening over the Munzur Dağları, from the head of the Çardaklu pass (August 1964)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

ACROSS THE MOU NTA INS TO SATA L A  251

Preferring an easier and lower route, the frontier road passed north of the great agglomeration of peaks that close off the plain of Erzincan, and lie north of its main access route over the Çardaklu pass, a place of unhappy memories. At an overnight halt near Melik Şerif in July 1984, I was tempted to change from my Erzincan bus to the bus for Gümüşhane. The eastern side of the Çardaklu pass is very steep and severely eroded, overhung with unstable, shale screes. The slopes above are almost impassable, and on to them the southern face of the Çimen Dağları falls in a mass of cliffs and eroded gullies. Descending towards Erzincan, brakes failed, the Gümüşhane bus lay on its roof at the foot of the pass. Following close behind, my bus stopped, and eager passengers pulled the victims out of the windows.10 TH E F RONT I ER ROA D F ROM M ELI K S¸ ER I F TO K U RUGÖL Climbing above Melik Şerif, the frontier road followed the Rişkân and İkisivri ridgeways, and at Kurugöl, close below the summit of the Çimen Dağları, joined the main support road from Ancyra, via Nicopolis, to Satala. The line can be followed almost continuously on the ground. Along the ridgeway above Melik Şerif, a well-­preserved ancient track, known as the ‘Baghdad Road’ and similar in line and remains to sections of the Sultan Murat Caddesi over the Antitaurus high above Kemaliye, can be followed eastwards continuously for nine hours over the mountains to Kurugöl. I had walked across the main Çimen Dağları with Ahmet Demirtaş in August 1987 and October 1989, and returned to the western end in 2000. Unescorted research was still forbidden. For two days in August, protected by Sergeant Mustafa and five heavily armed jandarma, enthusiastic and impressive young men crammed into a ‘Lant’, watched by an uninvited MIT team trailing conspicuously behind us in a white Murat, and guided by Süleyman Polatlı, I scoured the long ridgeway above the Refahiye asfalt. Known and welcomed everywhere, Süleyman radiated confidence and good humour, encouraging cheerful conversation and a valuable flow of information. The villages, under-­populated for eleven months, many deserted in winter, were full of families holidaying from the cities of western Turkey and northern Europe. Bare and level at 7,200 feet, the ridgeway offers an easy route. On the north side, valleys torn by landslides and erosion plunge steeply to the deep valley of the Zevker Dere. Short traces of an ancient road, 6 or 7 metres wide, with an apparent agger but no edges, are preserved above Ekecik. Reduced in width in places to 4, more frequently to 2–3 metres, the road dropped down from the ridge close below Rişkân. German-­speaking girls were working in the fields, and new, well-­polished BMWs were parked beside piles of tezek, cakes of dried ox-­dung. In the cemetery below the village, a Turkish tombstone was inscribed beneath an earlier text preserved only in the enigmatic letters LECIEA, suggesting leg I’E’ A(pollinaris): legio XV Apollinaris, in garrison at Satala. Descending diagonally for nearly two hours into the depths of the middle Zevker Dere, the road passed between pine trees perched above huge screes, and rounded the high shoulder opposite Çukurçimen. Protected by the insulating layer of mud applied to their wooden walls for warmth in winter, its houses survived the 1992 earthquake without damage. Bricks would have collapsed; and a small church, which had been standing five years before in fields north of the village, had been destroyed. The road

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 252  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

continued relentlessly downwards, with zigzags through oak trees above Kar Yatağı, ‘snow bed’, and below Kınalı, to the abandoned Health Centre at Mülk, once Melik and in population partly Armenian. There the valley of the Orcil Dere turns abruptly to the south-­east, towards its source in the Çimen yayla, and the road crossed its narrow gravel bed by a kervan köprü, a ‘caravan bridge’ remembered locally, but now vanished. From the crossing the ancient road turned north-­east into the side valley, deep and remote, of the Söğütlü Çay. Below Söğütlü itself, a man smart in dark suit and tie, and his son, were sacrificing a goat on the barren hillside beside the river. It was 15 August, the Feast of the Assumption: as at Çit Harabe (Sabus), a day for memories. The upper valley, unvisited, is thronged with villages, once Armenian. Among the highest is Çatakkilise, ‘narrow valley church’. Two miles from the Orcil Dere, the road climbed east-­south-­east in steep zigzags, visible in places beside the modern track, to Söğütlü, where once had been two Armenian churches. An old man, born in 1915, recalled camels and horses heading for Kelkit. The road can be clearly traced through the village, rising to gentle uplands that fall precipitously to the west into the Orcil Dere. Emerging from the tree line, it turned east, and for two hours wound gradually up the western slopes of the Çimen Dağları to reach the Cibil sirt, the ‘naked crest’; and to pass below the northern base of İkisivri (7,700 feet), ‘twin peaks’, rising high, rounded and conspicuous above the ridge. To south and west, the naked crest falls precipitously into the upper Orcil Dere, rushing down from the Çimen yayla. Beyond to the south rises the steep mass of Kara Dağ. From what was once the eastern base of İkisivri, now slipped away, the road passed along a fiercely eroded col, offering an extraordinary natural bridge to the base of the highest summit. As on the southern side of the Sipikör Pass, much of the road has also slipped recently down the mountainsides. Climbing again by steep zigzags, and reaching its highest point, the road passed between two towering rock outcrops at an altitude of about 7,700 feet. On neither is any trace of structures. To the east falls a long, rounded ridge, and the road ran down it, just below the crest. Narrowed at one point to a width of 3.35 metres in a gap cut through a single huge rock, it passed 500 metres north of a ruined han, 28 metres long by 21 metres wide, perched at about 7,200 feet on the rim of the Çimen yayla. This is the only structure on the barren ridges that surround the Çimen yayla, and is believed, mistakenly, at Mengüt to be associated with the Baghdad road from Suşehri, near Nicopolis, to Sadak (Satala); 1,000 feet above the tree line, it is certainly no position for a fort. In twenty minutes the track descended to Kurugöl (7,050 feet), a small ‘dry lake’, and the desolate junction with the main support road from Ancyra and Nicopolis, two hours from İkisivri and four from Balahor; in precisely the configuration suggested by the Peutinger Table, and corroborated in the Antonine Itinerary. The meeting of roads shows that the summit of the Çimen Dağları was a position of key geographical and strategic importance. TH E M A I N SU PPORT ROA D F ROM N ICOPOLIS TO K U RUGÖL (F IGS. A1, A 2) From the junction with the southern, winter support road at Karayakup, the main support road from Ancyra and Nicopolis continued due east, without surviving trace, to the

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

ACROSS THE MOU NTA INS TO SATA L A  253

Çobanlu Su; and crossed at the mouth of the savage gorge, described by Cumont. Through it the river, joined by the Zevker Dere, cuts northwards to join the Kelkit Çay, the ancient Lycus. There was once a wooden bridge, Koymat Köprü, said in October 1989 to have been destroyed ‘about fifty years ago’. A modern, concrete bridge, then under construction on the same alignment, is 78 metres long. Of an ancient predecessor there is no trace. From the crossing, and still known as the Caravan or the Old Baghdad Road, the road can be traced eastwards towards the ‘passe encore indéterminée’ which carried the Roman road from Nicopolis directly over the Çimen Dağları to Satala. It has been a marked privilege for me, as an ‘explorateur futur’, to accomplish the task denied to Cumont. Running beside the lower Zevker Dere, the course of the ancient road is marked by Ottoman, perhaps Selcuk cemeteries, until, after 3 miles, it turns north-­east to climb across gentle hills to Kökseki (4,900 feet; Fig. 11.12). Below the village, three hours on foot from Koymat Köprü,there had been a stone bridge and a han, evidently destroyed half a century ago. Yavuz Sultan Selim (1512–20) is said to have stayed at Kökseki for three days, and quartered a regiment there; and the road, known also as the Expeditionary Road, was used within living memory by large caravans. Lying among fertile, well watered slopes, Kökseki was claimed to be ancient and important, once a city with a church and castle. In 1642 the population was predominantly Armenian. About seven and a half hours from Ağvanis (Olotoedariza), this is the last substantial village until Balahor, below the eastern slopes of the Çimen Dağları. It seems certain that an unnamed station was located in the vicinity.

F ig . 11.12*  Cemetery beside the support road at Kökseki: view west, towards distant Nicopolis (October 1989)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 254  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Half a mile above Kökseki, a section of kaldırım, identified as the Old Baghdad Road, survived in 1987, not more than 3.5 metres wide, built with small stones, and with traces of paving. All was destroyed by ploughing in 1988. The road continued its gradual ascent, passing two Selcuk cemeteries and the small village of Çatak, once also pre­dom­ in­ant­ly Armenian; and turned south to climb steeply up to the western end of the long Kazveren ridgeway. This section was in origin certainly Roman. Well preserved throughout, and known as the Caravan Road, it rose steadily eastwards for three hours, skirting around the southern sides of three rounded summits, high above the deep valleys of the Zevker Dere and Sögütlü Çay. Beneath the second summit, and half a mile south of the ancient road, a remarkable monolith, in 1989 broken in half but said once to have been 5 metres tall, stands conspicuous but uninscribed in a Greek cemetery, at Kervan Pınarı, ‘caravan spring’, above Akşehir. On the tree line, and evidently a yayla, the vanished ‘white city’ may have been a high-­altitude refuge. Beneath the last summit the road crosses a low culvert bridge, 3.65 metres wide and built with large flat stones. In the south-­eastern distance the frontier road from Melik Şerif rises above Söğütlü towards İkisivri. Passing close above Kazveren, a scattering of primitive shepherd houses above the tree line at 6,100 feet, the caravan and ancient road curves slowly to the south-­east, skirting a few hundred feet below the ridge and rising to 7,700 feet, and descends to the dry lake bed at Kurugöl. Here, seven hours from Kökseki, the main support road from Nicopolis, the Antonine road, joined the Peutinger frontier road from Melik Şerif.11 Along the high, barren ridgeway across the Çimen Dağları convincing traces survive of an ancient road, known today as the Eski Rus Yol, the ‘Old Russian Road’. The Front in 1916 has left trenches and cartridge cases at 7,000 feet. No certain remains of a built road, no kerbs or central spine can be determined. But what remains resembles in places the long section descending the northern slopes of Şakşak Dağ towards Melitene. With Ahmet Demirtaş in August 1987, I was able to trace the road westwards for fourteen hours, from Çimen yayla to Mülk, below Çukurçimen; reached at the cost of altitude sickness. F ROM K U RUGÖL TO SATA L A The convergence of strategic roads demanded a station, at or in the vicinity of Kurugöl. There Peutinger marks Draconis: the fort symbol indicative of a road junction. The Antonine variant Ad Dracones, on the support road from Ancyra and Nicopolis, suggests a topographical place-­name, linked with a natural or artificial reference point. The twin peaks of İkisivri, a conspicuous geographical landmark, provide an obvious explanation. The dominant feature of the Çimen Dağları, used by the Russians for artillery spotting, and by villagers as a geographical reference point in discussion of tracks across the mountains, these are the Dragons of the Itineraries, their haunt a high and forbidding landscape. The desolation of Kurugöl invites a guardpost, but Dracones itself should be located in a kinder position, further to the east. Now combined, the frontier and support roads continued east for an hour, along a dry, shallow valley running parallel to and close above the Çimen yayla, a few hundred metres to the south. On a low col above Kurugöl (Fig. 11.3) the road passes between two old Ottoman cemeteries, and on the next col, about a mile east, are possible signs of collapsed paving

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

ACROSS THE MOU NTA INS TO SATA L A  255

F ig . 11.13  Çimen Dağları: the frontier road running west towards Kurugöl, centre, and İkisivri, left (August 1987)

nearly 5  metres wide. Known in Mengüt as the Baghdad and the Russian Road, the Roman road did not descend into the yayla, but continued east for nearly 2 miles, on solid ground about 200 metres uphill from its eastern end. Just below the eastern rim of the yayla a spur must have led down to its water and shelter.

Çimen Yayla (? Ad Dracones) Surrounded by mountains, the Çimen yayla, at nearly 7,000 feet, is a mile across. For five months it is snowbound, for seven well-­watered by melting snow, wet and in places boggy. From early June until late September, villagers from Mengüt use the yayla for grazing and crops. In the passage of the Çimen Dağları, high and inhospitable, this was an important place of shelter and refuge: at the half way point, eleven hours from each, on the Peutinger frontier road between Melik Şerif and Sadak (Satala). On the yayla’s northern edge, close to the Russian road, a Shia cemevi, an open-­air kızılbaş mosque, with three large ashlar stones in reuse as steps, stands in the middle of an ancient cemetery. A copious and clearly ancient spring flows nearby from the base of a low cliff, the only reliable source of clean water in the Çimen Dağları. On dry and level ground before it are spread the foundations of at least nine large rectangular buildings, 18 to 22 metres long, and 6 or 7 metres wide, with walls a metre thick. Their purpose is obscure. Not formal hans, and too massive to be animal pens, they are perhaps high-­altitude refuges, constructed from the relics of an ancient station. At the opposite, south-­western corner of the yayla, on firm but sloping ground, is a mass of formless foundations, without cut stones. Above them a zigzag track climbs steeply south towards the shoulder of Kara Dağ. It was identified in the Çimen yayla as the Salt Road to Kemah. Escorted once more by Ahmet Demirtaş, I followed this section of the Salt Road in swirling snow in October 1989. The radio relay station on the summit was about to be buried for nearly six months. A smooth track cleared along the

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 256  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 11.14 Çimen yayla, view north-­west: supposed site of Ad Dracones (October 1989)

eastern ridge showed that the cheerful technicians would be resupplied by Snowcat from the Ahmediye pass. The sheltered Çimen yayla, with its ancient structures clustered around the spring, must be considered the site of Dracones (Fig. 11.14). The desolate ridgeways leading up from the west are too high and exposed for a station either on the frontier road above Söğütlü, or on the support road above Akşehir, five and six hours away respectively. To the east, bare slopes offer no alternative site until Balahor. Edging close above the yayla, the Old Russian and Baghdad Road climbs to the low ridge overlooking its eastern rim, and divides. The former followed the valley which winds down from the eastern end of the yayla, preferring a route more suitable for guns, and evidently passed through Cemallıkomu. The Baghdad Road took a more northerly path, descending gradually from the Çimen Dağları along a series of interlinking watersheds. Its path can be traced continuously (Fig. 11.15). In contrast to the separate paths of the frontier and support roads, much eroded, on the western ridgeways of the Çimen Dağları, several long sections, one running straight for about 300 metres, preserve the two kerbs and centre spine of a 5-­metre road, marked with the droppings of wolves. Similar in construction to the 7-­metre cobbled road in the Deregezen valley and across the Antitaurus, the Baghdad Road must be identified as Roman. After ninety minutes it reaches the sharp ridge high above and between Cemallıkomu and Uzunkol. From the ridge the Roman road turns abruptly south, zigzagging down a steep spur to reach the modern track a mile east of Cemallikomu; and turns east again, towards Balahor. A well-­preserved section, 5 metres wide, can be traced eastwards for half a mile,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

ACROSS THE MOU NTA INS TO SATA L A  257

F ig . 11.15  Above Cemallıkomu: the combined frontier and support road climbing west towards the Çimen yayla, with Ahmet Demirtaş (October 1989)

close above the gorge of the Balahor Dere, and descending to the stream bed opposite the village.

Balahor (? Cunissa) Three hours below the Çimen yayla, Balahor (6,000 feet) stands close above the south bank of the stream, on sloping ground at the very limit of the tree line. This is the first fertile place with good fields, the highest village after the descent from the long crossing of the Çimen Dağları. Only its proximity to the ancient road, and cut stones of uncertain date, suggest antiquity. But there can be no doubt that a station existed in its vicinity: probably Cunissa. Balahor had been attacked, and sixteen jandarma shot by the PKK in 1988, and by 1989 the village was largely abandoned.

From Balahor to Satala From Balahor the frontier road passed down the north bank of the Balahor Dere, full of trout. Three miles east of the village the Turkish Army map marks a han, now vanished, on the north bank; confirming the continuation of the caravan route from Melik Şerif served by the ruined han above Kurugöl. At the junction of rivers, the frontier road turned east along the broader valley of the Balahu Dere, followed by the asfalt from Erzincan to Kelkit, that stretches eastwards as far as Sipanazat some 7 miles away. Wide, fertile, and shaded with poplars and willows, the valley supports a scattering of villages nestling in side valleys on the lower slopes above. Kâlür and Sarpo on the southern side reveal no trace of antiquity. Near Sipanazat in June 2003 an ox-­drawn cart with solid wooden wheels was a relic of the 1960s. Six miles from Satala, caravans from Suşehri,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 258  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

near Nicopolis, diverged south-­eastwards to pass through Bandola, now Dörtyol, and continue to Erzerum. From Sipanazat, the ancient road climbed gradually for nearly an hour, up to the low col above the fortress of Satala. Looking back, the Balahu valley can be seen rising almost in a straight line to the foothills of the Çimen Dağları 20 miles away. This was the principal route from the west, and memory at Satala recalled the remains of a kaldırım, a paved road, on the summit of the Çimen Dağları, and names which confirm its continued use in more recent times. From the Russian advance in 1916 it is still generally known as the eski Rus yol, the ‘old Russian road’. It is also known as the eski manda yolu, the ‘old water buffalo road’, to Suşehri. Water buffalo crowded Sadak in their hundreds in the 1960s, recalling the immense herd seen by Cumont some miles east of Melik Şerif: ‘La route est déserte: nous rencontrons seulement un immense troupeau de buffles que des bouviers conduisent lentement, patiemment, à travers toute l’Anatolie jusqu’au marché de Constantinople.’12 NOT ES 1. Hommaire de Hell, Voyage IV 252ff. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 306. Kuruçay, Cuinet, Turquie I 219. 2. To be distinguished from the kaza of Koçkiri, centred around Zara, Cuinet, Turquie II 683ff.: a seat of the Koçkiri–Dersim uprising in 1921. 3. The Sipdiğin milestone, Cumont, SP II 324f., and EAM 534, no. 55. 4. Gercenis, Cuinet, Turquie I 218, and Strecker, ZAE 11 (1861) 357. The kaza contained 176 villages with 3,376 houses. 5. Strecker, ZAE 11 (1861) 358: from Kemah, across a river flowing to the left and unfordable in spring (the Kürtler Dere, 5½ hours), to Nezgeb (½ hour); Sitemi (2 hours); both Tschallo (Çalolar, ½ hour); then over Disch-­Tasch Dagh (Diştaş) to Zibti (Sipdiğin, 4 hours); in all a total of 12 hours. Strecker does not specify the route from Nezgep to Sitemi, and his times, particularly from Sitemi, should be doubled. Brant followed the Post Road from Kemah in 1835, JRGS 6 (1836) 203f. 6. Cumont, SP II 331. Strecker, ZAE 11 (1861) 357f. The Çardaklu pass, renamed Sakaltutan, ‘beard freezing’, has been open in winter only since the completion of the asfalt in 1964. 7. The tombstone of Sextilius Longinus, aged 4, EAM 533f., no. 54. Pliny, NH 6, 26. 8. Population in 1642, Başıbüyük, EGR 27 (2012) 91. Cumont, SP II 326–30. Inscriptions, EAM 534f., nos. 55–7, and the Melik Şerif milestone, ILS 8904. Haris is not mentioned in the Antonine Itinerary. 9. The course of the southern support road was followed, in places erroneously, by Cumont, SP II 321, 323–5, and 328. Milestones at Ağvanis and Sevindik, EAM 532f., nos. 52 and 50. From Karayakup the eastward course of the main support road is discussed below. 10. The unfamiliar geography, Cumont, SP II 328. 11. Cumont, SP II 321. Population in 1642, n. 8 above. 12. Cumont, SP II 330.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

TWELVE

Satala (Sadak) (Maps 1, 2, 3, 4, 21)

Satala (5,950 feet) commanded the strategic cross-­roads of north-­eastern Asia Minor (Fig. 12.1). Immediately below the fortress, through the valley of the Sadak Çay, passed the main axes of communications in Roman times: between Syria and the Euxine, and between the Aegean and northern Armenia. The first carried the frontier, the second the natural land route to Armenia, Albania, and Media Atropatene. Commanding the very point of their intersection, a few miles from the headwaters of the Lycus (Kelkit Çay) and the Acampsis (Çoruh), it was a position of crucial importance: to control traffic along and across the frontier, to mount campaigns and support military activity in Armenia and the Caucasus, and to resist incursion. In its location, Satala illustrates even more clearly than Melitene the remarkable strategic and tactical judgement of Roman commanders. In terms of the issues and forces at stake, the position of the legionary fortress at Satala is among the most crucial in the Empire. A NCI ENT ROA DS The fortress lay at the intersection of three principal ancient routes (Figs. A1, A2).

Frontier Roads The Antonine road per ripam turned away from the Euphrates in the plain of Erzincan, climbed over the short Sipikör pass (7,870 feet), and approached Satala from the south. The Peutinger road, more direct but higher over a much longer distance, left the Euphrates opposite İliç, passed through Melik Şerif, and climbed over the high Çimen Dağları to approach Satala, the caput viae, from the west. Remaining far above the tree line for nearly four hours on either side of the summit (7,700 feet), this was a long and  arduous road: a full day on horseback, it was said, from Melik Şerif to Satala, or  twenty-­five hours, two days, on foot. Both roads converged at the fortress, and ­continued north across the upper Lycus and the Pontic ranges to Trapezus.

Support Roads from the West The support roads from Ancyra, the Peutinger road via Amaseia, Comana Pontica, and the Lycus valley, and the Antonine road via Tavium and Sebasteia, combined at Nicopolis, and continued east; to climb easily up the high ridgeways of the Çimen Dağları and ­converge on the Peutinger frontier road at Kurugöl, near Ad Dracones. Known variously as the ‘Caravan’, ‘Baghdad’, ‘Old Baghdad’, ‘Expeditionary’, ‘Old Russian’, and ‘Old

Discovering Rome’s Eastern Frontier. Timothy Bruce Mitford, Oxford University Press (2021). © Timothy Bruce Mitford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843425.003.0013

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 260 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 12.1  Satala: basilica, and, on the hill beyond, Sadak. The conspicuous white house stands on the south-­east corner tower (August 1964)

Water Buffalo Road’, the road can be followed almost continuously across the mountains. It was used in the water buffalo trade from Sadak to Suşehri, open from May to November, but was blocked by 2 metres of snow in winter. Before the ascent to the Çimen Dağları, a lower route from Nicopolis diverged at Karayakup, to provide an alternative support road, important in winter, to Satala. Passing through Melik Şerif, it turned south towards the Euphrates, and joined the Antonine frontier road per ripam at Carsaga.

Route into Armenia The Peutinger Table marks a route which, from Satala, passed evidently through the plain of Erzurum, descended the Araxes valley through Andaga, Chadas, and Raugonia, evidently sited at road junctions, and diverged near Artaxata (south of Erivan) for Iberia and Albania. This, the east–west axis of the strategic cross-­roads, was to become the course of the historic caravan route from Constantinople to Erzerum and Tabriz in northern Persia: in early Ottoman times one of the five great caravan routes that linked Europe with Asia.1 The accounts of travellers during and after the seventeenth century show that caravans of great size and numbers passed between Tokat and Erzerum before the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and until the construction in 1939 of the railway from Sivas. The route passed below the crumbling walls of Satala, before embarking on the highest, and what was considered the most difficult and dangerous section of the entire journey between Constantinople and Erzerum; a section difficult enough in summer, and in winter practically impassable. Situated on an insignificant tributary of the Lycus, in a

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SATA L A  261

position of no consequence today, the fortress commanded the main strategic highway of northern Asia Minor at its most sensitive point. TH E CA R AVA N ROUT E Traffic was continuous and important. Caravans bound for the east started from Smyrna, rarely from Constantinople, while one left Bursa every two months. Tavernier journeyed ‘par toutes les routes que l’on peut tenir’, and passed four times between Tokat and Erzerum, the last in 1664. Listing the stages, he gives particular detail where the caravan route was most arduous, in the vicinity of Satala. Tokat was ‘un des plus grands passages de l’Orient; . . . il y arrive incessament des Caravanes de Perse, de Diarbequer, de Bagdad, de Constantinople, de Smyrne, de Synope et d’autres lieux. C’est d’ordinaire où ces Caravanes se séparent quand elles viennent de Perse. Celles qui vont à Constantinople prennent à main droite au couchant d’hyver, et celles qui vont à Smyrne tirent à la gauche au couchant d’esté.’ Tavernier was obliged to lodge outside Tokat with his own caravan, itself ‘fort grosse’, for the town was wholly occupied by that of the Grand Vizier returning from the abortive siege of Baghdad. The latter was executed next day, and his head was delivered to a palace servant who had hastened from Constantinople to collect it. On his last journey, Tavernier joined a caravan of 600 camels and 600 horses outside Smyrna, and arrived in Erivan more than three months later (9 June to 14 September): a distance of about 1,200 miles. Bound similarly for Tiflis in October 1777, Reineggs left Constantinople with a caravan which reached Tocat in twenty-­three days. Carefully described by Wright, the route from Trebizond, via Erzerum, to Tabriz, 548 miles, was well provided. Caravans took a minimum of thirty days for camels, and thirty to thirty-­five days for pack-­horses and mules, at a rate of about 15 miles a day. Twenty-­nine hans or caravanserais each marked the end of one day’s stage on the winter track. In 1872, both the winter and the summer tracks were considered too rough for camels, so that horses, mules, and donkeys were used to carry merchandise. Nevertheless, by 1884 over 5,000 camels were said to be engaged in the traffic. The last to be seen in Trebizond was in 1936, and by 1944 most of the hans were lying in ruins..Caravans northbound from Aleppo to Trebizond, Brant noted, covered 18 miles a day.2

Between the Lycus and the Euphrates In a single route adequate for caravans of immense size, traffic eastbound from Tokat followed the Lycus (Kelkit Çay) valley to Çiftlik (Kelkit); turned south-­east beside the Sadak Çay to pass close below the fortress; climbed over high barren mountains sprawling north-­east from Keşiş Dağ, descended to the Euphrates valley near Karakulak, and followed it easily through Aşkale to Erzerum. In the valley of the Sadak Çay, caravans passed beneath and in sight of Satala. Travelling with a caravan from Erzerum in 1701, Tournefort noted, ‘nous passames sur une montagne couverte de pins, dont la descente est fort rude, et qui conduit dans une vallée étroite et tortue, sur la gauche de laquelle on voit le reste d’un vieux Aqueduc à arcades arrondies qui paroit assez ancien’. The mountain was clearly the Pulur Dağları, the aqueduct the remains of the basilica, still standing half a mile south-­east of the fortress of

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 262  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Satala. Descending from the mountains in June 1809, Morier discovered on the left of his road to Chiftlik (Kelkit) ‘the village of Sadac’, situated some 2 miles from the road, ‘on the declivity of the hills, with a surrounding territory admirably fertile in corn, and well watered’. Travelling westwards in November 1819, Ker Porter too saw on his left ‘the village of Saddock’. Immediately below the fortress at least three hans once lay in the bed of the Sadak Çay, refuges before or after the passage of the mountains. From the river, eastbound caravans climbed directly over the ridge (7,200 feet) of the Pulur Dağları, identified by several travellers as Elmalı Dağ, its name taken from the village of Elmalı lying among its south-­western foothills. Descending to the Lori valley they passed through (Yukarı) Lori, and climbed again over a second range, the Otlukbeli Dağları, its name recorded only by Fraser; probably by a route winding over the high ridge (7,875 feet) near Otlukbelikomları, and running down the valley to Karakulak. At both Lori and Karakulak were post-­houses. On his first journey Tavernier travelled from Constantinople to Erzerum and Persia with a huge caravan which followed the standard route between Lycus and Euphrates. After Louri (Lori), ‘en sortant de Chaouqueu’ (Çay Köy), where he met a man aged 130, ‘on trouve une haute et rude montagne, ce qui luy a donné le nom d’Aaggi-­dogii, c’est a dire “montagne amère”. Comme les passages sont fort étroits, il faut que la Caravane fasse un defile, et c’est alors que l’on conte tous les chameux et les chevaux, chaque . . . payant au Caravan-­bachi un certain droit.’

Ilıca (Elegeia) to Sadak Close to the Euphrates at the western end of the plain of Erzerum, Ker Porter passed through Ilıca, in a position of great strategic importance. Approach from the east was channelled between hills and the Euphrates, wide enough to be spanned by a six-­arched bridge. The village lay on a rapid stream. West of Ilıca, the valley narrowed considerably, closing almost to the width of the river. Remarkable for two warm springs at 100°  Fahrenheit (38° Celsius), ‘used as baths and much frequented during the fine ­season by the inhabitants of Erz-­Rum and its environs’, Ilıca, Suter reported, lay about 6 miles west of Erzerum. Ker Porter continued along the left bank. Fording the Euphrates at Aşkale, he followed the north bank, for eight hours, seeing ‘more than a hundred graves (of travellers murdered by the Courds, mostly at night) in the hollow of this valley of death’, before turning north and west over the mountains to Kara-­Koulak. There, while vainly asking the chief for an escort, a sudden uproar revealed a band of armed Kurds ‘driving off several flocks of sheep and buffaloes’. From Kara-­Koulak, he was guided through the mountains by a little old hunch-­backed man, who ‘knew their paths well, and could lead us by ways far from the dangerous tracks we must pass, should we take the direct route’. Ker Porter took two days and a few hours on horseback from Ash-­kala to the Sadak Çay below Satala: the first day’s march, with a slender escort, ‘over the most dangerous ground lying between Tokat and the Persian frontier’; the second, passing below the Alma-­lee-­Dagler, part of which ‘we had purposely avoided on account of the noted robbers’. Riding through ‘the gorge of the pass so much dreaded’, evidently over the Pulur Dağları, and almost in sight of Satala, ‘our Tatars bade farewell to our trusty guide; and most heartily congratulated me and themselves on there being no more objects of fear all the way to Constantinople’.3

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SATA L A  263

TH E PEUT I NGER ROA D I NTO A R M EN I A With the exception of the Ararat milestone, found south of the Araxes, some 20 miles south-­west of Kainepolis (Eçmiadzin, west of Erivan), and dating perhaps from Marcus Aurelius, no trace of a Roman road has been recorded east of Satala. It seems unlikely that a formal road was constructed, to the standard of the frontier and the main support roads from the west. But its broad course, dictated by geography, and preserved in the Ottoman caravan route, had implications for military activity in Armenia. This, the route to Aşkale (? Lucus Basaro), Elegeia (Ilıca), Erzurum, the plain of Pasinler and ultimately Artaxata, beside the Araxes south of Erivan, was the main route followed by Roman armies, with their impedimenta, into and across Armenia: by Pompey and Corbulo, by Trajan, Arrian, Sedatius Severianus, and Verus. This was the route which supported the builders of the walls at Harmozica, north of Tiflis, in later ad 75, barely four years after the formation of Vespasian’s frontier; the deployment under Domitian of a centurion of XII Fulminata to the Caspian Gates; and vexillations of XII Fulminata and XV Apollinaris in garrison at Kainepolis in ad 175–7 and ad 184. The stations along the road to Artaxata are known in full only from the Peutinger Table. The first two stages from Satala were very difficult, but no more so, and lower, than the high-­level sections of the roads over the Çimen Dağları; and the first stations, at Salmalassos (Lori) and Varucinte (Karakulak), were sited at low level, at positions later used by caravans; their purpose to provide shelter and sustenance in the arduous passage of the mountains. Four stations east of Erzurum are marked as forts. Andaga and Chadas may be located beside the Araxes, at the modern road junctions of Horasan (for north-­ western Iran), and Karakurt (for Kars); and Raugonia may have stood at the western limit of the Armenian plain, which extended to the fourth fort, Artaxata.4 H ISTOR ICA L CONT EX T The town of Satala appears to have existed in the early first century bc, at the time of the Mithridatic wars. Its location was no doubt known to Claudius, a detail in an acute geographical knowledge which included the source of the Tigris, the Arsanias (Murat), Dascusa, and the length of Armenia. With Nicopolis, Ptolemy reckoned, Satala shared the longest hours of daylight in eastern Asia Minor. Activity under Nero drew repeated attention to the advantages of the site. Corbulo’s supply route from Trapezus and across the Pontic mountains, garrisoned with praesidia in ad 58, terminated in all probability at Satala: some 128 miles by the modern road over the Zigana pass. From this vicinity, the natural route to the upper Euphrates and the Araxes valley supported the garrison, mentioned in ad 51, at Gorneae, east of Erivan; and served as a line of advance for Nero’s planned expedition, explained by Pliny, to the Caspian Gates.5

The Legionary Garrisons In mid ad 71, Vespasian deployed at least the main body of XVI Flavia Firma from Syria to Satala: to add legionary power to the northern sector of his new frontier, to organize and if necessary enforce the annexation of the new province of Armenia Minor, and to undertake a vast programme of road building or improvement along the frontier and in  the approaches to Satala. There can be no doubt that the legion was involved in

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 264 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

the construction of the walls completed in ad 75 (after 1 July) at Harmozica, and in the section of strategic roads completed above Melik Şerif in ad 76 (before 30 June). The presence of XVI Flavia Firma at Satala in the late first or early second century is confirmed in the tombstones of Quintianus Maximus, standard bearer, and Trebonius, a soldier.6 In preparation for the Armenian campaign, Trajan marched up the frontier road from Syria with two legions, joined evidently by XII Fulminata as he passed through Melitene. At Satala he concentrated his army: XVI Flavia Firma, acclimatized at altitude and ex­peri­ enced in the geography and conditions of Armenia; and the legions which had passed the winter of ad 113/4 in Ancyra, accompanied by large numbers of auxiliary units transferred from the lower Danube provinces. At Satala Trajan received client kings from the Pontic coast, and from there advanced on Artaxata, and descended into Mesopotamia. After the Parthian war, XVI Flavia Firma was redeployed to Samosata.7 Probably in ad 114, XV Apollinaris arrived from Carnuntum on the Danube, to remain at Satala at least until the compilation, c. ad 400, of the Armenian section of the Notitia Dignitatum. There is no evidence that the legion served in the rapid Armenian campaign, or in Parthia. Its task was no doubt to garrison the western part of the short-­lived province of Armenia Major; just as IV Scythica, still at Artaxata in ad 116, evidently garrisoned the eastern. The legion is well documented in the fortress. Martialis, a soldier from Pannonia Superior, Mansuetus, evidently a beneficiarius on the staff of the legionary commander, from Noricum, and Turranius Severus, a centurion from Cisalpine Gaul, all died at Satala soon after their arrival from the Danube. Antonius Paternus, custos armorum aged 53, had served for twenty-­eight years. Many tiles bear the legionary stamp. Coins with the countermark LXV have been found at Nicopolis (of Trajan, ad 114), and near Dascusa.8 During his second journey in Asia Minor, Hadrian visited Satala in early autumn ad 129, and there, like Trajan, evidently received and confirmed tribal rulers from the south-­eastern shores of the Euxine: to secure by diplomacy the hinterland behind the chain of coastal forts extending eastwards from Trapezus to Sebastopolis below the Caucasus. From the fortress the emperor continued northwards over the high Pontic mountains to Trapezus. That he was able, in the footsteps of Xenophon, to see the Euxine points to the brief period when the south wind brings favourable visibility, in mid September. From Satala, governors of Cappadocia marched against enemies approaching from the east. In c. ad 135, Arrian led XV Apollinaris, a vexillation of XII Fulminata, and a carefully balanced army against the Alani, evidently towards the western end of the plain of Erzurum and Ilıca (Elegeia), the focal point through which invaders were obliged to pass. In ad 161, Sedatius Severianus advanced to disaster, his army overwhelmed by Parthian archers. As under Trajan, the fortress was the base for Verus’ Armenian war.9 Vexillations of up to 1,000 legionaries of XV Apollinaris were detached to Trapezus; to Kainepolis, where the garrison was shared with XII Fulminata in ad 175–7 and perhaps in ad 184, and where the tribune in command, Aelius Valens, was accompanied by his wife and daughter; and perhaps to Pityus, below the western Caucasus.10

Civic Life There followed nearly a century of peace, which saw an imperial dedication to Iulia Domna, an association of fire-­fighters or of veterans, the death of Attica, born in Rome, two Greek freedmen and their patronus from Tyana, and many of the Latin inscriptions

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SATA L A  265

surviving from the fortress. There is no evidence that a colony was established. But there was seemingly a mint. A bronze coin seized by police from metal detectors near the fort­ ress, and now in the Erzincan Museum shows, perhaps, a young Commodus; while the reverse depicts the legionary gryphon crouched above LEG XV.11 The monumental evidence points to the development of civic life comparable in quality with that in the eastern Pontic cities: suggested by the bronze head and hand of a cult statue of Anaitis, shown in the guise of Aphrodite, the legs of a bronze horse, the statue bases and large fragments of mosaic, the sarcophagus on the hillside above, the architrave block inscribed with a single line of letters, the capital and column drum (others were seen by Cumont), the metope and triglyphs, Cumont’s ‘masque grimaçant’, the foundations between the spring and the fortress, the huge spread of fragmentary roof tiles towards and beyond the basilica, the sculpture in high relief of a Winged Victory (?) outside the fortress, on the ‘mushroom road’ to Kelkit.

Goths and Sapor But in ad 256, Sapor captured Satala and the cities of Domana and Suisa, adjacent to north and south, with their surrounding territories. Much of the garrison was perhaps absent in the vain defence of Trapezus against the Borani, allies of the Goths. A crude monumental inscription in honour of Gallienus in ad 262 may represent the final stage in a hasty programme to rebuild the fortress and its defences. A dedication to Aurelian in ad 272–5 perhaps marked a further stage in the recovery of the fortress.12

Christianity At the time of Diocletian, Satala contained a substantial Christian community. The fort­ ress was the headquarters of the infamous dux Lysias, ordered in c. ad 303 to conduct a  purge of Christian soldiers in the frontier garrisons, and inquisitor at Arauraca of St  Eustratius and his four companions, the Five Martyrs of Armenia. The Christian im­port­ance of Satala is confirmed by the legend of St Orentius and his six brothers, sent there by Galerius Maximianus in the Great Persecution in the East of ad 306–11, before their exile and martyrdom along the Pontic coast. The town was represented by a bishop at the council of Nicaea in ad 325. Commissioned by Valens to appoint bishops to vacant sees in Armenia (Minor), St Basil wrote to the people of Satala, promising the ordination of a bishop, Poimenios, who would be worthy of them after a prolonged lack of leadership; and visited them in the summer of ad 372. The bishopric survived into the mid sixth century, to which should be assigned more than two dozen Christian epitaphs found mostly in the vicinity of the basilica. They include a deaconess, perhaps of St Gregory the Thaumaturge, and an abbot.13

Persian Wars and Decay The Persian wars of ad 421/2 and 441 confirmed the crucial importance of the fortress. In ad 530, a Persian army, twice the size of the Roman, camped at Octava, at the eighth mile from the fortress, probably at Bandola; and, advancing, was put to flight beneath the walls of Satala by Justinian’s general, Sittas, with a force not larger than 15,000: the legion, evidently, and its auxiliaries. Justinian renewed the crumbling fortifications,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 266 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

building a new circuit wall of great height and thickness, and surrounding the fortress with a circular outer wall. But his defences did not prevent the capture of Satala in ad 607/8 by Chosroes II: the inhabitants persuaded to open their gates to the Persian army. Cumont dates the eclipse of the town to this period. Its very existence, amid these remote mountains on the furthest limit of Armenia Minor, depended on the military requirements of the Roman frontier. With its abandonment, the need for north–south communications came to an end. The fortress no longer served a military purpose, and sank into an oblivion not shared by the other great road centres of eastern Asia Minor. At Melitene, Sebasteia, and Caesarea virtually all trace of the Roman period has been obliterated in repeated occupation, destruction, and rebuilding.14 R EM A I NS At Satala only villagers remained (Fig. 12.2), and an epigraphic and structural treasury has survived, in north-­eastern Asia Minor rivalled only by Sebastopolis and Comana Pontica. In add­ition to the vast cores of Justinian’s walls, of which traces could be followed all round the perimeter of the fortress, a bath house survived in 1972 with vault intact, just outside the walls to the south-­west. On the hillside above stands an ancient cistern. The arches in fields below the fortress to the south belonged not to an aqueduct, as Tournefort and others supposed, but to a basilica serving a large civil population attested by the great number of Christian epitaphs found outside the walls. Describing a fortress much better preserved than it is today, the

F ig . 12.2  Sadak: cart, hens, and children (August 1964)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SATA L A  267

accounts of travellers show how recent in relative terms has been the spoliation of the basilica, and by inference of the other remains of Satala.

Position The city of Satala lay on a gentle plain surrounded by many peaks, and its position, Procopius knew, was vulnerable. Above the fortress to the west loomed the towering ridge of Mantartaşı. But the site was commended by its plentiful supply of water, the proximity of agricultural produce from the plains of Erzincan and around Kelkit, and its ability to control important routes. Approaching from the south-­east in 1866, Taylor passed below ‘Suddak Village, with some ruined arches on one side of it’, half way up the chain of hills above the river, and in sight for about 3 miles. At Çiftlik (Kelkit) he was offered ‘so many coins of different dynasties and nations’, said mostly to have come from Suddak, that he returned; and was ‘much pleased with the curious massive remains still in situ’. The village was built ‘on one of the mounds covering the debris of ancient edifices’. In 1874 Biliotti reported a village of eighty houses, built on the upper part of the site of the ancient Satala, on ­comparatively low ground about 300 feet above the level of the Sadak Çay. The ground rises gently from the banks of the river towards the west for nearly a mile and a half, and there forms a platform of irregular elevation. On the north and south of it extend shallow ravines bordered by hills beginning a chain of mountains on either side. On the west there is a hillock overlooking the village, and behind it a high mountain. The platform, which is lower on the north-­east, rises gradually in terraces towards the south-­west, while on the south and especially on the south-­east, it becomes a mound of some importance, tapering on the west until it joins the ­highest terraces.

In 1894 Yorke described Sadagh as ‘a Turkish village of about a hundred and fifty houses, built for the most part of old squared stones’.

The Fortress The fortress was roughly rectangular, its walls approximately 440 metres to north and south by 370 metres to east and west: the area, 16.25 hectares, smaller than the 20 hectares normal for a legionary fortress (Fig. 12.3). With the village of Sadak, and the locations of outlying remains, it is carefully described by Taylor. ‘The ruins of the town itself were enclosed on three sides by a deep ditch and high wall—14 feet of the latter being at one point still standing though in a dilapidated condition. It was composed of rough pieces of stone—imbedded in a cement of lime and small pebbles— faced with large even-­cut polished blocks. The northern side, with a gate in the centre, was 366 paces long, the two others 246 each, with a gate in either corner.’ Only at one corner could Taylor discern the remains of a bastion. ‘To the south-­east and south-­west were two large mounds (probably forts); for in one, where excavations had been made to procure material from the old buildings, were the remains of high massive walls of great thickness and solidity.’ This, the south-­east mound, was the source of the coins seen in Çiftlik, ‘and on its summit are also dug up skeletons and coffins containing the relics of the Byzantine period’.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 268 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 12.3  ‘Satala. Kurzbericht über die geophysikalische Untersuchungen und den Survey im August 2004’ (Hartmann, August 2004) (by permission of Dr Martin Hartmann)

Biliotti noted that ‘The walls stand above the ground only on the north-­west and north-­east and are about 18 feet high. . . . They are built of rubble, and were lined on both faces with squared stones, a few of which are only seen here and there. . . . The walls are nearly 14 feet wide, . . . flanked at irregular intervals with square projecting towers measuring about 7 yards on each side.’ On all but the south-­west corner he recorded similar square towers set at an angle. He traced foundations of the south and west walls, and saw gates in the north and east walls, each about 60 metres from the corner tower, and used then by modern roads to Gümüşhane and Bayburt. The gates, gaps in the north wall of 12 and in the east wall of 13.7 metres, were, in fact, some 180 metres from the north-­east corner. Biliotti’s plan shows a square extension at the south-­west corner. There is now no evidence to support the existence of this curious annex. Yorke describes the ‘considerable remains of an ancient fortified town (which) exist near the modern village. The walls, which consist of a rubble core faced with well-­ squared stones, seem to have formed a square enclosure, the sides of which faced the four points of the compass. They are best preserved on the north side, where the towers are still standing along the whole line and at the two corners. On the south and along part of the west side the ancient walls have been almost obliterated by the modern village, which is built over the south-­west corner of the enclosure.’ He judged the walls to be not older than the time of Justinian. Travelling with Yorke, Hogarth noted that ‘the ground plan of the city walls, with towers forty paces apart, is well preserved on the north and east sides of the enceinte, and

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SATA L A  269

F ig . 12.4  Satala: eastern wall of the fortress, from the site of the south-­east corner tower (August 1964)

can be traced without difficulty on the west. On the south the modern village has obliterated everything. The latter is built entirely of the old stones, and but few fragments of the ancient edifices within the walls have been spared.’ The only large, cut stones come from inside the fortress. They are still valuable, and are always reused. In 1900, Cumont was able to follow the circuit wall for nearly 200 metres to the east (Fig. 12.4), and for 400 metres to the north, with square, projecting towers: typical of construction under Justinian. His map marks six square, intermediate towers. The corners were protected by more powerful bastions, on the north-­east particularly well preserved. The wall facings had been stripped, leaving a conglomerate of stones and tile debris set in hard mortar. A sunken road marked the position of a gate in the centre of the north wall. At the south-­eastern corner, the end of a long spur covered in debris was crowned by the base, recently exposed, of a massive hexagonal tower, 8 metres wide and constructed in regular courses of quarried blocks alternating with rows of bricks set in thick cement (Fig. 12.1). The ramparts supported fields in a series of terraces descending towards the east. Protecting the north wall and the north-­east corner, a second terrace, 5 metres lower and surrounded by another wall without visible towers, stood above a streambed, overlooked by higher ground on the further side: perhaps, with the huge south-­east corner tower, Cumont supposed, the remarkable fortification constructed forward of the main walls by Justinian and reported by Procopius. Of buildings inside the fortress there was no ­discernible trace. Cumont judged the surviving ruins to be not earlier than the sixth century.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 270  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

In August 1964 the ruins of the north-­east angle tower still stood to a height of some 20 feet; and traces could still be seen of Cumont’s south-­eastern tower. From it the south wall of the fortress ran along the spur (Fig. 12.5). The south-­western corner itself was buried beneath a threshing floor in 1965, but the remains of the rubble core protruded above it, proving the continuity of the south wall at its western end. Biliotti’s south-­ western annex did not exist, and of his square intermediate towers no trace survived.15

Inscriptions Strecker heard in c.1860 that stones with Infidel writing, that is Greek or Latin, were sometimes found beneath the rubble of the walls. In a field ‘occupying a part of the ground of the old town’, Taylor saw a Roman votive altar, and a damaged, twelve-­line inscription in Latin on the base of a statue of Aurelian. Several other stones were shown to him ‘bearing inscriptions in Byzantine Greek; but they were of no interest, and had been simply epitaphs on deceased citizens’. In spite of the minutest researches, Biliotti could find only five Christian epitaphs extracted from the vicinity of the basilica, and a fragment of brick, probably a tile, bearing the stamp of XV Apollinaris. Hogarth and Yorke copied several inscriptions, including a fragmentary milestone, almost wholly defaced, which may have come from any of the roads leading to the fortress. Cumont’s epigraphic haul was larger, if modest, permitting him to identify a remarkable fact: that all the oldest inscriptions are Latin, almost exclusively military, while the Greek are Christian, evidently not earlier than Justinian.

F ig . 12.5  The headmaster, Dürsün Göz, and helpers on the southern wall of the fortress, view south-­west: the cistern, out of sight, is on the low plateau above; the tall trees, right, point to the summit of Mantartaşı (August 1964)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SATA L A  271

The digging season in Sadak starts in April, when winter ends, and continues throughout May; and the purpose has until recently been to retrieve building materials rather than antiquities. The entire village is constructed with massive limestone blocks said to have come from ancient buildings and the remains of the walls. In 1964 Dürsün Göz, the grave, erudite, and much respected headmaster, knew where all the inscriptions were to be found. They are of soft limestone, and decompose quickly when exposed to frost. None are of marble. Most had been dug up in the previous six years, and many were built inside houses. I was invited into several dozen. The Greek inscriptions came either from about 150 metres outside the southern wall, south of the basilica, or from Maşat, said to have been the Greek cemetery, on the tip of the promontory leading to the south-­east corner tower. The stones may have been moved to the latter in recent times. At least one of the Latin came from excavations in the north-­western part of the fortress, where many foundation blocks were also found; and in c.1978 a group of four legionary tombstones was dug up on the hillside north of the fortress (Fig. 12.6). After Dürsün retired to Erzincan in 1982, visits to Satala became less productive. In  July 1996 the PKK were active on the northern slopes below the Sipikör pass. At  Kelkit  the young jandarma commander, Ali Yalınkılıç, was acting as kaymakam. Hospitable, respected, and decisive, he was concerned about western support for Kurds

F ig . 12.6  Satala, view south: stelae of XV Apollinaris, arranged beside the threshing floor of Ahmet Yiğin (July 1984)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 272  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

and Armenians, and enmity towards Turkey. Mindful of his hidden duties, my Representative asked to talk to him privately. Escorted to Satala by eight commandos in a Lant, ‘Landrover’, crammed with guns, we entered a ghost village. All were on edge, and after an anxious day we left them pushing their expiring Lant at Sökmen, opposite Sadak. The larger casualty was trust. Automatic rifles and epigraphy are ­awkward companions (Fig. 12.7), and the villagers, source of all information, melted away. But after a while an 11-­ year-­ old attached himself, Serkan Nahir, clearly a descendant of the leading antiquarian family of Sadak, of great assistance to me in the 1960s and 1970s. His knowledge of the antiquities and history of Satala was astonishing. But, sadly, little is left. Mesüt Güngör, assistant in the Erzurum Museum, went to Sadak with a truck in July 1986, and with local help removed the three finest Latin inscriptions, the Winged Victory, and a sarcophagus lid. But he ‘confiscated’ them without payment, and the muhtar told me in August1987 that, as a direct result, most of the remaining inscriptions had vanished. Indeed, very few remained visible. It seems that the rest were hidden, buried, turned face-­inwards; or stolen. Conversation, ably conducted by Taner in the tea house in October 2002, confirmed that inscriptions have indeed been hidden to evade the museum authorities. Only three were still visible: one new, another copied thirty years before. The owner, İşmail Keleş, remembered me, and produced a sumptuous salad lunch with a gigantic omelette (Fig. 12.8). A brief visit early in July 2004 confirmed the absence of any new inscriptions. In the tea house the new headmaster, Abdullah Nahir, revealed what had happened. Thirty-­two inscribed stones had been removed on signature to the Erzurum Museum in 1987, but

F ig . 12.7  Satala: armed epigraphy, Serkan Nahir, and the Gallienus inscription (July 1996)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SATA L A  273

F ig . 12.8 Sadak: İşmail’s cheese, kurut, drying in the sun (July 1996)

the officials were bogus and the stones had vanished. Banners across the road welcomed visitors to the Sadak festival. But the muhtar burst in, hand hovering above his pistol in uncontrolled rage. Sadak was a ‘forbidden village’ because of impending excavations, evidently the Hartmann survey anticipated five weeks later. He phoned the jandarma in Kelkit. Taner was appalled. Leaving before their arrival and inevitable arrest, we called on the kaymakam to complain. Such is the wreckage when the modern world collides with an ancient way of life. After forty years of courtesy and hospitality, this was a sorry way to leave Satala.16

Mosaics Shortly before Strecker’s brief visit, three mosaic floors had been found by villagers and excavated, in an irrigation ditch dug outside the village on its south-­eastern side. The small, square, coloured stones were set in cement so hard that he had great difficulty in extracting a few pieces with a hammer. One panel, 3' 6" tall and 2' 6" wide, had a portrait of a woman with bejewelled neck and long curled hair; on the other two, longer and narrower, were merely decorations on a white background. Strecker arranged further digging at the same spot, but to no avail. The floors confirm that houses of some sophistication were built on the eastward facing slopes between the fortress and the basilica, somewhere below the Sadak tea house. Passing six years later through the village, ‘which is built on one of the mounds covering the débris of ancient edifices’, Taylor ‘saw a small piece of mosaic, and being assured that several more existed, made a rigid search in all the wretched hovels of the place’. In the Kehya’s (muhtar’s) house he

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 274  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

found the hearthstone was composed of one large fragment [perhaps that seen by Strecker] representing the centre part of a human figure, as large as life, in minute mosaic of brilliant coloured stones. The fragment was 3 feet long by 2 broad, and evidently a magnificent specimen of that beautiful art. The colours had not suffered from the action of the fire, but it was minus the head and feet, and altogether far too damaged to remove. In another house was part of a mosaic pavement, 6 feet long by 3 broad, forming part only of one side. The border consisted of fine cone figures, succeeded by a series of lozenges in black, white, slate-­colour, green, yellow, and red stones, in alternate rotation, and then a prolonged geometrical figure in small black stones, in a white field, the whole surrounding a centre of crossed lines forming squares, each containing a smaller one, with the corners at right angles to the sides of the former. Another and larger piece was kicking about the public thoroughfare. These remains had been dug out of the top of a hill at the back of the ruins overlooking the village.

Biliotti was advised that the mosaics came from the interior of the ruins of ‘a massive square building’ on the summit of the hillock: one piece, measuring 2 feet by 1' 9", in which ‘glass cubes are also occasionally used, seems to me to represent the drapery of a human figure, but the action of the fire has nearly defaced it’. In an acorn store, Cumont was shown probably (a part of) the same mosaic, ‘très fine, formée de méandres et de rinceaux compliqués avec une fantasie tout orientale’; and saw fragments of mosaic paving the fireplace in a thatched cottage. All but Strecker’s mosaics were probably found on the slopes occupied by the main parts of the village, outside the fortress to the south-­west, and on the hillside above. All trace of mosaics had vanished before my various v­ isits.

Water Supply Above the village, Strecker reported in c.1860, gushed close to each other a number of unusually powerful springs, which had been channelled a few paces from their source into a large basin, constructed apparently in antiquity; a place of frequent pilgrimage, it was related, for Christians (that is, Armenians) and Turks from long ago. ‘On the summit of a hill at the back of the ruins overlooking the village’, Taylor saw ‘a small spring, whose waters, collected in a large artificial basin, had at one side the ruins of buildings from which (the mosaics) had been dug out’. Biliotti described these as ‘the ruins of a massive square building, from the middle of which flows a spring of good water’. Its foundations, he reckoned, extended perhaps 60 by 40 yards. Of this there is now no trace: its place taken, it seems, by a large, shallow dredged pool, dammed on the lower, eastern side by a long, roughly constructed wall in which are included a few ashlar blocks. Taylor and Biliotti seem to describe Strecker’s basin or pool. Yorke adds: ‘a fine water supply . . . flows from a reservoir, which is artificially banked up above the village’. Nearby he saw, and misinterpreted, ‘the remains of earthworks, which possibly represent the site of a small fort which guarded the water supply’. There is no trace of an aqueduct supplying the fortress, nor need; for it was served from the spring on the hillside some 300 metres above the bath house. The spring flowed into a large cistern or settling tank, lined with ashlar blocks and measuring 15 × 11 metres, discovered ‘about 60 years ago (in 1964), after a dream’. Dating perhaps from the early second century, the cistern was linked to the fortress by terracotta

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SATA L A  275

‘milk-­pipes’, so described from the belief that white lime-­scale deposits were milk. These rect­angu­lar pipes, 23 cm wide and at least 16 cm deep, were set in mortar and until recently survived, unearthed, leading steeply down among the upper houses. Even in August, when the spring flows at its lowest level, the cistern is still the principal source of water for the village: sufficient for a population dwindling from around 1,500 in 1964, to about 1,170 in 1972. By 1989, 160 families remained in Sadak, and 164 had moved to Istanbul. There is little water to spare for irrigation. Within the fortress was a sophisticated distribution system. Several squared stone blocks, drilled to provide pressure junctions for water pipes, were reused in houses. Two seen in July 1996 were of particular interest (Fig. 12.9). A small ‘masque grimaçant’,

F ig . 12.9  Satala: pressure junction for water pipes (July 1996)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 276  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

seen in a house by Cumont, had once been a fountain spout. Some 200 metres south of the ­cistern, a second spring gushes from a remarkable grotto recessed into the hillside above the bath and the tea house, and surrounded by willows offering cool shade and play for the village children. From it water was probably channelled to houses on the slopes above the basilica.

Milk Pipes In August 1964 I was told of other ‘milk pipes’, or tunnels: a folk memory, now seen as an important indicator of the presence along the frontier of Roman military or civil occupation. Some, it was said, led from Mantartaşı, ‘mushroom stone’, the high peak looming above Sadak to the west. There is no obvious source on the mountainside, and these pipes were perhaps an imagined extension of those leading down from the spring above the fortress. Other ‘milk pipes of earth or porcelain’ could, in a widely repeated local tradition, be seen at Devekorusu Köy, below the ascent to the Sipikör pass, set among the Sadak yaylas near Ağlık (6,550 feet), some 11 miles, or four to six hours, south-­ south-­east of the fortress. The Pasha of Sadak, it was recalled, kept his dairy herds in the hills, and was assured of a constantly running supply of milk. I have not seen any of these milk pipes. But sections were reliably reported some 5 miles south of Satala at Eskiyol: pipes about 40 cm long and 4 cm in internal diameter, fitted together in a concrete bed buried a metre deep for protection against frost. Whether there was more than one line of pipes is not remembered. Their capacity may be illustrated by the larger, 7 cm plastic pipe which Ahmet Keleş showed me high above Sipikör in August 2006. Through it water rushes down from the second Russian Road, two miles above the village: sufficient in volume for eighty houses and a huge herd of cows. Parallels with a pipe sighted at Zabulbar, and credible reports at Çit Harabe (Sabus) and Hasanova (Analiba) suggest that the pipes certainly existed. If, as folklore declares, they drew from Ağlık, a descent of some 650 feet in the first two miles, to the south-­eastern bank of the upper Sadak Çay, would have required a ­ladder of intermediate tanks to relieve static pressure: the river to be crossed either by a siphon, as under the Rhone at Arles, and perhaps under the Kâhta Çay near Samosata; or by a short, low aqueduct. I have heard no reports and have seen no trace of either. For reasons of frost, as well as of construction and reliability, it seems probable, instead, that the pipes drew from an upper tributary of the Sadak Çay itself (5,900 feet), in the vicinity of the hans reported below Ağlık. How the source of water and the head of the pipes were protected through months of savage cold remains a mystery. With a descent, from the vicinity of Dürsü’s beehives, of some 200 feet over the succeeding 9 miles along the valley of the Sadak Çay—at about 20 feet per mile, more steeply than the 8.5 feet per mile of the Samosata aqueduct—the levels suggest that the pipes brought water not into the fortress but to the lower vicinity of the basilica (5,700 feet). Memories do not relate the height at which the milk pipes made their final approach to Satala. They probably passed around the lower slopes of the low hills surrounding the basilica, some 150 feet above the Sadak Çay, to reach the civil settlement at a level significantly lower than the fortress, served by its separate water supply. Terracotta pipes, often laid in groups of two or three, were commonly used in low-­ pressure lines in smaller aqueducts. Individual sections were normally 40–70 cm long, with an internal diameter of up to 10 or 15 cm; larger than the 4 cm internal and 10 cm

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SATA L A  277

external diameters remembered respectively at Eskiyol, south of Satala, and at Çit Harabe (Sabus). The aqueduct serving Argentoratum (Strasbourg) was more than 12 miles long, and consisted of a pair of terracotta pipes laid side by side and buried usually about a metre deep to protect against interference and frost.17

Excavations In the centre of the platform inside the south wall of the fortress, Biliotti was shown by an old man, Yüsüf, the exact spot where, while cutting an irrigation trench in around 1872, he had dug up the bronze head of Aphrodite, and, touching it, the left forearm of a bronze statue with the hand half shut, at a depth of about 2 feet. Yüsüf carried the head and hand to Erzincan for sale, but the Governor, hearing of the discovery, took possession of both relics, and sent them to the Governor General in Erzerum. Yüsüf from there accompanied the bronze head to the Porte in Constantinople, where it was acquired by Alessandro Castellani, and sold to the British Museum (Fig. 12.10). When Yorke and Hogarth were shown the spot, within the walls, where the bronze head was found, Yüsüf was at the point of death. ‘From the accounts of the oldest

F ig . 12.10  Satala: head of Aphrodite (? Anaitis) (© Trustees of the British Museum, image AN384321001)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 278  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

inhabitants, it appears that a thorough search was made at the time when the head and hand were discovered, and they all agreed that nothing else was found.’ Many survived who remembered the discovery. ‘All told one consistent story, that the head and hand only were found, in the process of making a threshing floor, and that nothing had ever been seen of the rest of the statue.’ Hogarth ‘made enquiries also in Erzincan and elsewhere in the neighbourhood with the same result. The story which has been related of the finding, hiding, and subsequent mutilation of a complete statue is pure fiction.’ One of the glories of the British Museum (Gallery 22), the bronze head, one and a half times life-­size (38 cm high), appears on stylistic grounds to be a work of the late Hellenistic or early Roman period, in the first century bc: a date confirmed by the thin-­ walled casting. Walters lists the ‘Head from colossal statue, perhaps Aphrodite’, among Greek Bronzes of the best period (460–300 bc), with the following description: ‘the hair is waved each side, with two curls falling on the forehead, and gathered under a thick fillet, in which ornaments have been inserted; a ringlet hangs in front of each ear, and another on each side of the neck. The mouth is slightly open; the eyes have been inlaid with precious stones or enamel.’ The hand, 10.5" long, is ‘holding a fragment of drapery which from the style and condition of the bronze appears to have belonged to the statue’. He further notes ‘it has been argued that the original was a copy of the Cnidian Aphrodite of Praxiteles, the left hand having held the drapery at her side, as in the statue in the Vatican’. Dr Higgs suggests that the statue may, rather, be a cast from a mould made in c.150 bc, whether of a Greek or Hellenistic original, or a Roman copy: ‘the eyes were originally inlaid with either precious stones or a glass paste, and the lips perhaps coated with a copper veneer. The top of the head was damaged during excavation.’ The head is normally ascribed to Aphrodite, but Walters comments that this ‘is by no means certain’. Its origin is obscure. Civic life in the cities of eastern Pontus and at Nicopolis reached its highest development in the second and third centuries, and the head is likely to have been imported to Satala at the same period, Cumont supposed, from a temple in Asia Minor. Probably, however, the head, if not the complete statue, came from the cult sanctuary at Eriza (Erzincan) a day to the south, and may plausibly be Anaitis: acquired or looted during Corbulo’s preparations for war in or after ad 55, or during construction of Vespasian’s frontier; and erected conspicuously inside the fort­ ress. Although the sanctuary had been sacked by Antony in 34 bc, the cult had recovered by the time of Strabo.18 Shortly after, apparently in the same year, Hasan was digging up stones about 130 yards to the north, at the foot of the platform, and evidently close to the centre of the fortress. At a depth of about 6 feet he came across the legs of a full-­size bronze horse; and found also a statue base and a large block, 7 feet by 3 feet by 2 feet, ‘the architrave of the doorway of a temple’ with a single line of letters, which the village headman, Mahmoud Aga, had built into the wall of his house. Biliotti saw the two stones, but the inscriptions were invisible, and they have vanished. On both sites he conducted extensive excavations, which lasted for eight days, with thirty-­six workmen, and went down to bedrock, or to a depth of 10 feet. He found no bronzes or inscriptions. ‘Under the circumstances, that is limited space owing to the threshing floors occupying most of the ground, want of all the necessary implements, wheelbarrows especially, and finally deficiency of funds, this was all I could do.’ In addition to foundations and bricks, he found

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SATA L A  279

in Yüsüf’s field two large amphorae, and ‘numerous rusty fragments of a Roman mail coat. They consisted of blades ½" by 2", which being pierced with holes at the four corners were probably united by small rings’; and in Hasan’s field, part of the frieze of a Doric temple. Close to the west wall (in fact outside it, and close to the mosque), Biliotti noted a small bath, with two vaulted, interconnecting rooms. In 1964 both rooms of the ancient bath were still in use: the larger as a byre, the smaller as the village bakery (Fig. 12.11). Each had a central vent in the roof, and subsidiary holes around it. Near the north-­west corner of the fortress, and also at a distance of 150 yards from the eastern wall, were ‘a few yards of thick masonry, evidently part of a large construction’. They were too dilapidated to suggest their purpose. Near the north wall is a huge block of rubble, vitrified by fire. Excavations by a Swiss team were said in July 2004 to be imminent; funded by the newspaper magnate Aydın Doğan, who owns a large villa and an organic milk farm in the fertile plain close south-­east of Kelkit. Indeed, brief geophysical investigations and a surface survey were carried out at Satala in August 2004 under Dr Martin Hartmann, by the Mavors-­Institut für antike Militärgeschichte in partnership with Atatürk University in Erzurum. Annual campaigns including archaeological soundings were expected to follow. This has not happened. The excavators may have realized the depth of overburden covering the primary Roman levels: at Melitene these lie up to 8 metres below surface level (Fig. 4.11). But the real reason is likely to be security, for more than a decade a sensitive issue at Satala.

F ig . 12.11  Sadak: bath house and bakery (November 1972)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 280 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Basilica Tournefort noted in 1701 ‘le reste d’un vieux Aqueduc à arcades arrondies qui paroit assez ancien’. Strecker saw four arches and five pillars standing in c.1860, and reported a tradition that there were formerly forty, that is, very many similar arches. The pillars were 4–5 feet thick and 10–12 feet high, built with large and small stones bound with very strong mortar, and once faced with ashlar. They were seen by Taylor in 1866 to the south-­east of the fortress: ‘seven arches, forming one side of a semicircular building— probably a bath—with opposite corresponding buttresses, at a distance of 11 paces from the former. The Turkish Government make use of the old cut stones found here to construct the government buildings at Erzingan’, after the disastrous earthquake of 1784. Biliotti described in great detail the remains in 1874 and provided a careful plan. At more than a quarter of a mile south-­east of the walls, and on the other side of the southern ravine, there is a large building, four arches of which, with part of a wall, are standing. They are about 18 feet above the modern soil, the height of the arches being 15 feet. This building has all the appearance of a Byzantine church, or rather of a Basilica. . . . used in latter times as a church.

The remains consisted of a nave and apse (looking to the east) flanked by two aisles each separated from the ­centre by a single row of pilasters. There are six of them measuring 8 feet on each side. They give six arches, the last of which rests on a wall the continuation of which forms the apse. The distance between each pilaster is 12' 6", with the exception of the sixth, which is only at 10 feet from the wall just mentioned. The north aisle alone is visible; its width is 17 feet; and that of the nave 25 feet. The length of the latter is 121 feet, and that of the apse 37' 6", giving a total length of 158' 6" from the sixth pilaster, not having succeeded in identifying the west wall.

In Trebizond itself, he noted, there is no church or basilica of such dimensions. Yorke saw five arches still standing in 1894, but identified them incorrectly as the remains of an aqueduct. In 1900 Cumont saw four arches, also, he supposed, of an aqueduct. Three arches were still standing in August 1964, and two in August 1987. To the south-­east was a Christian burial ground, the source of many of the Christian epitaphs; and for some 400 metres east of the basilica the fields below the fortress were filled with tile fragments. The arches are called Kırkgözler Harabe, ‘forty eyes ruins’, on the Turkish Army map: kırk, ‘forty’, in common use to express an indefinite high number. The Kırkgözköprü, ‘forty eyes bridge’, over the Tohma Su, has twenty-­three arches.19

Outlying Remains Outside the north wall, Yorke saw ‘some foundations of a building, but not enough of it is preserved to indicate its character’. Beyond the north and west walls, foundations of poor quality extended for up to 150 metres. On the low hillside overlooking the northern wall, a large number of ridged roof tiles, several thick square floor tiles, round hypocaust tiles, and sizeable quantities of pottery, glass, and metal fragments have suggested the presence of a civilian settlement. On these south-­facing slopes a single, roughly squared structure measures approximately 33.5 by 34.5 metres, the line of the walls

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SATA L A  281

v­ isible as raised piles of soil and rubble. It was divided by two internal cross walls, suggesting two ranges of rooms flanking a central courtyard. At a lower level on the west side was, apparently, a terraced forecourt. Tile and brick rubble strewn across the structure suggests that this was a small fort. It may, rather, have been a residence, perhaps even for the governor of Cappadocia. On top of the hillock above were the remains of a possible lookout tower. In the same general area was evidently a legionary cemetery: some 500 metres north of the village, deep ploughing in c.1978 unearthed the military tombstones erected around the threshing floor of Ahmet Yığın. Beside the direct track, the mantar yolu, ‘mushroom road’ to Kelkit, a large block of greyish limestone, perhaps looted and abandoned in transit, stood in a field a quarter of a mile north of the fortress: carved in high relief with the sadly worn torso of a winged female figure, leaning forward, her left arm raised, a Victory more simple than her ­predecessor on Trajan’s Column. The spread of inscriptions in the cities of eastern Pontus suggests a date in the late second century. Cumont observed ‘la déesse de la victoire a dû compter beaucoup de dévots dans cette place de guerre’. It is tempting to associate her with the successful conclusion of the Armenian campaign of Marcus and Verus. Perhaps from a tropaeum, the Nike is now in the Erzurum Museum. On the summit of the mountain, Mantartaşı, towering above the fortress, and on the tops of the mountains surrounding it on the other three sides, Biliotti was told of buildings, similar to the foundations around the spring but smaller; and reckoned they were probably lookout towers. I have not climbed to these summits. In 2002 the flat, rocky top of the conspicuous hill dominating the fortress, half an hour’s steep climb above the Roman cistern, proved, unexpectedly, to be bare. There are no structural remains of, for example, a signalling tower. But an old road runs diagonally up to the higher peak of Mantartaşı, an hour above and behind. Visible from the low, cemetery hill above Eski Köse (Domana), the summit was probably used in long-­range signalling, similar in function to Dulluk Tepe above Melitene, a crucial link in a strategic system.20

Other Finds Strecker reported that old coins were frequently found in and around the village, but seldom gems. He acquired fourteen coins (eight Roman imperial and six Byzantine, found together), including one of Claudius, two of Diocletian, one of Maximian, and one of Constantius II. Biliotti was shown several worn Roman and Byzantine coins, mostly copper, as well as some coarsely incised ring stones. Many Roman and Byzantine coins were offered to Cumont. I have seen none, but they are said to be recovered in quantity, and are collected for sale primarily in Istanbul. Other finds offer a meagre snapshot. Cumont saw ancient capitals built into the walls of houses, and in the cemetery a number of fragmentary column shafts. In August 1987 a very large sarcophagus, uninscribed, was standing on the hillside west of the cistern, high above the fortress. By July 1996 it had disappeared. A bronze eagle the size of a man’s hand was said in 1987 to have been found the previous year in fields outside the fortress. Stolen, it had disappeared. In 1996, I was shown a fragment of a small head in red terracotta, with surviving traces of red paint, found near the spring: fat cheeks, hair resembling flames, and above three symbols. A gold necklace formed of two snakes was said in 2002 to have been found about ten years before.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 282  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Agriculture The altitude of the fortress is hostile. At 5,950 feet, not far below the tree line, snow lies between December and May in most years, between January and March to a depth of 40–60 cm. But Sadak is surrounded by rich fields, and supplies were assured (Figs. 12.12, 12.13). For Morier in 1809, the road from Sadac to Chiftlik (Kelkit), 15 miles away, ‘leads through one of the most beautiful and happy looking valleys I ever saw’. The plain of Chiftlik was well cultivated. In late June ‘the peasants were ploughing the ground, while immense flocks of sheep, goats and oxen were spread over the whole country . . . Spring was here in the bloom, and the whole plain was a little Eden.’ Describing the valley of the Sadak Çay in the vicinity of Satala in 1866, Taylor noted ‘its banks are prettily though scantily wooded, and the land on each side covered with fine crops the peasantry were now [8 August] harvesting’. As he approached Çiftlik, ‘the crops of barley and wheat, and mixed wheat and rye, were very fine: everything bore a smiling appearance of busy toil, men and women in the fields gathering the harvest, and laden Arabas [carts] bearing the produce to the village’. Biliotti’s excavations were obstructed by threshing floors, and in recent years these have still occupied much of the higher part of the fortress. The proximity of the upper Lycus was an overriding benefit. At a more benign altitude, some 1,300 feet lower than Sadak, the valley is now, and was presumably in an­tiquity, extraordinarily fertile and productive. Though Biliotti reported its climate to be ‘not very healthy, owing to swamps formed by the Kelkit Cay’, the gazetteer of Gümüşhane (1990) shows that the district of Kelkit contains by far the most arable land (41,000 hectares) in the vilayet, and produces by far the most wheat, barley, and most types of vegetable. It has also by far the most pasture (109,000 hectares) and the greatest number of cows (36,000) and particularly sheep (84,000), with smaller stocks of goats, donkeys, and horses. It was in this fertile plain that Aydın Doğan established his dairy farm.

F ig . 12.12  Sadak, threshing floor outside the fortress: ox-­drawn threshing sledge (döven), left; yoked water-­buffaloes, centre rear; cart (araba), right (August 1964)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SATA L A  283

Kelkit is thus the bread basket of eastern Armenia Minor: its western equivalent the Aşkar Ova (3,100 feet), the plain below Nicopolis. This generous and adjacent source of supply must have been an important factor in the siting of the fortress. Köse, on the northern slopes above the Lycus, is, in contrast, in almost all respects the poorest district in the vilayet. Emigration is a concern. Six miles north of Kelkit, Pekün is now known, charmingly, as Küçük Londra, ‘Little London’. An ancient and conservative way of life survived into the 1960s. Over the space of forty years, I have watched its decline and collapse. Remote, isolated, and largely self sufficient, Sadak depended on barter and agriculture, as it had since the departure of the legion, and radiated a traditional courtesy and hospitality. Animals were kept in byres below the houses, drinking water was carried from the spring above the village, ploughing and haulage was by water-­buffalo: huge herds grazed and plodded around Satala, a source of milk, meat, heat, and fuel. Walls and houses were plastered with fuel cakes of dried ox-­dung, recalling the frenzied production of tezek seen by Curzon in Erzeroom in 1842. Processions of wooden-­wheeled arabas drawn by oxen and buffaloes brought corn from the surrounding fields, and threshing floors were busy with flint-­studded sledges and huge wooden winnowing forks. Ancient stones, particularly inscriptions, were prized for building, and re-­emerged at different times in different houses. But in the early 1970s, the YSE ‘road, water, electricity’ programme brought tractors and electricity. Tractors capable of deep ploughing were introduced around 1978. Until then, each of some fifteen villages around Sadak had an animal population of 700 buffalo, or more. All have disappeared. Roads, television, and modern comforts encouraged an exodus to the west. Mud brick was replaced with concrete, mud roofs with corrugated iron, and deep ploughing hastened a commercial interest in antiquities. The epigraphic treasury vanished with the removal of inscriptions to the Erzurum Museum in 1986, while the menace of the PKK replaced spontaneity with suspicion.21

F ig . 12.13 Sadak: araba and threshing machine (August 1965)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 284 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

NOT ES 1. Caravan routes, Lybner, Eng. Hist. Review 30 (1915) 578. Burnaby, Asia Minor 348f. 2. Tavernier, Six Voyages 1–18; for Tokat, 10–13. Reineggs, Mount Caucasus I vii. Wright, JRCAS 31:4 (1944) 290 and 297. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 205. 3. Tournefort, Voyage 289. Tavernier, Six Voyages 17. Ker Porter, Travels II 673f. and ­681–4. Suter, JRGS 10 (1840) 434. The route from Erzerum and Ilica to the Sadak Çay and Kelkit is carefully described by Morier, Journey 325–31. 4. The Ararat milestone, EAM 552, no. 105. At Harmozica, ILS 8795, and EAM 556ff., no. 114; Büyük Taş, beside the Caspian, EAM 562f., no. 124; Kainepolis, ILS  9117 and 394, and EAM 554f., nos. 109–11. 5. Claudius, see chapter 3, n. 13, and chapter 6, n. 8. Ptolemy 8, 17, 41. Tacitus, Ann. 12, 45, and 13, 39. Nero’s plans, Suetonius, Nero 19, 2, with Pliny NH 6, 40, and Tacitus, Hist. 1, 6. 6. Suetonius, Vespasian 8, Cappadociae . . . legiones addidit, consularemque rectorem imposuit pro equite Romano. The governor’s upgraded rank implies the presence of more than one legion from the formation of Vespasian’s new frontier. Part of XVI Flavia may have stayed behind, involved in canal building at Antioch in or before ad 75, van Berchem, Mus. Helveticum 40 (1983) 185–96. At Melik Şerif, ILS 8904 and EAM 535, no. 57; Harmozica, n. 4 above; Satala, EAM 537f., nos. 62f., erected by the standard bearer's wife, Iulia Maxima, and 63. 7. At Ancyra, IGR 3, 173. The kings, Dio 68, 19, 2. The legion in Parthia, ILS 2660, Abella (north-­east of Naples). 8. At Artaxata, EAM 553, no. 107; Satala, EAM 538f., nos. 66 (Martialis, from Savaria, south of Carnuntum), 67 (Mansuetus, from Virunum, east of Klagenfurt), 68 (Turranius, from Bellunum, north of Venice), 65 (Paternus), and 64 (legionary tiles). Countermarks, EAM 506, no. 21. 9. Hadrian’s journey, Arrian, Periplus 1. Early June is excluded, for the emperor was then still many hundreds of miles away, in western Asia Minor. Alani, Arrian, Ektaxis 5–6, 15, and 24, and Dio 69, 15, 1. Severianus, Dio 71, 2, 1. 10. At Trapezus, EAM 547ff., nos. 93–4 (medicus and soldier); Kainepolis, n. 4 above; Pityus, a tile fragment, EAM 551, no. 103. 11. EAM 536–41, nos. 60 (Iulia Domna), 70 (collegium), 75 (Attica), and 76 (freedman and patronus). 12. RGDS 18. EAM 535f., nos. 58–9. 13. EAM 541f., nos. 79–83. St Basil, Ep. 99 (written in Satala to Terentius, commander of Armenia), 102 (citizens of Satala), 103 (Satalans), 122 (Poimenios). 14. Procopius, Bell. Pers. 1, 15, 9–17, and Aed. 3, 4, 1–5. Cumont, SP II 346. 15. The fortress is described by five principal travellers: Strecker, ZAE 11 (1861) 344f. (a few hours in c.1860); Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 287–9 (one day in August 1866); Biliotti, Vice Consul at Trebizond, in Mitford, AS 24 (1974) 221–44 (nine days in September 1874); Hogarth, Athenaeum 3481 (1894) 73, and Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 460–2 (two days in June 1894; Yorke’s ‘complete plan of the site’ has not been published); and Cumont, SP II 342–51, and Carte XXVII, ‘Ruines de Satala’ (three days in June 1900). Others included in c.1882 Major William Everett, Vice Consul in Erzerum, later Consul for Kurdistan from July 1879 until January 1888. His area of responsibility, recalled in the Foreign Office List, comprised ‘the Pashalics of Erzeroom, Kharpoot, Diarbekir, Moosh

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SATA L A  285

and Van’. His visit to Satala (in EAM 540, no. 75) appears to have followed authorization granted in May 1882 to travel to Erzincan, to visit the western part of the vilayet (in PRO FO 195, 1429); and is not included in his archive. Sir Denis Wright, Vice-­Consul in Trebizond 1941–3, visited Satala, sadly without description, while travelling to the wreckage of Erzincan in 1942. I have visited Satala, mainly on foot, a dozen times between 1964 and 2006, staying on many occasions with the headmaster, Dürsün Göz. Mentioned in Cuinet, Turquie I 212, the legionary fortress is further discussed, after a brief but detailed survey in 1989–90, by Lightfoot, in Matthews, Ancient Anatolia, 273–84. Investigations and survey, discussed below, were carried out by Hartmann in 2004. 16. Inscriptions, EAM 535–42, nos. 58–83. To Cumont’s rule, the early tombstone of a centurion, Cuspius Fabianus, in Greek (no. 77), is the only exception. Removals to the Erzurum Museum included the stelae of a standard bearer of XVI Flavia Firma (no. 62), and of two soldiers transferred with XV Apollinaris from the Danube (nos. 66–7). 17. In the village centre, a large block, 73 cm square and 40 cm deep, faced on one side, evidently for insertion in a wall, had three holes, each 10 cm in diameter, cut in the square face. Two, still lined with traces of terracotta piping, ran straight through the block from the rear; but the third entered from the side with a diameter of 17 cm, and turned inside the block. The other, a round block, 49 cm in diameter, and more than 56 cm long, also had three holes, each 10 cm in diameter, cut through its length, and tapering inside to 5 cm. The grinning mask, Cumont, SP II 350, with photograph. Pipes, settling tanks, siphons, pressure, and the use of stone blocks for right-­angle elbow joints in an urban distribution system are comprehensively discussed by Hodge, Roman Aqueducts and Water Supply, especially 110, 113–25, 157, and 238–41. The aqueduct at Pergamum had 200,000 pipe sections. 18. Biliotti, in Mitford, AS 24 (1974) 236. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 461, and Hogarth, Athenaeum 3481 (1894) 73. Walters, BMC Bronzes, no. 266. The Victory, Cumont, SP II 350. 19. Tournefort, Voyage 289. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 289. Biliotti, in Mitford, AS 24 (1974) 233–5. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 461. Cumont, SP II 349, and n. 1, with photograph 343. In 1987 the cores of five piers survived, 2 metres thick, and 2.80 metres long. The length of the arches was 3.66 metres, and the overall height about 4 metres. 20. Towers, Biliotti, in Mitford, AS 24 (1974) 230. A civil settlement, Lightfoot, in Matthews, Ancient Anatolia 278f. Legionary tombstones, EAM 538f, nos. 66–9. Cumont, SP II 350f., and photograph. 21. Morier, Journey 330f. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 287. Biliotti, in Mitford, AS 24 (1974) 237 and 226. Curzon, Armenia 106–9.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 286 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER A

B

SEDISCA ? Ha

1

rș it

Zindanlar

Baghdad Bridge

21 )(

KANI S

D

C

22

Vavuk Gd. Gd

Yu r t la r

D.

2

Ağa Kl.

3

DOMANA

4

. Ke l k i t Ç

S CU LY

?

5

SATALA 20 6 10 km

Ç

5 miles

20

Sadak

0 0

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THIRTEEN

From Satala to the Upper Harşit (Map 21 and Figs. A1, A2)

The way north from Satala was confronted by the Pontic mountains, rising steeply from the eastern Black Sea in an unbroken barrier 300 miles long. Behind Trabzon the peaks approach 10,000 feet, and the passes are high and difficult. On their southern side the mountains fall abruptly in a confusion of eroded, contorted ridges. On the northern, countless sharp ridges separate deep valleys, walled by cliffs, choked with humid vegetation and almost impenetrable.1 Satala is about 65 miles fromTrapezus as the crow flies, but twice as far over the ground: by the Antonine Itinerary 125/130 miles, by the Peutinger route 124 miles, by the modern road from Sadak and over the Zigana pass about 128 miles. To the west of this line the valley of the lower Harşit, below Torul, is almost impassable. To the east, passes are longer and more difficult. The Roman frontier was constrained by geography to run almost due north from Satala to Trapezus and the Euxine. As far as the Harşit, the Antonine Itinerary and the Peutinger Table describe a single route, for Domana is common to both. But across the Pontic mountains they list two distinct sequences of stations: as in the Taurus and Armenia Minor, alternative routes which evidently divided east of or at Tekke, and re­united at Maçka. R EM A I NS BET W EEN SA DA K A N D T R A BZON Few traces of Roman work survive between Satala and Trapezus: a milestone fragment at Satala itself; a section of road climbing steeply from the Kılıççı Dere towards Halkevi; a longer section with well-­preserved traces of agger, descending northwards towards Havcış and the Lycus; at Köşe (Domana) an uninscribed column, identified as a milestone by Cumont; short sections of agger in the Yurtlar Dere; the abutments of the Baghdad bridge; at Tekke (Sedisca) a rock-­cut tomb; short sections of agger high above Tekke and İmera; fragments of late Roman bricks built sparsely into the ruins at Zindanlar and the fort at Hortokop; the abutments of the Güryeni bridge north of Maçka (Ad Vicensimum/Magnana). All else has, it seems, been obliterated long since by wars and reconstruction along the frontiers of the mediaeval empire of Trebizond, and by the continued use of the caravan route from Erzerum. As both Roman and caravan roads were constrained by geography to follow broadly the same line northwards

◀  Map 21  Armenia Minor: from Satala to the Harşit

Discovering Rome’s Eastern Frontier. Timothy Bruce Mitford, Oxford University Press (2021). © Timothy Bruce Mitford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843425.003.0014

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 288 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

to Trapezus, the positions of hans are an important indicator where other ­evidence is lacking. SATA L A TO KÖSE The frontier road emerged from the gate towards the centre of the north wall of the fortress, and descended gradually north-­east towards Sökmen, to reach the Sadak Çay and the caravan road. The river is only a few metres wide, and there is no trace of a bridge. A short distance to the south, the lower courses of an ashlar wall, 65 metres long, and constructed on solid foundations with large blocks in reuse, lie between road and river: the remains, perhaps, of a large han, north of Sadakhanları. Turning north along the east bank, the road followed the Sadak Çay for 2 miles. A section still known as the ‘caravan road’ lay, it was said, 70 cm beneath the modern road built by the Russians in 1916. By 2015 a dam had been built on the Sadak Çay, below Sökmen, and the ancient crossing and caravan road now lie beneath a large lake. The muhtar of Sadak told the archaeologist Mete Mimiroğlu that part of a Roman bridge was discovered during ­construction.

Sökmen and Kılıççı Below Sökmen the caravan road to Kelkit crossed the Han Dere. Here a han with walls then still standing, but now vanished, was reported to Cumont, who associated it, correctly, with the caravan route from Erzerum to Tokat. Below Kılıççı it curved north-­west along the Sadak Çay, flowing below lofty mountains towards Kelkit. This had been Taylor’s route, used by mules, beside the Sadak Çay. The village elders at Sökmen recalled that the northbound caravan road from Sadak continued through Kılıççı for Köse and Trabzon. Drawing on detailed personal knowledge of the mountains in his operational area, Ali Yalınkılıç, the jandarma commander in Kelkit, had given similar advice. Over the mountains north of Kelkit, Biliotti had cut directly south from Eski Gümüşhane to visit Satala in1874. These mountains, Ali reckoned, were more or less impassable for a northbound route. He talked, instead, of a ridgeway, similar to that across the Çimen Dağları, leading from Sadak to Köse. Sure enough, the Ottoman route to the north left the Sadak Çay, and climbed past Kılıççı. This was the post road followed by Yorke, from Erzincan to Köse and Trebizond; and it was probably here, in a village one hour from Satala, that he saw two uninscribed columns, perhaps milestones. This too was the route to Trapezunt followed in c.1860 by Strecker, to Kilidschlu (Kılıççı), the watershed above the Lycus, and the descent to Haudschusch (Havcış); and by Biliotti on his return in 1874, ‘over low hills and shallow ravines’, passing below Sökmen, and east of Kilidj (Kılıççı) to reach Haoudjous (Havcış) in three and a half hours from Saddak. In Kılıççı in July 1996 I barely survived an elaborate feast of döner kebab, in memory of an elder, forty days after his death. Cumont too passed through Kilidje (Kılıççı), without recognizing the path of the Roman road. Just above the village (Fig. 13.1), it crossed a narrow stream to the han marked on the map, but now vanished. Here the Russian road continued through a short ravine and up the western side of the sterile valley above Kılıççı. But the caravan and evidently Roman road diverged to traverse up the eastern side. From the position of the han a clear trace, 2 metres

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

FROM SATA L A TO THE UPPER H A R SIT  289

F ig . 13.1 Kızılbaş children in the steps of Hadrian, above Kılıççı (October 2002)

wide with some traces of cobbles, leads straight up from the direction of Kılıççı towards the southern shoulder of the conspicuous crags, now fringed with white marble quarries, half a mile below the high village of Halkevi. The crags must be the ‘éminence’, forty minutes beyond Kılıççı, on which Cumont recorded a mound of ruins: cut stones mixed with fragments of pottery, but no recoverable ground plan. Of these ruins there was no trace in October 2002. They were evidently close above the frontier road as it curved behind the crags, and traversed gradually up the eastern side of the valley below Halkevi. They seem to be the ‘Ancien poste militaire?’ marked on Cumont’s map a mile to the east of his road which led up the western side to the summit of the pass. The valley unexpectedly rises to high fields, and rejoins the Russian road a mile before an escarpment poised above the upper reaches of the Lycus (Kelkit Çay). Taylor suggests that the Greek name Lycus ‘seems to have been simply a translation of the original Armenian name of the same river, which was called the Kail Ket, “Wolf River” ’: a name surviving in the district of Kelkit, the modern name for Çiftlik. In Halkevi, just below the ridge three hours north of Satala, several sarcophagi and a second- or third-­century altar, uninscribed, point to a Roman site. The village was poor, and the atmosphere in August 2000 suspicious and brittle.

Above the Lycus Some 9 miles from Satala, the escarpment is a spectacular vantage point, with a clear view down to the Lycus valley and northwards to Köse. On it the extensive remains of a guard

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 290 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

post or signalling station have attracted much digging. The remains cover a rough rect­ angle, 80 metres long and 40 metres wide, strewn with old, coarse pottery. No ashlar survives. Below the crag is a spring, and the ancient road, followed by the Post Road from Erzincan, runs about a hundred metres to the east. Cumont certainly followed the Post Road. The remains are probably the ruins of a tower which he saw on a hillock ‘à droite’ on reaching the ridge-­line, the ‘Sommet de la passe’: the ‘Poste militaire en ruines’ marked on his map beside the road, still standing to a height of nearly 10 metres, visible from afar, and half collapsed (Fig. 13.2). His structure was rectangular, 11 metres long by 9 wide. Its walls were 1.5 metres thick, built with unworked or poorly quarried blocks, larger on the outside and smaller on the inside, and bonded with abundant mortar. Around were traces of buildings levelled to the ground, and even traces of a circular wall enclosing the summit of the hill. Cumont reckoned this a military post, a watch tower able to resist attack, dating ori­gin­ al­ly perhaps from the time of Justinian. Other than the remains on the escarpment, there was no trace in 2002 of Cumont’s tower, on the ridge or on the adjacent low hills. Six years earlier, Yorke had seen ‘one hour and a half after leaving Sadagh . . . what may be a Roman fort, 2 miles to the right of our road [the post-­road from Erzingan to Köse

F ig . 13.2*  ‘Ruines d’un Poste militaire’ (Cumont, June 1900; from SP II, p. 352)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

FROM SATA L A TO THE UPPER H A R SIT  291

and Trebizond]. We did not have time to visit it, but could make out with a glass that its walls consist of a rubble core faced with squared stones.’ Sighting his fort from the ­summit of the pass, Yorke, in a hurry, seems to have taken a more westerly route, passing below the escarpment and descending to Cinderek, now Obektaş. Cumont’s tower and Yorke’s would-­be fort seem to be one and the same, and must be identified with the structure sited so conspicuously on the escarpment. Clearly concerned with observation of the Lycus valley, and with line-­of-­sight signalling between Mantartaşı above the legionary fortress and the cemetery hill above the auxiliary station at Köse (Domana), the structure was, perhaps, the last standing fragment of a system traced along much of the length of the frontier: stark illustration, it seems, of the pace of destruction over the past century.

Descent to the Lycus Unable to determine even the general line taken by the Roman road in its descent to the Lycus, Cumont seems to have crossed the ridge at a lower level, passing perhaps, like Yorke, through Cinderek (Fig. 13.3). Full of ashlar, the village is locally renowned as a prolific source of quarried stone. Above it the rough track from Halkevi and Kılıççı now turns, unexpectedly, into a magnificent dual carriageway complete with street lights. From Cinderek Cumont passed through Aoudjus (Havcış) at the southern edge of the broad and fertile valley of the Lycus. On the northern slopes below the summit of the escarpment are unambiguous traces of a road 5 metres wide, a roadbed of small stones set between defined kerbs, just as Ali

F ig . 13.3  A child in Cinderek (August 1996)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 292 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Yalınkılıç had described. Dropping north for half a mile, the road zigzags down to the bed of a narrow, dry valley, and turns abruptly north-­east to descend at a shallow gradient in the broad direction of Köse. Construction in long curves, rather than angles, is reminiscent of sections below Şakşak Dağ and over the Antitaurus. Marked by a conspicuous line of electricity pylons, the road can be followed continuously for some 6 miles down to the Lycus. In places a pronounced agger rises 1 to 2 metres above stony fields. Two miles below the summit the Roman road is particularly well preserved, and the circular base perhaps of a guard post 7 metres in diameter stands 10 metres above on the northern side. Walking down towards us in 1996 were two armed men (Fig. 13.4). My Representative was sure he would die in these desolate hills, and implored me to take his body back to Izmir. But they were boar hunters, not PKK, and pressed an invitation, which we declined, to a sumptuous picnic. The road then curves left towards Köse, and after nearly a mile converges on a shallow stream flowing down from the north face of the Halkevi ridge. Clear water runs over flat bedrock and falls into a narrow gorge. This was a natural ford: there is no evidence for a bridge. The road traverses the eastern slopes above the gorge, winding slowly down towards Havcış. On a hillock a mile evidently west of Haoudjouz, Biliotti saw three large, uninscribed stelae, assessed as Byzantine. Half a mile west of the village, and perhaps in the same vicinity, the road passes beside a ruin field, the remains perhaps of a larger guard post, seems to turn sharply towards Havcış, and disappears. While springs

F ig . 13.4  The frontier road descending north-­east towards Havcış: Atalay Bayik and boar hunters (July 1996)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

FROM SATA L A TO THE UPPER H A R SIT  293

on the surrounding hillsides run dry in August, the village has constant water. There can be no doubt that this was the northbound frontier road from Satala, and that it passed through Havcış, heading almost directly towards distant Trapezus. There is no trace of the road in the fields below the village, or of a bridge over the Lycus, here no more than 6 metres wide. From the crossing as far as Köse, 4 miles from Havcış, all trace of the ancient road has, it seems, been obliterated by the modern.2

Köse (Domana) Eighteen miles from Satala and known to Ptolemy, Domana was the first station on the road to Trapezus both in the Antonine Itinerary and in the Peutinger Table. Adjacent, it was captured with its territory by Sapor in ad 256. In c. ad 400 Domana was garrisoned by equites sagittarii, cavalry well suited to the high plain, the Mormuşdüzü, ‘violet mouse (?) plain’, between the headwaters of the Lycus and Acampsis, surrounded by gently sloping hills some 8 miles east of Köse. By the ancient road Köse lies about 20 miles from Satala, seven hours on foot. On horseback Biliotti reached it in five hours, Cumont in four and a half. In a cemetery on the hill overshadowing the village to the west, Cumont saw an uninscribed column, ‘certainement une ancienne pierre milliaire’, the inscription, unmentioned in his epigraphic notebook, either buried or painted. Nothing of antiquity survives today. Köse has become a grim, dusty little town, strung out along a low, barren hillside. The inhabitants, Biliotti noted, ‘enjoy the unenviable reputation of being thieves’. Below the Merkez Cami, itself said to be very old, the much older houses of the original village of Köse cluster along the east bank of the stream flowing into the Lycus. Two hundred metres above the northern end of the village, old men remembered in June 2004 five hans buried below Cumhuriyet Parkı, close to the new Dedepaş Cami and beside the modern road to Gümüşhane. İşmail Kesler, an 80-­year-­old from the largest family, recalled camels carrying the post and gas bottles for lamps, from Trabzon to Erzincan; and trains of five horses, with two carrying the post. Throughout the year southbound caravans continued on through Havcış, Kılıççı, and Bandola and crossed the Sipikör pass. They would stop at Sadak. Along the caravan road Ismail claimed to be able to walk to Erzincan, at remarkable speed, in six hours. In winter snow always lay more than a metre deep at Köse. But the climate has changed, and now there is no more than 30 cm, lasting until March. The hans and the old village point to the presence of an ancient site: evidently Domana.3

KÖSE TO TH E U PPER H A R Ş I T

Over Köse Dağ From Köse the modern road runs north over the exposed heights of Köse Dağ (6,400 feet), and descends steeply to the Harşit valley at Pirahmet. This was the caravan route followed by Strecker in a violent December snowstorm, and the Post Road followed north from Köse by Biliotti, Yorke, and Cumont to reach the Erzerum road in about six hours at Pirahmet, where there was a han, a mile east of Tekke. In 1900 the chaussée, recently completed, was the best Cumont had seen constructed in Asia Minor.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 294 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

İsmail knew that the route over Köse Dağ was used by camels. It was also, he said, the Post Road, and the Old Russian Road rebuilt by the Russians in 1916. With friends İşmail used to walk along it, via Pirahmet and Tekke. Stopping at Zigana han, below the modern village, and at Maçka he could reach Trabzon in three days. But the line of the road descending north from the Köse Dağ pass has long seemed too deep, in difficult valleys, and in places too precipitous to have attracted Roman engineers. Pirahmet, moreover, is 3 miles west of the Baghdad bridge, the Roman crossing of the Harşit.4

Beside the Yurtlar and Keçi Dere To explain the bridge, the frontier road must have taken a more easterly line. With the Post Road it climbed initially from Köse and through the Köse Boğazı: where in 1996 I had seen a short trace on the west bank of the river. But by 2000 all had been destroyed by the construction of a waterless dam, 97 metres high. Immediately after the late Ottoman bridge, once Uççat Köprü, ‘three crash bridge’, now known as Taş Köprü, ‘stone bridge’, three and a half miles from Köse, the frontier road turned sharply away from the Post Road, and climbed gradually north-­east along the narrow valley of the Yurtlar or Hur Dere, its steep hillsides scoured by ravines. Barkley may have passed this way in December 1878. After a mile, at a point known as Kilise Burun, ‘church promontory’, the agger of the Baghdad Road, a section 120 metres long, is clearly visible, 5 metres wide and nearly 2 metres high (Fig. 13.5). At the end of July 1996, a group of bee-­keepers from Trabzon was camping on it for the summer, as they had done for many years.

F ig . 13.5  Yurtlar Dere: agger and beekeepers (July 1996)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

FROM SATA L A TO THE UPPER H A R SIT  295

On a spur about 100 feet above the road, they said, stood a structure, Ağa Kalesi, reckoned to have been a church. While my Representative lingered for tea and honey in a swarm of bees, I climbed with them up to remains invaded by trees and almost wholly destroyed. Once roughly rectangular, the walls measure some 25 × 65 metres, built with river stones without mortar. Only two ashlar blocks survive, and there is no pottery. The remains were too large to have been a chapel, and too remote, even ­inaccessible, to have been a church where the local Greek population was once small and scattered. Commanding the Yurtlar valley in both directions, they seem, rather, to have been a fortlet, perhaps a rebuilding of one of the praesidia built by Corbulo to protect his supply route across the mountains from Trapezus. The bee-­keepers were there again in October 2002, but 2006 was a poor season, and by the end of August they had departed. The road continued north-­east along the bed of the Yurtlar Dere. Half a mile after Ağa Kalesi, the stream, narrow and shallow, has cut a cross-­section through the road, suggesting the site of a bridge not more than 3 metres long. The northern end of the valley is blocked by a tall ridge crowned with pines. Below, a long trace of an apparent agger, 5 metres wide and 2 metres high, cuts across the stream. The modern track begins a long detour to the north-­west. But the ancient road, varying in width from 3 to 5 metres, continued straight up a short, dry valley among pines, and after ten minutes reached a narrow pass (6,725 feet) overlooking the broader, fertile valley of the Keçi or Karanlık Dere. To it the ancient road descended by zigzags, down a steep, eroded spine recalling the much greater descent to Tahnıç beside the Şiro Çay. The Keçi Dere, a small stream with little water even in winter and spring, flows gently through the twin villages of Hurusüfla, renamed Gökdere, to join the Harşit shortly east of Murathanoğulları, and a mile west of Kale (Kovans). In June 2004 an old man outside the mosque in upper Hurusüfla remembered the passage of camels. In the 1940s mules used the road to carry illegal, wide-­leaved tobacco from Akçaabat, west of Trabzon, for sale in the forest above Hurusüfla. Beside the Keçi Dere ran the frontier road, and all along the valley above lower Hurusüfla the muhtar, Mesut Gök, was able to point out traces of the Baghdad Road in July 1996. He too could remember the caravans. Mesut, and everybody else, had used the road as a matter of course until a stabilized road was built in 1985 to connect with the Russian road over Köse Dağ. His village was 11 miles from Köse, reached in five hours on foot; and 3 miles from the Harşit, the Byzantine Kanis. At Hurusüfla, advice in Gümüşhane suggested, was a castle, where bronze and occasionally gold coins and terracotta water pipes, ­suggestive of a Roman station, were said to be found. I saw none of these. An elderly muleteer remembered the stages along the old road from Trabzon and Gümüşhane to Erzincan: from Hurusüfla it passed through Köse, Havcış, Kılıççı, Sadak, and Sipikör. The Russians, he explained, had lived in Hurusüfla, but had not repaired this road. Thirty years ago there were nearly 180 houses, with a population of around 800. But almost all had migrated to Istanbul and İzmir.

Descent to the Harşit Two miles south of the village, the road is supported by a well-­constructed revetment above the short canyon of the Keçi Dere, through which the modern track and the

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 296 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Baghdad road descended. At its southern end, a mile before the Harşit, were traces of an older road, before 2003 destroyed by a huge quarry; and the remains of a narrow bridge, constructed from rough stones without an arch. The caravan route from Hurusüfla passed below enormous cliffs to reach the Harşit and the trunk road from Erzerum a mile and a half west of Kale (Kovans), where in December 1890 Bishop saw ‘in and outside the immense camel stables seven hundred camels were taking shelter from the storm’. There it turned west beside the river, to pass the site of Murathanoğulları, an important group of hans obliterated in 1990 by the modern road from Erzurum. Strecker reported there two houses and five or six hans. Above was a water mill.5 ROUT ES A L ONG A N D ACROSS TH E H A R Ş I T Here, at the Harşit, the frontier road coming north from Satala converged with the line of the great caravan route from north-­west Persia and Erzerum; a route which had passed along the Bayburt valley, over the Vavuk Dağ pass (7,200 feet), and through Kale (Kovans). In Ottoman times, Murathanoğulları marked a junction and crossroads of major importance. The common destination was Trebizond.

The Antonine and Winter Route In winter, caravans continued westwards down the twisting and difficult valley of the upper Harşit (3,250 feet), following the later line of the Transit and modern road from Erzurum, to pass through Tekke, Gümüşhane, and Torul, cross the mountains by the Zigana pass (6,665 feet), and descend to Maçka. The importance of the Byzantine and mediaeval route is attested by a series of almost inaccessible castles poised on precipices high above the Harşit between Kale and Torul. This was the Antonine route, with four intermediate stations between Domana and Trapezus. One was Zigana. Like Zimara beside the Euphrates, and evidently the Tapurs north-­west of Kuruçay, the Roman place-­name has survived in the Turkish village below the Zigana pass. On either side of the pass are long traces of an ancient roadway. This was the route taken by the frontier road in winter. From it the sea cannot be seen.6

The Peutinger and Summer Route In summer, caravans from Erzerum preferred a short cut across the high Pontic mountains. Diverging after Bayburt, some turned north-­west at Hadrak, before the Vavuk Dağ pass and 15 miles east of Kale. Others diverged after the pass, either at Kale itself, or at Murathanoğulları; where, Strecker observed, the road from the south to Trapezunt turned right, and in summer led almost directly north for nine hours to Maden Han(ları). There it joined the caravan route from Erzerum, and Hadrak, until the early 1930s in  constant use during the summer months by trains of pack-­animals: camels, horses, and mules. The route from Murathanoğulları, through Leri, was the Peutinger road, with seven intermediate stations between Domana and Trapezunta; different place-­names along a different natural route. Its course is confirmed by the ruins of Ottoman hans, revealing the purpose of the many stations in the Peutinger Table. These were not forts, but

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

FROM SATA L A TO THE UPPER H A R SIT  297

­ igh-­altitude refuges. The three central stations, close together, conform to the ­important h geographical positions of the highest hans: Maden relatively benign, sheltered to north and east by the flanks of Deveboynu Dağ, and watered by a generous spring; Anzarya and Kolat dangerously exposed, the caravan road crossed by routes linking the rich Greek communities at İmera and İstavri with the Larhan valley, and offering rapid descent from altitude in emergency. From Gymnias, evidently Bayburt, this was the route known to Xenophon’s guide; and from it the Ten Thousand saw the sea. Evidently protected with praesidia by Corbulo nearly five centuries later, this from Murathanoğulları was the line of the frontier road followed by Hadrian and Arrian, who looked down on the Euxine from the same point as Xenophon. As in the ranges to the south, it was a high-­level route, following ridgeways across the Pontic mountains, far above the contorted valleys and canyons east of Gümüşhane. The line of the summer caravan route preserves the line of the summer frontier road, more direct but much higher than the Antonine. Climbing steeply from the upper Harşit, it passed over the yaylas east of Gümüşhane and descended to Maçka.7

The Zindanlar Ruins (? Horonon) and the Crossing of the Soyran Dere In summer and autumn the Harşit can easily be forded between Kale and the mouth of the Soyran Dere, which even in summer flows strongly into the Harşit barely half a mile west of Murathanoğulları. There is no trace or memory of an old bridge or crossing. About half a mile north of Murathanoğulları, confused ruins lie scattered at Zindanlar Arazı, on the narrow promontory between the Harşit and the Soyran Dere; a tongue of gardens and terraced fields of remarkable fertility, supported on rough, dry-­stone walls c.5 feet high. Here Strecker reported a group of quite extensive ruins, widely spread in former times. To the north, 30 metres from the Soyran Dere, the remains of a round tower, 3 metres in diameter at the base, stand to a height of about 8 metres. It is still faced with patches of unworked river stones, laid flat in mortar in nine rough, herring-­bone courses. In 2000 four fragments of thin brick, 3 cm thick and perhaps Roman, could be seen in its mortared core. Six scattered traces of wall cores, similarly mortared and about 1.5 metres wide, suggest that a small, evidently pentagonal fort, measuring roughly 80 × 60 metres, was associated with the tower (Fig. 13.6). Curved sections of mortar suggest the possible presence of two other corner towers. The north wall rests on a natural embankment rising 5 metres above the level of the river, and the interior of the fort is flat. The tower is probably Byzantine, perhaps not earlier than the tenth century. Cramped between the Harşit and the Soyran Dere, and standing on the further bank of both rivers, the ruins cannot have been associated with the Baghdad bridge, or with the Antonine frontier road beside the Harşit; and they enclose an area far too small for an infantry cohort, requiring some 120 by 120 metres over the ramparts. But the location commends itself as a suitable site for Horonon, a new, very powerful fortress built by Justinian at the junction of three roads, on the boundaries of the Romans, the Persarmenians, and the Tzani.8 A hundred metres to the south. the walls of a rectangular structure, 39 metres long and 20 metres wide, stand to a height of 3 metres on a lower terrace, with crude courses of river stones and fragments of mortared cores. Inside, women were harvesting beans in

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 298  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER N

S o y r a n

D e r e

? tower Tower Height c.8m

c.4.25 ha

? tower

0

50 Metres

F ig . 13.6  Plan of Zindanlar (September 1999 and August 2000)

August 2000. Clearly not a fort, the enclosure was probably a large han. The name Zindanlar means ‘prisons’, or ‘camel byres’. In a strange coincidence, an E-­Type prison, full, it was said, of PKK, faces Zindanlar on the opposite bank of the Soyran Dere. After our brief meeting in 1999, Oktay, my tireless guide, had been interrogated by MIT, and the proximity of jandarma made him nervous. The second meaning suggests a purpose, confirmed in the immense camel stables reported by Bishop at Kale, a place where caravans and camels could rest and shelter at the southern end of the passage of the Pontic mountains. The rectangular enclosure is probably Selcuk, perhaps contemporary with the rebuilt Baghdad bridge. The Zindanlar ruins should thus be associated with the summer route from Erzerum, via Kale; and particularly with the route from Erzincan, via Murathanoğulları and a shallow ford across the upper Harşit. From Kale, caravans of camels and mules were said to have taken only two days to reach Trabzon, stopping for the night at Leri on the southern, and Larhan on the northern side of the mountains. They seem to have taken a short cut over low hills a mile or more east of Zindanlar; and, 3 miles upstream from the ruins, crossed the Soyran Dere, about 20 metres wide. On the high left bank, a short section of kaldırım 2 metres wide leads to a bridge abutment said to have been Greek. There is no trace of an arch, and the opposite abutment has been swept away. The bridge was probably flat, built with timber supported on three piers. Here caravans from Erzerum and Erzincan united, and from the bridge passed directly through a gap in low cliffs, to enter the narrow ravine of the Leri Çay (5,225 feet).9

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

FROM SATA L A TO THE UPPER H A R SIT  299

The Baghdad Bridge In winter, the frontier road from Satala, and the caravan routes from Erzincan and Erzerum, continued across steep hillsides above the south bank of the Harşit, to the great Selcuk bridge known as Tohumoğlu or Bağdat Köprü, ‘Baghdad Bridge’, 13 miles east of Gümüşhane (Fig. 13.7: Taner’s height 1m 78). Two large arches survive, at each end and in the centre bedded on solid rock. Including approach ramps, the overall length is 74 metres. Of the northern abutment and the central pier the two lowest foundation courses, 57 cm high, are indisputably Roman, their workmanship probably of the second or early third century. Their width is 5.45 metres, a measurement closely repeated in other large bridges carrying the frontier road. The masonry of the central pier is extended up and down river in a wedge shape to streamline the flow. The base of the southern abutment is obscured by gravel and sand, but a similar wedge shows that this arch too was rebuilt on Roman foundations. In the southern approaches to the bridge there is no trace of the road, long since collapsed into the river. On the north bank too the road has vanished, in an orchard and beneath the Transit road and asfalt to Gümüşhane.10 The Baghdad bridge proves that the frontier road passed through the Yurtlar and Keci Dere to reach the Harşit at Murathanogulları, rather than further west over Köse Dağ and through Pirahmet. The winter route continued westwards, along the Harsit valley (3,250 feet) and over the Zigana pass (6,665 feet). The summer route, alternative to Leri, turned north through Tekke, to climb directly over the high Pontic mountains.

F ig . 13.7  Baghdad bridge over the Harşit, view north: central pier with wedge-­shaped cutwater, and Taner Demirbulut (June 2003)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 300 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

NOT ES 1. The northern section of the frontier, between Satala and Trapezus, a maze of routes used by caravans or described by European travellers, I explored in 1963, 1984, 1996, 1999–2000, 2002–4 and 2006. 2. Cumont, SP II 352ff. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 286f. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 462. Strecker, ZAE 11 (1861) 346. Biliotti, in Mitford, AS 24 (1974) 225f. and, at Havcış, 239. 3. Biliotti, in Mitford, AS 24 (1974) 239. Cumont, SP II 354. Sapor, chapter 12, n. 12. 4. Strecker, ZAE 11 (1861) 348. Biliotti, in Mitford, AS 24 (1974) 239–41. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 462. Cumont, SP II 355. 5. Barkley, Armenia 340. Bishop, Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan II 390f. 6. The Harşit route is described by Bryer and Winfield, Pontos 305–12. 7. Xenophon, Anabasis 4, 7, 19–20. In ad 55–8, Tacitus, Ann. 13, 39. Arrian, Periplus 1. 8. Horonon, Procopius, Aed. 3, 6, 15f. 9. Built with courses of roughly squared stones, the abutment was some 3.35 metres high and 2.12 metres wide. 10. The length of the northern arch is 14.29, and of the southern more than 16.17 metres. The width of the present roadway, used by mules, is 4.6 metres.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

FOURTEEN

Through the Pontic Mountains to Maçka (Maps 22, 23, and Fig. A1)

From the Baghdad bridge, the Antonine and winter caravan route followed the north bank of the Harşit west and north-­west to Torul, curved north-­east to climb steeply over the Zigana pass, and descended to Maçka. Along this line was channelled trade with Urartu in the eighth century bc. It carried the Ottoman caravan route from Trebizond to Erzerum and northern Persia, and the great cart road completed to Erzerum in c.1890. This, Colonel Maunsell reports, ‘for the first 100 miles from Trebizond traverses a difficult defile liable to obstruction and in spring blocked more or less by floods and landslips. In summer, if repaired, it remains in good order and is easily passable.’ It was used by ‘the only carriage road through the coast ranges’ In the modernization of the Transit Road, started in 1931, it was a leading requirement that ‘maximum use be made of the existing road’. The entire centre line of the new road was accordingly staked out over the old road, the old packhorse track, with local deviations where the gradient was excessive or curves too tight. There were serious difficulties to overcome: landslides, the scouring action of mountain torrents, the heaps of debris washed down by hail and heavy rains. Culverts were blocked, and liquid mud pouring down the hillsides deposited itself in layers over long sections of road, sometimes ten feet deep. Following cloudbursts just east of Torul in July 1938, two sections of road were buried in less than fifteen minutes under 2,000 cubic metres of debris. A hundred men worked through the night to clear 400 metres of road. By the end of September the road is usually completely free of debris. Autumn ends abruptly with the first violent snowstorm. A L ONG TH E H A R Ş I T VA LLEY Until Tekke, all trace of the caravan route is lost. At Pirahmet, junction of the Post Road from Erzincan over Köse Dağ, its course is marked by a han, reported by Cumont; and soon after by the site of Karagözhanı. The türbe of Karamanoğlu Pir Ahmet, Bey of Karaman, given dominion over Bayburt by Uzun Hasan, bears the date 1550, but was said to have been erected by Mehmet II, the Conqueror (1451–81). An important meeting of routes, Pirahmet was the scene of much confusion during the Russian attack and Turkish retreat in July 1916.1

Discovering Rome’s Eastern Frontier. Timothy Bruce Mitford, Oxford University Press (2021). © Timothy Bruce Mitford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843425.003.0015

▲   Map 22  Pontic Mountains: from the Harşit to Zigana and Pylae

5

4

0

0 10 km

5 miles

THIA ?

C

Ha

r șit

21

KAN IS

1

MOCHORA ?

SEDISCA ?

PYLAE

E

Șon Kale

THECHES MONS

Zindanlar

SOLONENICA ?

Ağyarlar MEDOCIA ?

Karayayla

PATARA ?

FRIGIDARIUM

23

Baghdad Bridge

Xenophon Cairn

D D. an La r h

3

ZIGANA

B

F

Vavuk Gd. Gd

22  302 

2

1

A

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

)(

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE PONTIC MOU NTA INS TO M AÇK A  303 A

B

C

D 0

5 miles

0

10 km

1

TRAPEZUS

TE

S

2

Güryeni Kp.

nd

er

e

PY

XI

3

De

ği

rm

e

AD VICENSIMUM / MAGNANA

Hortokop 4

Larhan

D.

GIZENENICA ? 5

PR Y

N TA

IS

23

22

▲   Map 23  Pontic Mountains: roads descending to Maçka, and Trapezus

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 304 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Tekke (Sedisca) Along the line of the frontier road about 18 miles from Köse, Tekke (4,600 feet) takes its name from the holy tomb of Seyid Mahmut Çağırgan. Built beside the caravan road with a date of 1582, it is attributed locally to Sultan Murat IV (1623–40). A flat-­topped, natural mound rises nearly 300 feet above the Harşit, where, riding south and east to Baiburt in winter 1897, Hepworth passed ‘the little village of Tekke, built on a hillside and reminding of pictures of Hebrew towns’. The summit is ringed with sections of mortared walls and cores set in herring-­bone courses resembling Justinian’s walls at Satala. They form a rough pear shape, some 200 metres long and 100 metres wide at the southern end, dominating the road to Gümüşhane (Fig. 14.1). On the northern neck a large fountain draws on a clear stream flowing down from Bahçecik, and above rises the ancient track leading up to the Tekke yaylas. Encouraged by talk of rings, and by fragments, eagerly shown, of huge pithoi, treasure hunters know the mound is hollow, and dig assiduously to find the secret entrance. On the summit, fringed with Greek and Turkish houses, was a rock-­cut cistern, 8 metres square and some 3 metres deep; and at least four other cisterns lined with lime and plaster. One, circular, was 2 metres in diameter and 3 metres deep, another 4 metres wide and originally some 4 metres deep. There are great quantities of ashlar, salvaged probably from Greek houses. Below the mound, and 100 metres east of the türbe of the Seyid, an enormous boulder beside the house of Niyazi amca, ‘uncle Niyazi’, contains a simple, uninscribed rock-­cut tomb from the classical period. Now split in half, the tomb is 2.9 metres long, with traces of a door and semicircular roof. It is well-­known as a ziyaret, a place of pilgrimage. Beside the tekke, ‘Dervish chapel’ referring to the holy tomb, are the ruins of a han, and on the opposite side of the road was another, now vanished. Oktay’s father Rahmi, once muhtar of Bahçecik, a charming and learned man with a detailed knowledge of the local geography, reckoned that there were up to ten hans in the vicinity of the tekke. They were called Sindi, and the village was of the greatest ­importance as quarters for caravans. Hot sulphur springs bubble up below the mountainside half a mile to the west. At Tekke, as well as in the vicinities of Murathanoğulları and the Baghdad bridge, the low- and high-­level caravan routes to Trebizond were said to have diverged. There was much talk of caravan traffic, camels, horses, and mules, passing along the low-­level route through the Harşit valley; below Eski Gümüşhane, through Torul and over the Zigana pass. The other route led northwards from the village and into the mountains. Tekke appears to mark the southern end of the passage of the Pontic Alps, just as Maçka marks the northern. So significant is the position of Tekke that it must, inevitably, have attracted attention in Roman times. The aura of antiquity is unmistakable. It lay close to the point where the direction of the frontier road turned from north to west, at Murathanoğulları, in the furthest corners of Armenia Minor and Pontus. In the former, Domana, at Köse, was the last station, and the provincial boundary seems to have been drawn along the mountains between the Lycus and the Harşit, perhaps along the ridge separating the Yurtlar and the Keçi Dere. Tekke seems to have been the first town reached in Pontus by the frontier road, and can reliably be identified with Sedisca, fi(nes) Ponti: the name probably derived from the flat-­topped hill, the stool or bench on which the village lies.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE PONTIC MOU NTA INS TO M AÇK A  305

F ig . 14.1  Tekke, on a rocky promontory high above the Harsit, view south-­west: beyond, the eastern slopes of Köse Dağ (August 2000)

From Tekke, the Antonine road continued along the narrow, twisting bed of the Harşit: in places an extremely difficult route, at risk to landslides. Mountains crowned with cliffs rise steeply from both banks of the river, and only the side valley leading up to Hayekse offers a way to the north. Other valleys are blocked by almost impassable canyons. Even before the destruction caused by the new asfalt from Erzurum, no trace survived of the Roman road. But, inevitably, its course was broadly followed by the caravan route, and later Transit Road, and is confirmed by a series of hans.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 306 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Gümüşhane For ten miles the Harşit valley offered an easy descent as far as Gümüşhane, reckoned at one day from Tekke. From the valley no natural route leads up on either side, and the caravan road, cut up by melting snows and heavy floods in spring, clung to the north bank. Half an hour before Gümüşhane, Cumont entered a Greek land. On this winter route from Trebizond to Erzerum, Texier confirms, caravans passed through the centre of the little town, ‘située au milieu d’une chaos de montagnes inextricables’. From Gümüşhane, a difficult path led up through Hayekse. Joined by another track from Beşkilise, it climbed past İstavri to join the high summer route at Kolat hanları, in a summer shortcut to Maçka. It is inconceivable that the Ten Thousand were guided, or that Hadrian and Arrian were obliged to dismount and walk along them. Leaving the town, caravans crossed the Harşit by a predecessor of the modern bridge. Around the northern end clustered six hans, among which Büyük Han was their preferred stopping place. From the southern end of the bridge a steep road led up to the densely packed settlement and silver mines of Eski Gümüşhane, the Greek Argyropolis, where the population was 60,000 in Ottoman times. There Cumont saw six Greek churches, but no sign of antiquity; and Eski Gümüşhane was too high and inaccessible to have been directly associated with the Antonine road. In the Pontic mountains the ancient Chalybes, Strabo knew, had mined iron and silver. These mines, Southgate was told, formerly yielded 1,500 pounds of silver annually. The smelting process is described by Hommaire de Hell. Once there had been forty furnaces, but only two, Brant reported, remained in full employment in 1835; and only one mine was still open at the time of Hamilton’s visit the following year. By 1900 all were in disuse.2

Beşkilise (Thia) The caravan route continued north-­westwards along the Harşit valley: as Cumont observed, ‘une des plus fréquentées de l’empire ottoman. Sans cesse elle est parcourue par les caravans portant à la côte les tapis et les denrées de la Perse.’ After 4 miles a narrow, single-­arched bridge, Ottoman or Greek, crosses the river at Köprübaşı, evidently carrying the track to Beşkilise. There is no trace of older foundations or masonry. Half a mile beyond, the Harşit is joined by the Haşara Dere, which drains the Hayekse valley and cuts a deep ravine north of the precipitous ridge above Gümüşhane. To avoid it, the ancient road probably crossed the Harşit not at Köprübaşı, but where the river flows around a low, rocky promontory protruding from the northern bank, to pass through Beşkilise itself. Here were the ‘five churches’, now vanished, which once distinguished an important Greek village, set above willow trees and extensive gardens, fertile and well-­watered, known as Beşkilise çarşışı, ‘market’. The name recalls the great markets held by caravans at Hasanova and Mezraaıhan. Many cut blocks are built into the houses. At the tip of the promontory a suspension foot-­bridge now crosses the Harşit, directly opposite Haciemin hanları. The only site suitable for a station between Gümüşhane and Torul, Beşkilise has been identified with Thia, in the Antonine Itinerary 17 miles from Sedisca, and 24 miles from Zigana: close to the actual distances from Tekke and Zigana. From Beşkilişe a steep path led north-­ east. Followed by travellers to and from Gümüşhane, it crossed Bazbent Dağ (6,890 feet), at the western end of Koroş Dağ

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE PONTIC MOU NTA INS TO M AÇK A  307

(7,550 feet), descended into the deep valley of the Korum Dere, and climbed through İstavri to Kolat hanları on the high ridgeways.3

Torul West of Beşkilişe the Harşit valley contracts to a narrow defile, and the road struggled along craggy slopes falling directly into the river. In 2006 the asfalt was rerouted at great expense to avoid landslides which had swallowed the road on the left bank. At the ruins of Harava hanları, the Korum Dere, draining the İmera valley and the southern slopes of the high ridgeways, emerges from its deep canyon and flows into the Harşit. There the north bank widens and for a short distance provides an easy route for the Transit Road. Shortly before İkisuhanı, ‘two river han’, a huge Ottoman bridge over the Harşit, without trace of earlier work, gave access to the wide valley of the İkisu Dere. The caravan and Transit road passed further hans at Demirciköy hanları, and filed between the great crags that hang above Torul. Here, descending from Zigana at the end of April 1404, Clavijo came to a castle that stood crowning a height that lay across and blocking our road, the name of which was Cadaca (Ardasa). At the foot of the castle and the height flowed a river, while on the other hand stood a range of bare mountains that none would dare attempt to make his way over. Thus the road through was but a narrow strait passing between the river on the one side and the rock of the castle on the other, and the passage was exceedingly close, one man, or one horse at a time only being able to make way ahead. Hence though only a few might be on guard in the castle, they could easily stop any number going that road, which to cross this mountain range was the only path by which the march could be made.

In the centre of Torul, where Cumont was unable to verify talk of a ‘written stone’, a long, three-­arched Ottoman bridge carried the caravan road briefly to the west bank. The abutment on the right bank, built on bedrock, shows no sign of earlier work. But the lowest four courses of the two central piers are older, with rounded corners suggesting earlier Ottoman, but not Roman construction.4 From this point renamed Philabonites in mediaeval times, the Harşit turns north-­west 2 miles north of Torul, to carve a deep gorge through the Pontic mountains and reach the sea at Tirebolu. At the bend, beside Köprübaşı hanları, ‘bridgehead hans’, the road crossed again to the east bank by a large, single-­arched Ottoman bridge 5 metres wide. The northern end abuts on bedrock, and again incorporates no trace of earlier work. OV ER TH E ZIGA NA PASS Here the road divided. The Ottoman chaussée, constructed to carry the Post Road northwards from Erzincan, and later the Transit Road, began a long, unrelenting climb through pine forest clinging to precipitous hillsides, past Tanirahanı, through Zigana village, to the Zigana pass (6,665 feet). But the earlier caravan road, clearly following the Roman, continued along the valley followed by the new asfalt which leads up to the long Zigana tunnel, built in 1983–4; and after nearly 3 miles diverged north-­eastwards from the asfalt, to climb through the short, narrow defile of the Zigana Çay, far below the Ottoman chaussée and the Transit Road.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 308 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Zigana (Zigana) The Transit Road crossed the Zigana Çay by a large Ottoman bridge at the southern entrance to Zigana village, 5 miles below the Zigana pass, 50 miles from Trabzon, and for Hepworth in winter 1897 a day’s journey from Maçka. Here Cumont passed a group of miserable hans, simple stone and wooden houses. Yorke saw no trace of antiquity. There were said in 2003 to have been two hans, and an old man remembered that the caravan road lay beneath the modern road. The village must be, or must lie close above, the Antonine station of Zigana, 24 miles from Thia and 22 miles from Ad Vicensimum (Maçka). Cumont saw the ruins of a large caravansaray, with eight piers set 5 metres apart supporting the flat brick vaults of a large room. These are certainly to be identified with the ruined han lying close to the bed of the Zigana Çay, amid fields half a mile and 600 feet below the village; described by Bryer and Winfield as ‘an impressive Ottoman caravansaray, the central vault of which was once carried by eight columns, each over 5 metres tall. The caravansaray, which was abandoned in the nineteenth century or before, must have been built after Mehmet II’s conquest of the area in 1479–80 and in its size may emphasize the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century Ottoman determination to make the Tabriz route secure.’ Most of the cut stones had been reused in the Ottoman bridge, and by 2003 the interior had been excavated by treasure hunters, and walls and piers had been stripped of their ashlar facing. A short distance downstream, Cumont reported a castle: clearly the remains of a power­ful mediaeval fortress perched on a rocky crest high above the right bank of the Zıgana Çay, half a mile south-­west of the village. Passed by Clavijo in 1404, its walls followed the crest, and at the lower end a round tower commanded the defile used by the caravan road. Below the castle Cumont reported a rust-­coloured spring, and villagers spoke of mineral water. The castle, and the caravansaray similar in size to hans scattered along the line of the frontier road, confirm that Zigana stood on and controlled the only practicable route leading up to the Zigana pass. The Roman station was perhaps in the vicinity of the han, on level ground beside the clear water of the Zigana Çay. A mile north of the han a slender Ottoman bridge, a single, slightly-­pointed arch 3 metres wide and 7 metres long on abutments of rough stone, shows that caravans con­ tinued up the bed of the upper Zigana Çay. But after Maden hanları, passed by Curzon in January 1844, the ravine becomes increasingly steep and narrow; and caravans must have followed the eastern bank with some difficulty, traversing around green hillsides and across pine-­studded screes falling 200 feet into the river, as they climbed towards the Zigana pass. From the pass the southbound route is described by Everett: ‘A winding road entirely cut out of the rock descends continuously and at a steep gradient to the village of Zigana, between steep slopes above which rise pointed peaks and sharp ridges.’ Almost all trace of the ancient road has been lost. A mile below the pass a small Ottoman bridge crossed the ravine to carry the Transit Road in a long loop to the west. Above the bridge the ravine widens into a bowl of alpine pastures, and a well-­preserved section of the caravan road, about 4 metres wide, relic, it seems, of the Roman, climbs at a gradient of 1:7 across the steep southern slopes that lead up to the Zigana karakol, the jandarma station controlling access to the yaylas (Fig. 14.2).5

The Zigana Pass The Zigana pass (6,665 feet) was of the highest importance for the Antonine road and the approaches to Trapezus. It had a second great advantage. Rounded slopes lead

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE PONTIC MOU NTA INS TO M AÇK A  309

F ig . 14.2  The winter and caravan road climbing north to the Zigana pass, seen beyond the pine trees, above (June 2004)

steeply up from the pass to the long Zigana ridge, giving easy access to the heights of Kolat some four hours to the east, and to the high-­level, the Peutinger route, which in summer carried caravans and frontier road over the Pontic mountains. The ridge is far from as flat as the map suggests, and along it the modern track winds left and right, up and down, climbing to c.8,550 feet at the high crest above Kolat. At Ayaser yayla (8,100 feet), traces survive of older roads; and east of Ayaser a single kerb and a section of cobbles protrude though the modern track for 100 metres. This was a minor route, said to have been used occasionally by caravans from Persia as alternative access to, and escape via the Zigana pass from the main route over the high ridgeways.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 310  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

A garrison stationed in the vicinity of the Zigana pass could therefore, uniquely, control both the low- and the high-­level route across the Pontic mountains. In strategic terms, if not in habitability, the pass offered a site of far greater value than the fields and later han below Zigana village: a compelling position, on a rare stretch of level ground, for both fort and karakol, ‘jandarma barracks’. There should be located the Ziganne of the Notitia Dignitatum, garrisoned in c. ad 400 by cohors II Valentiana at a period of rising Persian threat and turbulence in Armenia. Later, the Roman name moved to a new, milder location, just as the name of the Roman fort at Zimara migrated from the Euphrates bank to the Turkish village 5 miles uphill. The pass lies at a remarkable weather boundary, where the humid north wind sweeping inland from the Black Sea meets the dry, clear skies of central Anatolia. Except when the wind blows from the south, for four weeks in May and June and during an uncertain period towards the end of September, the Zigana pass and the ridge above are wreathed in a cold mantle of clouds and mist. In winter, when snow lies deeply from November until the end of March, the approaches and the pass itself were extremely dangerous. Cramer reports a local superstition that the Zigana pass required an average of ten lives each winter. ‘Conditions during a blizzard on this pass have to be experienced to be believed. The temperature often falls as low as 40° Celsius below freezing, and travellers are guided through the blinding hurricane by posts painted black and placed at short intervals along the road.’ During the winter months sudden blizzards and avalanches were a main cause of loss of life on the steep slopes of the Zigana pass, especially dangerous in March when the massed snows began to soften. Approached by icy slopes, the crossing of the Zigana pass in December 1890 was much more serious for Bishop than the Kop pass. The snowstorm had lasted for three days, the snow was from 4 to 9 feet deep on the summit. The drift was blinding, stinging and suffocating. Bishop could not see her horse’s neck. On the northern descent from the pass ‘the snow had drifted on the path to a height of fully twenty feet. Twenty laden camels had gone over the brink of a precipitous slope, and were heaped in the ravine below, not all dead.’ Curzon had encountered worse in January 1842: ‘we passed the mountain of Zigana Dagh, by a place where a whole caravan accompanying the harem of the Pasha of Moush had been overwhelmed in an avalanch, over the icy blocks of which we made our way, the bodies of the unfortunate party and all the poor ladies lying buried far below’. Hepworth’s southward route to the Zigana pass in winter 1897 was blocked in two places by snow and ice. Four or five caravans of camels were descending from the pass, and a score of camels and pack horses lay dead beneath precipices.6

Descent to Maçka From the Zigana pass, the Transit road descended steeply through the tree line in tra­ verses and long zigzags. Four hundred feet below the pass the northern slopes were banded in late June with yellow rhododendrons, zifin, source of the mad honey relished by the Ten Thousand (Fig. 14.3). At the foot of the narrow valley running down from the pass, a fine trace of the caravan road, half a mile long, can be seen on the eastern side, passing east of Barutcu hanı and turning into the upper valley of the Pervaneoğlu Dere, ‘son of the night-­moth river’, the Byzantine Prytanis.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THROUGH THE PONTIC MOU NTA INS TO M AÇK A  311

F ig . 14.3  Zifin, below the Zigana pass (June 2004)

The great strategic importance of the long valley leading down from the Zigana pass to Trebizond is described by Bryer and Winfield. It is the largest valley leading down from the eastern Pontic mountains, ‘the only one with serious access to the interior as well as to the sea’ and through it passed the final stages of the caravan road from Tabriz to Trebizond. High on the eastern side of the valley the road looped in and out of steep side valleys. Rapidly losing height, it passed the ruins of a han near Bekçiler, and con­ tinued through the five villages of Hamsiköy, about 11 miles below the Zigana pass, and 14 miles from Maçka. Greek bribery ensured that the Transit Road was diverted from a more logical course, to pass through them. In the upper village were numerous hans and shops; and a steep route led up to the high ridgeway and Turnagöl, nearly 4,000 feet

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 312  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

above. Riding south from Maçka in winter 1897 with an escort of six well-­armed cavalrymen, Hepworth reached the dreadful khan at Hamsi Kur in a severe snowstorm. In it were thirty muleteers and camel drivers, mostly Persian.7 After Hamsıköy the descent became more gradual. The caravan route was said to run below the flat promontory of Kıransa, some 200 feet above the Pervaneoğlu Dere: site, perhaps, of an intermediate station unmentioned in the Antonine Itinerary. Climbing in places to 800 feet above the river, and marked by a series of hans—Küzhanları, ‘hot embers hans’; Kiremitlihan, ‘han with tiles’; Kirlikilisehanı, ‘dirty church han’; and Meksilahanları—the caravan road reached Maçka, 25 miles below the Zigana pass. NOT ES 1. For metal work from Urartu, Chapter 16, n. 10. The route from Tekke to Maçka, Wilson, Handbook 203. Maunsell, Military Report I (1893) 4 and I (1903) 66. Riding to Satala in 1942, Sir Denis Wright, Vice-­Consul in Trebizond 1941–3, passed along the Transit Road. William Cramer was then the engineer responsible for the last 150 miles of the Transit Road, from the high Kop pass to the Black Sea, Structural Engineer 18 (May 1940) 586–96. Allen and Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields 408. 2. Hepworth, Armenia 87f. Cumont, SP II 356f. Texier, Description de l’Arménie 143. Strabo 12, 3, 19 (549). Southgate, Tour through Armenia 164. Hommaire de Hell, Voyage I 2, 393f. Brant JRGS 6 (1836) 221. Hamilton, Researches 234ff. Over the years I spent many interesting hours with the police behind the vilayet building in Gümüşhane; where in 1996 the assistant valı, Nüsret Şahin, and the Director of Culture, Ahmet Çubukcu, were conspicuously helpful. 3. Cumont, SP II 359. The route from Gümüşhane, via Beşkilise, to Kolat was followed by Blau, and southwards by Kinneir, Southgate and Hommaire de Hell (see chapter 15, n. 5). 4. Clavijo, Embassy 117. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 462, identified the mediaeval castle on the rock above the village at Ardasa Han with the Byzantine Aradase. Cumont, SP II 359ff. The Torul bridge is 79 metres long and 5.5 metres wide. 5. Cumont, SP II 361. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 462. Caravansaray and castle are described by Bryer and Winfield, Pontos 297. Clavijo, Embassy 116f. Curzon, Armenia 161. Everett, Archive. 6. Cramer, Structural Engineer 18 (May 1940), 593f. Bishop, Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan II 393f. Curzon, Armenia 31. Hepworth, Armenia 72–85. 7. Bryer and Winfield, Pontos 151f., 256, and 264.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

FIFTEEN

Over the Pontic Mountains to Maçka (Maps 22, 23, and Fig. A2) F ROM TH E BAGH DA D BR I DGE TO AĞ YA R L A R Emerging from the Keçi Dere, the first stage of the summer caravan route led north, it seems, directly across the Harşit from east of Murathanoğulları to the bridge over the Soyran Dere, and on to Leri. But the Baghdad bridge offered a Roman alternative for the Peutinger frontier road as it climbed into the Pontic mountains. The ridgeways, Maunsell reported, carried one of the chief routes from Baiburt to Trebizond, passing via Maden Khan and Karakapan. It followed ‘the high spur south-­ west of Larkhana (Larhan) by a track with steep gradients’, to cross the mountains at a very high elevation, closed in winter: and, since the recent improvement of the Larkhana track into a good mule track, ‘is little used except by caravans descending’ This was the summer route, which, he said, left the chaussée close to the east of Tekke, and passed over the Kolat Dagh to reach Jevizlik (Maçka) in about fifteen hours. Layard noted that the summer caravan route is ‘the shortest, but the most precipitous, and, crossing very lofty mountains, is closed after the snows commence; it is called Tchaϊrler (çayırlar) from its fine upland pastures, on which the horses are usually fed when they take this route’. Several routes climb north from the Harşit, and converge to pass along the narrow Ağyarlar ridge (7,000 feet), on the tree line 2,000 feet above Leri. Forming the watershed between the Soyran Dere and the deep valley of the İmera Dere, the ridge forms a natural, high-­level bridge providing unique access to the flanks of Deveboynu Dağ (10,100 feet) and the high Pontic ridgeways. Oktay explained that Ağyarlar means ‘white earth’, but other meanings, ‘strangers’, ‘enemies’, even in Greek ‘Saints’, suggest a religious divide, perhaps between Greeks and Armenians. Far below the ridge, the once Greek and probably ancient city of İmera is known locally as the religious centre of Pontus. The well-­preserved church of St John Prodromos on the northern slopes above the village was built in 1859, on the site of a monastery founded c.1710. Along the Ağyarlar ridge and the high ridgeways are clear traces of the frontier road.1 TH E ROUT E TH ROUGH LER I From the Baghdad bridge the summer route may have diverged immediately from the winter, to follow the valley of the Soyran Dere; passing east of the crags and precipices which hang above the Harşit, and mark the southern end of the high Cönger ridge between the Soyran Dere and the valley above Tekke. In August 1996, village elders at Cönger remembered that the route from the prison, opposite Zindanlar, continued beside the river for 3 miles. At the bridge, in summer, it joined a branch of the caravan

Discovering Rome’s Eastern Frontier. Timothy Bruce Mitford, Oxford University Press (2021). © Timothy Bruce Mitford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843425.003.0016

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 314  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

route from Erzerum, turned through the ravine of the Leri Çay and crossed gently rising slopes for 2 miles to pass west of and close below Leri (c.6,400 feet). Here, one hour below the (Ağyarlar) ridge and high above the slopes of the Leri Çay, Strecker passed Lerri Han and Lerri villages, inhabited by Greeks, whose forefathers under religious pressure once fled to these almost inaccessible heights, eking a living from the produce of their herds and a few arable fields. Its name perhaps derived from the Armenian for yayla, Leri lay at the very limit of the Greek world; the fines Ponti on the edge of Chaldia, the mountainous region broadly between the Vavuk and the Zigana passes, and probably in Greek ecclesiastical hands by the ninth century. The church, dated 1805, had been converted into a mosque, and a door hinge on a nearby house still carried the inscribed name of the owner, Alexandros Charalambos Alexandridos. If Leri stood on the Peutinger route, it may be identified with Solonenica, 18 miles from Domana: the actual distance from Köse is about 21 miles. Elders recalled, optimistically, that it took fourteen hours on foot to Trabzon by the busy Larhan route, which was in recent times used only by horses and mules. If from Bayburt Xenophon was guided over the Vavuk Dağ pass, the Ten Thousand must have passed through Leri. A high and difficult ascent followed, across steep mountainsides treacherous with screes and boulders, as caravans climbed transversely up from the village and below Şon Kale to the Ağyarlar ridge. This was a route used by camels, but of their passage I have found no sure trace: all has been swept away by erosion and landslides. ROUT ES TH ROUGH TH E T EK K E VA LLEY From the Baghdad bridge, the summer route may, alternatively, have followed the winter road westwards along the north bank of the Harşit, skirting below the Cönger crags, as far as the broad valley of the Kermut Dere; rising north above Tekke, rimmed on each side by sharp ridgeways, and closed to the north by dangerous, shale-­covered cliffs. Above the eastern, Cönger ridge towers the fearsome pinnacle of Şon Kale. The western rim is formed by the Tekke ridgeway. Through and above the valley of the Kermut Dere, three routes leading northwards into the mountains converge to pass along the Ağyarlar ridge and reach Maden hanları in a long day. Without specifying whether he followed the ridge southwards in person, or how his route descended from the Ağyarlar ridge, Everett reported in c.1882 that the southbound road from Jevizlik (Maçka) over the Kolat Dağ ‘falls in from the north’ to join the chaussée just east of Tekke.

1.  The Cönger Ridge and Şon Kale The elders of Cönger reckoned that the Baghdad Road itself did not pass up the Soyran Dere, but continued west from the Baghdad bridge, following the Harşit for a mile or more to Karagözhanı before curving steeply up the western flanks of the Cönger crags. Three miles above the Harşit, this route reached the knife-­edge ridge above their village, and turned to follow it due north for more, they said, than five hours. Eroded traces can be followed along the eastern side just below the crest; and in places there are rough

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

OV ER THE PONTIC MOU NTA INS TO M AÇK A  315

stone revetments. But the track is narrow and meandering, obstructed by rocks and lateral ravines. Little wider than a path, and used by mules rather than camels, it was built, according to Hasan, the muhtar of Tekke, for Russian artillery in 1916: a memory confirmed by Rahmi Okur, Oktay’s father, and by its name, the ‘Old Russian Road’. From the direction of Cönger the Russians are said to have attacked Tekke in 1916. Three miles north of Cönger, and above Leri, Şon Kale (6,800 feet), an extraordinary pinnacle of crumbling rock, rears up from the ridge (Fig. 15.1). The western side, hanging above the Tekke valley, is precipitous, the east extremely steep. With Oktay I clambered to the summit in August 1996. About 100 feet below the summit an ancient wall, some 3 metres high with courses of roughly squared blocks set in mortar, curves around the eastern crags. Graves have been robbed, and coarse Roman and some Byzantine pottery is strewn in abundance. The summit itself has been levelled to form a rough platform about 30 metres long and 12 across, and the northern and western cliffs are topped by mortared walls. At the south-­west end of the summit platform is a large cistern, 4 metres in diameter and 2.5 metres deep, full of debris. As a vantage point Şon Kale is without equal. A hub in the centre of a wheel of jagged mountains, it dominates the Leri and the Tekke valleys, both leading north from the Harşit. Cönger and the flat summit of Tekke are visible, and in the southern distance can be seen the Keçi Dere and the Hurusüfla valley. Murathanoğulları is out of sight. To the north the view is blocked by the saddle before the Ağyarlar ridge. In a position of such importance, Şon Kale may have been garrisoned by Corbulo. But its very harshness recalls the type of Taochian stronghold attacked by Xenophon. The defenders rolled huge boulders down onto the Greeks, and at the last threw themselves off the cliffs. An ardent hunter, armed with a Browning pistol for bears, and an automatic shotgun for everything else, Oktay rolled boulders below Şon Kale into the Kermut valley to flush out bears, and startled a giant uğur keklik, ‘lucky partridge’, a cousin, perhaps, of a capercaillie.2 Two hundred feet below the peak of Şon Kale a section of the Old Russian Road, some 300 metres long, climbs around the base of the eastern cliffs. A short section, 2.5 metres wide, is cut through rock. The ridge climbs steeply north, and just below the crest traces of the Old Russian Road rise towards the high saddle on the skyline above Şon Kale. In this vicinity the track was joined by the vanished caravan route climbing from Leri. Beyond the saddle stretches the Leri yayla, a long alpine meadow, sloping down to a spring crowded in August with Laz families, goats, and calves. Above curve steep slopes, and across them all trace of a road has disappeared until the meadow reaches the Ağyarlar ridge. Combined, the caravan road and the Old Russian Road passed along the ridge towards the peak of Deveboynu Dağ.

2.  Through the Tekke Valley to Şon Kale From the Baghdad Bridge a second route continued westwards beside the Harşit for a further mile to Tekke itself, and diverged at the higher end of the village. From Tekke, shorter by an hour than the Cönger route, and much steeper, a mule track led northwards through Bahçecik and directly up the centre of the Kermut valley. Before the Russians came in 1916, animals following this route passed through extensive gardens. To avoid the precipices and impassable, crumbling rock faces that encircle the head of the valley,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 316  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 15.1  Şon Kale: Oktay Okur scrambling down towards Aşağı Kermut (August 2000)

the track passes the ruins of Aşağı, ‘lower’, Kermut, rises steeply from the Kermut Dere at the huge black rock known as Katırcı Taşı ‘muleteer’s rock’ (where, by the stream, Oktay had shot his largest bear), climbs across dangerous screes below Şon Kale, and emerges on the Cönger ridge to join the Old Russian Road close to the north of Şon Kale. Plagued by bears and snakes, the track was certainly used by mule traffic, but steepness and inaccessibility discount it as the frontier road.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

OV ER THE PONTIC MOU NTA INS TO M AÇK A  317

3.  The Tekke Ridge A third route, separating above Tekke, climbed to the difficult western rim of the Kermut valley, and curved clockwise above the encircling precipices to descend to the Agy̆ arlar ridge. Remains and local knowledge show that this was the principal route. The Tekke ridge offers a longer and higher, but much easier route than the Cönger ridgeway for traffic between the Baghdad bridge and the heights of Maden hanları. The obvious importance of Tekke suggests that this was probably the preferred route of the Peutinger frontier road. In August 2000 Oktay was waiting for me in Gümüşhane, and took me straight to his family home in Bahçecik, above Tekke. Four hoopoes joined us for breakfast in his apple orchard. Above the village, a mule track, worn, ancient, and without kerbs, and varying in width from 2 to 4 metres, climbs steeply north-­west to the Tekke yaylas. This was the route to Rahmi’s small fields, and he gave Oktay and me a lift on his diminutive tractor. A long sequence of place-­names of yaylas and conspicuous points, several meaningless in Turkish, suggests a well-­used and probably old route. Marked by a rock-­cut section 3 metres wide, a clear trace passes up to and across the main Tekke yayla, and curves north towards the Greek fields known as İspasmana, and Bap Dağ, ‘gate mountain’ (6,800 feet). Climbing above the Tekke yaylas, the trace disappears, but for a single, short section, in erosion and landslides, until it reaches, evidently by zigzags, and then follows the sharp ridge of Bap Dağ. This is the gateway between the valleys of the Kermüt Dere and, to the west, of Hayekse, rich and fertile, and in Greek times terraced all the way up to the summits. Along the ridge, 1,500 feet above Hayekse, a well defined ‘muleteers’ road’, in one section some 3 metres wide, loops around and over summits in typically Roman fashion. Passing a spring below the narrow saddle on the north side of Bap Dağ, a section of the old road, 100 metres long and 3 metres wide in a short rock cutting, loops around and up to the ridge. On either side, eroded mountainsides fall steeply into the valleys far below. Caught on the ridgeway in a sudden thunderstorm in September 1999, my enthusiastic companions, Süleyman, Muammer, and Ali, assigned to me by Avni Bey, the mayor of Tekke, guided me down, with some difficulty, to the Kermut river-­bed. Well preserved and much used fifty years ago, the road evidently passed close to the steep summit of Uzun or Rum Bayır, ‘long’, or ‘Greek hill’. Erosion and friable rocks have destroyed its trace. Below, it was said, had been a han. In September 1999 Hasan, the muhtar of Tekke, had told me that the caravan road passed this way, through the Tekke yaylas. In confirmation, six Laz families had followed it, with their flocks, from above Trabzon, via Maden hanları, to camp for five months in a small yayla above Asağı Kermut. Hacar Akyüz, aged 67, told me he had made the journey every year since 1980. A knife-­edge ridge, just wide enough for the road, ran steeply down the north side of Uzun Bayır, to reach an extraordinary cliff-­girt causeway running towards the head of the Kermut valley (Fig. 15.2). At its neck the ancient road is joined by a Greek track coming up from Hayekse. Passing through the Hayekse yayla, known as Kazanpahar, ‘spring’ or ‘spice cauldron’, and beside a spring at Beg Yurdu, almost level with the summit of Uzun Bayır, the road passed diagonally over the high ridge at the head of the Kermut valley, five hours from Tekke, out of sight below Bahçecik. Descending towards the head of the İmera valley, the

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 318  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 15.2  Narrow causeway carrying the summer road east, towards the head of the Kermut valley (August 2000)

road traverses down the northern side of the long ridge, passes through rock-­cut gates, 4 metres wide, and descends in clearly preserved zigzags to the broad Ağyarlar ridge (7,000 feet; Fig. 15.3). TH E AĞ YA R L A R R I DGE Here the route from Tekke was joined by the track and Old Russian Road following the Cönger ridgeway, and with it the caravan route climbing up from Leri. Running along the Ağyarlar ridge in August 1996 were clear traces of an ancient road, and the remains of a roadbed of small stones, 3.6–4.6 metres wide. The edges were not marked by kerbs, but could be clearly discerned by shadows. All trace of this ancient road was destroyed in 1999 by a new road bulldozed up from Leri. Along the ridge Strecker’s summer road ran north-­east for about a mile. But then, he reckoned, it turned in a headlong descent of terrible steepness, to plunge for 2,000 feet across dangerous shale and gullies to the Derin Dere, (‘deep’, the İmera Dere), passed east of İmera, and climbed in zigzags yet higher up the opposite mountainside. Above the İmera yayla it crossed the ridge and continued to Maden Han to join the northbound summer road from Erzerum to Trapezunt. This was a line of treacherous and needless difficulty. Strecker was unaware of an easier route, taken by the frontier road which continued north-­eastwards along the Ağyarlar ridge.3 On its eastern side, a lethal scree of sulphurous yellow marbles plunges down through the tree line, and had carried Oktay’s great-­uncle to his death. About four hours from

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

OV ER THE PONTIC MOU NTA INS TO M AÇK A  319

F ig . 15.3  Rock-­cut gates carrying the Roman road down to the Ağyarlar ridge: Oktay Okur, and, beyond, Deveboynu Dağ (August 2000)

Leri and six from Tekke, a flat rocky summit rises 200 feet above the road, perhaps Medocia. Desolate pastures, 100 metres square, offer a last place of rest before the long ascent to Maden hanları, some five hours distant, high in the Pontic mountains. To the north the bare slopes of Deveboynu Dağ are laid out in panorama from east through to west, and the ancient road can be seen climbing gradually around the folded mountainside to the distant ridge above the İmera yayla.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 320  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 15.4 Ağyarlar: woman carrying brushwood (August 2000)

AĞ YA R L A R TO KOL AT The rocks and pastures on the summit of the Ağyarlar ridge are connected to the higher slopes by a second, flat saddle, and along it a track (Fig. 15.4), clearly successor to the caravan road, continues to climb steadily towards the high peak of Deveboynu Dağ, a southern spur of Çakırgöl Dağ (10,050 feet). This, by several hundred feet, is the highest mountain between Bayburt and Trabzon; and the name of the spur, ‘camel’s neck mountain’, suggests the proximity of a caravan road. Çakırgöl Dağ thus has a strong claim to be Xenophon’s Theches. Half a mile north of Ağyarlar and well above the tree

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

OV ER THE PONTIC MOU NTA INS TO M AÇK A  321

line, the track passed a clear stream flowing throughout the summer at about 7,400 feet. Across it, the track turned abruptly to the north-­west, in a huge loop across the screes tumbling down from Deveboynu Dağ, and rose in two and a half hours to the shoulder far above İmera. In places the remains of the road were up to 3 metres wide. But the eroded slopes are covered with volcanic marbles so treacherous that Oktay and I were forced to turn back.

İmera Yayla This was the high basin of the İmera Dere, and at the north-­western end traces of the same road continue up to a high shoulder, an eroded mass of black, red, and orange rocks hanging above İmera. From the Ağyarlar ridge the ancient road thus maintained its height, and did not descend through İmera, or into the İmera Dere. Climbing across the shoulder, the road skirts 200 feet above the small, oval-­shaped İmera yayla (8,200 feet), 200 metres long, poised on the very rim of the İmera valley: a small cluster of huts, with cows, but no han and no trace of antiquity. Above it, a finely preserved section of evidently Roman road, 200 metres long and varying in width from 3.3 to 4.3 metres, leads up to a high saddle behind the enormous black crag suspended above İmera. The ancient road passes through a rock cutting on the saddle, drops steeply down the western slopes for 300 metres, and for 4 miles traverses almost horizontally above steep screes fringing the grassy flanks of the highest mountains, to reach Maden hanları. The main caravan route from Kolat to Bayburt, followed by Texier in August 1839 and discussed below, appears to have passed far above the Roman road. The latter, local knowledge in İmera asserted, was in fact the caravan road from Persia, and it passed through Leri and above the yayla on its way to Maden hanları, which was known as a stopping place for mules. About seven hours’ journey from Leri, and nearly nine from Tekke, the yayla is the first in a series of high-­altitude refuges, each in Peutinger some two or three hours apart, with access to rapid descent in winter emergency. For more than six hours the road across the Pontic mountains runs at over 8,000 feet, dangerously exposed to violent changes of weather, and prone to the altitude sickness endured by Taner above Zigana. Between Ağyarlar and the safer altitude of Turnagöl, far above Hamsiköy, the high level passage takes about nine hours.

Karayayla Above is Karayayla, sheltered beneath Deveboynu Dağ, and facing west (Figs. 15.5, 15.6): a barren scattering of stone huts, with broad fields of corn, and cows grazing among crocuses at the end of August 2006. The flowers, called vargit, ‘let’s go’, indicated when the time had come to leave. Here Resül Ergenç, aged 70, had spent every summer for sixty or, he reckoned, seventy years, and had heard from his elders that caravans from the east used to pass for three months. From Bayburt, he said, they took a single day, and their route passed below Karayayla, for it had no han. A clear trace evidently of a Roman road, in places 4.5 metres wide with a roadbed of small stones but no kerbs, can be followed for about a mile as it crosses the modern track and curves more steeply down the eastern spur above Maden hanları, a mile and a half north-­west of Karayayla.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 322  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Fig. 15.5  Karayayla: hay baling, summer huts, and, beyond, the higher slopes of Çakırgöl Dağ (August 1996)

Maden hanları (? Patara) Clustered at 8,100 feet in a sheltered bowl, with meadows watered by two reliable streams on the western flanks of Çakırgöl Dağ, Maden hanları is a line of ten solidly constructed houses and stables, serving as informal hans; the name taken from iron mines on the eastern side of the ridge above the settlement. Many building corners and doorways are built with large ashlar blocks of brown sandstone, all said to have come, by a steep, rough road and with untold effort, from İmera, nearly 3,000 feet below. Of formal hans there is no trace or memory. Each year in May, seven or eight families come up from Çağlayan (Kireçhane), 5 miles south of Trabzon, and leave in September. Hazel nuts are brought up by truck, four tons at a time, and spread out to dry on the meadows (Fig. 15.7). After several minutes of cheerful conversation with their proud owners, the secret police escorting Professor Manfredi and myself in September 1999 realized that the drying hazel nuts were not an appropriate sight for photographs, and angrily forced his party away. Evidence for occupation and activity suggests that Maden hanları occupies the site of an ancient refuge, identified as Patara. Detail of the high-­level caravan route across the mountains is apparent in Texier’s account. Travelling from Trebizond to Erzeroum at the end of August 1839, he stayed at Koulabat-­Bogazi, Kolat, below Koulabat-­Dagh. Rather than descend via İstavri to Gumuch-­Hané, he chose to continue along the summer caravan route to Bayburt, because it was two days shorter; passing evidently through Maden hanları and Karayayla, and high above the Ağyarlar ridge, and continuing south-­east at the same altitude for a further 6 miles. There were still patches of snow, but few caravans, and so no bandits. After a difficult descent, he reached Veisernik (Veyserni, on the Soyran Dere about

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

OV ER THE PONTIC MOU NTA INS TO M AÇK A  323

F ig . 15.6  Karayayla—children (August 1996)

8  miles north-­east of Leri); and continued north of the Vavuk Dağ pass to Bayburt. Travelling north in autumn 1851, Walpole followed broadly the same route. Recorded without precision, his journey from Erzerum to Trebizond, in a total of fifty-­eight hours, seems to have taken him north-­west along a ridgeway from the Vavuk Dağ pass through Visnereik. He probably traversed below the summit of Deveboynu Dağ, descended through Karayayla and Maden hanları, and there joined the Peutinger road. Everett confirms Texier’s southbound route, ‘the summer route from Jevizlik (Maçka) over the Kolat Dağ’, in c.1882. ‘At a group of buildings known as Maden Khan, only tenanted during the summer months’, he reported an important divergence, eastbound

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 324  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 15.7  Maden hanları: hazel nuts laid out to dry (September 1999)

for Erzerum and south for Erzincan: ‘that to the left keeps to the ridge’, climbing apparently through Karayayla, as Resül recalled, ‘and, avoiding the basin of the Kharshut Su, passes to the north of the Wawouk Dagh and descends the bare and easy slopes to Khadrak, where it joins the chaussée’, about 15 miles east of Kale, to Baiburt and Erzerum. The road to the right, which ‘should be taken by travellers desiring to proceed direct to Erzincan’, did not follow the easier traverse of the Roman road by the Ağyarlar ridge, but ‘descends steeply into the Krom (Karum) valley—inhabited by a Greek population—by a zigzag, and (passing half a mile east of İmera) ascends the opposite side to a ridge which is followed for three miles in a south-­easterly direction, when (apparently towards the southern end of the Ağyarlar ridge) a track branching to the left, little better than a goat track, leads the traveller down into the valley of the Kharshut Su joining the main chaussée just east of Tekke’: a description not easily matched with the geography, but important confirmation of the broad line taken by the frontier road to and from the south. With Hadrak offset several miles to the east, beyond the Vavuk pass, and İmera lying at the foot of a needless and perilous descent, neither of Everett’s routes was used by the Roman frontier road. From the Ağyarlar ridge it had passed between them; to unite below Karayayla with the high-­level caravan route, and from Maden hanları to continue northwards around more gentle slopes, descending to the watershed at Anzarya hanlar 2 miles away.4

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

OV ER THE PONTIC MOU NTA INS TO M AÇK A  325

Anzarya hanlar (Frigidarium) The Anzarya hans, a place of desolation until recently abandoned, stood on a narrow, windswept col at over 8,000 feet, below the northern foothills of Çakırgöl Dağ. This was an important crossroads, and hans were clustered in its four corners. The largest, divided into three rooms, measured 13 by 24 metres. Others measured 6 by 11, and 5  by 6 metres. In 2006 a spartan hotel had been erected at the north-­west corner. From the hans, and guard house, Everett saw ‘a magnificent view to the north and south’. The important situation and the altitude commend the hans as the site of Frigidarium. There the frontier road was joined by the main Greek route from İmera to Trebizond; and a spur continued northwards across the col to follow the bed of the long valley leading down past Acısuhanı, in Greek times a source of mineral water, to Larhan; deep in the Larhan Dere, east of and far below the high ridgeway followed by the main caravan road, and some 12 miles from Anzarya hanlar. The Larhan valley, very hot in summer, becomes increasingly narrow and contorted as it descends, and its lower reaches are a maze of cliffs and vegetation hanging over the river. This, remembered at Kale in the upper valley of the Harşit, was a route used by some caravans preferring to descend by a lower route from Anzarya hanlar. But to Maçka it was less direct than the high-­level route through Kolat. The frontier road and the main caravan route followed the ridgeway that rises steeply north-­west above Anzarya hanlar, and reaches a maximum altitude of nearly 8,400 feet, the highest road in the Roman Empire; passing, Everett noted, ‘sometimes along the watershed (above İstavri) and sometimes on the northern slopes’, before descending steadily to Kolat hanları, five miles from Anzarya. At all points along this ridge any sighting of the Black Sea is blocked by Turnagöl Tepe, above Kolat, and by the great crag above Turnagöl itself.

Kolat hanları (Pylae) On the narrow ridge at Kolat, sometimes called Kulat, after the colour of horses, were Ottoman hans of great importance, twenty or thirty semi-­underground shelters for men and animals, dug into a wide, flat saddle 100 metres across, at 7,700 feet. All are now ruined, but the remains suggest that each han measured about 7 by 9 metres. There were three or four springs. At Kolat the main caravan route to Trebizond was joined by a side road climbing steeply up from the Karum Dere and İstavri, and continuing over the saddle to Acısuhanı beside the Larhan Dere; as at Maden hanları, offering rapid escape if necessary from snow and ice. From the Kolat hans a fifth road climbed steeply westwards for 500 feet along the ridge leading to the Zigana pass; a route used occasionally by caravans from Persia. Along all five routes, modern, earth roads were built in c.1950. At their remarkable conjuncture, Kolat is certainly to be identified as the Pontic Gates, the ancient Pylae, in Peutinger the sole castellum marked between Satala and Trapezus. The ‘gates’ were clearly of particular importance. But this was no site for a permanent fort. The weather is dangerously fickle. Kolat is normally covered in clouds for all but forty days a year, and is clear of snow for little more than four months, from late May to early October. Large animals spend no more than three and a half months in the Kolat yayla; sheep stay for five or six, and leave in mid October. The temperature at night falls below freezing from

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 326  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

September to May. Snow showers are expected from late September, and continue on and below the peaks until June, when snow is still lying in places a metre deep. In winter, from December to April, there are 2 to 3 metres of snow, set as hard as rock. Yet some caravans, camels and horses, passed along what was known as the Baghdad, the Silk, and the Caravan Road throughout the year. TH E ROUT E F ROM GÜMÜŞ H A N E TO KOL AT: TH E K A RUM VA LLEY A N D MOCHOR A The side road via İstavri carried the summer shortcut from Gümüşhane to Trabzon, avoiding the defile carved by the Harşit towards Torul and the steep approaches to the Zigana pass; a minor caravan route in regular use before the opening of the Transit Road. Southbound early in June 1814, Kinneir descended from the summit of Koat (Kolat) Dag through deep ravines to Estauri (İstavri). His onward journey to Gemish Khana was extremely difficult: down through a defile to ford a stream flowing north-­west (the Karum Dere); and a gradual ascent by a narrow footpath, through hollows and ravines, to the summit of Karash Dag (Koroş Dağ), from which (Eski) Gemish Khana could be seen five miles to the south. ‘This mountain was so steep, and the road so bad, that we were compelled to dismount from our horses and walk on foot for nearly an hour’, before the descent to the Harshoot valley. The view and direction of Gümüşhane, and the descent to the Harşit valley show that Kinneir passed over Bazbent Dağ (6,850 feet), following the path to Beşkilise. In May 1836 Hamilton, and in June 1837 Southgate too descended via Stavros; and in September 1847 Hommaire de Hell was advised at Karakaban to take the same, shorter route to Gümüşhane, eight hours distant. Diverging at a ‘station de caravans, plusieurs maisons’, evidently Kolat, he descended into a ravine impassable in the rainy season, and reached Gümüşhane, ‘horriblement fatigué’, in five hours from Stavri. The same route was followed northbound by Blau in August 1860, a ride of sixteen hours from Gümüşhane to Karakapan. On the heights of Koroş Dağ above Gümüşhane he encountered the caravan of a high official, pack animals, harem, and slaves, camped for the night on its way to Erzerum. After two hours of difficult, often dangerous descent, Blau reached the Karum Dere. An hour to the east was a cluster of nine villages inhabited by a Greek population. In the mountain valleys between Maçka and Krom, the valley of the Karum Dere, Wright reported a group of Greek-­ speaking Muslims, known as Maçkalis and Kromlis, who escaped the exchange of populations under the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. It was agreed that ‘there shall take place a compulsory exchange of Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory and of  Greek nationals of the Moslem religion established in Greek territory’. Nine such ­villages, with a combined population of between 12,000 and 15,000, claimed descent, in local legend, from stragglers of the Ten Thousand. I have not heard Greek spoken in the Krom valley. On a spur below the mountains, deep in the narrow valley with little flat ground, the largest village was Mochora, now known as Mollaali: the name taken from a family of which the muhtar holds records showing births from around 1815, while the cemetery preserves their names, deciphered by Atalay Bayik, on Ottoman tombstones. Through this central, densely inhabited part of the Karum valley passed all routes between the

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

OV ER THE PONTIC MOU NTA INS TO M AÇK A  327

Harşit and the Kolat heights. To the east, laborious tracks from Tekke to Maden hanları and Anzarya hanlar passed by İmera. At Mollaali a difficult track from Tekke via Hayekse crossed the Karum Dere. To the west, the well-­used caravan route from Gümüşhane and Beşkilise descended to cross the river near Pardü, from which Blau climbed again for more than three hours through Stawri (İstavri) to a group of dark hans on the pass of Kulat Baghaz (Kolat hanları). Mochora was garrisoned in ad 400 by an unidentified cohort, mirroring the strategic purpose of Zigana. Both stations controlled access ­ultimately to Trapezus, a preview of Justinian’s dispositons to control Tzanica.5 KOL AT A N D TH E T EN THOUSA N D

Xenophon and the Sighting of the Euxine From Kolat, Oktay and I were guided in early August 1996 by Celal Yılmaz. His family has climbed up from Trabzon to spend the brief summer, two or three months, in the high alpine pastures, every year since the Russians left in early 1918. His father and grandfather had told Celal of the caravans which used to pass through Kolat from June to October: camels, mules, horses, 300 of them, each laden with 150 kilos of sugar, rice, and clothes, bound for Erzerum, and returning to Trabzon, two days from Kolat, with grain. The road was not used by sheep. The last caravans passed in c.1945. Like Xenophon’s guide, Celal offered to take us to Turnagöl Tepe, dikili taş, the only ‘standing stone’ on the heights above Kolat, and the place from which, he said, the Black Sea can first be seen: at night the lights of Boztepe above Trabzon, 25 miles away; by day smoke from the cement factory, and the blue sea. Celal’s words recalled Xenophon’s famous description, and the northbound journeys of Hadrian and Arrian along the same route. In his letter to Hadrian, Flavius Arrianus (Arrian), governor of Cappadocia and historian of Alexander the Great, reported with authority and scholarship progress on work set in hand by the emperor during his inspection of the frontier, probably in autumn ad 129. Writing less than two years after the imperial visit, Arrian followed Hadrian’s route northwards from Satala, along the frontier road. Drawing on Xenophon’s words, he wrote to Hadrian ‘We have arrived in Trapezus, a Greek city, as Xenophon says, founded beside the sea, a colony of Sinope: and we looked down with gladness on the Euxine from the place from which both Xenophon and you looked down.’ Hadrian did not travel over the Zigana pass, for from it the sea is not visible. He followed the high-­ level frontier road, at this point of supreme significance known in the second century to coincide with the route followed by Xenophon, more than five centuries before, across the Pontic mountains. So it was with anticipation that we followed the caravan and Roman road for about a mile north-­west from Kolat, rising gradually on a broad slope to 8,200 feet. Suddenly, at Turnagöl Tepe, evidently ‘the hill above Turnagöl’, the road levelled, to cross the base of a spur thrown north-­east from the Zigana ridge, a platform 100 metres wide and 150 metres long. On three sides the mountainsides fall sharply away into the Larhan valley. But around the rim, 100 metres north-­east of the road, at least 400 men could stand shoulder to shoulder, and gaze down on to the distant sea. This is no fleeting glimpse between

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 328  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

mountains, no view snatched from a precipitous track, but a stupendous vantage point known in that distant past to a guide living five days away beyond hostile tribes, and known equally to our own guide, Celal. Alas, all he could show that day, among swirling mist, was a sea of clouds 1,000 feet below. But this, without question, was where Xenophon stood (Fig. 15.8): and the broad, gradual ascent from Kolat was where he rode with Lycius, and where the rearguard ran. The moment when the Ten Thousand sighted the Euxine is one of the most haunting scenes to come down to us from the ancient world. Retreating after Cyrus’ defeat at Cunaxa, near Babylon, in 401 bc, Xenophon describes how the Greeks fought their way northwards across Kurdistan to scale the Pontic mountains, and in 400 bc reached the sea at the Greek city of Trapezus, already more than two centuries old. By linking Xenophon’s famous account with Hadrian’s inspection of his eastern frontier, their route across the mountains, and their triumphant viewpoint, can be determined with some certainty. About 120 miles before the Greeks reached the Euxine, the ruler of a large and prosperous city called Gymnias, probably the modern Bayburt, sent a guide to Xenophon. The guide said that he would lead them within five days to a place from which they could see the sea; if he failed to do so he was ready to accept death. . . . On the fifth day they did in fact reach the mountain; its name was Theches. Now as soon as the vanguard got to the top of the mountain, a great shout went up. And when Xenophon and the rearguard heard it, they imagined that other enemies were attacking in front; for enemies were following behind them, from the district that was in flames, and the rearguard had

F ig . 15.8  Zigana Dağ, where the Ten Thousand saw The Sea. Taner Demirbulut in the steps of Hadrian, with the calculated line of the distant horizon (May 2002)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

OV ER THE PONTIC MOU NTA INS TO M AÇK A  329

killed some of them and captured others by setting an ambush, and had also taken about twenty wicker shields covered with raw, shaggy ox-­hides. But as the shout kept getting louder and nearer, as the successive ranks that came up all began to run at full speed toward the ranks ahead that were one after another joining in the shout, and as the shout kept growing far louder as the number of men grew steadily greater, it became quite clear to Xenophon that here was something of unusual importance; so he mounted a horse, took with him Lycius and the cavalry, and pushed ahead to lend aid; and in a moment they heard the soldiers shouting, ‘The Sea! The Sea!’ and passing the word along. Then all the troops of the rearguard likewise broke into a run, and the pack animals began racing ahead and the horses. And when all had reached the summit, then indeed they fell to embracing one another, and generals and captains as well, with tears in their eyes. And on a sudden, at the bidding of someone or other, the soldiers began to bring stones and to build a great cairn. Thereon they placed as offerings a quantity of raw ox-­hides and walking sticks, and the captured wicker shields. . . . After this the Greeks dismissed the guide with gifts. . . . Then he showed them a village to encamp in, and the road they were to follow to the country of the Macronians.6

The Cairn of the Ten Thousand From this exposed and windswept plateau, without water and stripped of stones, both Anzarya hanlar, 6 miles to the south at almost the same height, and Kolat hanları are hidden from sight. There was no sign of Celal’s standing stone. But Hamilton offers important confirmation. This was undoubtedly the spot, some three and a half hours (he reckoned 6 miles) above Karakaban, and forty-­five minutes before he turned west to descend through Stavros (İstavri), where, on 26 May 1836, he ‘saw the sea for the last time. On a rising knoll, about a mile to the west, was a large block of stone standing upright on the summit.’ Near the centre of the platform is a rounded shelter, for animals perhaps, or, Celal suggested, a shop: Greek or Ottoman, the ruined walls, of large, loose stones, measure some 18 by 20 metres. But set back 80 metres from the northern rim is a second structure, an almost circular disc of stones, some 1.5 metres high and 17 metres in diameter. This was no habitation. It looks like the base of a huge pile of stones, none other, it seems, than the base of the cairn raised by the Ten Thousand (Fig. 15.9). From the cairn Oktay drove through thick mist, down the long ridge to Maçka. Three years later, Professor Valerio Manfredi invited me to join a small team tracing the final stages of Xenophon’s approach to the Black Sea. He had arranged his whole programme through the Turkish Embassy in Rome. We arrived in Trabzon in September 1999, on the same flight. While I joined an eager group of Turks at the ‘Collect Your Guns Here’ desk (my knife had been confiscated), he and his team (a distinguished freelance photographer, Giorgio Fornoni, and an ITV producer) were received as VIPs: an official guide (Taner Demirbulut), two nights in the luxurious Police House in Trabzon, two in a tourist complex of log cabins below the Zigana pass, minibuses, meals. All expenses were met by the vali of Trabzon. But our work was not to be in his vilayet, and there had been a failure of coordination. It took nearly a day to explain ourselves to the vali of Gümüşhane, Salih İşik, a helpful and decisive man with happy memories of Bristol. There was a problem: I was not included in the Italian team, but only I could show them where to go. After several revisits to clarify for disbelieving

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 330  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

­subordinates, the vali allowed us to go and to photograph wherever we liked. The only catch was an escort of secret police, edgy about investigations and photographs which might be used to discredit Turkey. I took Professor Valerio Manfredi to the Xenophon cairn, with companions and police (Fig. 15.9). Both the stone disc and the larger remains recalled the large structures built with ­collected stones reported by Diodorus, and had indeed, he reckoned, been built by the Ten Thousand. From the site, Professor Manfredi and I wanted to walk down the Roman road to Maçka. But the police objected,. and were becoming fractious: they were hungry, it was Sunday, a child was ill, the tyres were old. At this difficult moment the tyche of Xenophon intervened. Minibus reversed into police car, loaded with guns, and wrecked its radiator. Chaos gave us opportunity to set off on foot to Maçka, a journey of seven hours in cloud and heavy rain.7 The Italians now departed for Rome. I had unfinished business in Gümüşhane. But without them the climate had changed. The vali now refused permission, and asked who was going to pay for the radiator, some 40 dollars. I produced them. He was joking, and it did the trick. After all, I was a colonel writing a book. Salih Bey undertook to ask the jandarma commander over lunch. The outcome was a dream permit: I could go and do whatever I wanted, alone and unescorted. Permission which, through normal channels, takes up to a year to obtain, if at all, and comes with representatives and police, had been achieved in a few hours. I caught a minibus to Tekke, and called on the Mayor. Phoning the vali to verify my permission, he found a pick-­up and a guide to climb back into the mountains the following day.

F ig . 15.9  Cairn of the Ten Thousand, with Valerio Manfredi (Giorgio Fornoni, September 1999)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

OV ER THE PONTIC MOU NTA INS TO M AÇK A  331

Visibility and The Sea Above Kolat the high ridge of Zigana Dağ had been hidden in cloud in mid September 1999, but was clear at the end of May 2002. It runs gradually down to the platform containing the Xenophon cairn. From Kolat the Ten Thousand could have climbed easily to any point along the rising crest. But the higher they might have reached, the longer and steeper the ascent from Kolat, and the more difficult, at over 8,600 feet, for the rearguard physically to run. The obvious point must be the platform and cairn, for they lie on the lowest and easiest route, followed by the Ottoman caravans and the modern track as it curves around and over the crest, to which the approaches from the south, from Kolat, and from the north, from Turnagöl, are gradual and unobstructed. From the cairn itself, set back from and slightly lower than the rim of the platform, Boztepe is not visible. The Ten Thousand no doubt carried stones towards the cairn from all sides. In it illegal digging had revealed a mass of fist-­sized stones, apparently tossed down, without soil between them. The wicker shields, unsurprisingly, have vanished. On the highest point of the ridge, half a mile to the west and 400 feet above, a modern cairn rises above a much wider pile of stones, 25 metres in diameter, strewn on bedrock. The cairn may have replaced Celal’s standing stone. From it, and all along the crest below, there is an unobstructed view to the north, as far as Boztepe (800 feet), above Trabzon. This tremendous view is formed by looking over the huge crag above Turnagöl, and directly down the narrow, V-­shaped valley of the lower Değirmendere. It is the only view, narrow and distant, on this route through the coastal range, and it is blocked at the northern end by Boztepe itself, 25 miles away and 7,400 feet below. Its eastern crags, and Celal’s cement factory on the shore below them, are hidden by the eastern wall of the Değirmendere valley. Thus the Black Sea can only be seen over, but not around Boztepe; and it can only be seen in clear visibility and reduced humidity. Trabzon has only fifty days of sunshine a year, and the clearest period is said to be between mid May and mid June, when the wind blows from the south. There can also be clear days in mid to late September. Travelling south from Jemishee (Cevizlik, now Maçka) in early June 1814, Kinneir offers important confirmation. When at six in the evening he reached the summit of the mountain called Koat Dag by the Turks, ‘the melting snow presented a grand and singular spectacle’. From the summit, they told him, ‘the Euxine is visible on a clear day’. Perhaps from the same point, travelling north in autumn 1851, Walpole saw the sea from a great height, twelve or fourteen hours distant, from a ‘pass 8,000 feet above the sea’; evidently after passing Starvez (İstavri) Boghaz, which was seven and a half hours from Djevijlik (Maçka). The point at between 7,000 and 8,000 feet from which Tozer sighted the sea in 1879 (23 September), in exceedingly clear visibility, was evidently some distance to the east of the direct caravan road from Baiburt to Trebizond, somewhere above the Sumela valley: ‘away to the north-­east cape after cape was seen extending into the sea, . . . and completing all the soft-­blue Euxine’.8 Like Kinneir, over the course of several visits I have not seen the sea. Looking north from Torul, or from the heights of Maden hanları, a mantle of cloud, bunched by the prevailing wind from the sea, can be seen cascading over the ridge of Zigana Dağ for all but about forty days a year.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 332  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

In 1996 (5 and 15 August), and in 1999 (11 September) the wind was from the north, bringing humidity, clouds, and rain. The mountains above Trabzon were wrapped in a dense, swirling fog, which in 1999 extended down to the tree line below Karakaban. In 2002 (at 11.40 a.m. on 30 May), the wind was strong from the south-­west, the weather was crystal clear and very cold, and the summit barely accessible through snow fields. In 2006 (at 4.45 p.m. on 30 August) there was no wind, and visibility to the north was exceptional. But on both occasions Boztepe could only be seen opaquely through vapour rising from dense vegetation in the Değirmendere valley; while pollution rising from Trabzon, behind Boztepe, obscured all trace of the sea and the horizon. In 2002 a great off-­white rectangle could be clearly seen, through binoculars, on Boztepe, and, to the right and slightly higher, the outline of what looked like a lattice tower. Next morning I climbed up to Boztepe, to find on the ridge twenty-­three tower blocks, mostly eleven storeys high in three main clusters; and on the highest point, inside the jandarma barracks, a tall water tower, erected on a lattice mast. These, foreshortened by distance, were the structures seen from beside the Xenophon cairn. In 2017 (at 3 p.m. on 20 October), Taner Demirbulut, my enthusiastic guide, revisited the site to confirm that the disc of stones is undamaged. He saw no sign of treasure hunting. The apartment blocks on Boztepe were again visible, but the sea beyond was obscured by vapour rising above the hot shore line, at that time of day 20° Celsius. At Trabzon the weather traditionally breaks on 15 August; and is now reckoned to be clear only for the last two weeks of May and the first two weeks of June, when the wind blows from the south, and for a month from mid September. But even these predictions are unreliable. In 2001, Taner said, the wind had swung to the north by the beginning of June, bringing early humidity, the clouds that pour over the crest of Zigana Dağ for most of the year, and rain between there and the coast. For a sight of the Black Sea, it seems that the best time of day is early morning, and the best time of year mid to late September, when the wind is from the south, the sun is less strong, humidity levels in Trabzon and the Değirmendere valley are reduced, and the temperature in Trabzon drops below about 15° Celsius. Even during this period only about one day in three is likely to be clear. Hoping for clearer visibility, Taner and I tried an earlier season in 2002. Under blue skies, with a freshening wind from the south-­west, we drove steeply up the mountainside above the Zigana pass at the end of May, following the dirt road to Kolat. The way looked easy, the weather promising. But after a mile the track was blocked by a bulldozer, stuck in a snowdrift 4 metres deep. It took us nearly ten hours to walk along the ridge of Zigana Dağ to the high crest above Kolathanları, and return. Far above the tree line, the mountains were virtually deserted. Two shepherds with a donkey wandered across the slopes close above Zigana; and in the distance below Ayaser, where Hüsnü Yiğit, aged 60, and his father lived from June to September, a third watched over 400 hungry sheep, among meadows carpeted with gentians, crocuses, and tiny violet and yellow pansies. The ridge was otherwise abandoned to ravens, swarms of larks, a falcon, and a solitary fox. There was no trace of wolves. All the north-­facing gullies were filled with snow. Dominating the south-­eastern horizon, Deveboynu Dağ was an alpine wilderness, vast expanses of snow studded with areas of black rock; and the road leading north from Anzarya hanlar to Kolat was blocked by huge drifts and snow fields. Exhausted by altitude, Taner stopped for ever more frequent rests, and the return to the Zigana pass became a race against thunder clouds gathering around the exposed

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

OV ER THE PONTIC MOU NTA INS TO M AÇK A  333

ridge. The jandarma had been worried about his abandoned car. Because of the snow, we could not return to the Xenophon cairn from the north, up the Maçka ridge. Nor could we contemplate walking up through the snows from the Ağyarlar ridge. Celal’s observations are confirmed by calculation. From the height of the Kolat platform, Captain Alex Morrice reckons the distance to the horizon at approximately 110 miles, and is certain that the sea would have been visible over the intervening hills (Fig. 15.8). Calculating the probable line of the horizon, he notes that in the Antarctic he has seen mountain tops at more than 100 miles, while a naval Hydrographic colleague has documented a sighting at 120 miles. In cold, pre-­industrial conditions there is no reason why Xenophon could not see so far. A question is whether the human eye could discriminate the small sliver of sea. Over Boztepe, the angular distance and so the width of the sliver are largest, and several factors would act in favour of the Ten Thousand. They wanted to see the sea. They knew where to look. Most importantly, they were looking ‘down sun’. Two facts are now certain. The crest provided Xenophon’s view, and across the platform passed the Roman frontier road, followed by Hadrian and Arrian. The heights of Zigana Dağ, from which Xenophon and Hadrian sighted the Euxine, were a site of unparalleled distinction. This supreme point might commend itself as Arrian’s ‘site most suitable for eternal memory’. But of the altars and statue commissioned by Hadrian there is no trace, and the rounded, walled structure beside the cairn is too crude to be associated. I saw no cut stones or ancient sub-­structures on or below the platform, in the small settlement at Turnagöl, or, above it, in the much larger yayla village, about a dozen stone houses concealed in the mist in previous visiits, and in late May 2002 still wholly deserted. It is not here, amid ice and snow, that the altars and statue should be sought. They were erected, rather, in the city of Trapezus, and it was there that Arrian saw the altars already standing, as was the imperial statue, ‘its pose fine, for it points to the sea’. Whatever the season of Xenophon’s passage, his guide must have been confident, and the Ten Thousand fortunate indeed to have seen the Euxine. Access to the viewpoint was not easy for an army coming from the south during the clear weather period in late May and early June. Even for the Greeks, well acquainted with Armenian snows and suffering, the snow lingering at these high altitudes, particularly on the slippery traverse below Deveboynu Dağ, would have been difficult and dangerous, and the mountains devoid of livestock and provisions. If they passed in September, with shorter days, the odds of clear visibility were not in their favour. Noting the abundance of mad honey as the Ten Thousand approached Trapezus, Manfredi argues, with other internal evidence, that Xenophon did not reach the sea until the end of May or the beginning of June. The honey season seems, however, to have been later: bee-­keepers camped near Köse in July and August, and for Dürsü Nezir the season near Sipikör lasted for three months and ended on 15 September.9 Established and fortified by Corbulo for his supply route, and presumably consolidated as a formal road on the creation of the frontier, the route followed by Hadrian and Arrian in Xenophon’s footsteps was much easier than it had been for the Ten Thousand. In a period of clear visibility, Hadrian appears to have crossed the Pontic mountains in September, for June is eliminated by the apparent timing of his progress across Asia Minor. Arrian evidently followed in June, reaching Trapezus in time to sail eastwards in midsummer.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 334  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

DESCENT TO M AÇK A

Turnagöl and Hocamezarı hanları From this remarkable summit, Celal reckoned it took eighteen hours on horseback to reach Trabzon. The frontier and caravan road dropped down easy slopes for a mile to the summer pasture of Turnagöl (7,150 feet), sheltering from the north wind beneath its huge crag. A few families graze sheep and cows. Wolves had been sighted the previous day in early August 1996. There is an old cemetery and long walls, but no cut stones. Turnagöl must be the village shown to Xenophon; and the road leading down to the country of the Macronians must be the ancient track looping along and around the ridge that falls steeply northwards for 16 miles to Maçka. The Greeks moved rapidly, and from the village Xenophon descended in a day to the junction of two rivers. Hadrian and Arrian inevitably followed the same route. From Turnagöl, Celal reckoned a caravan would take five hours to reach Maçka. With Valerio and Giorgio it took me seven. The modern track closely follows the caravan route, of which very long sections are well preserved in a remorseless descent. Few places are suitable for rest or lodging: above the tree line, the Turnagöl yaylas, Hocamezarı hanları an hour beyond, and Karakaban; below it, Meşeiçihanı and Hortokop. From Turnagöl the ancient road curves westwards beneath the crag, traversing around the edge of a valley known quaintly as Karabağa düzü, ‘black tortoise-­ shell plain’, hanging above Hamsiköy, unseen nearly 4,000 feet below. At the northern end of the valley, sections of an older road run below the modern track, climb above it, paved with large flat stones, to cross the ridge, and descend its eastern side to Hocamezarı hanları, ‘hans at the hoca’s tomb’ (7,100 feet), 2½ miles from Turnagöl. These are rich summer pastures, vacated in mid September. Above the caravan road was a han, and below the road another, destroyed in around 1990. Shepherds recalled caravans of horses and camels ten or twenty years before, when the whole meadow was filled with tents and camels. Here the road loops upwards to the north-­east, passing a spring of sweet water, and crosses again to the western side of the ridge: Everett’s ‘track passing around the head of the valley beneath which is Hamsi Keui on the chaussée’. Down the precipitous slopes a clear trace descends steeply and in zigzags 100 feet below the modern track, curves sharply around a promontory above jagged rocks, and heads north-­east, now beneath the track, towards Karakaban, ‘black hill’ (6,725 feet), poised at the northern end of a small plain 5 miles or about two hours from Hocamezarı hanları (Fig. 15.10). It was, Hamilton found, ‘a wretched hovel, a cold and dreary spot, consisting of a few huts, and a barn for the accommodation of travellers’.

Karakaban From Karakaban Celal reckoned that the sea can again be seen; and here indeed, on a hazy morning in 1836 (26 May), Hamilton measured ‘the depression of the sea horizon which was visible from this elevated spot’. But in impenetrable mist, which also enveloped Kinneir about 2 miles above the tree line in early June 1814, and Hommaire de Hell in mid September 1847, I could not determine this during my descent. Climbing south at the end of August 1839 Texier reported that the ascent is enveloped in thick mist at all

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

OV ER THE PONTIC MOU NTA INS TO M AÇK A  335

F ig . 15.10  Karakaban, on the ridgeline, left; the frontier and caravan summer road, foreground right, continuing north, broadly on the horizontal line of the modern track; beyond, the Değirmendere valley (August 2006)

seasons: reason, perhaps, for his mistaken view that the normal route to Gumush-­Hane diverged at Kara-­Kapan, rather than at Kolat. Kinneir found ‘the snow lay three or four feet deep on the ground. The cold was so piercing that we were completely benumbed.’ Climbing south in June 1837 to Karakaban on the tree line, ‘a cluster of small buildings with grocers’ stalls and stables for the refreshment and repose of travellers’, Southgate followed a difficult path with broken pavements and snow drifts, and ‘long trains of caravans with from thirty to fifty horses in each’. Descending to Maçka in autumn 1851, Walpole found ‘the roads being much used, and only earth, were now girth deep in mud, and in places almost impassable’. Of the route below Karakaban Everett, travelling south in c.1882, wrote ‘from Jevizlik [Maçka] a narrow spur rising to the south ascended sharply at first and afterwards more gently by a broad mule track, paved in places, and evidently of great antiquity. The knife edged ridge, which prevents at times the deep valleys on either side being seen from the track, is followed through a forest, . . . and khan and guardhouse are reached. The trees and rhododendrons now disappear, the latter being replaced by azaleas.’10 At Karakaban the caravan road cuts abruptly over the edge of the plain, and clinging to a narrow ridge enters the tree line, and plunges steeply down the eastern side in a long descent through tall pines. The gradient is uniformly about 1:7, flattening gradually as it approaches

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 336  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 15.11  The frontier and caravan summer road descending steeply north to Meşeiçihanı, and climbing, right, around the forest base (July 1996)

Meşeiçihanı. In this descent the ancient roadbed, varying in width from 3.6 to 7 metres, and in places badly eroded, is remarkably preserved for more than 2 miles (Fig. 15.11).

Meşeiçihanı (? Gizenenica) An hour and a quarter below Karakaban, Meşeiçihanı, ‘han inside the forest’ (4,675 feet), stood on a narrow saddle some 2,500 feet above Larhan. There were, in fact, three hans, close together opposite the mosque, but all were destroyed about fifty years ago. One was near the village shop, among a handful of houses beside the modern track. West and above Meşeiçi rises a low summit thick with pine trees. The muhtar, Şefik Ofluoğlu, reckoned that the caravan road followed the line of the ridge, through the trees and over the summit. But he was unable to demonstrate any convincing traces. The village is 7 miles from Maçka, about two hours below by the Caravan Road, also called the Silk Road. The saddle offers the only level ground north of Karakaban, and the distances commend it as the site of Gizenenica, 18 miles in Peutinger from Bylae, and 10 to Magnana: five hours downhill from Kolat, and two and a half above Maçka. Five hundred metres north of the shop, the paving of a narrow roadbed protrudes through the modern track looping eastwards around the summit above Meşeiçi: constructed with slabs, the largest measuring some 0.6 by 1 metre, between pronounced kerbs in places visible on each side. This kaldırım is only 1.8 metres wide, and Şefik recalled from his father, aged 95, that it was built by the Russians in 1916 to consolidate a section of the caravan road. The Russian Road climbs gradually up to the ridge at Mezraa, and follows it northwards, just below the crest, for nearly a mile. Above it a long platform shows that half was cut out of bedrock, while the other, eastern half has collapsed on to the modern

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

OV ER THE PONTIC MOU NTA INS TO M AÇK A  337

road. A mile and a half north of Meşeiçi the track crosses the ridge, and starts its final descent down the western flanks, passing beneath the cemetery and shattered memorial of the battle in defence of Maçka on 16 May 1916. The eastern side of the ridge is now lined with cliffs. The western slopes, open grassland above, and below thick with pine trees, fall very steeply down to the Pervaneoğlu Dere. High on the opposite side of the valley perches the great Greek monastery of Vazelon. The caravan road maintains height at first, far above the modern track. This is the ‘broad mule track, paved in places, and evidently of great antiquity’, described by Everett in c.1882. Confronted with crags, it starts to descend, at a gradient of 1:12 and in places much steeper; and by zigzags, mainly lost in landslides, rejoins the line of the modern track. There are some traces of stabilizing stones, but no kerbs. Below the crags it passes through a rock-­cut section, 30 metres long and 3.35 metres wide. Thirty minutes later it reached the site of a han beside the mosque at Hortokop, and passed around and below the fortlet, in origin evidently Roman, conspicuous on a flat promontory 150 metres north-­ ­ east of the mosque, at an altitude of 2,200 feet.

Hortokop Described by Crow and Bryer, the Hortokop fortlet commanded the descent of the high-­level summer route from the south, the caravan route known as the gâvur yolu, ‘infidels’ road’; but not the road from the Zigana pass at the foot of wooded, in places precipitous slopes in the valley of the Pervaneoğlu Dere 1,000 feet below. The importance of the Hortokop ridge was apparent in April 1916, when the capture of Trebizond and its rapid use for the landing of Russian troops opened a new route for the penetration of Anatolia. Roughly circular and about 70 metres in diameter, the fortlet stands on a natural mound and sloped westwards towards the Pervaneoğlu Dere. The walls were built with random courses of rough-­cut stones of varying shapes and sizes, set in hard mortar with a flat face to the exterior. Thus the original facing survives. There is no trace of ashlar, and no section survives to the height of the catwalk. Ten semicircular towers, 8–11 metres in diameter, stood 12–15 metres apart, and on the eastern, uphill side was a single gate (Fig. 15.12). A scattering of tile and small brick fragments, the latter 2.5 cm thick, could be seen inset in the mortar of the north-­east gate tower. The surviving walls suggested to Bryer and Winfield that, ‘if their course is Roman, their execution is much later’, perhaps mediaeval. The enclosure, they noted, was littered with ridge tiles: I did not see them. There is no trace of internal buildings, and no evidence for date. Coin finds included an Antiochene from Commagene (c.69 bc–ad 72), a third-­century Roman coin, and bronze coins of Anastasius I (ad 491–518). Water was said to have been brought in clay pipes 50 cm long, recalling the milk pipes reported at Çit Harabe (Sabus), Hasanova (Analiba), and Satala. Abdurrahman Yavuz, a sprightly 70-­year-­old sitting outside the Hortokop mosque in August 1996, recalled how his father used to make the round trip from Trabzon to Erzerum every fifteen days between May and October, until the Zigana road was opened for traffic in 1931. He had ten or twenty horses, and travelled with friends in a group of up to 300 horses, carrying sugar, rice, winter food, and clothes from Trabzon, and returning with grain and bulgur, ‘cracked wheat’. Loads were in bundles of 100–150 kilos for horses, 200–250 kilos for mules, 300–400 kilos for camels. For protection

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

 338  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 15.12  ‘Plan of Hortokop Kalesi’ (Crow and Bryer, 1993; from Dumbarton Oaks 51 (1997), after p. 284, 6)

against robbers they would join caravans bound for Tehran: 100, sometimes 200 camels climbing up the paved road to Meşeiçi. The caravans too stayed close together. They would travel by day, and, if it was too hot, by night; and would stop at hans to rest the horses: by the cemetery outside Maçka, at Meşeiçi and Karakaban, Hocamezarı and Kolat. The hans were two to three hours apart to help the mules. Caravans took six hours

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

OV ER THE PONTIC MOU NTA INS TO M AÇK A  339

from Trabzon, via Çağlayan and Ayvas, to reach Maçka; two and a half to three hours to Meşeiçi, the same time onward to Hocamezarı; and another three hours to Kolat, where, in winter, snow lay a metre and a half deep. Abdurrahman said the old name was Kulat, which, despite Celal’s explanation, had no meaning. Hommaire de Hell reckoned Hordokop to be seven hours from Trebizond. Many stables and shops lined the route, in almost continuous use by couriers, caravans, and travellers.11 For 2½ miles below Hortokop the road continued its steep descent to the bed of the Pervaneoğlu Dere, and passed below the old Ottoman cemetery and a vanished han half a mile south of Maçka. The town stands at the junction of two rivers, the Pervaneoğlu Dere and the Larhan (Meryemana) Dere. It is here, 16 miles from Turnagöl Tepe, that the ridge ends its long descent. At the cemetery the Peutinger and caravan road over the high passes rejoined the Antonine and Transit Road leading down from the Zigana pass. NOT ES 1. Maunsell, Military Report I (1903) 67. Layard, Travels in Armenia 5. From Tekke, I climbed along the access routes to Ağyarlar with my friend, Oktay Okur, unrivalled in energy and local knowledge, and with others, in 1996, 1999, and 2000. 2. Everett, Archive. Xenophon, Anabasis 4, 7, 1–14. 3. Place-­ names above Bahçecik: Söbede (yayla), Peliklik (yayla), Elmali (small plain), Mesçiti (yayla), Seredek (yayla), Leğenlik (gorge). Strecker, ZAE 11 (1861) 348f. 4. Texier, Description de l’Arménie 54–7. Walpole, Travels 206–9. Everett, Archive. 5. Kinneir, Journey 345ff. Hamilton, Researches 167f. Southgate, Tour through Armenia 162. Hommaire de Hell, Voyage I 2, 389f., and 4, 247f. Blau, ZAE 11 (1861) 377ff. Wright, JRCAS 33:2 (1946) 127f., and chapter 14, n. 3. 6. Xenophon, Anabasis 4, 7, 19–27, trans. Loeb, and Arrian, Periplus 1, 1. 7. Hamilton, Researches 166. Manfredi, La Strada dei Diecimila 226, citing Diodorus 14, 29, 4. 8. Kinneir, Journey 344. Walpole, Travels 206–9. Tozer, Turkish Armenia 431f. 9. Manfredi, La Strada 211–15. 10. Traces of an older road above Hocamezarı hanları: below the track, a section 150 metres long and 3.35 metres wide; on the ridge, 17 metres long and 4.25 metres wide; descending, a clear trace 5.2 metres wide. Everett, Archive. Hamilton, Researches 165. Kinneir, Journey 344. Hommaire de Hell, Voyage I 2, 389. Texier, Description de l’Arménie 54ff. Southgate, Tour through Armenia 159ff. Walpole, Travels 209. 11. Crow and Bryer, Dumbarton Oaks 51 (1997) 287, with plan, Fig. 6. Allen and Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields 382f. and 396ff. Bryer and Winfield, Pontos 52, 256f., and 285, with Pl. 211f. Hommaire de Hell, Voyage I 2, 387f., and IV 247.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SIXTEEN

Maçka to Trapezus (Trabzon) (Map 23 and Figs. A1, A2)

M AÇK A (A D V ICENSI MUM/M AGNA NA) In a position of high strategic importance, Maçka, formerly Cevizlik, is evidently the site of Ad Vicensimum, 22 miles from Zigana, and of Magnana, 10 miles from Gizenenica. Both were 20 miles from Trapezus. This approximates to the distance, 18 miles by the valley of the Değirmendere, to the modern centre of Trabzon; and accurately reflects the distance over Boztepe to the Ortahisar. Travelling south in June 1814, before the ascent of a ‘very steep and lofty mountain’, Kinneir reached the ruined village of Jemishee (Cevizlik), where the Meryemana is joined by another river from the south-­west. This was Jevizluk, at the junction of the Dierman Su (Değirmendere) and the Meramana Su, where Hepworth stayed in a two-­storey khan in winter 1897. In August 1839 Texier had found Djevislik no more than a khan or station for caravans. In 2006 PKK were killed in a gun battle in the middle of Maçka.1 Descending from the mountains, Xenophon reached the junction of the two rivers. On the right, as he describes, are the final crags of the ridge which he had just descended; on his left the Pervaneoğlu Dere, flowing down from the Zigana pass. Ahead is the other river, the Larhan or Meryemana Dere, which flows north-­west from Larhan and Sumela. The crossing was barred by the Macronians, lining the north bank. The river, at Maçka about 25 metres across, was too wide for their stones to carry. The ancient crossing point is preserved by the two-­arched Ottoman bridge, 35 metres long over the Larhan Dere, aligned with the course of the caravan roads, here at last combined. The Roman station was probably located close to the bridge, on the broader, northern bank. In the town there is no sign of antiquity. From the crossing no road awaited the Greeks, and the trees were too thick for them to pass. Xenophon, with the Ten Thousand, must have found the Değirmendere valley, north of Maçka, virtually impassable, and they were able to advance only with great difficulty. But the Macronians were persuaded to help by cutting down trees, evidently within their own territory, and building a road. M AÇK A TO T R A BZON From the junction of two rivers, Xenophon took five days to reach the sea at Trapezus. The Macronians guided him to the boundary of the Colchi, in three days covering ­perhaps no more than a dozen miles over the shoulder of the mountain north of Maçka, and above the east bank of the Değirmendere. The river itself probably formed the common boundary. The opposite bank belonged to Colchi, who were drawn up in line of

Discovering Rome’s Eastern Frontier. Timothy Bruce Mitford, Oxford University Press (2021). © Timothy Bruce Mitford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843425.003.0017

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

M AÇK A TO TR A PEZUS  341

battle on a great mountain, evidently the steep ridges rising above the river to the west. The Greeks cut through the Colchi to reach the top, and camped in numerous ­villages.  Across a labyrinth of hills, so near to the coast, it took the Greeks, gorging themselves on the mad honey still known in Trabzon, two more days to reach the sea at Trapezus. The frontier and caravan road took a similar course. To avoid the short gorge below Maçka, and the huge cliff falling on the far, western side into the combined river, the Pyxites ante Trapezunta known to Pliny, and now the Değirmendere, ‘mill river’, the ancient road climbed above the east bank, broadly along the line followed by the Transit Road. Passing Atlıkilisehanı, ‘church with horses han’, and after two miles Kanlıpelithanı, ‘bloody acorn han’, nearly 400 feet above the river, it descended by zigzags to follow the east bank. The Roman and caravan road seems to have crossed the Değirmendere just south of Matracı, where an Ottoman bridge, with no trace of a predecessor, carried the early vehicle road.2

The Güryeni Bridge At Güryeni, 2 miles north of Matracı and 15 miles from Trabzon, the Degĭ rmendere, elsewhere in a gravel bed, passes between low, water-­worn cliffs, and is spanned by a narrow bridge, 2.75 metres wide, with a single, 13-­metre arch. The road itself is 2.45 metres wide. Known as Terazi Köprü, ‘Scales Bridge’ once served many villages. The abutments are bedded on solid rock. In the eastern, the four lowest courses, laid without mortar, are evidently Roman, and the second course contains two large stones with architectural mouldings. The five lowest courses of the western abutment appear also to be original. This is clearly Roman masonry in reuse, perhaps a reconstruction after the raid of the Borani in the mid third century. There is no evidence of earlier, wider foundations, and the bridge is too narrow to have carried the frontier road. Close beside it, a concrete bridge now carries a minor road. Above Güryeni, the western slopes encountered by Xenophon are steep and high, confused with ravines, cliffs, and dense vegetation. The Transit Road, completed in 1872, continued along the left bank of the Değirmendere. All trace has been buried beneath the modern road and industrial development in the river valley. Caravans, too, followed the valley floor, passing Ayvasilhanı, ‘St Basil han’, 3 miles north of Güryeni; their northward course assured when the Transit Road was blasted through a narrowing gorge to reach the coast. This was the route used by Tozer in 1879, continuing north beside the Değirmendere along a very carefully constructed road in the valley of the Pyxites as far as the seashore, crowded with ‘caravans starting for the in­ter­ ior, especially for Persia, for the landing-­place from the steamers is hard by’. Avoiding the gorge, the earlier caravan road, reworked in 1850 and broadly following the line of the Roman road, passed a deep ravine through the western hills about 5 miles from the sea, and climbed out of the riverbed, some 2 miles north of St Basil han, and close to a large brick factory, the Ünye Çimento Trabzon Hazır Beton Tesisi. Here were said to have been other hans. Here too, beside the Değirmendere, was Chosch-­Oglan (Hoşoğlan), the first village worth mentioning after Boztepe, two hours away, in Blau’s southward journey along the great caravan road from Trebizond. Close beside the brick factory, Hoşoğlankahvesi commemorates the first Turkish warrior to enter Trebizond. The site was important. It marked the point where the army of Mehmet II, the

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 342 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Conqueror, left the valley of the Degĭ rmendere, and climbed to the ridge that leads to Boztepe. From Hoşoğlan a road led up to Anifa, past the apparent site of the Dragon’s Fountain described by Bryer and Winfield.3 This was the route followed by Abdurrahman’s father, from Hortokop. It is well documented. Journeying southwards in June 1814, Kinneir ascended the hills immediately behind Trebisond, traversed for 5 miles a rough and stony road, which descended into a narrow valley, and followed the left bank of the Değirmendere to Maturage (Matracı, close to the Güryeni bridge), 15 miles from Trebisond. Likewise in June 1837, starting his journey by post-­horse to Erzerum, Southgate too climbed ‘to the summit of the hill that rises abruptly above the town’ before descending to the Değirmendere. Travelling through the mountains, along the only line of communication between Constantinople and Persia, at a pace of some 30 miles a day, Curzon observed in January 1844 that ‘the only road known in this part of the world’ led up from Trebizond, and from the summit of Boztepe continued as ‘a track wide enough for one loaded horse’.

The Route over Boztepe For the first 2 miles above the Değirmendere the ancient road probably followed the line of the modern access road to a huge lime quarry. All trace of the ancient has been obliterated since the late 1940s. Above the quarry to the north are the vestigial remains of a han, a few large stones hidden among hazelnut trees belonging to Celal Sağır, aged 65. He was born and lives beside the han, and his father moved here 100 years before. The han was evidently large: it used to cover, Celal recalled with some exaggeration, about 1,000 square metres. And there was a tea shop. After the han the northward route is lost for a mile among a confusion of low hills smothered in vegetation. Then the caravan road reappears, climbing slowly above the broad, well-­watered meadows of Devedüzü, ‘camel plain’, in which the Conqueror is believed locally to have camped with his huge army before the capture of Trebizond in 1461. Here, 4 miles south of Boztepe, the road climbs diagonally, suspended above the Değirmendere on a spectacular traverse nearly a mile long and in places cut out of the rock, to reach the ridge that leads to Boztepe. This section is known, curiously, as Tekneciler Yolu, ‘the Boatmen’s road’. To south and west the hinterland of Trabzon is a maze of hills and valleys, cliffs and ravines. But, in places conveniently signposted as İpek Yolu, ‘the Silk Road’, the caravan road follows the level rim of the escarpment northwards, high above the Değirmendere, for about 3 miles. Its course along the Boztepe ridge, where 2 miles of paving was laid in 1850, is described by Sir Denis Wright. Relying on memories of the caravans, almost the entire line can be traced. A steep cobbled section, 3 metres wide, and known as Yedikaldırım, ‘seven pavements’, leads up beside the new Mısırlı Cami. Passing the Muradiye Cami, İpek Yolu Caddesi reaches the junction of Hastahane Sokak, half a mile south of the jandarma barracks, Şehit H. Erdal Kurtoğlu Kışlası, on the rounded summit of Boztepe. The caravan road did not continue along the ridge to join the modern road, İran Caddesi, which curves up from Trabzon around the northern brow of Boztepe, passes the Ahi Evren Dede Türbesi, a place of devotion and picnics overlooking the modern port at Daphnous, and skirts along the eastern rim of the escarpment above the Değirmendere.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

M AÇK A TO TR A PEZUS  343

Instead, caravans turned sharply down from the Boztepe ridge, initially on the line of Hastahane Sokak, the main modern road descending westwards to Trabzon; then cutting diagonally down the western slopes of Boztepe by a less steep and shorter route: twenty-­five minutes to descend to the Tabakhane bridge and thirty-­five minutes to climb up from it again.4 T R A PEZUS Trapezus, later capital of the empire of Trebizond and now Trabzon, lies in a position of great importance on the eastern shores of the Black Sea, at the northern end of the only significant route leading through the Pontic mountains to the Armenian highlands and the Euphrates valley; a city of ancient fame, founded by Greeks at the limit of the Pontic shore (Fig. 16.1).5 Above the Degĭ rmendere the Ten Thousand followed the western escarpment to Mt Minthrion, the flat-­topped hill now known as Boztepe (846 feet). Dropping steeply away to the east and west, and looming over the ancient city, the mount has been regarded with reverence at all periods. At its northern foot lay the stepped rock, the table from which Trapezus draws its name, bounded by cliffs rising sheer from ravines tumbling on either side down to the Euxine. This natural fortress invited settlement from the earliest times, and forms now, as the Ortahisar, the centre of the modern city (Fig. 16.2).6 Both the acropolis, and to the east a narrow platform a mile long and 150 feet above the sea, were occupied during the Greek and Roman periods. Here there is no similarity with the other desolate fortresses of the eastern frontier: destroyed and vanished at

F ig . 16.1*  ‘Trebisonde’ (Tournefort, 1701; from Voyage du Levant III, p. 79) (BOD Wardr. 20. 10–20)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 344 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Samosata, overbuilt at Melitene, decayed at Satala. All that is ancient here lies hidden beneath the layers of Byzantine, Genoese, Venetian, and Ottoman rebuilding, in turn buried under the large modern city. In antiquity Trapezus, hidden by a huge mountain, was virtually cut off by land. The interior was densely wooded, as Xenophon found. Across the coastal ranges communications were laborious, impeded by rain and vegetation. Along the coast was no continuous strip of plain. Torrents had carved ravines, separated by rocky ridges, and the Ten Thousand were obliged to open up roads to the west. The neighbouring tribes were wild, and hostile at all periods. Across the Pontic mountains Corbulo established gar­ risons to protect his supply route, not least from tribal brigands. East of the Pyxites, the Değirmendere, the Sanni were very hostile to the people of Trapezus. Arrian identified them with the Drillae mentioned by Xenophon. They lived in strong points and had formerly paid tribute to Rome, but had turned to brigandage. He vowed to make them pay, or to destroy them. They were still troublesome in the time of Justinian.7 All external traffic was therefore carried by sea. Xenophon often saw ships sailing along the coast. But this eastern shore, the Admiralty advised, ‘from end to end gets a terrible battering from northerly winds in winter, and the parallel alignment of the mountains

Sea Tower

s? aro Ph 1km

St Basil

Sarafoğlu S.

Tabakhane bridge

Muhittin Cami

S Eleousa Pt

İran C ..

oğ

6

U

Erz urum C.

Eleousa

C.

St Eugenios

Değirmendere

Gözaçan Cami C.

Theoskepastos

İran C.

Ahi Evren Dede türbesi

Maltepe Altıntas Altıntaş cami

Boztepe (846’)

Kemik Hastahanesi Boztep e C.

Ta b akh

an

ne avi er

ak S. K on

İ ra

nC .

no Za ğ

a um

Dik S.

C ni Ye

sr avin e

7

Tavanlı Cami pe zte Bo

8

çtıi S .

i S. Cam

5

CITADEL

d iıka

Bi la l

ORTAHİSAR 10 9

Al

l u S.

4

O

N

Zağnos bridge

15

Chrysokephalos 11

Uzun S.

Tabakhane Cami

PH

3

13 12

Gâvur Meydan

St Anne

2

1

DA

14

St Nicholas ?

St Gregory Nyssa

LOWER CITY

Haghia Sophia 2km

Kalmek Pt

Leontokastron

Hadrian’s harbour ?

Lattice water tower Şehit H. Erdal Kurtoğlu Kışlası Church

Landslide

Mosque

Hast

ahan

e S.

Tower Blocks

İpek Yolu C.

Numbers 1–15 sections of Roman masonry

0

Muradiye Cami

F ig . 16.2  Sketch plan of Trapezus/Trabzon (as at c.1937)

0

1000 yds 1 km

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

M AÇK A TO TR A PEZUS  345

deprives it of naturally sheltered harbours’. Protected from the north-­west, but open to the north and north-­east winds, the bay at Daphnous, east of the city, was a poor anchorage. From April to September the wind blows from the sea every third day, while at night strong gusts sweep down from the coastal range. Storms are brief and violent. Warm in summer and mild in winter, with a humidity much higher than in Byzantium, the climate would have been unattractive to Greek colonists.8 The strategic and commercial advantages of its position were very great. Until the railway between Sivas and Erzurum was completed in 1939, the Transit Road remained the principal conduit for trade with Armenia, Kurdistan, and Persia. Tournefort followed this route to Erzerum in June 1701 in the caravan of the pasha of Erzeron: 600 people, horses, mules, and countless camels, the women in litters with grills. Just after the Crimean war, Rawlinson wrote that ‘European goods to the value of nearly three millions sterling are at present annually landed at the port of Trebisonde, but two thirds of these goods are consumed in Turkish Armenia, in Kurdistan, and in Western Persia, Tabriz being the great entrepot of commerce.’ At the end of the nineteenth century nearly two-­thirds of the merchandise for Persia and the greater part of central Asia was landed there.9

Foundation and Early History The original settlement probably depended on fishing. But the presence of seafarers below the Zigana pass must have encouraged some commerce with the peoples of the interior. Trapezus was perhaps the outlet for metal work from Urartu, on the eastern shores of Lake Van, in the eighth and early seventh centuries, brought by Greek traders from there to Miletus and the Aegean. Its foundation is dated by Eusebius in Olympiad 6 year 1, 756/5 bc, long before Greek colonies, trading stations owning little land outside their walls, were founded c.630 bc on the Pontic coast. In them the earliest Greek finds have been assigned to the years 610–600 bc. It was then that Sinope established a colony at Trapezus, a Greek city in the territory of the Colchians. The founder was perhaps Philesios.10 The city is seldom mentioned in antiquity. With a large and splendidly equipped squadron, Pericles landed troops at Sinope in c.437 bc, but appears to have sailed no further east. When the Ten Thousand reached the sea at Trapezus in 400 bc, they were received with great hospitality, and were billeted in the immediate neighbourhood of the city, which still paid tribute to Sinope, the mother city.11 The Greek element in the population cannot have been large. The earliest coins are assigned to the fourth century, ‘d’une facture assez barbare’. Even after Hadrian’s visit nobody could cut a Greek inscription accurately. Only three are known before the time of Diocletian, and only a single author, Nicostratus, is known to have written at Trapezus.12 In c.301 bc, Mithridates I took possession of the Pontic coast as far as Trapezus, founding the new kingdom of Pontus, and a dynasty which lasted until Mithridates VI Eupator. The kingdom later included Trapezus, the entire Pontic coast as far as Colchis, and Armenia Minor. In the Pontic mountains were rich mineral resources, which supplied raw materials for manufacturing arms, and funds for the invasion of Asia Minor.13

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 346 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Contact with Rome After the defeat of Mithridates, Pompey gave his kingdom including Trapezus to Deiotarus, prince of Galatia, in 63 bc. By 36 bc, the city was a part of the kingdom of Polemon I of Pontus, and passed to Pythodoris, his wife, until her death perhaps in ad 33.14 With the advance of Roman interests towards the Euphrates and Armenia Minor, the strategic value of Pontus became more apparent. But under Claudius and Nero no military roads yet led across Armenia Minor. Trapezus was crucial for all military activity in Armenia. The city served as a logistic base for Nero’s Armenian war. Corbulo installed Roman garrisons over the mountains to Satala, and Tiridates was unable to cut off his supplies reaching Trapezus by sea. In 1914 Trabzon was to serve the same purpose, as the main supply base for Turkish forces in eastern Anatolia.15

Annexation of Polemon’s Kingdom Until the construction of land routes to serve Vespasian’s frontier, the security of the eastern provinces to a large extent depended on the stability of the Euxine. In ad 64 Trapezus and the whole of the kingdom of Polemon II, known henceforth as Pontus Polemoniacus, were incorporated in the province of Galatia. Nero thus secured a base for his ambitious plans in the Caucasus, and to ensure safe navigation on a wild and empty sea took determined action against the camarae of the Pontic pirates. Rome also acquired the royal ships, to form the nucleus of the classis Pontica which later patrolled the Euxine. The fleet headquarters were at Sinope, but Trapezus remained a forward base, garrisoned by a cohort of auxiliaries. Raised by Polemon II, they were retained in Rome’s service for the protection of this remote and exposed corner of Asia Minor. Josephus mentions under Nero a strength of 3,000 hoplites, and 40 Liburnian biremes, the small, fast warships used by Augustus at Actium, to subdue the nations bordering the Euxine to east and north. Perhaps no more than eight biremes were based at Trapezus. Arrian’s flagship was a trireme.16 Possession of Pontus Polemoniacus assured control of the port of Trapezus, with the route leading south-­eastwards into Armenia; and of the entire sea line of communications between the Thracian Bosporus and the foothills of the Caucasus. Garrisons were stationed at strategic anchorages, to secure trade with Phasis and to guard against tribal incursions. But in ad 69 Anicetus, a freedman of Polemon II and former prefect of the royal fleet, rebelled in support of Vitellius. Attacking Trapezus, he massacred the garrison, burned the ships, and escaped by sea. Vespasian despatched Virdius Geminus, spectatae militiae, from Syria, with vexillations from, perhaps, two legions. Driving the rebels out of the city, he pursued and captured Anicetus at the river Chobus in Colchis.17

Formation of the Frontier Under the Flavians the natural advantages of the city’s position could be exploited. With the construction of military roads in Armenia Minor, Trapezus was formally linked to Satala, and so ultimately to the upper Euphrates, ensuring for the first time adequate

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

M AÇK A TO TR A PEZUS  347

F ig . 16.3  Trireme, escorted by two biremes (one with furled sail): Trajan sails by night from a harbour town to cross the Adriatic, June ad 105, for the Second Dacian war (Trajan’s Column lxxix–lxxx/208–12: Anger, Neg. D-­DAI-­Rom 89.754, detail)

communications with the interior. A difficult coastal road no doubt existed under Vespasian to serve the coastal forts extending to the east.

The Frontier Road Descending steeply from the Boztepe ridge, at first beneath Hastahane Sokak, the ­caravan road curved abruptly north, to run down a rock-­cut ledge, 5–7 metres wide and 200 metres long, directly towards the sea (Fig. 16.5); here visible for the first time since the long descent below Karakaban, high above Maçka. On the corner, illustrating the very bad state of disrepair of the existing road from Trabzon to Iran, was Cramer’s ‘Section of old Transit Road trodden by Xenophon and his Ten Thousand’ (Fig. 16.4). Below it, the roadbed is marked by wheel ruts in several places. As the descent eases, the road disappears in a m ­ assive landslide, and its onward course becomes unclear.18 In Ottoman times a main part turned north-­east towards the Gâvur (now Atatürk) Meydan, ‘Infidels’ Square’, seen in Tournefort’s engraving of 1701, in the heart of the mediaeval and modern city. Caravans bound for Erzerum and Persia assembled here, and adjacent were stables for mules and horses. But the principal ancient road appears to have continued its rock-­cut line, to curve gradually down the eastern rim of the Tabakhane ravine. Its route is preserved in ancient streets running down the very lip of the ravine, and passing the eastern end of Yeni Cuma Cami. This was formerly the Church of St Eugenios, patron saint of Trapezus, martyred here, it was said, under Diocletian. The road winds

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 348 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 16.4*  ‘Section of old Transit Road trodden by Xenophon and his Ten Thousand’ (from Sir Denis Wright, c.1939)

F ig . 16.5  Rock-­cut descent on the western slopes of Boztepe (October 2002)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

M AÇK A TO TR A PEZUS  349

down to the Tabakhane mosque, site, it seems, of a temple of Hermes, and continues to the high Tabakhane bridge leading into the Ortahisar and the heart of the Roman city. This was evidently the route followed in 1223 by the Melik of Erzerum, who attacked Trebizond from the ‘upper road’ leading down from Mt Minthrion, Boztepe, to the citadel, and camped close to the church of St Eugenios.19

Trajan Coins were again struck in the city under Trajan, perhaps associated with the war which ended by August ad 114 in the annexation of Armenia. There appear to have been games: Ulpius Augustianus, his stage name Paris, won distinction as a dancer at both Trapezus and Antioch.20

Hadrian and Arrian Hadrian visited Trapezus probably in September ad 129, at the close of his second eastern journey, and set in hand a number of projects. Arrived for his inspection two years later, Arrian reported progress in a personal letter to the Emperor. The temple of Hermes was built in ashlar, quite well. The altars were already set up, but in rough stone, and the Greek inscription was inaccurately carved, as though written by barbarians. Arrian rebuilt them in white stone, with clearly cut lettering. The pose of the imperial statue was ­pleasing—it pointed to the sea—but its workmanship did not resemble Hadrian, and was no good anyway. Arrian ordered a replacement in the same pose, for the site was the most suitable for eternal memory. The statue stood probably on the commanding site now occupied by a statue of Barbarossa, in gardens about 100 metres on the seaward side from the Chrysokephalos church, now the Ortahisar Cami. There, in the very centre of ancient Trapezus, a huge dedication to Hadrian forms the lintel above the main door, and must have been associated with a structure looking over the harbour and the sea.21

Hadrian’s Harbour Arrian reminded Hadrian that he was building a harbour to replace an exposed anchorage, but does not report progress: detailed, no doubt, in his separate, official report in Latin. Until its construction, the trireme and Liburnian biremes of the classis Pontica were probably drawn up on the beach at Daphnous, risky and remote, a mile east of the Ortahisar. In winter, indeed, warships were probably laid up, but commercial vessels, more solidly built, occasionally put to sea. Tournefort’s sketch shows ships at anchor, or drawn up on the beach of the port of Platana, where, Sir Denis Wright recalls, ‘the Genoese are said to have used the bay immediately east of Kalmak Point as their harbour, where today’s harbour now is between Kalmak Point and Kampos. Said to have been known as Daphnous.’ This became the modern port of Trabzon.22 Hadrian’s harbour lay immediately below the lower city. In an excellent photograph, Hepworth shows two semi-­submerged piers extending the lines of the walls below the Ortahisar into the sea. Known as the Genoese harbour, or Molos, it is well recorded by travellers (Figs. 16.6, 16.7).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 350  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 16.6*  ‘Trebizond, Molos’ (Sir Denis Wright, c.1942)

In 1840 Ainsworth noted that ‘the emperor Adrian constructed here an artificial port, the remains of which are visible in the present day’. Tournefort sketched the half-­ submerged remains of two moles, enclosing a rectangular harbour beneath the walls of the citadel, and clearly abandoned at the time of his visit (Fig. 16.1). In 1859, Finlay marked on his map ‘ruins of port’, and two moles directly extending the north–south walls of the ancient city. Lynch marks the ‘Remains of ancient mole for the most part submerged’, adding ‘the submerged remains of a semicircular mole—a work of the old Greek times—are indicated by a line of surf in the sea. It is evident that the entrance to this harbour was on the east.’ This harbour evidently preceded the Turkish conquest, for, as Tournefort notes, ‘les Turcs ne s’embarrassent guères de réparer ces sortes d’ouvrage’. In June 1814 Kinneir landed here, at the western port, near the ruins of a pier built by the Genoese. In May 1835, Brant reported, ‘the quays were of masonry, and surrounded the whole port, leaving only a narrow entrance; the upper parts have been washed away, but enough of the masonry remains under water to break the violence of the sea, and to give protection to boats and small craft by which the port is still frequented’.23 In October 1964 I rowed and swam over the two moles with snorkelling equipment. The eastern was aligned to extend the line of the city wall straight into the sea. The western started about 70 metres west of the extended line of the western wall. The course of each mole was marked by massive irregular blocks laid on a sand and shingle bottom, which shelved from a depth of a few feet to approximately 15 feet in the western part of the harbour, and 30 feet at the entrance. Both moles ran out in parallel from the shore for about 80 metres, and then curved gradually inwards; the western, considerably longer, continued its curve in a semicircle back towards the shore; the eastern curved to the west, to leave an entrance 25 metres wide between the ends of the two moles. The tips of each mole were widened, as though to suggest that towers or beacons marked the

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

M AÇK A TO TR A PEZUS  351

F ig . 16.7*  ‘Trebizond’, showing the Molos, and, in the distance, the Hieron Akron (Hepworth, May 1897; from Armenia, p. 52) (BOD 20601 e.4)

entrance; and the western, rather wider, may have held a low pharos. Although almost wholly submerged in 1964, the moles would have afforded shelter against any but the strongest winds from any direction. A north-­easterly wind would have caused some swell in the entrance, but the harbour itself would have remained reasonably calm. It was entirely artificial, and measured about 350 by 150 metres. The rubble remains offered no evidence of date. That the moles for much of their length still came to within a few feet of the surface suggests that they were in use or reuse in mediaeval times. The Byzantine walls of the central and lower parts of Trebizond overlay the walls of the Roman city, precisely on the lines extended in the submerged remains. The latter were overlooked, it seems, by the structure marked by the huge dedication to Hadrian built into the Chrysokephalos church. If this was the base of the imperial statue, it indeed stood in the most suitable position for eternal memory, looking on the sea and the imperial harbour directly below. The coastal road, constructed after 1964, completely destroyed the Molos harbour, and the seaward character of Trabzon. The foreshore beneath the Ortahisar was further reclaimed in 1976, and the moles are now buried under land-­fill, 200 metres wide, carrying the Transit Road and a large warehouse.

Lighthouses ? The monastery of the Saviour Christ of the Pharos was once a ‘fortified walled enceinte with rubble-­built towers, incorporating or associated with a lighthouse’. Located below the western suburb of Trabzon, on or close to the sea between the imperial harbour and

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 352  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Hagia Sophia, there is no monumental evidence for the monastery. But it has led to conjecture that a Byzantine lighthouse stood on or above the foreshore half a mile west of the Molos, to serve as a leading mark for ships rounding Yeros Burnu, the ‘Holy Cape’, 15 miles to the north-­west and sheltering the bay of Trebizond. In Roman times there was no less need for navigational aids, to ensure the safe arrival of shipping at the logistic base for Nero’s wars in Armenia, and for early support of Vespasian’s frontier. Commercial and military ships, and the protecting classis Pontica, sailed by night as well as by day: passage from Phasis to Amisos and Sinope, Strabo relates, took two or three days, a voyage that demanded overnight passage; Arrian’s trireme left Apsarus in darkness. Under Hadrian, the classis Britannica and ships using the sea lane from Gaul by night were guided by twin lighthouses on commanding heights half a mile each side of the harbour at Dover (Dubris). The eastern lighthouse, originally some 70 feet high, in 8 tapered stages, to the base of a parapet, was built, it seems, between ad 117 and 140. The Dover lighthouses suggest a similar, dual configuration at Trapezus, to guide the classis Pontica and shipping safely into the imperial harbour equidistant between them, and to serve coastal traffic in its approaches: a western pharos, on the site of the ­monastery, invisible to navigators from the east, and an eastern, standing, as later, on Kalmek Point, built under Nero, or as a part of Hadrian’s harbour project. If the purpose of a western pharos was indeed to guide ‘shipping from the Holy Cape to the imperial and commercial harbours’, this meant a beacon height of some 150 feet above sea level, with a fire, in a wood-­burning brazier, large enough to penetrate the prevailing rain and haze of Trapezus. As in the Pharos at Alexandria, a mirror may have reflected light out to sea. An eastern pharos is marked by Lynch on Kalmek Point, in the seaward walls of the great Genoese castle of Leontokastron. With a base height of c.60 feet, a tower and beacon 40 feet high would have been visible for ships rounding Araklı Burnu from the anchorage and fort at Hyssou Limen.24 During the second century Trapezus was garrisoned by vexillations, detachments perhaps of 1,000 legionaries in rotation, of XII Fulminata and XV Apollinaris: the legions at Melitene and Satala. The eastern approaches were protected by an elaborate system of client kings, and anchorages fortified with powerful garrisons, inspected by Arrian.25

Remains of Roman Trapezus In Trebizond and its surroundings, Brant saw no remains in 1835 ‘of buildings of a more remote age than the Christian era’. Almost all of the Roman remains surviving in Trabzon are concentrated in and beside the Ortahisar. The huge inscriptions of Hadrian in the Chrysokephalos church, and, more than four centuries later, of Justinian above the eastern gate, Tabakhane Kapısı, and above the western perhaps another, attest the enduring importance of Trapezus, secure between its ravines. The Ortahisar and upper citadel were surrounded by a wall preserving sections of unmistakable Roman masonry, visible in at least a dozen places around the Ortahisar and upper citadel. Selina Ballance identified one distinctive type: ‘blocks of grey conglomerate up to 1.30 × 0.55 × 0.45 metres in size, laid very true and close-­jointed, without mortar’, which she assigned to the first to third centuries ad. From the evidence of the surviving masonry, Bryer and Winfield concluded, ‘the main rock on which the city

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

M AÇK A TO TR A PEZUS  353

stands . . . was fortified with walls round its entire perimeter in Roman times. The similarity of the stretches which survive indicates one particular period of building.’ As at Ancyra, the walls were probably constructed shortly before the Gothic raids in the mid third century. Forming the inner face of a curved bastion looking down towards the Zağnos bridge over the western ravine, a domed, semicircular structure with niches for statues or fountains may be identified as a nymphaeum. Below the bridge, the north-­western corner of the Ortahisar is revetted with eight surviving courses of ashlar, laid without mortar; large blocks of black limestone 1.70 metres long, 0.65 metres high, and evidently Roman, rising from the garden of Emin Uludüz (Fig. 16.8). In the adjoining garden are two supporting arches of large ashlar blocks filled with rough stones. A Roman doorway has been blocked up at the base of a curved tower, and several courses of white ashlar have recently been revealed. The size and style of the masonry point to Roman work of the second century. In the centre of the northern side of the Ortahisar, a Roman gate led down to the lower city, whose walls, originally of the third century, were (re)built by Alexios II in 1324.

F ig . 16.8  Roman foundation courses (position 14), below the north-­west corner of the Ortahisar (August 2000)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 354  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

The original Trapezus, now the Ortahisar, was approached by high bridges, their massive foundations evidence of its great importance in Hellenistic and Roman times. To the east, the Tabakhane bridge, about 58 metres long, was originally some 3.80 metres wide. A construction ledge on the western side of the arch suggests that it stood to approximately its present height, some 12 metres above the bed of the ravine. From the western end of the bridge the road climbed steeply to the Ortahisar. ̆ os Paşa bridge leads directly into the Ortahisar, at a level Over the western ravine, the Zagn suggesting the passage of an aqueduct. It is even larger: some 88 metres long, 5.20 metres wide and 16 metres high. At the base on its southern side, large ashlar blocks, perhaps Hellenistic, are set in courses to a height of some 6 metres above the stream. Embedded in the modern structure is a Roman pier, including the spring of two arches rising to within 4 metres of the road surface. The narrow river arch is strengthened against flash floods by enormous ashlar blocks, 38–50 cm deep and up to a metre long, laid without mortar: a type of masonry that went out of use in the third century bc. Between the bridges, the Ortahisar is a small plateau not larger than 150 metres square: little more than two hectares of level ground, bordered to the north by cliffs, and to the south by the long, steep incline that led up to and past the Byzantine palace. In the centre stands the Chrysokephalos church, on the Roman site, it must be supposed, of a large public building or temple. The lower city, captured by Anicetus and ravaged by the Borani, was confined between the two ravines to a sloping area of about seven hectares. The undulating area embraced by the Byzantine walls, about 200 metres wide between the two ravines and 350 metres long from the shore to the crags of the Ortahisar, is too cramped to have contained the fortress of the new legion, I Pontica, raised by Diocletian, with a strength of about 6,000 men.26 New bridges carry the huge Samsun–Georgia Transit Road, approved in 2002, across both ravines, about 200 yards south of the ancient bridges. Concrete viaducts pass over the city walls, and the Tanjant Road cuts directly through the upper citadel. In 2006 work had started to clear all the houses in the Zağnos ravine. A recent report of the Karadeniz Teknik Üniversitesi comments that the controversial road has had a negative impact on the historical texture of Trabzon: ‘a visual chaos was created’. Spread across slopes and undulations at the foot of Boztepe, the main city of Trebizond lay east of the Ortahisar. A narrow platform of about 20 hectares rises above the eastern harbour: the only expanse of relatively level ground, and the only location meeting the basic military requirements for the legionary fortress. The rectangular pattern of blocks between side streets west of Gâvur (Atatürk) Meydan, in the centre of modern Trabzon, has suggested that a vicus lay beneath them, perhaps in a grid system with the Meydan as its agora. The street plan, indeed, may preserve the outline of a small legionary fortress. From the ‘eastern suburb’, east of the Tabakhane bridge, come all the military inscriptions of known provenance; and Finlay saw ‘a curious mass of masonry of Roman times, with some sculpture’. Piled in the garden of the Ayasofya Museum in 2000 were long fragments of, it seems, seven tall, monolithic columns of blue, green, and white striped marble, smooth, 4.62 metres long, about 50 cm in diameter, and said to have been quarried in Giresun. Three of these, blackened by weather, were remembered by museum staff to have come from Büyük Ayvas, ‘Great St Basil’, before 1972, when the church was buried, they declared, beneath the Merkez Bankası 200 metres west of Atatürk Meydanı. St Basil was founded, in tradition, by Belisarius, who brought its columns from the temple of Apollo on the Hieron Akron, the Holy Cape, and whose equestrian statue

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

M AÇK A TO TR A PEZUS  355

stood both inside and outside the door. In 2002 the columns, with architrave fragments of white marble bearing an imperial dedication perhaps of Hadrian, had been arranged in the museum garden in an impression of a small temple. Other columns, much cleaner but broken, were recovered in 1997 from excavations at the building site of the Güven İş Merkezi, immediately behind the Tabakhane mosque. Two similar columns of smooth grey marble, approximately 45 cm in diameter, flank the north door inside the Ortahisar Cami, the ‘Chrysokephalos church’. Of these some 3.6 metres remain visible. The Museum Director identified the 1997 columns as remains from the Temple of Hermes reported by Arrian; and six fragments of a lifesize (c.1.60 metres tall) bronze statue of a youth, complete with its pedestal, found crushed beneath them in the Tabakhane excavations, as Hermes himself. The height compares precisely with the Hermes statue, about five feet tall, recommended by Arrian. Reassembled, the statue stands in the basement of the new Museum, with the description: The weight is on the left foot, the right is thrust forward. The right hand is clenched in a loose fist, with a thin wire wound between the fingers. Beside the statue was found a kerykeion, two snakes twisting around each other. The left elbow is slightly bent, and all except the index finger are curled, as though pointing to something. The hair is curly and combed back. On the head is a garland entwined with ivy buds. On the forehead are two little horns, in the form of a small bump above each eye, half way below the hairline. The pupils of the eyes are carved, the eyelids are half closed, the lips a little parted.

Architectural fragments found on the same site are adorned with goats’ heads, suggesting a connection with Dionysus or Pan. But the kerykeion suggests that the statue is of Hermes, perhaps the very statue which Arrian invited Hadrian to send. Tabakhane, at the eastern end of the bridge, was a site of great prominence. The point of arrival of the frontier road from the south, it was particularly appropriate for the god of road users, and for Arrian’s temple. Common practice elsewhere suggests that the latter was overlaid by a church, and replaced in turn by the Tabakhane mosque.27 Successive Museum Directors and their staffs have been invariably helpful. In July 1996 the Director of Culture kindly received me, alone; but next day instructed my newly arrived Representative, in rude and unguarded Turkish, carefully to note and report my interests and activities; and in 2000 police appeared out of nowhere to forbid photographs, beside a public road, of the foundations of the Tabakhane bridge.

Peace and Destruction Large, rich, and well populated for more than a century after Hadrian’s visit, the city was secure behind its walls and garrison. In c. ad 170, the Pontic fleet was redeployed to the west, to Cyzicus, to guard the Propontis. But in the mid third century the Borani, allies of the Goths, briefly besieged Pityus below the western Caucasus. A year or two later, in ad 255 or 256, the inhabitants of outlying settlements sought shelter in Trapezus, a stronghold with double walls: one around the Ortahisar and citadel, a second around the Lower City, protecting the harbour and extending to enclose the settlement east of the Ortahisar. Despite reinforcement by a very large number of soldiers, perhaps a vexillation of XV Apollinaris, the Borani captured and plundered the city, destroying temples,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 356 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

houses, and everything else of size or beauty; and made off with the inhabitants and many captured ships.28

Later Dispositions With this disaster should be associated reconstruction of the Güryeni bridge over the Pyxites, about 10 miles south of Trapezus. The last known coins had been struck in ad 245 under Philip II, and the city lay apparently unrestored until the time of Diocletian and his successors. Its position ensured survival as a garrison city. A new legion, I Pontica, attested in Rough Cilicia in ad 288, was present in Trapezus in ad 293/305, when its prefect, Trocundus, dedicated, presumably, a public building; and its fortress was perhaps constructed in an area razed and unused since the destruction of the Borani. Under ad 362, Ammianus knew Trapezus, like Pityus, as an oppidum non obscurum.29

Resources In imperial times certain products were especially associated with the city. The most important was the great mineral wealth of eastern Pontus. Iron in particular, but silver and lead too, were mined in the mountains behind Trapezus. To the Chalybes was ascribed the discovery of iron; and the geology of the Sandjak, the sub-­province of Gümüşhane, has been considered the most important in Asia Minor. At Eski Gümüşhane Hamilton reported thirty-­four mines of argentiferous lead—‘the name, in Greek (being) Silver City, reflecting its wealth to this day’. From remote times caravans bore these minerals to Assyria and the south. And from the beginning of colonization, they went by sea to the west.30 Other products were of local importance. Trapezuntine honey, known now as deli bal, ‘mad honey’, derived from the yellow rhododendron zifin, has been famous since the passage of Xenophon. Aristotle knew of its healing properties, especially for epilepsy. Tunny fishing was important, but the fish, Strabo notes, were still small. Vines were cultivated in antiquity: Xenophon’s army was given wine as well as barley by the inhabitants, and representations of grapes appear on the earliest coins. Lynch records that ‘in the middle of the seventeenth century, we are told of upwards of thirty thousand gardens and vineyards inscribed in the city registers, and at that time the slopes about Boztepe were completely covered with vines’. Pontus had wood for ship-­building, but, Hadrian knew, was short of most other ma­ter­ials; and Arrian took care to salvage everything, even nails and wax, from the shipwreck at Athenai. No vines are grown today: their place has been taken by hazel nuts, tobacco, and neglect. In the final years before construction of the railway to Erzurum, local exports were indeed hazel nuts and tobacco, with beans, linseed, cereals, fruit (especially apples from Gümüşhane), livestock (sheep and cattle from Erzurum and presumably the upper valley of the Lycus), wool, cotton from İğdir, skins, eggs, butter, wax, tallow, fish-­oil, boxwood, silver filigree work (by local and Persian workmen), alum, lead, and copper from mines inland. Saw mills cut timber for shipbuilding, house construction, charcoal, and firewood.31

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

M AÇK A TO TR A PEZUS  357

Cults In addition to Hermes and Philesios, the founder, local cults known from inscriptions at Trapezus included Theos Hypsistos, Asclepius and Hygieia, and Venus; and from the coinage Serapis, Dionysus, and particularly Mithras, to whom a grotto was dedicated. His cult, the source of its name, was remembered on the Mithrian hill, Boztepe, where St Eugenios overthrew the statue of Mithras. Their temples, Cumont supposed, were buried beneath the churches of the Comneni: in Trebizond were ninety-­six known churches and monasteries. Lynch noted ‘the scanty remains of a heathen temple’ at a ruin about three-­quarters of a mile south-­east of Hagia Sophia: in a recess in the hillside ‘Portions of a tower and doorway, the lower parts of two walls, . . . small, square niches are seen in the walls at close intervals, said to have contained the statues of gods’.32

Christianity Christianity, tradition records, was introduced at Trapezus by St Andrew. During Diocletian’s persecution, martyrs included Eugenios, patron saint of the city. The first churches were probably built under Constantine, whose nephew, Hannibalianus, was believed to have founded the Chrysokephalos church, possibly on the site of a temple or statue of Hadrian. Domnus, the first known bishop of Trapezus, attended the Council of Nicaea in ad 325.

Justinian During the Persian advance through Colchis, Trapezus was a strategic base of great importance, and enjoyed a partial recovery. Justinian reconstructed most of the churches, decayed by time, and his great inscription above the eastern, Tabakhane gate records the renovation of the public buildings of the city, perhaps in ad 546–7. He also built the aqueduct, named after the martyr Eugenios, and carried, perhaps, by the Zağnos bridge. To the Tzani Justinian introduced civilization and Christianity, building forts with strong garrisons of Roman soldiers all over Tzanica, the Pontic mountains behind Trapezus.33 NOT ES 1. Kinneir, Journey 344. Hepworth, Armenia 69ff. Texier, Description de l’Arménie 54. Spelling of Ottoman place-­names, based on the spoken word, has been subjective and inconsistent. 2. Xenophon, Anabasis 4, 8, 9–22. Pliny, NH 6, 12. Mad honey in the mountains above Colchis, Heptakometae, and Pompey’s army, chapter 17, n. 2. 3. Tozer, Turkish Armenia 448ff. Blau, ZAE 11 (1861) 371. Bryer and Winfield, Pontos 207, no. 45. 4. Kinneir, Journey 343. Southgate, Tour through Armenia 157. Curzon, Armenia 35–9. The Conqueror’s route is discussed by Bryer and Winfield, Pontos 60–5. Wright, JRCAS 31:4 (1944) 292.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 358  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

5. The topography and antiquities of Trebizond are discussed by Lynch, Armenia I 8–36, and Cumont, SP II 363–72; the Byzantine city, by Bryer and Winfield, Pontos 10, and 178–250. Sir Denis Wright, Vice Consul in Trebizond 1941–3, dangerous years, has generously given photographs and recollections of the city. Trabzon, the Ottoman name, was the centre of a sancak, ‘sub-­province’, in the eyalet, ‘province’, of Rum (1461–1514). The Byzantine name survived with travellers. Trapezus, vetusta fama civit(as), a Graecis in extremo Ponticae orae condit(a), Tacitus, Hist. 3, 47. 6. Cumont, SP II 363f. and 367f. 7. monte vasto clausum, Pliny, NH 6, 1. Strabo 12, 3, 18 (549). Tacitus, Ann. 13, 39. Xenophon, Anabasis 5, 2, 1–3. Arrian, Periplus 11, 1f. 8. Xenophon, Anabasis. 5, 1, 11. NID, Turkey I, Meteorological Tables, and II 53 and 379f. Described by Curzon, Armenia 22; Cuinet, Turquie I 14; and Hamilton, Researches 242. 9. NID, Turkey II 52. Cramer, Structural Engineer 18 (May 1940) 586–96, passim. Tournefort, Voyage 86–106. Rawlinson, Georgia 7. Barkley, Armenia 347. 10. Barnett, The Aegean and the Near East 228f. Akurgal, Ausgrabung in Sinope 5f. Cook, JHS 66 (1946) 72–84. 11. Plutarch, Pericles 20, 1–2. Xenophon, Anabasis 4, 8, 22, and 5, 5, 10. 12. Reinach, Récueil 147f., nos. 1–3B. Arrian, Periplus 1. EAM 542f., nos. 84f., and 549, no. 95. 13. Plutarch, Demosthenes 4, 4. Appian, Mithridatica 9. 14. Strabo 12, 3, 13 (547), and 28f. (555f.). 15. Tacitus, Ann. 13, 36 and 39. NID, Turkey I 306 and II 52. 16. Albania, Tacitus, Hist.1, 6. Josephus, BJ 2, 16, 4 (367). Camarae and trireme are discussed in chapter 17, nn. 2 and 5. Biremes were about 70 feet long and 11 feet broad, with 26–28 oars in two vertically distinct banks on each side, manned by 56 oarsmen, 6 sailors, and 60 marines. They appear as river transport on Trajan’s Column, Lepper and Frere, Trajan’s Column 268. 17. bellum servile, Tacitus, Hist. 3, 47f.: detachments, probably, from IV Scythica and XII Fulminata. 18. With well-­defined kerbs and a width of some 6 or 7 metres, Cramer’s section, Structural Engineer 18 (May 1940) 587, Fig. 3, strongly resembles stretches of the frontier road preserved in the Antitaurus. 19. Bryer and Winfield, Pontos 182 and 223. The church and city are well described by Tozer, Turkish Armenia 449–61. 20. Reinach, Récueil 148, nos. 4–8, of ad 113–14. Paris, at Thyateira, IGR 4, 1272. 21. Arrian, Periplus 1f. EAM 542f., no. 84. Copying the Hadrianic lintel was not easy in November 1963. The muezzin tore down my first squeeze. 22. Arrian, Periplus 16, 6. Tournefort, Voyage 81. 23. Hepworth, Armenia 52. Ainsworth, Travels 398. Tournefort, Voyage 81, and sketch, 78. Finlay, ‘Journal’ 28. Lynch, Armenia I 13 and 29. Kinneir, Journey 335. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 189f. 24. Bryer and Winfield, Pontos 215ff., no. 56. Navigation by night, Strabo 11, 2, 17 (498), and Arrian, Periplus 7, 4. Dover lighthouses, Wheeler, Arch. Journ. 86 (1929) 29–46, and Booth, EHHR 2 (2007) 9–21. By the h ­ arbour at Boulogne (Bononia) was a much taller, perhaps earlier lighthouse. With a calculated total height of about 100 feet, in eleven diminishing stages, the Tour d’Ordre, which collapsed down the cliff face in

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

M AÇK A TO TR A PEZUS  359

1644, has been plausibly identified with the very high tower erected by Gaius in ad 40 on the ocean shore; from it, like the Pharos, fires shone out at night to direct the courses of ships, Suetonius, Gaius 46. 25. Military inscriptions, EAM 546ff., nos. 92–4. 26. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 189. Hadrian, EAM 542f., nos. 84f.; Justinian, EAM 545f., nos. 89–91. Bryer and Winfield, Pontos 186f. and Fig. 41. At Ancyra, IGR 3, 206. 27. The street plan of the ‘eastern suburb’ is discussed by Bryer and Winfield, Pontos 180, 198, no. 17, and 201 no. 24. Hermes statue, Arrian, Periplus 2, 1. 28. Zosimus 1, 33. 29. ILS 639 = EAM 544f., no. 88. Ammianus 22, 8, 16. 30. Cuinet, Turquie I 127f. Hamilton, Researches 234f. 31. Xenophon, Anabasis 4, 8, 20f., and 23. Strabo 7, 6, 2 (320). Lynch, Armenia I 18f. Arrian, Periplus 5, 2. NID, Turkey II 52f. 32. Inscriptions, EAM 549, nos. 95–7. Cumont, SP II 367–9. Lynch, Armenia I 28. Bryer and Winfield mention cults also of Abundantia and Nemesis, Pontos 180. 33. Bishops, EAM 404. Procopius. Aed. 3, 6, 1–26, and 7, 1. EAM 545f., no. 89 (east gate), with nos. 91(west gate) and 90. Cumont, SP II 366. In 1814, Kinneir, Journey 338, ‘found it impossible to copy [the inscription over the eastern, Erzerum gate] from the great number of Turks continually hovering about the spot’. The history of Trebizond after Justinian is discussed by Bryer and Winfield, Pontos 182–6, and bibliography.

A

R

Y

A

e

s i

D

R ACA

MPS

S

IS

SI

ci

A

h e cS h i o a c M e n M H

E

W

O

PETRA ?

P RY o n l TA N I

Moshora

as

azian

G

A

ES

Se

M

L

gra

e

R

S

CHADAS ?

M

AR

AX

E

SARAPANA ? Surami

I

A

U

SCANDA ?

NI

E S RAUGONIA ?

N

)(

ANDAGA ?

N

e t a ei

azi

S

)( Passimta

A

SUA ARCHAEOPOLIS

Sa

C

E

)(

S

Aletli

A

E

KAINEPOLIS

I

B

Zguderi

Mamisson

0

Darial

M )(

0

F

O

R

A

24

S

100 km

50 miles

G

GORNEAE

I

HARMOZICA

N

S

SATALA

P

)(

4

Zigana Gd.

Ab

Abk h

H IP PO S

)( Klukor

U

C US d o c h e z i CAH O BO CHOBUS ps i l aL e CP H AH I S PHASIS SIS

ARCHABIS ATHENAI CORDYLE

Colchi Sanni ) (Drillae

ae

ZIGANEOS

ig

APSARUS

San

A

STROBILOS MONS

D

RU

TRAPEZUS

Zilchi

SEBASTOPOLIS

P O N T U S E U X IN U S

B l a c k S ea

PITYUS

Anchxa

KORAX

)(

C Maroukh

C

CY

RHIZAION KAINE PAREMBOLE OFIUNTE HYSSOU LIMEN

3

2

1

)(

)( Achun-Dara

Z

AL U TU S

S

r

B

all

ARAGO

d

 360 

y

A

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

SEVENTEEN

The Pontic Coast (Maps 4, 24, and, partially, Fig. A2)

The northern flank of Vespasian’s frontier was protected eastwards from Trapezus, as far as Sebastopolis and the foothills of the western Caucasus: a voyage of 134 miles across the open sea, but at least 100 miles longer around the crescent coast.1 F ROM T R A PEZUS TO TH E CAUCASUS: A NCHOR AGES A N D FORTS This was a turbulent region. Attempting to conquer the tribes between Pontus and the Crimea before his second war against Rome, two-­thirds of Mithridates’ army had been lost in skirmishes and to the severity of the climate. In the mountains above Colchis in 65 bc the Heptakometae intoxicated three maniples of Pompey’s army with bowls of mad honey, and easily destroyed them. The dangers of navigation along unprotected shores had been exposed during the return of the Roman army from victory three days’ march from the Tanais (Don) in ad 49. Some of the ships were driven ashore in the Crimea and surrounded by barbarians, who slew the prefect of a cohort and many auxiliaries. The tribes below the Caucasus lived on piracy. In ad 64 Nero deployed 40 biremes and 3,000 soldiers to subdue the nations bordering the Euxine to east and north. But in July or August ad 69, Anicetus incited the tribes of the eastern seaboard, barbarians, to attack Trapezus in their camarae. It was because of these incessant ­barbarian raids that Vespasian added legions to Cappadocia, and appointed a consular governor.2 Soon after his arrival as governor of Cappadocia, Arrian sailed from Trapezus, perhaps in July ad 131, to inspect forts and their garrisons along the eastern Pontic coast; and in the Periplus, the ‘circumnavigation of the Euxine’, reported to Hadrian a coastline under determined Roman control, and tribes under the supervision of client kings. Accompanied by his assessment in Latin, the Periplus is the principal source for the military nature of many of the coastal stations: full of military, geographical, political, and antiquarian detail, a model of clarity and erudition, and of great historical value.3

◀  M ap 24  Pontic Coast, Colchis, Armenia, Iberia (from GSGS 2555, Asia 1:1, 000,000 (North K.37 Batum and K.38 Tiflis), compiled at the RGS under the supervision of the GSGS, drawn and printed at the War Office 1916, Provisional Edition. Abkhazian Wall outlined from Pachulia, 120, with Deutsche Heereskarte (Russland-­Kaukasus) (K-­37-­XII Ssuchum) 1:200,000, January 1943)

Discovering Rome’s Eastern Frontier. Timothy Bruce Mitford, Oxford University Press (2021). © Timothy Bruce Mitford. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843425.003.0018

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 362  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

A chain of substantial forts protected secure anchorages. Spaced roughly a day’s passage apart, they could control all traffic approaching Trapezus from the east by sea and land. As far as Phasis, all except the abandoned fort at Athenai lay on rivers tumbling down from the coastal ranges. Their purpose was to guarantee the anchorages, to assist safe navigation along a coast whose dangers Arrian experienced in person, to ensure the behaviour and allegiance of the coastal tribes, and to block routes by which turbulent peoples might sweep down from the Caucasus. The continuity of a succession of military posts stretching eastwards from Trapezus is suggested by the places of martyrdom of St Orentius and his six brothers, legionaries exiled from Satala supposedly during the persecution of Galerius Maximianus in ad 306–11. When weather permitted, travel, resupply, and reinforcement were by sea. But the rugged coastline and unpredictable winds, mainly onshore, make the eastern Euxine unreliable and notoriously hazardous. With no navigational aids but the stars, at the mercy of the winds, and along a coastline unmarked by lights, non-­urgent navigation was ef­fect­ ive­ly confined to daylight. Prudent mariners preferred to anchor overnight. Safe anchorages, not far apart, were of vital importance, and their close control a military necessity. Trapezus and Sebastopolis were linked by a road, shown in the Peutinger Table with eighteen intermediate stations. Many of the distances between them are identical with those sailed by Arrian. From Trapezus passing through dense vegetation and across ten rivers known to Arrian, the road led eastwards through Archabis as far as Apsarus, by the mouth of the Acampsis (Çoruh); a difficult route, perhaps no more substantial than the rough track through the Taurus gorge. Of seven stations before Apsarus, Arrian reported only two: the fort at the mouth of the Hyssos, and the once important station at Athenai. Beyond Apsarus the coastal ranges gave way to the rich plain of Colchis, stretching eastwards below the Caucasus and the high passes which, long before Justinian, offered difficult routes for barbarian invasion from the north. The plain was filled with cities, and was watered by many rivers. Pliny knew almost all of those reported by Arrian, with the precise distances between each; seven, including the Phasis, large enough for navigation. They were crossed, no doubt, by ferries similar to the large kayik on the Euphrates east of Melitene. The river names provide locations for several stations, settlements with anchorages at their mouths. Of ten stations marked in Peutinger after Apsarus, Arrian reported two: the fort at Phasis and the anchorage at Chobus.4 With a trireme and several cargo ships, carrying unspecified supplies for the forts and garrisons, Arrian sailed eastwards as far as Apsarus, the furthest point, he reckoned, in the length of the Euxine; then north and north-­west to Sebastopolis. In his wake, Brant, the first British Vice-­Consul in Trebizond, embarked in a galley in May 1835, and coasted along the shore for sixty hours as far as the Joruk Su (Çoruh): a journey which could ‘only be performed in boats: there are no practicable roads’.5 From Apsarus, Arrian’s course lay north, past the Acampsis (Çoruh), to Phasis and Chobus; initially at night and under oars, at a speed of not more than 5 knots, for the north wind was light. From Chobus he continued by night, indication, it seems,of some urgency. In the approaches to Sebastopolis, his course turned towards the setting sun. There the Caucasus met the sea, and the fort marked the end of Roman control. Including inspections, and stormbound for two days at Athenai, Arrian’s voyage seems to have taken ten days under sail and oars. He evidently planned to arrive at each fort at around midday, allowing time to carry out inspections in daylight. On the exposed coastline, safe anchorages were scarse, and the forts were spaced at irregular distances apart.6

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE PONTIC COA ST  363

Some of the forts had been established long before. The forces deployed by Nero to subdue the coastal tribes demanded safe and protected anchorages among them; and the numbers imply a chain of garrisons. At Phasis, known to Pliny as a most celebrated city, Arrian inspected a fort in which earth walls and wooden towers had been replaced with brick; and a civilian and trading settlement had grown up outside the walls. Drawing perhaps on Corbulo’s reporting, Pliny knew castella, forts, at Absarrus, where a theatre and hippodrome were later built, and at Sebastopolis; and an earlier fort had existed at Athenai. Under Trajan, Procopius recalled, detachments of Roman soldiers were stationed evidently in all the coastal towns east of Trapezus, as far as the Sagrae, in or beyond Colchis. In c. ad 400, the Notitia Dignitatum lists cohorts in garrison at Hyssou Limen and Sebastopolis, and at Caene Parembole. To counter the Persians, pressing below the Caucasus towards the Euxine, Justinian founded Petra in the uninhabited part of Lazica, by the south bank of the Phasis, to be the principal fortress in Lazica, ef­fect­ive­ly Colchis, just beyond the northern limit of Roman territory. Beyond the Phasis were the very strong city of Archaeopolis, and the forts of Scanda and Sarapana. He rebuilt and strengthened the forts at Sebastopolis and Pityus. The remainder of the coastal forts seem by then to have been abandoned, but there were populous towns in Roman territory between Petra and Trapezus: Rhizaion, Athenai, and certain others. The allegiance of the coastal tribes, surrounding the forts and extending inland behind them, was of paramount importance. Trajan invited their rulers to pay homage at Satala in ad 114, and appointed client kings: Anchialos, east of Athenai, and Julianus, north of Phasis. Hadrian confirmed and repeated these arrangements, appointing Malassas of the Lazi, Resmagas of the Abasci, Spadagas of the Sanigae, and, 65 miles beyond Pityus, Stachemphax of the Zilchi. Thus, beyond Phasis, Roman clients, all but one his own nominees, extended without interruption to Sebastopolis, the limit of Roman control; and continued as far as Cotys, king of the Cimmerian Bosporus. Within Arrian’s province, tribal acquiescence was no doubt encouraged by the presence among them of forts and garrisons, at Hyssou Limen, Apsarus, Phasis, and Sebastopolis. His list of client kings shows the success of a policy to be continued, it seems, under Antoninus. Arrian inspected four forts and their garrisons, at Hyssou Limen, Apsarus, Phasis, and Sebastopolis; visited the abandoned fort at Athenai; and anchored with undisclosed ­purpose at the mouth of the Chobus. Of the forts on the Turkish coast, only Hyssou Limen (Araklı) has been tentatively located. In Georgia three sites have been identified: Apsarus (Gonio, near Batumi), Phasis (south of Poti), and Sebastopolis (once Dioscurias)—beneath Sukhumi, all lying on a coastline until recently in Soviet hands and sensitive to fieldwork. Near Samtredia in August 1965 I took the road to Poti instead of Sukhumi, and was immediately stopped by an unmarked Georgian police car following unseen.7 The forts were soundly constructed, and their powerful garrisons were known in detail by Hadrian: auxiliary cohorts at Hyssou Limen and Sebastopolis; no fewer than five cohorts, perhaps a vexillation of legionaries, supported by auxilia, at Apsarus; and 400  picked soldiers, almost a cohort, at Phasis, equipped with ballistas to withstand siege. Arrian’s inspections were rigorous. He paid the soldiers and inspected their weapons, exercised infantry and cavalry, visited the sick, checked arrangements for storing corn inside the forts, and examined the defences, walls, and ditches.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 364 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

The strengths suggest that Arrian may have inspected the forward defences of his province, perhaps reinforced, in anticipation of a perceived threat in Colchis. Reports of impending trouble may have reached Arrian. The invasion of the Alani, crossing the Caucasus some four years later, points to a likely source. At Phasis, and in the approaches to Sebastopolis, Arrian’s antiquarian interests were well rewarded.8

Hyssou Limen (Araklı, west of Sürmene) From Trapezus, Arrian passed the Colchi, known to Xenophon, and reached Hyssou Limen on the first day: 180 stades (about 20 miles) by sea, and in Peutinger 24 miles by land. The garrison was a cohort, which Hadrian knew to be infantry, with twenty cavalry as appropriate support. Arrian exercised the infantry, and made the cavalry hurl their javelins. This was, perhaps, cohors Apuleia civium Romanorum, deployed from the coast to form part of Arrian’s army in c. ad 135, and stationed at Hyssou Limen in c. ad 400. The fort should perhaps be sought in the valley of the Kara Dere, beneath Araklı or in the vicinity of its harbour. The anchorage at Sürmene was much better than that at Trapezus; and from it a track ran over the Pontic mountains to Bayburt, ‘following the comparatively easy and well protected Kara Dere valley and crossing the main ridge by a sheltered 8,000 feet pass which was rarely impassable in winter’. Blau’s map shows that this track passed far to the east of any road to the upper Harşit and Satala. But it offered a much shorter route from the coast to Bayburt, 56 miles, as against 121 miles from Trabzon by the Zigana pass and Gümüşhane. Behind the cohort, the unruly Sanni lived in strongholds in the coastal ranges. Hostile to Trapezus since the passage of Xenophon, brigands without a king, they had formerly paid tribute to Rome. Arrian was determined to enforce payment, or to destroy them. Surrounded by instability, the garrison had a real military purpose, and would have been directly involved in carrying out Arrian’s threats. Evidently some 20 miles east of Hyssou Limen, Caene Parembole, the new camp known in the Notitia Dignitatum, is unlocated. There, travelling east along the coast with St Orentius in ad 303, died Eros, the first of the brothers (22 June).9

Rhizaion (Rize) Two days later St Orentius reached Rhizaion, 50 miles east of Trabzon; and, with a stone around his neck, was cast into the sea (24 June). The position is not mentioned by Arrian. In c. ad 400 the garrison may have been ala Rizena. In the sixth century Rhizaion was a place two days’ sail along the coast from Trapezus and three days from Apsarus. There Justinian constructed a novel system of defence, and made it as large and safe as any city on the Persian frontier. It was a populous town. The remains of a barrel-­vaulted, brick-­built chamber in the north-­west tower of the upper citadel, built on a natural acropolis, and large rectangular blocks in four great towers of the lower citadel and walled town could ‘plausibly be the work of Justinian’: defending a triangle measuring c.335 metres from citadel to sea, and 240 metres along the shore. In the foundations of a  circular tower and its adjoining wall, a course of large rectangular blocks resembles classical masonry beneath the Ortahisar in Trapezus. Traces of semi-­submerged moles preserve the outline of a harbour similar to the Molos at Trapezus.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE PONTIC COA ST  365

From Rize a difficult route, practicable only in summer, led south over the Pontic mountains.10

Cordyle (? Kalecik, west of Athenai) Below and east of the headland of Kalecik, 4 miles west of Pazar, the mouth of the Kalecik Dere offered sheltered beaching, and was the probable site of Cordyle, and of the martyrdom of the third brother, Pharnakios (3 July).11

Athenai (Atina, now Pazar, 25 miles east of Rize) Arrian reached Athenai, apparently in one day from Hyssou Limen, after a difficult voyage of about 60 miles: in Peutinger 67 miles by land. Sailing in light winds at dawn, and under oars, he later in the day rowed through calm, then sharp head winds, and shipped much water. The name came not from an Athenian colony, but from Athenaia, in former times chatelaine of the region, and her tomb survived there until the time of Procopius, when Athenai was a populous town. There was an abandoned fort, perhaps contemporary with the Greek shrine of Athena mentioned by Arrian. Athenai, Ptolemy records, stood on a headland; and on a headland half a mile west of Pazar, large, well-­dressed rectangular blocks are built into the mediaeval Kız Külesi tower. At Pazar itself there are no sure remains of the classical period. The fort may have been occupied under Nero or the Flavians to control the anchorage. But it was inadequate and dangerous. Though sheltered from south, east, and even north winds, it could not accommodate many ships, and with westerly winds was unsafe, as Arrian was to discover. During the night a violent thunderstorm raged and the wind veered to south, then south-­west. Leaving his trireme at anchor in the lee of a rock, Arrian was obliged to beach as many of his ships as the shore could accept. One was wrecked, but he was careful to report the salvage of everything of value, including nails and caulking. It took two days for the storm to subside. As there was no garrison, Arrian justified his expensive visit as tourism. In a replay of the strategic threat confronted by Arrian, Russian troops landed at Pazar in March 1916. From there a paved track, perhaps as above Maçka constructed by the Russians, led through the Pontic mountains to İspir in the upper valley of the Çoruh (Acampsis).12

Apsarus (?Makriyali (Kemalpaşa), 7 miles south of the mouth of the Çoruh (Acampsis)) Arrian left Athenai at dawn, passed the palace, beside the Prytanis, of Anchialus, king of the Machelones and Heniochi, who had paid homage to Trajan at Satala, and with a light north wind arrived at Apsarus before midday, after a voyage under oars of about 28 miles: in Peutinger 36 miles by land. The fort, known to Pliny and implying occupation probably under Nero, was at the mouth of the river Absarrus. Beyond were the Zydreitae, subject to Pharasmanes, the Iberian king. Sailing east from Cordyle, two of St Orentius’ brothers, Firmus and Firminus, were martyred there (7 July), at a time when Apsarus, an ancient city, still possessed, if it escaped the Borani, huge walls, a theatre, and a hippodrome. But by the time of Procopius only the foundations survived. Arrian does not describe the harbour or anchorage, Originally named after Apsurtos, slain by Medea, the name was corrupted by the surrounding barbarians.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 366 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Close west of the mouth of the Çoruh and the southern exit from the plain of Colchis, and mid way between Trapezus and Sebastopolis by sea and land, the position was important. Perhaps in ad 128, cohorts of irregular infantry, or a small mixed force of auxiliaries and legionaries of XV Apollinaris, were stationed at Apsarus under the command of Plaetorius Celer, who had seen service as a centurion in XVI Flavia Firma, at Satala, and was familiar with the northern sector of the frontier. Apparently these units were under canvas, suggesting recent or temporary deployment to reinforce a smaller, permanent garrison. Arrian inspected the five cohorts stationed there: outside the legionary fortresses, the most powerful garrison on the eastern frontier. He paid ‘the army’, evidently deserving of Hadrian’s apparent knowledge and interest, and inspected their weapons, the wall and ditch, the sick, and arrangements for storing corn inside the fort. His assessment for Hadrian was attached in Latin. If Arrian used at Apsarus the organizational model revealed in his orders four years later for march and battle against the Alani, the garrison was perhaps a vexillation detached from XV Apollinaris at Satala, supported by two or three cohorts of infantry and archers: a temporary concentration of force to reinforce Hadrian’s instructions, articulated by Arrian, to deal with the Sanni in their strongholds behind Hyssou Limen. Brant’s journey in May 1835 reveals Arrian’s concerns. The sick were perhaps victims of climate, for nearby Batumi was ‘an unhealthy station, and those who venture to reside there from July to October are exposed to severe attacks of fever’. The corn supply was important, for ‘the country is so wooded and mountainous, that it does not produce grain sufficient for the consumption of the population’.13

0

100 m

F ig . 17.1  ‘Plan of the Fortress of Apsarus’ (Lekvinadze, before 1961; from VDI 108:2 (1969), 77, 2) (by permission of Professor Ivantchik, Chief Editor)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE PONTIC COA ST  367

Apsarus has been identified with the ruined fortress at Gonio: massive walls on a low rise above the coastal plain, about a mile from the Black Sea and 2 miles south of the Çoruh (Fig. 17.1). The large castle of Gonie, ‘held by the Turks, distant only forty miles from Phasis’, was described by Chardin in 1672: ‘four square, built of hard and rough Stones of an extraordinary bulk: seated upon the sea-­side upon a sandy foundation’, with, outside, a village of about thirty homes. The coast was ‘all exceeding High-­ land and rocks’. The rectangular shape might suggest a Roman origin, but the size, 245 metres long by 194 metres wide, is much larger than the requirement of an auxiliary cohort. Nevertheless, excavations in the principia of the fortress in 1995–8 revealed drain pipes dated to the second century, and two bricks or tiles, with the stamp COH II. This may refer to cohors II Claudia equitata, listed in Galatia and Cappadocia in ad 101, and discerned in Egypt in a fragmentary papyrus letter recording the evident presence at Apsaro of a veteran of [c]oh II Claudiana. Here, as at Phasis, there may have been a settlement of v­ eterans and traders. No coins or other datable material have been published. Apsarus was evidently abandoned and destroyed before the sixth century, and the remains of the fortress look mediaeval. The identification is open to further doubt. Both Arrian and Pliny placed Apsarus at the mouth of a known river, as part of a chain of coastal forts. The description does not fit Gonio: not on a significant river, and too far inland to have offered protection and convenience for ships beached or at anchor. The closest river flows into the sea at Kemalpaşa, formerly Makriyali, ‘long beach’. Nine miles north-­east of Hopa, 2 miles north-­east of Limani, ‘harbour’, and 4 miles south of Gonio, Makriyali was a major coastal station and the most easterly safe base of the Empire of Trebizond. Arrian’s Apsarus should be sought in this vicinity.14

Phasis Beside the river Phasis (Rioni), apparently on the south bank. Perhaps submerged in Lake Paleostomi, the ‘old river mouth’, south of Poti. Sailing from Apsarus before dawn, and after 2 miles passing the Acampsis (Çoruh) in the dark, Arrian evidently reached Phasis in a long day, a voyage of 360 stades (40 miles). In the river was a harbour, and a mooring place for ships. From there, Strabo relates, the voyage to Amisos (some 320 miles along the coast) and Sinope (400 miles) took three days, implying continuous sailing, by night as well as by day, at a speed of over 4 knots; or two days, if the weather and the outflow from the rivers were kind. Arrian found the water exceptionally soft and sweet. It would keep fresh for ten years, and ships calling at Phasis were ordered to empty and refill their containers. The current of the Phasis flowed so strongly that it did not mingle, and sailors could draw drinking water far out to sea. Phasis was founded as a colony of Miletus in the mid sixth century bc, beside the river Phasis. In a fragment of Aeschylus quoted by Arrian, the great river was the boundary between Europe and Asia, passed by the Titans on their way to witness the torment of Prometheus Solutus. Apollo Hegemon was the patron, his cult no doubt brought by the colonists. From his temple, an inscribed silver cup dated to 420–400 bc, looted and carried off perhaps by the Bosporan king Pharnaces or by pirates, was found north of the Caucasus in a burial mound of the first century bc. At the river mouth, Phasis was known to Pliny as a town of great distinction, and, in Strabo, was a market centre for the

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 368 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Colchians, protected on one side by the river, on another by a lake, and on a third by the sea. The honey was bitter. On the left of the entrance to the Phasis, Arrian reported, sits the goddess Phasiane, resembling Rhea, for she has a cymbal in her hand and lions beneath her throne, and sits like the Pheidias statue in the Metroon in Athens. At Phasis he was shown the iron anchor of the Argo: not old enough, he reckoned, but fragments of another anchor, in stone, were probably the original. Artemis too had a temple, raided by the Borani in c.  ad 256. Whether or not destroyed, the fort was clearly one of the garrisons, commanded by tribunes or centurions, standing beside the Phasis under Constantine. Awaiting Arrian 400 picked soldiers were stationed in the fort. Its siting , he reckoned, was very strong, and it lay in the most convenient position for the safety of seafarers. A wide double ditch surrounded the wall, formerly of earth with wooden towers. But wall and towers had been replaced with baked brick on sound foundations, and ballistas were installed. The fort, in short, was fully equipped against any approach by barbarians, and the garrison was protected against any danger of siege. Outside the walls lived the retired soldiers, various merchants, and others. To secure the houses outside the walls and the mooring place, Arrian decided to enclose them with another ditch, extending from the double ditch as far as the river. The garrison, almost a cohort in strength, and their carefully defended fort are a measure of the importance attached by Hadrian to maintaining a position at the mouth of the Phasis, after his withdrawal from Trajan’s province of Armenia Major. The rebuilding, probably several years before Arrian’s visit, and the elaborate defences, including artillery, updated by Arrian, show that the position of its earth and timber predecessor, however exposed, was considered essential. Hadrian thereby endorsed a policy inherited from Trajan, under whom detachments of Roman soldiers were stationed at the Phasis. The earlier fort had stood at Phasis for long enough to need reconstruction, for its soldiers to retire, and for the formation outside the walls of a civilian and trading settlement worth defending. It was probably built by Nero, perhaps by Vespasian, whose military concerns extended in ad 75 to Harmozica, the capital of Iberia, close north of Tiflis. The rebuilding in brick is likely to have been undertaken under Trajan, perhaps a decade before the Armenian campaign. The strategic importance of Phasis, at the furthest limits of the Euxine, was long known to Rome. Control of Colchis had enabled Mithridates to construct his fleet in preparation for his invasion of Bithynia and Asia in 89 bc. Here in 65 bc Servilius waited with his ships, to meet and perhaps to extract Pompey; marching west from Iberia with his army for some 210 miles, up the Cyrus valley and over the Surami pass (3,100 feet) to descend into Colchis. There Pompey recognised the dynast Aristarchus as king. The Phasis, Pliny knew, was navigable for several miles by ships of any size: as far, for Strabo, as the fortress of Sarapana, 70 miles from the sea. From there, on the eastern border of Colchis, people travelled overland to the Cyrus in four days, by a wagon road through narrow defiles and over 120 bridges. This was the route followed by Dumas in January 1859. Allowing eleven days to reach Poti, at the mouth of the Phasis, he left Tiflis with three carriages and nine horses, crossed the Surami heights, after Kutaisi boarded a long, narrow flat-­bottomed boat, and passed down the Rioni to Poti and a waiting steamer. A month before, the English Ambassador in Persia was obliged to engage sixty oxen to draw his three carriages over the pass.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE PONTIC COA ST  369

From Phasis Roman influence could thus extend throughout the plain of Colchis, and reach, albeit with difficulty, along the important trade route followed by Pompey towards Iberia and the mouth of the Darial pass at Harmozica: a journey far shorter than the overland route, of more than 500 miles, from Satala. The fort at Phasis commanded an essential link in the chain of strategic anchorages stretching to Sebastopolis. It was a centre for trading activity. The Colchians, Procopius states, were always engaged in commerce by sea with the Romans who live on the Euxine: supplying skins, hides, and slaves in order to obtain salt, wheat, and other good things which they needed. The plain of Phasis was, moreover, a valuable source of materials for shipbuilding and of timber, brought down, Strabo reports, by river. Hence the mooring place, enclosed by a new ditch.

F ig . 17.2*  Phasis: ‘Plan du Fort antique placé à l’ancienne embouchure du Phase, près de Poti’ (Dubois de Montpéreux, June 1833; from Voyage, Atlas, Series 1, Pl. XVIII) (BOD Mason Y. 65)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 370  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

On the Asiatic, southern side of the river, the fort of Phasis has been identified with the structure, partly submerged by a rise in the river level, surrounded by swamps and now lost, described by Dubois de Montpéreux. About 4½ miles south of the Russian fortress of Poti, and 2½ miles from the sea, Lake Paleostomi was the old river mouth, and to it Justinian dug a canal from the Phasis opposite Poti. Wading through barely penetrable marsh, Dubois found, 700 paces from the Phasis, ‘les restes d’un fort carré construit en briques. Aux quatre coins s’élevaient quatres tours carrées de 40 pas de face. La porte du fort était tournée vers la mer. Les briques qui ont servi à toute cette construction, avaient 10p. 6f. de long, 6p. de large et 1p. d’epaisseur [pouce = inch: c.27 × 15 × 2.5 cm]; elles étaient liées par un ciment rougeâtre.’ The interior, 140 paces wide, was just a sea, summer and winter, and the entrance gate a quagmire. The mounds of the collapsed towers were covered with a thick yellow clay. Allowing for a pace of about 1.5 metres, and for the difficulties of his survey, the plan shows a square fort, some 180 metres long and 175 metres wide (Fig. 17.2): similar in size to the forts at Sebastopolis and Pityus, but too large for Arrian’s 400 soldiers. The position, the overall dimensions, and bricks of the same thickness as fragments at the late Roman fort at Hortokop support identification with Phasis. But the circular, projecting corner towers described and drawn by Dubois do not resemble second-­ century work, and his fort was probably much later. A more suitable location may be that of the ‘R. Fort’ marked on the German Army map, on the left bank of the southern arm of the Rioni (Phasis), close to its mouth and between Poti and the Euxine.15

Chobus (probably at the mouth of the river Khobi) Arrian covered the short distance from Phasis in about half a day: 180 stades (20 miles) by sea, and 19 (?) miles by land. Entering the river Chobus, which was navigable, he anchored, perhaps only until nightfall. It was there that Anicetus, betrayed by barbarians, had been hunted down by Virdius Geminus two generations before. The Chobus is identified with the Khobi, tumbling down from the Caucasus as Pliny describes, and the second river north of the Phasis wide enough for navigation. There is no mention of a fort or garrison. Like his assessment of the troops at Apsarus, the purpose of Arrian’s visit and its results were reserved for his report in Latin. It was not, it seems, to inspect an existing fort, or tourism, activities carefully described elsewhere in the Periplus. Arrian must have had good reason to break his journey, in daylight, at the river. For the onward voyage to Sebastopolis was long, and required passage by night: risky off a low-­lying coast. Arrian’s visit may imply recognition of the military value of the Chobus: a reconnaissance, to see whether the mouth provided an anchorage and site suitable for a protecting fort; and to determine, perhaps, whether the long river-­line might serve as a barrier, as a frontier beyond Phasis, to block the outlets of the high passes over the western Caucasus. But his purpose was probably diplomatic. Four client kings had been appointed in the plain of Phasis and its northwards extension to Sebastopolis: three by Hadrian, the fourth, Iulianus of the Apsilae, by Trajan. His kingdom evidently embraced the mouth of the Chobus, where Anicetus had sought refuge in ad 69. Arrian was perhaps tasked to recommend whether Hadrian should continue Trajan’s patronage, so confirming and updating Roman control of the whole coastline.16

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE PONTIC COA ST  371

Ziganeos (? Anaklia) On the coast 50 miles south of Sebastopolis. At or near Anaklia at the mouth of the Inguri (Sigames). Sailing from Chobus for 210 stades (about 23 miles), Arrian passed the navigable river Sigames, 420 stades (47 miles) south of Sebastopolis. At its mouth was Ziganeos, known primarily from the Passion of St Orentius: there died the sixth brother, Kyriakos (24 July). It was later a bishopric in the metropolitan diocese of Phasis. The Inguri was the southern boundary of the Abkhazian SSR, its mouth some 57 miles by road south of Sukhumi (Sebastopolis); and forms a natural barrier across the northern end of the plain of Phasis. Close to the mouth on the southern bank stand the ruins of a huge fortress at Anaklia, described by Reineggs: ‘the residence of the Abghazian prince Lewan Serwasitse (Chervachidze); and although the inside of the fortress is only fourteen fathoms long and thirteen wide, yet it is surrounded by walls three fathoms high and five feet thick. The gate is two ells and a half high, and one and a half broad.’ From the Inguri, Reineggs reported, a road apparently ran along the coast, to the north side of the Caucasus. In the late nineteenth century a  rough track beside the Black Sea north-­west of Sebastopolis was replaced by the Coast Road.17

TH E A BK H A ZI A N WA LL Below the western Caucasus, the Abkhazian wall started at the sea, opposite the fort­ ress of Anaklia; followed the north bank of the Inguri (Sigames) inland for nearly 25 miles to the foothills; ran beneath them, over ravines and thickly wooded hillsides; crossed the Kodori (Hippos) to reach the Kelasuri; turned to follow its south bank, and terminated at the sea tower 3 miles south of Sebastopolis (Fig. 17.3). The remains of wall and towers can be traced almost unbroken for 80 miles. They enclosed and protected a rectangle of fertile, undulating coastal strip, watered by many rivers, about 45 miles long and generally not more than 14 miles broad. This huge construction protected an enclave of about 650 square miles, virtually the entire coastal region of the Abkhazian SSR. Observed in 1672 by Chardin, Colchis was fortified against the Abcas (Abkhazians) to the north ‘by a wall Sixty Miles in length, which has been laid in Ruines these many years’. In 1833, Dubois de Montpéreux saw the sea tower at the mouth of the Kelasuri, and, opposite the house of his host and informant, the famous Prince Hasan Bey, a section of the ‘grande muraille’ in the river valley. ‘Une tour . . . qui bordait le rivage était le point de depart d’un haut mur, . . . cette immense muraille qui enceignait tout leur (les Grecs) territoire jusqu’au pied des montagnes.’ From the sea, the wall followed the Kelasuri to a sort of acropolis on the summit of a high mountain, and from it ‘une se­conde muraille, remontant la Kodor, s’avançait dans l’intérieur du pays, circonscrivant une vaste étendue de terrain, y compris le premier plan des montagnes. Il fermait ainsi hérmetiquement toutes les hautes vallées, . . . et versait aboutir a l’Enguri. . . . De distance en distance on l’avait fortifiée de tours’. The very existence of the wall is almost unknown outside Abkhazia, and a century of work by local scholars has done little to reveal its purpose, let alone its history.18

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 372  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

F ig . 17.3  Plan of the Abkhazian Wall (after Pachulia, May 1963, and Deutsche Heereskarte K-­37-­XII and XVIII, January 1943)

In 1965 its ruins, hanging like a long curtain above the northern river bank, were plainly visible from the modern bridge over the Inguri, flowing wide and swiftly from the Caucasus; and I was permitted to see a short section in the Kelasuri valley. Close to the south of the river mouth, a massive tower stands on the shore (Fig. 17.4). From the northern corner springs the wall itself, 2 metres thick and 5.5 metres high, with larger stones on the outer, northern side. Following the crest of the low hills above the Kelasuri, it descends after about 2 miles to follow the valley floor, about 400 metres south-­east of the river. In places 8 metres high, the wall forms the outer face of square, two-­storey towers. Standing in ruins 70 to 90 metres apart, each within bow shot of the next, they were linked by a wide, internal cart-­ road. Pachulia reckoned that the towers continued throughout the length of the wall; and describes huge fortresses, sited at strategic points to control passage from the high passes down through the valleys of the Kodori, the Galizga, which flows into the sea at Ochamchiri, and the Inguri.19

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE PONTIC COA ST  373

F ig . 17.4  Sea tower at the northern end of the Abkhazian Wall, south of Sukhumi: the sea, left, and beyond, Sukhumi (August 1965)

From the sea tower, Pachulia followed at least part of the wall in May 1963. Seven miles inland, the wall veers eastwards, crosses the narrow Tsebeldağ valley, and climbs to the foot of Mt Gerzeul. On the summit above are the remains of a fortress nearly 500 metres long, with twin towers at each end, a small, early mediaeval church with a roof apparently of fluted tiles, and a funnel-­shaped cistern. From Gerzeul the wall descended, with separate ruined towers, into the gorge of the Kodori. Pachulia crossed the river by raft, and here, it seems, for his onward account lacks detail, his expedition ended. Four miles north of the wall, the Kodori valley was commanded by the later fortress of Tsebeldağ, 15 miles east of Sukhumi. Excavated in a necropolis in 1960, and sighted in Sukhumi in 1965, were an aes probably of Hadrian; denarii of Antoninus of ad ­138–44, and of Julia Domna; and an inscribed, fourth-­century medallion. German Army maps and offensive plans in 1942 lay bare the strategic importance of the high passes over the western Caucasus, and of the position of Sebastopolis. Tracks leading down from the Maroukh and Klukor passes converged in the valley of the upper Kodori about 20 miles east-­north-­east of Tsebeldağ. Diverging, one route continued south-­west towards Sukhumi; the other, turning south, followed the river through the Tsebeldağ gorge. This was the main route from the Kuban to the plain of Colchis. The scale of the wall and its fortifications indicates a more ordered society than the tribal organization reported by Arrian; and suggests external interest and assistance to those within its protection. But the wall itself has produced no archaeological evidence for date. The necropolis at Tsebeldağ and the early coins have not been linked with its construction. Inside the wall no substantial remains of civic life have been discovered. Longer than Hadrian`s Wall, the Abkhazian may be contemporary with the Long Wall

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 374  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

in Thrace, built in the late fifth century and repaired up to the eleventh. The construction of the remains sighted in the Kelasuri valley points to a single building phase. Most of the wall, Pachulia believes, was built in the fifth and sixth centuries, with repairs up to the tenth. Large ashlar blocks incorporated in the sea tower beside the Kelasuri, and mentioned by Pachulia in other inland sections of the wall, point to an earlier period. Massive rebuilding of the fort at Sebastopolis under Justinian may suggest simultaneous work, unmentioned by Procopius, underlying some of the remains of fortresses described by Pachulia. Different sections of the wall were probably built and repaired by local ­rulers over the centuries following Roman withdrawal from the Caucasus.20 BEL OW TH E CAUCASUS

Sebastopolis (once Dioscurias) (beneath Sukhumi) Arrian arrived at Sebastopolis before noon: a voyage of 630 stades (about 70 miles), by land 43 miles from Chobus. As his trireme neared the anchorage, he saw the Caucasus (Fig. 17.5), and the summit was pointed out. It was called Strobilos, where Prometheus in legend was hung up by Hephaestos. This was Mt Elbrus (18,510 feet), the summit cleft after the deluge by the keel of the Ark, floating over the mountains towards Ararat, its final resting place. His passage was overnight: at a speed of about 5 knots, Arrian cannot, as from Apsarus, have sailed before dawn. He does not describe the anchorage, presumably the roadstead off the modern town, but notes that Sebastopolis was formerly called Dioscurias, a colony of Miletus; founded probably in the mid sixth century bc. It was clearly an important trading centre, and Pliny was well informed. The city, some thought, was founded by the charioteers of Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri, from whom the Heniochi (charioteers) were descended. Once very famous, it was deserted. At the beginning of the isthmus between the Euxine and the Caspian, tribes speaking 300 different languages came down to it, mostly Sarmatians, all Caucasians; and the Romans conducted business through 130 interpreters. The location commanded the southern and western end of routes leading from the Kuban valley across the Caucasus: in particular, routes descending from the Maroukh and Klukor passes and along the Tsebeldağ valley. The coastal road shown in

F ig . 17.5  ‘Panorama de l’Abkhazie et du Caucase occidental’ (Dubois de Montpéreux, June 1833; from Voyage, Atlas Series 2, Pl. VII, described I, 301–6) (BOD Mason Y. 65)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE PONTIC COA ST  375

Peutinger did not terminate at Sebastopolis, but continued by Caspiae, marked as a ­castellum, and perhaps Archaeopolis or Harmozica, to Artaxata, 400 miles away. Pliny knew Sebastopolis as a fort, 100 miles from Phasis. Probably established under Nero, it lay in the territory of the Sanigae, whose king, Spadagas, had been appointed by Hadrian. Pliny and Strabo agree that the coastline was peopled by wild tribes. Arrian paid the soldiers immediately on arrival, inspected their horses and weapons, watched the cavalry leaping on to their horses, inspected the sick and the corn supply, and walked around the wall and ditch. His programme was the same as at Apsarus, and payment was again the first priority. But the state of training and the condition of the defences were evidently of equal interest; and Arrian’s preoccupation with arrangements for storing corn suggests, as at Apsarus and Phasis, that the possibility of attack by barbarians was in his mind. A marble plaque, marking perhaps the construction of a building by Hadrian, evidently records Arrian’s instructions, if not his visit. His concern for the sick is illustrated by Dubois de Montpéreux: the Russian garrison in 1833 was extremely unhealthy, and a quarter to a third of its strength was habitually in hospital. Buried beneath the modern city of Sukhumi, Sebastopolis lay on the coast about 3 miles north of the river Kelasuri, at the furthest end of the Euxine and the limit of Roman dominion. Perhaps already cohors I Claudia equitata, stationed at Sebastopolis under Theodosius, the part-­mounted garrison guarded the southern and western end of routes leading across the Caucasus from the Kuban valley. Tiles of XV Apollinaris at Pityus suggest a legionary presence at Sebastopolis too, perhaps in the later second century; confirmed, it seems, in a photograph, in Sukhumi N

a Se

B

0

LA

C

K

S

ll wa

EA

50 Metres

F ig . 17.6  ‘Sebastopolis: plan of the Roman castellum’ (after Lekvinadze, c.1959; from VDI 108:2 (1969), 83, 6) (by permission of Professor Ivantchik, Chief Editor)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 376  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

Museum, of a tile fragment stamped LEG. Sebastopolis was not attacked by the Borani in c. ad 254, and Roman garrisons remained at the forts there and at Pityus until the time of Procopius. But some nine years after the capture of Justinian’s principal fortress, Petra, by Chosroes I in ad 541, the houses were fired, the walls were razed to the ground to prevent them falling into the hands of the Persians, and the garrison withdrew in small boats to Trapezus. Justinian restored Sebastopolis with an impregnable circuit wall and other defences, and adorned it, a large and beautiful city, with streets and buildings. Excavations in 1954 and 1959 have partially recovered the plan of an apparently early fort, built in stone with double layers of brick, and now largely under the sea (Fig. 17.6). The length of the surviving, north-­west wall, c.175 metres, suggests a fort similar in size to Pityus, with large, square corner towers and a smaller, central tower flanked by intermediate bastions. The original phase, with rounded corners, is dated to the first or second cen­tur­ies. In the Museum, I sighted a denarius of Trajan Dacicus, and two of Hadrian, from ad 119.21

Pityus (Pitsunda) Arrian did not sail beyond Sebastopolis, the limit of his province. But hearing of the death in late ad 131 of Cotys, Hadrian’s client in the Cimmerian Bosporus, the governor felt it would be useful to include for the emperor details of the onward passage by sea to his kingdom. Pityus was the first anchorage to the north-­west, 350 stades (about 39 miles) away, evidently unprotected. Much of the coastline below the Caucasus, Strabo recorded, was mountainous, without harbours. Pliny knew Pityus as an extremely rich city, laid waste by the Heniochi;

F ig . 17.7  ‘Plan of Pitiunt (find spots, marked x, of tiles with legionary vexillation stamps)’ (Kiguradze, before 1987; from VDI 181:2 (1987), 90, 5) (by permission of Professor Ivantchik, Chief Editor)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE PONTIC COA ST  377

perhaps during a collapse of order among the coastal tribes apparent in the revolt of Anicetus in ad 69. Beyond the plain of Colchis, Ptolemy lists a ‘strong wall’ near the mouth of the river Korax, perhaps the Bzib, flowing down from the high passes above Pityus. This, Dubois suggests, was the ‘mur koraxien’ in the foothills below the Caucasus, noted by a contemporary of Justinian. Pityus held out against the Borani, in c. ad 254. But they soon attacked again and the city fell, opening the way by sea to the sacking of Trapezus. Pityus was restored by  Diocletian. There was washed up the body of Longinus, the last of the brothers of  St  Orentius, sailing on from Ziganeos and drowned in a storm at sea (28 July). A bishop of Pityus attended the Council of Nicaea in ad 325. Ammianus knew Pityus as a prominent city, adorned with churches and basilicae, in ad 364, and in c. ad 400 there was a powerful cavalry garrison, ala I Felix Theodosiana. When chosen for the exile of John Chrysostom in ad 407, Pityus was the limit of Pontus and of Roman rule. Under Justinian the two remaining forts in Colchis, at Pityus and Sebastopolis, with garrisons from earlier times, were demolished to prevent them falling into the hands of Chosroes during the Persian wars. Pityus was not restored. Excavations started in 1952, and continuing into the 1980s, revealed a fort measuring c.165 by 145 metres, with corner and three intermediate towers on each wall except the eastern (Fig. 17.7). Outside the east gate were baths, and a 75-­metre extension of the walls to include the settlement. About 1,400 Roman coins, dating from the first to the fourth centuries, suggest a Roman presence before Hadrian, and the establishment of a garrison perhaps some twenty years after Arrian’s report. As at Sebastopolis, a legionary element, perhaps a vexillation, is later confirmed by at least three tiles stamped LEG and LE]G XV: a deployment perhaps contemporary with the garrison under Marcus and Commodus at Kainepolis. Beyond Pityus, evidence for the presence of Roman forts is unsound.22 TH E M A I N PASSES OV ER TH E CAUCASUS The mountain ridges and passes of the Caucasus range are broadly 2,000 feet higher than those in the Alps. The huge barrier, 600 miles long, was crossed by about seventy tracks and paths: minor and difficult routes, some suitable only for pack animals and men marching in single file, and closed by snow for all but two or three months of the year. In the central and eastern Caucasus two routes were of particular strategic importance and concern to Rome. The Darial pass (7,810 feet), called by the Russians the ‘Pass of the Cross’, gave access to Iberia. Approached through the Terek (? Alutus) gorge, it descended the Aragvi (Aragos) valley to Msketa (Harmozica) close north of Tiflis. From the northern nomads, Strabo knew, a difficult journey of seven days led to Iberia, climbing for three days, and for four descending the Aragos. There the way was blocked by an impregnable wall: perhaps the walls strengthened by Vespasian in late ad 75, below the junction of the Aragos and the Cyrus. At Cumania, in the chasm of the Terek, were the Caucasian Gates seen by those serving in Armenia with Corbulo and described by Pliny: the Dar-­i-­Alan, ‘gate of the Alans’. Along the Caspian shore, the Derbent passage, ‘always the historic highway along which armies have passed the Caucasus’, gave access to Albania. At the narrowest point between the mountains and the sea, the gap is about 6 miles wide. This too was blocked

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 378  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

by a wall constructed as early as the fifth century ad to protect the Persian Empire from invasion from the north, and garrisoned by the Sassanian kings. The narrow defile was known, Dubois recalled, as Bab-­al-­Abvah, ‘Porte des Portes des Perses’. These were the Caspian Gates, narrowed and made difficult by Etesian gales in summer, the southern exit commanded by a legionary detachment under Domitian. Between them lay the Kodor pass (9,290 feet) east-­north-­east of Harmozica; and a minor and difficult route crossed the Salavat pass (9,240 feet) into northern Albania.23

Passes over the Western Caucasus Difficult and narrow routes led over the high crest of the western Caucasus. The passes of Passimta and Elbrus, Dubois reported, ‘ne sont praticables que pendant quelques mois de l’année à cause de leur hauteur relative; ils étaient très difficiles pour le passage d’une armée; néanmoins, les Lazes étaient là aux débouchés de ces deux grandes vallées (Rioni and Inguri) en cas de nécessité’. In winter, Strabo relates, the high peaks above Dioscurias (Sebastopolis) could not be crossed. But in summer travellers passed through snow and ice by tying spiked plates of untanned ox-­hide, like drums, to their feet, and lying on sledges to slide down with their loads. Men also attached to their feet small wooden discs, fitted with spikes. Three passes in particular allowed access from the north, and explain the strategic importance of Sebastopolis. West of Mt Elbrus (18,510 feet), the Achun-­Dara and Anchxa passes (both c.8,500 feet) carried a route which climbed southwards from the valley of the Kuban, and descended to the upper Bzib (? Korax). Diverging there, one path descended the river to Pityus, the other continued south-­ eastwards to Sebastopolis. A second route led over the Maroukh pass (9,080 feet), by ‘deux chemins’. ‘Le plus fréquenté’ passed by a narrow col east of the summit of Maroukh; while the other, ‘plus particulièrement fréquenté par ceux qui viennent de l’ouest de l’Abkhazie’, and followed by Reineggs, passed by another col west of the summit. United, they continued south-­eastwards to the upper Kodori (Hippos). There, at the later fortress of Chchalta, the combined route from the Maroukh pass was joined by a third route, from the Klukor pass (9,240 feet), carrying once the Sukhumi Military Highway. This ‘grande route’ descended the Kodori south-­westwards into the high Tsebeldağ valley, to reach Sebastopolis. West of the Darial pass, this, Dubois identified in 1833, was the most important pass over the Caucasus: ‘le col du Maroukh fit une des plus antiques voies de communication du Caucase, et c’est par-­là que passe en grande partie la civilisation et la commerce d’un revers à l’autre. . . . La grande route aboutissait à Dioscurias à travers les cols du Maroukh et la haute vallée du Tsebelda, arrosée par le Kodor et ses affluents.’ Founded precisely where the grande route descended from the Caucasus, Dioscurias was once the great emporium of commerce from north and south, from the steppes and from the Black Sea. East of Mt Elbrus, two passes gave access to the plain of Colchis. From the valley of the eastern Tcherek, the Passimta pass (c.9,400 feet) led to the headwaters of the Phasis (Rioni). The difficulties and obstacles to constructing a route similar to that by the Terek and over the Darial pass were immense. From the valley of the Ardon, a tributary of the Terek, the Mamisson pass (9,280 feet) carried a more important route, later followed by the Imeretian Military Road. Both routes descended the Rioni to join the upper Phasis at Kutaisi.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE PONTIC COA ST  379

In later times, the Caucasus passes were blocked by defensive walls. Baddeley quotes an anonymous Tagebuch of 1781: right through the Caucasus, from one sea to the other, in all the narrowest defiles giving passage through the mountains, [are] remains of frontier fortresses, walls and towers built right across defiles with impassable mountains on either side. On the Caspian at Derbent these remains are three versts [2 miles] long, and on the frontier between Mingrelia and Abkhazia [the Inguri] not more than 15 versts [10 miles], while in the mountains the widest are those on the Terek, 60 fathoms [110 metres].

Fortification of these narrow defiles was ‘the simplest, most natural and least expensive in regard to upkeep of any possible method of frontier defence in the Caucasus’.24 The danger from the north was real. Invited by the Iberian king, a horde of Sarmatian horsemen, perhaps already the Alani, crossed the Caucasus in c. ad 35 and devastated Armenia. The Alani passed through Iberia in c. ad 72. Against them the Parthian king, Vologaeses, asked in vain for auxiliary support in ad 75, to be led by one of Vespasian’s sons; and later in the same year Vespasian blocked with walls the exit from the Darial pass at Harmozica. In Albania, the southern exit from the route through the Derbent passage was, it seems, observed if not controlled under Domitian. In the west, perhaps in defence of Colchis, Hadrian appointed a king for the Lazi. Incited, it seems, by the Iberian king, the Alani crossed the Caucasus again, in c. ad 135, their threat to Armenia Minor deterred by Arrian. In c. ad 282, a large Sarmatian army crossed the western Caucasus by the Maroukh pass to ravage Colchis, and advanced to the Halys. Huns crossed in the fifth century. Until the sixth, the northern approaches to the plain of Colchis, the boundaries of Lazica (Colchis), and the border with Iberia were guarded with great difficulty by the Lazi, at the fortresses of Sarapana and Scanda. Subject to the Romans, but paying no tribute, their purpose was to prevent Huns from descending from the Caucasus passes into Lazica, and invading Roman territory. Justinian built walls across the narrow, very long mountain passes and the roads through them, to block the entrances into Lazica; replacing the garrisons briefly with Roman soldiers.25

The German Assault on the Caucasus German plans and operations to break through the Caucasus in 1942 are highly in­struct­ ive. Hitler’s strategic thinking delegated to Turkey the role of an ally protecting Germany’s southern flank against the remnants of a defeated Russia. In March 1941, he stated in discussion with Halder, Chief of the General Staff, that Turkey was to receive territory in the Caucasus, perhaps the Caucasus as a whole, as a reward for helping the Axis; but the territories were to be ‘exploited’ by Germany. In August he proposed to the Turkish Ambassador in Berlin that Turkey should annex the Turkic areas of the Soviet Union. In continuation of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia in June 1941, Hitler approved Case Blue in April 1942, a vast offensive across the southern steppes. In mid 1942, von Papen, the German Ambassador in Ankara, was asked by the Turkish Prime Minister and Foreign Minister about  the future of the USSR’s Turkic minorities; as Turkish plans featured the establishment of a series of buffer states along the future Turkish–German border, and a sphere of influence extending over these states. Hitler was not ready, however, to make territorial concessions to the Turks before they ­committed themselves fully to the Axis.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 380 

DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

To implement Case Blue, Army Group South (von Bock) was divided. Heeresgruppe A (List) was tasked, in Directive No. 45 signed by Hitler on 23 July, with the main strategic objective, Operation Edelweiss: to cross the Caucasus, to capture the entire eastern coast of the Black Sea as far as Batumi, and via the Derbent passage to seize the Baku oilfields, source of 80 per cent of Russian oil; and so to cripple Russia, and bring Turkey to the German side. This would open the way to the Middle East and Plan Orient: to link up with an advancing Afrikakorps, fuelled by huge stocks of petrol in Egypt. Heeresgruppe B (von Weichs), advancing towards Stalingrad, was to protect the flanks along the Volga. The Don (Tanais) was crossed on 25 July, and the wrecked oilfields at Majkop were seized on 10 August. Supported by part of Luftflotte 4 (von Richtofen), the 1st Panzer Army (von Kleist) rolled headlong towards the Caspian, its objectives the Grozny oilfields, the Derbent passage and Baku, and on 9 August approached the foothills of the Caucasus. The offensive plan, revised in August, envisaged advances across the Darial and Mamisson passes to Tiflis, and an assault on the high passes in the western Caucasus before their closure by snow in late September, to capture Sukhumi and advance to Batumi. The Terek was not crossed until 19 August, for the Russians gave priority to the defence of the Georgian Military Road through the Darial gorge and pass. Simultaneously, from Armeegruppe Ruoff, 49 Alpine Corps (Conrad) mounted a frontal assault on the western Caucasus. With great speed and daring, three Mountain Divisions crossed the Kuban on 13 August, penetrated the narrow valleys and cliff-­lined mountain defiles in small, mobile Kampfgruppen, skilfully manoeuvred with trucks, then pack animals to carry equipment, and in a week captured many of the vital passes: their objectives Sukhumi, Zugdidi, Kutaisi, and Tiflis. On 20 August, Hochbergsgruppe Groth planted the German flag on the icy summit of Mt Elbrus (18,510 feet), the pre-­ eminent point from which to proclaim expected victory. On the right, the 4th Mountain Division captured the Achun Dara, Anchxa, and other passes behind Pityus on 25 August, and paused barely 17 miles from Sukhumi. On the left and centre, the 1st Mountain Division took the Mamisson pass above Kutaisi, the Klukor on 17 August, and the Maroukh on 7 September: the last two passes considered the key to the planned advance to the coast. On the day of its capture the southern slopes were seized below the Klukor pass, and Kampfgruppe von Hirschfeld, holder of the Knight’s Cross, descended to the village of Klydz, 40 miles east of Sukhumi and commanding the upper Kodori valley: a remarkable feat recalling the apparent crossing of the Darial pass and descent to the Terek by a soldier of I Minervia in ad 163. Anticipation of victory included administrative arrangements. Inheriting and confirming the strategic importance of Harmozica, Tiflis was designated on 8 September as the seat of the Reichskommissar Kaukasien, already appointed; to direct the civil administration of south Russia as far as the Volga, and beyond the Caucasus of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, each identified as a Generalkommissariat. By December 1942 a German consul had arrived, newly appointed, in Trabzon. His efforts to persuade all the news­papers in his consular district to adopt a more pro-­German attitude were virulently attacked by the editor of Güzel Ordu, published 100 miles to the west: as Sir Denis Wright, Vice-­Consul in Trebizond, noted, ‘it was a brave thing to do at that time’.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE PONTIC COA ST  381

But the Germans were unable to sustain operations to reach the Derbent Passage, to penetrate the Terek gorge, or to descend to the Black Sea coast. Operation Edelweiss stalled in September, and in November was halted by winter. Resumption planned for spring 1943 was overtaken by disaster at Stalingrad. Von Papen had been informed that Turkey could not join the Axis Powers until Russia was crushed. But instead of overwhelming German pressure on the Turkish border, with victorious Mountain Divisions massing at the Georgian rail heads near Zguderi and at Tiflis, and a Panzer army passing through Armenia to Erivan and Aleksandropol (Leninakan), intent on passage, expected in May 1943, through eastern Turkey to Syria, the inducements and the dreams of a series of Turkic buffer states and a sphere of influence along the future Turkish–German border had turned to ashes; strict Turkish neutrality was unshaken, and SOE plans for a resistance force in the Dersim were not put to the perilous test.26 NOT ES 1. I have not attempted to cover the Black Sea coast east of Trabzon, except during a brief visit by car to Abkhazia, between the Chobus and Sebastopolis, in August 1965. 2. In ad 49 dispar fortuna fuit, Tacitus, Ann. 12, 17. Appian, Mithridatica 67. Heptakometae, Strabo 12, 3, 18 (549). Camarae, Strabo 11, 2, 11f. (495f.), were light and narrow. Built without nails, they had prows at each end, and could be rowed in either direction, while the sides could be heightened and arched over with planks. They could carry twenty-­five, occasionally thirty men, and were borne ashore to serve as huts and concealed bases for raids on villages and towns. Under Nero, Josephus, BJ 2, 16, 4 (367). Anicetus, once Polemon’s fleet commander,Tacitus, Hist. 3, 47, Vespasian Cappadociae propter adsiduos barbarorum incursus legiones addidit consularemque rectorem imposuit, Suetonius, Vespasian 8, 4. 3. The date is determined by news of the death, probably in late ad 131, of Cotys, Hadrian’s client in the Cimmerian Bosporus, Periplus 17, 3. The season was around midsummer: approaching Sebastopolis, Arrian’s course, Periplus 11, 5, was towards the setting sun. 4. St Orentius and his brothers, Bryer and Winfield, Pontos 326; martyred at Caene Parembole (new encampment), Rhizaion, Cordyle, Apsarus, Ziganeos, and Pityus. Rivers, Pliny, NH 6, 12–14, and Arrian, Periplus 7 and 10. Only Sebastopolis was not associated with a river. Reflecting their suitability in Roman times, harbours at Rize (Rhizaion), Pazar (Athenai), and Hopa (9 miles south-­west of Apsarus) until recently remained in use by the Turkish Maritime Lines. 5. Arrian, Periplus 4, 4. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 191–4 and 222. Arrian’s trireme, Fig. 16.3, and Starr, Roman Imperial Navy 51–5, was lightly built, about 120 feet long and 20 feet broad. Drawing 3 feet and with a low freeboard, it was ‘not very seaworthy or even stable’, and depended on the power, ‘limited and easily expended’, of about 150 oarsmen in three banks. ‘Even moderate seas were dangerous. On long voyages the rowers probably served in shifts. Sustained speed under oars was low, but with a favourable wind a large square sail was hoisted on the central mast, and a small sail at the prow.’ 6. From Trapezus to Hyssou Limen, 180 stades (c.20 miles), a day’s passage; to Apsarus, 790 stades (c.88 miles), requiring an overnight voyage or an intermediate landfall (at Athenai); to Phasis, 450 stades (c.50 miles), a long day’s passage; to Sebastopolis, 900 stades (c.100 miles), partly overnight, Periplus 7, 4 and 10, 1–4. 7. Nero’s forces in the eastern Black Sea, Josephus, BJ 2, 16, 4 (367). Pliny, NH 6, 12–14. Military control of the coast under Trajan, Procopius, Bell. Goth. 8, 2, 11–16, and 21;

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 382  DISCOV ER ING ROME’S E A STER N FRONTIER

and 8, 4, 4f.; and under Justinian, Procopius, Aed. 3, 7, 3–9. Petra is identified with Tsikhisdziri, on the coast 25 miles south of Poti, Lekvinadze, VDI 108:2 (1969) 87. Petra, forts and towns, Procopius, Bell. Pers. 2, 29, 18–22. Client kings, Arrian, Periplus 7, 3; 11, 1–3; and 18, 3. Antoninus installed Pacorus as king of the Lazi in ad 141, SHA, Pius, 9, 6. Sites are described by Lekvinadze, VDI 75–85. Arrian’s name appears on a fragmentary plaque at Sebastopolis, EAM 550, no. 99. 8. Arrian, Periplus: Argo 9, 2, Strobilos 11, 5, clients 11, 2–3 and 18, 3. 9. Arrian, Periplus 3, 1, with 7, 1, and 11, 1f. Araklı Kalesi, Crow, AS 44 (1994) 17, and with Bryer, Dumbarton Oaks 51 (1997) 283 and 286f. Wright, JRCAS 31:4 (1944) 292. Caene Parembole, Bryer and Winfield, Pontos 327. 10. Spearmen from Rize were included in his army in c. ad 135, Arrian, Ektaxis 7 and 14. Procopius, Aed. 3, 7, 3f., Bell. Goth. 8, 2, 3 and 10f., and Bell. Pers. 2, 29, 22. Bryer and Winfield, Pontos 331–4. 11. In Pliny, portus Cordule, west of Trapezus, NH 6, 4, 11. Listed east of Athenai, Ptolemy 5, 6, 6. Identified with Kalecik, Bryer and Winfield, Pontos 334. 12. Arrian, Periplus 4f., and 7, 1ff. Procopius, Bell. Goth. 8, 2, 10 and Bell. Pers. 2, 29, 22. The Kız Kulesi tower, c.7 metres square, Bryer and Winfield, Pontos 335f. and 339. Allen and Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields 370f. NID, Turkey I 47. 13. Arrian, Periplus 6, and 7, 3f. Pliny, NH 6, 12. Procopius, Bell. Goth. 8, 2, 11–14. From Trapezus, Apsarus was 970 stades (108 miles), three days along the coast by sea, Periplus 3, and 11; and 126 miles in Peutinger by land. Plaetorius Celer, ILS 2660, Abella: a parallel, perhaps, of the vexillation of XV Apollinaris deployed at Trapezus, EAM 547ff., no. 94. Sanni and Zydreitae, Periplus 11, 1f. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 193 and 191. 14. Chardin, Travels 105 and 157f. Lekvinadze, VDI 108:2 (1969) 76–9. Goniya harap (ruins), Bryer and Winfield, Pontos 346 and 350f. Bricks/tiles, Mamuladze, VDI 240:2 (2002), 33–9. The papyrus was perhaps a fragment of archives carried off to Egypt by a departing prefect of the cohort. Fort sizes, Collingwood and Richmond, Archaeology of Roman Britain 25f. Auxiliary units listed in Galatia and Cappadocia in the diploma of 29 March ad 101, EAM 452f. Makriyalı, Bryer and Winfield, Pontos 338. 15. Arrian, Periplus 7, 4–9, 5. Titans, Arrian, Periplus 19, 2, with Procopius, Bell. Goth. 8, 2, 27–33 and 6, 15. The Apollo cup, EAM 551, under no. 103. Pliny, NH 6, 13, and Strabo 11, 2, 17 (498). Borani, and Constantine’s forts, Zosimus 1, 32, 3, and 2, 33, 1–3. In Britain, Flavian forts of wood reached the end of their structural life by the beginning of the second century, and from ad 100, or soon after, began to be replaced in stone, Collingwood and Richmond, Archaeology of Roman Britain 34f. At Harmozica, EAM 556–8, no. 114. Sarapana, perhaps Shoropani, and the route to Iberia, Strabo 11, 2, 17 (498), and 3, 4 (500); and, Mithridates, 2, 18 (499). Plutarch, Pompey 34. Aristarchus, Appian, Mithr. 114. The route used by the invading Persians in the sixth century, Procopius, Bell. Goth. 8, 13, 5. Dumas, Caucase III 104–232. Dubois de Montpéreux, Voyage III 62–75, and Atlas, Planche XVIII. Deutsche Heereskarte, Einzelne Nachträge 1942 (Russland–Kaukasus), K-­37-­XVIII (Poti). 16. Arrian, Periplus 10, 1, and 11, 3. Anicetus, betrayed by the king of the Sedochezi, fluxa, ut est barbaris, fide, Tacitus, Hist. 3, 47f. Tacitus and Arrian doubted the reliability of the surrounding barbarians. 17. Arrian, Periplus 10, 2. Bishopric, Cumont, SP II 361, n. 1. Reineggs, Mount Caucasus I 325, and 333 (one ell = 45 inches). To the north as far as Sebastopolis, about 50 miles by land, Arrian reported no navigable river.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

THE PONTIC COA ST  383

18. Chardin, Travels 78. Dubois de Montpéreux, Voyage I 309–17. Mentioned by Baddeley, Caucasus 155, and Reineggs, Mount Caucasus I 325f. and 332, the wall is described by Pachulia, Golden Fleece 34–44. 19. The sea tower is 17 metres long by 7 metres wide. The walls, 10 metres high and 2 metres thick, are constructed with courses of squared river stones set in very hard white concrete. At the inland corners a few large ashlar blocks survive. In the Kelasuri valley, each tower is about 10 metres long by 9 metres wide, and stands to a height of about 6.5 metres. The walls are built with flat river stones, large on the outside and smaller inside, set horizontally on a concrete core. In a few towers, embrasures, 1.30 metres long by 1.60 metres high, are preserved in the upper storeys. No trace was seen of doors at ground level, and access was probably from the wall itself. 20. Deutsche Heereskarte, K-­37-­XII Ssuchum, and K-­37-­XVIII Poti. The course of the wall has been reconstructed from these maps, and from Pachulia’s description and map of Abkhazia, attached to Golden Fleece. ‘It can be no coincidence that Sebastopolis-­ Dioscurias and Pityus together lay near the Colchian end of the main route northwards, through the Tsebel’da valley and up the valley of the river Bzyb respectively,’ Braund, BAR 553 (1989) 34. From the Tsebeldağ necropolis, EAM 551, no. 102. 21. Arrian, Periplus 10, 3f., 11, 5, and 17, 1f. Ker Porter, Travels I 127. Pliny, NH 6, 14–16, and Strabo 11, 2, 16 (497f.). The Arrian inscription, and title, EAM 550, no. 99. Dubois de Montpéreux, Voyage I 278ff. Dismantled and abandoned, Procopius, Bell. Goth. 8, 4, 4–6; and restored by Justinian, Aed. 3, 7, 7ff. The fort, Lekvinadze, VDI 108:2 (1969) 81ff. Veneration of the Dioscuri, the early history of the trading city, and archaeological finds, Tsetskhladze, Klio 76 (1994), 85ff. 22. Arrian, Periplus 17, 3, and 18, 1. Strabo, 11, 2, 12 (495), and 14 (496f.). Oppidum opulentissimum, Pliny, NH 6, 16. Korax, Ptolemy 5, 9, 10, under Sarmatia Asiatica; and Steph. Byzantinus 373, 5 and 400, 19. Borani (Scythians), Zosimus 1, 32f. Oppidum non obscurum, Ammianus, 22, 8, 16. Excavations, Kiguradze, VDI 181:2 (1987) 88–92; tiles, EAM 551, no. 103. At Kainepolis, ILS 9117 and 394, and EAM 554f., nos 109–11. Lekvinadze, VDI 108:2 (1969) 85–7; and, beyond Pityus, 88–90. 23. Darial pass, Strabo, 11, 3, 5 (500). Pliny, NH 6, 30 and 40. Crossed by Ker Porter in October 1817, Travels I, 66–103 (and by myself in August 1965). Vespasian’s walls at Harmozica, EAM 556f., no. 114. Derbent passage, Allen and Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields 4–6; Dumas, Caucase I 301f.; Dubois de Montpéreux, Voyage IV 300; and EAM 562 f., no. 124. Salavat pass, EAM 561f., no. 122. 24. Dubois de Montpéreux, Voyage I 320f. and II 77ff. Strabo 11, 5, 6 (506). Baddeley, Caucasus 155f., and Map of the Western Caucasus. Allen and Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields 5f. 25. Alani, ad 35, Tacitus, Ann. 6, 33; ad 72, Josephus, BJ 7, 7, 4, and Suetonius, Domitian 2, 2, with, Vologaeses, Dio 66, 15, 3, and at Harmozica, EAM 556f., no. 114; ad 135, Dio 69, 15, 1f., and Arrian, Ektaxis. The king, Malassas, Arrian, Periplus 11, 2. Huns, Isaac, Limits of Empire 230. Lazi, Procopius, Bell. Pers. 2, 15, 2–4; and, for Justinian, Bell. Goth. 8, 13, 15–18. 26. Battles for the Caucasus passes, Glantz, JSMS 22:4 (2009), 700–11. Mt Elbrus, Lucas, Eastern Front 75–9. Turkish neutrality and SOE at strategic level, Tamkin, WH 15:3 (2008) 327–31. I Minervia, ad Alutum flumen secus monte Caucasi, ILS 4795, Cologne. Wright, JRCAS 33:2 (1946) 125f.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

ANNEX A

Geography and Climate (Maps 1–4, 16, 24)

GEN ER A L DESCR I P T ION Eight hundred miles by road from the Aegean, the mountains of eastern Asia Minor confronted Vespasian with challenges of altitude, accessibility, and climate not encountered in other sections of the imperial frontiers. The Roman frontier extended for more than 700 miles. From Commagene in north-­ eastern Syria it followed the Euphrates valley northwards through Cappadocia, passed through and across the mountains of Armenia Minor to Satala, and climbed over the high Pontic ranges to the Black Sea at Trapezus (Trabzon). A chain of protected anchorages extended along the Pontic coast to Sebastopolis (Sukhumi), below the foothills of the Caucasus. The distance from Samosata to Trapezus, 200 miles as the crow flies, was more than doubled over the ground. Yorke’s calculations in 1894, from Samosata to Trapezus around 470 miles, and from Melitene to Satala around 245 miles, underline the sheer scale of the frontier. They endorse the overall mileages recorded by the ancient Geographers, 466–77 miles in the Antonine Itinerary, and 511 miles in the Peutinger Table, with alternative routes across each of the mountain barriers. Many of the place-­ names are confirmed by Ptolemy. Distance in Turkey was, and still is, often measured in hours: a method, described by Colonel Maunsell, in vogue long prior to the advent of the Turks. An hour’s distance should be taken to be nearly 3½ miles on foot (rather than 3 miles, which can in practice lead to annoying underestimates of distance). It can be covered in an hour’s time by a native horse with rider in average weather on fair ground, but only under exceptional circumstances by troops on the march. Although a pedestrian might cover 35 miles of difficult mountains in 10 hours, a horse usually takes about 14. The ordinary rate of travel is that of caravans or loaded pack animals, usually a little under 3 miles an hour. Supposing the stage to be eight hour’s distance, 10 hours should be allowed for the actual march; or 6 hours for a 5 hour march. Time, confusingly, was reckoned from ­sunset, or rather from seven minutes after, which was considered a fixed reference point for each day, and was always 12 o’clock. Twelve hours after sunset was also (again) 12  o’clock. Noon at the spring and autumn equinoxes was thus at 6.00 (Turkish); in midsummer at about 4.15 (Turkish), ie with 7 ¾ hours of daylight remaining until sunset; and in midwinter at about 7.30 (Turkish), with 4½ hours of daylight remaining. As a general calculation in hilly country, I reckoned on foot to cover 3 miles in an hour. On horseback Yorke averaged about 3½. Conditions and travel were no different in antiquity. At unusual speed, Caesar marched the Sixth legion from Tarsus, through the Cilician Gates, to Zela in 47 bc, some 310 miles in about 22 days, at a rate of about

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

40°E

BLACK SEA Trepezunta 20 ad Vicensimum

22 24

Zigana Thia 17 Sedisca

24v v

st ba

Si

Se

36

Simos 40 0v 2 v

s

u at

in

18v

YS HAL

24

os

nd

a Bl

28

o di

e

M

27

25v

an

Sc

/24

Ca m

ar a

ia

is

a

40°N

Zar a 18

ra D 28

28

30 Gundusa

16 Teucila 28

24

Satala leg.XV Apollinaris 17/26

24v

18/24

Sabus

16 Dascusa

Aranis 28

ARSA

NIAS

32

ad Praetorium

in Medio

a

Domana

Suisa Ar C au Analiba ar ra sa ES co AT Si gis R s n H 16 e P rv EU as Zimara

Eumeis

Tonosa

26v

24/26 Ha z

24

sso

Euspena 25

26v

Daga la

18

ad

24v v

23 Zoana 25v

25v

24v v

24

co n

da

N

O

lo

ic op

to e

ol

i

IRIS

es

r iz a

LYCU S

s no

so Pi 22

32

24

Chiaca

16

38 vv v 28

TIGRIS

/ 22 v/ 12 24

v

Melas 18 v 26/28v 24/22 i r Melitena a d v as rc 24 v an 12v Miasena t a A to n P 24 i na ax s Coma nd ra ca vv v v a 28v a 8 2 Ar D 24v sd O o 24v s Lacotina s bi is ra ric15 i A S so cu 26v Co Perre

Germanicia

15

a an ab t Ca 16 in

24v se ar 13 Samosata h T leg. VII

s su Ni 14

12

15/20

Aedissa 10/15 12/14/24 Dolica

Zeuma

5

2 13/

ES RAT PH EU

Sico Basilisses

N

2 12/2

Canaba

15/18 in Medio

MILEAGES LISTED: 24 v = 24 miles twice 24 vv = 24 miles three times 24/26 = 24 and 26 miles

F ig . A1  Antonine Itinerary: Commagene, eastern Cappadocia, Armenia Minor, and Pontus (Cuntz, paras 176–217)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

40°E

n

A

BLACK SEA

Ca

t

Py

30

Polemonium

?

36

s ne

y ep

30

lia

ca

m

lo hi

riu

24

?

ile 16 20 rd o C Magnana

P

Z

23

15

27

Zimara

Megalasso

18

Vereuso

13

10

20

20

20

Ziz

iola

EU PH R

ATES

Analiba 15

13

Saba

18

Hispa 18 Arangas Ciaca AS M EL

ARSA

NIAS

13

is

Coruilu 14

14

Claudia

Arcilapopoli

TIGRIS

Arsinia 14

12

en

te n

Colchis 13

AdAras Thertonia 9 ? 8 Corne Metita

M

14

16

8

Sama

Lagalasso

24

12

Mazara

el

Arega

18

9

28 18

Nocotesso

30

Satala

12

Haris

17

Daseusa

Singa

Hassis

Cunissa

16

18

Zenocopi

30

16

13

?

Comaralis

18

Domana

8 Elegarsina Megalasso Caleorsissa Bubalia 24

LYS HA

e nt

fiu

O

18

Dracon is

is ol 14

15

22 32

op

?

luncis

Mesorome 16 21 22 Oleoberda Doganis 25

Comassa

Sevastia

Spe

25

ic

on da ag ab ul a Da na e

G ag

M

tic

Po n

40°N

Anniaca

25

IS

N

IR

a

a

5

18

10

6 Bylae Frigdarium 8 Patara 4 Medocia 12 Salonenica

Matuasco

LYCUS

16

16

H

24

Gizenenica

Sauronisena

38

M iro

21

Neocesaria

Seramisa

m Co

so

as

rn Ca

Bartae

10

an

a

el

M

8

e

m

illi

s ys

o

8

nt

Sa lm ala ss

a 7 en

e an

e ap Tr

te

30

m Ca

a nt

zu

um

in

le

ac

er

H

ila

uc

on

Va r

40

Tegea

o nc

Coissa

46

Pagnum Ariandum 5

Nastae

5

Pordonnium

Capriandas

2

4 4

– Singe Ad pon

2

Carbanum 4 19 Tarsa

24

Octacuscum

Perre

3

?

12

Barsalium

9 30

Heba

Charmodara Samosata

N

Ad fl. Capadocem

Arulis R PH EU

24

underlined

S ATE

Zeugma

Forts

F ig . A2  Peutinger Table: Commagene, eastern Cappadocia, Armenia Minor, and Pontus (Miller, segments IX and X)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

388 

A N NEX A: GEOGR A PH Y A ND CLIM ATE 69

70

72Ἂψο

71

ρρ

Ξυ λίν η

Φα ρνα κία

Κερ

ασo ͂ υs

όп ολι s

᾽lσ χ

T N O P

S

C

Ἀριαράθιρα

POL.

E

S

M

U C UR

R

US

Фούφηνα M

I• L

IC

IA

TA

I N

O

L

E

Kιακίς

K A •

’Aράσαξα

Κίζαρα

T A

O

Γαρνάκη

N

I V A L Λαύγασα or

N I

38 Παδυανδός

∑αβάγηνα

A

Κόμανα Kαππαδοκίας Tαναδαρίς

I

A

N

68

S Y R I A

υλα ρθ ο

Mό

ρδ ύλ η

Kο

ην ω῀ ν ἄ

Mελιτηνή Kόρνη Mέτειτα

Zιζόατρα

39

Kλαυδιάς Πασάρνη

E

Nοσαλήνη

’Iουλιόπολις

Σεραστερή

Bαρζαλώ

Λακριασσός

E E N A V A R Eὐτέλεια

38 Xολμαδάρα ’Aράκη

C O M M A G E N E

῎Aδατθα

69

Mάρκαλα or Kάρμαλα

Kαπαρκελίς

Λεανδίs

Mόψου Kρήνη

Eὐσιμάρα

∑ίνιη κολωνία

Λεύγαισα

Λαδοινερίς

Καρναλίς

Φουσιπάρα

E

Σημισός

Nύσσα Καρναλίς

N

40

R

E

Δάγουσα

J O M A

Zοροπασσός

67

E

M

Κόταινα

M O U R I A N

Δασκοῦσα

’Aράνη

I T

Zιμάρα

Kασάρα or Mασόρα

Tιταρισσός

’Iασσός

E U P H R AT E S

Zωπάριστος

Kιάνικα

῎Оρσα

39

Tιραλλίς

Kαράπη

῎Iσπα

R

Mάρδαρα

MELA S

Καβασσός

Σίσμάρα

A R M E N I A

I NT

Фούφάτηνα

∑ίνδιτα

Δάλανα or Δάδανα

Ἀναλίβλα

’Oρόμανδος

Eὐδοίξατα

Оὐάρσαπα

42

41

Σελεοβέρροια

῎Aρχαλλα

C

Kαλτιόρισσα

Γοδάσα

A

Σόβαρα

N

Xάραξ

Σελεoβέρρoια

Eβάγηνα

Κύβιστρα S URU I TA ANT

῀ Δαγωνα

PONTUSΣεβάστεια

SA R GAR AUSE NE Γαύραινα Mάρωγα

40

O

A

S

DOR US Πισιγγάρα SC ISC

Δανάη

Φίαρα

D

R

O η νά Δα

P

Φίαρα

N

I

N

O M

E L

Mεγαλωσσόs

O

R

USENE RA

IR IS

᾽Aξιρίs

R

IA

Zήλα

SA RG A

I

п

Tάпoυρα

Δόμανα

M

(E

п

N

ICUS

41

Σαβαλία

43

E

пοντική

44

L

JO

Kόμανα

Kαμουρήσαρβον

Ἂσιβα

Σίνηρα or Σίνιβρα

Xoρσαβία

Nικόпoλιs

S

A

Mεγάλουλα

Mεσορώμη

O

C U S C I D O S A U P YC

A

I

BI

M

PONT. GALAT-

A

Άβλατα

A

M

Nεoκαισάρεια

Mάρδαρα

᾽ αλα

K

R

42

C

R

73

A

A

Σαυναρία

Kαρουανίs

C

S

IS

Eὔδιϕοs

U

U

Ἄζα

P

A

A

SS

O S R R S O A P

Bαρβάνισσα

Kωκαλία

KI

᾽O

T

͂ υs ε ζo

N

ν ιμή υλ

O

ήν λιμ ῀υs ῀υs ιζo п ιo

σ σo

P

THERMODON

αп Tρ

᾽lα σόν ιον Κυ τ έω ἄκρ ρoν ον U S ‘Eρµώ ν ασ σα

᾽P ῾Ύ

Zεϕύριον

ύλη Κορδ

43

Ἀθ

44

Σεβαστόп

οs

M O S C H I K A

68

kρ ον

67

70

71

Σαμόσατα Λεγίων Oὔριμα

72

73

SOUTHERN PART

F ig . A3  Ptolemy: Commagene, eastern Cappadocia, Armenia Minor, and Pontus (Nobbe 5, 6, 1–18, and 5, 7, 1–12)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

A N NEX A: GEOGR A PH Y A ND CLIM ATE 

389

14 miles a day. An army with impedimenta would cover no more than 10. At this pace, Satala was nearly four weeks by the frontier road from Melitene.1 But in urgent circumstances and by despatch riders much higher speeds and greater distances could be achieved. Along the Persian Royal Road, Herodotus relates, messages could pass in relays from Sardis to Susa, some 1,700 miles, in 7 or 9 days. Mithridates, it was said, could ride 120 miles in a single day; and in c. ad 41 Vardanes, a man of great daring, covered 375 miles in two days with a small force of cavalry, to surprise and depose his brother, Gotarzes, the Parthian king. In more recent times, Fraser recalled, an experienced Tatar in the service of the British Consul-­General in Constantinople had made ‘some amazingly rapid journeys, among which perhaps the most remarkable was one from Constantinople to Demavund (Damavand), a place about sixty miles beyond Tehran, where the British Envoy was residing,—that is, very near two thousand miles in  all,—which he accomplished in seventeen days, bearing the news of Napoleon’s escape [26 February 1815] from Elba’: an average speed, evidently in spring, of nearly 120 miles a day.2 This extraordinary pace was a significant unit of distance along the frontier. It is clear that an urgent message could be conveyed from Samosata to Melitene at any time of year in a single day; from Melitene, by the fort half way at Zimara, to Satala in two days; and from there to Trapezus in a further day. The intermediate forts were generally no more than three to five hours apart. A LTIT U DE A N D ACCESSI BI LIT Y Across the path of the frontier, four great ranges rise steadily from the edges of the ­central Anatolian plateau. In the south, the Taurus, 100 miles wide and 6,000 feet or higher at the passes, stretches east for 400 miles from Cilicia towards Lake Van. In Ottoman times the only wagon road across the chain of mountains was where they narrow to a width of 30 miles, south of Harput, and the Ergani pass (4,430 feet) allows an easy route, much used, to Mesopotamia. In the centre, the Antitaurus sweeps north-­eastwards, and divides into two high ranges which channel the upper Euphrates between them in a deep trench extending to Erzincan. To the south are the Munzur Dağları, a ‘roughly jagged, serrated skyline above the Dersim’, 10,000–11,000 feet high. The northern range, the watershed between the Persian Gulf and the Black Sea, covers much of Armenia Minor, and separates the Euphrates from the basins of the Halys (Kızıl Irmak), flowing west past Sivas (Sebasteia), and the Lycus (Kelkit Çay), flowing west below Niksar (Neocaesarea). The valleys of both rivers offer important strategic routes from the west. In the north, the Pontic mountains, drained to the south by the deep valleys of the Lycus and the Acampsis (Çoruh), fall steeply to the Pontic coast. The altitudes were unequalled elsewhere along the imperial frontiers. Over the Taurus and Antitaurus the lowest passes are at 5,800 and 6,000 feet. In Armenia Minor, Satala is approached over desolate passes, from the south-­west and west at nearly 7,700 feet, from the south at 7,870 feet. Over the Pontic mountains the summer route climbs to nearly 8,400 feet.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

390 

A N NEX A: GEOGR A PH Y A ND CLIM ATE

TH E EU PH R AT ES VA LLEY The Euphrates passes through five distinct geographical zones: the plains of north-­ eastern Commagene, the Taurus, the Malatya plain and eastward-­sloping foothills of Cappadocia, the Antitaurus, and the narrow trench leading to Erzincan. Of these, the last two were not considered to offer viable communications for military use in modern times; and only in the Erzincan trench has the ripa survived the building of dams. All were crossed by the main frontier road, followed broadly by Ottoman caravan routes. Through the Taurus and Antitaurus the Euphrates has cut enormous gorges, the first difficult to penetrate, the second impassable except southwards by kelek; rafts much used before the building of the Keban dam, to float downriver from Erzincan as far as Kömürhan at the mouth of the Taurus gorge. The gorges were traversed by difficult routes connecting positions along and above the ripa. North of the Taurus the Euphrates drains a vast, rectangular basin bordering the central Anatolian plateau. In the western part, two large rivers rise beneath the Antitaurus. To the north, the Çaltı Çay (? Lycus) joins the Euphrates at its southward bend. On the south-­eastern side, the Tohma Su (Melas) joins the Euphrates 6 miles north of Melitene. Between them several lesser tributaries lay also in the path of the frontier road. Most can be forded in summer and autumn, nearly all demanded a bridge. Here, among plains and  undulating hills, lies Corbulo’s extrema Cappadocia. Except in the gorge below Keban, the Euphrates was easily crossed in many places by kayik, the current slow, the water often shallow in summer and autumn. Near Ağın, above the junction with the Murat, was a crossing for cavalry; and close upriver I waded easily across the Euphrates in October. The eastern part of the basin is defined by the two parallel arms of the Euphrates, embracing the Dersim, and beyond it much of western Armenia. Rising in the highlands 30 miles north-­east of Erzurum, the Euphrates itself (Fırat or Kara Su) flows rapidly from Erzincan in a deep trench, in places barely wide enough to carry the single-­track railway, beneath the steep northern face of the Munzur Dağları and the wild mountains of Armenia Minor, for nearly 100 miles to the great southward bend into the Antitaurus gorge. Three main tributaries flow down from the north: the Karabudak (Sabrina), the Kürtler Dere, and the Kömür Çay. Rising from the mountains north and west of Lake Van, the Murat (Arsanias) is swollen by the Munzur Su (Pyxurates), which springs abruptly from the foot of the Munzur Dağları south of Kemah; and joins the Euphrates north-­west of Elazığ, about 6 miles above the Keban dam. TH E DER SI M Extending the sweep of the Antitaurus, the Munzur Dağları stretch eastwards in a gigantic wall rising well over a mile vertically above the Euphrates, its crest never dropping below 8,500 feet, its highest summit (11,050 feet), south-­east of Kemah, extending in a vast ridge to Mercan Dağ (10,900 feet), close to the south of Erzincan. Viewed from above Melitene, more than 100 miles away, the ridge glitters like a giant saw, white with snow, lying along the north-­eastern horizon. This savage chain of mountains forms a

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

A N NEX A: GEOGR A PH Y A ND CLIM ATE 

391

natural barrier to direct communications between the Kara Su and the Murat: a difficulty much felt during the Russian campaign of July 1916. This was the Dersim, one of the most remote and wildest parts of the Ottoman Empire, an almost trackless confusion of impenetrable mountains, wild gorges, and oak forests, defined by Riggs as that part of  the area between the two rivers which is inhabited solely by Kurds. It formed no part of the Roman frontier. But it provided defence in depth.3 Taylor’s conversations in the Dersim suggested that one branch of the Dersim Kurds is descended from an autochthonous population inhabiting both sides of the Euphrates in Roman times; descended, Maunsell avers, from the original Pagan stock existing there even before Christianity. Indeed, from the time of Xenophon, Tozer observes, the Carduchi, his most formidable foe, ‘have maintained themselves in their original seats notwithstanding all the changes that have passed over western Asia’. In religion, the Dersimlis are kızılbaş, ‘redhead’, a name given by Sunnis to a large section of the population which is either Shia or Alevi in faith, or professes a strange mixture of Shiism and Christianity, with some traces of Paganism and some peculiarities which render them sympathetic towards Christians. Like the Persians, they hold the ubiquity and omnipresence of Ali, the companion of Mahommed and fourth in succession of the caliphs after him, creator of everything in heaven and earth; and in contemplation of his magnitude and primeval existence worship venerable natural objects, as huge oaks, and large isolated masses of rock. They adore the sun at rising and setting, reverence fire, and pray and sacrifice at the sources of rivers. All the Dersim tribes, Tozer concluded, ‘are apparently Pagans, who call themselves Shias, their religion being a mixture of magic and nature worship, doubtless robbers and cut-­throats . . . small, wiry men with sharp features’. Warlike, given to brigandage, and virtually ignorant of arts and crafts, they speak a Kurdish dialect involving many Armenian words. Their seyyids or religious chiefs have much influence over them, and are able to go freely and safely among the tribesmen in times of feud. So common are the feuds in the Dersim, and so respected are the seyyids, that the business of conducting travellers or goods is wholly in their hands. Almost all Kurds were mounted, ‘for it is considered a mark of disgrace or a symptom of extreme poverty to be seen on foot’, and went armed with javelins about 3 feet 9 inches long, or a bow made of horn nearly 6 feet long, with armour-­piercing arrows. Xenophon found them very skilful archers. The Kurds are much dreaded by all travellers and by the Turks especially, who sacrifice a lamb as token of gratitude when they reach the opposite frontiers in safety.4 The whole country in the Dersim, ‘the home of the unruly Kurds’, contained many old Armenian remains, ruined towns, villages, churches, and convents. At few periods can it have seen significant traffic. But it was not impassable, and was crossed by five difficult routes: three from Kemah and two from Erzincan. Tantalizing but unconfirmed reports suggest that some were used, and in places formally constructed, in late Roman and Byzantine times. From Kemah, three days east of the Çaltı Çay and two days west of Erzincan, two summer and a single winter route led to Harput. The main summer route, a mountain track suitable for pack animals and used by Taylor, climbed south ‘at a great elevation’ over the Munzur Dagl̆ arı by the Ziyaret pass (9,200 feet), and descended to Ziyaret (twelve hours). Here was the main source of the Pyxurates, reported by Licinius Mucianus, beneath the slopes of the mountain called Capotes. By an unnamed pass at the same altitude not far to

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

392 

A N NEX A: GEOGR A PH Y A ND CLIM ATE

the east, a second summer route led to Ovacık, and south to Hozat, garrisoned in Ottoman times by two infantry battalions, and headquarters of a cavalry regiment. From Ziyaret a route continued south with some difficulty to Hozat (eight hours), and on to Pertek (eight hours), where it crossed the Murat by ferry to reach Harput in a total of thirty-­four hours from Kemah. Cuinet reported that only mules could continue north from Khozat, and only in summer: for six winter months, snow made the route impracticable. The winter route closely followed the left bank of the Euphrates westwards, climbed over the western shoulder of the Munzur Dagl̆ arı by the Hostabeli pass above İliç, and turned south to cross the Murat by ferry to Aşvan and reach Harput in a total of about forty-­two hours. Along the western border of the Dersim, Sykes reported ‘well-­made bridges, embanked roads, mills, granaries, winter rest-­houses, carefully built fountains and deeply worn caravan tracks’. Followed in part by the Silk Road from Egĭ n (Kemaliye) to Kemah, the winter route was a well-­established mule track in Ottoman times, and was important. It offered a line of communications and patrol, open at all seasons, above the further, eastern bank of the Euphrates, and it was accessible from most of the forts between Dascusa, opposite the long southern slopes above the Arsanias, and Suisa in the plain of Erzincan. From Erzincan a single route crossed the Euphrates, and divided. One route, prac­tic­ able in winter, climbed over the lower Boğazvankomu pass (6,700 feet) to join the line of the modern road at Pülümür, and continued through the Darboğaz defile to Mazkirt and Palu. The other, a summer route, led south-­westward over the Mercan pass (9,900 feet), found ‘very steep and toilsome’ by Taylor, to join the summer route from Kemah at Ziyaret. Winter traffic from Erzincan to Harput followed the Euphrates valley to Kemah, and used the route over the Hostabeli pass.5 Despite its difficulties, the Dersim saw reconnaissance and perhaps planned military activity under Nero. But for a sustained Roman presence beyond the Euphrates, whether forts, or a road system integrated with the frontier defences, there is no firm evidence. Huntington’s ‘old Roman bridge’ over the Arsanias, an ‘old Roman viaduct’ spanning a ravine between İn and Ergan, south of Hozat, and sections of paved road below Çemişgezek, in many places west of Mazkirt, and north-­east of Tunceli, identified as Roman by Taylor and Molyneux-­ Seel, may have been Byzantine, but were probably, in fact, much later: the roads contemporary, perhaps, with sections of the narrow Silk Road surviving between Arabkir and Kemaliye.6 In late 1942 the Dersim became a region of interest for SOE. The Dersim Kurds had shown sympathy with persecuted Armenians, with whom, in the opinion of many, they  shared a common ancestry; and were said to hate the Turks, who are orthodox Sunnis, more than they do the Christians. Here in March 1921 had been the seat of the Koçkiri–Dersim uprising under Nuri Dersimi. The demand of the tribal leaders, for the creation under Alevi Kurdish administration of a vilayet comprising the kazas of Koçkiri (near Zara), Divriği, Refahiye, Kuruçay, and Kemah, helps to explain the enduring sensitivity of the region; and may suggest the localized survival of an indigenous Kurdish population requiring control in Roman times. In June 1937 the Dersim had seen the revolt of Sheikh Seyyid Reza, entrenched in the Munzur and Mercan Dağları in the vain hope that the Kurds of other regions in eastern Turkey would join him. In October 1939 a single track railway was opened from Erzurum to Sivas. Below the Munzur Dağları, in places falling sheer into the Euphrates, it ran through dozens of tunnels and bridges constructed with great difficulty. The line connected in the east with a narrow-­gauge line constructed by the Russians in 1916 from Leninakan; and in the west with the line to Malatya and onward to Aleppo, Mosul, and Baghdad.7

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

A N NEX A: GEOGR A PH Y A ND CLIM ATE 

393

A R M EN I A M I NOR Three routes lead north from the Euphrates. Opposite İliç, the first followed the upper Karabudak (Sabrina) towards the Halys, and the plain of Nicopolis. At Kuruçay, a difficult route diverged north-­east to the plain of Refahiye. This carried the Peutinger frontier road, and was used by caravans. Opposite Kemah, the second route followed the valley of the Kömür Çay north-­westwards towards the same plain. This carried the Antonine support road from Nicopolis to Satala, and in winter the caravan road to Erzincan. Above the plain loomed the barren ridges of the Çimen Dağları (7,700 feet). The third route led north from the plain of Erzincan, over the Sipikör pass (7,870 feet) to Satala. It carried the Antonine frontier road. TH E PONT IC MOU NTA I NS Through the high Pontic range, the Harşit has cut a deep, transverse valley nearly 70 miles long, lined almost everywhere with cliffs; a natural line of northbound communications, continued over the Zigana pass (6,665 feet), and down the narrow valley of the Değirmendere to Trabzon (Trapezus). This was followed by the Antonine frontier road, and by caravans and the Transit Road from Erzerum. East of the Harsit, fractured mountains rise to over 10,000 feet. Climbing to follow ridgeways at nearly 8,400 feet, a direct line, clear of snow between June and October, leads from the headwaters of the Harşit to Maçka. This route was followed in summer by the Peutinger frontier road, and by caravans from northern Persia. Down the northern flanks, bare ridges and deep ravines choked with dense forest growth, pine, oak, alder, beech, chestnut, and walnut fall sharply to the Black Sea. TH E PONT IC COAST East of Trapezus a narrow coastal strip, scoured by rivers listed by Arrian, curves east and north-­east below the Pontic mountains for about 130 miles, to the mouth of the Çoruh (Acampsis). In May 1835, Brant noted, The mountains rise immediately from the sea from 4,000 to 5,000 feet, clothed with dense forests. . . . No places on the coast communicate by caravans with the interior. There are passes from Surmene, Of and Rize, which are only practicable in summer. . . . There are numerous summer anchorages all along the coast from Trebizond, as also several which are considered safe, and used in winter, but there is no port except at Batum. . . . The country throughout is without roads; during the winter a direct communication with the interior across the mountains is impracticable, and between places on the coast it is kept up by sea.

North of the Çoruh, near Batumi and half way to the Caucasus, the mountains recede from the coast to fringe the plain of Colchis. Cut by several large rivers flowing slowly into the Black Sea, the coast continues its long curve north to the Rioni (Phasis), and north-­west as far as Sukhumi (Sebastopolis). A coastal road of sorts existed in antiquity, but communications by sea have always been more important.8

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

394 

A N NEX A: GEOGR A PH Y A ND CLIM ATE

COL CH IS Enclosed by the converging ranges of the Pontic mountains and Armenian highlands to the south, and of the Caucasus to the north, the low, triangular plain of Colchis looked naturally towards the Euxine and the Roman world. It was famous, in Herodotus, for its flax and manufactures of fine linens; and Strabo knew that it was a kingdom celebrated long before the Argonauts for its timber. In the sixth century the Lazi (Colchians) were always engaged in commerce by sea with the Romans who lived on the Euxine. Lazica (Colchis) produced no salt; and grain, vines, indeed any other good thing, did not grow there. Everything was brought in by sea, and exchanged for hides and slaves. At the eastern limit of the plain, some 70 miles from the sea, the two converging ranges were linked by the Surami ridge which separates Colchis from Iberia. Over it passed an important trade route. Strabo describes a road carrying wheeled traffic in  four days from the upper Phasis and down the Cyrus to Iberia: a route which ­continued to the Caspian, and on through Hyrcania and Bactria to India. Travelling in 1833, Dubois de Montpéreux, echoing Strabo, reports the route most commonly used: Les grandes barques remontaient le Phasis jusqu’à son confluence avec le Rion. Les petits bateaux pouvaient pousser jusq’au château fort de Sarapana. De là, le chemin côtoyait toujours le Phase rapide jusque dans la haute vallée de Satchkhéri. Le Phase, encaissé jusque-­là entre deux murailles de rochers, ne laissait pas toujours assez de marge le long de ces roches calcaires à pic pour pouvoir y pratiquer un chemin, et vingt ponts transportaient vingt fois le voyageur d’une rive à l’autre.9

CA R AVA N ROUT ES Across the line of the frontier passed natural routes of the greatest importance in Ottoman times. The northern carried the main caravan traffic from Smyrna and Constantinople, across Asia Minor and Armenia, to northern Persia. Through Bursa and Ancyra, through Amasya (Amaseia), Tokat, and Comana Pontica, and below Niksar (Neocaesarea), it ascended the Lycus valley by Şebinkarahisar (Colonia), passed beneath the crumbling walls of Satala, climbed over high, barren mountains north-­east of Erzincan, and from Aşkale followed the Euphrates valley to Erzerum. Only in the early 1900s were the Persian caravans replaced by the motor road, augmented in 1939 by the railway to Erzurum. At Tokat a route of equal importance diverged for northern Mesopotamia and Baghdad. Passing south-­east through Sivas (Sebasteia), seen by Burnaby as ‘the most important military position in this part of Turkey’, at Hekimhan it divided. A direct route to Harput, shorter by several days, led over rough mountains and crossed the Euphrates by the ferry at Keban Maden. The longer, easier route, the ‘high Constantinople road’, continued to Eski Malatya, furnished with enormous caravanserais. There caravans were joined by others from the west, from Kayseri (Caesarea). Combined, the caravan route crossed the Euphrates near the eastern tip of the Malatya plain, and continued via Harput to Diyarbekir.10

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

A N NEX A: GEOGR A PH Y A ND CLIM ATE 

395

Far less important were northbound trade routes between Commagene and the Black Sea. But small hans in the main ranges and living memories show that a caravan road in continuous use by camels, mules, and horses passed up the Euphrates valley from Aleppo, through Eski Kahta, Eski Malatya, and Arabkir, and continued over the mountains to Erzincan and Trebizond. It is known almost everywhere as Sultan Murat Caddesi, ‘the highway of Sultan Murat’ (Murat IV, 1623–40); and in Armenia Minor and the Pontic mountains also as the kervan yolu, ‘the caravan road’, or Bağdat Caddesi, ‘the Baghdad highway’. The line, and much of the surviving roadbed are Roman. From Commagene, the caravan road climbed tortuously through and over the Taurus, and descended to cross the ‘high Constantinople road’ at Eski Malatya. Continuing northwards beside the Euphrates, it passed through Arabkir, at Eğin crossed briefly to the eastern bank, and re-­crossed at İliç and at Kemah. Opposite İliç caravans diverged. A few continued northwards along a minor route leading to the upper Halys, passed through Nicopolis and Şebinkarahisar, and reached the Black Sea at Giresun. Most followed a second, more important route north-­eastwards through difficult mountains, to reach the upper Refahiye valley, bisecting the jumbled mountains of Armenia Minor. Through the valley passed a minor caravan route, eastbound from Şebinkarahisar to Erzincan; a route which in summer led directly over the barren Çardaklu pass (7,400 feet), and in winter descended the Kömür Çay to Kemah and the Euphrates valley. Traffic from the south and bound for Trebizond crossed this route near Refahiye, climbed over the Çimen Dağları, long and exposed, by a high pass (7,700 feet) now disused, and descended into the broad valley leading towards Satala (5,900 feet). Known there in part as the ‘Old Russian road’ or the ‘Old Water Buffalo road’, this was the shortest and most direct route from the south, and avoided the plain of Erzincan. A third route, barely used, turned east to follow the Euphrates valley, with much difficulty, to Kemah. There it joined the Silk Road, to continue to the plain of Erzincan, climb northwards over the shoulder of Keşiş Dağ by the abrupt Sipikör pass (7,870 feet), and descend to Satala (5,950 feet). There, among the north-­western foothills of Keşiş Dağ and only 16 miles from the watershed of the Lycus and the Acampsis, the two routes from the south, from Refahiye and Erzincan, reunited. Crossing the great caravan route to northern Persia, northbound traffic continued across the headwaters of the Lycus towards the upper Harşit valley, carving its natural passage north-­westwards through the Pontic mountains; and joined the important caravan route from Erzerum to Trebizond. This last was the historic route from Armenia. Assuring regular communications between Europe and the interior of Asia, it explains the importance of Trapezus from the earliest times. From Erzerum the journey to the coast in winter took ten to twelve days. Diverging at Aşkale from the main caravan route from Persia, it climbed over the Kop pass (8,100 feet), high and dangerous, and passed below the walls of Bayburt, climbed again over the Vavuk pass (7,200 feet), and descended to the headwaters of the Harşit. Soon after the Torul gorge the northbound route left the river, climbed steeply over the Zigana pass, and descended by the deep and narrow valley of the Değirmendere to Maçka, and Trebizond. When the carriage route to Trebizond was opened in 1872, the Transit Road was used by 50,000 travellers a year. In summer, caravans diverged after Bayburt in a shortcut along the high ridgeways east of Gümüşhane, and descended to Maçka. This was the high-­altitude route used by Xenophon, and was joined by Hadrian and Arrian riding north from Satala.11

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

396 

A N NEX A: GEOGR A PH Y A ND CLIM ATE

CLI M AT E Climate varies with altitude. In eastern Anatolia extremes of temperature result, and two seasons predominate. Spring is short, confined to April and May. Summer brings scorching, often unhealthy heat to the plains and valleys. Autumn begins in September, and ends by late October. Winter grips the mountains and highlands with terrible cold: on the high plateau snow falls around mid November, and lasts until mid April. Both summer and winter bring heavy rain. The passes over the main ranges and the higher ridgeways are snowbound for up to six months of the year, and between November and April reduced hours of daylight compound the difficulties of movement. Small groups could travel at almost any time of year, regardless of temperature and snow conditions. But for large bodies of men, movement along the frontier can have been safe and practicable only in summer, from June to September, when the high ridgeways allow cool and rapid communications; and in May and October at lower levels, with risk of heavy rain, mud, and lingering or early snow. In the plains and valleys, July and August are oppressive with heat for two hours before and after midday; and positions beside the Euphrates, notably Melitene, Keban Maden, and Erzincan, were unhealthy with summer fevers.

Summer Summer is very hot at lower altitudes. Even in late May the sun in northern Commagene is already barely supportable at noon. Following the Samosata aqueduct in 1965, I succumbed to heatstroke on two consecutive days. The valleys are stifling, but altitude brings some relief in the foothills of the Taurus. At Malatya, showers from the middle of March to the middle of June give way to the long, dry, cloudless season, and the plain is scorched for several hours in the middle of the day. In August the mean temperature reaches 80° F (27° C). In mid October come a few heavy autumn showers. In contrast, the August mean temperature in Erzurum, little higher than Satala (5,950 feet), is to 65° F (18° C). July and August are the most oppressive months, and beside the upper Euphrates frequently brought sickness and disease. Eski Malatya was unhealthy with summer fevers, and very unhealthy in the autumn, when, Brant was advised, ‘out of a brigade of 3000 troops, as many as 400 were lost’. The reason is suggested in Ainsworth’s visit in May 1839: ‘there is little or no wood near the town, which is consequently exposed to all the violence of the sun’s rays in summer’. At Keban Maden, Hommaire de Hell reported in 1847, the heat was so severe for five months that almost all the inhabitants were affected by fevers. Below Harput in July 1838 Brant himself, with all his party and even Hafiz Pasha, suffered much from fever. Four of his attendants were very ill, ‘and so much worse for the march’. They were later placed in arabas, and a month later one of his muleteers ‘was very ill with a relapse of the Harput fever’. Brant also found Erzincan unhealthy in summer with fevers and eye diseases. At a similar altitude, the Armenian capital, Artaxata, was likewise oppressed with summer fevers and malaria.12

Winter In winter and early spring the climate on the Commagene plain is good and healthy, with some rain and occasional frost at night. The north winds are very cold, for the high

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

A N NEX A: GEOGR A PH Y A ND CLIM ATE 

397

Taurus is covered with snow which blocks the passes. Winters around Malatya, ‘with some snow in late December and January, are cold enough to be bracing, but are not severe’. At Keban Maden, Hommaire de Hell reported, the cold in winter was very harsh. There in 1846 the Euphrates was frozen over for twenty-­one days, and laden ­animals crossed without danger. Almost everywhere on the Anatolian plateau, frost can be expected daily from November until March. Sheltering before dawn in their laundry in  Sebastopolis (3,300 feet), icebound in early November, I was attacked and beaten vigorously by washerwomen. In the north-­eastern highlands of Armenia Minor and Armenia, winter has always brought havoc to communications. Blizzards are common, and overwhelm men and animals trying to traverse the mountain passes. Snow drifts deeply at 6,000 feet. The movement of large bodies of troops, with inferior roads and poor transport, Maunsell advises, would be difficult if not impossible at altitude from mid December to mid April. The entire mountain country is blocked with deep snow, and military operations could scarcely be undertaken. In April and May rivers are usually impossible to ford, and smaller streams become torrents when the snow melts. Roads are very muddy and difficult. Grim accounts survive from antiquity. The Ten Thousand in autumn 401 bc were buried in an Armenian blizzard as they slept, frozen by the north wind near the source of the Euphrates. The snow was six feet deep. Eyes were blinded, toes rotted off by the cold. Men faint with hunger wrapped bags round their horses’ feet: without, they would sink up to their bellies. Only 8,600 reached Cerasus alive. The rest, some 4,300 hoplites, peltasts, and lightly armed troops, had perished in battle or in the snow, a few too from disease. During his campaign against Mithridates in 68 bc, Lucullus’ army suffered from unexpected and terrible frost and snow in Armenia at around the autumn equinox. Violent storms covered most of the ground with snow, and clear patches brought frost. His horses could no longer find water, for the rivers were frozen over with the great cold; and when they tried to cross, the ice broke and cut their legs and tendons. In his retreat from Media Atropatene in the late autumn of 36 bc, Antony lost 8,000 men to winter and Armenian snows. Corbulo’s soldiers suffered grievously. Many were frost-­bitten, some perished on guard duty, one soldier’s hands froze so hard to a bundle of wood that they dropped from his arms, leaving mere stumps. Retreating from Media across the Armenian mountains in the winter of ad 232/3, most of the Roman army under Palmatus perished, and the feet and hands of many soldiers turned black and mortified from cold. Strabo tells how caravans carried long poles to dig air holes through the snow, if overwhelmed by avalanches. Under the Armenian kings, ‘l’Intendance royale des Neiges’ was one of the highest offices of state.13 In more recent times, Bishop crossed the much-­dreaded Kop pass (8,100 feet) in early December 1890. From Ashkala, where her ink and dinner froze, she took five hours, through snow 3 feet deep: ‘it is a most dangerous pass, owing to the suddenness and fury of the storms, and only last winter sixty fine camels and ten drivers perished there in a blizzard’. The snow at Baiburt was very deep, and in and outside the immense camel stables at Kala (Kale Kovans) 700 camels were taking shelter from the storm. Her crossing of the Zigana pass (6,700 feet) was yet more dangerous. The governor of Sivas told Burnaby in January 1877 how he was leading 500 soldiers between Kars and Erzerum: ‘a snow storm came on, we lost our way. My men strayed in different directions. I had furs, and was able to resist the cold, but . . . the next morning more than half the men were frost-­bitten, and several had died during the night.’

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

398 

A N NEX A: GEOGR A PH Y A ND CLIM ATE

Military operations around Sarıkamış in December 1914 were hampered by deep snow: movement was more active on the icy, wind-­swept heights than in the snow-­ clogged valleys, and much of Enver’s army was swallowed up in the winter offensive. Fighting ceased everywhere in the mountains during the winter of 1916/17. Even in the early 1940s, the road on the high exposed plateau between Erzerum and the (Persian) frontier, Sir Denis Wright reported, could not be kept open, and ‘from mid-­December until the end of April the transit traffic comes to a standstill except for occasional consignments which may be sent on from Erzerum by sleigh or pack-­horse’. Some eastern passes are closed for six to eight months. I have clambered through snowfields on Zigana Dağ (8,100 feet) at the end of May, crossed drifts blocking the Sipikör pass (7,870 feet) at the end of October, and climbed from the high Çimen yayla (7,000 feet), still clear of snow, and up through a snowstorm to reach the relay station on the summit of Kara Dağ (9,000 feet) in mid October. There, from the end of the month, snow lies 4 or 5 metres deep for six months. In the Lycus valley west of Kelkit, Smith and Dwight reported houses sunk underground ‘for more effect and defence from the frost’. In such houses, crowded with people, goats, sheep, cattle, and fowls, well stocked with food, fodder, and strong barley wine drunk through straws, Xenophon took shelter in Armenia. Cold and snow, however, did not prevent essential, even routine movement in w ­ inter. During Trajan’s Armenian campaign, Bruttius Praesens ordered native guides to show him their winter route across the mountains in ad 114/5. Fitting circles of willow withies to their feet, they trampled down the snow, in many places 16 feet deep, to provide easy passage for his legion. Even in the depths of winter, sheltering from snow storms, large caravans and small groups with urgent purpose could cross Armenia. In Sivas in January 1877 Burnaby witnessed the departure of a mounted regiment for Erzerum: a march by a short route expected to take about a month at a rate of not more than 16 miles a day, via Şebinkarahisar, and presumably by Satala and over the Otlukbeli Dağları.14 In conditions effectively unchanged since Roman times, the increasing difficulties of travel and the terrible hardships of winter in the long approaches and ascent of the Lycus valley from the west, in the vicinity of Satala, and over the mountains to the Euphrates and Erzerum are described by Fraser. Carrying cabinet dispatches, he travelled on horseback from Constantinople to Tehran in January 1833, using ‘the posting establishment of Turkey, a series of posts, placed at various distances apart from each other, that is from three to sixteen hours [9 to 48 miles] each stage, extending along most of the great lines of road’. In these posts, ‘horses were kept . . . for couriers or persons travelling on the business of government’. Fraser’s account shows how far and how fast determined men could travel in the most primitive and hostile conditions of snow and cold. With a Tatar guide and relays of horses often of abject quality, and relying on its stages and shelter, he followed the caravan route eastwards to Erzerum. Reaching Amaseia he had ‘travelled seven hundred miles within the six days, in desperate weather, and stopping only a few hours at a time’; the last stage galloped through rain and mud mixed with melting snow, 32 miles in six hours. But after a night of hard frost he covered the next stage of 48 miles in brilliant sunshine ‘in little more than 7 hours, having cantered a good part of the way’; and with fresh horses galloped on by moonlight to Tokat, eight hours or 32 miles. Changing horses he rode on to Niksar (Neocaesarea), 36 miles, ‘on one of the coldest mornings and hardest frosts possible’.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

A N NEX A: GEOGR A PH Y A ND CLIM ATE 

399

After Niksar, Fraser left ‘the lower regions of Asia Minor to ascend the far colder and mountainous plateau of Armenia’. Snow ‘increased as we ascended, until we found it lying full four feet thick, the road being reduced to a narrow track beaten down by previous passengers, along which only one person could move at a time’. Following the Lycus valley to Çiftlik (Kelkit), he was able to cover not less than 5 miles an hour, ‘as the new-­fallen snow that covered the track was not tough enough to impede us much’. But as he ascended, the snow increased in depth to 4 or 5 feet, and ‘we were losing much precious time in digging the animals and their loads out of the snow when they fell. . . . Our boots, soon wet through, had been frozen stiff, and the snow clogged our clothes and chilled our limbs.’ In the valley of the Sadak Çay the snow was very deep. For 16 miles he made good progress. But soon after Satala, and ‘even before reaching the ascent, we encountered huge snow wreaths, where the horses sank, and, floundering through that which was fresh fallen into that which was old and tough, plunged almost inextricably deep’. On  30  January Fraser dragged his horses through blizzards and deep snow over the Elmalı Dağlar, east of Satala and the most difficult stage of the entire journey. ‘On we pushed—with a toil I cannot describe—ourselves in our heavy boots, and rigid, snow-­ saturated garments, dragging foot after foot with pain along, sinking at almost every step mid-­thigh deep, and often rolling over into holes of fresh-­drifted snow.’ Near the summit of Elmalı Dağ, Fraser and his companion had ‘become like solid lumps of snow, chilled to death in spite of our exercise, and the people were all working as hard as possible in perfect sheets of ice’. Another night’s snow would, he knew, make the next range im­pass­able. Descending to the Euphrates valley ‘such was the intensity of the cold after nightfall that our guides refused to go on. The thermometer must have been many degrees below zero; and there was slight moving of the air at times, which played about our faces and our persons like a blast from the throat of death itself.’ Fraser reached Erzerum (6,100 feet) on 2 February, and at the end of the month was forced back to a caravanserai to take refuge from a snow storm. In the morning men approached on foot, ‘a proof that the road was practicable for foot-­passengers, although for horses, they assured us, it was scarcely so’. His horse was brought from the stable with ‘one of the hind legs frozen stiff and hard by the severity of the last night's weather. The limb hung dead and useless from its body; cold, hard, and motionless as a stone.’ ‘We always have six months of snow and winter here’, the Khan told him on the Persian frontier, ‘and when God pleases seven; sometimes it clears up at the no-­roz (the vernal equinox), and then we have spring; but oftener the ground is covered with snow for a month longer.’ Snow lies continuously for more than four months at Erzurum. The terrible effects of cold are described by Curzon: ‘Dead, frozen bodies were frequently brought into the city, and it is common in the summer, on the melting of the snows, to find numerous corpses of men, and bodies of horses, who had perished in the preceding winter.’ Then started the frantic production of tezek for fuel. At Sadak (Satala) conditions are similar. Snow lies in the village from December to March, and winter lasts for seven months, its severity anticipated by cakes of tezek drying on every wall.15 A LTIT U DE A N D ACCLI M ATI Z ATION In winter, as Fraser discovered, altitude is the crucial factor. At Divriği (3,200 feet) in 1837, Ainsworth noted ‘as a rude generalisation, it appeared, in this land of rocks and

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

400 

A N NEX A: GEOGR A PH Y A ND CLIM ATE

mountains intersected by deep valleys, that the snow lay pretty continuously up to April at an elevation of 6,000 feet, in May at 6,500 feet, and in June at 7,000 feet of elevation’. Effective acclimatization is a serious concern in campaigning at altitude, and in ascending high passes. Seldom achieved at altitudes below 5,000 feet, it depends on continuous residence. Increased water intake and a diet of carbohydrates, rather than of meat or fat, combat altitude sickness, and improve sustained physical performance. These requirements were well, if inadvertently, met at Satala (5,950 feet). Water was abundant, and cereals were the principal food of the Roman soldier: each consumed about a third of a ton of wheat per year, supplemented with a great variety of meat, cheese, and vegetables. Acute mountain sickness, a potentially serious condition, can develop on rapid ascent to altitude. With decreased oxygen, performance starts to reduce above 3,500 feet. Starting from below that level, ascent in less than six hours to heights above 6,000 feet— as in the Taurus from the Cendere bridge to Gopal Tepe, and from Melitene to Kubbe Tepe; in the Antitaurus, from the Çaltı Çay to the Mamahar pass; in Armenia Minor from Erzincan to the Sipikör pass; in the Pontic mountains from Maçka to Karakaban— degrades physical and mental performance and endurance, and increases the risk of altitude sickness. Rapid ascent from below 5,000 feet to 8,000 feet—as in Armenia Minor from Melik Şerif to the Çimen Dağları; in the Pontic mountains from Tekke to Maden hanları—with sustained physical exertion, causes severe, disabling coughing spasms in many individuals; and in up to a third increases the incidence of acute mountain sickness: a short-­lived illness lasting two to seven days, with headache, nausea, fatigue, and light-­ headedness. At this altitude, men start to become less friendly, less clear-­thinking, and sleepier. Altitude sickness explains in part the sufferings of armies marching from low-­lying regions, from below 3,000 feet, up to the Armenian plateau and heights at and above 7,000 feet: in the advances of Lucullus after wintering in Gordyene; and of Corbulo during his long march from winter quarters at Artaxata to Tigranocerta in ad 59, under attack by the Mardi, a mountain people, at around 7,000 feet, and so exhausted by short supplies, hardships, and scarcity of water that his army, accustomed to a diet of wheat, cheese, and vegetables, was compelled to avert starvation by eating meat (Tac., Ann. 14, 24); and in the retreats from Media Atropatene, via the Araxes, of Antony and Palmatus. Riding up to the rim of the crater of Sapan (Süphan) Dağ, on the north shore of Lake Van, in September 1838, Brant describes the risks of altitude sickness. In the ensuing four-­hour climb to the summit cone (13,314 feet), ‘we could not ascend more than five or six steps without stopping to take breath’, and his party suffered grievously from sickness, in some persistent, giddiness, and intense headache. Twice I encountered the same. Coming up from Erzincan (3,970 feet) by minibus, and passing a night at Mengüt (7,050 feet), north of Balahor, legs turned to lead after a day spent crossing the Çimen Dağları (7,000, rising to 7,700 feet); and starting from sea level at Trapezus, my friend Taner nearly collapsed in exhaustion on Zigana Dağ (8,100 feet). Trajan’s legions marching from the south, and auxiliary units in the Euphrates valley east of Zimara, were thus unprepared for the high passes astride the routes to Satala. Movement east and south from Nicopolis reached altitudes not encountered in the journey from the west. Vexillations at Trapezus faced a traumatic climb to the heights of the Pontic mountains. Only at Satala (5,950 feet) was service rewarded by acclimatization.16

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

A N NEX A: GEOGR A PH Y A ND CLIM ATE 

401

R A I N A N D MU D Leaving Sivas in January, Burnaby waded through snow, but on his descent into a valley ‘deep mud, reaching above our knees, covered the track before us. It was terrible hard work for the baggage horses.’ In spring and late autumn, rain is a further burden, falling at Melitene and Satala mainly between April and June, and most heavily in May. Riding west from Erzerum in late June 1809, Morier noted, ‘at about twelve o’clock the clouds arose from the SE and brought thunder, hail and rain: a circumstance which I had remarked almost every day at the same hour. . . . The surface of our road was rendered difficult by the mud which the rain had made.’ Rivers can be swollen with melted snow until July. Autumn brings more rain, gathering over the Antitaurus from the beginning of October. I have navigated the Euphrates in flood in mid September, from the middle of October watched thunderstorms roll down from the Dersim each afternoon to bring short deluges around Dascusa, and seen the weather break violently in the Taurus gorge at the end of October. At Trabzon, and on the northern flanks of the Pontic mountains, rain falls on 150 days a year, until the end of June, and hard and persistently from September to December. Humidity is higher during the rainy months, especially in May. The wind blows from the south in June and for a few days in mid September. During the winter months the coast is ravaged by violent storms descending from the north-­west.17 NOT ES 1. Maunsell, Military Report I (1903) 35f. Yorke, GJ 8 (1896) 318f. Caesar, Bell. Alex. 34–41. 2. Herodotus, Historiae 5, 52–4 and 8, 98. Appian, Mithridatica 112. Tacitus, Ann. 11, 8. Fraser, Winter’s Journey 167. 3. Allen and Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields 414–20. Riggs, Armenia 109–17. 4. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 316–21. Maunsell, Military Report I (1893) 7–9; I (1903) 26f.; and IV (1904) 28–33. Huntington, BAGS 34:4 (1902) 309f. and 384–8. Tozer, Turkish Armenia 257–62. Xenophon, Anabasis 3, 5, 15f. and 4, 1–2. 5. Strecker, ZAE 11 (1861) 273–6. The main passes were crossed by Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 329f. and 335f. Pliny, NH 5, 83f. At Hozat, Maunsell, Military Report IV (1904) 153. Cuinet, Turquie II 390f. The winter route, Sykes, Caliph’s Last Heritage 367–72. 6. Over the Arsanias, Huntington saw near Pertek ‘the ruins of an old Roman bridge . . . part of the road from Harput . . . to Erzincan. The makers of the bridge utilized as piers two islands, on the larger of which massive limestone blocks still remain in place’, GJ 20:2 (1902), 186. Taylor, JRGS 38 (1868) 323 (viaduct), 342 (Mazgerd), and 316 (Çemişgezek). Molyneux-­Seel, GJ 44 (1914) 54 (near Tunceli). 7. Arfa, The Kurds 43f. NID, Turkey II 248f., 253, 285–8. 8. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 191–4. 9. Herodotus, Historiae 2, 105. Strabo 11, 2, 17f. (498), and 11, 3, 4 (500). Procopius, Bell. Pers. 2, 15, 4–5, and 2, 28, 27f. Dubois de Montpéreux, Voyage II 71f. and 248. 10. The principal caravan routes from Constantinople and Smyrna are discussed by Burnaby, Asia Minor 348–54 (Appendix 14). 11. Re-­engineering of the Transit Road from Trebizond to the Kop pass, Cramer, Structural Engineer 18 (May 1940) 586–96.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/10/21, SPi

402 

A N NEX A: GEOGR A PH Y A ND CLIM ATE

12. NID, Turkey I 200 and 227. Maunsell, Military Report IV (1904) 37. Brant, JRGS 6 (1836) 211 (Eski Malatya); 366f. and 400 (Harput); and 202 (Erzincan). Ainsworth, JRGS 10 (1840) 320–2. Hommaire de Hell, Voyage I 421. 13. Hommaire de Hell, Voyage I 421. Maunsell, Military Report I (1893) 11, and I (1903) 30f. Xenophon, Anabasis 4, 4–5, and 5, 3, 3. Plutarch, Lucullus 32 and Antonius 51. Corbulo, Tacitus, Ann. 13, 35. Palmatus, Herodian 6, 6, 3. Strabo 11, 14, 4 (528). Cuinet, Turquie I 144. 14. Bishop, Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan II 387; the Zigana pass, chapter 14. Burnaby, Asia Minor 147, and 155f. Allen and Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields 258, 283ff., and 436–41. Wright, JRCAS 31:4 (1944) 296. Smith and Dwight, Missionary Researches 110f. Xenophon, Anabasis 4, 5, 25–7. Praesens, Arrian, Parthica, frag. 85. Snowshoes are still in use in the Taurus. 15. Fraser, Winter’s Journey 167, 205–9, 228, 236–50, 332, and 368; and, the post system, 82ff. Curzon, Armenia 152ff. and 106ff. 16. Ainsworth, Euphrates Expedition 364f. Webster, Roman Imperial Army 262ff. USARIEM, ‘Altitude Acclimatization Guide’. Tacitus, Ann. 14, 24, and n. 13 above. Brant, JRGS 10 (1840) 409f. and 418. 17. Burnaby, Asia Minor 161. Morier, Journey 326. UK Hydrographic Office, Black Sea Pilot 60.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

ANNEX B

Chronology c.1300 bc c.857–5 bc c.836 bc 810–805 bc 764–735 bc 756/5 bc c.546–486 bc 400 bc 90–84 bc 73–67 bc 66/5 bc

62 bc 53 bc 47 bc 36 bc 34/3 bc 30 bc

Small boats bring supplies through the Antitaurus gorge to Hittite Samuha Shalmanezer III, Assyrian king, crosses Euphrates at Ayni Shalmanezer crosses Euphrates at Tomisa, and receives tribute from the Melidian king Semiramis, queen regent of Assyria, founds Melita Sardur II, Urartian king, crosses the Euphrates at Tomisa, and besieges Militia Foundation of Trapezus The Persian Royal Road from Sardis to Susa, under Cyrus the Great and Darius: via Melitene, the Euphrates crossing at Tomisa, the Ergani pass, and Amida After the death of Cyrus II at Cunaxa and their retreat through Armenian snows, Xenophon and the Ten Thousand sight the Sea from Zigana Dağ (? early June) First Mithridatic War. Sulla sights the Euphrates. Mithridates VI invades Bithynia and Asia, massacres Romans in Asia, and with Tigranes, the Armenian king, invades Cappadocia Second Mithridatic War. Lucullus crosses the Euphrates at Tomisa, and defeats Tigranes near Tigranocerta, his southern capital (7 October 69 bc) Third Mithridatic War. Pompey penetrates Armenia, and enters Artaxata, the northern Armenian capital; defeats Albanians and Iberians; passes through Colchis to Phasis, and returns to be blocked, by hordes of deadly snakes, three days from the Caspian; defeats Mithridates at Nicopolis, and captures his treasuries including Sinoria (Sinervas) Pompey’s settlement of eastern Asia Minor, up to and beyond the Euphrates Licinius Crassus, triumvir, crosses the Euphrates with seven legions to invade Parthia; defeated near Carrhae by Surenas and archers (6/7 May) Marching rapidly from Tarsus, Caesar defeats Pharnaces, Mithridates’ son, at Zela Canidius Crassus, Antony’s lieutenant, defeats the kings of Iberia and Albania; Antony invades Media, besieges the capital, Phraata, and retreats through Armenian snows Antony occupies Armenia and Artaxata, with a garrison and influx of Roman traders, and loots the golden statue of Anaitis in the plain of Erzincan Artaxias I, installed in Armenia by the Parthian king, Phraates IV, massacres the traders

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 404  A N NEX B: CHRONOLOGY

20 bc c.7 bc–ad 23 ad 1–2

ad

17–18

ad 35 c.ad 50

ad

51

ad

54–7

ad

58–63

ad

64

ad

69

ad

70–7

ad

71–2

c. ad 72

Augustus sends Tiberius, his stepson, to recover Armenia Strabo of Amaseia, Geographica Gaius Caesar and Phraataces, the Parthian king, meet on an island in the Euphrates, designated by Augustus as a frontier between spheres of influence. Gaius invades Armenia, and dies near Artaxata Tiberius annexes Cappadocia (including Armenia Minor) and Commagene, and sends Germanicus to crown Artaxias II in Armenia Alani cross the Caucasus and capture Artaxata Claudius measures the length of Armenia from Dascusa, beside the Euphrates in Cappadocia, and (?) founds Claudiopolis in the Taurus Gorge Roman garrison in the fort of Gorneae, 12 miles north-­ east of Artaxata, besieged by Iberians. With only provincial forces in Cappadocia, a legion marches across the Taurus from Syria Nero moves Syrian legions closer to Armenia. Domitius Corbulo, assigned to secure Armenia, protects his supply route from Trapezus and prepares for war Corbulo invades Armenia, captures and destroys Artaxata, captures and garrisons Tigranocerta. Pliny informed of military activity in Iberia (the Caucasian Gates) and the Dersim (under Licinius Mucianus), of navigation of the Euphrates from Zimara to Melitene, and of coastal forts at Absarus and Sebastopolis. Parthians and Romans withdraw from Armenia. Two legions winter in furthest Cappadocia. Caesennius Paetus crosses the Euphrates at Tomisa to recover Tigranocerta, defeated by Vologaeses I, the Parthian king, surrenders at Rhandeia, east of Harput, and flees to meet Corbulo’s legions, marched day and night over the Taurus from Syria. The Euphrates, as before, recognized as the frontier between Rome and Parthia. Corbulo concentrates at or near Melitene, crosses Euphrates at Tomisa, and agrees peace with Vologaeses Annexation of Pontus Polemoniacus. Sea lines to Trapezus protected by the Pontic Fleet and coastal garrisons. Corbulo erects an imperial monument below Harput. Nero sends picked units to reconnoitre, and plans expedition to the Caspian Gates Coastal tribes, barbarians incited by Anicetus, attack Trapezus. Virdius Geminus marches 600 miles from Syria with legionary detachments, and hunts down Anicetus below the Caucasus Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis; dedicated to Titus ad 77. His sources include Claudius and Corbulo Vespasian annexes Armenia Minor, and (for the second time) Commagene, after the bellum Commagenicum; combines Galatia and Cappadocia, with Armenia Minor, under a consular governor; and deploys legions from Syria to Melitene (XII Fulminata) and Satala (XVI Flavia), with auxiliary garrisons in forts mentioned by Pliny beside the Euphrates and along the Pontic coast Alani cross the Caucasus by the Darial pass and devastate Armenia

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

A N NEX B: CHRONOLOGY  ad

75–6

ad ad

76–7 81–2 (?)

ad

83–96

ad

92–4

ad

94–100

ad

101

c. ad 112 ad 114

ad

114–17

ad

117

ad

129

c. ad 130–50

405

Vespasian constructs walls at Harmozica, to block access from the Darial pass into Iberia. Pompeius Collega, his first known governor of Cappadocia, completes a section of the frontier road in Armenia Minor (the milestone above Melik Şerif) The fort at Gorneae reconstructed Caesennius Gallus, governor of Cappadocia, constructs a military building at Dascusa; and directs a vast programme of road building in central and eastern Asia Minor, including a section of the road from Caesarea to Melitene A detachment of XII Fulminata stationed above the southern exit from the Caspian Gates Possible expedition to the Caspian Gates under Antistius Rusticus, governor of Cappadocia; construction of a section of frontier road in Armenia Minor (the Sipdiğin milestone) Pomponius Bassus, governor of Cappadocia, constructs roads ­leading east from Ancyra, with work on the road from Caesarea to Melitene Four cavalry regiments and thirteen cohorts are listed in Galatia and Cappadocia (diploma of 29 March). Most probably accompanied the two legions transferred from Syria in ad 71 Cappadocia and Armenia Minor detached from Galatia Trajan’s Armenian war: marches north from Syria with two legions; from Melitene diverts forces to capture Arsamosata, east of Harput, and collects XII Fulminata; advances north along the frontier road; met at Satala by legions and auxiliaries deployed from the Danube (XV Apollinaris replacing XVI Flavia Firma), and by tribal kings of the Pontic coast; with at least eight legions invades Armenia; captures and installs a legionary garrison (IV Scythica, from Zeugma) at Artaxata, annexes Armenia Major, and descends into Mesopotamia for the Parthian War Trajan annexes Mesopotamia; construction work at the fort at Zimara under Catilius Severus, governor of Armenia Major, briefly combined with Armenia Minor and Cappadocia Hadrian withdraws from Armenia Major, and confirms the Euphrates as the eastern frontier: reinforced and consolidated after the Parthian war by the deployment of XVI Flavia Firma to Samosata At Satala, in the autumn, Hadrian receives the homage of four contiguous rulers on the Pontic coast; travels north over the high Pontic mountains, looking down on the Sea in the steps of Xenophon; and at Trapezus founds a temple of Hermes, commissions an imperial statue, and orders the construction of a harbour. Milestones on the frontier road (at Sipdiğin, in reuse) and on the road (combined, at Aşkar) from Sebasteia and Zimara to Nicopolis, evidently under Statorius Secundus, governor of Cappadocia, and a flurry of honorific activity in the Greek cities of eastern Pontus, suggest that the emperor returned via Satala to pass the winter at Nicopolis Road network between Zeugma and Sebastopolis is preserved in the Peutinger Table (compiled c. ad 300)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 406  A N NEX B: CHRONOLOGY ad

131

c. ad 135

c. ad 160–8 ad 161–6

ad

172

ad

172

ad

195–9

ad

198

c. ad 200

ad

212/13

?ad 214

ad

218–53 224–30

ad

232

ad

249–51

ad

Flavius Arrianus (Arrian), governor of Cappadocia, also looks down on the Sea; reports progress on Hadrian’s projects in Trapezus; and sails east to inspect forts and garrisons at anchorages extending along the coast as far as Sebastopolis Incited by the Iberian king, Alani cross the Darial pass. Deploying from Satala, Arrian blocks their invasion; and may have advanced to drive them from Armenia, settle the boundary between Iberia and Albania, and reach the Caspian Gates Ptolemy of Alexandria, Geographica A Parthian army invades Armenia, and destroys Sedatius Severianus, governor of Cappadocia, and his army, at Elegeia five days east of Satala. Lucius Verus sent by Marcus Aurelius to Antioch: pre­par­ations for war include work on the frontier road in Commagene (the Bibo milestone). Statius Priscus, governor of Cappadocia, invades Armenia, destroys Artaxata (ad 163), and installs a client king and garrison at the new capital, Kainepolis. A soldier of I Minervia crosses the Darial pass. Martius Verus occupies Osrhoene, and installs a client king at Edessa. Marcus withdraws to Hadrian’s frontier on the Euphrates Martius Verus, now governor of Cappadocia, suppresses insurrection in Kainepolis, garrisoned with vexillations from XV Apollinaris and XII Fulminata (inscriptions of ad 175 and 184) Rain Miracle, answering the prayers of Christian soldiers of XII Fulminata, deployed from Melitene to the Danube during the Marcomannic War Severus’ Parthian War. Tiberius Claudius Candidus overruns northern Mesopotamia and conquers Arabs (ad  195). Annexation of Osrhoene and Mesopotamia Severus rebuilds the central section of the road from Caesarea to Melitene, and builds at Melik Şerif Severus reconstructs the bridge over the Chabina (Cendere Su), probably the bridge over the Singe (Göksu) in Commagene, and perhaps the road over the Taurus. Candidus erects altar of Apollo above Direk Kale (Lacotena) Caracalla annexes Osrhoene, and sends Theocritus to defeat in Armenia Antonine Itinerary (compiled in the late third century): prepared in part for Caracalla’s journey from Rome to Alexandria ad 214–15, and preserving the early road network between Zeugma and Trapezus Continued rebuilding of the road from Caesarea to Melitene Ardashir defeats the Parthian king, Artabanus V (ad 224) and founds the Sassanian (Persian) dynasty; attacks Armenia (ad 227/8), to be met by bands of Huns, probably Alani, passing through the Caucasian and Caspian Gates; and raids Cappadocia (ad 230) Severus Alexander attacks the Persians. Palmatus’ army passes through Armenia into Media, and retreats with great loss during the Armenian winter Decius rebuilds the bridge over the Sabrina (Karabudak) in Armenia Minor. Persecution of Christians

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

A N NEX B: CHRONOLOGY 

c. ad 256 ad 256

ad

260

ad

268–72

ad

284–8

ad

297–8

ad

303

ad

306–11

c. ad 314 c. ad 319 ad

359

ad

360

ad

370–8

ad

395

c. ad 400

442 498/9 ad 502 ad ad

ad

527–65

407

Borani, allies of the Goths, raid Phasis, and sack Pityus and Trapezus Sapor, Ardashir’s son, invades Armenia, installs his own son as king, takes control of Iberia and Albania, overruns Armenia Minor, capturing Satala with Suisa, Domana, and perhaps Arauraca, and raids Cappadocia Sapor captures Valerian at Edessa, takes Samosata, and raids Cappadocia as far as Caesarea Zenobia raids Cappadocia and Galatia as far as Ancyra. Aurelian captures Zenobia at Palmyra, and re-­establishes Roman authority up to the Caucasus Diocletian forces the Persians to accept a Roman client in Armenia; raises a new legion, I Pontica; and assigns to Galerius Maximianus responsibility for the defences of the eastern frontier Narses, the Persian king, invades Armenia, defeated by Galerius east of Satala, and in the Treaty of Nisibis recognizes Roman authority in Armenia and Iberia Great persecution of Diocletian, provoked in part by a revolt instigated by Christians at Melitene. St Eustratius and companions martyred at Arauraca: the Five Martyrs of Armenia Great persecution of Galerius in the East. St Orentius and his six brothers at Satala exiled and martyred along the Pontic coast Armenia converted to Christianity by St Gregory Persecution of Licinius. Christian soldiers of XII Fulminata remembered as the Forty Martyrs of Sebasteia: Forty-Five Martyrs of Nicopolis Sapor II captures Amida (Diyarbakır). Ammianus flees across the Euphrates in the Taurus gorge, to Melitene From Caesarea and Melitene, Constantius II follows the frontier road via Lacotena, to Samosata and Edessa Valens campaigns in Armenia and Iberia, and repairs the support road east of Nicopolis (the Ağvanis milestone) Huns cross the Caucasus by the Darial pass, invade Armenia and attack Melitene The Notitia Dignitatum lists the forces of the Dux Armeniae guarding the eastern frontier: a garrison, largely unaltered since the time of Hadrian, of three legions, two units of mounted archers, eleven cavalry regiments, and ten cohorts Theodosius II pays the Persian king to guard the Caucasus passes Nicopolis destroyed and Armenia ravaged by earthquake (September) Cavades, the Persian king, attacks Armenia, and captures Theodosiopolis (Erzurum) and Amida. Anastasius starts construction of a wall around the fortress and city of Melitene, the base for Roman advances against the Persians Justinian continues the Persian war. Sittas defeats the Persians at Theodosiopolis, and beneath the walls of Satala (ad 530). Sebastopolis and Pityus dismantled (ad 540). Chosroes captures Petra (ad 541) and Nicopolis (ad 543), and agrees to guard the Caucasus passes against barbarians (treaty of ad 561). Justinian rebuilds Nicopolis and fortifications along the frontier, completes the walls of Melitene, constructs an outer wall of great height at Satala, and reconstructs and strengthens Sebastopolis and Pityus

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 408  A N NEX B: CHRONOLOGY ad

572–90

ad

602–10

ad 612–29 c. ad 640–7 ad ad

656/7 680

Persian war continues. Chosroes captures and destroys Melitene (ad 575) Chosroes II invades Armenia and Cappadocia. Persians capture Satala (ad 607–8) and Nicopolis (ad 610) Persians overrun Asia Minor, and expelled by Heraclius Arabs capture Syria, advance through Asia Minor and besiege Constantinople Arabs capture Melitene Battle of Karbala. Death of Ali SEL CU K , OT TOM A N, A N D T U R K ISH

1071 1461 1473 1512–20 1623–40 1839 1876–1909 1895 1914–15 1915 1916

1921 1922 1923 1925 1937 1939 1972 1984 1987 1992 2000

Battle of Manzikert (Malazgirt), north of Lake Van (26 August). Byzantine army defeated, and Romanos IV captured by Selcuk Turks under Alp Arslan Capture of Trebizond by Mehmet II, the Conqueror Battle of Otlukbeli, east of Satala (11 August). Akkoyunlu under Uzun Hasan, ally of the Comneni of Trebizond, defeated by Mehmet II Sultan Selim I extends Ottoman Empire into eastern Anatolia Sultan Murat IV recaptures Erivan and Baghdad from Persians Battle of Nizib, near Zeugma (24 June). Hafiz Pasha defeated by Ibrahim Pasha and Egyptian army Sultan Abdul Hamid II Armenian massacres (Arabkir, Eğin, Pingan) (winter) Battle of Sarıkamış, west of Kars (December–January). Ottoman army defeated by Russians Armenian massacres (Arabkir, Eğin, Armenia Minor) (June) Russians capture Erzerum (15 February), land at Pazar (Athenai) (4 March), capture Trebizond (19 April), cross the Pontic mountains through Maçka (16 May), Tekke, and Kelkit, capture Gümüşhane (7 July) and Erzincan (11 July) and advance west beside the Euphrates and over the Çimen Dağları: to remain until evacuated from Armenia in February 1918 Koçkiri–Dersim uprising, under Nuri Dersimi (February–June) Departure of the Pontic Greeks Treaty of Lausanne (24 July). Turkish Muslims resettled from Greece Revolt of Sheikh Sa’id, between the Euphrates and Lake Van (February–April) Revolt of Sheikh Seyyid Reza in the Dersim (June–November) Earthquake destroys Erzincan, with catastrophic damage in eastern Pontus and Armenia Minor (26/7 December) Keban dam floods Dascusa and the Antitaurus gorge Emergence of the PKK (15 August) Karakaya dam floods the northern Taurus gorge, the ripa east and north of Melitene, and Corne and Ciaca Atatürk dam floods Samosata, Charmodara, Heba, Barzalo, and the southern Taurus gorge Birecik dam floods Zeugma and the ripa below Samosata

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

ANNEX C

Glossary of Latin and Turkish Words L AT I N aes agger ala allium auxilia bellum beneficiarius caput castellum castrum classis cochlia cohors collegium custos armorum decurio denarius dignitas diploma dux equitata equites extremus finis flumen fossa kerykeion legio martyrium medicus miles milliaria notitia numerus nymphaeum omma oppidum opus patronus

bronze coin raised cobbled roadbed cavalry regiment (512 men) garlic auxiliary cohorts and alae war staff officer head fort fort fleet snail, water screw cohort, infantry regiment (500 men) corporation, association armourer, in charge of weapons and equipment troop commander silver coin high office discharge certificate (on two bronze plates) commander part-­mounted cohort, quingenaria 480 + 120, milliaria 800 + 240 strong cavalry furthest border, limit river ditch herald’s staff (from Greek) legion shrine of a martyr medical orderly soldier ala and cohort (1000 men) list allied native unit, equivalent to and later replacing cohort sanctuary of the nymphs eye (from Greek) town military or public work patron

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

410 

A N NEX C: GLOSSA RY OF L ATIN A ND TUR K ISH WOR DS

periplus pervius pharus pithos praefectus praepositus praesidiarius praesidium praetorium primus pilus principia puteus pyrgos quingenaria ripa sagittarii signifer solum stele strategos tropaeum vallum vexillatio via

circumnavigation (from Greek) crossable lighthouse, on the island of Pharos, off Alexandria earthenware storage jar (from Greek) commander commander garrisoned garrison (post) commandant’s house senior centurion headquarters building mine shaft, well tower (from Greek) cohors, 480 strong; ala, 512 (Arrian) bank (of the Euphrates) archers standard bearer (of a century) ground tombstone governor, or local magistrate (from Greek) victory monument rampart legionary detachment road

T U R K ISH

Suffixes plurals: -ler(i), -lar(ı); as harabeler, ‘ruins’, or Munzur dagl̆ arı, ‘Munzur mountains’ descriptives: -li, -lı, -lu, -lü; as bahçeli, ‘with garden’, or elmalı, ‘with apples’ occupations : -ci, -cı; as kayikci, ‘ferryman’, or corbacı, ‘soup seller’ ada amca araba aşağı asfalt asistan baba bağ bahce bakır bayır bekçi bey

island uncle two-­wheeled cart lower tarmac road assistant (of a doctor or professor) father vineyard garden copper hill watchman chief

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

A N NEX C: GLOSSA RY OF L ATIN A ND TUR K ISH WOR DS 

boğaz bulgur büyük cadde çal cami çarşi çatak çay çayır cemevi cep çermik çeşme çimen çorba dağ(ları) değirmen demir dere deve direk döven düz elek elma emniyet er Ermeni eski ev eyalet gâvur geçit gemi göl gordin görev göz gümüş halı han harabe hisar hobi hüyük ıhlamur

gorge, defile boiled, pounded wheat large main road, highway pit mosque market narrow valley small river meadow open air (Shia) mosque pocket, mobile phone hot spring fountain wild grass(land) soup mountain(s) (water) mill iron valley, stream camel pillar, column threshing sledge, studded with flints flat sieve apple security brave man, soldier Armenian old house province infidel, Christian crossing, ford, pass ship lake guard post (Kurdish) duty eye, arch silver carpet khan, caravanserai ruin castle hobby settlement mound lime tree

411

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

412 

A N NEX C: GLOSSA RY OF L ATIN A ND TUR K ISH WOR DS

iki ilce imam jandarma kaban kaldırım kale kaleş kara karabatak karakol karanlık kasaba katır katırcı kaya kayik kaymakam kaza keklik kelek kelekci ker kerpiç kervan kireç kırık kırk kızıl kızılbaş kom kondık köprü kör köy küçük kudret halvası kurt kürt lant lokanta mantar medrese melik meydan mezraa misafiroda

two district (= kaza) imam gendarme, commando hill, or rough (Armenian) cobbled road (= agger) castle Kalashnikov black smew duck jandarma barracks darkness hut mule muleteer rock ferry district governor (of kaza) district partridge raft raftsman baby donkey (Kurdish) mud brick caravan lime pointed forty, countless red Alevi Kurd hamlet (?) settlement (?) bridge blind village small manna wolf Kurd(ish) Landrover restaurant mushroom theological college sovereign (Muslim) square hamlet, field village guest room

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

A N NEX C: GLOSSA RY OF L ATIN A ND TUR K ISH WOR DS 

müdür müezzin muhtar nahiye nehir oda oğul(ları) okul oluk ören orta ova pekmez pınar pire posta Ramazan Rum Rus sağ salata şalvar sancak saray şark şehir şehit seyyid şirket sırt sivri su süvari tahta taş tekke temsilci tepe tesis tezek top türbe uzun vali vilayet viran yarım

director muezzin village headman sub-­district large river room son(s) school channel, conduit ruins middle plain grape juice, boiled and reduced to flat strips spring flea post Ramadan, the month of Muslim fast Greek Russian healthy, right salad baggy trousers sub-­province palace east town, city martyr, fallen soldier feudal lord, priest company ridge pointed, conical water, river cavalry wooden stone Dervish monastery or chapel representative hill, prominent peak installation dried cakes of ox-­dung gun tomb (of a holy man) long governor (of vilayet) province ruined half

413

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

414 

A N NEX C: GLOSSA RY OF L ATIN A ND TUR K ISH WOR DS

yayla yazı yeni yol yufka yukarı yurt yürük ziyaret  

high, summer pasture writing new road, track thin, round, unleavened flatbread upper home, settlement nomad place of pilgrimage

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

ANNEX D

Travellers Intrepid travellers rode along and across the line of the frontier at a time when the ancient way of life was still largely undisturbed. Their accounts are of great value, and many constructed their own maps, preserving routes, and the relative positions of rivers, mountains, and villages. See also Index 2 and Bibliography. OF F ICI A L S Resident in eastern Anatolia: consuls in Trebizond and Erzerum, military advisers in Erzincan and Eski Malatya, teachers and missionaries in Harput. Barbaro, J., Venetian ambassador to the Akkoyunlu, (1471, 1473): from Erzincan, through the Dersim, to Pertek and Aleppo. Biliotti, A., vice-consul in Trebizond (September 1874): from (Eski) Gümüşhane, by Pekun, Kelkit, Sadak, Sökmen, Kılıççı, Havcış, Köse and Pirahmet, to Gümüşhane. Blau, O., Prussian consul in Trapezunt (August 1860): from Bayburt, by Gümüşhane, Koroş Dağ, Karum Dere, İstavri, Kolat Boğaz, Karakaban, and Cevizlik (Maçka), to Trapezunt. Brant, J., vice-­consul in Trebizond, consul in Erzrum (May to July 1835): from Trebizond, by the Pontic coast, Çoruh, . . . Erzerum, Erzincan, Kemah, Egĭ n, Arabkir, Keban-­Maden and Harput, to Diyarbekir; and from Diyarbekir, by the high Constantinople road through Harput, İzolu, and (Eski) Malatya (Melitene) to Hekimhan, and by Sivas, . . .  Tokat, Niksar, Şebinkarahisar, and Eski Gümüşhane, to Trebizond. Curzon, Hon. R., private secretary to Sir Stratford Canning, ambassador at Constantinople (early 1842, January 1844): from Trebizond, by Boztepe, Zigana pass, Gümüşhane, Bayburt, and Kop pass, to Erzerum; from Erzerum, by Kop pass, Kale, Gümüşhane, and Madenhanları below the Zigana pass, to Trebizond. Everett, Sir W., vice-­consul in Erzerum, consul for Kurdistan (c.1882–3): from Maçka, by the Zigana pass to Gümüşhane, and by Kolat, Anzarya hanlar and Maden hanları to Tekke or Hadrak; Satala. Huntington, E., teacher at Euphrates College in Harput (July 1900, April, summer, and September 1901): Dersim; by raft from Eğin to the Malatya plain, and from Akhor on the Murat (Arsanias) through the Taurus gorge to Gerger. Moltke, Baron H. von, military adviser to Hafiz Pasha at Eski Malatya (1838–9): by raft from Palu, through the Taurus gorge, to Samsat and Birecik; from Harput through Tomisa to Eski Malatya; from Hekimhan to Keban, Arabkir, Hapanos, and Eğin. Reineggs, J., resident in Georgia (October 1778–81): Constantinople to Tiflis, Msketa (Harmozica), Darial pass and Terek, Anaklia, Abkhazia, Maroukh pass. Riggs, Revd  H.  H., missionary in Harput (1915–17): Harput, Çünküş, Arabkir to Eğin, Dersim.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

416 

A N NEX D: TR AV ELLER S

Strecker, W., Artillerie-­Officier, Instructeur der anatolischen Armee zu Erzerum (with O. Blau, c.1858–60): Erzincan; routes through the Dersim to Palu and Harput, to Kemah and Melikşerif, and through Sipikör, Sadak, Köse, and Gümüşhane to Trapezunt; a summer route diverging at Murathanoğlu, past ruins (Zindanlar) and Leri, to Madenhan, İstavrihan (= Kolat), Karakaban, and Cevizlik; a summer route from Erzerum through Bayburt; a route from Çiftlik (Kelkit), by the Kelkit Çay (Lycus), to Koymat Köprü, Aşkar Ova, and Enderes (near Nicopolis). Suter, H., vice-­consul in Trebizond (October 1838): from Erzerum, through Ilıca, Aşkale, Karakulak, Sadak Çay, and Kelkit, to Aşkar Ova and Şebinkarahisar. Taylor, J. G., consul for Kurdistan, in Erzerum (August to October 1866): from Erzerum through Sadak (Satala) and across Armenia Minor to Şebinkarahisar and Pürk (Nicopolis); south, by Aşkar, to the Kızılırmak (Halys), Kuruçay, (Turkish) Zımara, ̆ ık (Dascusa); Pingan (Zimara), Antitaurus, Arabkir, and the Euphrates crossing at Pagn through the Dersim, by Çemişgezek and across the Munzur Su (Pyxurates) and Munzur Dagl̆ arı (Capotes), to Kemah, Ardos, and Erzincan; and through the Dersim to Harput. Wright, Sir D., vice consul in Trebizond (1941–3): Trebizond to Satala, and the Transit Road to Erzurum.

SCHOL A R S Several scholars have sought to record the material and epigraphic remains of the frontier region, notably in Commagene and Armenia Minor, and to place them in their historical and geographical setting. Hogarth alone has attempted to follow and document the frontier itself. Bryer, A.  A.  M. (1959–79, 1992–4), and D.  C. Winfield (1957–62): Trebizond; Pontic mountains, Hortokop, Mochora, Zigana, Zindanlar, Transit Road; Pontic coast, Araklı Kalesi, Rize, Gonio. Chapot, V. (1901): Samsat to Zeugma, and to Edessa. Cumont, F. (May and June 1900): Sivas (Sebasteia) and Tokat, and from Niksar, by Pürk (Nicopolis), Aşkar, Melikşerif, Çardaklu pass, Erzincan, Sipikör pass, Sadak (Satala), Köse, Harşit valley, (Eski) Gümüşhane, Torul, and Zigana, to Trebizond. Finlay, G. (1859): Trebizond. Grégoire, H. (1907): Pürk (Nicopolis), Aşkar Ova, Aşkar to the Halys. Hogarth, D.  G. (with W.  M.  Ramsay, July–August 1890): from Şar (Comana Cappadocica) towards Kayseri; (with J. A. R. Munro, July–August 1891): from Şar to Elbistan; (with V.  W.  Yorke, April–June 1894): Halfeti, Samsat and aqueduct, Pirun (Perre), Eski Kâhta, Chabina bridge, over the Taurus, Eski Malatya, Kilisik, Morhamam, Çermik (Sartona), Deregezen, Körpinik Hüyük, Arabkir Çay, Ağın, Aşutka, Eğin, Pingan, (Turkish) Zımara, Dostal, Sabrina bridge, Hasanova, Kemah, Erzincan, Sipikör pass, Sadak (Satala), Köse, Harşit, Gümüşhane, Zigana and pass, to Trebizond. Humann, K. (with O.  Puchstein, 1882–3): Halfeti, Samsat, Pirun (Perre), Karakuş, Chabina bridge, Gerger Kalesi, Bibol. Jacopi, G. (1935): from Sivas, by Eski Malatya, Pirot, Samsat, and Chabina bridge, to Eski Kâhta.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

A N NEX D: TR AV ELLER S 

417

Kökten, I. K. (1945): from Pirun (Perre), by Chabina bridge, Taurus, Eski Malatya, Pirot, Habibuşağı (Hızırtaşı), Elazığ, Keban, Körpinik Hüyük, Pağnık, and Kültepe, to Çemişgezek. Lehmann-­Haupt, C. F. (June–July 1899): from Harput, by Kömürhan, Hızırtaşı, and İzolu (Tomisa), Eski Malatya, Arabkir Çay, Eğin, Kemah, and Erzincan, to Bayburt. Munro, J. A. R. (with D. G. Hogarth, August 1891): from Sivas, by Zara, to Pürk (Nicopolis) and Aşkar; by the Lycus valley to Niksar, Gömenek (Comana Pontica), and Tokat. Osten, H. H. von der (1927–8): from Sivas to Eski Malatya, Morhamam, Eski Arabkir, Antitaurus gorge, Eğin, Gemirgap castle, and Venk Kale. Özdoğan, M. (1977): Samsat, and Kocan (Charmodara); the ripa below Morhamam. Puchstein, O. (1882–3): see Humann, K. Serdaroğlu, Ü. (1968–70, 1974): Samsat and Kocan (Charmodara), Pağnık Kalecik and Öreni, Kilise Yazısı Tepe. Yorke, V. W. (April–June 1894): see Hogarth, D. G. A L ONG CA R AVA N ROUT ES Many, travelling independently or with caravans, followed the main caravan and postal routes from Constantinople through Tokat and Sadak, and from Trebizond, over and through the Pontic mountains and through Bayburt, to Erzerum and Tabriz; and from Tokat, through Sivas, and by Keban or Eski Malatya, to Harput and Diyarbekir. Bishop, I. B. (December 1890): from Erzerum, by Kop pass, Kale (Kovans), and Zigana pass, to Trebizond. Clavijo R. G. (April 1404): Pontic coast, Zigana, and Torul. Fraser, J.  B. (January 1833): from Constantinople, by Niksar, Lycus valley, Kelkit, Elmalı Dağlar (east of Satala), and Erzerum, to Tehran. Hamilton, W.  J. (May 1836): from Trebizond, by Boztepe, Cevizlik (Maçka), Karakaban, İstavri, Eski Gümüşhane, and Bayburt, to Erzerum. Hepworth, Revd G. H. (winter 1897): from Trebizond, by the Değirmendere, Cevizlik (Maçka), Hamsıköy, Zigana pass, Zigana, Gümüşhane, Tekke, Bayburt, and Kop pass, to Erzerum. Kinneir, J. M. (June 1814): fromTrebizond, by Boztepe, Cevizlik (Maçka), Karakaban, Kolat Dağ, İstavri, and Koroş Dağ, to Gümüşhane. Layard, Sir A. H. (September 1849): from Trebizond, probably by the Zigana pass and Bayburt, to Erzerum. Lynch, H. F. B. (1898): Garni, Dersim, Satala to Bayburt, Trebizond. Morier, J. J., private secretary to Sir Harford Jones, Envoy Extraordinary to the Court of Persia (June/July 1809): from Erzerum, by Ilıca, Cennis, Mamahatun, Karakulak, Sadak valley, Çiftlik (Kelkit), Şebinkarahisar, Lycus valley, and Niksar, to Tokat. Southgate, H. (June 1837): fromTrebizond, by Boztepe, Karakaban, Kolat, İstavri, and Gümüşhane, to Erzerum. Tavernier, J.-B. (1631, 1664): from Constantinople, by Tokat, Germeru, Sökmen, Aşkale, and Ilıca, to Erzerum and Persia; from Smyrna to Erzerum and Erivan. Texier, C.  F.  M. (August 1839): from Trebizond, by Cevizlik (Maçka), Karakaban, Kolat, Maden hanları, Karayayla, Veyserni, and Bayburt, to Erzerum.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

418 

A N NEX D: TR AV ELLER S

Tournefort, J.  P.  de (1701): from Erzerum, by Sadak and Sökmen, to Tokat; from Trebizond to Erzerum. Tozer, Revd H. F. (August and September 1879): from Sivas, by Hekimhan and Keban, to Harput; from Erzerum, by Ilıca, Kop pass, Bayburt, (?) Anzarya hanlar, Sumela, Cevizlik, and Değirmendere valley, to Trebizond. Walpole, Revd R. (autumn 1851): from Erzerum, by Veyserni, Kolat, and Maçka, to Trebizond.

I N DEPEN DENT T R AV ELLER S Military and other travellers followed and describe other routes, beside and across the Euphrates, in the Dersim, and in the Caucasus. Ainsworth, W. F., in charge of an expedition to Kurdistan (1836–7, 1839–40): from Caesarea to Eski Malatya, Gerger, Samsat, and Birecik; retreat from Nisib, through Commagene and across the Taurus; flight along the ripa to Morhamam; Trebizond. Barkley, H.  C. (December 1878): from Diyarbekir, by Harput, Keban, Antitaurus gorge, Eğin, Kemah, Erzincan, Sipikör pass, (?) Yurtlar Dere, Baghdad bridge, and Zigana, to Trebizond. Boré, E., chargé de mission scientifique, to the source of the Lycus (July 1838): from Sivas, by Nicopolis and Melik Şerif, to Erzincan. Burnaby, Capt. F. (January 1877): from Sivas to Arabkir, and by the Silk Road to Çit Harabe (Sabus), Eğin, Kemah and Erzincan. Chardin, Sir  J. (1672): from Constantinople, by Feodosiya (in Crimea), Mingrelia (around Zugdidi), Imeretia (around Kutaisi), Tiflis, and Erivan, to Tabriz. Chesney, Lt. Col. F.  R., in charge of an expedition to test the navigability of the Euphrates (1831–2, 1835–6): Birecik, Samsat, Kurdistan. Dubois de Montpéreux, F. (1833–4): Abkhazian Wall, from Phasis to the Cyrus, Caucasus passes, Eçmiadzin (Kainepolis), Artaxata. Dumas, A. (1858–9): from Baku to Tiflis and Poti; Msketa (Harmozica), Darial pass. Dwight, Revd. H. G. O. (with E. Smith, 1830): Lycus valley, Germeru (near Kelkit) to Karakulak, Trebizond. Hommaire de Hell, I. X. M. (with J. Laurens, September 1847): from Trebizond, by Hortokop, Karakaban, Kolat, İstavri, Eski Gümüşhane, Refahiye, Kuruçay, Dostal, Pingan, Eğin, and (by raft) Keban, to Harput. Ker Porter, Sir R. (October 1817, November 1819): Terek and the Darial pass, Msketa (Harmozica), Eçmiadzin (Kainepolis), Garni, Ardashir (Artaxata); from Erzerum, by Ilıca and Aşkale, to the Sadak Çay. Maunsell, Lt. Col. F. R. (May and July 1888, August 1892, ? 1900): Kurdistan, south of Lake Van. Molyneux-­Seel, Capt. L. (July–September 1911): Erzincan, Kemah, Dersim (Ziyaret, Çemişgezek, Hozat, Eski Pertek). Percy, Earl H. A. G. P. (September 1899): from Adıyaman, by Pirun (Perre), Chabina bridge, Eski Kâhta, Sincik, Taurus, Malatya, Kadıköy (İzolu), Hızırtaşı, Kömürhan, and Harput, to Palu. Smith, E. (1830): see Dwight, Revd. H. G. O.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

A N NEX D: TR AV ELLER S 

419

Stark, F. (with M. Lennox-­Boyd, August 1962): Gerger to Taraksu (? Juliopolis), Tillo, Pütürge, Malatya. Sykes, M. (June 1906): from Diyarbekir, by Pertek, Çemişgezek, İliç, Armudan, and Tut, to Zara. T R AV ELLER S’ M A PS Blau, ‘Topographische Skizze von Routen im Pontischen Gebirge’ (ZAE 11 (1861), Tafel IV) Brant, ‘Sketch of a Route through part of Armenia and Asia Minor’ (attached to JRGS 6 (1836), following 223) Cumont, ‘L’Asie mineure de l’Halys à l’Euphrate’ (SP II, Cartes I and XXII–XXVI) Hogarth, ‘ . . . Routes followed in 1890 and 1891’ (2 maps, attached to RGS Suppl. Papers 1893) Humann and Puchstein, ‘Routen mit Sester zwischen Euphrat und Tigris gezeichnet von H. Kiepert’ (Reisen, Atlas, Karte 3) Huntington, ‘The Great Cañon of the Euphrates River’ (GJ 20:2 (1902), 177) Lehmann-­ Haupt, ‘Kartenskizze . . . Reise durch Armenien 1898–1899’ (attached to Armenien einst und jetzt, I) Maunsell, ‘Eastern Turkey in Asia’ (GJ 28:2 (1906), 163–5, and map, 208): compiled at the WO, and derived (as also his Military Reports) from the reports of many ex­ped­ itions 1839–1906 Molyneux-­Seel, ‘Turkey in Asia. Sketch Map of Dersim Showing the routes followed by Capt. L. Molyneux-­Seel, 1911’ (GJ 44 (1914), facing 50) Percy, ‘Map of Asiatic Turkey’ (attached to Highlands of Asiatic Turkey) Strecker and Blau, ‘Das Nordwestliche Hoch-­ Armenien, zusammengestellt von H. Kiepert’ (ZAE 11 (1861), Tafel 3) Sykes, ‘Route from Diarbekir to Zara’ (attached to The Caliph’s Last Heritage) Taylor, ‘Map illustrating a Tour in Armenia, Kurdistan and Upper Mesopotamia’ (attached to JRGS 38 (1868)) Yorke, ‘Sketch Map of a Journey in the Valley of the upper Euphrates from Samsat to Sadagh’ (attached to GJ 8 (1896))

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

BI BL IOG R A PH Y A i ns wort h , W. F. ‘Notes on a Journey from Kaisariyah, by Malatiyah, to Bir or Birehjik in May and June 1839’, JRGS 10 (1840), 311–40 A i ns wort h , W.  F. Travels and Researches in Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Chaldea and Armenia, 2 vols. (London 1842) A i ns wort h , W. F. A Personal Narrative of the Euphrates Expedition, I (London 1888) A k u rg a l , E. Die Ausgrabung in Sinope (Ankara 1956) A l l en , W. E. D. and P. P. M uratoff , Caucasian Battlefields: A History of the Wars on the Turco-Caucasian Border 1828–1921 (Cambridge 1953) A n der son , J.  G.  C. ‘The Eastern Frontier under Augustus’, CAH X (Cambridge 1934), 254–82, and bibliography 921 A nderson , J.  G.  C. ‘The Eastern Frontier from Tiberius to Nero’, CAH X (Cambridge 1934), 747–78, and bibliography 985ff. A rfa , H. The Kurds: An Historical and Political Study (Oxford 1966) B addeley , J. F. The Rugged Flanks of Caucasus, I (London 1940) B arbaro , I. Viaggi fatti da Venetia . . . in Persia, etc (Venice 1645) B arkley , H. C. A Ride through Asia Minor and Armenia: giving a Sketch of the Characters, Manners and Customs of both the Mussulman and Christian Inhabitants (London 1891) B a r n et t, R. D. ‘Ancient Oriental Influences on Archaic Greece’, in The Aegean and the Near East: Studies presented to Hetty Goldman, ed. S.S. Weinberg (New York 1956), 212–38 Baş ıbüyük, A. ‘Demographic and residential properties of Gercanis and Kuruçay subprovinces in mid 17th century’, EGR 27 (2012), 85–104. B ay n e s , N.  H. ‘The Great Persecution’, CAH XII (Cambridge 1965), 646–77; and ‘Constantine and Licinius’, 691–6 B ennett , J. ‘The Cappadocian Frontier: from the Julio-Claudians to Hadrian’, in Limes 18 (2002), 301–12 B e n n e t t , J. ‘The Origins and Early History of the Pontic-Cappadocian Frontier’, AS 56 (2006), 77–93 B e rc h em , D.  va n , ‘Une inscription flavienne du Musée d’Antioche’, Mus. Helveticum 40 (1983), 185–96 B ertrandy , F. and B. R émy , ‘Legio XII Fulminata’, in Le Bohec and Wolff, Légions de Rome (Paris 2000), 253–7 B iliotti , A. ‘Report on Saddak, the supposed site of the ancient Satala’, dated 24 September 1874, in Mitford, AS 24 (1974), 221–44 B irley , A. R.‘Hadrian’s Travels’, in Representation and Perception of Roman Imperial Power, ed. L. de Blois, P. Erdkamp et al. (Amsterdam 2004), 425–41 B ishop , I. B. Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan, II (London 1891) B lau , O. ‘Reisen im Orient, 1. Querrouten durch die Pontischen Alpen’, ZAE 11 (1861), 371–83, and Map 4 B laylock , S. R. ‘Adıyaman Survey 1985–1991’, in Matthews, Ancient Anatolia, 101–10 B laylock , S. ‘Rescue Excavations by the BIAA at Tille Höyük, on the Euphrates, 1979–1990’, in Matthews, Ancient Anatolia (Exeter 1998), 111–26 B liss , Revd. E. M. Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities (London 1896)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 422 

BIBLIOGR A PH Y

B lömer , M. and M. F acella , ‘Ein Weihrelief für Iupiter Dolichenus aus der Nekropole von Perrhe’, in E. Winter (ed.), Patris Pantrophos Kommagene: Neue Funde und Forschungen zwischen Taurus und Euphrate, AMS 60 (Bonn 2008), 189–200 B ooth , K. ‘The Roman Pharos at Dover Castle’, EHHR 2 (2007), 9–21 B oré , E., Correspondance et mémoires d’un voyageur en Orient 2 vols. (Paris 1840) B osworth , A. B. ‘Vespasian’s Reorganisation of the North-East Frontier’, Antichthon 10 (1976), 63–78 B ounegru , O. and M. Z ahariade , Les forces navales du Bas Danube et de la Mer Noire aux 1er–VIe siècles (Oxford 1996) B rant , J. (Consul at Erz-Rum), ‘Journey through a part of Armenia and Asia Minor, in the year 1835’, JRGS 6 (1836), 187–223 B rant , J. ‘Notes of a Journey through a part of Kurdistan, in the Summer of 1838’, JRGS 10 (1840), 341–434 B raund , D. C. ‘Coping with the Caucasus: Roman responses to local conditions in Colchis’, BAR 553 (1989), 31–43 B ryce , Viscount. The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915–1916: Documents presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon (London 1916) B ryer , A. A. M. and D. C. Winfield, The Byzantine Monuments of the Pontos (Dumbarton Oaks 1985) B urnaby , Capt. F. On Horseback through Asia Minor (London 1877, repr. Oxford 1996) C alder , W. M. ‘The Royal Road in Herodotus’, CR 39 (1925), 7–11 C hapot , V. La Frontière de l`Euphrate de Pompée à la conquête arabe (Paris 1907) C hardin , Sir J. The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia and the East Indies in 1672, II (London 1686) C hesney , F. R. (Lt. Col.) The Expedition for the Survey of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, carried on by order of the British Government in the years 1835, 1836 and 1837, I (London 1850) C ichorius , C. Die Reliefs der Traianssäule herausgeben und historisch erklärt, I: Die Reliefs des ersten Dakischer Krieges, II: Die Reliefs des zweiten Dakischer Krieges (Berlin 1896 and 1900) C lavijo , Ruy Gonzales, His Embassy from Henry III of Castille to Tambutlaine the Great at Samarkand, 1403–1406, trans. Le Strange (London 1928) Collingwood, R.  G. and I.  A.  Richmond, The Archaeology of Roman Britain (London 1969) C omfort , A. M., C. A badie -R eynal and R. E rgeç , ‘Crossing the Euphrates in antiquity. Zeugma seen from space’, AS 50 (2000), 99–126 C omfort , A. M. and R. E rgeç , ‘Following the Euphrates in antiquity: north–south routes around Zeugma’, AS 51 (2001), 19–50 C ook , R. M. ‘Ionia and Greece in the eighth and seventh centuries bc ’, JHS 66 (1946), 67–98 C orbier , M. ‘Coinage, Society and Economy’, CAH2 XII (Cambridge 2005), 393–439 C ramer , W. ‘Construction and Maintenance of the Trebizond – Iran Transit Road’, Structural Engineer 18 (May 1940), 586–96 C row , J. G. ‘Trabzon Vilayet Survey 1993’, AS 44 (1994), 16–18 C row , J. G. and A.  A.  M.  B ryer , ‘Survey in Trabzon and Gümüş hane Vilayets, Turkey, 1992–1994’, Dumbarton Oaks 51 (1997), 283–9 C row , J. G. and D. H. F rench , ‘New Research on the Euphrates Frontier in Turkey’, BAR 71 (1980), 903–12

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

BIBLIOGR A PH Y  423

C uinet , V. La Turquie d’Asie: Géographie administrative, statistique, descriptive et raisonnée de chaque Province de l’Asie Mineure, I–II (Paris 1892) C umont , F. Études Syriennes (Paris 1917) C umont , F. ‘The Frontier Provinces of the East. Cappadocia, Lesser Armenia, Commagene’, CAH XI (Cambridge 1936), 606–13, and bibliography, 918f. C umont , F. and E. ‘Voyage d’exploration archéologique dans le Pont et la Petite Arménie’, SP II (Brussels 1906) C untz , O. Itineraria Romana 1, Itineraria Antonini Augusti et Burdigalense (Leipzig 1929) C urzon , R., Hon. Armenia: A Year at Erzeroom, and on the Frontiers of Russia, Turkey and Persia (London 1854) D abrowa , E. ‘Sur la création de la legio XVI Flavia’, Latomus 41 (1982), 614–19 D elaporte , L. J. ‘Malatya. La ville et le pays de Malatia’, Rev. Hittite 2 (1932–34), 129–54 D illemann , L. Haute Mésopotamie orientale et Pays adjacents: contributions à la géographie historique de la région du V siècle avant l’ère chrétienne au VI siècle de cette ère (Paris 1962) D odgeon , M. H. and S. N. C. L ieu , The Roman Eastern Frontier and the Persian Wars ad 226–363: A Documentary History (London 1991) D örner , F. K. and T. B. G oell , Arsameia am Nymphaios: die Ausgrabungen im Hierothesion des Mithridates Kallinikos von 1953–1956 (Berlin 1963) D ubois de M ontpéreux , F. Voyage autour du Caucase chez les Tcherkesses et les Abkhases en Colchide, en Géorgie, en Arménie et en Crimée, avec un Atlas géographique, pittoresque, archéologique, géologique, etc., 6 vols. (Paris 1839–43) D umas , A. Impressions de voyage. Le Caucase, I–III (Paris 1884) D unbabin , K.  M.  D. Theater and Spectacle in the Art of the Roman Empire (Cornell University Press, 2016) E rarslan , F. and E.  W inter , ‘Perrhe (Pirun) - Geographische Lage, Topographie und (Forschungs-)Geschichte’, in E. Winter (ed.), Patris Pantrophos Kommagene: Neue Funde und Forschungen zwischen Taurus und Euphrate, AMS 60 (Bonn 2008), 179–87 E v er e tt , Sir  W. (Consul for Kurdistan), Collection (Archive, in Middle East Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford) F acella , M. La Dinastia degli Orontidi nella Commagene ellenistico-romano (Pisa 2006) F acella , M. ‘Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine coins from the necropolis of Perrhe’, in E.  Winter (ed.), Patris Pantrophos Kommagene: Neue Funde und Forschungen zwischen Taurus und Euphrate, AMS 60 (Bonn 2008), 207–26 F inlay , G. ‘Journal 1850–68. Memoranda during a tour to . . . Trebizond . . . in 1859’ (manuscript, in the British School at Athens) F itz , J. Akten des XI Internationalen Limeskongresses, Budapest 1976 (Budapest 1977) F raser , J. B. A Winter’s Journey (Tatar) from Constantinople to Teheran; with Travels through various parts of Persia, etc., I (London 1838) F reeman , P. Limes XVIII: Proceedings of the XVIIIth International Congress of Roman Frontier Studies, Amman 2000 (Oxford 2002) F r e n c h , D. H. ‘New Research on the Euphrates Frontier: Supplementary Notes 1 and 2’, BAR 156 (Oxford 1983), 71–101 F rench , D. H. Roman Roads and Milestones of Asia Minor, Fasc. 2: An Interim Catalogue of Milestones, Parts 1 and 2, BAR 392 (Oxford 1988) F rench , D. H. and C. S. L ightfoot , The Eastern Frontier of the Roman Empire: Proceedings of a colloquium held at Ankara in September 1988, BAR 553 (Oxford 1989)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 424 

BIBLIOGR A PH Y

F rench , D. H. and J. M oore , ‘Excavations at Tille. An interim Report 1979–1982’, AS 32 (1982), 161/187 G abriel , A. Voyages archéologiques dans la Turquie orientale, I (Texte) and II (Planches) (Paris 1940) G arstang , J. and O. R. G urney , The Geography of the Hittite Empire, Occasional Publication of the BIAA, no. 5 (London 1959) G lantz , D. M. ‘The Struggle for the Caucasus. Combat Chronology and Documents Vol. I 21 July–18 November 1942. Part One 21 July–11 September’, JSMS 22:4 (2009), 588–711 G oell , T. B. ‘Samosata Archaeological Excavations, Turkey 1967’, NGS Research Reports, 1967 Projects, 83–109 (Washington 1974) G régoire , H. ‘Rapport sur un voyage d`exploration dans le Pont et en Cappadoce. De Tokat à Sivas’, BCH 33 (1909), 28–41 G regory , S. Roman Military Architecture on the Eastern Frontier ad 200–600, II and III (Amsterdam 1997) G udea , N. Roman Frontier Studies: Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Roman Frontier Studies, Zalâu (Napoca) (Zaläu 1999) G unther , R. T. The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides. Illustrated by a Byzantine ad 512, Englished by John Goodyer ad 1655 (London and New York 1968) H amilton , W. J. Researches in Asia Minor, Pontus and Armenia, with some Account of their Antiquities and Geology, I (London 1842) H amson , C. J. Liber in Vinculis (Trinity College, Cambridge 1989) H anson , W. S. and L.  J.  F.  K eppie , Roman Frontier Studies 1979: Papers presented to the 12th International Congress of Roman Frontier Studies (University of Stirling), BAR 71 (Oxford 1980) H arper , R.  P. ‘Excavations at Pağ nık Öreni’, AS 19 (1969), 4; 20 (1970), 4ff.; 21 (1971), 10f. H arper , R.  P. ‘Two Excavations on the Euphrates Frontier 1968–1974: Pağ nık Öreni (Eastern Turkey) 1968–1971 . . .’, in Limes 10 (1977), 453–60 H aupt , D. and H.-G. Horn, Studien zu den militärgrenzen Roms, 2: Vorträge des 10 internationalen Limeskongresses in der Germania Inferior, Beihefte der Bonner Jahrbücher 38 (Cologne 1977) H epworth , Revd. G. H. Through Armenia on Horseback (London 1898) H ewsen , R. H. Armenia: A Historical Atlas (University of Chicago 2001) H odge , A. T. Roman Aqueducts and Water Supply (London 1991) H oepfner , W. ‘Direk Kale. Ein unbekanntes Heiligtum in Kommagene’, Ist. Mitt. 16 (1966), 157–77 H ogarth , D.  G. ‘The military road from Caesarea to Melitene on the Euphrates’, RGS Suppl. Papers 3 (1893), 678–718 H ogarth , D. G. ‘Notes from the Euphrates Valley. 1 (Malatia, May 17, 1894)’, Athenaeum 3477 (June 16, 1894), 780f.; and ‘2 (Trebizond, June 21, 1894)’, Athenaeum 3481 (July 14, 1894), 73 H ogarth , D. G. A Wandering Scholar in the Levant (London 1896) H older , P. A.‘Auxiliary Deployment in the Reign of Hadrian’, in Documenting the Roman Army: Essays in Honour of Margaret Roxan, ed. J. J. Wilkes (London 2003), 101–45 H older , P. A. ‘Auxiliary Deployment in the Reign of Trajan’, Dacia 50 (2006), 141–74 H ommaire de H ell , I.  X.  M. Voyage en Turquie et en Perse, exécuté par ordre du Gouvernement Français pendant les années 1846, 1847 et 1848, . . . accompagné de Cartes

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

BIBLIOGR A PH Y  425

d’Inscriptions, etc, et d’un Album de 100 planches, illustré par Jules Laurens, I (Paris 1854); and (Observations météorologiques, Itinéraires), IV (Paris 1860) H onigmann , E. and Α. Maricq, Recherches sur les Res Gestae Divi Saporis (Brussels 1952) H ornell , J. ‘Floats and buoyed rafts in military operations’, Antiquity, 19 (1945), 72–9 Humann, K. and O. Puchstein, Reisen in Kleinasien und Nordsyrien, Text and Atlas (Berlin 1890) H untington , E. ‘Through the great Caňon of the Euphrates River’, GJ 20:2 (1902), 175–200 H untington , E. ‘The Valley of the Upper Euphrates River and its People’, BAGS 34:4 (1902), 301–10, and 34:5 (1902), 384–93 H untington , E. and C.  F.  L ehmann , ‘Weitere Berichte über Forschungen in Armenien und Commagene’, ZE 33 (1901), 173–209 H yde , W.  W. ‘The recent discovery of an inscribed water-organ at Budapest’, TAPA 69 (1938), 392–410 I saac , B. H. The Limits of Empire: The Roman Army in the East (Oxford, revised 1992) J acopi , G. Dalla Paflagonia alla Commagene: relazione sulla prima campagna esplorativa 1935 (Rome 1936) J ordan , W. Conquest without Victory (London 1969) K ennedy , D. L. (ed.), ‘The Twin Towns of Zeugma on the Euphrates. Rescue Work and Historical Studies’, JRA Suppl. 27 (1998) K er P orter , S ir  R. Travels in Georgia, Persia, Armenia, Ancient Babylonia etc. etc. in 1817, 1818, 1819, 1820, 2 vols. (London 1821 and 1822) K iguradze , N. S., G. A. L ordkipanidze and T. T. T odua , ‘Timbres de la XVe legion à Pityous’, VDI 181:2 (1987), 88–92 K inneir , J. M. Journey through Asia Minor, Armenia and Koordistan in the years 1813 and 1814, with remarks on the Marches of Alexander, and the Retreat of the Ten Thousand (London 1818) K inross , Lord P. B. The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire (London 1977) K ökten , I. K. ‘Prehistorical Researches in the regions of Sivas, Malatya, Elazığ ’, Belleten 11 (1947), 431–72 (in Turkish) Koşay, H. Z. ‘Ou se trouvait le sanctuaire hittite Samuha?’, Belleten 36 (1972), 463–8 (in Turkish) K ulikowski , M. ‘The Notitia Dignitatum as a Historical Source’, Historia 49 (2000), 358–77 L awrence , T. E. Crusader Castles (London 1986) L ayard , Sir  A.  H. Discoveries among the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, with Travels in Armenia, Kurdistan, and the Desert: being the result of a second expedition undertaken for the Trustees of the British Museum (London 1853) L eaning , J.  B. ‘The date of the repair of the bridge over the River Chabina: L.  Alfenus Senecio and L. M arius Perpetuus in Syria Coele’, Latomus 30 (1971), 386–9 L e B ohec , Y. and C. W olff , Les Légions de Rome sous le Haut-Empire, Actes du Congrès de Lyon 17–19 Septembre 1998 (Paris 2000) L ehmann -H aupt , C. F. Armenien einst und jetzt, Reisen und Forschungen I: vom Kaukasus zum Tigris und nach Tigranocerta (Berlin and Leipzig 1910) L ekvinadze , V. A. ‘The Pontic Limes’, VDI 108:2 (1969), 75–93 L epper , F. A. Trajan’s Parthian War (Oxford 1948) L epper , F. A. and S. Frere, Trajan’s Column: A New Edition of the Cichorius Plates (Gloucester 1988)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 426 

BIBLIOGR A PH Y

L e S trange , G. ‘Description of Mesopotamia and Baghdad written about the year 900 ad by Ibn Serapion, . . . with Translation and Notes’, JRAS 27 (1895), 1–76, with notes and corrections by D. G. Hogarth, 744–7 L e S trange , G. The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia from the Moslem conquest to the time of Timur (Cambridge 1905) L ewin , A. S. and P. Pellegrini (eds.), The Late Roman Army in the Near East from Diocletian to the Arab Conquest: Proceedings of a colloquium held at Potenza, Acerenza and Matera, Italy (May 2005), BAR 1717 (Oxford 2007) L iddle , A. Periplus Ponti Euxini/Arrian: edited with introduction, translation and commentary (London 2003) L ightfoot , C. S.‘Survey Work at Satala: a Roman legionary fortress in North-East Anatolia’, in Matthews, Ancient Anatolia (Exeter 1998), 273–84 L odwick , J. The Filibusters: The Story of the Special Boat Service (London 1947) L oon , M. N. van. ‘The Euphrates mentioned by Sarduri II of Urartu’, in Anatolian Studies Presented to Hans Gustav Güterbock (Istanbul 1974), 187–94 L ucas , J. War on the Eastern Front 1941–1945: The German Soldier in Russia (London 1979) L ybner , A. H. ‘The Ottoman Turks and the routes of Oriental trade’, Eng. Hist. Review 30 (1915), 577–88 L ynch , H.  F.  B. Armenia: Travels and Studies, I: The Russian Provinces; II: The Turkish Provinces (London 1901) M agie , D.  M. Roman Rule in Asia Minor to the End of the Third Century after Christ (Princeton 1950) M amuladze , Sh. Kh., M.  S.  Khalvashi and L.  G.  Aslanishvili, ‘The Roman garrison at Apsarus’, VDI 240: 2 (2002), 33–9 M anfredi , V. M. La Strada dei Diecimila: Topografia e Geografia dell’ Oriente di Xenofonte (Milan 1986) M aricq , A. ‘Res Gestae Divi Saporis’, Syria 35 (1958), 295–360 M atthews , R. (ed.) Ancient Anatolia: Fifty Years’ Work by the BIAA (Exeter 1998) M aunsell , Lt. Col. F. R. Military Report on Eastern Turkey in Asia (London), I (1893), ‘General Report’, compiled for the Intelligence Division of the War Office; I (1903), ‘Black Sea Littoral: Country from the Black Sea to Sivas and Erzerum’; IV (1904), ‘Middle Euphrates Valley: Country from the Gulf of Alexandretta towards Erzerum and Bitlis’ M aunsell , Lt. Col. F. R. ‘Notes to Accompany Lieut.-Colonel Maunsell’s Map of Eastern Turkey in Asia’, GJ 28:2 (1906), 163–5 and 208 (map) M axfield , V. A. and M. J. Dobson, Roman Frontier Studies 1989: Proceedings of the XVth International Congress of Roman Frontier Studies (University of Kent at Canterbury) (Exeter 1991) M illar , F. The Roman Near East 31 bc –ad 337 (Harvard and London 1993) M iller , K. Itineraria Romana: Römische Reisewege an der Hand der Tabula Peutingeriana dargestellt (Stuttgart 1916, repr. Rome 1964) M itchell , S. Armies and Frontiers in Roman and Byzantine Anatolia: Proceedings of a colloquium held at University College, Swansea, in April 1981, BAR 156 (Oxford 1983) M itford , T. B. ‘Some inscriptions from the Cappadocian limes’, JRS 64 (1974), 160–75 M itford , T. B. ‘Biliotti’s excavations at Satala’, AS 24 (1974), 221–44 M itford , T. B. ‘The Euphrates Frontier in Cappadocia’, in Limes 10 (1977), 501–10 M itford , T. B. ‘Cappadocia and Armenia Minor: Historical Setting of the Limes’, ANRW 2, 7.2 (1980), 1169–228

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

BIBLIOGR A PH Y  427

M itford , T. B. ‘The Inscriptions of Satala (Armenia Minor)’, ZPE 115 (1997), 137–67 M itford , T. B. ‘The Cappadocian Limes’, in Limes 23 (2015), 661–7 M itford , T. B. East of Asia Minor: Rome’s Hidden Frontier, 2 vols. (Oxford 2018) M oltke , Graf H. von, Briefe über Zustände und Begebenheiten in der Türkei aus den Jahren 1835 bis 1839 (Berlin 1876) Molyneux-Seel, Capt. L. ‘A Journey in Dersim’, GJ 44 (1914), 49–68 M orier , J. J. A Journey through Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor, to Constantinople in the years 1808 and 1809 (London 1812) M unro , J. A. R. ‘Notes on roads in the vilayet of Sivas’, RGS Suppl. Papers 3 (1893), 719–39 NID, Turkey, 2 vols. (London 1942/3) Nobbe, C. F. A. Claudii Ptolemaei Geographia, II (Leipzig 1913); and A. Diller (Hildesheim 1966) N utton , V. ‘Medicine and the Roman Army: a Further Reconsideration’, Med. Hist. 13:3 (1969), 260–70 O sten , H. H. von der, Explorations in Hittite Asia Minor (1927–28) (Chicago 1929) P achulia , V. In the Land of the Golden Fleece (Moscow 1964; in Russian) Peeters, P. ‘La légende de S. Orentius et de ses six frères martyrs’, Anal. Boll. 56 (1938), 241–64 P ercy , Earl H. A. G. P. Highlands of Asiatic Turkey (London 1901) P etersen , E., A. von Domaszewski, and G. Calderini Die Marcus-Säule auf Piazza Colonna in Rom, mit cxxviii Tafeln Folio (Munich 1986) P rontera , F. Tabula Peutingeriana: Le Antiche Vie del Mondo (Florence 2003) R amsay , W. M. ‘The Historical Geography of Asia Minor’, RGS Suppl. Papers 4 (London 1890) R awlinson , H. C. Report on Georgia (London 1859) R einach , Th. (following W. H. Waddington and with E. Babelon), Récueil général des monnaies grecques d’Asie Mineure, I: Pont et Paphlagonie (2nd ed., Paris 1925) R eineggs , J. A General, Historical and Topographical Description of Mount Caucasus, translated from the works of Dr Reineggs and Marshal Bieberstein by Charles Wilkinson, 2 vols. (London 1807) Rémy, B. Les fastes sénatoriaux des provinces romaines d’Anatolie au Haut-Empire (31 av. J-C – 284 ap. J-C): Pont-Bithynie, Galatie, Cappadoce, Lycie-Pamphylie et Cilicie (Paris 1988) R eynolds , J. ‘Roman Inscriptions 1966–1970’, JRS 61 (1971), 136–54 R ichmond , I. A. ‘Trajan’s Army on Trajan’s Column’, PBSR 13 (1935), 1–40 R iggs , Revd. H. H. Days of Tragedy in Armenia: Personal Experiences in Harpoot 1915–1917 (Ann Arbor 1997) S alvini , M. Corpus dei testi urartei, I: le inscrizioni su pietro e roccia (Rome 2008) S erdaro g ̆ l u , Ü. AS 21 (1971), 48f. S evin , V. and Z. Derin, ‘A fortified site to the east of Malatya’, BAR 553 (1989), 437–60 S herwin -W hite , A.  N. ‘Lucullus, Pompey and the East’, CAH2 IX (Cambridge 1992), 229–73 S inclair , T. A. Eastern Turkey: an Architectural and Archaeological Survey (London 1989–90) S mith , E. and H. G. O. D wight , Missionary Researches in Armenia: including a Journey through Asia Minor, and into Georgia and Persia (London 1834) S ommer , C. S. and S. M atešic,́ Limes XXIII: Proceedings of the 23rd International Congress of Roman Frontier Studies, Ingolstadt 2015 (Mainz 2018) S outhgate , H. Narrative of a Tour through Armenia, Kurdistan, Persia and Mesopotamia, I (London 1840)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

 428 

BIBLIOGR A PH Y

S peidel , M.  A. ‘The Development of the Roman Forces in Northeastern Anatolia. New evidence for the history of the exercitus Cappadocicus’, in Lewin and Pellegrini (eds.), BAR 1717 (Oxford 2007), 73–90 S peidel , M.  P. ‘The Caucasus Frontier. Second century garrisons at Apsarus, Petra and Phasis’, in Limes 13 (1986), 657–60 S tark , F. Rome on the Euphrates: The Story of a Frontier (London 1966) S tarr , C. G. The Roman Imperial Navy 31 bc –ad 324 (New York 1941) S trecker , W. (Artillerie-Officier, Instructeur der anatolischen Armee zu Erzerum), ‘Topographische Mittheilungen über HochArmenien’, ZAE 11 (1861), 258–79 and 341–59 and Map 3 S tumpf , G. R. Numismatische Studien zur Chronologie der römischen Statthalter in Kleinasien (122 v. Chr. – 163 n. Chr.) (Saarbrücker Studien zur Archäologie und alten Geschichte 4) (Saarbrücken 1991) S uter , H. (Vice-Consul at Trebizond), ‘Notes on a journey from Erz-Rum to Trebizond, by way of Shebb-khaneh, Kara Hisar, Sivas, Tokat, and Samsun, in October, 1838’, JRGS 10 (1840), 434–44 S ykes , M. ‘Journeys in North Mesopotamia’, GJ 30:3 (1907), 237–54, and 30:4 (1907), 384–98 S ykes , M. The Caliph’s Last Heritage: A Short History of the Turkish Empire (London 1915) S yme , R. ‘Flavian Wars and Frontiers, The Eastern Frontier’, CAH XI (Cambridge 1936), 137–45 S yme , R. ‘Domitius Corbulo’, JRS 60 (1970), 27–39 T albert , R. J. A. Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (Princeton 2000) T amkin , N. ‘Britain, the Middle East and the “Northern Front”’, WH 15:3 (2008), 314–36 T as ̧ y ürek , O. A. ‘A Rock Relief of Shalmanezer III on the Euphrates’, Iraq 41.1 (1979), 47–53 T avernier , J.-B. Les Six Voyages . . . en Turquie, en Perse et aux Indes, première partie (Paris 1679) T aylor , J. G. (Consul at Diarbekr), ‘Travels in Kurdistan, with Notices of the Sources of the Eastern and Tigris, and Ancient Ruins in their Neighbourhood’, JRGS 35 (1865), 21–58 T aylor , J. G. (Consul for Kurdistan), ‘Journal of a Tour in Armenia, Kurdistan and Upper Mesopotamia, with notes of Researches in the Deyrsim Dagh, in 1866’, JRGS 38 (1868), 281–346 T exier , C. F. M. Description de l’Arménie, la Perse et la Mésopotamie, I (Paris 1842) T ournefort , J.  P.  de, Relation d’un voyage du Levant fait par l’ordre du Roy: l’Histoire Ancienne et Moderne de plusieurs Illes d’Archipel, de Constantinople, des Côtes de la Mer Noire, del’Arménie, de la Georgie, des Frontières de Perse, et de l’Asie Mineure, III (Lyon 1717) T ozer , Revd. H. F. Turkish Armenia and Eastern Asia Minor (London 1881) T rombley , F.  R. and J.  W.  W att , The Chronicle of Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite (Liverpool 2000) T setskhladze , G. R. ‘Colchians, Greeks and Achaemenids in the 7th–5th Centuries bc : a Critical Look’, Klio 76 (1994), 78–102 UK Hydrographic Office, Black Sea and Sea of Azov Pilot: Marmara Denizi, Black Sea, and Sea of Azov with adjacent coasts of Turkey . . . and Georgia (Admiralty Sailing Directions) (UK Hydrographic Office, Taunton 2006) U nz , C. Studien zu den Militärgrenzen Roms III: 13. Internationaler Limeskongress Aalen 1983 (Stuttgart 1986)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

BIBLIOGR A PH Y  429

USARIEM, ‘Altitude Acclimatization Guide’, Technical Note TN04–05, March 2004 V an R engen , W. ‘La IIe Légion Parthique à Apamée’, in Le Bohec and Wolff, Légions de Rome 407–10 W agner , J. ‘Die Römer am Euphrat’, in Dörner, ‘Kommagene’, Antike Welt 1975, 68–82 W agner , J. ‘Vorarbeiten zur Karte “Ostgrenze des römischen Reiches” im Tübinger Atlas des vorderen Orients’, in Limes 11 (Budapest 1977), 669–703 W agner , J. ‘Provincia Osrhoenae. New archaeological finds illustrating the military ­organisation under the Severan dynasty’, in Mitchell, Armies and Frontiers, BAR 156 (Oxford 1983), 103–23 W agner , J. ‘Dynastie und Herrscherkult in Kommagene. Forschungsgeschichte und neuere Funde’, Ist. Mitt. 33 (1983), 177–224 W alpole , Revd. R. Travels in Various Countries of the East; being a Continuation of Memoirs relating to European and Asiatic Turkey, etc. (London 1820) W alters , H. B. Catalogue of the Bronzes, Greek, Roman and Etruscan, in the British Museum (London 1899) W eb s ter , G. The Roman Imperial Army of the First and Second Centuries ad (3rd ed., London 1985) W heeler , E.  L. ‘From Pityus to Zeugma: the Northern Sector of the Eastern Frontier 1983–1996’, in Limes 17 (1999), 215–29 W heeler , R. E. M. ‘The Roman Lighthouses at Dover’, Arch. Journ. 86 (1929), 29–46 W ilson , S ir   C.  W. Handbook for Travellers in Asia Minor, Transcaucasia, Persia, etc. (London 1895) W right , Sir Denis (as A Correspondent), ‘Trebizond and the Persian transit trade’, JRCAS 31:4 (1944), 289–301 W right , Sir Denis, ‘Trebizond and North-Eastern Turkey’, JRCAS 33:2 (1946), 121–32 Y orke , V. W. ‘A Journey in the Valley of the Upper Euphrates’, GJ 8 (1896) 317–35, and 453–72 Z uckerman , C. ‘The Early Byzantine Strongholds in Eastern Pontus, 1. The Pontic Garrisons of the Notitia Dignitatum’, Travaux 11 (1991), 527–40

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

I N DE X 1: PL AC E N A M E S Ancient Place Names (in CAPITALS), and Turkish and modern Place Names are located by Map number and grid square (see also Introduction). Some modern names (eg, Darende) are not marked, and are located in grid squares. Abbreviations Fl. Flumen river M. Mons mountain Mt. mountain N. Nehir large river Abdülwahab türbe (11 A2)  101 Abkhazia(n) (24 C2): SSR  371, 374, 378; wall 371–4 Abrenk (13 C3)  162, 165; Dere  165, 166 Abuzergafari türbe (6 B3)  24, 230 ACAMPSIS (Çoruh) (4 B2)  259, 389; headwaters  293, 365, 395; mouth  293, 365, 367, 393 Acarlar çeşme (13 D3)  148 and n. 8 Acemoğlu bridge (15 C2)  206 Achun-Dara pass (24 B1)  378, 380 Acı Dağ (Aaggi-dogii), E of Satala (2 C2)  262 Acıhalılan (6 D5)  18 ACILISENE (plain of Erzincan) (2 C2)  199, 210; controlled by Pompey  211; Anaitis and sanctuary  211, 265, 277, 278, 403; at ERIZA, ? Vazgirt  211, 215, 278; sacked byAntony  211, 278, 403; tomb of St Gregory  211; Four Martyrs,  211 Acısuhanı (22 D2)  325 ACTIUM 346 ADIABENE (4 C4)  36 Adiş (9 E2)  60–1 Adıyaman (formerly Hüsnümansur, 22) (6 A3), position  23, 24; close to PERRE (Pirun)  6, 22, 23, 24, 148; maps  3, 50; population 23; prison 18; vilayet and boundary  19, 37, 38; caravan route, to Eski Kâhta and Eski Malatya  24, 27, 39, 43; and to Harput, via Çünküş and Ayvas  45, 59, 69; ‘Old Adıyaman Road’, from Karakuş  23, 24; ‘Old Samsat Road’  5, 9, 23; new road to Urfa  11

AD VICENSIMUM, MAGNANA (Maçka 287) (23 C4)  340; road from ZIGANA 308 Aegean, distance from  385; trade from Urartu  345; and to Armenia  259 Ağaca (Aghaja) Dağ (3 D3)  101 Ağa kalesi (21 C3)  295 AGA M. (? Ahi Dağ, or Keşiş Tepe) (20 E3)  215, 219 Ağın (12 D3)  116, 119; helpers,  112, 124; olives and climate  116; roads, frontier from south  114, and to north  140, 152; Byzantine  116; Armenian  140; modern  124, 125; Çay  118, 119 Ağıyabuşağı (10 B2)  72, 77–80, 84 Ağlık (20 E3)  222, 276 Ağvanis (OLOTOEDARIZA) (18 C2)  250 and n. 9, 253, 407 Ağyarlar (? MEDOCIA) (22 E3)  319; ridge,  313–15 and n. 1, 317–22, 324, 333 Ahi Dağ (? AGA M.) (20 E3)  219 Ahi Evren Dede türbe (23 D2)  342 Ahmediye, now Ahmetli, pass (20 C3)  3, 215, 221, 256 Akbudak, now Süpürgüç (SUGGA) (5 C2)  13 Akçaabat (23 B1)  295 Akcadağ (ARCA) (2 B4)  95 Akhor (? RHANDEIA) (2 C3)  47, 415 Akşehir (19 B1)  254, 256 Akuşağı (10 C3)  71–2 Alacaatlı (19 B3)  232, 245, 247 Alacahan (18 D3)  250 Alakışyazı (7 C2)  41 Alaköprü (8 B5)  17–18, 20–1

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

432 

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES

ALBANIA (Azerbaijan) (4 E2): route to, and access  259–60, 377–9; Roman penetration, by Pompey  403; Canidius Crassus  403; Domitian  379, 405; ? Antistius Rusticus  405; ? Arrian  263, 379, 406; Sapor  406; han  145–6, 148 Aleksandropol, now Leninakan (24 E4)  381 Aleppo, Halep (BEROEA) (1 F7): caravan routes, to Diyarbekir  14; Pirun  25; Arabkir, Erzincan and Trebizond  105, 112, 261, 395, 415; railway from Malatya 392 ALEXANDRIA: library and Eratosthenes  80; Ptolemy 406; pharos 352 Ali Baba Ziyareti (7 B2)  41 Aliçeri (7 C3)  38, 41 Ali Dağ (6 B3)  22–3 Alidam (8 D2)  50–1, 73 n. 1 Alış Yer (20 E2)  223 Alp Köy (15 C2)  206–7, 225, 246 Alps, passes  377; Pontic,  304 Altın Tepe (2 C2)  177 ALUTUS Fl. (? Terek) (24 F2)  377; CUMANIA  377; I Minervia  380 AMASEIA (Amasya) (3 C1): on northern support road from ANCYRA to NICOPOLIS and SATALA  185, 259; Hadriane 185; Strabo 403 Amasya (AMASEIA) (3 C1): on caravan route to northern Persia  394, 398; and Mesopotamia 394; deportations 39; earthquake 212 Ambar Tepe (18 D5)  239 AMIDA (Diyarbakir) (4 B4): on Persian Royal Road  403; flight of Ammianus  46, 59, 91, 407; captured by Persians  407; route to Eski Malatya  59, 61 AMISOS (AMISUS, Samsun) (3 C1); navigation, from PHASIS  352, 367 Amperi (19 A3)  232–3, 241 ANAETICA REGIO (2 C2)  211 Anaklia (? ZIGANEOS) (24 C2)  371, 415 ANALIBA (ANALIBLA, Hasanova) (14 C2) 191–3: garrison  193; tiles, pottery, coins  192; water pipes  55, 192, 222, 276, 337; bishopric  188, 193; churches  188, 192; on road per ripam,  169, 203; route to Melik Serif (? HARIS)  239; not on road to NICOPOLIS 182 ANALIBOZORA (upper Ardos) (15 D2)  207–9

Anatolia (central and eastern, Map 1): mountains and plateau 389–90; climate  310, 396; winter  397; arrival of Selcuks  187; Russian advance  337; and Turkish forces 346; churches  154; expected German advance  89, 96 n. 1; antique dealers  124 Anchxa pass (24 B1)  378, 380 ANCYRA (Ankara) (3 A2): winter quarters  264; city walls  353; road-building  405; centre of roads, via CAESAREA  94, 405, and SEBASTEIA  94, to MELITENE; via SEBASTEIA  185, 259, and NEOCAESAREA  185, 259, to NICOPOLIS  14, and SATALA  249, 251–2, 254, 259; on caravan routes to northern Persia  394, and Mesopotamia, 394; Zenobia 407 ANDAGA (? Horasan) (4 B2)  260, 263 Anifa (23 D2)  342 Ankara (ANCYRA) (1 A4): bus to Malatya,  95; German Ambassador  379; grapes from Çit Harabe  129; JUSMAT 149; maps 226 Antalya 129 Antioch (Antakya, ANTIOCHIA) (1 E7): coins  29 n. 21, 55; earthquake  212; games  349; Vespasian’s canal  284 n. 6; Lucius Verus  406; St Lucian  6 Antitaurus (2 A/B3)  131–8, 161–7, 389: southern escarpment  132; altitude  131, 389; Mamahar pass  135, 172; water scarcity  131–2; villages  133–5, 137–8; Kurds and caravans  134; stations  126, 134–6; signal mounds  138; routes over  122, 192–3; frontier road  133, 135, 137–8; pack-mule tracks  162, 163–6 gorge  144–52, 161, 163–4; rafts  47, 149–50, 177–9; fish  144; araba road  144, 148–9; caravan and Silk road 143–8; see also Eğin Anzarya hanlar (FRIGIDARIUM) (22 D2): situation and altitude  325, 329, 332; exposed on watershed  297, 324; access  297, 327; travellers (Everett; Tozer)  415, 418 APAMEA, in Osrhoene (5 B6): bridge from ZEUGMA  14; road from SAMOSATA  15; and to EDESSA  17 APAMEA, in Syria,  97 n. 17 APSARUS (? Makriyali, now Kemalpaşa) (4 B2): position  362, 364–7 and n. 13;

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES 

known to Pliny  365; Arrian’s inspection  352, 362, 365; fort and garrison  363, 366–7; Gonio  366–7 Aptal boğazı (18 C5)  231 AQUINCUM, N of Budapest,  90 and n. 13 Arabkir (12 B2): population and Armenians  129, 162, 408; Eski Arabkir  126 and n. 2, 133; caravan roads, from Aleppo and Eski Malatya, and to Erzincan and Trebizond  98, 105, 107, 112, 395; and from Harput  110; Silk Road to Eğin and Kemah  126, 143–4, 392; alternative route to Eğin,  132, 162; to Divriği 135; to Hasanova  193; travellers (Brant, Moltke, Riggs, Taylor; Osten; Burnaby) 415–8 Arabkir Çay (12 A2-D4)  112–13, 124–5, 133–4; bridges, Bahadın  114–16, and Kara Mağara  116–17; travellers (Hogarth, Lehmann-Haupt)  416–17 ARAGOS Fl. (Aragvi) (24 F2)  377 Aragvi (ARAGOS Fl.) (24 F2)  377 Arakel Ziyareti (13 B3)  138 and n. 11, 162 Araklı (HYSSOU LIMEN) (24 B4)  363–4 Araklı Burnu (24 B4)  352 Arapuşağı (10 B2)  71 Ararat Mt (4 C3)  263, 374 ARAURACA (Ardos) (15 D2)  207–9; garrison  207; St Eustratius  186, 265, 407; Armenian dialect  188; bishopric  188; as ? PHREATA, captured by Sapor  214, 406; on frontier road per ripam  183, 209, and southern support road to SATALA  207, 250 ARAVENE (2 C4)  54 ARAXES Fl. (Aras, Araks) (4 B3-E2): as route to ARTAXATA  260, 263, 400 ARCA (Akcadağ) (2 B4): on road to Melitene  95; veteran colony  90 ARCHABIS Fl., 7 mls W of APSARUS (24 C3) 362 ARCHAEOPOLIS (Nokalevi), in COLCHIS (24 D2)  363, 375 Ardasa (Torul) (22 B3)  307 and n. 4 Ardon (24 F1/2)  378 Ardos (ARAURACA) (15 D2)  207–9; Armenian population  189 n. 14, 204, traveller (Taylor)  208, 416 Arege (Türkarege) (13 B3)  133, 138, 161–2, 165–6; signalling mound  171, 247; traveller (Taylor)  138

433

ARGENTORATUM (Strasbourg), aqueduct pipes 277 Arguvan (2 B3)  108 Arles, aqueduct siphon  276 ARMENIA (4 B3-D2): extent  116, 263, 390, 404; capital, ARTAXATA  396; GORNEAE  263, 404; TIGRANOCERTA  80, 403–4; Five Martyrs  207, 265, 407; St Gregory converts to Christianity 407; dux Armeniae 186, 407; greater  193; winter  397–9; earthquake  21 and n. 17, 407 passage of Xenophon  333, 397–8, 403; Mithridates  199; invasions, of Lucullus  80, 397, 403; Pompey  80, 263, 403; Canidius Crassus  403; Antony  397, 403; Tiberius  403; Gaius Caesar  404; Germanicus  404; Nero  80, 86–7, 90, 120, 346, 352; Corbulo  263, 346, 377, 397, 400, 404; Paetus  14, 80, 404; ? Antistius Rusticus  405; Trajan 15,  37, 90, 263–4, 398, 405; ? Arrian  263, 379, 406; Severianus  263, 406; Verus  263–4, 281, 406; Theocritus  406; Palmatus  397, 406; Galerius  407; Valens  407 Roman traders  403; involvement of Vespasian  404; Domitian  405; annexed by Trajan 349,  405; abandoned by Hadrian  368, 405 incursions of Alani (c. ad 35, c. ad 72, c. ad 135, ad 227/8)  379, 404, 406; Huns  407: Persians and wars  310, 406–8; German plans  380–1 routes, to southern, from COMMAGENE  56, 59, 69; and by TOMISA  80, 95, 394; to central, by DASCUSA  118; to northern, by Eğin  144; by SATALA  259–63, 394; and from TRAPEZUS  343, 345–6, 395 ARMENIA MAJOR (province) (4 B3-D2): annexed by Trajan 349,  405; garrison  264; governor  175, 405; abandoned by Hadrian  368, 405 ARMENIA MINOR (kingdom and province) (2 A2-C2): plains, of Aşkar Ova  185, Erzincan  210–11; and Kelkit  282–3; passes, Kerboğaz 237–8; Pelitsirti 209; Sinibeli  230–1; Sipikör  219; earthquakes, at Antioch  212; Çukurçimen 251–2; Erzincan 211–2; Kerboğaz  237; Nezgep  195, 212;

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

434 

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES

ARMENIA MINOR (Cont.) NICOPOLIS  21 and n. 17, 185–6; Refahiye  232–3; Sipikör and hans 220; climate, winter  397–9; navigation of EUPHRATES 176 oppida AZA (HAZA)  247; CAESAREA  247, with Urartian fire temple  88; NICOPOLIS, capital and metropolis  185, 247; Christianity  186, 265; martyrs, Four  211; Five  207, 265, 407; Forty-Five  185–6; bishoprics  188, 193, 207, 265; Armenian dialect  186, 207; and population  187–8 kingdom of Mithridates  173, 345; occupied by Lucullus  397; and Pompey  185, 188, 199, 403; given to Deiotarus  346; annexed with CAPPADOCIA by Tiberius  404; and by Vespasian  6, 185, 188; with CAPPADOCIA under consular legate  404; garrison, XVI Flavia Firma  263–4; XV Apollinaris  264; military boundary  182; signalling  89, 138; Hadrian visit  185; overrun by Sapor  406; arrival of holy men  24 Roman roads, network  225, 249; reused by caravans  189 n. 10, 226–7; frontier road, from Çaltı Çay to Karabudak  168, 176–7, 180–2; from Karabudak to SATALA, per ripam by Erzincan  190–223; and through mountains by Melik Şerif  227–32, 249, 251–2, 254–8, with milestones  95 and n. 3, 232, 249; from SATALA to Harşit  259, 287–296; road from ZIMARA to NICOPOLIS  182–5; track, from Hasanova, via Kerboğaz, to Melik Şerif  225, 233–41; support roads from ANCYRA to NICOPOLIS  185; continuing to SATALA, northern across Çimen Dağları  252–8; southern, by Melik Şerif, Kömür Çay and Erzincan,  203–23, 241–7, 250; Salt roads, north of Kemah,  243–4, 244–7 Armudan (? LADANA) (14 B2)  182–3, 188 Arnavut (Albanian) han (13 D4)  145, 148 Arpayazıbeli (Bekolar) pass (18 D4)  231 ARSAMEIA AD EUPHRATEN (Gerger kalesi) (8 E1)  5 and n.2, 46–7, 50–1 and n. 8 ARSAMEIA AD NYMPHAEUM (above Eski Kâhta) (7 B4)  5, 23–4, 31

ARSAMOSATA (? Arsimsat) (2 C3)  80, 212, 405 ARSANIAS Fl. (Murat N.) (4 C3-A3): source, and PYXURATES (Munzur Su),  81–2, 390; known to Claudius  61, 263; Paetus and RHANDEIA  404; ‘Roman bridge’  401 n. 6; route to southern and central ARMENIA  81–2, 108, 111, 118 Arslantepe (MILITIA) (11 A5)  82, 88–9 ARTAXATA (Artashat, Küçük Vedi) (4 D2): beside ARAXES  263; altitude and summer fevers  396; submits to Pompey  403; occupied by Antony  403; Gaius dies near  404; captured by Alani  404; destroyed by Corbulo  400, 404; captured by Trajan, and garrisoned (IV Scythica)  15, 264, 405; inscriptions 15; partially destroyed by Statius Priscus  406; and replaced by KAINEPOLIS  406; routes, from SATALA  260, 263; and SEBASTOPOLIS  375; travellers (Dubois de Montpéreux, Ker Porter)  418 ARULIS (? Elif) (5 C3)  11, 13–14 Arzen (? TIGRANOCERTA) (4 B4)  5 n. 2 ARZIYA (? ZIMARA) (13 B1)  143, 176 Aşağı Kermut (22 D4)  316–17 Aşağı Tahnıç (MIASENA) (7 B2)  39–40 Asia, linked with Europe by caravan route  260; with Phasis as boundary  367; trade with central  345, 395; durability of Kurds 391 ASIA (province): Mithridates’ invasion  345, 368, 403 Asia Minor, eastern: minerals  356; mountains 385; winter climate  399; Pompey’s settlement  89, 403; exposed  346; Hadrian’s journey  264, 333; Sapor’s offensive  90; overrun by Persians and Arabs  408; beauty of Eğin  153; water at Hasanova  192; crops at Erzincan,  210; daylight at SATALA  263; and strategic cross-roads  259, 261; road centres  266; road building  405; inscriptions  266; head of Aphrodite  278; caravans  394; chaussée to Erzerum  293 Aşkale (? LUCUS BASARO) (1 I4)  261–4, 395; travellers (Suter; Tavernier; Ker Porter) 416–8

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES 

Aşkar (17 B2)  183, 185; milestone  183, 405; travellers (Taylor; Cumont, Grégoire, Munro; Ker Porter)  416–17 Aşkar (Suşehri) Ova (17 A1-C2)  183, 185, 250, 283; travellers (Strecker, Suter, Taylor; Grégoire)  416 Aşutka (13 E4)  143; visibility  122, 124, 131; winter, and movement  143–4; above descent to EUPHRATES gorge,  119, 145; watch post  144; on route from Eski Malatya and Harput to Eğin  112, 116, 140; on road (Silk Road) from Arabkir to Eğin 143–4 Aşvan (2 B3)  392 Atatürk dam (5 G2)  408: lake and resited villages 23; ripa submerged, in COMMAGENE  46, with Samsat (SAMOSATA) 11, aqueduct 17–22, Akcaviran (? HEBA)  50, Gerger Çay (ARAVENE)  54; Killik (BARZALO)  86, and Çünküş ferry  59 Ateşkomu (Ateşler) (18 D6)  233, 238 ATHENAI (Atina, now Pazar) (24 B3)  365, 408; abandoned fort  362–3 and n. 4; town  363; shipwreck  356, 362; Atma (Türkatması Köy) (14 E2)  195, 198 Avbi (7 B4)  37 Avşin (Avshin, near Gullubağ) (14 D3): Şeytan köprü  167 n. 13 Ayaser yayla (22 C2)  310, 332 Ayni (5 C3)  13, 27 n. 4 Ayvas, below Keferdis (10 E2)  69 Ayvas, S of Trebizond (23 D2)  339 Ayvasilhanı (23 D2)  341 Azerbaijan (ALBANIA) (4 D1/3-F2): Melikşah  248; German plans  380; gas pipe-line 219 Babsu Köy (? CALEORSISSA) (17 C5)  183 BABYLON, 50 mls S of Baghdad: Cyrus’ defeat 328 BACTRIA 394 Bademli (12 C3)  124–5; signalling mound  124, 138; olive presses  116 Baghdad: siege of  261; recaptured 408; post road from Samsun  89; caravan road from Constantinople  95, 394; railway from Leninakan and Malatya  392; see also Index 3, Baghdad Road

435

Baghdad bridge (Bağdat, Tohumoğlu köprü) (21 C1)  287, 294, 297–9, 301, 304, 313–15, 317 Bağıştaş (14 B4),  131, 162, 180, 193; gorge  177, 179; station  177 Bağlıca (14 A4)  177 Bahadın bridge, over Arabkir Çay (12 D4)  114–16, 169, 181 Bahçe (Çatbahce, formerly Kadelik) (7 B4)  33 Bahçecik (22 D4)  304, 315, 317 and n. 3 Baku (4 F2): oilfields, and German plans  380; traveller (Dumas)  418 Balahor (? CUNISSA) (20 C2)  246, 252–4, 256–7, 400; Dere  257; PKK  246, 257 Balahu Dere (20 D2)  257 Bandola, now Dörtyol (OCTAVA) (20 E2)  219, 221–2, 258, 265, 293 Bap Dağ (22 D4)  317 BARZALO (Killik, Berzelo) (9 E3)  55–7, 61, 408; below Ziyaret Tepe  55–6; aqueduct, water pipes, coins  55–6; castrum praesidiarium, on route from southern ARMENIA, via Çünküş ferry, to COMMAGENE 56 Başdana Kaya (14 C1)  229, 235 Başmezraa (7 B2)  32, 38–41 Başvartinik (13 E3)  146 BATANAEA, SW of Damascus  74 n. 7 Batumi (24 C3)  363, 366, 393; German plans 380 Bayburt (? GYMNIAS, 297) (1 I3): passed by Xenophon  297, 314, 328; on caravan route from Trebizond to Erzerum  296, 321–2, 323, 395; track from Sürmene  364; road from Sadak  268; given to Pir Ahmed  301; travellers (Blau, Curzon, Strecker; Lehmann-Haupt; Hamilton, Hepworth, Layard, Texier, Tozer) 415–18 Bazbent Dağ (22 C3)  306, 326 Bazgu (18 C6)  230 Beg Yurdu (22 D3)  317 Bekçi Kasabası (29 D4)  210, 217–18 Bekiran (Aluçlubekiran) (10 C3)  70–2, 85 Bekolar (18 D4)  231 Belkis (ZEUGMA) (5 B6)  14 BELLUNUM (Belluno)  264 and n. 8 Berzelo, now Killik (BARZALO) (9 E3)  55–6 Beşkilise (THIA) (22 C4)  306–7 and n. 3; caravan market  306

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

436 

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES

Beş Saray (15 E1)  210 Bezbaba Tepe (6 D2)  24 Bibo (6 D1)  25–7; milestone  26 and n. 25 Bibol (9 E3),  51, 56; dam  57; travellers (Humann and Puchstein)  416 Bilâluşağı (11 A3)  99 Bilimen (Biriman) (6 D5)  18 Birecik (2 B5) crossing  14; raft  47; route to Pirun  25; modern road to Urfa  17 Birecik dam (2 A5) : flooding  11, 46, 408; of ripa  11; of ZEUGMA  11, 14 BITHYNIA: Mithridates  368 Bizmişen (13 C3) tracks to  131, 133, 136, 162, 164–5: Çay  162, 165–6 Black Sea (EUXINE) (3 E1): Xenophon sighting  325, 327, 329, 331–2; frontier extended to  4, 28 n. 7, 361 and n. 1, 385; routes leading inland, from Samsun to Diyarbekir and Baghdad  39, 89, 99, 110; Giresun  161, 163, 363; Trapezus, caravan and Transit Road to Erzerum  301 and n. 1, 343, high road to Harput and Diyarbekir  203, and trade route to COMMAGENE  231, 395; Araklı  364; Rize  364; and Pazar  365; watershed with Persian Gulf  232, 389; Pontic mountains and northern slopes  287, 393; weather boundary  310; coast and 1939 earthquake  212; rivers  393; coastal fort, Gonio  367; road below Caucasus  371; trading centre, DIOSCURIAS  378; German plans 380–1 Boğazvankomu pass (16 D1)  392 BONONIA (Bologna), Antony’s veteran  211 Boulogne, lighthouse  358 n. 24 Bournemouth 226 Boyalık (14 C2): visible from Dostal mound  180; Russian front  133, 197; village guards  193–4; on road per ripam  189 n. 10, 190–4, 197; below Kerboğaz route  159, 193, 233–4, 236, 239 Boz Dağ (above Malatya) (2 B4)  31, 38 Boztepe (MINTHRION M. 343, 349, 357) (23 D2): above Trapezus  343–4, 354, 357; visible from Xenophon cairn  327, 331–3; route over  340–3, 347–9; travellers (Curzon; Hamilton, Kinneir, Southgate)  415, 417

Bristol 329 Britain  382 n. 15 BUBALIA (? Kuruçay) (14 B2)  229 Budalauşağı (7 B1)  41 Budapest 90 Burç (10 D3)  11 Burmahan (Urumia, 13 B2)  138, 169–70, 180; bridge over Çaltı Çay  131, 138, 169–70 Bursa, caravans from  261, 394 Burustun (10 C2)  71 Butan (10 B2)  72; Hayrullah Temur,  78 and n. 2 Büyük Armudan (14 B2)  182–3 Büyüksarmısak Tepe (14 B3)  247 Büyük Tapur (14 A1)  183 Bzib, Bzyb (? KORAX Fl.) (24 B1)  376, 378, 383 n. 20 CAENE PAREMBOLE (24 B3)  363–4, 381 n. 4 CAESAREA (MAZACA, Kayseri) (3 C3): capital of CAPPADOCIA  94; coins, at Pirot of Elagabalus  85–6; in DASCUSA area of Nero  120; Antoninus  120; Severus Alexander  124; Sapor’s raid  407; Constantius’ journey  33, 407; St Mamas,  97 n. 20; St Basil  8; eventual destruction 266 on land route from GANGES, across EUPHRATES, to Spain  80; on roads, to Cilician Gates  97, n. 18; and from ANCYRA to MELITENE  94–5 and n. 18, 405–6; on caravan route to Eski Malatya  394; travellers (Hogarth; Ainsworth)  416, 418 CAESAREA (? Cengerli) (19 B3)  245,  247 Cafer Kale (CORNE) (10 A2)  79 Çağlayan, now Kireçhane (23 C2)  322, 339 Çakal Dere (? CAPADOX Fl.) (5 G1-G2)  11 Çakırgöl Dağ (THECHES M.) (22 E2)  320, 322, 325 Çakmalı harabeleri (19 B3)  232 Çal Dağ (13 D2)  161 CALEORSISSA (? Babsu Köy) (17 C5)  183, 185 Çalolar (14 D1)  236, 258 n. 5 Çaltı (13 B2)  162 Çaltı Çay (? LYCUS Fl.) (13 A2-B2)  151, 165, 170, 231, 390–1; han  138, 169;

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES 

bridge  131, 169–70; roads across  138, 161–2, 166, 169; Antitaurus slopes above  131–2, 135, 144, 180, 247, 400; Kurds  134; crossing, of frontier road from CAPPADOCIA to ARMENIA MINOR  138, 169 CANABA (? Yuvacık) (5 E6)  17 Çanakcı (? VEREUSO) (13 C5)  131–6; Çay  134–5; Kurds  134–5, 152 Cankurtaranevi (13 C2)  160 Canlı çeşme (13 B2)  132, 137–8, 162 CAPADOX Fl. (? Çakal Dere) (5 G1-G2)  11 CAPOTES M. (? Munzur Dağ) (13 E2): Mucianus, and source of EUPHRATES  161 and n. 14, 170, 193, 391; traveller (Taylor)  416 CAPPADOCIA (kingdom) (3 B3-E3)  5, 80: invaded by Mithridates  402; annexed by Tiberius  5, 80, 404 CAPPADOCIA (province) (3 B3-E3): capital, CAESAREA  94; annexed by Tiberius  5, 80, 404; activity under Claudius,  116, 404; provincial militias  404; combined by Vespasian with ARMENIA MINOR  404; under consular governors  90 and n. 12, 122 n. 3, 138 n. 2, 214, 249, 264, 327, 361, 404–6; coin  120; residences  90, 281; garrison, legionary, XII Fulminata at MELITENE  90; auxiliary  70, 103, 118, 129, 367 and n. 14, 405; detached from GALATIA  405; addition of ARMENIA MAJOR  405; raided by Persians (Ardashir, Sapor, Chosroes, Chosroes II)  91, 406–8; and by Zenobia  407 crossed by frontier  4, 6, 385, 390; road from south  13, 39; southern boundary 38; and approaches  61; EUPHRATES crossings  80, 85, 103, 119, 155–8; extrema  90, 116, 390, 404; northern, military boundary  182; dams and flooding, Karakaya  66, 70, 75, 78–9, 86–7, 98–104, 106, 408; Keban  112, 151, 158, 177, 408 frontier road  95; over Taurus  40–4; Malatya plain  88, 98–109; around DASCUSA  112–6, 121–2; approaches and Antitaurus  124–16, 131–8; Trajan’s advance  264; support road from ANCYRA to MELITENE, via CAESAREA,  94–5; and via SEBASTEIA  95, 98

437

CARBANUM (? Eski Hüsnümansur) (6 B3)  23 Çardaklu (now Sakaltutan) pass (19 D2)  227, 250–1, 395; gorge  243, 251; caravan route to Erzincan, in summer  250; blocked in winter  201, 226, 241, 243, 246; open in winter  258 n. 6; higher Salt Road  243; traveller (Cumont)  416 CARNUNTUM  264 and n. 8 CARRHAE (4 A4)  403 CARSAGA (? Sağ) (15 B2)  3, 204–5, 249; ruined church  188, 204–5; fort  207; signalling  247; on roads per ripam 207, 249, 260; and to Nicopolis  249–50 Caspian (4 F1)  374; Pompey  403; Claudius  116; shore  377, 379, and Büyük Taş  263 and n. 4; route to  394; German advance  380 Caspian Gates (CLAUSTRA CASPIARUM, and Derbent passage) (4 E1)  377–9; Nero, deployments and plans  263, 404; Rusticus  405; Domitian  263, 378–9; ? Antistius Rusticus  405; ? Arrian  263, 379, 406; Huns  406; German plans  380–1 Çatak (19 B1)  254; Armenian population  188 Caucasian Gates (CUMANIA) (24 F2): Nero and Vespasian  377; see also Darial pass Caucasus (4 B1-E2): Mt Elbrus (STROBILOS M.)  374, 378, 380; snowshoes  37; above COLCHIS  362, 394; coastal road  371; rivers, coastal  363, 370–2 and n. 17, 372–3, 376; Terek and Aragvi  377–8; CYRUS  368, 377; Abkhazian Wall  371–4; north of  361, 367, 374–5, 377 frontier extended to  361, 385; coastal forts below, SEBASTOPOLIS  264, 362, 373–6; PITYUS  264, 355, 376–7; and shipping  346; military activity in  259; Nero, plans  346, and Corbulo  377, 404; Vespasian  368 and n. 15, 377; Verus, and I Minervia  380, 406; Heraclius  407; Justinian  363, 407 tribes  361, 374, 404; incursions  362; by Alani  364, 379, 404; Huns  407; passes  362, 370, 373–4, 377–80; guarded by Persians  407; walls  377, 379; Ottoman interests  211; German plans and assault  89, 373, 379–81; travellers (Reineggs; Dubois de Montpéreux, Dumas, Ker Porter)  415, 418

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

438 

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES

CAUCASUS M. (24 C1-F2) seen under Corbulo  377; by Arrian  374; see also Elbrus Mt, Darial pass, Derbent passage Çayıruşağı (10 C2)  71 Çay Köy (Chaouqueu), E of Satala (2 C2)  1, 262 Çeker (14 D1)  233–6, 238 Cemallıkomu (20 B2)  256–7 Çemişgezek (16 B2)  119, 124, 392; travellers (Taylor; Kökten; Molyneux-Seel, Sykes) 416–9 Cemolar (14 D1)  238 Cendere Su (CHABINA Fl.) (7 A3/4-B5)  24, 27, 31–2; bridge, of Vespasian ?  26, 44 n. 1; of Severus  13, 21–2, 25, 31 and n. 1, 32–3, 36–7, 95, 158, 406 Cengerli (? CHORSABIA or CAESAREA 247) (19 B3)  205, 245–7; kale  246; fire temple  88, 246; garrison and inscription  246; auxiliary tiles ?  247 Cennis (Gennis, Cinis) (2 D2)  417 CERASUS (Giresun) (2 B1): Xenophon  397 Çerkesin Mahalle (15 B3)  177 Çermik, E of Çünküş ) (2 C4)  56, 59 Çermik (SARTONA), below Morhamam (11 B1)  105–6, 108; travellers (Hogarth and Yorke)  416 Çermik Mahallesi, below Morhamam (11 A1)  104–5 Çet Mevki (7 B1)  41 CHABINA Fl. (Cendere Su) (7 A3/4-B5): bridge, of Vespasian ?  181; of Severus  6, 13, 21–3, 27, 31–3, 36, 40, 93, 181, 406; crossing, of frontier road from COMMAGENE to CAPPADOCIA  31; travellers (Hogarth and Yorke, Humann and Puchstein, Jacopi, Kökten; Percy) 416–8 CHADAS (? Karakurt) (4 C2)  260, 263 CHALCEDON (Kadıköy): Council of  6, 25 CHALDIA (2 C1)  82, 314 CHARAX (? Ermelik, or Diştaş) (19 D5 or A4)  204 and n. 7, 239, 243 CHARMODARA (Kocan) (8 B5)  22, 50, 408; travellers (Özdoğan, Serdaroğlu) 417 Chchalta (24 C1)  378 CHOBUS, mouth of the Khobi (24 C2)  362, 370–1, 374

CHOBUS Fl. (Khobi) (24 D2-C2)  363, 370 CHORSABIA (? Cengerli, or Başgercenis) (19 B3 or 18 D4)  232, 247 CIACA (? Kilisilik) (11 A2)  80, 193, 408: fort and garrison  103, 105, 118; navigation 176 Cibolar (? Kondilia) (19 B3)  232 Çiftlik, by Kuru Çay (11 A3)  100 Çiftlik, above Çaltı Çay (13 B2)  138 Çiftlik, near Kuruçay (14 B2)  227 Çiftlik (Kelkit) (21 B4)  261–2, 267, 282, 289, 399; travellers (Strecker; Morier) 416–17 Çilhoroz (14 D2)  234 CILICIA (3 A4-C4)  4–5, 94; Taurus  389; Dioscorides  174; Sapor,  91; Rough, and I Pontica  356 Cilician Gates (3 B4): Caesar’s march 385; on road from CAESAREA  97 n. 18 Çimen Dağları (20 A2-C3): snow, and altitude  205, 207, 252, 254–5, 260, 263, 400; İkisivri, and Russian artillery spotting  252, 254, 408; Çimen yayla  225, 252, 255–6; AD DRACONES  254–6; road system,  251, 393; traces of kaldırım 182, 254–5, 256–8; frontier road, from Melik Şerif  182, 191, 225, 249, 259; and support road, from NICOPOLIS  253–4; join at Kurugöl  251–2, 259; and continue to Balahor  254–7; ‘Caravan’,‘Old Russian’, ‘Baghdad’ and ‘Old Water Buffalo Road’, from Suşehri to Sadak  251, 253–6, 259–60, 395; Salt Road, from Kömür and Euphrates  243–4, 255 Cimmerian Bosporus: client king  363, 376, 381 n. 3 Cinderek, now Obektaş (21 C4)  291 Çırabengi Tepe (19 A4)  241 Cisalpine Gaul  265 Çit Çay (12 B1-D2): crossing  121; bridges  126, 132–3, 142, 143; villages  131, 140–1; ridge above, and frontier road  121–2, 124–6, 132, 181; gorge  126; upper (as Çanakcı Çay)  131–2, 135 Çit Harabe (SABUS) (12 C1): as Harap Pazar  126; fort, ruins  126–9, 132, 214; garrison  129; water pipes  55, 129, 138,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES 

222, 276–7, 337; signalling mounds  122, 125, 131; Armenians, fate, pilgrimage, sacred pool, vines  129, 183, 188, 252; traveller (Burnaby)  418 CLAUDIOPOLIS, CLAUDIAS (Tillo ?) (9 E2)  47, 59–61, 404: known to Pliny, and foundation  46, 53–4, 61; castrum praesidiarium  61; Ammianus, and minor route from AMIDA, via Çünküş ferry to MELITENE  59, 61 CLAUSTRA CASPIARUM (Derbent passage) (4 E1), see Caspian Gates Çobanlu Su (18 E4-C1)  250, 253 COCUSUS (Göksun) (3 C3)  94 COLCHIS (Lazica) (B1-C1): plain  362, 369, 393–4; rivers  346, 362, 367–8; tribes  361, 363, 374–5, 404; in kingdom of PONTUS  345; Mithridates  361, 368; and Pompey  360, 368–9, 403; Anicetus  361, 370 client kings  264, 352, 361, 363, 370, 379; stations and anchorages  362; cities and forts  362–3, 374–7, 379; garrisons, under Nero or Vespasian  363, 368, 375; Trajan 368,  370; Hadrian, inspected by Arrian  361–3, 368; Constantine  368; Justinian, and Persians  357, 375 routes, from south  366; from north  371, 376; over Caucasus  373, 378–9; to IBERIA  368–9, 394; by sea  367; see also PHASIS: PHASIS Fl. COLONIA (Şebinkarahisar) (2 B2)  186, 394 COMANA CAPPADOCICA (Şar, 32 mls NNW of COCUSUS) (3 C3)  94; traveller (Hogarth)  416 COMANA PONTICA (Gömenek, 5 mls NE of Tokat) (3 D2)  266: on support road from ANCYRA, to SATALA  259; and caravan road to Erzerum  394 COMMAGENE (3 D4-E3)  1, 3–4: Hellenistic kingdom  4; fertility and plain  22, 25; climate  396; cities (SAMOSATA, DOLICHE, GERMANICIA, PERRE)  4–9, 11, 13, 24–5; ZEUGMA  14–15; LACOTENA  33–6; JULIOPOLIS  53–4; Nemrud Dağ  21, 31; monuments  5, 33; coins  25 and n. 21, 337; Greek fire  4, 26 and n. 24; crossings  4, 13–4; rivers (MARSYAS, Karasu, SINGE,

439

CAPADOX, Ziyaret Dere, CHABINA, Kâhta Çay, Narince Çay, Gerger Çay) and bridges  11–14 and n. 7, 17, 20, 24, 31–2, 54, 406 annexed by Tiberius  5, 54, 404; restored by Gaius  5; annexed by Vespasian, added to SYRIA, and bellum Commagenicum 5, 404; legionary garrison  6, 13–15; forts, HEBA 50, BARZALO 55–7, CLAUDIOPOLIS  59–61; stations (URIMA. ARULIS, SUGGA, TARSA,)  11–14; added to EUPHRATENSIS  6; northern boundary  38, 63; dams (Birecik and Atatürk) and flooding  11, 46, 56 routes, to north  385, 390, 395; from ZEUGMA, via PERRE to CHABINA bridge  11–14, 22–3, 25–7; and from SAMOSATA  23–4; milestone  95, 406; over Taurus  31–3, 37–8, 80, 395; per ripam  17–21, 50–3, 55, 57–9; to Karakuş  23–4; into OSRHOENE  15–17; to southern ARMENIA  56 travellers (Chapot, Hogarth and Yorke, Humann and Puchstein, Jacopi, Kökten, Özdoğan, Serdaroğlu; Ainsworth, Chesney, Percy, Stark)  416–18 Cönger (22 E4): ridge  313–18 Constantinople  137, 277, 408; Third Council  193; caravan routes, to Diyarbekir and Baghdad  95, 99, 394–5; to Erzerum and northern Persia  222, 258, 260–2, 342, 389, 394, 398; travellers (Brant, Reineggs; Fraser, Tavernier)  415, 417 CORDYLE (? Kalecik, W of ATHENAI) (24 B3)  365, 381 n. 4 CORNE (Cafer Kale) (10 A2)  79, 408 Çornecil (19 D5)  203 Çoruh (ACAMPSIS Fl.) (1 H3-J2)  389; headwaters  259; mouth  362, 365–7, 393; traveller (Brant)  415 Crimea: Mithridates  199, 361; barbarians  361; war  345; traveller (Chardin) 418 Çukurçimen (19 C2)  251, 254 Çukur Dere (19 C2-A2)  232 CUMANIA (Caucasian Gates) (24 F2)  377 CUNAXA, c. 20 mls SSW of Baghdad  403 CUNISSA (? Balahor) (20 C2)  257

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

440 

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES

Çünküş (9 F2)  58, 60, 63–4, 69: ferry  45–6, 59, 69, 85, 111; Ammianus  46, 59–60; massacre  59; caravan routes, Diyarbekir to Eski Malatya  45–6, 61; Harput to COMMAGENE  56–7; traveller (Riggs)  59, 415 CYRUS Fl. (Kura) (4 C2-E2): Pompey  368; Vespasian, walls  377; route to COLCHIS  368, 394; travellers (Dubois de Montpéreux, Dumas)  418 CYZICUS 355 DACIA: Trajan’s wars, bridges over Danube  81, 158–9; Rain Miracle  91, 406; sails in trireme  347 Damlı (10 D3)  70 Danube: bridges, pontoon  8–9, 81; stone  158–9; signal towers  88; Iron Gates,  11, 239; recruitment  121 and n. 12, 264; transfer of legions, to  406; from  28 n. 7, 264, 285 n. 16, 405; and auxiliaries  264, 405 Daphnous, now Platana (23 D1)  342, 345, 349 Darboğaz (16 D2)  392 Darende (1 F5)  75 Darial pass (24 F2)  377–8; Caucasian Gates, sighted under Corbulo  377; HARMOZICA, and Vespasian’s walls  369, 377, 379, 404; Verus and I Minervia  406; route through Caucasus, nomads  377; Alani  404, 406; Huns  407; German plans  380; travellers (Reineggs; Dumas, Ker Porter)  415, 418 DASCUSA (Pağnık) (12 D3)  116, 118–19, 126; extrema Cappadocia  116; climate  116, 396–7, 401; crossing, and ‘cavalry crossing’  119; access to Dersim  119, 392; known to Claudius  116, 263, 404; fort, under ? Nero  120; Caesennius Gallus  122 n. 3, 405; garrison  118 and n. 8, 140–1, 176; coins  264; signalling  122; navigation  105–6, 116, 119, 176; flooded  408; route from central Armenia  118; frontier road  112, 121, 133; and to Antitaurus gorge  121, 140, 143; traveller (Taylor)  416; see also Pağnık Öreni DASTEIRA M. (? Vank Dağ) (19 B5)  198–9 Davul köprüsü, over Venk Çay (13 D2)  159 Değirmendere, in Taurus gorge (10 C3)  71–2

Değirmendere (PYXITES Fl.) (23 B5-D1)  331–2, 335, 340–4, 393, 395; travellers (Hepworth, Tozer)  417–18 Değirmen Tepe, above Direk Kale (LACOTENA) (7 B4)  33, 35, 37 Değirmen Tepe, in Malatya plain (11 B4)  86–7 Deliktaş (13 D3)  160, 167 n. 7 DELPHI 36 Demavund 389 Denizli (12 D4)  112 Derbent passage (Caspian Gates) (4 E1)  377–9; southern end, Nero  263, 404; Rusticus  405; Domitian  263, 378–9, 405; Arrian  406; Huns  406; German plans 380–1 Derebaşı (19 A4)  241 Deregezen (12 B5): frontier roadbed  95, 108–9, 124, 181, 256; caravan road  112; signalling  88, 122; travellers (Hogarth and Yorke)  416 Derin (İmera) Dere (22 E3-D3)  318 Dersim (16)  390–2; Munzur Dağları 101, 113–14, 159, 173, 190, 226, 389–91; garlic  171–3; forests  106; southern slopes  119, 124, 149; rain  401; closed to research  226; and PKK  172, 198, 226, 244; railway  86, 175, 191, 392; SOE plans  380–1, 392 Roman ? interest  119, 176, 193; Nero, Mucianus and Dioscorides  173, 392, 404; sections of Roman or Byzantine roads  119, 203, 392 Armenians and remains  391–2; Kurds and tribes, autochthonous  226, 391; Kızılbaş  104, 203, 391; seyyids 391; violence  152, 203, 391; revolts, KoçkiriDersim  225–6, 258 n. 2, 392, 408; and Sheikh Seyyid Reza  392, 408 routes to Harput, in summer, from Kemah over Ziyaret pass  391–2; and by cart road, via Ovacık and Pertek  203; and from Erzincan over Mercan pass  211, 392; and via Pülümür, to Palu  392; in winter, over Hostabeli pass  203, 392; crossed by Barbaro  211; MolyneuxSeel  203: Sykes  392: Taylor  203; other travellers (Huntington, Riggs, Strecker; Lynch) 415–7 Deveboynu boğazı, above Kuruçay (14 B2)  227 Deveboynu Dağ, above Ağyarlar (22 E3)  297, 313, 315, 319–21, 323, 332–3

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES 

Deveboynu (Sipikör) pass (20 E3)  215 Devedüzü (23 D2)  342 Devekorusu (20 E3)  222; Köy  276; yayla 222 Develi Dağ (2 A4)  95 Deyro (9 E3)  57, 61 Dilli (13 C3)  138, 162–5 DIOSCURIAS, later SEBASTOPOLIS (Sukhumi) (24 C2)  363, 374 and n. 20; centre of commerce below Caucasus  378; tribes and interpreters  374; snowshoes  37, 378 Direk Kale (LACOTENA) (7 B4) cult centre, of Apollo  5, 406; ruins  33–7 and n. 3, 53; on frontier road  13, 32–3, 37 Diştaş, formerly Viranşehir (? CHARAX) (18 D5)  237, 239–41; CHARAX  223 n. 7, 239; yayla  239; PKK  226; on Kerboğaz route  193, 197, 226, 233–9 and n. 5 Diştaş Tepe (18 D6)  199, 225, 237 Divriği (TEPHRIKE) (1 G4)  182, 225, 231; yürüks  136; Armenians  162; demands of Koçkiri-Dersim uprising  225, 392; winter  399; on route from Arabkir to Sivas  99, 135; route to Kuruçay  161; modern road from Erzincan  227 Diyarbekir, now Diyarbakır (AMIDA) (1 I6)  3; martial law  63; railway from Malatya  86; on ‘High Constantinople Road’, via Sivas, Eski Malatya and Harput to Baghdad  82, 95, 99, 394; military road from Samsun, via Keban and Harput  110–1; routes, from Eski Malatya, via Çünküş  43, 45, 59; and via Ayvas  69; from Black Sea, via Erzincan and Harput  203; travellers (Brant; Barkley, Sykes)  415, 418–19 DOLICHE (Dülükbaba Tepe, 6 mls NW of Gaziantep) (3 D4)  6, 11; god of  25 DOMANA (Eski Köse) (21 C3)  293; captured by Sapor  214, 265, 406; garrison  291, 293; signalling  281; on frontier road  287, 293, 296, 304, 314; ? milestone  287 Don (TANAIS Fl.)  361, 380 Dörtyol, formerly Bandola (20 E2)  222, 258 Dostal (14 B4)  180–1, 223 n. 3; travellers (Hogarth and Yorke; Hommaire de Hell)  416, 418 Dover, lighthouses  352

441

DRACONIS, AD DRACONES (19 E2): in Çimen yayla  243, 255–6; near junction of frontier and northern support roads to SATALA  254, 259; Salt road from Kemah 255 Dulluk (Gelincik, Mağrıp) Tepe, above MELITENE (11 B5)  42–4, 87–8, 90; signalling node  89, 247, 281; beacon platforms  88, 247; visibility  38, 42, 86–7, 107, 109 Dumanlı (15 D1)  207, 209 Düvermezraası harabe (19 C2)  246 Eçmiadzin (KAINEPOLIS) (24 F4)  263; travellers (Dubois de Montpéreux, Ker Porter) 418 EDESSA (Urfa, Şanlıurfa (2 B5): kingdom  17, 406; absorbed into OSRHOENE by Caracalla  6, 406; Valerian  407; Count of  204 and n. 7; roads, from SAMOSATA  6, 8, 15, 33, 407; from ZEUGMA and APAMEA  17, 64; and milestone  17; traveller (Chapot) 416 Eğin (now Kemaliye) (13 C3)  152–4: Armenians  153–4; churches and archbishop  153; causeway  160–1, 163–4; Venk monastery  155; massacres  154, 408; population, andrenamed Kemaliye  154; winter  152, 163; Antitaurus gorge  163–4, 179; rafts and rapids  119, 149–50, 165, 173, 176, 178–9, 193; bridges, at Geruşla  152; and Venk, over Euphrates  122, 152, 155–8; fort, at Geruşla (TEUCILA?)  150–2; pack animals, at Pegir  126; and Sandık  163–5 roads from south, frontier road  112, 122, 143; caravan and Silk Road  126, 140, 143–8, 152, 163, 395; araba road  148–9; mule track via Pegir  132, 162; routes to north  122; caravan and Silk Road to İliç and Refahiye  122, 152, 159, 164–5, 193, 227, 239, 395; and to Kemah  152, 159, 203, 392, 395; mule tracks, over Munzur Dağları to Pingan (ZIMARA)  159–61, 170, 173; over Harmancık Dağ  161–7; via Kerboğaz to Refahiye  233, 239; travellers (Brant, Huntington, Moltke, Riggs; Hogarth and Yorke, Lehmann-Haupt, Osten; Barkley, Burnaby, Hommaire de Hell)  415–18

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

442 

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES

Eğribük (11 A3)  99 Egypt  92, 367 and n. 14, 380, 408 Ehme (12 D3)  119 Ehnes (5 B5), quarries  11, 14–15 Ekrek Su (10 F2-E3)  67 Elazığ (below Harput) (16 C3)  45; museum  122 n. 6; vilayet boundary  125; Murat (ARSANIAS)  170, 390; roads in Malatya plain, old  87; modern  43, 47, 72; traveller (Kökten)  417 Elba 389 Elbistan (2 A4): route to Pirun (PERRE)  25; on road from CAESAREA  94; travellers (Hogarth and Munro)  416 Elbrus Mt (STROBILOS M.) (24 D1)  374, 378, 380 Elbrus passes (24 D1)  378 ELEGARSINA (? Mezraaıhan) (18 C5)  231, 249 ELEGEA, at mouth of Taurus gorge (10 B2)  176 ELEGEIA (Ilıca) (2 D2)  262: Arrian and Severianus  263–4, 406; on route to ARTAXATA 263–4 Eleki (Morhamam) Çay (11 A1)  99, 101, 103–4 Elif (? ARULIS) (5 C3)  13 and n. 11 Elmalı, above Kömür Çay (19 C4)  244; Çay 243–4 Elmalı, E of Satala (21 D6)  262; Dağ 262, 399; traveller (Fraser)  417 Elmalı Dağ, above Kürtler Dere (14 D1)  233–4, 236 Ençiti (12 C2): Armenian village, and church  129; raft traffic from Eğin 143; below frontier road  112, 141, 143; traces of Silk Road  140, 143 Ergan (16 C3)  392 Ergani (2 C4): pass  89, 389, 403; on Persian Royal Road  403; natural route from Harput to northern MESOPOTAMIA  89; minor routes, from Harput to Adıyaman  45, 57, 59; and Diyarbekir to Eski Malatya  45, 59 Ergü (13 D3)  146–7; Ergü (Köy) Dere  146; bridges  146–8, 150; rapid  149 Erivan (now Yerevan) (24 F4), near ARTAXATA  260, 263; GORNEAE  263; and KAINEPOLIS  263; recaptured  408; caravan route from SMYRNA  261;

expected German advance  381; travellers (Tavernier; Chardin)  417–8 ERIZA (? Vazgirt) (20 D4)  211, 215, 278 Ermelik (? CHARAX) (19 D5)  203–5 and n. 7, 225, 239, 243; Armenian population  183, 189 n. 14, 204; fate, suspicions, arrest  204, 219; on low-level caravan road from Erzincan to Refahiye 243 Erzerum (now Erzurum) (THEODOSIOPOLIS) (1 J4)  3; plain  210, and ELEGEIA  262, 264; agriculture  210, 356; climate, winter  397–9; production of tezek 399; summer  396, 401; archive  182–3, 223 n. 4; captured by Persians  407; Melik of, attacks Trebizond  349; Ottoman Army  191; Governor General  277; captured by Russians  408; Congress of  154; museum  272 and n. 16, 281, 283 on caravan routes, to northern Persia, from Constantinople  222–3, 260–3, 394, and hans  261, 288; and from Trebizond, in winter and summer  296, 345, 393, 395; from Suşehri  222, 257–8; railway, from Sivas  191, 345, 392; and to Diyarbekir 86 travellers (Brant, Curzon, Strecker, Suter, Taylor, Wright; Bishop, Fraser, Hamilton, Hepworth, Layard, Morier, Southgate, Tavernier, Texier, Tournefort, Tozer, Walpole; Ker Porter)  415–18 Erzincan (1 H4)  210–4; climate  210, 396; earthquake and landslides  212, 408; tomb of St Gregory  211; head of Hussein  210; ruler, Akkoyunlu, Uzun Hasan and Barbaro  209, 211, 415; Euphrates bridge  211; HQ of IV Army Corps  89, 211; and Turkish Third Army  211, 215; museum  246; navigation  149, 176; Armenians  155, 188, 210; kızılbaş Kurds  210; mistrust between Sunni and Alevi  219; captured by Russians 408; PKK 226; vali 145, 190, 219, 226, 245; vilayet boundary  182, 191 on frontier road per ripam  190; and winter road from NICOPOLIS  205, 241–3; caravan routes, from Aleppo  105, 395

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES 

and to Trabzon  215, 395; from Sebinkarahisar in summer over Çardaklu pass  395; and in winter by Kömür Çay  393; routes to Harput, in summer, over Mercan pass  211, 392; in winter, via Kemah and Hostabeli pass  119, 392; and to Eğin  159; via Pülümür and Pertek  203, 392 travellers (Barbaro, Brant, Strecker, Taylor; Cumont, Hogarth and Yorke, LehmannHaupt; Barkley, Burnaby, MolyneuxSeel) 415–18 Erzincan Kale (SUISA) (20 D5)  212–14; Selcuk structures  211–13 Erzincan plain (ACILISENE) (2 C2),  206, 210–1, 403 Eski Arabkir (12 B2)  116, 126 and n. 2, 133 Eski Erzincan (20 D5)  206–7, 212 Eski Gümüşhane (Argyropolis) (22 C4)  288, 306, 356; travellers (Brant; Cumont; Hamilton; Hommaire de Hell)  415–18 Eski Hisar (5 E4),castellum  15 and n. 14 Eski Hüsnümansur (? CARBANUM) (6 B4)  23 Eski Kãhta (7 B4): below ARSAMEIA AD NYMPHAEUM  5, 31; Kurds, rebellion and Hafiz Pasha  46; on caravan routes, from Adıyaman, over Taurus to Eski Malatya  24, 39, 43, 395; and by Ayvas crossing to Harput  45, 69; travellers (Hogarth and Yorke, Jacopi; Percy)  416, 418 Eskikonak (18 D5)  231 Eski Köse (DOMANA) (21 C3)  281 Eski Kozkışla (14 C1)  229–31 Eski Malatya, now Battalgazi (MELITENE) (11 A4)  3, 89, 92–3; close to MILITIA,  89; and Dulluk Tepe  87–90; gardens, vineyards and orchards  90, 92; climate, summer and fevers  91, 396; winter  397; fortress, destruction and remains 91–3; coins 92; caravanserai 92; Hafiz Pasha  47, 91–2, 99; and von Moltke  32, 47; military port, İmamoğlu  86; navigation, rafts from north  176; and through Taurus gorge  45, 47 Persian Royal Road,  86; caravan routes, from Sivas, to Harput, Diyarbekir and Baghdad  81, 87, 89, 95, 394; from Adıyaman, and Eski Kâhta  24, 39, 395;

443

from Kayseri  42, 94–5, 394; to Erzincan and Trebizond  395; minor routes from Diyarbekir, via Ayvas  45, 69; and Çünküş  45, 59 travellers (Moltke; Hogarth and Yorke, Jacopi, Kökten, Lehmann-Haupt, Osten; Ainsworth) 415–18 EşkıyaTaşı (18 D6)  238 Eskiyol (20 E2),  223; milk pipes  222, 276 EUPHRATENSIS (1 G6-F7-H8)  6, 25 EUPHRATES Fl. (Fırat, Kara Su) (1 J3-H8): valley and source  390, sighted (PYXURATES) by Mucianus  170–1; ripa (and main tributaries), in COMMAGENE  11–14, 17–21, 50 (and see MARSYAS, Kar asu, SINGE, CAPADOX, CHABINA, Ge rger Çay); through TAURUS  45–73 (and see Şiro Cay); east of MELITENE  74–97; north of MELITENE  98–111, 112–23, 140–3 (and see MELAS, ARSANIAS, Arabkir Çay, Çit Çay); through ANTITAURUS  144–58; in Erzincan trench  169–81, 190–211 (and see Çaltı Çay, SABRINA, Kömür Çay); fishing  20, 47–9, 144; floods  13, 49, 85, 155; frozen, at Keban  397; islets  75, 80, 105, 404; rapids, in Taurus gorge  45, 47, 49, 59, 63, 68–70, 73; Keban gorge  109; Antitaurus gorge  149, 158, 176 gorges, Gerger  51; Taurus  53–73; Keban  109; Antitaurus  144–9, 161, 163–4; Bağıştaş  177; Güllübağ 191; Kemah  201; Kemahboğazı 209–10 navigation  8–9, 47–9, 86–7, 119, 149–50, 176, 404; rafts, of Goell  53; von Moltke  32, 45, 47, 67, 70: Huntington  45, 47–9, 149: Hommaire de Hell  111, 119, 149, 178; and myself  177–9; timber, from Gerger Çay  54; Samuka  143; Kemah  176, 206; to İmamoğlu  87, 176; and Keban Maden  149, 176 crossings, and ferries, at Birecik  14–5; ZEUGMA 14, Ayni 13; SAMOSATA  6–7, Çünküş 59, Ayvas 69, TOMISA, Hallan and İzolu (Pirot)  80–5; Söğütlü  108; Keban  110–11, Pağnık 119; Eğin 155–8; Pingan 173, Khostu 192–3; fords, at Ayni  13; Pağnık, ‘cavalry

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

444 

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES

EUPHRATES Fl. (Fırat, Kara Su) (Cont.) crossing’  119, and east of Kemah  206; kayik crossings, east of Kâhta Çay  22; Taurus gorge  45, 53–5, 57, 59, 61, 64; Malatya plain  75, 85–6; north of Tohma Su  99–100, 104–5, 108, 390; Eğin 155; and see Maps  8–12 bridges, built, at Kömürhan  78; Pirot  75, 85; Keban  111; Eğin 155–8; Pingan  173; Makhut (? nr İliç) and Avşin  167 n. 13; Kemah  203; Erzincan  211; Ilıca  262; ‘metal’, below Hapanos  145; iron, at Lordin  177; suspension  59, 119, 157; pontoon, at ZEUGMA  14; SAMOSATA  7; TOMISA 75; and construction  80–1 and n. 4 ‘Gates’  11; river god, and sacrifices  13, 158; sighted by Sulla  403; crossed, by Lucullus  75, 80; Vitellius  13; Paetus  75, 80; Corbulo  75, 80; Trajan  80; as frontier, with PARTHIA, Augustus  404, Hadrian  405; Roman rule extended to, Tiberius  7, 54; Vespasian  6, 404; forts, Urartian  82; established by ? Claudius  61, 116, 404; ? under Nero  404; followed by caravan route, 395 see also Dams; Forts; Signalling; Watch-towers Europe  251, 260 EUXINE (Black Sea) (3 E1): climate  345; winds, and perils  362, 365; rivers  362; Greek colonies  345, 367, 374; harbours, at TRAPEZUS  349–51; and PHASIS  367; Nero and TRAPEZUS  346, 361; lighthouses  351–2; navigation, commerce and supply  352, 362, 367, 369, 394; classis Pontica 346, 349; trireme  362, 365; biremes (Liburnians)  346; anchorages and forts  362–3; under Nero,  363, 365, 368; coastal tribes, and rulers  264, 346, 363, 374–5; camarae  346, 361 Pericles’ expedition  345; sighted, by Xenophon,  297, 327–33; and by Hadrian and Arrian  297, 327; Anicetus  346; Arrian’s inspection  361–2; Borani, raids  355–6; Justinian and Persians  363; frontier road to  4, 94, 155, 258, 286 Ezirins, now Melik Şerif (? HARIS) (19 B2)  188, 248

Feodosiya 418 France 129 FRIGIDARIUM (Anzarya hanlar) (22 D2) 325 Furuncu (11 B5)  43 GALATIA (3 A2-C2): kingdom, augmented by Pompey with Pontic coast and ARMENIA MINOR  346; capital, ANCYRA  185; governor, under Claudius,  207; addition by Nero of PONTUS POLEMONIACUS  346; combined by Vespasian with CAPPADOCIA and ARMENIA MINOR  404; auxiliary units, under Trajan 367 and n.  14, 405; detached from CAPPADOCIA and ARMENIA MINOR  405; legions winter in ANCYRA  264; roads through,  94, 185, 259, 405; raided by Zenobia  407 Galizga (24 C2)  372 Garni (GORNEAE) (24 F4)  417–18 Gâvur Dere (11 A1)  98, 105–6, 193 Gâvuroluğu (14 D2)  190, 193–4, 225, 234 Gâvurun Bağı (20 D4)  210, 217, 219 Gâvuryurdu (18 D5)  231 Gavusa Tepe (7 B3)  37 Gaziantep, formerly Aintab (6 mls SE of DOLICHE) (1 F6)  6 Gemho, in Antitaurus (13 B3)  131–2, 135–7 Gemho, near Armudan (14 B2)  1, 227 Gemirgap (13 D3)  148–9; massacre  154; traveller (Osten)  417 Georgia (COLCHIS and IBERIA) (4 B1-D2): sites of coastal forts  363; German assault, Military Road and plans  380–1; Transit Road  354; travellers (Reineggs; Chardin, Dubois de Montpéreux, Dumas, Ker Porter)  415, 418 Gercenis, formerly Gercanis, Başgercenis (? CHORSABIA) (18 D4)  232 and n. 4; massacre 248 Gerger (9 B5): valley  31, 51 and n. 8, 54 and n. 9; route, to north,  46, 58, 60; caravan, to Çünküş  57; by raft to  49; travellers (Huntington; Ainsworth, Stark)  415, 418 Gerger Çay, formerly Pütürge Çay (9 B5-D4)  45, 51, 53–4; ARAVENE  54 Gerger kalesi (ARSAMEIA AD EUPHRATEN) (8 E1)  27 n. 2, 46,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES 

49–51 and n. 8; Kurds, rebellion and Hafiz Pasha  46; rapids  47 and n. 5; travellers (Humann and Puchstein)  416 GERMANICIA (Maraş, Kahramanmaraş) (2 A5)  6, 11 n. 9, 13 Geruşla (TEUCILA) (13 C3)  148–52, 162; aqueduct  151; bridge  152; church  152, 175 Gerzeul Mt. (24 C2)  373 Giresun (CERASUS) (1 G3): columns from  354; route from Eğin 161; pack-mules from Sandık  163; caravans from İliç  229, 395; and from Sivas  183; salt from nr Kemah  244 Girik (6 B2)  26; Çay  23, 26 GIZENENICA (? Meşeiçihanı) (23 C5)  336, 340 Göksu (SINGE Fl.) (5 E1-E2), and bridge  11–13 and n. 9, 158, 406 Göksun (COCUSUS) (1 E5)  94 Gölcük (Hazar Gölü) (16 C4)  61 Gömenek (COMANA PONTICA) (3 D2); traveller (Munro)  417 Gonio (? APSARUS) (24 C3)  363, 367; traveller (Bryer)  416 Gopal (Kopal, Ziyaret) Tepe (7 B3)  31, 37–9, 42, 400 GORBILON, in plain of Harput (16 C3)  95 GORDYENE (4 C4)  400 GORNEAE (Garni) (4 D2)  263, 404 Grozny 380 Gülan Dağ (19 B4)  198–9, 235, 237, 239, 241, 245–6 Gülan Dere (19 A4-B4)  239, 241 Gullubağ (14 D3)  191; gorge  170, 191, 194; Şeytan köprü  167 n. 13 Gümüşakar (18 D5)  231; jandarma and karakol  225–6, 239, and PKK  231 Gümüşhane (1 H3)  306; Greeks  111, 306; Armenians  155; captured by Russians 408; earthquake 212; vali, and police  42, 306 n. 2, 322, 329–30; caravan routes, from Eski Malatya  112, 395, and Erzincan  217, 299; from Erzerum to Trebizond, via Zigana pass  296, 301, 306; and via Kolat  306–7 and n. 3, 326–7; travellers (Blau, Curzon, Everett, Strecker; Cumont, Hogarth and Yorke; Hepworth, Southgate; Hommaire de Hell)  415–18; see also Eski Gümüşhane

445

Gürün (1 F5)  75 Güryeni bridge, over Değirmendere (23 D3)  287, 341–2, 356 GYMNIAS (Bayburt) (2 C2)  297, 328 Habeş bridge, over Karasu (5 C2)  13, 15 Habibuşağı (10 B2)  80, 82; travellers (Huntington, Moltke; Kökten, LehmannHaupt; Percy)  415, 417–8 Haburman (9 E2)  57–8, 61; coins  58 Hacıkomu (14 D1)  233, 236 Hadrak (2 C1)  296, 324; traveller (Everett) 415 Hakverdi (11 C4)  87 Halikhan (7 A1)  42 and n. 7 Halkevi (21 C5)  287, 289, 291–2 Hallan, on Kâhta Çay (8 B4)  17, 20, 22 Hallan crossing (10 B2)  79–81 Halleberik (10 C3)  47, 70–1 HALYS Fl. (Kızıl Irmak) (3 E2-C1)  389; crossed by road from ZIMARA to NICOPOLIS  183, 185, 393, 395; Huns  379; travellers (Taylor; Grégoire) 416 Hamamlık (9 E3)  57 Hamsiköy (22 C1)  311, 321, 334 Hanado (10 B2)  71–2 Hanarde (15 C2)  207 Handere, NNW of Refahiye (18 D3)  250 Han Dere, NE of SATALA (21 C5)  288 Handeresi, in Antitaurus (13 D4)  131–2 Hanı Deresi, below Ergü (13 D3)  147 Hanönü köprü, over Hapanos Çay (13 D3) 145–8 Hapanos (13 D3)  140, 145–6, 149, 159; Çay  145–6; bridge  145–6; traveller (Moltke) 415 Harapkarkır köprü, over Göksu (5 E2)  11–3 HARIS (? Melik Şerif) (19 B2)  232, 239, 247–50 Harmancık Dağ (13 C3)  133, 151–4, 161–5, 167; natural pits  162, 194 HARMOZICA (Msketa) (4 D1): importance, below Darial pass  369, 377, 380; and Pompey  369; Vespasian, and walls  263–4, 368, 379, 404; routes, from PHASIS  369 and n. 15; and SEBASTOPOLIS  375; travellers (Reineggs; Dumas, Ker Porter)  415, 418

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

446 

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES

Harput, above Elazığ (16 C3): plain  80, 95, 118; and Corbulo inscriptions  95 and n. 20, 120, 404; rafts and fish  47; cotton  71; summer fevers  396; mountains above  101, 104, 108; crusaders  204; Hafiz Pasha  91; Euphrates College, and US consul  46, 49; missionaries  59; Paetus’ surrender at RHANDEIA  404; Trajan and ARSAMOSATA 405 Persian Royal Road  80, 86; route to southern Armenia  95; caravan routes, to Diyarbekir and Baghdad  89, 389, 394; to Adıyaman, via Ayvas crossing  45, 69; and via Çünküş  57, 59; to Sivas via Hallan crossing and Eski Malatya  81–2, 85; via Söğütlü crossing  108; and via Keban  111–12, 394; to Eğin  116; to Kemah,  120, 203, 391–2, and Erzincan, in summer  211, 392; and in winter,  119, 391–2 travellers (Brant, Huntington, Riggs, Strecker, Taylor; Lehmann-Haupt; Tozer; Barkley, Hommaire de Hell, Percy)  415–18 Harşit (22 F4-A2)  393; Byzantine Kanis  295; and Philabonites  307; Zindanlar  297–8; Baghdad bridge  294, 299; Pirahmet  293–4; Tekke (SEDISCA)  304–5; Gümüşhane 306; Beşkilise (THIA)  306; Torul  287, 307 caravan route from Erzerum, in winter  296, 299, 301–7, 393; and landslides  301, 305, 307; joined by caravan and frontier road from south  293, 295–6, 395; summer routes to north  312–17, 326–7 travellers (Cumont, Hogarth and Yorke) 416 Hasanova (ANALIBA) (14 C3)  191–3; coins  190, 192; water pipes  193; population, Armenian  182, 188, 192; bishop  188, 193; churches, and fate  182–3, 192; Russian front  133; administrative boundary  182, 191; caravan market  191, 231; difficulty of Kuruçay valley  193, 227 two routes to south  122, 159, 193; caravan route to Erzincan  159, 191 and n. 3, 227; track via Kerboğaz to Melik Şerif  159, 233, 239; travellers (Brant; Hogarth and Yorke)  415–16

Haşara Dere (22 D3-C4)  306 Haşkento (10 E3)  64, 66 Hastek Kale (12 C3)  116, 118; gorge  112, 116 Havcış (21 C4)  287–8, 291–3, 295; travellers (Biliotti, Strecker; Cumont)  415–16 Hayas (5 G2)  11 Hayekse (22 D3)  305–6, 317, 327; yayla 317 Hayırsız Suyu (10 B3-A2)  79 HEBA (? Akcaviran, near Tille) (8 D3)  50, 408 Hekimhan (1 F5), on ‘High Constantinople Road’ to Diyarbekir  98–9; shorter route to Harput  108, 110, 394; travellers (Brant, Moltke; Tozer)  415, 418 Helameti (14 D2)  195, 197 Herdiyan (6 D4)  18–21 Heskin Çay (9 C3-D2)  63 HIERAPOLIS, in LYDIA  36 Hieron Akron (Yeros Burnu) (23 A1)  351, 354 Hinge (13 E4)  143 HIPPOS Fl. (Kodori) (24 C1-C2)  371, 378 Hırsız Taşı (10 B2)  72 Hirso (9 D3)  63–4 Hızırtaşı (OMMA) (10 B2)  78–9, 82–4; travellers (Huntington, Moltke; Kökten, Lehmann-Haupt; Percy)  415, 417–18 Hocamezarı hanları (23 C5)  334 and n. 10, 338–9 Hopa (1 J2)  367, 381 n. 4 Horan, yayla (10 C3)  71 Horasan, in HYRCANIA: holy men  24, 227, 230, mortar  155 Horasan (? ANDAGA) (1 K3)  263 Horno (6 C5)  22–3 HORONON (? Zindanlar) (22 E4)  297 Horopol (19 B3), on lower Salt Road to Melik Şerif  243–5, 247; Armenians, church and fate  188, 244, 248; Çay  244–5; quarry 245 Hortokop (23 C4)  287, 334, 337–9, 342; coins  337; bricks  337, 370; travellers (Bryer; Hommaire de Hell)  416, 418 Horum (? URIMA) (5 B6), hüyük 14 Hoşgördi (Hüsgören) (7 B2)  41 Hoşoğlan (23 D2)  341–2 Hostabeli pass (13 D2)  159, 203, 392; see also Khostu, ferry Hotar (13 C3), yayla 164–6 Hozat (1 H4), cart road to Harput, and ‘Roman viaduct’  203, 392; travellers (Taylor; Molyneux-Seel)  416, 418

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES 

Hurusüfla (21 C2)  295–6, 315 Husukani (Hostukuşağı) (10 E3)  67–8 Hüyük Köy (11 B1)  105 HYRCANIA, on route from Caspian to Bactria and India  24, 394 HYSSOS Fl. (Kara Dere) (24 A4-B4)  362 HYSSOU LIMEN (Araklı, 3 mls WNW of Sürmene) (24 B4): anchorage, and fort  352, 363–5; garrison, known to Hadrian, and in Notitia Dignitatum  363–4; tribes and Sanni  363, 366; track to Bayburt  364 IBERIA (Georgia) (4 C1-D2): capital HARMOZICA  368; Darial pass  369, 377, 380, 404, 406; Caucasus passes, and fortifications  378–9, 407; invaded by Pompey  368–9, 403; Canidius Crassus 403; Corbulo, and Caucasian Gates  404; Vespasian, walls  368, 404; Verus, and Darial pass  406; Sapor  406; Treaty of NISIBIS 407; Valens 407; Germans 380 routes, from SATALA, through ARMENIA  260, 369; from COLCHIS 368–9 and n. 15, 394, 403; from SEBASTOPOLIS  375; from north, nomads, Alani, Huns  377, 379, 406–7; travellers (Reineggs; Dubois de Montpéreux, Dumas, Ker Porter)  415, 418 İğdir (1 M4)  356 İhtik (SINERVAS, SINORIA) (14 E2)  197–9; Armenians, and fate  183, 204; church  188, 198–9; Italian City  190, 198–9 İkisivri (19 D2)  251–2, 254–5 İkisu Dere (22 B4-B3)  307 İkizhüyük (11 C4)  86 İliç (14 C4): Armenians  182, 187; monastery, Surp Tavor  161; Khostu ferry  193, 233; Makhut bridge  159; railway  191, 227; jandarma  182, 225–6, 233, 238; kaymakam  210, 229 Silk Road from Eğin  152, 164–5, 231, 395; route to ZARA  182; caravan routes, to HALYS, Suşehri and Şebinkarahisar 182–5, 229, 393, 395; to Kuruçay and Refahiye  227, 229, 393, 395; to Kemah  191, 226; travellers (Brant; Sykes)  415, 419 Ilıca (ELEGEIA) (2 D2)  262–4 and n. 3; hot springs  262; Arrian, and Severianus  264,

447

406; on caravan routes, from Constantinople and from Trebizond to Erzerum  263, 395; travellers (Curzon, Suter; Bishop, Morier, Tavernier, Tozer; Ker Porter)  415–8 İmamoğlu (11 B4), military port  86–7, 105; quays  14; supplies, by raft  87, 90, 176 İmera (22 D3): Greek  297; church, St John Prodromos  313; road to Trebizond  325; Dere  313, 321; yayla  318–19, 321; and agger  287, 321 Imeretia (24 D2-E2)  378; traveller (Chardin) 418 İmranlı, formerly Ümraniye (17 B4)  183, 225, 227, 229 İn, near Çit Harabe (12 C2), Armenian  129 İn, in Dersim (16 C2), ‘Old Roman viaduct’ 392 INDIA: extent of earth  80; route to  394 Inguri (SIGAMES Fl.) (24 E2-C2), and Abkhazian wall  371–2, 379; below Elbrus passes  378 IN MEDIO (? Mağaracık) (5 H6)  17, 64 IN MEDIO (? Midye, Mediye) (9 D2)  64 Iran  222, 263, 347 Iraq  56, 96 n. 1 İspasmana (22 D4)  317 İspir (24 B4)  365 Istanbul: emigration to  154, 197, 239, 275, 295; coins sold in  281; kaymakam 42; beggar  124; apartments  129; number plate 233 İstavri (22 C2): Greek  297; route from Gümüşhane to Kolat  306–7, 322, 325–7, 329, 331; travellers (Blau, Strecker; Hamilton, Kinneir, Southgate, Walpole; Hommaire de Hell)  415–8 İzmir (SMYRNA)  292, 295 İzolu, Isolu (10 A2)  3, 79 and n. 2, 82; crossing  80, 82–5, 87; Persian Royal Road  80, 86; ferry  85; 119; bridge  85; islets  80; travellers (Brant, Huntington, Moltke; Lehmann-Haupt; Percy)  414, 417–18 Jerusalem: siege  5, 74 n. 7; coin  114; and XII Fulminata 90 Jilan (yılan) Değirmeni (10 E2)  70 JULIOPOLIS (near Taraksu) (9 D4)  53; traveller (Stark)  418

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

448 

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES

Kadıgölü çeşme, in Eğin (13 C3)  153 Kadıköy (10 A2), crossing  82, 85, ferry and bridge  85; traveller (Percy)  418 Kâhta (Yeni Kâhta) (6 D2)  22–3, 27, 35 Kâhta Çay (upper NYMPHAEUS Fl, lower CHABINA Fl.) (8 B1-C5) beside aqueduct  17, 20–2, 45–6, 49–50 and n. 7, 276; towards Cendere bridge  22–5, 27; above Eski Kâhta (NYMPHAEUS Fl.)  31–2, 38–9; travellers (Hogarth and Yorke, Özdoğan, Serdaroğlu) 416–17 KAINEPOLIS (Eçmiadzin, Vagarşapat) (4 C2)  263; new capital of ARMENIA, under Verus,  406; legionary garrison  263–4, 377, 406; route from SATALA  263; travellers (Dubois de Montpéreux, Ker Porter)  418 Kalan (7 B5)  27 Kalburcu (6 B2)  26 Kalburcusuyu (6 C2-B4)  22, 24, 26 Kale, in Malatya plain (10 B2)  78–9 and n. 2 Kalecik, near Zabulbar (12 D2)  140–1 Kalecik (? CORDYLE) (24 B3)  365; Dere 365 Kalecik Tepe, above Ardos (15 D2)  207, 209 Kale (Kovans), beside Harşit (22 E4)  295–8, 324–5; stables and caravans  296, 298, 397; travellers (Curzon; Bishop)  415, 417 Kale Köy, below Muşar Dağ (11 A2)  101 Kalmek Point (23 D1), ? lighthouse  352 Kâlür (20 D2)  257 Kanigol (7 D2)  41 Kaplıca (below Direk Kale) (7 B4)  36 Karababa Dağ (5 F1)  11 Karabağa duzu (22 D1)  334 Kara Baba Kaya (11 A2)  80, 100–1, 103, 105 Karabudak (SABRINA Fl.) (14 A1-C4)  170, 180, 390; Decius’ bridge  95, 180–1, 182, 406; agger  95, 180–1, 190; ridge above  181–2, 191–2, 233; and divergence of roads  182, 191, 227; vilayet (Sivas and Erzincan) boundary  182; upper Karabudak, and road to NICOPOLIS  182–3, 393 Kara Dağ, W of SAMOSATA (5 C2/3)  13–14 Kara Dağ, above Vahsen (12 C/3)  121, 124 Kara Dağ, between Kemah and Erzincan (15 C1)  204, 205–9; church  204

Kara Dağ, above Çimen yayla (19 D2)  243–4, 248, 250, 252; radio station  243, 255, 398 Kara Dere (HYSSOS Fl.) (24 B4)  364 Karagözhanı (22 E4)  301, 314 Karahan, in Eski Malatya (11 A4)  92 Karahan Mahallesi, S of Eski Malatya (11 A4)  44, 87, 93 Karahisar, opposite Muşar Dağ (11 A2)  100, 105 Karahüseyin (Hüsrevuşağı) (10 C3)  70–1 Karahüyük (2 B3)  111 n. 5 Karakaban (23 C5)  326, 329, 332, 334–6, 338, 347; mountain sickness  400; travellers (Blau, Strecker; Hamilton, Kinneir, Southgate, Texier; Hommaire de Hell) 415–18 Karakaya dam (2 C4)  31, 408; site  66; ripa submerged, in Taurus  46, with Mamaş (? METITA); Malatya plain  75, 87, with TOMISA crossing  80–6, and Cafer Kale (? CORNE)  79; north of Tohma Su  99, with Kırkgözköprü  99, Kilisilik (? CIACA)  103, below Morhamam  101–4, Çermik (SARTONA)  105–6, and Söğütlü Dere  107; cooling of Euphrates 56 Karakulak (? VARUCINTE) (2 C2), station, on caravan route to Erzerum  261–3; travellers (Suter; Morier; Dwight and Smith) 416–18 Karakurt (? CHADAS) (24 D4)  263 Karakuş (6 D1)  22–4 and n. 19, 33 Karakutuk Tepe (17 B3)  183 Kara Mağara köprü, over Arabkir Çay (12 D4)  116–17 Karaman (1 B6) Karamanoğlu Pir Ahmed türbe (22 E4)  301 Karapınarbaşı (13 D5)  131 Karasar (11 A2)  100 Karasu, W of Samsat (5 A2-C3): bridges, Habeş  13; and 3 mls upriver  13 Kara Su (EUPHRATES Fl.) (1 J3-H8): junction with Murat  49; dangerous rapid, below Eğin  119; Munzur Dağları  39; at Erzincan 211; source 390 Kara Tepe, above Mutmur (12 B5)  109 and n. 6 Karayakup (18 C2), divergence of roads to SATALA  247, 250, 253, 260 Karayayla (22 E3)  321–4; traveller (Texier) 417

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES 

Karbala, 45 mls SSW of Baghdad  210, 408 Kars (1 L3)  263, 397, 408 Karum (Krom) valley (22 D3-C3)  324–7; traveller (Blau)  415 Kar Yatağı (19 C2)  252 Katırcı Taşı (22 D4)  316 Kayseri (CAESAREA) (1 D5): road to MELITENE  94–5; caravan routes, to Eski Malatya  394; to Erzerum  222; traveller (Hogarth)  416 Kazancık (18 D6)  239–40 Kazanpahar (22 D3)  317 Kazveren (19 B1)  254 Keban (Maden) (12 D5)  110–11, 150; as Gümüş Maden  176; silver mines  111, 149; climate, and summer fevers  396; Euphrates frozen  397; crossing and ferry  85, 107–8, 110–12, 118–19; bridge  111, and watchman  114; gorge  103–5, 107–9, 390; on routes, to Eğin  116, 143; and from Sivas, via Hekimhan, to Harput  108, 394; travellers (Brant, Moltke; Kökten; Tozer; Barkley, Hommaire de Hell)  415, 417–18 Keban dam (12 D5)  408; effect on navigation  177, 390; lake, and flooding  46, 112, 125, 146, 151, 170; of ripa, at Pağnık (DASCUSA), Pağnık Öreni and Tanusa 116–21; Zabulbar 141–2; Geruşla  151; of bridges, at Bahadin  114–16; Kara Mağara  116 and n. 6; Hapanos  146; Venk, and suspension  158; silting, at Kemaliye  170 Keçi Dere (Karanlık Dere) (21 C2-C1)  294–5, 299, 304, 313, 315 Keferdis, formerly Şiro (10 D3)  68–70, 106, above Ayvas crossing  45, 69; track through the Taurus gorge  46, 63–4; rafts from Komurhan  47; caravan and post route from Kale, Pirot and Eski Malatya 70–2 Keferme (6 D1)  23, 25, 27 Keklik Pınar (7 A1)  42 Kelasuri (24 C1-C2): Abkhazian wall  371–2 and n. 19, 374–5 Kelkit (Çiftlik) (21 B4)  289; plain and fertility  267, 279, 282–3; winter, and travel  398–9; coins from Sadak  267; Russian advance  408; jandarma commander  271, 273, 288; destination of

449

camels, over Çimen Dağları  252; on caravan route to Persia  261–2, 288; m ­ odern roads from Erzincan  215, 221, 257; travellers (Biliotti, Strecker, Suter, Taylor; Fraser, Morier; Dwight and Smith)  415–18 Kelkit Çay (LYCUS Fl.) (1 H3-E2)  259, 389; swamps near Kelkit  282; route above, and name  289; followed by caravans  261; travellers (Strecker; Munro; Fraser; Dwight and Smith)  416–8 Kemah (16 C1)  201–3; Armenian villages, and fate  204; bishopric  207; bridge, over Euphrates  203; earthquake  212; timber, floated to Keban  176, 201; railway, and tunnels  191; holy man from Horasan  230; Kurdish uprising  225–6, 392; jandarma  194, 201, 225–6, 236, 238 caravan and Silk road, from Eğin  152, 155, 159, 392; caravan routes, beside Euphrates  190–2, 194–5, 197–9, 206–7, 209–10; and by Kömür Çay, to Refahiye, Suşehri and Şebinkarahisar  247, 250, 393, 395; routes to Harput, in summer over Ziyaret pass  190, 203, 391–2; in winter over Hostabeli pass  119, 203, 392; Salt Roads, to Malatya  99, Melik Şerif  244–5, and Cimen yayla 243–4, 255; post road to Kuruçay  229, 233, 236 travellers (Brant, Strecker, Taylor; Hogarth and Yorke, Lehmann-Haupt; Barkley, Burnaby, Molyneux-Seel)  415–18 Kemah boğazi (15 E1)  206–7, 209–10 Kemaliye, formerly Eğin (13 C3)  154; rafts  143, 177, and raftsmen  47, 53; kaymakam 154; jandarma 166; fire  154; new road  146, 148; Col. Altıkat 154 Kemaliye Çay (13 C3-D3), bridge  152, 157; route and pack-mules  132–3, 152, 162 Kemik Tepe (12 D1): hot spring, and ? signalling position  143 Kerboğaz (18 D6), ridgeway  225, 233–6, 240–1; pass  263–9 Kerefto (10 E3)  67; watch post  66–7, 140; Çay 66 Kerkinos (9D2)  64 Kermut Dere (22 E3-D4)  314, 316–17 Kervan pınarı (19 B1)  254 Kerz Çay (15 A2)  204–5 Kerz Dağ (15 A2)  199, 245

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

450 

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES

Keşiş Dağları (16 D1)  190, 210, 219, 261, 395 Keşiş Tepe, 11 mls ENE of Erzincan (16 D1)  210 Khobi (CHOBUS Fl.) (24 C2)  370 Khostu, ferry (14 C3)  122, 159, 193, 233 Kılıççı (21 C5)  221, 288–9, 291, 293, 295; Dere  287; travellers (Biliotti, Strecker; Cumont, Hogarth and Yorke)  415–16 Kilise Burun (21 C3)  294 Kilise Tepesi (Battal Gazi kalesi) (11 A1)  103 Kilise Yazısı Tepe (12 D3)  121; traveller (Serdaroğlu) 417 Kilisik, SW of Karakuş (6 C2)  24 Kilisik, in Malatya plain (11 B4)  40, 75, 86, 103, 121 Kilisik Mezarı, above Avbi (7 B3)  37 Kilisilik (Kilisik, ? CIACA) (11 A2)  103; travellers (Hogarth and Yorke)  416 Killik (BARZALO) (9 E3)  55–7, 59; Çay  57 Kınalı (19 C2)  252 Kıransa (23 B5)  312 Kırkgözköprü, over Tohma Su (11 A3)  40, 98–9, 280; ? similar bridges  40, 100, 108 Kırkgözler harabe (21 C5)  280 Kırman Tepe (Karamıldan) (11 B5)  43 Kirmehmet Dere (11 D5-C4)  86 Kırmızı Dağ (15 D2)  208 Kirzi (18 C6)  230–1, 234–6, 238; holy men  24, 230, 235, 239 Kişik (8 D3)  50–1 Kızıl Dağ (5 D/E2)  13 Kızıl Irmak (HALYS Fl.) (1 G4-D2)  183, 389; traveller (Taylor)  416 Klukor pass (24 D1)  373–4, 378; Sukhumi Military Highway  378; German assault 380 Klydz (24 C1, at 1041 spot height)  380 Kocan (CHARMODARA) (8 B5)  17–18, 20–2; travellers (Özdoğan, Serdaroğlu) 417 Koçevi (19 C4)  244–5 Koçkiri, above Gümüşakar (18 C5)  231 and n. 2; Armenians  188 Koçkiri, near ZARA (2 A2)  225, 258 n. 2, 392, 408 Kodor pass (4 D1)  378 Kodori (HIPPOS Fl.) (24 C1-C2)  371–3, 378; German assault  380

Kökseki (19 B1)  253–4; Armenians  188 Kolakuşağı (10 C3)  70 Kolat (Koulabat) Dağ (22 D2)  313–4, 323; travellers (Everett; Kinneir, Texier)  415, 417 Kolat (PYLAE) (22 D20)  309, 321, 325, 327; hanları  306–7 and n. 3, 325–7, 329; weather, and animals  297, 325, 332; caravans  327; Zenophon  327–8, 331, 333; travellers (Blau, Everett, Strecker; Kinneir, Southgate, Texier, Walpole; Hommaire de Hell)  415–8 Kömür, NE of PERRE (6 C2)  23, 25–6 Kömür, N of Kemah (15 B2), salt mines  243 Kömür Çay, opposite Kemah (19 B3-D6)  199, 203, 206; winter route, from NICOPOLIS to SATALA  204, 224, 226, 241, 393; caravan route  243–5, 247, 395 Kömürhan (10 B2): han, and caravans  82, 84–5; bridge (İsmetpaşa)  45, 72, 78, 85, 119; gorge  31, 45, 47, 70–3, 77; rafts  49, 176, 390; travellers (Moltke; Lehmann-Haupt; Percy)  415, 417–8 Kömür Köy, formerly Sağ (? CARSAGA) (15 B2)  189 n. 14, 204–5 Kondilia (? Cibolar) (19 B3)  232 Konya (1 A6)  40, 89, 93, 154 Kop pass (2 D2): caravans, and hazards in winter  310, 395, 397; Transit Road  312 n. 1; travellers (Curzon; Bishop, Hepworth, Tozer)  415, 417–8 Köprübaşı (22 C4)  306 Köprü İbrahim (15 B3)  206 KORAX Fl. (? Bzib) (24 C1-B1)  376, 378 Korea  71, 112 Korkup (14 E2)  197, 199 Koroş Dağ (22 D3)  306, 326; travellers (Blau; Kinneir)  415, 417 Körpinik (12 D4)  113–14 Körpinik Hüyük (12 D4)  113–14; agger  113–14, 116, 124; coins  113–14, 116; inscriptions  114; signalling  114, 121–2; travellers (Hogarth and Yorke, Kökten)  416–17 Korum Dere (22 D3-C3)  307 Koşan (8 B5)  18, 20 Köse (DOMANA) (21 C3)  293, 304; boğazı  and dam 294; agriculture  283; snow  293; signalling  281, 291; ? milestone  287, 293; on caravan and post road  215, 288,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES 

290, 295, 301; travellers (Biliotti, Strecker; Cumont, Hogarth and Yorke)  415–16 Köse Dağ (21 B/C2)  293–4, 299, 301, 305 Koymat köprü, over Çobanlu Su (18 D2)  253, 415 Kozkışla (14 C1)  235; and see Eski Kozkışla Kuban (24 D1)  373–5, 378 Kubbe Tepe (7 A1)  38, 42, 400; pass  40–1 Küçük Armudan (14 B2)  182, 188 ‘Küçük Londra’ (Pekun) (21 A4)  283 Küçük Tapur (14 A1)  183 Kültepe Hüyük (Pulur) (16 B3)  119 Kuluşağı (11 C4)  75, 86–7 Kurdistan (4 A/C3, A/D4)  25 n. 7; Xenophon 328; manna 63; flag 225; trade with  345; travellers (Everett, Taylor; Ainsworth, Chesney, Maunsell)  415–16, 418 Kürelik (18 D3)  250 Kürtler Dere (14 D1-E2)  195–8, 390; bridge (Kuru Köprü) above,  195, 197–8; ancient and caravan road  195–7, 223 n. 3; earthquake  195, 212; landslides  195, 197; upper valley  233–4 and n. 5, 236, 238; and Armenians  233, 239 Kurtlu Tepe, above Melik Şerif (? HARIS) (19 B3)  225, 232, 241, 247, 249; signalling node, and visibility  89, 138, 172, 247 Kuruçay (? BUBALIA) (14 B2): han 229; district of, and Armenians  182, 187–8; Armenian pilgrims  204; Koçkiri-Dersim revolt  225, 392; karakol, and jandarma  192–3, 225–7; on frontier road, from ZIMARA to HARIS  225, 227, 393; caravan routes from İliç, to Refahiye  227, and to Şebinkarahisar 229; post road from Kemah  233–4; modern road to Refahiye  226, 232, and to Imranli  227; travellers (Taylor; Hommaire de Hell)  416, 418 Kuruçay ‘dry river’, below Hasanova (14 C1-C3)  191; timber  176; lower valley impassable  193, 227; crossed by caravan and frontier roads per ripam  191–2, 227, and to Refahiye and HARIS  227, 229; upper valley (Kuruçay Dere)  227, 230 Kuru Çay, formerly Çamurlu Su, N of Tohma Su (11 A3)  75, 99–100, 104; bridge abutments 100; kızılbaş 104

451

Kurugöl (19 D2)  251–2, 255; han  252, 257; junction of frontier and support roads  252, 254, 259 Kuru köprü (Sultan Hamid köprüsü) (14 E2)  195, 197–8 Kuşak Tepe (15 D2)  209 Kutaisi (COTAIS) (24 D2)  368, 378; German objective  380; travellers (Dumas, Chardin) 418 LACOTENA (Direk Kale) (7 B4)  33–6; Claudius Candidus and altar of Apollo  406; Constantius II  33, 407 LADANA (? Armudan) (14 B2)  183 Larhan (23 C5)  298, 313–14, 325, 336, 340 Larhan (Meryemana) Dere (23 C5-C4)  325, 339–40; valley  297, 325, 327 LAVINIANE (valley of Şiro Çay) (2 B4)  40 LAZICA (COLCHIS) (4 B/C1)  363, 379, 394 Leontokastron (23 D1)  352 Leri (? SOLONENICA) (22 E3)  296, 298, 313–15, 321; Çay  298, 314, 318–19; yayla  314–15; traveller (Strecker)  416 Levenge (12 B5)  108 Limani (24 C3)  367 London  7, 244, 283 Lordin (14 B4)  177–8, 180 Lori (Yukarı Lori) (? SALMALASSOS) (2 C2)  262–3 LUCUS BASARO (? Aşkale) (2 D2)  263 LYCUS Fl. (? Çaltı Çay) (13 A2-B2)  168, 390 LYCUS Fl. (Kelkit Çay, Kelkit) (3 F2-D1)  253, 389; name  289; valley, and strategic route from west  185, 259, 261, 389, 394; headwaters, near SATALA  259–60, 282, 293, 395; and fertility  291, 356; guard post above  289–90; winter  398–9; travellers (Strecker, Taylor; Munro; Fraser, Morier)  416–7 LYDIA: Hierapolis  36; Sardis  80 Maçka, formerly Cevizlik (AD VICENSIMUM, MAGNANA) (23 C4) 340; bees 221; Xenophon 334, 340; junction of caravan routes from Erzerum,  304; in winter  301, 312, 395; summer  297–8, 313, 323, 330, 393, 395; Russians  337, 408; travellers (Blau, Everett; Hamilton, Hepworth, Kinneir, Texier, Walpole)  415, 417–18

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

452 

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES

Madenhanları, below Zigana pass (22 B2)  308; traveller (Curzon)  415 Maden hanları (? PATARA) (22 E2)  322–4; travellers (Everett, Strecker; Texier)  415–17 Mağaracık (? IN MEDIO) (5 H6)  17 Mahmut-el-Ansarı türbe (6 B3)  24, 230 Majkop 380 Makhut, bridge over Euphrates (14 C3)  159 and n. 13 Makriyali, now Kemalpaşa (? APSARUS) (24 C3)  367 Malatya, 6 mls SW of Eski Malatya (11 A5), at Aspuzu, renamed  91; plain, to east  31, 42, 71–2, 75–87; ? horn-shaped  79; to west  90, 95; to north  101, 103, 106, 108, 390; fertility  78, 87, 89–90, 231; navigation  49, 75–6, 96–7, 119, 149; climate  396–7; earthquake  92, 212; vilayet 38; vali  42; museum, and Director  44, 92–3; Turkish Second Army  89; antique dealers  92, 114; railway, and Plan Wonderful  86, 89, 96 n. 1, 392; Kurdish grazers  134; Armenian deportations  39, 96 n. 1; caravan route  394; journey from Şiro Çay  40–1; from Pütürge  41; from Keferdis  71–2; travellers (Huntington: Percy, Stark)  415, 418 Malyan Çiftlik (12 B6)  106 Mamahar pass (13 B4)  131, 135 and n. 9, 400 Mamahatun (2 D2)  417 Maman (7 C2)  39 Mamaş (? METITA) (10 D3)  70; Çay (Şiro Çay) 73 Mamhor (11 A2)  100 Mamisson pass (24 E2)  378, 380; Imeretian Military Road  378 Manastir harabe (Surp Tavor), above İliç (14 C4)  161 Manavgat Çay (MELAS Fl.)  21 Mantartaşı, above SATALA (21 C5)  267, 270, 276; signalling  89, 247, 281, 291; ? lookout towers  281 Manzikert (4 C3)  187–8, 408 Maraş, Kahramanmaraş (GERMANICIA) (1 E6)  6 Mardin (1 I6)  14 Marik Dağ (15 A2)  198–9 Markik (6 D1)  24

Maroukh pass (24 C1)  374, 378–9; German plans  373, 380; traveller (Reineggs)  415 MARSYAS Fl. (Merzumen) (5 A3-B4): bridges, near mouth  14; and 3 mls upriver 14 Maskir (12 D2)  141 Matracı (23 C3)  341–2 Mazkirt (16 D2)  392 Mecidiye, formerly Rumsaray (20 D3)  215, 218–9; Çay, gorge and dam  215, 217–19; han 219 MEDIA ATROPATENE (4 D3/E4): route, via SATALA, from Aegean  259; retreats, of Antony  397, 400; and Palmatus  400 MEDOCIA (? on Ağyarlar ridge) (22 E3)  319 Mehmet Ali Bey türbe (14 C3)  227 MELAS Fl. (Tohma Su) (2 A3-B4)  75, 98, 390; name  89–90; bridge (Kırkgözköprü)  40, 95, 98–9; railway bridge, and Plan Wonderful  89, 96 n. 1; travellers (Hogarth and Yorke, Osten; Ainsworth) 416–8 Melik Şerif, formerly Ezirins (? HARIS) (19 B2)  248–9: names, and Melikşah  3, 188, 248–9; below Kurtlu Tepe  226, 247; fort, temple and garrison  248; inscriptions  188, 248; milestones  95, 232, 249, 264, 404; Armenians, and fate  188, 248; muhtar, Süleyman Polatlı  226; on roads to SATALA, frontier, from ZIMARA and over Çimen Dağları  225, 251, 254–5, 259, 400; and shortcut via Kerboğaz  233–4, 239; support, from NICOPOLIS and via Kömür Çay  205, 226, 243–5, 250, 260; caravans  226, 257; travellers (Cumont; Boré)  416, 418 MELITENE (Eski Malatya, now Battalgazi) (11 A4)  3, 75, 89–93, 385, 389; name, and district  89–90; extent  90; grapes and olives  89; summer, unhealthy  396; spring and autumn, rain  401; below Dulluk Tepe, and signalling  38, 86–9, 247, 281; fortress, and remains  92–3; walls  91, 407; garrison, XII Fulminata  27 n. 3, 90 and n. 13, 182, 352, 404; water supply, and springs  92; cemetery  93; veterans  90; Christianity, and persecution  91, 406–7; coins  92; inscriptions  90, 93 and n. 17; military

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES 

port, and navigation  47, 86, 105–6, 119, 176, 404; ripa flooded  408 Nero and Corbulo  80, 90; Trajan 133,  264, 405; attacked by Huns  407; destroyed by Chosroes  407; captured by Arabs  408; occupation layers  92, 94–5, 279 Persian Royal Road  80 and n. 3, 403; roads, from CAESAREA  94–5 and n. 18, 405–6; from SEBASTEIA  94; to MESOPOTAMIA, by TOMISA  80, 89, 94, 389; frontier  95, 407; route, via Çünküş, from AMIDA  46, 59, 91, 407; travellers (Brant, Moltke; Hogarth and Yorke, Jacopi, Kökten, Lehmann-Haupt, Osten; Ainsworth, Percy)  415–18; see also MILITIA Mendürgü (12 C2)  141 Mengüt (20 B2)  244, 252, 255, 400 Mercan Dağ (16 D2)  218, 390, 392 Mercan pass (16 D1)  211, 392 Meryemana (Larhan) Dere (23 D5-C4)  339, 340 Merzumen (MARSYAS Fl.) (5 A3-B4): bridges  14 and n. 11 Meşeiçihanı (? GIZENENICA) (23 C5)  334, 336–9 Mesırı (5 B4)  14 MESOPOTAMIA (2 C4-D5): irrigation  46; access, from Malatya plain, by TOMISA and Ergani pass  80, 89, 94, 111, 389, 394; from Sivas, by Keban  111, 394; routes by EUPHRATES crossings, at Birecik  14; SAMOSATA  4; Çünküş 59; Ayvas 69 annexed by Trajan, 6,  405; Verus, and auxiliary cavalry  50; annexed by Severus  6, 406; invaded by Persians  6 METITA (? Mamaş, below Keferdis) (10 D3): position, and garrison  70 Meydancık (11 C4)  86 Mezraa, near Keferdis (10 E3)  68 Mezraa, above Meseiçihanı (23 C5)  336 Mezraaıhan (? ELEGARSINA) (18 C5)  230–1, 249; han, and caravan market  231, 306 Midye, Mediye (? IN MEDIO) (9 D2)  63–7 MILETUS  345, 367, 374 MILITIA (MILID, MELITEIA, MELITA), at Arslantepe (11 A5)  82, 89, 403

453

Mingrelia (24 C/D2)  379; traveller (Chardin) 418 MINTHRION M. (Boztepe) (23 D2)  343, 349 Mirazim (8 B5)  18 MISENUM 13 MOCHORA (Mollaali) (22 D3)  3; garrison 327 Mochora, now Mollaali (MOCHORA) (22 D3)  3, 326; traveller (Bryer)  416 MOESIA: IV Scythica  14 Monkare (15 A2)  205 Morhamam (11 A1)  99, 101, 104, 106–7; travellers (Hogarth and Yorke, Osten, Özdoğan; Ainsworth)  416–18 Morhamam (Eleki) Çay (11 A1)  99 Mormuşdüzü (2 C2)  293 Mosul (1 L7)  63, 392 Msketa (HARMOZICA) (4 D1)  377; travellers (Reineggs; Dumas, Ker Porter)  415, 418 Mülk, formerly Melik (19 C2)  252, 254 Munzur Dağ (? CAPOTES M.) (13 E2)  161 and n. 14 Munzur Dağları (16 B2-D1),  113–4, 190, 210, 214, 250, 389–91: PKK  236, 245; source of Munzur Su (PYXURATES) 170–2, 390–1; routes over, from Pingan 159; İliç  122, 193; Kemah  190, 391, and Erzincan  190, 211; Silk Road from Eğin  146, 152, 155, 159, 203, 392; railway below  390, 392; travellers (Taylor; Molyneux-Seel)  416, 418 Munzur Su (PYXURATES Fl.) (16 B2-C3)  170–2 and n. 3, 390; wild garlic  172; traveller (Taylor)  416 Murat N. (ARSANIAS Fl.) (1 L4-G5)  390; valley  118, 391; oak forests and manna  63; junctions, with Munzur Su (PYXURATES)  170; and Kara Su (EUPHRATES)  110, 112–3, 390; ferries, at Aşvan  392; and Pertek  392; ‘cavalry crossing’ near Pertek  122 n. 10; rafts, from Palu and Akhor  47, 49, 188; routes to, from Kemah  203, 392; and Erzincan  392; travellers (Huntington, Moltke) 415 Murathanoğullari (21 C1)  295–9, 304, 313, 315; traveller (Strecker)  416 Musağa (13 D2)  146; Davul köprüsü, over Venk Çay  148, 159

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

454 

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES

Muşar Dağ (11 A2)  100, 104, 106–7; Mihal Kilise (Surp Abaron)  101 Mutmur, opposite Muşar Dağ (11 A2)  105 Mutmur, N of Yeni Levenge (12 B4)  109 Narince Çay (8 B1-B4)  17, 21 Navril (13 C2)  163, 165, 177 Nemrud Dağ (7 C4)  25–6, 31, 37–8, 51, 56; tomb of Antiochus I  5 and n. 2, 33; destination of ‘Old Adıyaman Road’  24; source for SAMOSATA aqueduct  17, 21 NEOCAESAREA (Niksar) (2 A1): ? Hadrian visit  185; on support road from ANCYRA to NICOPOLIS and SATALA 185 Nesin Baba Kirzi Ziyareti (18 D5)  239 Nezgep (14 D2)  195, 197; han  195; route over Kerboğaz  258 n. 5; earthquake  195, 212 NICAEA (İznik) Council  265, 376 NICOPOLIS (Pürk) (2 B2)  3, 185–7; plain  185, 283; celebrated oppidum 247; Hellenism, and metropolis of ARMENIA MINOR  185; Armeniarch  185; inscriptions  15, 187 and n. 12; Armenians 185–8; Christianity 186; bishopric  186, 188; Forty Five Martyrs  185–6, 407; St Basil  186; earthquakes  21 n. 17, 186, 212, 407; remains 186–7 Mithridates, and Pompey’s victory  185; foundation, and veteran colony  185, 187; ? Hadrian’s visit  185, 405; rebuilt by Justinian  186, 407; captured by Chosroes I and II  407–8 on routes, from ZIMARA  182–5, 227; and milestone  183, 405; from ANCYRA, via SEBASTEIA  185, 259; and NEOCAESAREA  185, 259; to SATALA, in summer, over Çimen Dağları 250–4, 259, 407; in winter, via Kömür Çay and EUPHRATES  205, 207, 225, 243, 249–50, 260, 393; caravans, to Giresun  395; travellers (Strecker, Taylor; Cumont, Grégoire, Munro)  416–17 Niksar (NEOCAESAREA) (1 E3): above LYCUS  389; and caravan route to Erzerum  394, 398–9; earthquake  212; travellers (Brant; Cumont, Munro; Fraser, Morier) 415–17

NISIBIS (Nusaybin) (4 B4): Ibn Hawqal  28 n. 9; Treaty of  407 Nizib, near ZEUGMA (5 B7): battle  92, 408 NYMPHAEUS Fl. (Kâhta Çay) (7 C3-B5): ARSAMEIA  5 and n. 2, 23–4, 31 Ochamchiri (24 C2)  372 OCTAVA (Bandola) (20 E2)  265 OLOTOEDARIZA (Ağvanis) (18 C2)  250, 253 OMMA (Hızırtaşı) (10 B2)  77, 83 Orcil (Zevker) Dere (19 E2-A1)  249, 252 Ordu (1 F2): Caddesi  215, Güzel 380 Ortahisar (23D1) fortress  340, 343–4, 349, 351–5, 364, Cami (Chrysokephalos church)  349, 355 Ortaköy (13 B4)  132, 134–5 Ösneden (13 C4)  131–4, 162 OSRHOENE (2 B5): castellum, at Eski Hisar  15; roads to EDESSA  15, 17; annexed by Trajan  17; occupied under Marcus  406; annexed by Severus  6, 17, 406; and Caracalla  406 Otlukbeli (2 C2): battle of  209, 222, 408; Dağları, on caravan route to Erzerum  262, 398; winter  399; komları  262; traveller (Fraser)  417 Ovacık (16 C2)  171, on route from Kemah to Harput  203, 392 Pağnık (DASCUSA) (12 D3)  116, 118–20, 122, 126; rafts  119, 176; crossing  85, 111, 118–9; ford  119; bridge  119; Çay  119; travellers (Taylor; Kökten, Serdaroğlu) 416–17 Pağnık Öreni (12 D3)  119–20, 122 n. 3, 128, 141 Paleostomi, Lake (24 C2)  267, 370 PALMYRA 407 Palu (16 D3) rafts  47; oak forests and manna  63; route from Erzincan  392; travellers (Moltke, Strecker; Percy)  415–16, 418 PAMPHYLIA 21 PANNONIA, auxiliary soldier from  121: SUPERIOR, legionary from  264; INFERIOR, capital AQUINCUM  97 n. 3 Pardü, W of Mollaali (22 C3)  327 PARTHIA: Crassus defeated at CARRHAE  403; interference in ARMENIA  403; Vardanes and

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES 

c­ avalry  389; meeting at ZEUGMA  14; Paetus defeated by Vologaeses  404; Antiochus’ sons, and Velius Rufus  5 and n. 3; and Alani  379; Severianus defeated at ELEGEIA  264, 406 EUPHRATES as frontier, under Augustus  404; Nero  404; and Hadrian  405; wars, of Trajan 6,  264, 405; Verus  50; and Severus  15, 406; overwhelmed by Persians  6, 406 Paşa Mezraası (13 B4)  135–6 Pasinler (1 J3)  263 Passimta pass (24 E2)  378 PATARA (? Maden hanları) (22 E2)  322 Pazar, formerly Atina (ATHENAI) (1 I2)  365, 381 n. 4; Russians  365, 408 Pegir (13 C3)  132–3, 161–2 Pelitsirti pass (15 D2)  182, 190, 209, 222 Peraş Kale (7 D3)  41 n. 5, 73 n. 4 PERGAMUM  285 n. 17 PERRE (Pirun) (2 B5)  6, 24–5; fountain house  25, 148; necropolis  25; bridge  25–6; oil fields  4; road from ZEUGMA  13; from SAMOSATA  22–4; to the Cendere bridge and MELITENE  25, 27; travellers (Hogarth and Yorke, Humann and Puchstein, Kökten; Percy)  416–8 Persia: caravan route from Constantinople  222, 260, 262, 394–5, 398–9; travellers (Fraser, Morier, Tavernier)  417; from Trebizond  296, 301, 309, 321, 325, 341–2, 345, 347, 393; ambassador  368 Persian Gulf: by raft  149; watershed, above Black Sea  232, 389 Persian Royal Road  27 n. 1, 80 and n. 3, 86, 389, 403 Pertek (16 C3): ? controlled from DASCUSA  119; at crossings of Murat, by bridges, ‘old Roman’  393 and n. 6; and wooden  96 n. 6; cavalry,  122 n. 10; ferry  392; on route to Harput, from Black Sea  203; from Kemah  392; from Erzincan  392; travellers (Barbaro; Molyneux-Seel, Sykes)  415, 418–19 Pervaneoğlu Dere (PRYTANIS Fl.) (23 A5-C4)  310, 312, 337, 339, 340 PETRA (? Tsikhisdziri, or Poti) (4 B1)  363 and n. 7, 376, 407

455

PHASIS (S of Poti) (4 B1)  362–3, 367–8, 375: colony of MILETUS  367; oppidum celeberrimum  363, 367; harbour  367; anchor of the Argo  368; statue of Phasiane  367; temple of Artemis, raided by Borani  368, 406; and of Apollo Hegemon  367; on south, Asiatic, bank of PHASIS Fl.  367, 370; plain  362, 369–71; trade with, and passage  346, 352, 362–3 and n. 6, 367–70 fort,  362; earth and wood, of ? Nero  363, 368; rebuilt in brick, by ? Trajan 363,  368–70; artillery  363, 368; Arrian inspection  362–4, 375; client kings  363; garrison  363, 368; maintained by Constantine  368; traders and veterans  367–8; bishopric  371; traveller (Dubois de Montpéreux)  418 PHASIS Fl. (Rioni) (24 E2-C2)  363, 367, 393; current, and fresh water  367; navigable to SARAPANA  362, 368; boundary of EUROPE and ASIA  367; on left bank, PHASIS and PETRA  363, 367, 370; on right, ARCHAEOPOLIS and other cities  363; routes, to IBERIA  368–9, 394, 403; over CAUCASUS  370, 378; traveller (Dumas) 418; and see COLCHIS Philabonites (Harşit, to north of Torul) (22 B3-A2)  307 PHRAATA (? Maragheh) (4 E4)  403 PHREATA (? ARAURACA) (15 D2)  209, 214 Pillars of Hercules  80 Pınarbaşı Dere (11 B5-B3)  44, 89–90, 92–3, 95 Pingan (ZIMARA) (14 A4)  3, 143, 170, 173–6; Armenian town  175, 183; and fate  154, 188, 408; churches, St Ange  175; Three Holy Children  175–6; ferry, and bridge  159, 173; inscriptions  175, 188; name transferred to Turkish Zımara  172; grain, rafts and navigation  176–9; track from Eğin  159–63, 170, 173; travellers (Taylor; Hogarth and Yorke; Hommaire de Hell)  416, 418 Pirahmet (21 C1)  215, 220, 293–4, 299, 301; han, türbe and Russians  293, 301 Piriz Baba türbe (1 ml S of Girik) (6 B2)  26

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

456 

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES

Pirot (10 A2): Armenian village  85; on ripa  55, 78, 85–6; hüyük  84–5, 87; submerged  86; crossing  42, 79, 82, 84–5; kayik, and ferry  75, 85, 111, 119; bridge  75, 85; route from Keferdis  71; caravan road to MELITENE  87; travellers (Moltke; Jacopi, Kökten, Lehmann-Haupt; Percy)  415–8 Pirun (PERRE) (6 B2)  24–5; fountain  25; bridge  23, 25–6 and n. 23; and caravan road to Eski Kahta  23, 25–7; travellers (Hogarth and Yorke, Humann and Puchstein, Kökten; Percy)  416–18 Pitsunda, Pitiunt (PITYUS) (24 B1)  376 PITTIYARIGA (? hüyük above Şeker Suyu) (14 B4)  143, 176–7 PITYUS (Pitsunda) (4 B1)  376–7; sacked by Heniochi  376; fort  370, 376–7; garrison, legionary  264 and n. 10, 375, 377; auxiliary  376; besieged by Borani  355, 376, 406; restored by Diocletian 376; oppidum non obscurum  356; rebuilt by Justinian  363, 407, and demolished  376; below Caucasus passes  378, 380, 383 n. 20 Pontic Coast (24 A3-B1)  361–77, 385, 389, 393; Greek colonies  345; kingdom of Pontus  345; Anicetus  97 n. 12, 370; coastal tribes  361, 363–5, 370; client kings  264, 405; St Orentius  265, 362, 364, 407; forts and anchorages  362–3, 365, 404; Arrian inspection  361–8, 370–1, 374–5; coastal route  362; Abkhazian Wall  371–4; travellers (Brant; Bryer; Clavijo; Dubois de Montpéreux) 415–18 Pontic mountains (2 A1-D1)  393; THECHES M.  320, 328; Pontic Gates (PYLAE)  325; refuges  297; Xenophon, Hadrian and ‘The Sea’  264, 327–33; Corbulo’s supply route  263, 333; garrisons, at MOCHORA  327, and ZIGANA  310; Justinian, forts in TZANICA  357; Greek-speaking Moslems 326 caravan routes, summer over mountains  296–7, 299, 313–39, 393; and winter, by Harşit valley  296, 301–12, 393; tracks over, from Sürmene  364, 393; Rize  364; and Pazar  365

travellers (Blau, Curzon, Everett, Strecker, Wright; Bryer, Cumont, Hogarth and Yorke; Bishop, Clavijo, Hamilton, Hepworth, Kinneir, Layard, Lynch, Southgate, Texier, Tournefort, Tozer, Walpole; Barclay, Hommaire de Hell) 415–18 PONTUS (3 C1/2-F1): kingdom and Mithridates  345–6, 361; annexed as PONTUS POLEMONIACUS  346, 404; minerals, and wood  356; cities  278, 281; Hadrian visit ?  185, 405; fines Ponti (SEDISCA)  304; extends to PITYUS 376; İmera, religious centre  313; earthquake  212, 408 PONTUS POLEMONIACUS (4 D1/2), see PONTUS Poruk Baba türbe (1 ml SW of Diştaş) (18 D5)  239 Pöşür harabeleri (18 D3)  232 Poti (? PETRA) (24 C2): near PHASIS  363, 367, 369–70; at mouth of Rioni,  368; travellers (Dumas, Dubois de Montpéreux) 418 PROPONTIS (Sea of Marmara)  355 PRYTANIS Fl. (Pervaneoğlu Dere) (23 A5-C4) 310 PRYTANIS Fl. (? Furtuna Dere, E of Athenai) (24 C3)  365 Pülümür (16 D1)  211, 392 Pulur (16 B3)  119 Pulur Dağları (21 D5)  261 Pürk (NICOPOLIS) (17 B2)  3, 185; Armenians, and destruction  185, 187–8; earthquake  185; inscriptions  187–8 and n. 12; on routes to Kemah and over Çimen Dağları  250; travellers (Taylor; Cumont, Grégoire, Munro)  416–17 Pütürge (9 B2)  31–2, 38, 46, on caravan route from Eski Kâhta to Eski Malatya  27, 39 and n. 5, 43, 68; tracks from Tillo (? CLAUDIOPOLIS)  46, 59–60, 63; Midye  64; and Keferdis  69–71; road from Malatya  41–2; traveller (Stark)  418 PYLAE (Kolat hanları) (22 D2)  325 PYXITES Fl. (Değirmendere) (23 B5-D1)  341, 344, 356 PYXURATES Fl. (Munzur Su) (2 B3-C3)  170–1 and n. 3, 390–1; travellers (Taylor; Molyneux-Seel)  416, 418

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES 

RAPHANEAE (32 mls S of Syrian APAMEA) 90 RAUGONIA (? near Kağızman) (4 C2)  260, 263 Refahiye (18 D4)  1, 232–3, 244; plain and valley  232, 248, 250; Armenian villages  187–8, 232, 248; Kockiri-Dersim uprising  225, 392; earthquake  212, 232–3; kaymakam, Çahit İşik, and jandarma escorts  225–6, 233, 238–9, 249; and MIT  251 at intersection of routes  225; of caravans, from Kuruçay  139, 226–33, 393, 395; from Euphrates valley and Kemah  201, 203, 226, 241–7, 250, 393; of packanimals, from Hasanova, via Kerboğaz  139, 193, 233–41; of frontier road from ZIMARA and over Çimen Dağları  182, 395, with milestones  95, 232, 249; to Erzincan  242–3, 250–1 travellers (Cumont; Hommaire de Hell)  416, 418; see also Kurtlu Tepe: Melik Şerif RHANDEIA (? Akhor) (2 C3)  118, 404 RHIZAION (Rize) (24 B3)  363–4, 381 n. 4; ? garrison  364, 382 n. 10 Rioni (PHASIS Fl.) (24 E2-C2)  393: headwaters below Passimta pass  378; navigation below Kutaisi  368 Rişkân (19 C2)  251 Rize (RHIZAION) (24 B3)  364; harbour  381 n. 4; route over mountains  364, 393; earthquake 212; vali  154; traveller (Bryer) 416 Rome: Mithridates, second war against  361; Antiochus’ sons, escorted to  11; Sanni, paying tribute to  344, 364; Attica, born in  264; Turkish Embassy  329 Rum (eyalet of) (3 C1/2-F1/2-E3)  358 n. 5 Rum Kale (5 B4)  14 Rumsaray, above İhtik (14 E1)  198–9 Rumsaray, now Mecidiye (20 D3)  215, 217, 219; Alevi, once Greek  219; travellers (Strecker; Cumont)  416 Russia: Erzincan, outpost against  211; German plans and invasion of  96 n. 1, 379–81 Rustuşağı (11 B4)  86 SABRINA Fl. (Karabudak) (14 A1-C4)  390; bridges, Decius  95, 180–1, 406; and 5 mls upriver  182; cobbled roadbed from

457

south, ends at  190; ? legionary boundary  182; divergence of roads, to NICOPOLIS, Refahiye, and Erzincan  393; travellers (Hogarth and Yorke; Sykes)  416, 419 SABUS (Çit Harabe) (12 C1)  126–9; name ? linked with SAMUHA  143; ruins of fort  127–8; resembling SUISA  214; garrison  128–9; signalling mounds  125, 131; tiles and water pipes  129; traveller (Burnaby) 418 Sadak (SATALA) (21 C5)  3; village and population  266–7; below Mantartaşı 267, 276, 281; climate, winter  271, 276, 397, 399; agriculture  262, 282–3; headmaster, Dürsün Göz  270–1 and n. 15; water supply, ‘milk’ pipes  221–2, 275–7; spring, and grotto  276; fortress remains  267–70; inscriptions, removal and disappearance  264–5, 270–3 and n. 16, 278, 283; mosaics  273–4; excavations, and head of Aphrodite  277–9; PKK  271, 283 at crossing of caravan routes, from Smyrna to Erzerum and northern Persia  260–2, 394; via ‘Old Water Buffalo road’ over Çimen Dağları  258–60; and from Aleppo to Trebizond  395, via ‘Old Russian road’ from Erzincan  221–3; Sadakhanları  262 travellers (Biliotti, Everett, Strecker, Taylor, Wright; Cumont, Hogarth and Yorke) 415–6 Sadak Çay (21 C6-B4)  220–3,259, 261–2, 267, 276, 282, 288, 399; dam  288; travellers (Suter, Taylor; Fraser; Ker Porter) 416–8 Sağ (? CARSAGA) (15 B2)  3; Armenians, churches and fate,  188, 204–5 and n. 7 Şahverdi (19 B3)  232, 247 Şakşak Dağ (10 A4-C2) : in Taurus  31, 70–2, above Malatya plain  75, 79, 85; Kubbe Tepe  40, 42, 400; Yorke Dağ  86; frontier road, from south  31, 39–41, 43, 181, 195, 239, 254, 292; caravan route from Adıyaman  31, 68 Salavat pass (4 E1)  378 Salkı Çiftlik (ESE of Karasar) (11 A2)  105 SALMALASSOS (? Lori, 13 mls ENE of SATALA) (2 C2)  263 SAMOSATA (Samsat) (2 B5)  3–11; capital and metropolis of COMMAGENE  4, 6;

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

458 

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES

SAMOSATA (Samsat) (Cont.) citadel mound  4; EUPHRATES crossing, and bridge  4, 6–8; navigation  9; remains, and excavations  6–11; EDESSA Gate  8; legionary fortress  6–7; aqueduct  17–21; garrison, early and XVI Flavia Firma  6–7, 405; Greek fire, naphtha  4; sarcophagi  9; bishopric  6, 8–9; flooded, by Atatürk dam  11, 408 Seleucus  4; Hellenistic kingdom, Ptolemaeus and Samos  4; Antiochus I Epiphanes  4–5, annexed, by Tiberius  5; restored to Antiochus IV  5; annexed by Vespasian  5; Valerian headquarters, and captured by Sapor  6, 407; captured by Arabs 6 roads, to CAPPADOCIA, over TAURUS  4, 407; OSRHOENE  15–17, 407; and SYRIA, via ZEUGMA  11–14 Samsat (SAMOSATA) (6 D5): Kurdish and Armenian village  7; climate,  396; flooded, by Atatürk dam  11, 408; relocated to Yeni Samsat  23 ‘Old Samsat Road’, from Adıyaman  23; and via (Yeni) Kâhta and Karakuş, to Eski Kâhta  23; track per ripam to Kâhta Çay 18–20 travellers (Moltke; Chapot, Hogarth and Yorke, Humann and Puchstein, Jacopi, Özdoğan, Serdaroğlu; Ainsworth, Chesney) 415–18 Samsun (AMISUS) (1 E2): post road, via Eski Malatya, to Baghdad  89, 99; Armenian women  39; military road, via Keban, to Diyarbekir  110; earthquake  212; Transit Road to Georgia  354 Samtredia (24 D2)  363 SAMUHA (Samuka) (12 D2)  3, 126, 143, 176, 403 Samuka (SAMUHA) (12 D2)  3, 126, 140, 143, 175–7 Sandık (13 C3)  133, 161–5 Sapan Dağ (1 K5)  400 SARAPANA (? Shorapani) (24 E2)  363, 368, 379, 382 n. 15, 394 SARDIS, 30 mls E of SMYRNA: Persian Royal Road  27 n. 1, 80, 389, 403 Sarıçiçek Dağları (13 B4/D5)  134–5, 152, 162, 193; yaylas 134 Sarıkamış (1 K3)  398, 408

Sarılar (5 B3)  14 SARMATIA, N of Caucasus  374, 379, 383 n. 22 Sarmısak Dağ (Tepe) (? SCORDISCUS M.) (14 B3)  172, 247 Sarpo (20 D2)  257 SARTONA (Çermik) (11 B1)  105–7, 176; travellers (Hogarth and Yorke)  416 Şaşlıbaba Dere (18 D5-C5)  231–2 SATALA (Sadak) (2C2), altitude and climate  259, 397, 399–400; fortress  267–70 and n, 15; Mantartaşı, and signalling  247, 281; water supply, ‘milk’ pipes, and distribution  221–12, 274–7 and n. 17; cistern  266, 270, 274; basilica  260–1, 265, 270–1, 280 and n. 19; garrison, XVI Flavia Firma  263–4 and n. 6, 404; replaced by XV Apollinaris  264 and n. 8; inscriptions  264–5, 270–3 and n. 16, 278, 283; mosaics  273–4; civic life  264–5, 278; coins, and mint  265, 267, 281; veterans, and colony  264–5; bath and bakery  279; Aphrodite head  277–9; sarcophagus, and bronze eagle  265, 272, 280; cemeteries, legionary  271, 281; and Christian  270–1; Christianity, St Basil, and St Orentius,  265, 407; excavations and survey 277–19 Claudius, and Nero  263; Corbulo’s supply route  263; Vespasian  263–4, 404; Trajan, legions and kings  264, 405; Hadrian, visit and kings  264 and n. 9, 405; Arrian and Severianus  264, 406; Verus  264; captured by Sapor  265, 406; Persians defeated, and fortress rebuilt by Justinian  265–6, 407; captured by Persians  266, 408 position, at crossing of Roman routes, from SYRIA to TRAPEZUS, and from the Aegean to ARMENIA  259–60, 263; distance from MELITENE  385, 389; caput viae of frontier roads from Karabudak (SABRINA), over Çimen Dağları, and per ripam  259; on road from ANCYRA via NICOPOLIS  259; on route to ARMENIA and Caucasus  260 Satchkhéri, NE of SARAPANA (24 E2)  394 SAVARIA  284 n. 8 Savaşgediği pass (14 D2)  201, 233–6

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES 

Savuk, opposite Zabulbar (12 D2)  149 SCANDA (24 E2)  363, 379 SCORDISCUS M. (? Sarmısak Dağ) (14 B3)  172–3 SEBASTEIA (Sivas) (3 D2): on HALYS  389; sacked by Sapor  91; Christianity, and Forty Martyrs  91, 407; destruction  266; on roads from ANCYRA, to MELITENE  94–5, 394; and via NICOPOLIS to SATALA  185, 259, 405 SEBASTOPOLIS, formerly DIOSCURIAS (Sukhumi) (4 B1)  363, 374–6; limit of Roman control  363; strategic purpose  374–5, 383 n. 20; below Caucasus passes  373, 378; and STROBILOS  374; tribes, and client kings  363, 370, 375; castellum, ? under Nero  363, 375, 404; Arrian, and auxiliary garrison  361, 363, 375, 405; ? legionary  375–6; inscriptions  375–6; dismantled  376, and rebuilt by Justinian  363, 374–5, 407; remains  375–6; close north of Abkhazian Wall 371; unhealthy 375; snowshoes 37, 378; navigation  362; coastal route  362, 393, 405; route to ARTAXATA  374–5 SEBASTOPOLIS (Sulusaray, in PONTUS) (3 C2)  185, 266 Şebinkarahısar (COLONIA) (2 B2): archbishop of NICOPOLIS  186; earthquake  212; on Silk Road from Sivas and İliç to Giresun  163, 183, 229, 395; and caravan route, from Constantinople to Erzerum  394, 398; and to Erzincan  395; travellers (Brant, Suter, Taylor; Morier)  415–17 SEDISCA (Tekke ) (22 D4)  287, 304–6 Şekeran (? Şeker han) (10 C3)  70 Şeker Suyu (14 A3-B4)  170; PITTIYARIGA 176–7 Sekular (10 C3)  70 Seküyan (7 B5)  27 Şepik (12 B2)  125–6 Seracık (12 C4)  121; hüyük 112 Şeyh Hasan Baba türbe, below Başdana Kaya (18 C6)  229 Şeyh Hasan Baba el-Kirzi türbe, at Kirzi (18 C6)  24, 230, 235 Şeyh Ömer Yamaçı (Zeynel Dağ), 2 mls NW of Husgören (7 B1)  41 Şeytan köprü, over Euphrates (14 D3)  187 n. 13

459

Shorapani (? SARAPANA) (24 E2)  363, 368, 379, 382 n. 15, 394 SIDE 21 SIGAMES Fl. (Inguri) (24 E2-C2)  371 Siirt (? TIGRANOCERTA) (1 J6)  5 n. 2 Şikar Komları (14 E2)  195, 197–9 Şimili (6 B2)  26 Sinanlı (11 A3)  99; Kurds  134 Sincik Gates (7 B4)  32, 35, 37–8, 50 Sindi, at Tekke (22 D4)  304 SINERVAS (İhtik) (14 E1)  198–9; Mithridates treasury, at SINORIA  199, 403; remains, and talian City  198; ruined church  188, 199 SINGE (unlocated, near SINGE Fl.) (5 E2)  11 SINGE Fl. (Göksu) (5 E1-E2)  11–12, 406; Harapkarkır bridge  11–13 Sinibeli pass (18 C5)  182, 230–1, 233 SINOPE (Sinop) (3 B1): mother city of TRAPEZUS  327, 345; and tribute  345; Pericles’ expedition  345; navigation, from PHASIS  352, 367; classis Pontica 346 SINORIA (SINERVAS) (14 E1): Mithridates, refuge and treasury  188, 198–9, 403 Sipanazat (20 D2)  257–8 Sipdiğin (19 B3)  232–3 and n. 5; milestone  232–3, 249, 405 Sipikör (20 E3)  219–23, 276, 295; earthquake  212; bees  221, 333; Dere  220–1 Sipikör (Deveboynu) pass (20 E3)  190, 210, 215; southern side, via Bekçi kasabası and Mecidiye 215–9; landslides 215; han  219; altitude, gas pipeline, and snow  219, 398, 400; northern side  219–21; hans  132, 220; ‘milk pipes’  222, 276; brigands  221; PKK  271 caravan route, from Erzincan to Trebizond  190, 217, 221, 293, 395; post and ‘Old Russian Road’  190, 220–1; frontier road, from Euphrates to SATALA190,  259, 393; traces  217–19, 221; travellers (Strecker; Cumont, Hogarth and Yorke; Barkley)  416, 418 Şiro Çay (10 B5-D3)  31, 38; LAVINIANE  40; crossings, of frontier road  32, 39–41; Battalgazi  40, 136; of road per ripam, 70 Şirzi (13 C2)  159, 161; bridge, over Venk Çay  145–6 and n. 7, 159, 161; new bridge, over Euphrates  163

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

460 

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES

Sis Kale (10 B3)  79 Şişman (11 C4)  87; han 87; hills 86–8 Sitemi (14 D1)  233–4 and n. 5, 236, 238 Sivas (SEBASTEIA) (1 F4): Four Martyrs  211; missionaries  59; earthquake  212; military importance  394; mounted regiment  398; vilayet and boundary  182, 188, 191; Armenian pilgrims  204; railway to Erzurum  260, 345, 392 on caravan routes, from Samsun  99; and ‘High Constantinople Road’ to Eski Malatya, Harput, Diyarbekir and Baghdad  82, 95, 98–9, 394; (via Eski Malatya and Eski Kâhta) salt to Adıyaman  27; Armenian women to Urfa  39, 95; via Keban to Harput  108, 111, 394; minor routes, via Arabkir, to Eski Malatya  99, 107–8; via Divriği to Eğin  161; via Zara and Şebinkarahisar, to Giresun  183; and to Erzerum  398; in winter, via Refahiye and Kemah, to Erzincan  201; travellers (Brant; Cumont, Jacopi, Munro, Osten; Tozer; Burnaby) 415–18 SMYRNA (İzmir): caravans  261, 394 and n. 10; traveller (Tavernier)  417 Soğuk Dağ (9 C3)  60 Söğütlü (19 C2)  252, 254, 256; Çay  252, 254 Söğütlü Dere (12 A3-B5)  98, 107–8, 181; ferry 108 Sökmen (21 C5)  222, 272, 288; travellers (Biliotti; Tavernier, Tournefort)  415, 417–8 SOLONENICA (? Leri) (22 E3)  314 Şon Kale (22 E3)  314–6 SOPHENE (2 B3/C4): TOMISA  80; given by Pompey to Ariobarzanes  80; client king installed by Nero  80; access from Keban 111 Soyran Dere (22 F3-E4)  297–8, 313–14, 322 Spain 80 Stalingrad 380–1 STROBILOS M. (Mt. Elbrus) (24 D1)  374 Süderek (12 D4)  113, 119 Suez Canal  260 SUGGA (? Akbudak) (5 C2)  13 SUISA (Erzincan Kale) (20 D5): structures, and fort  212–14; garrison  214; captured by Sapor  209, 214, 265, 406; churches,

vanished  188; on road per ripam  203, 207 Sukhumi (SEBASTOPOLIS) (24 C2)  373, 375, 393; museum, and excavations  373, 375–6; below Caucasus passes, and Military Highway  373–5, 378; German plans  380; travellers (Reineggs, Dubois de Montpéreux)  415 Süpürgüç, formerly Akbudak (? SUGGA) (5 C2)  13 Surami pass (24 E2)  368, 394 Sürerek (15 D2)  209 Sürmene (1 I3)  364, 393 Surp Tavor (Manastir harabe ), above İliç (14 C4)  161, 163 SUSA, 225 mls E of Babylon  27 n. 1, 80, 389, 403 Suşehri (Enderes) (17 A1)  185; route to Kemah  247; to Sadak  252, 258, 260; to Erzerum  222, 257–8; earthquake  212 SYRIA (3 D4): military road from, to CAPPADOCIA, and EUXINE  4, 13, 94–5, 259; frontier from, to SEBASTOPOLIS  385; transfer to ZEUGMA, IV Scythica  14, 28 n. 7; legions cross Taurus, unidentified  404; IV Scythica  14; with Corbulo  404; transferred from, XII Fulminata  90, 404; XVI Flavia Firma  263 and n. 6, 404; inscriptions at APAMEA  97 n. 17; advance from, of Virdius Geminus  346, 404; of Trajan 6,  90, 264, 400, 405 COMMAGENE added, by Tiberius  5; and, after bellum Commagenicum, by Vespasian  5–6, 404; governors, Lucius Vitellius crosses EUPHRATES  13; Cassius Longinus meets Parthians  14; Licinius Mucianus  176; Caesennius Paetus occupies COMMAGENE  5, 404; Severus’ conquests, a bulwark  6; ravaged by Sapor  91; captured by Arabs  408; Armenians deported to desert  26, 39, 96 n. 1; German plans  381; SOE plans  96 n. 1 Tabakhane (23 D1): ravine  347; bridge  343, 349, 354–5; mosque, ? on site of Hermes temple  349, 355; gate  352, 357; excavations, statue of Hermes  355 Tabriz (4 D3): destination of caravans  260–1, 308, 311, 345; traveller (Chardin)  418

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES 

Tahnıç (MIASENA) (7 B2)  39–40, 295; Çay 39 Tahtikân (10 C2)  71–2 TANAIS Fl. (Don)  361, 380 Tanusa (12 D3)  114, 121, 140; churches and coins  121; Kilise Yazısı Tepe  121; Çay  121; ford  119; traveller (Serdaroğlu) 417 TAPOURA (? Tapurs) (14 A1)  3, 183 Tapurs (? TAPOURA) (14 A1)  3, 183 Taraksu (9 D4)  53, 73 n. 4; traveller (Stark) 418 Tarhanik (13 D4)  126 TARSA (Turuş) (5 F1)  11, 13 and n. 9 TARSUS (Tarsus) (3 B4): Caesar  385, 401 Tarsus (TARSUS) (3 B4)  14; traveller (Barbaro) 415 Taşbaşımalyanı (12 B5)  107 Taurus (TAURUS M.) (2 A4/D3): geography  31, 400; border between COMMAGENE and CAPPADOCIA  38; frontier road over  31–44; winter  37, 396–7; crossed by legions, under Claudius, unidentified  404; Nero, IV Scythica  14; and with Corbulo  31–2, 38–9, 404; Vespasian, XII Fulminata  90, 404; XVI Flavia Firma  263 and n. 6, 404; and with Virdius Geminus  346, 404; Trajan, 6,  90, 264, 400, 405; by Sapor  91, 407; Constantius II  33, 407; signalling  38, 42, 68, 88; gorge, and track per ripam  45–74; SOE plans  96 n. 1; MIT  41 caravan route, from Eski Kâhta to Eski Malatya  27, 38–9 and n. 5, 41–3, 68, 395; minor routes, by Çünküş crossing from Diyarbekir to Eski Malatya  45–6, 59, 61; and from COMMAGENE to Harput  56–7; and by Ayvas crossing, from Diyarbekir to Eski Malatya  45, 69; and from Adıyaman to Harput  45, 69; mule tracks to Pütürge, from Tillo  46, 59–60, 63; Midye  64; and Keferdis  69– 71; travellers (Huntington, Moltke; Hogarth and Yorke, Kökten; Ainsworth, Percy) 415–18 TAVIUM (Büyük Nefes Köy, 15 mls W of Yozgat) (3 B2): on road, via SEBASTEIA and NICOPOLIS, to SATALA  185, 259 Tcherek (24 E1)  378

461

Tehran  338, 389, 398; traveller (Fraser)  417 Tekke (SEDISCA, FINES PONTI) (22 D4)  304–5; routes above  314–18; yaylas  304, 317 Tepehan (7 C2)  27, 38–40; hans  31, 37; Armenians 39 Tepte, above Arabkir Çay (12 C2)  125 Tepte (Tepta), above Karabudak (14 B3)  227 Terek (? ALUTUS Fl.) (24 F2-G1)  377–9; German assault  380–1; travellers (Reineggs; Ker Porter)  415, 418 TEUCILA (Geruşla) (13 D3)  126, 150–2; aqueduct, gardens, bridge and church  151–2, 188; on road per ripam 165 THECHES M. (Çakırgöl Dağ) (22 E2)  320, 328 THEODOSIOPOLIS (Erzurum) (4 B2): captured by Persians, and Persians defeated 407 THIA (Beşkilise) (22 C4)  306 Thrace: Long Wall  373–4 Thracian Bosporus  346 Tiflis (24 F3): south of HARMOZICA  263, 368, 377; route to Poti  368; caravans, from Constantinople  261; German plans  380–1; travellers (Reineggs; Chardin, Dumas)  415, 418 TIGRANOCERTA (Siirt or Arzen) (4 B4): Lucullus, battle and destruction  4, 29 n. 24, 80, 403; Corbulo, march, capture, and garrison  400, 404 TIGRIS Fl. (Dicle) (4 A3-C4): Xenophon crossing  80; headwaters known to Claudius  61, 263; water conditions  105–6; rafts  178 and n. 8; dams  46 Tilek (10 E3)  49, 63, 67 Tille (? HEBA) (8 D3)  50 and n. 7 Tillo (? CLAUDIOPOLIS) (9 E2)  45, 49, 59–61; ? known to Claudius  61; gorge below  59; Çay  63; Zaza  45; track to Pütürge  63; traveller (Stark)  418 Tilman (10 E3)  67 Tirebolu (1 G2)  307 Tohma Su (MELAS Fl.) (11 A4-B3)  75, 98, 101, 390; name  90; Kurds  104; Armenian women  39, 95; Kırkgözköprü  40, 98, 280; railway bridge and Plan Wonderful  89, 96 n. 1; on caravan route from Constantinople to

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

462 

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES

Tohma Su (MELAS Fl.) (Cont.) Baghdad  95; and from Aleppo to Trebizond  98–9, 395; travellers (Hogarth and Yorke, Lehmann-Haupt, Osten; Ainsworth)  416–18 Tokat (1 E3): Armenian women  39, 95; earthquake  212; importance  261; at divergence of caravan routes from Constantinople, to Erzerum and Tabriz  260–2, 288, 394, 398–9; and to Diyarbekir and Baghdad  261, 394; travellers (Brant; Cumont, Munro; Morier, Tavernier, Tournefort)  415–18 TOMISA (İzolu) (10 A2)  79–80; in Sophene  80; region opposite Pirot  55, 82; given by Lucullus to Arobarzanes  80; client installed by Nero  80 ancient crossing, of EUPHRATES  75; at Hallan  81, and at Pirot  82, 84–5; Urartian and ? Persian fort, at Habibuşağı  80, 82–4; Hallan crossing used by Assyrian king, Shalmanezer III  81–2, 403; Urartian king, Sardur II  82, 403; Persian Royal Road  27 n. 1, 80, 403; known to Eratosthenes 80; Mehmet II, the Conqueror, and caravans from Eski Malatya to Harput and Diyarbekir,  82; Pirot perhaps used by Lucullus  13, 80, 403; Caesennius Paetus  31, 80, 95, 404; Corbulo  80; Trajan  80; travellers (Huntington, Moltke; Lehmann-Haupt; Percy)  415, 417–18 Torul (Ardasa) (22 B3)  307; winter caravan road  296, 301, 304; cloudbursts  301, 331; travellers (Cumont; Clavijo)  416–17 Trabzon (Trebizond, TRAPEZUS) (23 D1)  3, 343–59; strategic position  343, 345; hinterland  342; Boztepe  342–4, 347–9; visible from Zigana Dağ 327, 331–2; climate  264, 331–2, 401; in province of Rum  358 n. 5; attacked by Melik of Erzerum  349; captured by Mehmet the Conqueror  341–2, 408; Comneni  209, 357, 408; churches  354, 357; Chrysokephalos  349, 352, 354–5; Ortahisar  343, 352–4; eastern suburb, Atatürk (Gâvur) Meydan  343–4, 347; layers of rebuilding  344; columns, excavations, statue of Hermes, and museums  354–5; Byzantine walls and

harbour  351, 354; Molos  349–51; and foreshore reclamation  351; ? lighthouse  352; earthquake  212; German consul  380; modern port  349; produce  356; mad honey  333, 341; bee-keepers 294; vali  329; supply base for Turkish forces  346; captured by Russians 408 caravan routes, from Erzerum  395; in summer  327, 337–9; and by Transit Road  308, 347–8; modernisation  301 and n. 1; Erzerum Gate  359 n. 33; and from Erzincan, ‘Old Trabzon Road’  215, 223, 288, 293–5; from Malatya  230; Samsun-Georgia Transit Road  354 travellers (Biliotti, Blau, Brant, Curzon, Suter, Wright; Bryer and Winfield, Cumont, Finlay, Hogarth and Yorke; Bishop, Hamilton, Hepworth, Kinneir, Layard, Lynch, Southgate, Texier, Tournefort, Tozer, Walpole; Ainsworth, Barkley, Dwight and Smith, Hommaire de Hell) 415–18 TRACHONITIS, SSE of Damascus  74 n. 7 TRAPEZUS (Trabzon, Trebizond) (23 D1) position and advantages  345–6; hinterland  344; climate  332, 344–5, 401; colony of SINOPE  327, 345, 403; early city, Ortahisar  353–4; vetusta fama 343 and n. 5; in territory of the Colchians  345; hostile tribes  344; classis Pontica  346; navigation  344, 346, 352; Daphnous  345, 349; Hadrian’s harbour  349–51; and ? lighthouses  351–2; garrison, auxiliary cohort  346; legionary vexillations  352, 355; and I Pontica  354, 356; ? site of fortress  354, 356; Tabakhane and Zağnos bridges  343–4, 349, 353–5; aqueduct  354, 357; temple and statue of Hermes  349, 355, 405; remains, Hellenistic  354; Roman  352–5; inscriptions  352, 354, 357; coins  345, 349, 356; cults  354; Christianity  347, 352, 357; minerals, local produce, mad honey 356 Pericles  345; Xenophon  344, 347–8, 356; Nero, base for Armenian wars  346, 352; Corbulo, garrisons and supply route  344, 346, 404; and Tiridates  346; annexed, with PONTUS POLEMONIACUS  346,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES 

404; sacked by Anicetus  346, 404; Virdius Geminus  346; Hadrian visit, and constructions  333, 348–51, 352, 405; Arrian visit  349, 355, 405; sacked by Borani  354–6, 406; Justinian, rebuilding  352, 357 route from ARMENIA  343, 345; and SATALA  343, 346; frontier road  259; travellers, see under Trabzon Tsebeldağ, E of Sukhumi (24 C2)  373; valley, and gorge  373–4, 378; necropolis  373 Tsikhisdziri (? PETRA) (24 C3)  382 n. 7 Tuğut, Tut (14 A2): Armenians, and fate  182, 188; traveller (Sykes)  419 Tunceli (16 D2)  172, 226, 392 Turnagöl (22 D1)  311–12, 321, 325, 331, 334; Tepe  325, 327, 339; yayla 333–4 Turuş (TARSA) (5 F1)  11, 13 and n. 9, 22; necropolis 11 TYANA (Kemerhisar) (3 B3)  264 TZANICA (24 A4/B4)  327, 357 Üççat köprü, now Taş köprü (21 C3)  294 Üçkardeş Tepe (15 B1)  203 Ümraniye, now İmranlı (17 B4)  183, 225, 229 URARTU (4 C2/D3)  82, 301, 345; Urartian king, Sardur II  82, 403; guard post  78–80 and n. 2, 82; fire temple  88, 246; records  89 Urfa (EDESSA) (2 B5): on caravan route from Aleppo to Diyarbekir  14; Armenian women  39; GAP project  46 URIMA (? Horum) (5 B6)  11, 14 Uslu(köy) (10 E2)  68 Uzun (Rum) Bayır, E of Hayekse (22 D3)  317 Uzunhüseyin (10 C3)  71 Uzunkol (20 B2)  256 Vahsen (12 D3)  114, 118, 121, 141 Van, Lake (THOSPITIS L.) (1 K/L5)  82, 345, 389–90, 400, 408 Vank Dag (? DASTEIRA M.) (19 B5)  198 VARUCINTE (? Karakulak) (2 C2)  263 Vavuk Dağ pass (22 F4)  296, 314 Vazgirt (? ERIZA) (20 D4)  210, 215, 217–19; Armenians  215; suspicion and arrest 219; yayla 217 Venk Çay (13 D2-C3)  146 and n. 7, 159

463

Venk Kale (13 D3)  159; traveller (Osten)  417 Venk köprü, over Euphrates (13 D3)  155–8 Venk monastery, opposite Eğin (13 C3)  155 Venkuk (9 D5)  46, 51, 74 n. 7 VEREUSO (? Çanakcı) (13 C5)  126, 132, 134–5 Veyserni (22 F3)  322; travellers (Texier, Walpole) 417–18 Volga 380 Yarımca (5 A3)  28 n. 11 Yarımca han, 1 ml E of Yazıcıhan (11 B4)  87 Yazıcıhan (11 B4)  87; Dere  43, 87 Yeni Çermik (12 B6)  98, 105 Yeni Levenge, 2 mls W of Levenge (12 B5)  99, 107–9 Yeni Samsat, 1 ml NNW of Horno (6 C5)  23 Yerevan (24 F4), see Erivan Yorke Dağ (10 A3)  86 Yukarı Çardak (5 B5)  14–15 Yukarı Yeniköy (18 D3)  250 Yumak Tepe (14 C1)  233–5, 241 Yurtlar (Hur) Dere (21 C2-C3)  287, 294–5, 299, 304; traveller (? Barkley)  418 Yürük camp (ZENOCOPI), Ortaköy (13 B4)  132, 136 Yuvacık (? CANABA) (5 E6)  17 Zabulbar, beside Çit Çay (12 D2)  121, 126, 140–1, 149; water pipes  129, 222, 276; fortlet  66, 140–1 Zağnos (23 D1): bridge  344, 354 ZARA (Zara) (2 A2): on Silk Road, from SEBASTEIA to NICOPOLIS  183; track, from Kuruçay, and İliç  182, 201; Koçkiri-Dersim revolt  225–6, 392; travellers (Munro; Sykes)  417, 419 Zekri Dere (14 F1-F2)  191, 199 ZELA (Zile) (3 C2): Caesar and Pharnaces  385, 403 Zengeto (9 E2)  59 ZENOCOPI (Yürük camp) (13 B4)  126, 136 Zerdiğ Deresi, NW of Kanigöl (7 B1-B2)  41 ZEUGMA (Belkis) (2 A5)  14; crossing, and bridge  14; Cassius Longinus and Parthians  14; garrison, III Gallica  6 and n. 4, 13 and n. 10; IV Scythica  13–15, 28 n. 7, 405; and Severus  6; tiles  15, 17; mosaics  15 and n. 13; priests  36; navigation  9; defeat of Hafiz Pasha  87,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

464 

INDEX 1: PL ACE NA MES

93, 99, 408; flooded, by Birecik dam  11, 408 road, cut in cliff face  210; to PERRE and CAPPADOCIA  13–14, 22; to SAMOSATA  11–14, to SEBASTOPOLIS  405; via APAMEA, to SAMOSATA  15; and to EDESSA  17; traveller (Chapot)  416 Zevker (Orcil) Dere (19 E2-A1)  249, 251, 253–4 Zeyikhan (10 B2)  78 Zeynel Dağ (Şeyh Ömer Yamaçı, 2 mls NW of Hoşgördi (7 B1)  41 ZIGANA (Zigana) (22 B2)  3, 296, 306, 308; garrison (at ZIGANNE)  310, 327 Zigana (22 B2)  296, 308; han 308; Çay  307–8; tunnel  307; travellers (Bryer, Cumont, Hogarth and Yorke; Clavijo, Hepworth; Barkley)  416–18 Zigana pass (22 B2)  308–9; karakol 308, 310; caravan route, from Erzerum to Trebizond  296, 301, 307, 310, 393; and conditions  310; route to Kolat, via ridge and Zigana Dağ  309, 321, 325, 327–8, 331–3; and Xenophon  328, 331, 333, 403; Hadrian  327 ZIGANEOS (? Anaklia) (24 C2)  371, 376 ZIGANNE (22 B2), on Zigana pass  310 ZIMARA (Pingan) (14 A4)  3, 173–6; as Hittite ARZIYA  143, 176; ? bridge over

EUPHRATES  173; CAPOTES  161 and n. 14, 170 and n. 3; ? known as fort to Corbulo  169–70; garrison  122 n. 8, 176; on ripa, and navigation  47, 116, 149–50, 170, 176, 404; inscriptions  175; SCORDISCUS and garlic  172–3 on frontier road  169, 180, 193, 225, 389; road to NICOPOLIS  182–5, 405; Trajan 158, 175, 405; travellers (Taylor; Hogarth and Yorke; Hommaire de Hell) 416 Zımara, NNW of Pingan (14 A4)  135, 171–2, 310 Zımara Dere (14 A4)  170, 175 Zindanlar (? HORONON) (22 E4)  297–8; Roman bricks  287; travellers (Strecker; Bryer) 416 Ziyaret, in Dersim (16 C2)  170, 391–2 Ziyaret Dere, at PERRE (6 A2-B5)  22–5; bridge at Pirun  25–6; abutments on ‘Old Adıyaman Road’  24 Ziyaret pass, above Kemah (16 C2)  203, 391 Ziyaret pass, above Refahiye (19 B3)  225, 232, 243, 247, 250 Ziyaret Tepe (Girfe), above BARZALO (9 E3)  31, 51, 55–7 Ziyaret Tepe (? CAPOTES) (13 E2)  161 and n. 14 Zugdidi (24 C2)  380; traveller (Chardin) 418

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

I N DE X 2: PE R SON A L N A M E S Ancient (pre ad 700) 1 Ancient Personal, Gods, Saints, Peoples and Tribal Names Modern (post ad 700) 2 Travellers, Scholars, Officials, Missionaries 3 Sultans, Holy Men, Germans and Others 4 Tribes and Peoples 5 Guides, and Helpers

1.  Ancient Personal, Gods, Saints, Peoples and Tribal Names Abbreviations: coh. cohors gov. governor mil. militum praef. praefectus proc. procurator trib. tribunus Abasci, Pontic tribe  363; client king Resmagas 363 Abgarus VIII (Septimius Abgarus), king of Edessa 17 Abundantia: cult, at Trapezus  359 n. 32 Aelius Ianuarius, proc. of Osrhoene 17 Aelius Vale(n)s, trib. mil. 264 Aemilius Carus, gov. of Cappadocia (ad 147–50)  214 and n. 14 Aemilius Pius, praef. of coh. I Bosporanorum, at Arauraca  207 and n. 9 Aeschylus 367 Aka (grand-daughter of Antiochus I Epiphanes) 23 Akulas (Aquila), at Körpinik hüyük 114 and n. 4 Alani: incursions, c. ad 35, 379 and n. 25, 404; c. ad 72, 379, 404; c. ad 135, and Arrian 264, 364, 366, 379, 406; c. ad 230, 406; c. ad 282 Sarmatians  379; Huns  379; penetration by Darial pass  379, 404, 406; Derbent passage  379, 406; Maroukh and western passes  379; countered by Vespasian, Domitian and Lazi  379 Albani (Albanians)  403

Alexander, the Great: death  4; maternal ancestor of Antiochus  5; bridge at Zeugma  14; Arrian, historian of  327 Ammianus Marcellinus, historian  356, 376; flight from Amida  45–6, 56, 59–61, 91, 407 Anaitis, goddess, at Eriza: sanctuary  211, statue, gold 211, 403; bronze, at Satala  211, 265, 277–8 ANASTASIUS I (Flavius Anastasius, ad 491–518): walls at Melitene  91–2, 407; coin at Hortokop  337 Anchialus, king of the Machelones and Heniochi (client of Trajan)  363, 365 Andrew, St.  357 Ange, St., at Pingan  175 Anicetus, Pontic rebel,  97 n. 12, 346, 354, 361 and n. 2, 377; betrayed to Virdius Geminus  346, 370 and n. 16, 404 Antiochis (daughter of Antiochus I Epiphanes) 23 Antiochus I Epiphanes (son of Mithridates I Callinicus), king of Commagene  4 and n. 2, 23

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

466 

INDEX 2: PER SONA L NA MES (2.1)

Antiochus IV Epiphanes, king of Commagene  4, 5 Antistius Rusticus, gov. of Cappadocia (ad 92–94) 405 ANTONINUS PIUS (T. Aelius Hadrianus Antoninus Pius, ad 137–61): coins  36, 114, 120, 373 and n. 7; client king  363 and n. 7 Antonius Paternus, custos armorum 264 Antony (Mark Antony): invades and retreats from Media  397, 400, 403; sanctuary of Anaitis  211, 278, 403 Aphrodite: head, at Satala  265, 277–8 Apollo: altar  406; oracles  36; temple  354; Epekoos  36; Hegemon  367 and n. 15 Apollodorus, architect 158 Apsilae, Pontic tribe  370; client king, Iulianus 370 Apsurtos (brother of Medea) 365 Arabs: conquered by Claudius Candidus  406; capture Samosata  6; Syria  408; Melitene  91, 408 Archelaus I, king of Cappadocia 80 Ardashir, Persian king: defeats Parthians  406; invades Mesopotamia  6; father of Sapor 406 Argonauts 394 Ariobarzanes I, king of Cappadocia 80 Aristarchus, king of the Colchians (client of Pompey) 368 Aristotle 356 Armenian, Armenians: king, Tigranes  403; language  186, 188, 207; Lycus  289; population  188; bishoprics  186, 188; priest, and head of Hussein  210; cult of Anaitis  211; destruction of Persian fire temples  246; section of Notitia Dignitatum 264; and see Index 3 Arrian (Flavius Arrianus), historian, gov. of Cappadocia (ad 131–35): sights ‘The Sea’  297, 327, 333, 395, 406; two rivers, at Maçka  334; reports work at Trapezus  327, 406; altars, temple and statue of Hermes  333, 349, 355; harbour  349; inspection of coastal forts  352, 361–2, 406; trireme  346, 352, 362 and n. 5, 365; rivers  362, 367, 371, 393; tribes  362–5, 379; Sanni (Drillae)  344; Hyssou Limen  362–4; Athenai  356, 362–3, 365; Apsarus  362–3, 365–6; Phasis  363, 367–8; Chobus  363,

367; Sebastopolis  363, 374–5, and plaque 375; antiquarian interests  364, 368, 374; death of Cotys  376; advance against Alani  406; route east from Satala  263; army  193, 207, 214, 264; ? advance to Caspian Gates  406 Artabanus V, king of Parthia: defeated by Persians 406 Artaxias I, king of Armenia 403 Artaxias II (son of Polemon I), king of Armenia 404 Artemis, at Phasis: temple  368 Asclepius: cult, at Trapezus  357 Assyria, Assyrian: Empire  4; minerals from Pontic mountains  356; king, Shalmanezer III crosses Euphrates, at Ayni  13, 403; and at Tomisa, against Melidian king  81–2, 89, 403; queen, Semiramis founds Melita  403 Athena: shrine  365 Athenaia, chatelaine, at Athenai  365 Athenais, at Hastek Kale: tomb  116 Athanasius, bishop of Perre 25 Attica, Roman lady, at Satala  264 and n. 11 AUGUSTUS (Caesar Augustus, 27 bc–ad 14): coin  69; Actium, and biremes  346; sends Tiberius to recover Armenia  403; designates Euphrates as frontier  404; entertained in Bononia  211 AURELIAN (L. Domitius Aurelianus, ad 270–5); coins  24; captures Zenobia  407; dedication at Satala  265, 270 Aurelius Carus Silvanus, signifer 15 Azzians 143   Basil, St, the Great, of Caesarea: letters, to Samosata  6; Nicopolis  186; Satala, and visit  265 and n. 13; Ayvas ferry, below Keferdis  69; Ayvasilhanı  341; Büyük Ayvas, in Trapezus  354; Ayvas suyu, at Niksar  74 n. 18 Bato, ? miles, near Dascusa  121 Belisarius, magister militum per Orientem 354–5 Borani (Scythians): allies of Goths  265, 355, 406; sack Trapezus  265, 341, 354–6, 406; and Pityus  355, 376 and n. 22, 406; raid Phasis  368; perhaps Apsarus  365; but not Sebastopolis 376 Bosporani. Bosporan kingdom: kings, Pharnaces  367; Cotys, client of Hadrian  363, 376, 381 n. 3

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 2: PER SONA L NA MES (2.1) 

Bruttius Praesens, legate of VI Ferrata (ad 114/5): winter in Armenia  37, 398 Byzantine, see Index 3   Caesar (Iulius Caesar): march, and defeats Pharnaces at Zela  385, 389, 403 Caesennius Gallus, gov. of Cappadocia (c. ad 80/1–83)  12 n. 3, 405; road from Caesarea  94; builds at Dascusa  120 CALIGULA (C. Caesar Augustus Germanicus, ad 37–41): restores Antiochus IV  5; lighthouse at Boulogne  358 n. 24 Callinicus (Iulius Callinicus, son of Antiochus IV Epiphanes), prince of Commagene 5 and n. 3 Candidus (Tiberius Claudius Candidus), proconsul of Asia, dux exercitus: conquers Mesopotamia, Adiabene and Arabs  36, 406; altar of Apollo  35–6, 406 Canidius Crassus, legate, in Iberia and Albania 403 CARACALLA (M. Aurelius Antoninus, ad 198–217): absorbs Edessa  6; inscriptions of II Parthica  97 n. 17 Carduchi (Kurds): and Xenophon  391 Cassius Longinus, gov. of Syria (ad 45/6–49): Parthians at Zeugma  14 and n. 13 Castor (son of Zeus), Argonaut 374 Catilius Severus, gov. of Cappadocia and Armenia Major (c. ad 114–17): construction at Zimara  175, 405 Caucasians 374 Cavades, Persian king: attacks Armenia  407 Chaldian 82 Chalybes  306, 356 Chosroes I (son of Cavades), Persian king: invades Commagene  6, 36; destroys Melitene  91, 407; captures Petra  376, 407 Chosroes II (grandson of Chosroes I), Persian king: captures Satala  366 CLAUDIUS (Ti. Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, ad 41–54): restores Antiochus IV  5; source of geographical detail for Pliny  46, 263, 404; of Euphrates in Taurus gorge, Arsanias and headwaters of Tigris  46, 61 and n. 13; length of Armenia, from Dascusa to Caspian  116, 404; ? Satala  263; coin  281; value of Pontus  346 Colchi, Pontic tribe  364; known to Xenophon 340–1

467

Colchians, people of Colchis: king, Aristarchus, client of Pompey  368; Phasis, market for  367–9; as Lazi, commerce by sea  369, 394 Colchians, Pontic tribe: Xenophon  340–1; Phasis, market for  367–9; as Lazi  394 COMMODUS (M. Aurelius Commodus Antoninus, ad 180–92): XVI Flavia Firma at Samosata  6 and n. 4; garrison (XV Apollinaris) at Kainepolis  377, 406; coins  36, 118; on coin minted at Satala 265 CONSTANS (Flavius Iulius Constans, c. ad 323–50); milestone  95, 98 CONSTANTINE the Great (Flavius Valerius Constantinus, ad 306–37): coins  120, 174; Commagene  6; churches at Trapezus  357; garrisons beside Phasis  368 CONSTANTINE II (junior) (Flavius Claudius Constantinus, ad 337–40): coin  114 CONSTANTIUS I (CHLORUS) (Flavius Valerius Constantius, Caesar ad 293–305): milestones 95 CONSTANTIUS II (Flavius Iulius Constantius, ad 337–61): at Lacotena  33, 36, 407; milestone  95, 98; coin  281 Corbulo (Domitius Corbulo), gov. of Cappadocia (ad 55–6 and 63–64): preparations for war  278; supply route from Trapezus  263, 295, 297, 315, 333, 344, 346, 404; to Satala  219, 263; winter hardships  116, 397; Dioscorides and garlic  173; invades Armenia  263, 404; Artaxata to Tigranocerta  400, 404; extrema Cappadocia  390, 404; crosses Taurus  31–2, 39, 80, 404; and Gopal Tepe  38; crosses Euphrates  75, 80; inscriptions and ? tropaeum, below Harput  95, 120, 404; eye-witness source for Pliny  404; for navigation  116, 176, 404; Lycus (? Çaltı Çay)  169; Aga mons  219 and n. 15; ? Apsarus and Sebastopolis  363, 404; Caucasian Gates  377, 404 Cotys (Iulius Cotys), king of Cimmerian Bosporus (client of Hadrian)  363, 376, 381 n. 3, 405 Crassus (Licinius Crassus), triumvir: defeat, near Carrhae  403 Crateuas, physician to Mithridates VI 173 Cuspius Fabianus, centurion, at Satala  285 n. 16 Cyrus the Great, Achaemenid king of Persia (559–529 bc): Persian Royal Road  403

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

468 

INDEX 2: PER SONA L NA MES (2.1)

Cyrus II, satrap of Asia Minor (408–401 bc): defeat at Cunaxa 328, 403 

Eustratius, St., one of Five Martyrs of Armenia: at Arauraca  186, 207–9, 407 

Daphnis, praef. of coh. IV Raetorum, at Analiba 193 Darius I the Great, Achaemenid king of Persia (521–486 bc): ancestor of Antiochus I Epiphanes  5; Persian Royal Road  403 DECIUS (C. Messius Q. Traianus Decius, ad 249–51): Sabrina bridge  181, 406 Deiotarus I, prince of Galatia: given Pontus and Armenia Minor 346 Dio (Cassius Dio), historian: Severus’ conquests  6; siege of Tigranocerta  29 n. 24; river crossings  80–1; Danube bridge 159 DIOCLETIAN (C. Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus, ad 286–316): Commagene  6; Great Persecution  91, 207, 265, 347, 357, 407; Christians at Satala  265; restores Trapezus  356; and Pityus  376; roads and milestones  94; coins  281; I Pontica  354, 356, 407 Diodorus Siculus, historian: Xenophon cairn  330 Dionysus: cult, at Trapezus  355, 357 Dioscorides (Pedanius Dioscorides), army physician: garlic  173 Dioscuri (Castor and Pollux): founders of Dioscurias  374 and n. 21 DOMITIAN (Caesar Domitianus Augustus, ad 81–96): walls, at Samosata  7; construction at Dascusa  120, 122 n. 3; XII Fulminata above Caspian Gates  263, 378–9; milestones, on roads east from Ancyra  185; and from Caesarea  94 and n. 18; and frontier road near Refahiye  95, 232–3 and n. 3 Domnus, bishop of Trapezus  357 Drillae, Pontic tribe: identified with Sanni  344   Epiphanes (Iulius Antiochus Epiphanes, son of Antiochus IV Epiphanes), prince of Commagene 5 Eratosthenes, geographer: Tomisa  80 Eros, St., at Caene Parembole  364 Eugenios, St., patron of Trapezus: church  347, 349; Mithras  357, aqueduct 357 Eusebius, bishop of Samosata  6: rowed to Zeugma 8–9 Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea Maritima, ecclesiastical historian 345

Fabius Cilo, legate of XVI Flavia Firma at Samosata  6 and n. 4 Firminus, St., at Apsarus  365 Firmus, St., at Apsarus  365 Flavians, see Domitian, Titus, Vespasian Fortuna, at Aquincum  97 n. 13   Gaius Caesar (C. Iulius Caesar): meets Parthian king, invades Armenia, dies near Artaxata 404 GAIUS, see CALIGULA GALERIUS (C. Galerius Valerius Maximianus, Caesar ad 293–305, Emperor ad 305–11): defends eastern frontier, defeats Narses E of Satala  407; Great Persecution  265, 362, 407 GALLIENUS (P. Licinius Gallienus, ad 260–8): rebuilding at Satala  265, 272 Georgius, bishop of Analibla 193 Germanicus (Germanicus Iulius Caesar): sent to crown Artaxias II  404 Gotarzes, king of Parthia: and Vardanes  389 Goths: allies of Borani  265, 355, 406; raids, and city walls  353 Greek, Greeks: colonies, of Sinope, Trapezus  327, 345; of Miletus, Phasis  367; and Dioscurias  374; (Ten Thousand) cross Tigris  80; through Kurdistan and Armenia  328, 333, 397; Gymnias  297, 314, 328; Taochian strongholds  315; ‘The Sea’, and cairn  328–31, 403; descent  334, 340; mad honey  310–11, 333, 341, 356; Trapezus,  343, 345, 348; ‘descendents’, in Krom valley  326; culture, at Samosata, and Greek Fire  4, 6, 26 and n. 24; Nicopolis,  185; cities in eastern Pontus  185; Satala  264, 278; Trapezus 327; Athenai 365; coin 114; inscriptions, near Dascusa  114, 116, 120–1, 124; at Erzincan  211; Satala  270–1 and n. 16; Trapezus  345, 349; milestone  183; spoken, by early traders  345; physician  173; commanders  193, 207; soldiers  121 Gregory, St. (Surp Krikor Lusarovich), the Illuminator: conversion of Armenia  407; relics, near Erzincan  211 Gregory, St., the Thaumaturge: deaconess, at Satala 265 

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 2: PER SONA L NA MES (2.1) 

HADRIAN (Traianus Hadrianus Augustus, ad 117–38): veteran colony near Melitene  90; journey, to Satala  264 and n. 9; ‘The Sea’  297, 327–8, 333, 395, 405; and Trapezus  345, 349; harbour and ? lighthouses  349–52, 405; imperial statue  349, 357,405; temple and statue of Hermes  355, 405; knowledge of Pontus  356; and of coastal garrisons  363–4, 366; Arrian’s report  361, 366, 405; client kings  370, 405; Malassas (of Lazi)  379 and n. 25; Resmagas (Abasci)  363; Spadagas (Sanigae)  363, 375; Stachemphax (Zilchi)  363; Cotys (Cimmerian Bosporus)  376, 381 n. 3, 405; policy, and Phasis  368; ? winter in Nicopolis, and titles Hadriane  185, 405; inscriptions  346, 349, 352, 355; coins  165, 373, 376–7; milestones, on roads east from Ancyra  185; and from Zimara and Sebasteia, near Nicopolis  183, 405; on frontier road near Refahiye  95, 232, 405; withdraws from Armenia Major, and confirms Euphrates as frontier  405; and garrison  407; residence in Aquincum  90 and n. 13 Haldi, warrior god of Urartu  82; indigenous Armenians 101 Hannibalianus (nephew of Constantine), king of Armenia 357 Heniochi, Pontic tribe: charioteers, descended from the Dioscuri  374; king, Anchialus, received by Trajan at Satala, and palace near Apsarus  365; sack Pityus  376–7 Hephaestos: and Prometheus  374 Heptakometae, tribe above Colchis 361 HERACLIUS (Flavius Heraclius, ad 610–41): expels Persians from Asia Minor  408 Hercules: Pillars of  80 Hermes: in Trapezus, temple  349, 355, 405; bronze statue  355; cult  357 Herodotus, historian: describes Persian Royal Road  27 n. 1, 80 and n. 3; and speed of messages 389; Colchis 394 Hittite, Hittites: Samosata  4; boat and ships  143, 176, 404; carry supplies from Pittiyariga and Arziya to Samuha  3, 126; Upper Lands ravaged by Azzians  143; Cengerli Kale  246 Huns: cross Caucasus  379, 406–7 Hygieia: cult, at Trapezus  357 

469

Iberi (Iberians): defeated by Pompey  403; besiege Gorneae  404; kings invite Sarmatians, and Alani, across Caucasus  379, 406 Isias (wife of Antiochus I Epiphanes)  23 Iulia Domna (wife of Severus): dedications at Nicopolis 187; and Satala  264, coin at Tsebeldağ 373 Iulia Maxima (wife of Quintianus Maximus)  264 n. 6 Iulianus, king of the Apsilae (client of Trajan)  363, 370 Iulius Agrippa  II, king of Batanaea and Trachonitis 74 n. 7 Iulius Crispus, praef. of ala I Ulpia Dacorum, at Suisa  214 and n. 14 Iulius Pacatianus, proc. of Osrhoene 17 [Iulius] Quartus, decurio of ala II UlpiaAuriana, at Zimara  176 Iulius Sextilius Longinus (son of Sextilius Valens)  246 and n. 7   Jewish: revolt  5 John Chrysostom, St., at Pityus  376 John Prodromos, St., the Baptist  313 Josephus (Flavius Josephus), Jewish commander, historian: classis Pontica 346 and n. 16 Jupiter: altar  175 JUSTINIAN (Flavius Iustinianus, ad 527–65): construction and repair, at Melitene  91–2, 407; Çit Harabe (Sabus)  127; Nicopolis  186–7, 407; Satala  265–6, 268–9, 407; and Greek inscriptions  270; watch tower above Lycus  290; Zindanlar (Horonon)  297; ? Tekke  304; in Tzanica  297, 327, 357; Trapezus  352, 357; Pontic coast  382 n. 7; and Sanni  344; Rhizaion  364; Petra  363 and n. 7, 376; canal near Phasis  370; Sebastopolis demolished, with Pityus  376, 407; and rebuilt  374–5; walls across Caucasus passes  376, 379; Persians wars  407; defeats Persians at Satala  265; coins  25 and n. 21; treaty with Chosrhoes (ad 561)  407   Kurds, see Carduchi Kyriakos, St., at Ziganeos  371   Lamprocles, praef. of coh. I Bosporanorum, at Arauraca 207

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

470 

INDEX 2: PER SONA L NA MES (2.1)

Laodike (second daughter of Antiochus I Epiphanes)  19 and n. 19 Lazi, tribe in Colchis: kings, Malassas, client of Hadrian  363, 379 and n. 25; Pacorus, client of Antoninus  363 and n. 7; guard borders of Lazica  397; commerce by sea  394 LICINIUS I (Valerius Licinianus Licinius, ad 308–24): persecution  407; and Forty Martyrs  91; Forty-Five Martyrs  186; coins  120, 143 Longinus, St., at sea off Lazica  376 Lucian, philosopher, at Samosata  6 Lucian, St., at Samosata  6 Lucius Vitellius, gov. of Syria (ad 35–37/8) 13 Lucullus (Licinius Lucullus), general: crosses Euphrates  13, 75, 80; defeats Tigranes  404; destroys Tigranocerta  4, 29 n. 24; snow and ice in Armenia  397, 400; gives Tomisa to Ariobarzanes  80 Lycius, cavalry commander, with Xenophon 328–9 Lysias, dux Armeniae; at Satala  265; route to Nicopolis  250 and n. 9; persecution, at Arauraca  186, 207; mobbed at Nicopolis 186   Machelones, Pontic tribe  365; king, Anchialus, client of Trajan  363, 365 Macronians, tribe below Pontic mountains, around Maçka: Xenophon  329, 334, 340 Malassas, king of the Lazi (client of Hadrian)  363, 379 and n. 25 Mamas, St.: church below Harput, and Corbulo inscriptions,  95 and n. 20 Manlius Priscus, legate of Pompey: captures Dasteira 199 Mansuetus, beneficiarius, at Satala  264 and n. 8 Marcellus: sherd at Pağnık Öreni, and tomb near Sabus  120, 141 MARCUS AURELIUS (M. Aurelius Antoninus, ad 161–80): Column  7, 9; milestones, at Bibo  23, 95; and ? Ararat  263; coins  114; veteran colony, at Arca  90; ‘Fulminata’ legion  91; Armenian war  281, 406; and withdrawal to Euphrates frontier  406; garrison, at Kainepolis,  377, 406 Mardarius, St., one of Five Martyrs of Armenia: at Arauraca  207

Mardi: and Corbulo  400 Maria, at Bademli  124 Martialis, miles, at Satala  264 and n. 8 Martius Verus, gov. of Cappadocia (ad 172–75), occupies Osrhoene  406; secures Kainepolis 406 Medea: oil  29; slays Apsurtos (Apsarus)  365 Meherdates, Parthian prince: escorted to Euphrates 14 Mihal (Michael) St,: church on Muşar Dağ 100–1 Mithras: cult and statue, at Trapezus  357 Mithridates I, Hellenistic king of Pontus 345 Mithridates I Callinicus, king of Commagene 4 Mithridates VI Eupator (father of Pharnaces II), king of Pontus,  345; coastal tribes  361; invades Bithynia and Asia  368, 403; Lucullus  80, 397, 403; Pompey defeats at Nicopolis  185, 346, 403; refuge in Sinoria  188, 199; plants and poisons  173; horsemanship 389 Mucianus (Licinius Mucianus), legate, gov. of Syria (ad 68/9); campaign in Dersim  176, 404; Capotes mons  161, 170; source of Euphrates  170, 391; navigation from Zimara  116, 176, 404   Narses (son of Sapor), Persian king: invades Armenia, defeated E of Satala  407 Nemesis: cult, at Trapezus  359 n. 32 Neratius Pansa, gov. of Cappadocia (c. ad 77/8–79/80)  120; coin  114 n. 3 NERO (Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, ad 54–68): Armenian war, Syrian legions  404; installs client king in Sophene 80; Melitene 90; Satala 263; Trapezus  346, 352, 404; navigation of Euphrates  86–7, 176; penetration of Dersim  392; legionary physician  173; cohors Bosporiana  207; coins  120 and n. 11; ? tropaeum  95 and n. 20, 120; classis Pontica  346, 361; subdues coastal tribes  363; forts and anchorages  363 and n. 7, 365 (Athenai, Apsarus), 368 (Phasis), 375 (Sebastopolis); reconnaissance and plans, for Caspian Gates  263 and n. 5, 346, 404 NERVA (Nerva Caesar Augustus, ad 96–8): milestones, on road east from Ancyra  185; and from Caesarea  94 and n. 18

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 2: PER SONA L NA MES (2.1) 

Nicholas, St.: relics, near Erzincan  211 Nicostratus, author, at Trapezus  345  Orentius, St.: at Satala  265, 362 and n. 4; martyred at Rhizaion  364   Pacorus, king of Lazi (client of Antoninus)  382 n. 7 Paetus (Caesennius Paetus), gov. of Cappadocia (ad 62), gov. of Syria (ad 72): invades Armenia  14, 75, 80; defeated at Rhandeia by Vologaeses  404; flees to Tomisa  95; met by Corbulo  31–2; bellum Commagenicum  5 Palmatus (Iunius Palmatus), general: winter retreat through Armenia  397, 400, 406 Pan: at Trapezus  355 Paris, see Ulpius Augustianus Parthian, Parthians: kings, Phraates IV  403; Phraataces  404; Gotarzes  389; Vologaeses I  5, 379, 404; Artabanus V  406; Gaius Caesar meets on Euphrates  404; Cassius Longinus awaits at Zeugma  14; withdraw from Armenia  404; wars, of Trajan 6,  264, 405; Verus  50; Severus  15, 406; archers, Crassus  403; and Severianus  264, 406; empire overwhelmed by Persians  6, 406 Pericles: lands troops at Sinope  345 Persarmenians, tribe south of Pontic mountains 297 Persians: Shia or Alevi in faith  391; fire temples  246; ‘naphtha’  29 n. 24; attacked by Severus Alexander  406; under Diocletian, accept Roman client in Armenia  407; Melitene as base against  407; under Justinian, defeated at Satala  407; pressing below Caucasus  363; by route from Iberia to Colchis  368 and n. 15; Sebastopolis and Pityus demolished  376–7; capture Satala and Nicopolis  408; Heraclius expels from Asia Minor  408 Pharasmanes, king of Iberia 366 Pharnaces, king of Cimmerian Bosporus: ? loots temple of Apollo at Phasis  367 Pharnaces II (son of Mithridates VI), king of Pontus: defeated by Caesar  403 Pharnakios, St., at Cordyle  365 and n. 11 Phasiane, goddess at Phasis 368 Pheidias: statue in Athens  368

471

Philesios, ? founder of Trapezus  345, 357 PHILIP II (M. Iulius Philippus Severus, ad 248–9): coins  356 Phraataces, Parthian king: met on Euphrates by Gaius Caesar  404 Phraates IV, Parthian king: installs Artaxias I in Armenia 403 Plaetorius Celer, praepositus numerorum: ‘army’ at Apsarus  366 Pliny (Plinius Secundus), geographer: Greek fire  29 n. 24; Marsyas  14; Zeugma, and Alexander’s bridge  11, 14; cataracts  45, 50; Euphrates in Taurus gorge, and Claudiopolis  46–7 and n. 5, 61 and n. 13; land route from India, via Euphrates and Caesarea  80; Melita, founded by Semiramis  89; navigation of Euphrates  47, 105, 116, 126, 143, 149, 170, 176, 404; Elegea, and Omma  77, 82, 176; Sartona  105; Dascusa, and length of Armenia  116; Zimara  126, 170; Capotes mons, and source of Euphrates (Pyxurates)  170 and n. 3; power of garlic  173, 189 n. 7; Dersim  176, 404; celebrated cities in Armenia Minor, Nicopolis, Caesarea and Haza  247; Anaetica regio (Erzincan) 211; Mons Aga  219 and n. 15; Pyxites and Trapezus  341; port, Cordyle  365 and n. 11; cities on Pontic coast, Phasis  363, 367; Dioscurias  374; and Pityus  376; rivers, Apsarus  367; in Colchis  362; Phasis  368; and Chobus  370; forts at Apsarus  363, 365, 404; and Sebastopolis  363, 375, 404; coastal tribes  375; Caucasian Gates  377, 404; Caspian Gates, and Nero’s plans  263 and n. 5, 404; sources, Claudius  46, 116, 404; Corbulo and Mucianus  116, 170, 176, 377, 404 Poimenios, bishop of Satala 265 Polemon I, king of Pontus 341 Polemon II, king of Pontus: royal ships, and Anicetus 346, 381 n. 2; kingdom annexed  346, 404 Pollux (son of Zeus), Argonaut 374 Pompeius Collega, gov. of Cappadocia (c. ad 75/6–77/8): milestone above Melik Şerif  122 n. 3, 249, 404 Pompey (Pompeius Magnus): Mithridatic war, army in Colchis  361; plain of Erzincan  211; Dasteira  199, 403; enters

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

472 

INDEX 2: PER SONA L NA MES (2.1)

Armenia  263; Artaxata  403; advances into Albania and Iberia, and towards Caspian  403; route from Iberia to Colchis  368–9, 403; recognises client king, in Commagene  4; settlement of eastern Asia Minor  403; Sophene and Tomisa  80; Mithridates’ kingdom  346; founds Nicopolis 185–7 Pomponius (near Sabus)  126 n. 2 Pomponius Bassus, gov. of Cappadocia ad 94–100): roads, from Ancyra, and from Caesarea 94 and n. 18, 405 Praxiteles: Cnidian Aphrodite  278 Procopius, historian: Persian incursions in Commagene  5 n. 5; Melitene  90, 92; Forty Martyrs  91; Satala  267; Justinian’s great fortification  269; Horonon  297 and n. 8; Roman soldiers in towns along Pontic coast 363; Athenai 365; Apsarus 365; Colchian trade  369; Sebastopolis and Pityus  376 and n. 21; Petra  363 and n. 7; route from Iberia  368 and n. 15; Lazi guard Colchis  379 and n. 25 Prometheus Solutus, on Strobilos  367, 374 Ptolemaeus, satrap and king of Commagene 4 Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus), geographer, 406: place-names 385; Urima  14; cities in Laviniane  40; Juliopolis 53; Aravene 54; Metita 70; Scordiscus Mons 172; Ladana 183; Tapoura  183; cities in Armenia Minor  188; Analibla  193; Charax  204, 239, 243; Chorsabia  247; daylight at Nicopolis and Satala 263; Domana 293; Athenai 365; Koraxian Wall  376 Pythodoris (wife of Polemon I)  346   Quintianus Maximus, signifer, at Satala  264 and n. 6   Regulus, ? governor, or magistrate: coin  114 and n. 3, 116 Resmagas, king of the Abasci (client of Hadrian) 363 Rhea, Titaness, daughter of Gaia and Chronos 368 Romans: massacred in Asia  403; withdraw from Armenia  404; boundary with Persarmenians and Tzani  297; trade with

Colchians  369, 394; and with tribes at Dioscurias  374; Lazi, guarding Caucasus passes 379 Rufinus, bishop of Samosata 6 Rutilius Gallicus, gov. of Galatia (ad 56–62): dedication of Aemilius Pius  207 and n. 9   Sagrae, Pontic tribe 363 Samos, king of Commagene 4 Sanigae, Pontic tribe: king, Spadagas  363, 375 Sanni, Pontic tribe: identified with Xenophon’s Drillae  344; hostile to Trapezus  344, 364; behind Hyssou Limen, and Arrian’s intentions  364, 366 Sapor I (son of Ardashir), Persian king: in second offensive sacks  37, and in third sacks  36 Roman forts and cities in Syria and Cappadocia 90–1, 407; captures Samosata  6, 20; and Satala, Suisa and Domana  91, 209, 214, 265, 293, 406 Sapor II, Persian king: captures Amida 407 Sardur II, king of Urartu (c. 756–735 bc): crosses Euphrates, and annexes Tomisa 82–3, 89, 403 Sarmatians: tribes at Dioscurias  374; cross Caucasus, and devastate Armenia  379; ravage Colchis  379 Sassanians (Persians): foundation of empire  406; garrison Caspian Gates  377–8; and see Persians Satalans, people of Satala,  265 n. 13 Scythians, see Borani Sedatius Severianus, gov. of Cappadocia (ad 161): defeated by Parthians,  263–4, 406 Sedochezi, Pontic tribe  382 n. 16 Seleucus I Nicator, successor of Alexander: Samosata  4; bridge at Zeugma  14 Semiramis, regent queen of Assyria (810–805 bc): founds Melita  89, 403 SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS (L. Septimius Severus Pertinax, ad 193–211): legate of IV Scythica  15; coins  36; Parthian campaigns  6, 15, 406; and Claudius Candidus  36, 406; Osrhoene  16–7; Direk Kale  13; bridges, over Chabina (Cendere)  6, 22, 25–7, 31–3, 114, 181, 406; and Singe (Göksu)  11–13, 406;

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 2: PER SONA L NA MES (2.1) 

Bademli  124–5; Melik Şerif  248, 406; roads, over Taurus  406; from Caesarea to Melitene 406 Serapis: cult, at Trapezus  357 Servilius, legate of Pompey: with ships at Phasis 368 SEVERUS ALEXANDER (M. Aurelius Severus Alexander, ad 222–35): coins  114, 124; attacks Persians  406 Sextilius Longinus (son of Sextilius Valens), at Cengerli  246 and n. 7 Sextilius Valens, decurio of cohors I Thracum Syriaca, at Cengerli  246 Shalmaneser III, king of Assyria (858–24 bc): crosses Euphrates at Ayni 13, 403; and at Tomisa  81–2, 403 Sittas, magister militum per Armeniam: defeats Persians at Satala  265, 407 Spadagas, king of the Sanigae (client of Hadrian)  363, 375 Stachemphax, king of the Zilchi (client of Hadrian) 363 Statius Priscus, gov. of Cappadocia (ad 162–164): destroys Artaxata, installs client king and garrison at Kainepolis  406 Statorius Secundus, gov. of Cappadocia (c. ad 124/5–128/9): milestones in Armenia Minor 405 Strabo, geographer,  403; position of Samosata  4 and n. 1; Tomisa  80; Melitene, fruit and olives  89, 116; Sinoria  198–9; cult of Anaitis  211, 278; Chalybes  306; tnnny fishing at Trapezus  356; Phasis, market for Colchians  367–8; plain famous for timber  394; Phasis navigable to Sarapana, and route to the Cyrus  368–9 and n. 15, 394; voyage from Phasis to Sinope  352, 367; wild coastal tribes, without harbours below Caucasus  376; snowshoes above Dioscurias  37, 378; journey over Caucasus to Iberia  377 and n. 23; camarae  361 and n. 2; caravans and avalanches 397 Sulla (Cornelius Sulla, Felix), general: sights Euphrates 403 Sulpicius Proculus, miles, at Samosata  15   Tacitus (Cornelius Tacitus), historian: ala Agrippiana, and Iulius Agrippa  50 and n. 7; XII Fulminata, and Anicetus  90 and n. 12,

473

361 and n. 2, 371 and n. 16; Corbulo, winter hardships  116; Trapezus  343 and n. 5; Colchis and Pompey’s army  361 and n. 2; and see Corbulo Taochi, Taochian, Pontic tribe: strongholds, attacked by Xenophon  315 Terentius, comes, dux Armeniae: letter of St Basil  265 and n. 13 Theocritus, praef. copiarum: defeat in Armenia 406 Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus: Eusebius, exiled from Samosata  8–9 and n. 6 THEODOSIUS II (Flavius Theodosius Iunior, ad 408–450): treaty with Persian king (ad 442)  407; coins  25 and n. 21, 120 Theos Hypsistos: cult, at Trapezus  357 TIBERIUS (Ti. Caesar Augustus, ad 14–37): expedition to recover Armenia  403; annexes Commagene and Cappadocia  5, 54, 404; ? founds Claudiopolis  46; Strabo  80 Tiglath-Pileser III, king of Assyria (745–27 bc) 77 Tigranes  I, the Great, king of Armenia: with Mithridates invades Cappadocia 403; Lucullus and siege of Tigranocerta  26 and n. 24, 403 Tiridates I, Parthian prince, king of Armenia 346 Titans 367 TITUS (T. Caesar Vespasianus Augustus, ad 79–81): siege of Jerusalem  5, 50 and n. 7, 90, 114; coins  114, 120; deploys XII Fulminata to Melitene  90; opus cochliae 13; milestone, on road east from Caesarea  94 and n. 18; Pliny  404 TRAJAN (Nerva Traianus Augustus, ad 98–117): coins  55, 118, 121 and n. 12, 264, 349, 376; Column  81, 88, 158, 165 and n. 17, 281, 347; Danube bridge  158– 9 and n. 1; Iron Gates, and inscription  11, 239; trireme, and biremes  347, 358 n. 16; milestones, on road east from Ancyra  185; advance from Syria to Satala  6, 133, 219, 264, 400; Karasu bridge  13; Melitene, and ­quarters  90; to Arsamosata  80; Zimara, and Catilius Severus  158, 175; Satala and client kings  264, 363, 365, 370; Armenian war  405; route east from Satala  263; Artaxata, inscription  15; Bruttius Praesens and winter  37, 398;

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

474 

INDEX 2: PER SONA L NA MES (2.2)

Armenia Major  368; coastal garrisons  363 and n. 7; Phasis  368; Parthian war, and XVI Flavia Firma  6 Trocundus praef. of I Pontica 356 Turranius Severus, centurion, at Satala  264 and n. 8 Tyche, of Xenophon  330 Tzani, tribe in Pontic mountains, and Justinian  297, 327, 357   Ulpius Augustianus (dancer, stage name Paris, at Trapezus and Antioch)  349 Urartians, Urartu: east of Lake Van  82; trade, through Trapezus  301, 345; fort, and cuneiform inscription, at Hızırtaşı  78, 80, 82 and n. 5; Sardur II crosses Euphrates and beseiges Militia  82, 89, 111 n. 2, 403; records  89; fire temple, at Cengerli  88, 246   VALENS (Flavius Iulius Valens, ad 364–78): bishops, exiled from Samosata  8; appointed in Armenia Minor  265; milestone, E of Nicopolis  407; in Armenia and Iberia  407 VALERIAN (P. Licinius Valerianus, ad 253–60): at Samosata, and capture  6, 407; coin  25 and n. 21 Vardanes, brother of the Parthian king, Gotarzes 389 Velius Rufus, primus pilus of XII Fulminata, 5 and n. 3 Venus: cult, at Trapezus  357 VERUS, L. (L. Aurelius Verus, ad 161–9): milestone, at Bibo, on road from Syria to Melitene  23, 95; Satala, and Armenian war  264, 281, 406; route east  263; Parthian war  50 VESPASIAN (Caesar Vespasianus Augustus, ad 69–79): frontier line, and construction  1, 201, 278, 346, 352, 385; coins  25 and n. 21; annexes

Commagene  5, 24, 28 n. 7, 404; and Armenia Minor  404; consular governor and legions in Cappadocia  90 and n. 12, 361 and n. 2, 404; Velius Rufus, and sons of Antiochus  5 and n. 3; Anicetus, and march of Virdius Geminus  97 n. 12, 346 and n. 17, 361 and n. 2, 404; raises ala II Auriana  121 and n. 12; opus cochliae 13; Cendere bridge  31 and n. 1; Satala, and XVI Flavia  263 and n. 6; and canal at Antioch  263 and n. 6; ? statue of Anaitis  278; milestone, above Melik Şerif, on frontier road to Satala  95; coastal flank, road, and forts  347, 361, 404; Phasis  368; walls at Harmozica  263–4, 368, 377 and n. 23, 379, 404 Virdius Geminus, commander of legionary vexillations: Anicetus, and march from Syria,  346 and n. 17, 370, 404 Virgil: garlic  173 VITELLIUS (A. Vitellius Germanicus Augustus, ad 69): supported by Anicetus 346 Vologaeses I, Parthian king, 5, 379, 404   Xenophon: crossing of Tigris  80 and n. 4; Cunaxa, and retreat  403; Kurds  391; Armenian winter  397–8; route from Gymnias  297, 314, 395; Taochians  315; Theches mons  320; ‘The Sea’  264, 297, 327–33, 405; cairn  329–33; descent  334, 340; Trapezus  327–8, 347–8; Drillae  344, 364; mad honey and wine  356; passing ships  344   Zenobia, queen of Palmyra: raids Cappadocia, captured by Aurelian  407 Zeus: statue, at Direk Kale  35; Hypsistos  387 Zilchi, Pontic tribe  363; king, Stachemphax, client of Hadrian  363 Zydreitae, Pontic tribe: subject to Pharasmanes 366

2.  Travellers, Scholars, Officials, Missionaries Places are listed broadly from west and south, to north and east. Actual routes are shown in summary in Annex D. See also Bibliography. Ainsworth, W.F. (1836–7,  1839–40): Samsat  6; aqueduct  17; tombs of holy

men  29 n. 20; Taurus gorge and rapids  46–7 and n. 5; Eski Kâhta, and Kurds  46; Gerger

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 2: PER SONA L NA MES (2.2) 

Kalesi, and towers  46, 50 and n. 8; Eski Malatya, and Hafiz Pasha  91–2, 396; flight through Morhamam, and Arabkir  98–9; Divriği, snow and altitude  399; Trebizond 350   Baddeley, J.F. (1888–1904): Caucasus defiles and walls  379 Ballance, S. (1960): Trabzon, Roman masonry 352 Barbaro, J. (Venetian ambassador to Akkoyunlu) (1471, 1473): Birecik crossing 14; Erzincan 211 Barkley, H.C. (1878): Keban crossing  110; Ençiti, and route to Aşutka  112, 121, 143; Silk Road  126, 144, 167 n. 8; Eğin 143; Venk bridge  158; Sipikör pass  217; Yurtlar Dere 294; Trebizond 112 Biliotti, A. (1874): Satala, position  267; walls  268, 270 and n. 15; inscriptions  270, 278; mosaics, and spring  274; head of Aphrodite 277; bath 279; basilica 280; Mantartaşı, towers  281; coins  281; excavations  278–9, 282; climate, at Kelkit  282; route, from Eski Gümüşhane  288; return, via Köse, to Erzerum road  288, 292–3 Bishop, I.B. (1890): winter journey from Erzerum  397; Kop pass  310; camel stables, at Kale (Kovans)  296, 298; Zigana pass 310 Blau, O. (1860): Erzincan  211; Gümüşhane via Karum Dere, to Kolat and Karakaban  312 n. 3, 326–7; south from Trebizond  341; Sürmene to Bayburt  364; map 419 Brant, J. (vice-consul in Trebizond, consul in Erzrum) (1835): spelling  1; Harput, unhealthy in summer, and Hafiz Pasha  85, 91–2, 396; Kömürhan, and İzolu  47, 85; Eski Malatya, unhealthy in summer  90–1, 396; kırkgözköprü and road to Sivas  95, 98–9; Keban crossing, and climate  110–11; Arabkir, caravans and climate  112, 129, 261; Eğin, and bridge  152, 155; Silk Road  144; and navigation  149; routes south from Hasanova  122 and n. 13, 159, 192–3; Post Road, from Kemah to Kuruçay  201, 258 n. 5; Kemah, bridge and fords  176, 201, 203, 206; Erzincan, fertile

475

but unhealthy in summer  210, 396; Eski Gümüşhane  306; Trebizond, harbour and remains  350, 352; voyage to Çoruh  362, 393; Batumi, unhealthy  366; Palu, and manna  63; Sapan Dağ, and altitude sickness  400; rafts on Murat  177–8; map 419 Bryer, A.A.M. (1959–79, 1992–4): Arakel  138 n. 11; Harşit valley  296 n. 6; Zigana, han  308; valley from Zigana pass to Trebizond 311; Hortokop 337–8; Dragon’s Fountain  342; Trebizond, Roman walls  352–3; St Orentius  362 and n. 4; Araklı, and Caene Parembole  364 and n. 9; Rize  364 and n. 10; Cordyle  365 and n. 11; Athenai  365 and n. 12; Gonio, and Makriyali  367 and n. 14 Burnaby, Capt. F. (1877): Sivas, and missionaries  59: Four Martyrs 211; military importance  394; winter  397, 401; mounted regiment  398; Arabkir to Eğin, and Silk Road  126, 132, 144–6 and n. 6, 148; Çit Çay, and ruins of Sabus  126; Eğin  153; Euphrates, and fishing  144, 155; Hostabeli pass  159; Kemah, and bridge  201, 203; near, and at Erzincan  206, 215; caravan routes  394 and n. 10   Chapot, V. (1901): Samsat to Zeugma  11–14; Turuş  11; Habeş bridge  13; uninscribed milestones  13; Elif  13–14; Samsat to Edessa 15 Chardin, J. (1672): Gonio  367; Abkhazian Wall 371 Chesney, Lt. Col. F.R. (1831–2,  1835–6): Birecik crossing, and ferry  14–15; Samsat, and ferry  7; Kurdistan, and manna  63 Clavijo, R.G. (1404–5): Torul and Ardasa  307; Zigana and castle  308 Cramer, W. (c.1931–39): Transit Road, Kop pass to Trabzon  301 and n. 1, 395 and n. 11; dangers of Zigana pass  310; ‘old road trodden by Xenophon’  347–8 and n. 18 Crow, J.G. (1992–4): Hortokop  337–8; Araklı Kalesi  364 and n. 9 Cumont, F. (1900): earthquake, at Arsamosata and Nicopolis  21 and n. 17; Nicopolis  185–6; Aşkar, milestone  183 and n. 11; Çobanlu Su  253; Refahiye  232;

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

476 

INDEX 2: PER SONA L NA MES (2.2)

Sipdiğin, milestone  232 and n. 3; Melik Şerif  248, 258; Çardaklu pass  243; Arauraca  207; Erzincan  211; Sipikör pass 219–20; Bandola 222; Sadak 223, 265–6, 275–6, 281; walls  269–70 and n. 15; inscriptions  175, 270 and n. 16; mosaics  274; coins  281; head of Aphrodite 278; Victory 281; basilica  280; route to Köse, and tower  288–91; Köse, and ? milestone  287, 293; Harşit valley  293, 301, 306; Gümüşhane  306; Torul  307; Zigana, hans and castle  308; Trapezus, temples  357; map 419 Curzon, Hon. R. (1842, 1844): Erzeroom, tezek and cold  283, 399; Maden hanları  308; Zigana pass  310; road from Trebizond 342   Dubois de Montpéreux, F. (1833–4): Phasis  269–70; Phasis to Cyrus  394; Abkhazian Wall  371; Sukhumi, unhealthy  374–5; Koraxian wall  376; Passimta and Elbrus passes  378; Maroukh pass, and Dioscurias  378; Derbent passage 378 Dumas, A. (1858–9): Tiflis to Poti  368; Derbent passage  377–8 and n. 23 Dwight, Revd. H.G.O. (1830): Lycus valley, underground houses  398   Everett, Sir W. (vice-consul in Erzerum, consul for Kurdistan) (c. 1882–3): Satala,  284 n. 15; below Zigana pass  308; Maden hanları  323; Anzarya hanları  325; Hocamezarı hanları  334; below Karakaban  335; above Hortokop  337; Maçka, via Kolat, and Maden Khan, to Tekke, or Hadrak  314, 323–4;   Finlay, G. (1859): Trebizond, harbour  350; Roman masonry  354 Fraser, J.B. (January 1833): Constantinople to Tehran  398; Amaseia, Tokat, Niksar  398; Kelkit, Sadak Çay, Elmalı Dağlar 399; Otlukbeli Dağları  262; Euphrates valley, Erzerum, Persian frontier  399; Tatar, speed  389; post system  262, 398 French, D.H. (1979–82): Euphrates Gates  11; Tille  50 and n. 7 

Gabriel, A. (1932): Eski Malatya  89 and n. 9, 92; Pertek, bridge  85 and n. 6 Goell, T. B. (1964–7): Samsat, plan and excavations  8–9; water  20; Taraksu to Samsat, by raft  53 and n. 9; Arsameia ad Nymphaeum  5 and n. 2 Grégoire, H. (1907): Nicopolis, cistern  187   Hamilton, W.J. (May 1836): Eski Gümüşhane  306, 356; İstavri  326, 329; above Kolat, ‘The Sea’  329; Karakaban  334 Harper, R.P. (1968–71): Pağnık Öreni  120 and n. 11 Hartmann (2004): Satala, plan and survey  268 and n. 15, 273, 279 Hepworth, Revd. G.H. (winter 1897): Tekke  304; Zigana, and pass  308, 310; Hamsıköy  312; Jevizluk (Maçka)  340; Trebizond, harbour  349, 351 Hoepfner, W. (September 1965): Direk Kale, plan and temple  33–5 and n. 3 Hogarth, D.G. (July 1891, April-June 1894): from Comana to Elbistan  94 and n. 18; Samsat, ruins and aqueduct  6–7, 17, 21; Kâhta Çay, and crossing  22, 46; Taurus gorge  46; Chabina bridge  31 and n. 1; Taurus, ‘way of peace’  32; Kilisik, Çermik and Deregezen  103, 106, 108–9; Eğin 153; Pingan  173 and n. 6; Pingan to Erzincan  190, 226; Dostal  180; Hasanova  192 and n. 4; Dersim Kurds  152; Kömür Çay  206; Erzincan  206; Satala  268 and n. 15; inscriptions  270; head of Aphrodite  277–8; map  419; see also Yorke Hommaire de Hell, I.X.M. (September 1847): spelling  1; Keban, summer fevers  111, 396; and Euphrates frozen  397; Pağnık  119; Eğin, and bridge  153, 155; by raft to Keban  119, 149–50, 178; Pingan to Eğin  159, 173; Deliktaş, and Şirzi bridge  146 and n. 7, 160; Pingan  173; Refahiye to Kuruçay, and Karabudak  227; Eski Gümüşhane 306; Kolat to Gümüşhane  306–7 and n. 3; İstavri  326; Karakaban  326, 334; Hortokop 339 Humann, K. (June 1882, 1883): spelling  1; Samsat, ruins  6; Karakuş to Samsat  23; Pirun (Perre), and bridge  24–6; Perre to Chabina bridge  25, 31 and n. 1; Bibol, and

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 2: PER SONA L NA MES (2.2) 

Ziyaret Tepe  56; map  419; and see Puchstein Huntington, E. (July 1900, April, summer, and September 1901): in Harput  46; by raft, from Murat (Arsanias) to Gerger  47–9; Pertek and ‘old Roman bridge’  401 n. 6; from Eğin to Malatya plain  119, 149; kelek, construction and fishing  47; Armenians, and Kurds  47, 73; Taurus gorge  45; Gerger Kale  51; rapids, above Çünküş 59, 63; near Ayvas  69–70; and above Şiro Çay  73; Tilek, hot springs  67; Malatya plain, and bridge  49, 75–7; Urartian inscription  82; Muşar Dağ, Kurds and timber  100–1 and n. 2, 104, 106; Keban gorge  109; Eğin  153–4; Antitaurus gorge  163; Dersim  401 n. 4; map  419   Jacopi, G. (November 1935): Eski Kâhta  46 and n. 4   Ker Porter, Sir R. (October 1817, November 1819): Ilıca, by Aşkale, Karakulak, and Elmalı Dağlar, to Sadak Çay  262; Sadak  261; Darial pass  377 and n. 23 Kinneir, J.M. (June 1814): spelling  1; Kolat Dağ  331; Kolat, by İstavri and Beşkilise, to Gümüşhane  306–7 and n. 3, 326; Karakaban  334–5; Cevizlik (Maçka)  340; Trebizond, approaches  342; harbour  350; inscription  357 and n. 33 Kökten, I.K. (1945): Sincik to Malatya  32; Körpinik Hüyük, and kaldırım  114; Pağnık to Çemişgezek 119 Koşay, H.Z. (1969): Samuha, and Hittite raft traffic 143   Laurens, J. (September 1847): Keban  110, 150; Eğin, and Venk bridge  155; Şirzi bridge  146, 159–60 Lawrence, T.E. (1909): Rum Kale  14 Layard, Sir A.H. (1849): summer caravan route over Pontic mountains  313 Lehmann-Haupt, C. F. (June-July 1899): Hızırtaşı, inscription, fort and Omma  82–3; Eğin 153; map 419 Lennox-Boyd, M. (August 1962): Taraksu (? Juliopolis),  46 and n. 4, 53; and see Stark Lynch, H.F.B. (1898): Trebizond, topography  357 n. 5; arbour  350;

477

lighthouse  352; ‘heathen temple’  357; gardens and vineyards  356   Manfredi, V.M. (September 1999): Trabzon and Gümüşhane  329–30; Maden hanları  322; Xenophon cairn, and descent to Maçka  330; mad honey  333 Maunsell, Lt. Col. F.R. (1888–?1900): cavern near Çünküş  59; importance of Eski Malatya  89; Eğin, rough track to Zimara  161; Euphrates bridges  167 n. 13; Kemah, and track to Kuruçay and Zara  201; Ziyaret pass, Dersim, and Kurds  203, 391; Pontic mountains, carriage road through  301; summer route over  313; carts  133 and n. 8; distance and time  385; movement in winter  397; navigation of Euphrates, Erzincan to Komurhan  176; of Tigris, and rafts  105–6, 178 and n. 8; sources, and map  419 Moltke, Baron H. von (March and July 1838, March and spring 1839): by raft, from Palu and Eski Malatya, through Taurus gorge, to Samsat and Birecik  32, 45, 47; to Tilek  67; near Ayvas  70; from Harput to Hızırtaşı 82; İzolu, and Malatya plain  75; Eski Malatya  32; from Hekimhan to Keban (and Harput)  108; ferry  110; from Arabkir to Eğin, and snow  143–4, 146, 148; Hapanos  145; Eğin 153 Molyneux-Seel, Capt. L. (July-September 1911): Kemah, bridge  203; Keşiş Dağları, and head of Hussein  210; ‘Roman’ road in Dersim, near Tunceli  392; map  419 Morier, J.J. (June 1809): Sadak  262 and n. 3; road to Çiftlik (Kelkit), and plain  282; rain and mud  401 Munro, J.A.R. (August 1891): Nicopolis  185 and n. 12   Osten, H.H. von der (1927, 1928): Gemirgap, castle  148 and n. 8 Özdoğan, M. (1977): Kocan (Charmodara) 22 Özgüç, Nimet (1982, 1984–5, 1987): Samsat, excavations 9   Pachulia, V. (May 1963): Abkhazian Wall  372–4 and n. 18–20

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

478 

INDEX 2: PER SONA L NA MES (2.2)

Percy, Earl H.A.G.P. (September 1899): Pirun (Perre), bridge, and road to Chabina bridge  25; Eski Kâhta  46; over Taurus to Malatya  32 and n. 2; Pirot hüyük 85; Kadıköy (İzolu)  85; Hızırtaşı inscription 82 Puchstein, O. (June 1882, 1883): tower below Gerger Kalesi  50 and n. 8; and see Humann   Reineggs, J. (1777–81): Constantinople to Tokat and Tiflis  261; fortress at Anaklia  371; Abkhazian Wall  371 n. 18; coastal route, below Caucasus  371; Maroukh pass  378 Riggs, Revd. H. H. (1877,1915–17): Harput, Sivas, and Çünküş cavern  59; Arabkir to Eğin, dead pack animals  144; Dersim, and Kurds 391   Serdaroğlu, Ü. (1968–70, 1974): necropolis above Pağnık  118 n. 9; Kilise Yazısı Tepe  121 n. 12 Smith, E. (1830), see Dwight Southgate, H. (June 1837): Eski Gümüşhane  306; Kolat, by İstavri and Beşkilise, to Gümüşhane  306–7 and n. 3, 326; Karakaban  335; Trebizond, approaches 342 Stark, F. (August 1962): Gerger to Tillo, Pütürge and Malatya  46; watch tower near Taraksu  46 n. 4, 53; and see Lennox-Boyd Strecker, W. (c. 1858–60): (Turkish) Zımara to Kemah  191 and n. 3; Kemah, by Diştaş, to Sipdiğin  233 and n. 5; in winter by Kömür Çay, to Refahiye  243; and by Hostabeli pass, to Harput  203; Erzincan  211; plain, unhealthy  210; Kale  213; Vazgirt, site of Eriza  215, 217; Rumsaray (Mecidiye)  217, 219; Sipikör pass  215, 217; Bandola to Sadak  219; Sadak,  270 and n. 15; inscriptions  270; mosaics  273–4; springs and pool  274; basilica  280; coins  281; Sadak, by Köse, to Trebizond  288, 293; Murathanoğulları  296; Zindanlar ruins  297; Leri  314; Ağyarlar ridge, İmera Dere, Madenhanları, and summer route from Erzerum to Trapezunt  318; map 419

Suter, H. (vice-consul in Trebizond) (October 1838): Erzerum and Ilıca  262 Sykes, M. (June 1906): western Dersim, structures, and winter route from Kemah to Harput  392 and n. 5; İliç, by Armudan and Tut, to Zara  182; map  419   Tavernier, J.-B. (1631, 1664): spelling  1; with caravans, Constantinople to Erzerum and Persia  261–2; Smyrna to Erivan  261; Tokat, and caravans  261; east of Satala 261–2 Taylor, J.G. (consul for Kurdistan, in Erzerum) (1861, August to October 1866): Denizli, han  112; Kara Mağara Köprü, and direct route to Eğin  116; Pağnık, and ford  119; Arabkir, and population  129; Antitaurus road, and Zımara to Arabkir  122, 135 and n. 9, 137, 193; Gemho, and Kızılbaş  136–7; Arege, Burmahan, and Çaltı Çay  138, 169; (Turkish) Zımara, and Kızılbaş brigands  171; Pingan, and ferry  159, 173; Zimara to Nicopolis  183, 227; Karabudak  182, 227; Kuruçay, and timber  176, 227; Kuruçay, han, and divergence of routes  227, 229; Halys  183; Aşkar  183; Nicopolis, remains and aqueduct  186–7; Aşkar Ova  185; Kuruçay to Erzincan  190; Kemah, and bridge  201, 203; Monkare, and crusaders,  202 and n. 7; east of Kemah  206; Ardos  207–8; Erzincan, plain, and inscriptions  211, 214; Munzur Dağları and Pyxurates (Munzur Su)  391–2; Mercan and Ziyaret passes  391–2; Dersim, Kurds and violence  203, 391; ‘old Roman viaduct’ and ‘roads’  392; Çemişgezek, ‘old Roman road’  119; route, by Hozat and Pertek, to Harput  203, 392; Sadak, remains of basilica and fortress  267 and n. 15, 280; inscriptions  270; mosaics  273–4; spring and artificial basin  274; Sadak Çay and harvest  282, 288; Çiftlik (Kelkit), coins  267; Lycus, and meaning  289; map 419 Texier, C.F.M. (August 1839): Trebizond to Erzerum  306, 322; Djevislik (Maçka)  340; summer route, by Karakaban  334; Kolat, Madenhanları, Karayayla, Veyserni, and

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 2: PER SONA L NA MES (2.3) 

Bayburt  321–3; winter route, by Gümüşhane 306 Tournefort, J.P. de (June 1701): Erzerum to Tokat  261 and n. 3; Sadak, ‘aqueduct’  261–2, 266, 280; Trebizond, sketch  343, 347, 349–50; in caravan to Erzerum 345 Tozer, Revd. H.F. (August/September 1879): Hekimhan to Keban (and Harput)  108; Keban, ferry  110–11, 119; east of Kolat, sighting of Black Sea  331; Trebizond, approach  341; and description  347–8 n. 19; Dersim Kurds, and religion  391; ramazan 47   Walpole, Revd. R. (autumn 1851): Erzerum, ? by Veyserni, to Trebizond  323; Kolat, and ‘The Sea’  331; Maçka  335 Winfield, D.C. (1957–62), see Bryer Wright, Sir D. (vice consul in Trebizond) (1941–43): Erzincan, and Satala  270 n. 15; Trebizond, by Erzerum, to Tabriz  261; caravans, and hans  261; Erzerum to Persia, in winter  398; Transit Road  301 n. 1; Greek-speaking Moslems  326; Trabzon, recollections  343 n. 5; Silk Road on Boztepe  342, 348; modern port  349; old harbour (Molos)  350; German consul  380  

479

Yorke, V.W. (April-June 1894): avoiding Göksu (Singe)  11; Samsat to Pirun  23; Adıyaman  23; Pirun, and track to Eski Kâhta  25; Malatya plain  75; Yorke Dağ 86; Eski Malatya, and mortality  92; ripa north of Tohma Su  98–9, 101; Kilisilik (? Ciaca)  103; Çermik (? Sartona)  105; kaldırım above Körpinik hüyük, and coins  113; Ağın  116; Dascusa  118 n. 8; route to Aşutka  121 and n. 13, 140–1; Ençiti, paved road  143; araba road to Eğin  126, 144, 149; Eğin  154; route to Pingan  159–61, 163, 170, 173; Turkish Zımara  171; Pingan, and bridge  159; Hasanova, and quarantine  182, 191–3; route to Kemah  190 n. 2, 191, 226; Gâvuroluğu  193–4; Nezgep  195; Sultan Hamid bridge  197–8; Kemah, and bridge  199, 201, 203; Erzincan  211–2; carriage road to Pirahmet, and Sipikör pass  215, 219–20, 223; Sipikör  220; Sadak Çay  223; Sadak, description  267–8 and n. 15, 280; reservoir  274; basilica  280; post road to Köse and Pirahmet  288, 293; columns and fort  288, 290–1; Cinderek  291; Zigana  308; distances, and speed on horseback  385; map  419; see also Hogarth

3.  Sultans, Holy Men, Germans and Others  Abdül Hamit  II, sultan (1876–1909): araba road to Eğin 145, 408 Abdül Mecit, sultan (1839–61): taşyolu above Sandık 165 Abdülwahab, holy man on Muşar Dağ: türbe 101 Abuzergafarı, holy man from Horasan: türbe, near Adıyaman  24, 230 Akh Mrtouza Keshish, Armenian priest: head of Hussein  210 Alaeddin Keykubad, Selcuk sultan (1219–36): rebuilds Erzincan  211 Alexandridos, Alexandros Charalambos, former villager at Leri  314 Alexios II Comnenos, Emperor of Trebizond 353 Ali, cousin and son-in-law of the prophet Muhammed 210

Ali Baba, holy man: ziyaret above Şiro Çay  41 Ali Usta, builder from Diştaş 233 Altıkat, Atilla, colonel, in Kemaliye; memorial 154 Arakel, apostle (Armenian), near Arege; ziyaret  138 and n. 11, 162 Atatürk: changes ancient place names  1; renames Eğin  154; protected by Hayrullah’s grandfather  78 n. 2; related’ to muhtar, Hasan Demir  172; name given to Euphrates dam, see Index 1; University, in Erzurum  279; Meydan, in Trabzon  347, 354; and see Mustafa Kemal   Balak, emir at Harput: Crusaders  205 Baldwin II, king of Jerusalem 205 n. 7 Barbarossa, Ottoman admiral: statue in Trabzon 349

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

480 

INDEX 2: PER SONA L NA MES (2.3)

Battalgazi (Sidi Battals), Selcuk hero: of Eski Malatya, renamed  3, 93; ziyaret, above Şiro Çay  40, 136 Bock, Fedor von, field marshal, Army Group South 380   Castellani, Alessandro, collector and seller of ancient art: head of Aphrodite  277 Cem, governor (1474–81) of Eyalet of Karaman, capital Konya, sultan (1481)  40 Conrad, Rudolf, general,  49 Alpine Corps 380   Doğan, Aydın, newspaper magnate, near Kelkit  279, 282   Encombe, Viscount, artist, with Hogarth and Yorke 103 Enver Pasha, Minister of War: Sarıkamış  398   Frohse, F., artist, with Lehmann-Haupt: Omma  82–3; Eğin 153   Grand Vizier  261 Groth, Heinz, captain, Hochbergsgruppe Groth 380   Hafiz Pasha, at Eski Malatya: sickness  91–2; and at Harput  91, 396; attacks Kurds  46; guns and stores by raft  47, 87; defeat, near Zeugma, and retreat  87, 92, 99, 408 Halder, Franz, general, Chief of the German General Staff 379 Hasan Bey, prince, at Sukhumi  371 Hassan, holy man buried on Muşar Dağ 101 Hirschfeld, Harald von, captain, Kampfgruppe von Hirschfeld  380 Hitler 379–80 Hoşoğlan, warrior of Mehmet II  341 Hussein, grandson of the prophet Muhammed, and 3rd Shia İmam 210   Ibn Hawqal, geographer, of Nisibis  11 and n. 9 İbrahim Pasha, son of Mehmet Ali, pasha of Egypt  92, 408   Jocelyn de Courtenay, Count of Edessa, Crusader  205 n. 7

Kalpaks  75 n. 1, 89 n. 9; and see Preface Karamanoğlu Pir Ahmed, Bey of Karaman: türbe, at Pirahmet  301 Kleist, Paul Ludwig Ewald von, general, 1st Panzer Army 380 Kurtoğlu, H. Erdal, fallen jandarma: barracks, at Trabzon  342, 344   Laurens, J., artist, with Hommaire de Hell: ‘Kebann Madenn’  110; ‘L’Euphrate à Keban-Maden’  150; ‘Pont sur l’Euphrate à Eghinn’  155; ‘Délik Tasch; route dans les montagnes du haute Euphrate’ (Şirzi bridge)  146, 159 Lewan Serwasitse (Chervachidze), Abkhazian prince 371 List, Wilhelm, field marshal, Heeresgruppe A 380   Mahmut-el-Ansarı, holy man from Horasan: türbe, near Adıyaman24,  230 Mehmet  II, the Conqueror, sultan (1451–81): conquest, around Zigana 308; of Trebizond  341–2, 408; battle of Otlukbeli  209, 222, 408; Silk Road  142; türbe of Pir Ahmed  301 Mehmet Ali Bey, holy man from Horasan: türbe, above Kuruçay  227 Melik, of Erzerum: attacks Trebizond  349 Melikşah, holy man from Azerbaijan 248 Murat IV, sultan (1623–40) 408: han, on road from Kayseri  95; Sultan Murat Caddesi  395; over Antitaurus  135 n. 9, 137–8; Silk Road  143; bridge at Pingan  173; Gercenis 232; türbe at Tekke  304 Mustafa Kemal: supported by Eğin 154; and see Atatürk  Napoleon: news, and Tatar  389 Nesin Baba Kirzi, holy man: ziyaret, above Diştaş 239 Norton, T.H., professor, US Consul at Harput 49 Nürel, Ali Hasan, colonel at Boyalık  193, 197 Nuri Dersimi, leader of Koçkiri-Dersim uprising 1921: Dersim  392, 408; Ümraniye 225   Özal, Türgüt, prime minister: hospital outside Malatya 43 

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 2: PER SONA L NA MES (2.4) 

Papen, Franz von, German ambassador in Ankara  379, 381 Pasha of Erzeron: caravan from Trebizond  345 Pasha of Moush: caravan and avalanche on Zigana Dağ 310 Perry, Robert, colonel: navigates Euphrates  149 Piriz Baba, holy man: türbe, and massacre site, below Girik  26   Reshid Mohammed Pasha, at Harput  92 Richtofen, Wolfram von, general, Luftflotte  4 380 Ruoff, Richard, general, Armeegruppe Ruoff 380   Selim I (Yavuz Sultan Selim), sultan (1512–20)  408: at Kökseki  253

481

Şeyh Hasan Baba el-Kirzi, holy man from Horasan  24, 235: türbe, below Başdana Kaya  229; and at Kirzi  230 Seyid Mahmut Çağırgan, holy man: türbe, at Tekke 304 Sheikh Seyyid Reza, leader of Dersim revolt 1937: Munzur and Mercan Dağları  392, 408 Sidi Battals, see Battalgazi   Uzun Hasan. of Akkoyunlu, ruler of Erzincan  209, 301, 408   Weichs, Maximilian von, field marshal, Heeresgruppe B  380   Yarbrough, J., lieutenant colonel: navigates Euphrates 149

4.  Tribes and Peoples  Abcas, Abkhazians  371 Akkoyunlu, allies of Comneni  209, 408 Alevi Kurds, Kızılbaş: religion and Ali  391; dress  25; Taurus gorge, Deyro  57; north of Malatya  104; Dersim  391; mountain villages around Erzincan  210; Mecidiye, and mistrust  215, 219; Gemho  227; upper Kürtler Dere  236; Diştaş  239; Kockiri-Dersim uprising  225, 392 Austrian: engineers at Keban  111   Comneni, empire of Trebizond: and Akkoyunlu  209, 408; churches  357 Crusaders  205 and n. 7   Dersimli, in Munzur Dağları 391 Dirican Kurds, in Antitaurus  134   Genoese, at Trebizond: rebuilding  344; harbours, Daphnous and Molos  349–50; Leontokastron  352   Haldis, indigenous people of Van region 101   Kereçoğlu Kurds, in Antitaurus  134 Kızılbaş, see Alevi Kurds Kormazlı Kurds, in Antitaurus  134

Kromli, in Krom valley: Greek-speaking Muslims 326 Kurman, Kermanji-speaking Kurds: north of Tillo  63; around Malatya  104   Laz: at Leri yayla  315; Tekke yaylas  317   Maçkali, in Krom valley: Greek-speaking Muslims 326 Mamelukes: destroy Eski Malatya  91 Mongols: destroy Samosata  6; and Eski Malatya 91   Nairi, indigenous people of Armenian highlands 101  Ottomans, Osmanli, see Index 3   Parcıkan Kurds, in Antitaurus  134 Persians: religion and Ali  391   Sinanlı Kurds, in Antitaurus  134 Sunni: Turks, attitude and suspicion of Alevi Kurds, named Kızılbaş  219, 391–2; at Alp Köy  206; and Vazgirt  215; Kurds, at Alidam  50; and villages in northern Taurus gorge 70   Tarikan, in northern Commagene  27   Venetians, at Trebizond: rebuilding  344 

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

482 

INDEX 2: PER SONA L NA MES (2.5)

Zaza Kurds: in Commagene, at Kocan  21; and Direk Kale  35; in Taurus gorge, at Venkuk 51; Killik 55; Haburman 58;

Adiş  59; and Husukani  68; dialect, spoken south of Tillo  45, 63; in Harput mountains 104

5.  Guides, and Helpers  Akoğlu, Kara Ali, muleteer in Sandık  163 Aksoy, Metin İlyas, vali of Erzincan  190 Akyuz, Hacar, shepherd above Aşağı Kermut 317 Ali, guide at Kerboğaz 236–8 Ali, guide above Tekke  317 Alp, İlyas, headmaster of Kilisik  86 Altınok, Halil İbrahim, vali of Erzincan  226 Arslan, Ali, jandarma commander at Gümüşakar  231; Diştaş  239, 241 Atalay, Nürettin, villager near Ağın 112 Atmaca, Hasan, muleteer in Taurus gorge  46, 55, 65, 67 Avni, mayor of Tekke  317 Ay, Cemal, muhtar of Hirso  63 Aydoğmus, Aziz, guide near Ciaca  99–101, 104–5 Aykan, Ahmet, guide above Şiro Çay  38, 40   Balcı, Fehmi, photographer in Kemaliye  155 Bayik, Atalay, representative 1996: jandarma, private words, and difficulties  272, 330, 355; above Havciş, and fears  292; Yurtlar Dere, and beekeepers  295; at Mollaali  326 Bayram, Fahriye, representative 2000: in Erzincan  190 n. 1, 226; at Refahiye  226; Hasanova  191–2; Diştaş  241; forbids Pingan 182 Birsen, Mehmet, Turkish Brigade, in Bekiran 71 Boswell, Colin, the Garlic Farm 171–2 Bürütekin, Zeyner, muhtar of Bekiran  71   Cemal, treasure hunter at Diştaş 238 Çubukçu, Ahmet, Director of Culture in Gümüşhane  306 n. 2   Darakcı, Abdullah, treasure hunter at Kilisik  24 Dede, Abüzer, head village guard at Alidam  50 Demir, Hasan, muhtar of Zımara  172 Demirbulut, Taner, official guide  233, 329; ‘Old Samsat Road’, and Karakuş  23 and n. 19; ‘Old Adıyaman Road’  24 n. 20;

frontier road, from Perre to Chabina bridge  25 n. 22; and from Halikhan to Eski Malatya  42–3 n. 7; Taurus gorge, Alidam  45 n. 1; from Şiro Çay to Kömürhan bridge  47 and n. 4; Bekiran  71–2; caravan road from Pirot to Eski Malatya  87; frontier road from Bademli to Antitaurus  125; Silk Road in gorge  144 n. 5, 148; taşyolu north from Kemaliye, and jandarma 165–7; frontier road per ripam, from Pingan to Satala  190 n. 1; Ahmediye pass  215; Vazgirt to Mecidiye, jandarma and arrest  215, 219; Sipikör, Sadak Çay, and bees  220–1; Bandola, and karakol 222; frontier road by Sinibeli pass  230–1; Gümüşakar, karakol  231; Kerboğaz route  233, 235–6; above Sitemi  236–8; Diştaş  234, 238; Sadak, inscriptions and muhtar  272–3; Baghdad bridge  299; Zigana Dağ, and altitude sickness  321, 332, 400; ‘The Sea’  328, 332–3 Demirtaş, Ahmet, jandarma sergeant-major: Erzincan, and vali  190 and n. 1, 245; Alp Köy and PKK  207, 246; Sağ  205; Ermelik, jandarma and arrest  204; Cengerli  245; Çardaklu pass and PKK  243; frontier road over Çimen Dağları, Mengut, and altitude sickness,  244, 251, 254–5, 257; Salt Road, Balahor and PKK  246, 255–7   Ergenç, Resül, farmer at Karayayla  321 Ertan, Recep, local politician, in Yeni Samsat 23 Ertuğrul, Yılmaz, headmaster of Rustuşağı 86 Evren, Adil, representative 1989: at Başmezraa, and MIT  40–1   Faik, host in Navril  165 Fikret, muhtar of Hapanos  145   Gençaydın, Zafer, guide at Ağın  119, 124 Gıra, Timur, guide at Ardos  208–9 Gök, Mesut, muhtar of Hurusüfla  295

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 2: PER SONA L NA MES (2.5) 

Gökçay, İdris, Emniyet müdür, Adıyaman  37 Göldağı, Mevlud. villager at Çit Harabe  129 Göz, Dürsün, headmaster of Sadak  270–1 and n. 15 Günel, Namik, kaymakam of Kemaliye  154 Güngör, Mesut, assistant, Erzurum Museum 272 Gürbüz, Erkan, youth at Hasanova  192   Hacı Yıldız, host at Mengüt  244 Hakverdi, Basrı, helper at Hakverdi  87 Hasan effendi, watchman at Keban bridge  114 Hasan, villager in Sadak  278–9 Hasan, muhtar of Tekke  317 Hüseyin, guide at Girik Çay  26 Hussein, host at Abrenk  165   İnal, helper at Eski Malatya  42–3, 94 İnanç, Hasan, muhtar of Başmezraa 40–1 İsa, guide at Musağa 159 İşik, Cahit, kaymakam of Refahiye  226 İşik, Salih, vali of Gümüşhane 329–30 Işıkcevahir, Şamil, guide at Diştaş 239 İsmail, forester at Vazgirt  215   Kapısız, Mehmet, watch repairer at Ağin  112–14 Kara, Ahmet, guide at Ağın  112–13, 118, 141–2 Karaman, Şinası, headmaster of Pirot  85 Karayiğit, Yaşar, guide at Vazgirt  215 Keleş, Ahmet, guide at Sipikör  220–1 Kesler, İsmail, old man in Köse  293–4 Kiraç, Gündi, old man in Yazıcıhan  87 Kızılkaya, Hasan, muhtar of Hapanos  145–6, 148, 159 Koç, Zikar, muhtar of Pürk  187 Korkmaz, Ramazan, shepherd at Karakuş 24 Kumbaroğlu, Erdem, schools' inspector at Refahiye 244 Kutlu, Salih, muhtar of Cengerli  246–7   Mahmoud Aga, headman of Sadak  278 Mahmut, guide at Furuncu  43 Manfredi, Valerio, professor: Trabzon, Gümüşhane and Xenophon cairn  329–30; Maden hanları  322; mad honey  333 Mehmet, brother of muhtar of Atma  195 Miller, Revd. J.D., companion in Commagene  4 n. 1; Samosata aqueduct  18, 21; Direk Kale  33, 35–6

483

Mimiroğlu, Mete, archaeologist, 288 Morrice, Alex, captain 333 Muammer, guide above Tekke  317 Münür, guide at Ağın  112–14, 117–18 Murat (also Mustafa), muhtar of Kirzi  230 Muslu, Derviş, muhtar of Haşkento 66 Mustafa, jandarma sergeant: above Diştaş  239, 241; and Melik Şerif, 251 Müzaffer, jandarma sergeant: below Kurtlu Tepe 244   Nahir, Abdullah, headmaster of Sadak  272 Nahir, Serkan, old man in Sadak  272 Nahir, Serkan, boy in Sadak  272 Nezir, Dürsü, beekeeper at Sipikör: bees, brigands and Milk Pipes  221–3, 276, 333 Niyazi, villager at Tekke  304   Ofluoğlu, Şefik, muhtar of Meşeiçihanları 336 Okur, Oktay, friend: at Tekke  301 n. 1, 317; Zindanlar 298; Şon Kale  315–16; bears  316; Ağyarlar  313, 318–19, 321; above Kolat, ‘The Sea’  327, 329 Okur, Rahmi, former muhtar of Bahçecik  304, 315, 317 Özden, Sadettin, muhtar of Bademli  124–5 Özer, Mehmet, friend and guide, at Kemaliye  154: Zabulbar  140; Çit Harabe  127; Antitaurus  131, 133–4, 136; Gemho  137; and Sultan Murat Caddesi  138; Antitaurus gorge, araba road  144 n. 5; Geruşla aqueduct  151; köy yol over Harmancık Dağ  162; Abrenk and Navril  165; and kelek 178–9 Öztürk, Fail, old man in Halleberik  70   Polat, Mehmet, vali of Malatya  42 Polatlı, Süleyman, muhtar of Melik Şerif 226, 249; ridge above, and MIT  251; Diştaş 241   Sağır, Celal, farmer above Değirmendere 242 Şahin, Nüsret, deputy vali of Gümüşhane  306 n. 2 Savaşci, İşmail, villager in Eskiyol  222–3 Sevin, Hüseyin, muhtar of Gâvuryurdu  231 Şimşek, Cemal, villager in Aşkar 183 Süleyman, guide above Tekke  317 Sustam, Bakri, villager in Mezraaıhan  231 

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

484 

INDEX 2: PER SONA L NA MES (2.5)

Temur, Hayrullah, retired politician at Kale  78 and n. 2: Taurus gorge  71–2; Cafer Kale  79; Hallan crossing, road and hans  81–2; Kadıköy, ferry and bridge  85 and n. 6; Yorke Dağ 86 Tuncay, Hacı Kemal, guide at Ergü  146–8 Turan, muhtar of Sandık  163–5   Uludüz, Emin, house owner in Trabzon  353 Ünlü, Sevket, imam of Çatbahce  37 Uslu, Mustafa, retired businessman at Çit Harabe  127, 129   Yağmur, Bekir, guide above Avbi  37 Yailan, Hamid, guide at Sandık  165

Yalınkılıç, Ali, jandarma commander at Kelkit  271–2, 288, 291 Yavuz, Abdurrahman, old man in Hortokop: caravans and horses to Erzerum  337–9, 342 Yazıcıoğlu, Recep, vali of Erzincan: metal bridge  145; Natural Sports Centre  219 Yiğin, Ahmet, villager in Sadak  271 Yiğit, Baki, director, Malatya Museum  92 Yiğit, Hüsnü, shepherd on Zigana Dağ 332 Yılmaz, Celal, guide at Kolat  327: name  325, 339; caravans  327 334; sighting of Black Sea  327–9, 331, 333–4 Yüsüf, old man in Sadak: head of Aphrodite  277, 279

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

I N DE X 3: G E N E R A L Within entries, place names are listed in broad geographical sequence, from west and south to north and east (as Agger); and personal names are listed chronologically (as Governors). In some entries, references to the ancient and to the later or modern worlds are separated by Post 700. Abkhazian Wall  371–4 Acclimatization  399–400; of legions  264, 400; and see Altitude Agger (kaldırım): road from Caesarea to Melitene  94–5; road from Nicopolis to Satala  254; frontier road  181; over Taurus, above Şiro Çay  41; descent to Malatya plain  42–3; near Çermik  105; near Deregezen  107–8; above Körpinik Hüyük  113–14, 116; along Bademli ridge, and above Çit Harabe  124–5; ridge above Ençiti  140–1; over Antitaurus, above Eski Arabkir  133–4; long descent to Çaltı Çay  135–8, 193; above the Karabudak  181; Sinibeli pass  182, 231; above Melik Şerif 251; Çimen Dağları  255–8; Pelitsirti pass  182, 190, 209; above Lycus  287, 291–2; Yurtlar Dere  287, 294–5; above Tekke  287; along Ağyarlar ridge  318– ̇ 19; above Imera yayla, to Maden hanları  321; wheel ruts  133, 221, 347 Agriculture: important at Eğin  153; Sadak, Kelkit, and animals  282–3; destruction of military road, below Şakşak Dağ 43; ridge above Bademli  125; above Kuruçay 191. See also Cultivation Alae (auxiliary cavalry regiments): strengths, quingenaria  128, 410; milliaria 129, 409 ala Auriana: at Dascusa  118 and n. 8, 121 n. 12 ala Flavia Ag(rippiana): at Heba  50 and n. 7 ala Rizena: ? at Rize  364 ala I Augusta Colonorum: at Ciaca  103, 118 ala I Britannica, at Nicopolis  187 ala I Felix Theodosiana: at Pityus  377 ala I Ulpia Dacorum: at Suisa  214 ala II Ulpia Auriana at Zimara  118 n. 8, 176; see also Equites sagittarii Altars: at Samsat  7; Direk Kale, of Apollo  35, 37, 406; Pingan, of

Jupiter  175; Nicopolis, of bishop’s church  21 n. 17, 186; Satala  270; Halkevi  289; Trapezus, of Hadrian  333, 349 Post  700: at Adiş  59; on Muşar Dağ 101 Altitude  385, 389; climate  396; and winter  397–9; Xenophon in Armenia  333; Samsat and aqueduct  4, 20; Taurus, Gopal Tepe and Şakşak Dağ  31, 38, 41; Taurus gorge, ridges above Hirso and Midye  63–4; Melitene  89; Antitaurus, route to Pegir  132, 162; Mamahar pass and Ortaköy  135; Eğin  152; Harmancık Dağ 162; Hostabeli pass, and route to Pingan  159–61; Zimara to Nicopolis  183; Euphrates valley to Erzincan, and Gâvuroluğu 190; Pelitsirti pass  209; Munzur Dağları, passes  391–2; Sinibeli pass  231; Kerboğaz  237–8; Nicopolis to Haris  250; Çimen Dağları  252, 254; Salt Road  244; Erzincan  210; Sipikör pass  219; Satala  282; upper Lycus  282; Pontic mountains  395; Zigana pass  307–9; Anzarya hanlar  325; refuges  160, 296–7, 321; Caucasus, and passes  377–8; sickness  254, 321, 332, 400. See also Acclimatization Anchorages  346, 352, 362, 385, 405; Trapezus  345; Hyssou Limen and Sürmene 364; Athenai 365; Apsarus  365; Phasis (harbour)  367, 369; Chobus  370; Sebastopolis  374; Pityus 376; summer 393 Animals, sacrificial: Lucullus and Lucius Vitellius  13; Trajan  158; at türbe of Abuzergafarı  24; shrine of Hassan on Muşar Dağ  101; work on Taşyolu  163; Feast of Assumption 252; kızılbaş, and Turks  391; domestic, see Cattle: Goats: Sheep

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

486 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Animals, for transport and agriculture: see Camels: Donkeys: Horses; Mules: Oxen: Water buffaloes Animals, wild: see Bears: Boars: Foxes: Hyena: Ibex: Porcupines: Wolves Annexation: Sardur II, and Tomisa  82; of Commagene  5–6, 24, 54, 404; Cappadocia  5, 80, 404; Armenia Minor  6, 175, 185, 188, 249, 263, 404; Pontus Polemoniacus  346, 404; Armenia Major  349, 405; Osrhoene  6, 17, 406 Post  700: Turkic areas of Soviet Union  379 Antonine, Antonine Itinerary  385–6, 406; roads, from Ancyra, by Sebasteia, to Nicopolis  185, 259; in Commagene  22–3; over Taurus  33; from Melitene per ripam to Satala  98, 122, 182, 190; Antitaurus gorge  140, 143, 152, 165, 169; from Nicopolis to Satala, by Dracones (Cimen Daglari)  252; and by Carsaga (Euphrates valley)  205, 225, 393; from Satala, by Domana and Zigana, to Trapezus  287, 296, 393; Armenian villages  188. See also Ripa Apples: winter and summer, at Bekiran  71; Bahçecik  317; Gümüşhane 356 Apricots: at Bekiran  71; Malatya plain  78, 87, 231; Eski Malatya  90; Pürk  186 Aqueducts: Samosata  17–22, 276; Kocan  21–2; Barzalo  56; Melitene  92; Geruşla 151; Nicopolis 186–7; Trapezus  354, 357: Side  21; Pergamum  285 n. 17; Aquincum  97 n. 13; Argentoratum  277; Arles  276; misunderstood, at Perre  25; and Satala  222, 261, 266, 274, 280 Arabs: see Index 2. 1 Archers: and Xenophon  391; Parthian  264, 403; in auxiliary garrison, on foot, at Arauraca  207; mounted, at Metita  70; Sabus  118; and ? Apsarus  366; equites sagittarii  407: at Sabus  129, 214; and Domana  293; on pontoon bridges  81 Armenian, Armenians: ? common ancestry, and sympathy of Dersim Kurds  392; indigenous population  187; houses, and Xenophon,  398; daughters given to Anaitis  211; Armeniarch  185; spoken by one of the Forty-Five

Martyrs, at Nicopolis  186; and by Mardarius, one of the Five Martyrs of Armenia, at Arauraca  207; conversion to Christianity  407; relics of St Gregory and St Nicholas, and piece of the Ark, near Erzincan  211. See also Bishops: Wars: and Index 2. 1, Armenia Post  700: locations of villages, importance  187–8; employment, agriculture and commerce  129, 153–4; artisans at Keban  111; vines, fields and packmules  129, 163, 217; fishing, and rafts on Arsanias  47; kelekcis,  68; armed guards  173; soup seller  191 pilgrimages, to Çit Harabe  127, 129; ziyaret, of Arakel, near Arege  138, 162; at Zımara  171; church high above Ermelik  204; ziyaret at upper Ardos  209; springs at Sadak  274; Feast of Assumption, at Çit Harabe  129; below Söğütlü 252; sacrifices  101, 252 population, at Samsat  7; Adıyaman  23; Taurus gorge, Çünküş and Adiş 59; Şiro (Keferdis)  68; northern villages 45; Kadıköy 82; Pirot 85; villages (Kuluşağı, Rustuşağı, Kilisik, ̇ Imamoğ lu) beside Euphrates  86; Eski Malatya  91; Ağın 116; Arabkir 129; ̇ Çit Harabe, Ençiti and Ün (In) 126; Eğin  153; Musağa 159; Zımara 171; Pingan  173; Pürk  185–6; Büyük and Kücük Armudan, and Tut (Tuğut) 182–3; Hasanova 192; Kuruçay and villages  187–8; Mezraaıhan  231; Koçkiri  231; south of Kerboğaz  236, 239; Kemah, and fifteen towns and villages (including ̇ Ihtik, Sağ, Ermelik and Ardos)  201, 204–5, 208; Dersim, and remains  391; Gercenis and villages  187–8, 232; Melik Şerif  248; Mülk  252; villages in upper valley of Söğütlü Çay  252; Kökseki and Çatak  253–4; Erzincan  210, 214; Vazgirt and Gâvurun Bağı  215, 217 roads: near Aşutka  132, 140, 143; causeway, Eğin to Surp Tavor  160–1, 163–4; above Erzincan  217; ‘infidels’, recalled in Gâvur Dere  105, 193;

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

Gâvuroluğu  190, 193–4; gâvur yolu, at Hortokop 337; and see Gâvur suspicion, and western support  204, 271–2; ‘treasure’, at Tanusa  121; and near Kerboğaz  226, 236; desecration of Ali Baba ziyaret  41; Acarlar Çeşme  148; ? religious divide above Leri 313; terrorists 154 See also Cemeteries: Churches: Deportations: Graves: Mansions: Martyrs: Massacres: Monasteries: Villages: Wine Arrest: at Ermelik  204; and Vazgirt  219; avoided, at Kemaliye  166–7; Kerboğaz  236; and Sadak  273 Arsanias (Murat): see Ferries and Index 1 Artillery: at Barzalo  57; Phasis  368 Post  700: road of Reshid Mohammed Pasha  110; Russians, spotting, on ̇ Sivri  264; track Kurtlu Tepe  247; Iki on Cönger ridge  314. See also Guns Asfalt: Adıyaman to Cendere bridge, by Yeni Kâhta  27; by Pirun  25–7; Malatya to Pütürge  41–2; and Elazığ  87; in ̇ to Antitaurus gorge  146, 148; Iliç Kuruçay  227; and Refahiye  231–2, ̇ to Kemah  191, 197, 227, 241; Iliç 238; Kemah to Refahiye  232, 241; and Erzincan  209; Sivas to Erzincan, by Refahiye and Çardaklu pass  210, 243 n. 6 251; beside Erzincan Kale  213; Erzincan to Kelkit  257; Erzurum to Trabzon (Transit Road), by Gümüşhane and Zigana pass  299, 305, 307; and Zigana tunnel  307 Auxiliary garrison: Flavian and Trajanic  404–5; known to Hadrian  363, 366; diplomata  367 and n. 14, 405; Diocletian’s persecution  207, 265. See also Alae: Cohorts: Notitia Dignitatum Avalanches, in Strabo  397 Post  700: Kerboğaz  234, 236; Sipikör pass  215; Zigana pass  310 Backwardness: sensitivities, at Cengerli  245; Madenhanları  322, 324; Trabzon  355 Baggage: river crossings  119; see also Pack animals Baghdad Road (Bağdat caddesi): Adıyaman to Eski Malatya  43; Pirot to Eski

487

Malatya  87; Melik Şerif to Kurugöl  251; Suşehri, by Kurugöl and over Çimen Dağları, to Sadak  252–4, 256; Köse to Harşit  294–6; from Baghdad bridge, and above Cönger  314; ‘City of Baghdad Road’, above Kürtler Dere  197 Barbarians: backward  349; treacherous  370 and n. 16; raids, and attack on Trapezus  361 and n. 2, 404; around Apsarus  365; Phasis, protected against  368; Sebastopolis, at risk  375; in Crimea  361; crossing Caucasus  407. See also Pontic Tribes: Tribes Barbarossa: admiral  349; Operation  379 Barley: given to Xenophon, at Trapezus  356; and barley wine in Armenia  398 Post  700: by pack-mules from Eğin to Giresun  163; fields near Kemah  206; crops near Çiftlik (Kelkit)  282 Barracks: see Karakol Basilica: at Satala  260, 280; and Christian epitaphs  266, 271; Pityus  377; Aquincum  97 n. 13 Bath-houses: in Commagene, Kilisik  24; and Kalan  27; Satala  266, 279 Post 700: hamam, at Refahiye  232. See also Hot springs Baths: for Forty Martyrs  91; Melitene  90; Pityus  377; legionary, at Aquincum  97 n. 13 Post 700: Ilıca 262 Battalion: Ottoman: at Eski Malatya  89; Hozat 392 Bears: in Taurus, above Avbi, and below Gopal Tepe and Tepehan  37–8; Taurus gorge, on ridge between Hirso and Midye, and below Midye  63; Antitaurus, Harmancık Dağ, above Kemaliye  162, 165: Armenia Minor, above Savaşgediği  234; above Diştaş 239; below Gâvuryurdu  231; Mecidiye gorge  215; near Sipikör, attacking bee-hives  221; near Eskiyol  223: Pontic mountains, above Tekke  315–16 Bees, and bee-keeping: Bademli  124; near Sipikör; hives, diseases, yields, beeeaters, bears  221; below Ağa Kalesi  295; honey, at Abrenk  165;

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

488 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Bees (Cont.) Phasis  368; ‘honey mulberries’  71; ‘mad honey’ (zifin), and Xenophon  310–11, 333; at Trapezus  341, 356; Pompey’s army  361; honey-like, manna  63 Beggar 124 Bellum Commagenicum  5, 404 Biogas: at Diştaş 239 Birds: eagles, on frieze at Direk Kale,  33; bronze at Satala  281; bee-eater  208, 221; bustard  75; crane  75; crow  40; black diver  75; smew, and red-headed (pochard) duck  208; eagle  165; falcon 332; heron 75; hoopoe 208, 317; ibis  75; lark  332; red-legged partridge  179, 194, ‘cock partridge’  234; ‘lucky partridge’ (capercaillie) 315; pigeon, 109; raven 332; black stork  75; vulture  165 Bishops, bishoprics: of Caesarea  6; Samosata  6, 8–9, 25; Perre  6, 25; Melitene  91; Nicopolis  21 n. 17, 186, 188; Analiba  188, 193; Arauraca  188, 207, 209; Erzincan  211; Satala  265; Trapezus 357; Phasis 371; Ziganeos 371; Pityus 377 Post  700: archbishop, of Nicopolis  186; Armenian, of Eğin 153 Boars, sacrificial, to propitiate Euphrates  13 Post  700: below Gopal Tepe  38; above Vahsen  122; below Ergü  146; below Pürk 185; Kuruçay 227; Sipikör 221; Eskiyol  223; above Lycus, and ­hunters  292 Boats: Hittite, with supplies to Samuha  143, 176, 403; bishop rowed from Samosata to Zeugma  9; withdrawal from Sebastopolis 377; and see Bridges, Pontoon Post  700: passage boats at Birecik  14–15; ferry at Samosata  6–7; ferry (‘ship’) at Çünküş  59; and Kadıköy  85; at Keban  110–11; ‘ship’ at Pağnık 119; fishing coracle  144; navigation at Kemah  176, 200; Trabzon, boatmen’s road, and harbour  342, 350; on Phasis 368. See also Ferries: Rafts: Ships Boundaries: Euphrates, between Rome and Parthia, Augustus  404; Hadrian  405;

provincial, between Commagene and Cappadocia  38; Armenia Minor and Pontus  304; legionary, between Cappadocia and Armenia Minor  182; of Macronians and Colchi  340; Romans, Persarmenians and Tzani  297; Phasis, between Europe and Asia  367; of Lazica  379; between Iberia and Albania  406; stones, in Osrhoene  17; at Samuha  143; weather, between Black Sea and Anatolia 310 Post  700: operational, jandarma  233, 238; administrative, vilayet  38, 125, 182, 191; and linguistic  63; of Abkhazia 371 Bricks: aqueduct at Barzalo  56; Dulluk Tepe  89 and n. 8; Nicopolis  187; Erzincan Kale  213; han, near Bandola  222; Satala  269–70, 278, 281; Zindanlar  287, 297; Hortokop  337; Rhizaion  364; Gonio, stamped  367; Phasis, walls and towers rebuilt  363, 368, 370; Sebastopolis 377 Post  700: bridge, at Erzincan  211; vaults, at Zigana han  308; factory, near Trabzon  341; mud-brick (kerpiç) houses  18, 53, 63, 105, 177, 252, 283 Bridges: Pontoon, of boats: on Tigris, Xenophon  80; on Euphrates, Lucius Vitellius  13; at Zeugma, of Alexander  14; Samosata  7–8; Paetus, Corbulo and Trajan  80; on Danube, Marcus’ Column  7–9; Trajan’s Column, and construction  80–1 Stone wide: over Merzumen (Marsyas), below Yarımca  28 n. 11; Göksu (Singe) (Harapkarkır)  11–12 and n. 9; Karasu, south-west of Süpürgüç  13 and n. 11; Ziyaret Dere  24; Cendere Su (Chabina)  31–2 and n. 1; Arabkir Çay, at Bahadın  114–15; and Kara Mağara  116–17; below Ergü  147–8; Çaltı Çay (? Lycus), at Burmahan  169–70; Karabudak (Sabrina)  180–1; Harşit (Baghdad bridge)  299; reconstruction, by Severus (Chabina, and ? Singe)  13, 31, 406; Decius (Sabrina)  181, 406

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

narrow: Merzumen (Marsyas), below Rum Kale  14; Karasu, above Habeş 13 and n. 9; Ziyaret Dere, at Pirun (Perre)  25–6 and n. 23; Girik Çay  26; at ? Peraş Kale  39 n 5, 73 n. 4; Değirmendere, below Bekiran  71–2; Arabkir Çay, at ? Körpinik  114; Çit Çay, at Ösneden  132; below Ergü  146–7; Geruşla (? Teucila)  152; ̇ near Kemah (Köprü Ibrahim) 206; Dersim, ‘old Roman viaduct’  392; Sadak Çay, below Satala  288; Değirmendere (Pyxites), at Güryeni  341; Trapezus (Tabakhane and Zağnos) 354 Stone and timber: over Tohma Su (Melas) (Kirkgözköprü)  98–9; Kuru Çay  100; Euphrates, at Eğin (Venk bridge)  155–8; near Alp Köy  206; ? between Sarapana and Cyrus  368; Danube, of Trajan 158–9 Skins: over tributary of Tigris, and Xenophon  80 n. 4 Post  700: Bricks: Erzincan  211 Stone, at Ziyaret Dere  24; near Bahce  33; Killik  57; Keferdis  69; near Çit Harabe  126; Ösneden  132; below Hapanos  145–6; Geruşla 152; Bismişen  162; Şirzi,  146 and n. 7, 159–60; Musağa  159; below Kökseki  253; Köprübaşı, near Beşkilise  306; Torul  307 and n. 4; above Zigana han  308; Ilıca, over Euphrates 262 Stone and timber: construction  150, 155–8; Değirmendere  71; Çit Çay  141–2; Geruşla  150; over Euphrates, at Eğin (Venk bridge)  155–8; ? Karabudak, below Armudan  182; ̇ Euphrates, at Makhut, below Iliç 159, 167 n. 13; and Avşin (Shaitan Kopru)  167 n. 13; above Kürtler Dere (Kuru Köprü)  197–8; Kemah  167 n. 13, 203; ? in Dersim  392; below Hurusüfla  296; over Soyran Dere  298 Timber: Pirot  75, 85 and n. 6; Pingan  159, 167 n. 13, 173; Kemah  203; Koymat köprü  253; Pertek  85 n. 6 Tree trunks, below Midye  63 Culvert, near Akşehir 254

489

Iron, at Bekiran  71–2; ‘metal’, near Albanian han  145; Lordin  177 Suspension, at Çünküş  59; Süderek, below Pağnık  119; below Hapanos  146, 149; Kemaliye  157–8; Beşkilise 306 Railway, over Euphrates  80, 86, 88; Tohma Su  89, 96 n. 1; below Munzur Dağları 392 Late Ottoman and Turkish: Kömürhan 78; Keban 111; Kemaliye  163; Acemoğlu  206; below Sipikör pass  219; ‘caravan bridge’ near Mülk  252; Uççat, near Köse  294; over ̇ Harşit, at Gümüşhane  306; near Ikisu Dere  307; and Köprübaşı, near Torul 307; Zigana 308; Maçka 340; Trabzon 354 Brigands: tribal, in Pontic mountains, and Sanni  344, 364 Post  700: family near Pirun  26; ‘robbers’ rock’, near Kömürhan bridge  72; ‘Fools’ Gorge’ near Mezraaihan  231; ‘brigands’ stone’, above Kerboğaz 238; Dersim tribes, and Kızılbaş  171, 391; on Sipikör pass  221; Elmali Daglar  262; caravans over Pontic mountains 337–8 Bronze: at Satala, colossal statue of Anaitis  211, 265, 277–8; legs of full-size horse  265, 278; and eagle  281; at Trapezus, life-size statue of Hermes  355; coins, at Pirun (Perre)  25 n. 21; Killik (Barzalo)  55; Vahsen  121; Hasanova  192; Sadak, of mint of Satala  265; above Hurusüfla  295; and Hortokop  337; weapon points, at Pağnık Öreni  120; plaque, at Aquincum  97 n. 13 Bronze Age: hüyüks, at Horum, near Zeugma  14; in Malatya plain, at Ağıyabuşağı  78, 84; Pirot  84–5, 87: ̇ Değirmen Tepe  86–7; Ikizhüyük, at ̇ Kuluşağı  86–7; Imamoğ lu 87; Furuncu  43; Hüyük Köy, opposite Sartona  105; Karahüyük  108 n. 5; Seracık, above Arabkir Çay  112, 177; Kültepe, E of Pağnık  119: above Şekersuyu (? Pittiyariga)  143, 176–7; Altın Tepe  177; pottery, at Samuka  143; and Sağ (Kömür Köy) 205

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

490 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Buses: crashes, near Malatya  95; on Sinibeli pass  231; below Çardaklu pass  251 Byzantine: occupation levels at Samosata  9; Melitene  92; and Trapezus  344; Melitene, Arab campaigns and destruction  91; army defeated at Manzikert  187, 408 bath-house, at Kilisik  24; bridges, at Keferdis  69; and over Arabkir Çay (Kara Mağara köprü)  116–17; castles, at Gemirgap  148; and between Kale and Torul  296, 307 and n. 4; cistern at Nicopolis  187; site, at Bademli  124; Sadak, ‘Milk Pipes’  221; skeletons and coffins  267; and basilica  280; Zindanlar, tower  297; Trebizond, walls  351, 354; ? lighthouse  352; palace 354 coins, at Kilisik  24; Killik  55; and Sadak  281; inscriptions at Pirun  25; and Sadak  270; pottery, at Samuka  143; Zımara  172; and Şon Kale  315; capitals, at Hasanova  192; column bases, and gate in Kemah  201; stelae near Havcış 292 roads, from Harput, over Kara Mağara köprü  116; joining Silk Road from Arabkir to Eğin  143; viaduct and roads in Dersim  203, 391–2 bishops at Nicopolis, Analiba and Arauraca  186, 188; Armenian populations  188; copy of Dioscorides’ herbal 173 Camels: over Taurus, with Corbulo  31–2, 38–9, 80; and at Nicopolis  29 n. 17, 186 Post  700: caravans, from Aleppo to Diyarbekir  14; Smyrna to Erivan  261; Constantinople, by Tokat, to Tiflis  261; Trebizond to Erzerum and Tiflis  261, 345; Kayseri to Eski Malatya 94–5 memories, on ‘Old Adiyaman Road’  24; from Pirun to Cendere bridge  26–7; Şiro Çay to Malatya  41; Harput to Malatya  82, 87; Aleppo, by Malatya, Eğin and Kemah, to Erzincan  99–100, 105 180, 195, 197, 395; with diversion ̇ to Ihtik  197; Erzincan, by Sadak,

Gümüşhane, and Zigana pass, to Trabzon  217, 219, 222–3, 293, 304, 310, 395; by Köse Dağ  294; and by Hurusüfla  295; Malatya, by Eğin, Refahiye, Çimen Dağları and Kelkit, to Trabzon  227, 230–1, 252; Erzerum and Erzincan, in summer over Pontic mountains, to Trebizond  296, 298, 314, 327, 334, 337; and some in winter  326 place-names (deve), preserving caravan routes, from Kayseri, Develi Dağ, 95; from Erzincan, Deveboynu (Sipikör) pass  215; and Devekorusu yayla 222; ̇ Deveboynu boğazı  227; from from Ilic, Erzerum and Erzincan, Deveboynu Dağ  320; above Trebizond, Deveduzu 342 unsuitable routes (too rough, too steep), in northern Taurus gorge  72; on Silk Road allegedly from Eğin, by Hostabeli pass, to Kemah  159; or from Şebinkarahisar to Zara  183; over Kerboğaz  225, 234; Salt Road above Horopol  244; in 1872, Trebizond to Erzerum  261; Conger ridge  315 trains of five or ten  82, 195; ten or twenty  27, 195; thirty five to fifty  231; forty or fifty  105, 223; one or two hundred  338; three hundred  327; countless  345; six hundred  261; five thousand 14 loads  150; kilos  327; 300–400; kilos  337; salt from Sivas  27; and Kemah  99; sugar, grapes and manufactures from Aleppo  105; clothing and apricots from Malatya  230–1; nuts, post, gas bottles, sugar, rice, clothes from Trabzon  231, 293, 327; grain, from Erzerum  327 rate of travel  261; continuous, in summer and winter, day and night  223, 231, and in winter, overnight in hans  105, 261; enclosures, at Kalan  27; Zindanlar  298; in Devekorusu yayla  222; camp and market at Mezraaıhan  231; meadow and tents at Hocamezarı hanları 324; stables at Kale (Kovans)  296, 298, 397; drivers 312 supply train, by Eğin, to Russian front  144; death in winter, at

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

Aşutka  144; Zigana pass  310; Kop pass  397; laden with possessions, of Kurdish families evicted in Antitaurus 134 See also Pack animals Canals: of Vespasian, near Antioch,  263–4 n. 6; Justinian, from the Phasis  370 Post  700: from springs in Eski Malatya to gardens  90; in Eğin 153; Suez 260 Caput viae: Melitene  94; Satala  259; Haris (Melik Şerif) 232 Caravans: minerals from Chalybes to Assyria 356; snow 397 Post  700: ferries, at Bir(ecik)  14; caravanserai, at Eski Malatya  92, 394; Erzincan  211; Tekke, hans 304; Zigana  308; Erzerum  399; between Trebizond and Tabriz  261; enclosures, and shelter, at Kalan  27; Çimen yayla  255; Kale (Kovans)  296, 298, 397; Zindanlar  298; stations and refuges  296–7, 326, 340; markets, at Hasanova 191; Mezraaıhan 231; Eskiyol  223; Beşkilise  306; size, and frequency  14, 105, 231, 261, 328 337–8; slaves, harem and women in litters  310, 326, 345; animal loading  163, 327, 337; rate of travel  112, 163, 261, 385; in winter and snow 398–9. See also Brigands: Caravan routes: Hans: Pack animals ‘Caravan Road’ (kervan yolu)  209, 396; ‘caravan bridge’  252; ‘caravan spring’ 254 Caravan Routes, major: 1 Constantinople and Smyrna, by Ankara, Kayseri, Eski Malatya and Hallan crossing, to Harput, Diyarbekir, Mosul and Baghdad  94–5, 394 and n. 10 2 Constantinople and Smyrna, by Ankara, Kayseri and Cilician Gates, to Aleppo and Baghdad  394 and n. 10 3 Constantinople and Smyrna, and Bursa, by Ankara, Amasya, Tokat, Niksar, Şebinkarahisar, Kelkit and Sadak, to Erzerum and northern Persia  260–2, 394–5 and n. 10, 398–9; and to Erivan and Tiflis  261 4 Constantinople and Smyrna, and Samsun, by Amasya, Tokat, Sivas, Hekimhan,

491

Eski Malatya and Hallan crossing, to Harput, Diyarbekir, Mosul and Baghdad (‘High Constantinople Road’)  82, 95, 99, 394 and n. 10 5 Trebizond to Maçka, Bayburt, Erzerum and northern Persia  261, 395; from Maçka to Bayburt, in winter, by Zigana pass, Harşit valley, Gümüşhane and Tekke  296, 301, 310; and in summer, by Kolat and over Pontic mountains  296–7, 313; from Kolat, by ̇ Istavri, to Gümüşhane  326–7; and, by Zigana Dağ, to Zigana pass  325; Transit Road  301 and n. 1; Kop pass  395, 397 see also Hans Caravan Routes, minor: 1 Aleppo, by Birecik, Adıyaman, Eski Kâhta, Eski Malatya, Arabkir, and Eğin, ̇ Refahiye and Çimen and by Ilic, Dağları, or by Kemah, Erzincan and Sipikör pass, to Sadak, and by Zigana pass (or Kolat), to Trebizond  43, 100, 105, 112, 126, 239, 395. See also Silk Road: Sultan Murat Caddesi 2 Samsat, by Yeni Kâhta and Karakuş, to Eski Kâhta (‘Old Samsat Road’)  23 3 Adıyaman to Karakuş (‘Old Adıyaman Road’) 24 4 Adıyaman, by Eski Kâhta, Gerger, Çünküş ferry and Ergani, to Harput  57, 59 5 Adıyaman, by Eski Kâhta, Pütürge and Ayvas ferry, to Harput  69 6 Diyarbekir to Eski Malatya, by Çünküş ferry 59 7 Diyarbekir to Eski Malatya, by Ayvas ferry 69 8 Harput to Kemah, in summer, by Pertek and Hozat, and over Ziyaret pass  203, 391–2 9 Harput to Erzincan, in summer, by Pertek and Hozat, and over Mercan pass 211 10 Harput to Kemah and Erzincan, in winter, by Aşvan and over Hostabeli pass (Silk Road)  159, 203, 392 11 Eğin to Arabkir, by Pegir and Ösneden,  133, 162; by Pegir, to Bismişen and Canlı Çeşme 133,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

492 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Caravan Routes (Cont.) 161–2; by Sandık, to Bismişen 164; and to Dilli and Abrenk  165 12 Eğin to Pingan, by Şirzi and over shoulder of Munzur Dağları 159–61 ̇ over Hostabeli pass (Silk 13 Eğin to Iliç, Road)  144, 159 ̇ to Giresun, by Armudan, Suşehri 14 Iliç and Şebinkarahisar  163, 239, 395 ̇ by Hasanova and Ihtik, ̇ 15 Iliç, to Kemah and Erzincan  159, 395 16 Hasanova to Refahiye, by Kerboğaz 233 17 Kemah to Suşehri, by Kömür Çay valley and Refahiye  241–3; and by Melik Şerif 250 18 Kömür (near Kemah) to Melik Şerif and Çimen yayla (‘Salt Roads’)  243–5 19 Erzincan to Palu, by Boğazvankomu pass, Pülümür and Mazgirt  211, 392 20 Sivas to Giresun, by Zara, Aşkar, Suşehri and Şebinkarahisar  183, 398 21 Sivas to Harput, by Hekimhan and Keban or Söğütlü ferries  108, 110, 394 22 Sivas to Eski Malatya, by Divriği and Arabkir  99, 135, 161 23 Şebinkarahisar and Refahiye to Erzincan: in summer over Çardaklu pass  250, 395; and in winter (as route 17) by Kömür Çay, Kemah and Euphrates valley  241–3, 250, 395 24 Suşehri to Sadak, by Koymat Köprü, Kökseki, Kurugöl and Çimen Dağları  252–4, 258–60 25 Araklı, to Bayburt  364; Rize, towards ̇ ̇ Ispir  364; Pazar to Ispir 365 see also Hans: Pack animals, tracks Cart roads, from Phasis to Cyrus  368, 394 Post  700: (araba yolu): Harput, by Ergani to Mesopotamia  389; at Kadıköy, and Pirot  85; from Eski Malatya to ̇ Imamoğ lu  86; and to Sivas  95; Sögütlü ferry to Harput  108; Arabkir and Aşutka to Eğin  126, 144–5 and n. 5, 148–9; purpose of bridge at Bizmişen  162; Eğin towards Pingan  159; Euphrates valley to Kemah  201; Ovacık and Hozat to Harput  203; Refahiye to Karayakup  250; Erzincan to Sipikör

pass  215; Trebizond, to Erzerum  301; inside Abkhazian wall  372 Carts (araba): around Harput  396; Çiftlik (Kelkit) 282; Sadak 283; oxen 257, 268, 282–3; water- buffaloes  282–3; wheel ruts  133, 221, 347; not on caravan road from Aleppo, to Arabkir and Erzincan  105 Caspian Gates: Pompey’s advance  403; geography known to Claudius, and Strabo  116, 394, 403; Derbent passage  277–9; Nero’s plans and deployments  263, 404; Domitian, detachment of XII Fulminata  263 and n. 4, 379, 405; Antistius Rusticus  405; Arrian  406; passed by Huns  406; German plans and advance  380 Castellum: Absarrus and Sebastopolis, known to Pliny  363; Draconis, Pylae (Kolat), and Caspiae, marked in Peutinger  254, 325, 375, 405; Eski Hisar, in Osrhoene 15 Cattle, cows: Xenophon, skins for pontoon bridge  80 n. 4; crowding in Armenian houses  398; sacred heifer, sacrificed by Lucullus  13, bull, by Lucius Vitellius and Trajan  13, 158 Post  700: hundreds grazing east of Kemah  206; in Devekorusu yayla 222; at Turnagöl  334; exported from Erzurum 356 Causeway: Armenian, from Eğin, by Sandık, to Surp Tavor  160–1, 163–4; natural, above Kermut  317–18 Cavalry: Xenophon, and ‘The Sea’  329; Vardanes  389; Persian  6, 91; auxiliary garrisons  227, 405, 407; at Ciaca  103; Dascusa  118 and n. 8; Zimara  176; Suisa 214; Pityus 377; equites sagittarii, at Sabus  118, 129; Domana  293; part-mounted, at Arauraca  207; Cengerli 246; Sebastopolis 375; supporting infantry cohort, at Hyssou Limen  364; fort size  120, 128–9, 214; Arrian’s inspection  363, 375; hurling javelins  363–4; and leaping on to horses  375; troop  176; river crossings, and technique  119; deployed as rearguard  214; picked for service in Mesopotamia  50 and n. 7

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

Post 700: ‘cavalry crossing’, of Euphrates  119, 390; and Arsanias  122 n. 10; escort  312; mounted regiment marching from Sivas to Erzerum  398; tactical value  152; speed  165 Cemeteries: legionary, at Melitene  44; Satala 281 Post 700: Armenian: above Çaltı Çay  138, 169, 180, 247; Pingan  175; Sevindik  250; upper Ardos  209 Greek: above Akşehir  254; Sadak  271, 280 Selcuk: ? near Hallan crossing  81; Ermelik  203; upper Ardos, of Akkoyunlu  209; below and at Kökseki 253; Çatak 254 Muslim, beside caravan roads: in Commagene, at Bibo  26; in Taurus, at Avbi  37; Tahnıç  39; and near Hoşgördi  41; in Taurus gorge, below Mezraa, with bleeding stone  68; at Akuşağı, and on ridge above  71–2; in Cappadocia, outside Eski Malatya  44, 93; by Söğütlü Dere  107; and Deregezen  108; in Antitaurus, near Yürük camp  136; in Armenia Minor, at Dostal 180; Helameti 195; Kerboğaz  239; Rişkân  251; above Kurugöl  254; Çimen yayla  255; beside Sadak Çay  222; Eskiyol  223; Sadak  281; and above Eski Köse  281, 291, 293; in Pontic mountains, Mollaali  326; and Turnagöl  334; above and at Maçka  337–9 Muslim, elsewhere: earthquake, at Eski Erzincan 212 See also Graves Cemevi: Çimen yayla 255. See also Mosques Centurions: at Satala, Turranius Severus  264, Cuspius Fabianus  270 n. 16, and Plaetorius Celer  366; above Caspian  263; Velius Rufus, mission to Parthia  5; commanding forts beside Phasis 368 Cheese, in legionary diet  400; at Sadak  273 Christianity and Christians: Melitene  91; Nicopolis, and Forty-Five Martyrs  185–6; Satala, and inscriptions  265–6, 270, 280; Trapezus  357; in legions, XII Fulminata, Rain Miracle,

493

revolt, and Forty Martyrs  91, 406–7; XV Apollinaris, at Satala, St Orentius  265, 362; and at Nicopolis  186; in auxiliary garrisons, Diocletian’s persecution, at. Arauraca  186, 207, 265; conversion of Armenia  407; at Bademli  124; in Tzanica, introduced by Justinian  357 Post  700: religion of Kızılbaş, in Dersim  391; and sympathy  391–2; indigenous populations  187–8; on Muşar Dağ 101; Arabkir 129; tradition and pilgrimage, at Çit Harabe  129; and Sadak  274; Zımara  171; Gâvuroluğu 193–4; upper Ardos, settlement and burials  209; Horopol  247; Erzincan  211; Gâvurun Bağı 217. See also Armenians: Greek: Infidels: Bishops: Churches: Councils Churches (kilise): at Arauraca  207; Nicopolis  21 n. 17, 186; Satala  280; Trapezus 357; Pityus 377 Post  700: Armenian: as indicators of ancient sites  121, 129, 152, 188; at Kesrik (St Mamas) (? Tropaeum Neronis)  95 and n. 20, 404; Taurus and Cappadocia: at Avbi  37; Adiş  59–60; Kilisik  86, 103, 105; Muşar Dağ (Archangel Michael)  101; Kilise Tepe, below Morhamam  103; Kilisilik (? Ciaca)  103; Tanusa, and Kilise Yazısı Tepe  121; Ençiti  129; Samuka  140, 143; Çit Harabe ̇ 129; by Arnavut (Sabus)  129; Ün (In)  han  145; Geruşla (Teucila)  152, 188; Eğin 153–4; Sandık 163 Armenia Minor: Pingan (St Ange) (Zimara)  175, 188; Armudan  183; Babsu Köy  183; Pürk (Nicopolis)  186; Sevindik  250; Hasanova ̇ (Analiba)  188, 192; Ihtik (Sinervas)  188, 198–9; Sağ (Carsaga)  188, 204–5; high above Ermelik  204; near Ardos (Arauraca) (Meryemana, and ' ‘Italian church’)  188, 209; Sürerek  209; Gemho, above Kuruçay  227; Bazgu  230; near Gümüşakar 231; Melik Şerif (? Haris)  248;

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

494 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Churches (Cont.) Horopol  244; Kökseki  253; near Çukurçimen 252; Çatakkilise 252; Söğütlü  252; Dersim  391; Erzincan (Suisa) 188 Greek: at Pöşür harabeler  232; Cibolar (Kondilia)  232; beside Çukur Dere  232; Sadak  280; ? Kilise Burun, in Yurtlar Dere  294–5; Leri  314; ̇ Imera (St John Prodromos)  313; Eski Gümüşhane  306; Beşkilise 306; Kirlikilisehanı, and Atlıkilisehanı, near Maçka  312, 341; Trebizond,  357; of St Eugenios  347, 349; Great St Basil 354; Chrysokephalos 349, 351–2, 354–5; and ? Tabakhane  355; above Abkhazian Wall  373 Cisterns: Urartian, at Hızırtaşı  82; of opus cochliae, above Ayni crossing,  13; at Elif (?Arulis)  13–14; above Ehnes quarries  14; at Pirun (Perre)  25; Kırman Tepe  43; Körpinik Hüyük  113; Nicopolis  186–7; upper Ardos (Analibozora)  208–9; Cengerli  247; Satala  266, 274–6, 281; Tekke (? Sedisca)  304; Şon Kale  315; above Abkhazian wall  373 Classis: Brittanica 352; Pontica, Polemon II, and prefect, Anicetus  346; biremes and hoplites  346; purpose and navigation  346, 352, 404; based at Sinope  346; and Trapezus  346, 349, 352; withdrawn to Cyzicus  355. See also Ships, Biremes and Trireme Client kings: in Commagene, of Pompey, Antiochus I Epiphanes  4 and n. 2; and of Gaius and Claudius, Antiochus IV  5; in Sophene, of Nero  80; on Pontic coast,  352, 361; received at Satala and appointed by Trajan  264, 363, 365, 370 405; and Hadrian  363, 370, 375 and n. 3, 379; endorsed by Antoninus  363 and n. 7; at Kainepolis and Edessa, of Verus  406; in Armenia, of Diocletian  407. See also Pontic tribes, clients Climate: altitude, and acclimatization  396–7, 399–400; at Samsat  396; Harput (Elazığ)  396; Eski Malatya, unhealthy  396–7; Keban Maden,

unhealthy  111, 396–7; Ağın 116; Arabkir  112; Eğin (Kemaliye)  152–3; Erzincan, unhealthy  210, 396; Satala  398–9; Kelkit  282; Köse (Domana)  293; Trabzon  332, 346; Pontic coast  361; Batumi, unhealthy  366; Erzurum  397; Pontic mountains, weather boundary between Black Sea and Anatolia  310; violent changes  321, 325; visibility  332–3; navigation  362, 367. See also Altitude: Snow: Summer: Winter Coal: pots full of, at Mezraa, near Keferdis  68; carried by mules, to villages in northern Taurus gorge  71; charcoal, on rafts on Arsanias  177; mines, at Sağ  205 n. 7; and Kömür  243 Coastal tribes: see Pontic tribes Cohorts (auxiliary infantry): strengths, quingenaria  410, equitata  409; milliaria  409, equitata  409 coh., Mochora: at Mochora  326–7 coh. I Apuleia c.R.: at Hyssou Limen  364 coh. I Bosporanorum/Bosporiana sag. eq.,: at Arauraca  207 and n. 9; as milliaria 207 coh. I Claudia equitata: at Sebastopolis  375 coh. I Lepidiana c.R. eq. bis torquata: at Melik Serif (? Haris)  248 coh. I Thracum Syriaca (sag.?) eq.: at Cengerli (? Caesarea or Chorsabia)  246 coh. II Claudia/Claudiana (? eq.): at Apsarus 367 coh. II Valentiana: ? at Zigana pass  310 coh. III Ulpia milliaria Petraeorum sag. eq.: at Metita  70 coh. IV Raetorum eq.; Analiba  193 Coins: types: aes  85, 114, 120, 124, 192, 373; bronze  25 n. 21, 55, 121, 192, 265, 295, 337; copper  55, 85, 247, 281; denarii  69, 120–1, 373, 376; silver hemidrachm  165; silver tetradrachm 25 n. 21; silver  192; gold  295 finds: at Kilisik  24; Pirun  25 and n. 21; Killik 55; Haburman 58; Keferdis 69; Direk Kale  36; Pirot  85; Eski Malatya  92; Kara Hüyük  108 n. 5; Körpinik Hüyük  113–14; above Pağnık  118; Pağnık Öreni  120; villages around Ağın  120; Vahsen  121; Tanusa, and Kilise Yazısı Tepe  121; Hinge  143;

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

Ehme  119; Bademli  124; vicinity of Zımara 171; Abrenk 165; Hasanova  190, 192; Cengerli  247; Melik Şerif  249; Nicopolis  187, 264; Sadak  265, 267, 281; castle above Hurusüfla 295; Hortokop 337; Trapezus  345, 349, 356–7; Phasis  367; Tsebeldağ 373; Pityus 377 excavations, at Pağnık Öreni and Pityus; museums  265, 373; antique dealers, Malatya  92, 114; used as barter  114 Hellenistic:  25 n. 21, 337 Byzantine: at Kilisik  24; Killik  55; Satala  281 emperors, and activity: Augustus  69, 114 and n. 3; ? Claudius  114 and n. 3, 116, 281; Nero, victory in Armenia  120; Vespasian  25 n. 21; Titus,  120, 129; and Jerusalem  114; Trajan  55, 118, 121, 376; Hadrian  165, 373, 376; Antoninus  36, 120, 373; Marcus Aurelius  114; Commodus  36, 118, 265; Severus  36; Julia Domna  373; Elagabalus  85; Severus Alexander  114, 124; Philip II  356; Valerian  25 n. 21; Aurelian 24; Diocletian 281; Maximian  281; Licinius  120, 143; Constantine I  120, 124; Constantine II  114; Constantius II  281; Valentinian  85; Theodosius II  25 n. 21, 120; Anastasius I  337, 373; Justinian  25 n. 21 issues of governors: ? Regulus  114 and n. 3, 116; Neratius Pansa,  114 and n. 3, 120 mints: Antioch  25 n. 21, 55; Caesarea  85–6, 120, 124; Commagene  25 n. 21, 337; Samosata  25 n. 21; Nicopolis 185; Satala 265, Trapezus  349, 356 countermarks, of L(egio) XV  121, 264 rarity  114 and n. 3, 116 Collegium: at Satala  264 n. 11; Aquincum  97 n. 13 Colonies: Greek, on Pontic coast, Trapezus, of Sinope  327, 345; ? Athenai  365; Phasis, and Dioscurias (Sebastopolis), of Miletus  367, 374 veterans, at Arca  90; Nicopolis  185; ? Satala  265; Aquincum,  90 n. 13 Columns: uninscribed, ? milestones, near Elif  13; outside Melitene  44; near

495

Pingan  169; Kilicci  288; Eski Kose  287, 293 marble fragments, Samsat  6; Cendere bridge  31 n. 1; Ionic and Corinthian drums, and fragments of capital, Direk Kale  33; Tarhanik, near Çit Harabe  126; Ençiti  141; fragments, Geruşla  151; sculptured, Nicopolis 187; Hasanova 192; fragments and capitals, Erzincan Kale  214; drum, shafts and capitals, Sadak  265, 281; monolithic, and other, Trabzon 354–5 See also Marcus’ Column: Trajan’s Column Post  700: on caravan road from Sivas  95; Byzantine: bases, Kemah  201; in han, Zigana 308 Commanders: legionary, see Legates; auxiliary, see Prefects; of vexillations, Virdius Geminus  346, 404; of numeri at Apsarus, Plaetorius Celer  366; of Antony, Canidius Crassus  40; of Severus, Claudius Candidus  35–6; of Caracalla, Theocritus, praefectus copiarum in Armenia  406; of Diocletian, Lysias, dux Armeniae 186, 207; 250, 265; of Justinian, Sittas  265, 407; Belisarius  354 Conduit, stone: at Çermik (Sartona)  105. Copper: trade, at Erzincan  212; and see Coins Corn: in legionary diet  400; supply, and storage inside forts  363, 366, 375; transport on camels, by Corbulo  31–2, 80; on rafts  143, 176–7 Post  700: fields near Samsat  18, 20; beside Kalburcusuyu  24; in lower Antitaurus  131; at Zımara  172; inside Nicopolis  187; beside Khostu ferry  193; east of Kemah  206; inside Erzincan Kale  214; around Sadak  262; transported by cart  283; Karayayla 321. See also Grain: Wheat Cotton: fields, above Samsat  23; around Juliopolis  53; in Aşkar Ova  185; Erzincan plain  211; looms at Arabkir  129; mills, for uniforms, at Vazgirt  215; trade, by mules in Taurus gorge  71; at Erzincan  212; from Iğ̇ dir 356

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

496 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Council: of Nicaea (AD 325)  265, 377; Chalcedon (AD 451)  6, 25; Constantinople (AD 680–1)  193; city council, of Samosata  6; of veteran colony at Aquincum  90 n. 13; of vali of Malatya  78 Crops: Malatya plain, poppies and grain  86; near Ağın, obscuring old road  114; in Erzincan plain  210; yayla above Mengut  255; Sadak Çay and Çiftlik (Kelkit) 282; and see Agriculture: Barley: Cotton: Maize: Rice: Rye: Tobacco: Wheat Crossings: of Euphrates, see Index 1; Urartian fort,  80, 82; guarded by fortresses, Samosata  4, 6; Melitene  89; forts, Charmodara 22; Heba 50; Barzalo 56–7; Claudiopolis 61; Metita 70; Corne 79; Ciaca 103; Dascusa 118; Teucila 151; Zimara 173–6; Analiba 193; Carsaga  205, 207; Arauraca  207; Suisa  212; guard posts or watchhouses, Kerefto  55; opposite Muşar Dağ  100; Kalecik  140–1; below Aşutka  144; of rivers, and technique 119. See also Cavalry: Ferries (kayik); Fords Cufic, inscriptions  214 Cultivation: olives, and grain at Ağın 116, 119; vines at Trapezus  356 Post  700: little or none, in Malatya plain  91; beyond Euphrates, at Keban  110; Çit Harabe  127; Arege  138; Eğin valley  152; flanks of Kara Dağ 206 extensive, in plain and hills below Aşutka  126, 140; Armudan gardens  182; Aşkar Ova  185; Gâvuroluğu  194; valleys around Kemah  176, 201; plains of Erzincan  211; and Çiftlik (Kelkit)  282. See also Agriculture Cults: of river-god Euphrates, at Ayni, and south of Zeugma  13; Lucullus and sacred heifer, at Tomisa  13; at Direk Kale, of Apollo  5, 35–6; Eriza, of Anaitis  211, 265, 278; Trapezus, of Abundantia, ? Apollo, Asclepius and Hygieia, Dionysus, Hermes, Mithras,

Nemesis, Philesios, Serapis, Theos Hypsistos, Venus  354, 357 and n. 32; Phasis, of Apollo Hegemon  367. See also Goddesses: Gods Hittite, at Samuha  143 royal, in Commagene  23 n. 19 imperial, at Nicopolis  185 Cuneiform: inscription, at Hızırtaşı  77, 82 and n. 2, 101 n. 2 Custos armorum: Antonius Paternus, at Satala 264 Dams, 408; and see Index 1: on Euphrates, and flooding: Birecik; Atatürk; Bibol; Karakaya; Keban; resited villages: Yeni Samsat, Yeni Çermik, Yeni Levenge Armenia Minor: Mecidiye, Sadak Çay, Köse Danube: transfer of IV Scythica to Zeugma, under Nero  11 n. 7; raising of ala II Auriana  121 n. 12; bridges of boats  7–9, 81; transport barges  9; signal towers and beacons  88; Trajan’s bridge  158–9; Iron Gates, inscription  11; and road  239; Melitene, and excavations at Aquincum  90 and n. 13; transfer of XV Apollinaris to Satala, under Trajan, with legionary stelae  264, 271 and n. 16; and auxiliary units  264, 405; elements of XII Fulminata deployed to  406 Decurions, of auxiliary cavalry: at Zimara  118 n. 8; Cengerli  245 Denarii: see Coins, types Deportations, and convoys, of Armenian women: from Samsun, Amasya, Tokat, Sivas and elsewhere  39; Armudan, Tut and Hasanova  182–3; Gümüşhane and Erzincan  155, 210; passage, by Euphrates  210; Eğin  155; Tohma Su and Malatya,  39, 75 n. 1; Tepehan  39; and below Girik  26; to Kâhta, Urfa and Syrian desert  26, 39. See also Massacres Despatch riders  389; and see Tatars Destruction: of Antioch  212; Samosata  6–7, 91, 343–4; Samosata aqueduct  18; Direk Kale  36; Arsamosata  212; Melitene  91, 266, 407; Caesarea  266; Comana (Cappadocica)  91;

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

Sebasteia  91, 266; Nicopolis  186, 212, 407; ? Arauraca  215, 265, 406; Suisa  215, 265, 406; Satala  215, 265–6, 406; Domana  215, 265, 293, 406; Trapezus  355–6, 377; Apsarus 367; Phasis 368; Sebastopolis 376; Pityus 377; Tigranocerta  4; Artaxata  404, 406; of maniples of Pompey’s army  361; Sedatius Severianus  406 Post  700: of Amasya  212; Tokat  212; Sivas  212; Samsat  6–7; Eski Malatya  89, 91–2; Pürk (Nicopolis) 185; Kemah 212; Nezgep  212; Eski Erzincan, and hundreds of villages  211–12, 408; Sipikor  212, 220; Trabzon, foreshore and harbour  351 layers: at Melitene  92; Trapezus  344 places: Euphrates Gates, and inscription  11; Malatya plain  75; ‘old village’, at Hinge  143; Arauraca  207 bridges: Harapkarkir  11; Pirun  25–6; Çirik  26; Keferdis  69; Eğin, Venk  158; and Şirzi  159; Koymat Köprü  253; Sultan Hamid, above Kürtler Dere  197–8; planned, Tohma Su  96 n. 1 churches: at Kesrik  95 n. 20; Ün ̇ (In)  129; Hasanova  192; Ihtik 188, 198–9, Sağ  188, 204–5; Çukurçimen  252; Trabzon, Great St Basil  354 ̇ monastery: Surp Tavor, above Iliç 161 tower, above Lycus  291; fortlet at Ağa Kalesi 295 hamam and mosque, at Refahiye  232–3 hans: at Kuruçay  229; below Kökseki  253; above Sipikör  220; Eskiyol  223; Hocamezarı hanları 334; Meşeiçihanı 336 markets, at Pütürge  41–2; Kemaliye  154 roads; Euphrates Gates  11; Sincik Gates  37; above Tepehan  39; below and above Ali Baba Ziyareti  41; Silk Road, above Gemirgap  148; above Kuruçay  191; in valley of Kürtler Dere  191; above Diştaş  237; above Kökseki  254; in Köse Boğazı  294; Keci Dere, below Hurusüfla  295–6; Harşit

497

valley  305; on Rum Bayır, and Ağyarlar ridge 317–18 See also Armenians: Churches: Earthquakes Diet, of soldiers  400; at altitude  400. See also Food: Wine Diplomata: in Galatia and Cappadocia  405; cohors II Claudia, at Apsarus  367 n. 14 Disease: Xenophon  397; ? at Apsarus  366 Post  700: cholera and plague, at Eski Malatya  91; summer fevers, at Eski Malatya, and autumn  91, 396; Harput  396; Keban  111, 396; Erzincan, and eyes  210, 396; Batumi  366; and Sukhumi  375; quarantine, and cholera, at Hasanova  182, 191; mosquitoes, at lower and upper Ardos  207–8: malaria, at Artaxata  396; skin and rheumatic diseases, and sulphurous hot springs at Tilek  67; lime disease and varoa, in bees 221 Distances: measured in hours,  385; in days, for relays along Persian Royal Road  389; covered, on horseback, by Mithridates, Vardanes, Tatar and Fraser  389, 398; and by Caesar’s march  385; Melitene to Satala  389 in miles, on milestones  17, 183, 232, 249–50; geographers  126, 385, 389; Pliny, from Ganges to Spain, by Euphrates  80; and from Dascusa to Caspian  116; reported by commanders  176; to horizon  333 in inches and paces  370; between pilasters, of basilica at Sadak  280; posting establishment 398 on foot  215, 385; horseback  206, 385; pack-animals  165 n. 17, 385; caravans  261, 385; by river and raft  49, 126, 176; by sea, in days and stades, and by land  362, 364–5 and n. 13, 370, 374 See also Horses: Speed: Travel times: Signalling Dogs: mad dogs and garlic  173 Donkeys: Xenophon, and skins for bridge  80 n. 4; east of Samsat  18; crossing Kâhta Çay, above Hallan  20–1; on

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

498 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Donkeys (Cont.) ‘Old Adiyaman Road’  24; transport of rafts and fish  47; in northern Taurus gorge  72; caravan road, east of Eski Malatya  87; suspension bridge, below Pağnık  119; supply train, by Eğin, to Russian front  144; death in winter, near Aşutka  144; in caravans at Mezraaıhan  231; name of Kerboğaz  233; Salt Road to Melik Şerif  244; around Kelkit  282; route from Trebizond to Erzerum  261; on Zigana Dağ  332; size of wild boars  122; proof of strength  141; Nodding 26 Dux, Armeniae: forces  407; Lysias, at Satala  265; at Arauraca and Nicopolis  186, 207, 250 Dynamite: in feuds  18, 51; fishing  20, 114; Sincik Gates  37; road building, below ̇ Ihtik 199 Eagles: on frieze at Direk Kale  33; bronze, at Satala  281; on Harmancık Dağ 165 Earthquakes: at Antioch (AD 115)  212; Arsamosata (AD 498/9)  21 n. 17; Nicopolis and Armenia (AD 498/9)  21 and n. 17, 186, 212, 407 Post  700: ? Direk Kale  36; Bekiran (2003)  71; Eski Malatya (1873)  92; Çukurçimen (1992)  251–2; Erzincan (1784)  211, 280; with eastern Pontus and Armenia Minor (1939)  211–12, 408; cemetery  212; Nicopolis  185; Nezgep  195; Kerboğaz 237; Refahiye 233; hans above Sipikör, and village  132, 220 Edelweiss, Operation  380–1 Electricity: arrival in villages  215, 283; dams  46; power lines  219; pylons  148, 292 Emblem, of XV Apollinaris  265 Equites sagittarii: strength  129; at Sabus  118, 129, 214; Domana  293 Era: of Samosata  5; Christian  352 Euphrates (Kara Su): see Bridges (Venk, and Post 700): Ferries: and Index 1 Excavations: Zeugma  15; at Samsat  9; Tille  50; Pirun  25 and n. 21; Arslantepe  89 n. 9; Pağnık Öreni  119– 20; Kilise Yazısı Tepe  121; Sadak  273,

279, 282; Trabzon, Tabakhane  355; Gonio  367; Tsebel Dağ 373; Sukhumi 376; Pitsunda 377; Aquincum  90 n. 13 informal: at Eski Malatya  92; Muşar Dağ  101; Seracık hüyük  112; Pürk  187; Sadak  267, 271, 273, 278–9; Zigana han  308; and see Treasure Hunters Exchange of populations: Krom valley  326, 408; muhtar of Zımara  172 ‘Expeditionary Road’: see Roads Expeditions: of Shalmanezer III, at Ayni  13; and against land of Melid  81–2; Sardur II, against city of Militia  82; Tiglath-Pileser III  77; Pericles, to Sinope  345; Lucullus, to Tigranocerta and Gordyene  4, 29 n. 24, 80, 400; Pompey, in Armenia, Iberia and Albania  263, 369, 403; Licinius Crassus, to Carrhae  403; Canidius Crassus, in Iberia and Albania  403; Antony, to Media  397, 400, 403; in Armenia, and at Eriza  211, 278, 403; Tiberius, in Armenia  403; Gaius Caesar, in Armenia  404; Corbulo, in Iberia, Armenia and against Tigranocerta  263, 278, 400, 404; Nero, plans for Caspian Gates  263, 404; Virdius Geminus, to Trapezus and Chobus  346, 404; Vespasian, to fortify Harmozica  263–4, 379, 404; ? Antistius Rusticus, to Caspian Gates  405; Domitian, to Caspian Gates  263, 378–9; Arrian, against Alani  264, 379, 406; and ? to Caspian Gates  406; Sedatius Severianus, against Parthians  406; Statius Priscus, in Armenia  406; Palmatus, in Armenia and Media  397, 400, 406. See also Wars Post  700: Chesney, in Kurdistan  63; and to test navigability of Euphrates  418; Ainsworth, to Kurdistan, and Hafiz Pasha  91–2, 98–9, 418; Maunsell, in Kurdistan, and Military Reports compiled from many expeditions  418–19; Pachulia and Abkhazian wall  373; colonel from Erzincan, into Dersim 152

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

Factories, manufacture: fine linens, in Colchis  394; arms, for Mithridates 345 Post  700: at Aleppo,  105; calico, at Tokat  212; cotton goods at Arabkir  129; carpets, at Eğin 154; boots, at Erzincan  215; brick, beside Değirmendere  341; cement, at Trabzon  327, 331; and see Cotton, mills Feast, of Assumption: at Çit Harabe  129; beside Söğütlü Çay  252 Ferries: at Çünküş  46, 59; on Phasis  362 Post  700: (kayik) appearance and construction  6–7, 15, 85, 110–11, 119; on Euphrates, at Birecik  14–15; Ayni  13; Samsat  6–7; Çünküş  45, 56–7, ̇ 59–60, 69, 111; Ayvas  69; Izolu (Kadıköy) and Pirot  85, 111, 119; Söğütlü  108; Keban  107–8, 110–11, 119, 394; Pağnık  111, 119: ? above Eğin  161, 164; Pingan  159, 173; ̇ 122, 159, 192–3, Khostu, below Iliç  233; on Murat, at Aşvan 392; Pertek 392. See also Boats: Rafts: Ships Feuds: in villages beside Harapkarkır bridge  11; and below Samosata aqueduct  18; in Dersim  391 Fevers: see Disease Fire brigade: at ? Satala  264 and n. 11; Aquincum  90 n. 13 Fires: at Pütürge  41–2; Kemaliye  154 Fırman: for pack-mules  163 Fish, and fishermen: at Trapezus  345; tunny 354 Post  700: in Euphrates  20, 47, 144; Murat  47; Arabkir Çay  114; Ardos, upper lake (roach)  208; Balahor Dere (trout)  257; size and weight  47, 144; sold in Harput  47; and salted  144; fish oil  356; rafts and coracle  49, 144 Flax, in Colchis  394 Floods: flood arches, and buttress, Venk bridge, at Eğin  155–6, 158; Baghdad bridge  299; Trajan’s bridge over Danube 158 Post  700: of Euphrates  85, 87, 105–6; in spring  45, 49, 66, 85, 105; autumn  401; Kürtler Dere, in winter  197; Harşit valley  301, 306; flood

499

beds, of Şiro Çay  40, 70; Çaltı Çay  169; Kuruçay  227; Kömür Çay.; nourished fields, around Samsat  23; flood plains, by Malatya  75, 103; above Ösneden  132; Gâvuroluğu 194; Kömür Çay  206; below Ardos  207, 209; above Mecidiye  219; flash floods, in Trapezus  354. See also Dams Flowers: Sarıçiçek, ‘yellow flower’ yaylas 134; crocuses, at Karayayla  321; and gentian and pansies, on Zigana Dağ 332; mountain flowers, and honey  221; and bread  223; useful photos  219 Fodder: Xenophon in Armenia  398 Food: Hittite supplies  143, 176; Xenophon in Armenia  398; of Roman soldiers  400; carried by horses to Erzurum  337; during Ramazan  47; and see Fruit: Grain Fords: of Euphrates at Ayni  13; too deep, beside Malatya plain  75; tributaries between Tohma Su and Çaltı Çay  390; Pağnık, ‘cavalry crossing’  119; Tanusa  119, 121; unfordable, below ̇ 159, 193; east of Kemah, in one or Iliç  two places  206; and Aşkale 262 Arsanias (Murat), near Pertek, ‘cavalry crossing’  119 n. 10 rivers, Ziyaret Dere  23; Girik Çay  26; Cendere Su  27; Kâhta Çay  22, 27, 46; Tlllo Çay  63; Şiro Çay, at Mamaş 70; Kirmehmet Dere  97; Kuru Çay  99; Eleki Çay  101; Çaltı Çay  169; Kuruçay  227; Kürtler Dere, unfordable in spring,  191 n. 3, 233 n. 5; Kömür Çay  206; Sipikör Dere  221–2; upper Harşit  297–8; Karum Dere  326; rivers unfordable in spring  397 paved, near Mecidiye  219; bedrock, above Havcış  292; technique for crossing rivers 119 Forestry: destruction, by roads, trenches and ploughing, above Avbi  37; Tepehan  39; Şiro Çay  41; Kömürhan bridge  72; Gemirgap  148; Mecidiye Çay  218; route along watershed, above Refahiye  232; deforesting, below Gerger Kalesi  51 Forests: oak forests, in Commagene  4; galls, for tanning  4; timber, in Colchis  369, 394

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

500 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Forests (Cont.) Post  700: oak, on ridge above Hirso, and ? manna  63; Şiro (Keferdis)  106; fruit trees, at Aspuzu (Malatya)  91; Sinibeli pass  230; ravines of Gülan Dağ 239; pine, below Kurtlu Tepe,  226, 244–5, 249; yayla sold for, above Vazgirt  215; above Hurusüfla  295; pine, below Zigana pass  307; and below Karakaban and Meşeiçihanı (‘han inside the forest’)  335–6; pine, oak, alder, beech, chestnut and walnut, on mountainsides above Black Sea  393; oak, in Dersim  106, 391; and worshipped by Kızılbaş Kurds  391. See also Manna Fortifications: walls, at Kilise Yazısı Tepe  121; rebuilt at Satala  265–6, 269, 407; on Abkhazian Wall  373; in Caucasus defiles 379. See also Walls Fortlets: Kerefto  66; west of Pirot  86; Kalecik, near Zabulbar  66, 140–1; Ağa Kalesi, near Köse  295; Hortokop,  337–8. See also Forts: Signalling, mounds: Stations: Watch houses Fortresses: and see Index 1 legionary, and garrisons: Zeugma, and IV Scythica  11 n. 7, 14–15; Samosata, ? VI Ferrata, and XVI Flavia Firma  6–8 and n. 4, 405; Melitene, and XII Fulminata  89–90, 92–3, 404; Satala, XVI Flavia Firma, and XV Apollinaris  259, 263–4 and n. 6, 267–70, 404–5; Trapezus, and I Pontica  343–4, 354, 356, 407 other: Gerger Kalesi  5, 51 and n. 8; Sinoria 198–9; Horonon 297–8; Petra  363 and n. 7, 375; Sarapana  363, 368, 379, 394; Scanda  363, 379; on Abkhazian Wall 373–4; Gerzeul 373; Tsebeldağ  373; Aquincum  90 and n. 13; Carnuntum  264 and n. 8 Post  700: Eski Kâhta  46; Eski Malatya  92–3; Kemah  201; Erzincan Kale 212–14; Gonio 36–7; Poti 370; Anaklia 371; Chchalta 378 Forts: and see Index 1 Urartian, at Hızırtaşı 82 guarding Euphrates crossings, see Crossings, forts; navigational links, see Index 1 Euphrates

inland, in Cappadocia: Sabus  127–9; Vereuso  134–5; Zenocopi  136 Armenia Minor,: Sinervas  198–9; Cengerli (? Caesarea or Chorsabia)  245–7; Melik Şerif (? Haris)  248; Dracones  255–6; Domana 293 Pontus: Zindanlar  297–8; Zigana  310; Hortokop 337–8 Pontic coast: Hyssou Limen  364; Caene Parembole 364; Rhizaion 364; Athenai 365; Apsarus 365–7; Phasis 367–70; Sebastopolis 374–6; Pityus 376–7 other: Cappadocia, Pağnık Öreni  119–29; Pontus, Şon Kale  315; Osrhoene, Eski Hisar  15, 17; Armenia, ? Andaga, Chadas, and Raugonia  260, 263; Gorneae  263, 404; Iberia, Cumania  377; Albania, ? Büyük Taş  263 and n. 4, 405 known to Pliny, as castella: Claudiopolis  46, 61; Dascusa  116; Apsarus  363, 365, 367; Sebastopolis  363, 375; and Zimara 170; Phasis 367; Cumania 377 known to Ammianus, as castra praesidiaria: Barzala and (C)laudias  46 and n. 2, 56–7, 61 size: requirement  128–9 and n. 5, 214, 297; Cafer Kale  79; Pağnık Öreni  120; Çit Harabe  127–9 and n. 5; Erzincan Kale  214; Cengerli  246; Zindanlar  297–8; Gonio  366–7; Phasis  369–70; Sebastopolis 375–6; Pityus 376–7 construction: earth and wooden towers, replaced with brick. at Phasis  368; stone and brick, at Sebastopolis  376 garrisons: see Alae: Cohorts association with churches  121, 129, 152, 175, 188, 204; and see Churches, Armenian Fountains, at Vahsen  121; Çanakçı  134–5; Aşutka  143; Geruşla 151; Zımara 171; Mezraaıhan 231; Tekke  304; Dragon’s, above Değirmendere  342; Trapezus, above Zağnos bridge  353; in Dersim  392; fountain houses, at Perre  25, 148; and Acarlar Çeşme, below Ergü 148;

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

spout, at Satala  276; pen and pistol 112 Foxes, above Sandık  165; Zigana Dağ 332 Friezes: fragments in relief at Direk Kale  33; Satala 279 Frontier: established by Vespasian  404, confirmed by Hadrian  405 road, and course  95; and see Bridges, stone, stone and timber: Roads, supporting (3) construction, seen particularly below Tepehan  39; above Şiro Çay  40–1; descent from Şakşak Dağ 42–3; agger, above Söğütlü Dere  107; in Deregezen valley  108–9; and above Körpinik Hüyük  113; above Bademli  124; ridge above Çit Çay  125; above Ösneden  133–4; descent to Çaltı Çay  135, 137–8; above Karabudak  181; Marble Road  195–6; Pelitsirti pass  209; Deveboynu boğazı  227, 229; Sinibeli pass  231; ridge above Melik Şerif  251; Çimen Dağları  254–5; descent to Balahor  256–7; above Kılıççı  288–9; descent to Lycus  291–2 change of style, in Armenia Minor,  182 installations: see Fortlets: Forts: Fortresses: Signalling Frost: buried water pipes  222, 276–7; and inscriptions at Satala  271; underground houses 398; frost-bite 397. See also Winter Fruit, of Melitene  89; carved on frieze at Direk Kale  33. See also Grapes: Olives Post  700: at Midye  64; Malatya  91; Eski Malatya  92; Çit Harabe  129; Eğin  153; Zımara  171; Alp Köy  206; plain of Erzincan  210–11; from Kelkit and Harşit valleys, traded through Trabzon 357. See also Apricots: Grapes: Mulberries Galley: Brant’s coastal voyage  362. See also Ships. Gardens: Bahçe, below Direk Kale  33; Venkuk 51; Haburman 58; Keferdis  69; Bekiran  71; Eski Malatya 90; Aspuzu 91; Hinge 143; Arege  138; below Ergü  148; Geruşla  151; Eğin  152–3, 170;

501

Sandık 163; Pingan 174–5; Armudan 182–3; Tepte 227; Pürk  185–7; Hasanova  192; by Kürtler Dere  197; Kemah  201; beside Kömür Çay  206; Alp Köy  206; upper Ardos  208; plain of Erzincan  210; Refahiye  244; Zindanlar  297; above Tekke  315; Beşkilise 306; Trabzon  349, 353; of museums, Elazığ  116 n. 6; Trabzon  354–6 Garlic 172–3 Garrisons: along frontier: praesidia of Corbulo, in Pontic mountains  263, 295, 297, 315, 344, 346, 404; legionary and auxiliary, of Vespasian  404; auxiliary listed in diploma (AD 101)  405; known to Hadrian  363; deployed at Trapezus  264, 346, 352; Sebastopolis  375–6; and Pityus  264, 377; under Constantine, beside Phasis  368; Justinian, in Tzanica  357; and at Sebastopolis and Pityus  376–7 beyond frontier, deployed at Tigranocerta  404; Gorneae  263, 404; Artaxata  264; Kainepolis  263–4; ? Büyük Taş  263 and n. 4, 405 See also Dux, Armeniae: Fortresses: Forts: Notitia Dignitatum. Post  700: Eski Malatya, Hafiz Pasha, and Nizam battalion  89, 91–2; Malatya, Second Army  89; Erzincan, Fourth Army Corps, and Third Army,  89, 211, 215; Hozat, infantry battalions and cavalry  392; Russian, at Sukhumi  375. See also Jandarma Gas: bottles, by mule for villages  71; by camels, for lamps  293; pipeline across Sipikör pass  219; biogas, at Distas  239 Gates: at Samosata  8 and n. 6; Direk Kale  33; Gerger Kalesi  5 n. 2, 50 n. 8; Melitene  44, 87–8, 92, 94–5; Pağnık Öreni  119–20; Çit Harabe  127; Pingan 175; Nicopolis 187; Kemah  201; Erzincan Kale  212–13; Satala  266–9, 288; Hortokop  337; Trapezus  352–3, 357 and n. 33; Phasis  369–70; Anaklia  371; Pityus  377; on bridges of boats  81 ‘Gates’: Euphrates  11; Sincik  32–3, 35, 37–8, 50; Pontic  325; Caucasian  377, 404,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

502 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

‘Gates’: Euphrates (Cont.) 406; Caspian  263, 378, 404–6; Cilician  94 n. 18, 385; Iron  11, 239; marble  191, 194; rock-cut  318–19; ‘gate mountain’  317 Gâvur (‘infidel’): Gâvur Yazı Su (Arabkir Çay)  116 n. 6; Gâvuryurdu, near Refahiye  231; Gâvurun Bağı, edge of Erzincan plain  217; Gâvur (Atatürk) Meydan, in Trebizond  347, 354. See also Armenians, roads: Infidels Geographical sources: Claudius  46, 61, 116, 263, 404; Corbulo and Mucianus  116, 161, 170, 176, 391, 494; Ptolemy  388, 406; Peutinger Table  387, 405; Antonine Itinerary  386, 406, Geography  385, 389–94. See also Gorges: Ridgeways: Watersheds: and Index 1, Commagene: Taurus: Cappadocia: Antitaurus: Armenia Minor: Pontic mountains: Pontic coast: Colchis: Caucasus Geology: Jurassic: cliffs above Eğin 153; Munzur Dağları, above Pingan  173 Volcanic: blowhole, opposite Bibol  57; cavern, near Çünküş  59; outcrop, by Karabudak  180; escarpment, and peaks ̇ above Ihtik  199; marbles, above Kerboğaz  238; below Deveboynu Dağ 321 Notable formations: Keban gorge  109; Kerboğaz  233, 237–8; strata and salt ̇ pans, east of Ihtik  199; Kalecik Tepe, above Ardos  207; strata above Sürerek 209. See also Earthquakes: Hot springs: Landslides: Marble German, Germans: Erzincan station  212; Deutsche Heereskarte  370, 373; assault on Caucasus (1942)  379–81; and expected advance  75 n. 1, 89, 381; Mt Elbrus  380; ambassador in Ankara  379; consul, in Trabzon  380; PKK and kidnapping  172; spoken at Rişkân 251. See also Index 2. 2, Blau: Strecker Glass: at Pağnık Öreni  120; on hillside at Satala  280; mosaics, and eyes of Aphrodite  274, 278 Goats: Xenophon, and Armenian houses  398; skins, in pontoon bridge  80 n. 4;

heads, on architectural fragments in Trabzon 355 Post  700: herds, at Venkuk  51; Mecidiye  219; in plain of Çiftlik (Kelkit)  282; Leri yayla  315; wild, at Kerkinos  64; and, usefully, above Erzincan  219; as sacrifice, on Muşar Dağ  101; and beside Söğütlü Çay  252; skins, for rafts  177; as floats  106; for manna  63; track, above Tekke  324 God: true, of Christian legionaries  91; orders snow and winter  399; godless, Taylor at Gemho  137 Goddesses: Anaitis, at Eriza  211; Aphrodite, at Satala  265, 277–8; Phasiane, and Artemis, at Phasis  368; Hygieia, and Venus, at Trapezus  357; Fortuna, at Aquincum  97 n. 13 Gods: listened to Sardur II, at Hızırtaşı 82; with deified Antiochus I Epiphanes, on Nemrud Dag  5; ? statues, at Trapezus  357; Zeus, statue; Apollo, oracles and ? temple; and Apollo Epekoos, statue, at Direk Kale  35–6, 406; Apollo Hegemon, at Phasis  367 and n. 15; Hermes, of road-users,  355; and Asclepius, Dionysus, Mithras, Serapis, and Theos Hypsistos, at Trapezus  357; river-god Euphrates, at Ayni and south of Zeugma  13; of Doliche, at Perre  25 and n. 21. See also Cults Gold: carried from Militia by Sardur II  89; statue, of Anaitis  211, 403; necklace, at Sadak 281. See also Coins Post  700: lure of Armenian  226, 236; found at Battalgazi Ziyareti, above Şiro Çay  40; inside statues and inscription at Nicopolis  187; coins, above Hurusüfla 295 Gorges: Arabkir Çay, at Hastek  112, 116; Çit Çay  126; Phasis  368, 394; and see Index 1, Kara Su (Euphrates): Murat (Arsanias) Governors: and see Index 2. 1 Seleucid: Ptolemaeus  4 Consular, of Cappadocia and Armenia Minor  249, 263 and n. 6, 361, 404; with Armenia Major  175; residence, ? at Melitene  90 and n. 13; and ? at

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

Satala  281; friendship of prefects  207, 214 Cappadocia: Corbulo, Caesennius Paetus, Pompeius Collega, Neratius Pansa, Caesennius Gallus, Antistius Rusticus, Pomponius Bassus, Catilius Severus, Statorius Secundus, Arrian, Aemilius Carus, Sedatius Severianus, Statius Priscus, Martius Verus Galatia: Rutilius Gallicus Syria: Lucius Vitellius, Cassius Longinus, Licinius Mucianus, Caesennius Paetus Other: Regulus, . . . Post  700: of Erzincan  214, 277; Sivas  397; Governor General, in Erzerum  277; and see Vali Grain: on Hittite ships to Samuha  143, 176; by raft, from Taurus gorge to Samosata  7, 54: and from Zimara  172, 176; Dascusa  119, 176; and Sartona  106, 176; to Melitene  86–7, 90, 176; none in Colchis  394 Post  700: Gerger Çay  54; Malatya plain  86; around Ağın  119; little, at Eğin 152; by raft from Pingan  177; in Aşkar Ova  185; Erzincan plain  211; by camels, mules and horses, from Erzerum to Trabzon  327, 337; insufficient around Batumi  366; carried by Kurds and goat hides  106. See also Corn: Wheat. Grapes: on early coins of Trapezus  356 Post  700: from Aleppo, for Arabkir and Erzincan  105; in Taurus gorge, at Tilman  67; large, at Eski Malatya  90; Ağın  116; Çit Harabe  129; below Ergü  148; plain of Erzincan  210. See also Vines: Wine Graves: of Armenian girl on platform, and of Hassan in cave, on Muşar Dağ 101; slab-lined, on mound above Deregezen valley  109; ‘king’s grave’, near Diştaş  239; on Şon Kale  315; Armenian gravestones, at Pürk (Nicopolis)  187; Ottoman, in Taurus gorge, at Husukani  67; north of Malatya  67; smashed, near Deregezen  108; of travellers, at Eski Kozkışla  229; and Euphrates valley, west of Aşkale  262; mass graves, at

503

Tepehan  39; and Killik (Barzalo), and rock tomb  55; enormous graveyards, at Eski Malatya  92. See also Cemeteries: Tombs Grazing: see Yayla: Yürüks Greek, and Greeks cities: Nicopolis, culture, institutions and title  185–6, 405; Neocaesarea, title  185; Amaseia, title  185; Trapezus  327–8, 343, 345; colonies  345; early traders  345 language: inscriptions around Dascusa  114, 116, 121, 124; at Erzincan  211; Satala  264, 270–1 and n. 16; Trapezus  345, 349; milestone  183; on bowl at Pağnık Öreni  120; head of Aphrodite, at Satala 278; Scordiscus 172; Analibozora 209 physician, Dioscorides  173; prefects, Daphnis and Lamprocles, in Arrian’s army  193, 207; centurion, Cuspius Fabianus, at Satala  270 n. 16; Lucian, at Samosata  6; see also Ten Thousand; and Index 2. 1, Xenophon wine  89; coins  114; shrine, at Athenai 365 Post  700: miners at Keban  111; graffiti, at Albanian han  145; bridges, near Zindanlar  298; and at Köprübaşı 306; ? shop, above Kolat  329 names: Pürk (Nicopolis), from purgos  185; Horopol, ? from horos and polis  244; Lycus, from Armenian ‘wolf river’  289; Ağyarlar, ? from ’saints’, and religious divide  313; Leri, ? from Armenian yayla  314; Gümüşhane, from Argyropolis  306, 356; ‘Palace’, ̇ above Ihtik  198–9; and Mecidiye  215, 219; ‘hill’, and track, above Tekke  317 population, near Ağa Kalesi  295; in valley of Karum Dere, Greek speaking Muslims  324, 326; exchange of populations  326, 408 villages, names on maps  226; near Refahiye, Çakmalı harabeleri, Kondilia, Pöşür harabeleri 232; Horopol 244; in Pontic mountains, Leri  314; houses at Tekke  304; terraced fields, above ̇ Hayekse  317; Imera  297, 313; and

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

504 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Greek (Cont.) route by Acısuhanı and Larhan, to ̇ Trebizond  325; Istavri 297; Gümüşhane, entrance to a Greek land  306; Beşkilise  306; Hamsiköy, and bribery  311; monastery, of Vazelon 337. See also Cemeteries: Churches; and Index 1 ‘Greek fire’, naphtha, pitch, at Samosata  4, 26 and n. 24 Gryphon: emblem of XV Apollinaris, on coin of Satala  265 Guard post: Urartian, at Hızırtaşı  82; near Barzalo (Killik)  57; Kara Baba Kaya  100; above Bahadın bridge  116; Handeresi  132; Mamahar pass  135; Kalecik, by Zabulbar  140–1; below Aşutka  144; Düvermezraasi harabe, near Melik Şerif  245; above Lycus  292; near Havcış, 292; and see Watch houses Post  700: at Kömürhan  78; above Diştaş 240 Gunpowder, smell and rheumatism  36 Guns: jandarma, at Satala  272; police, at Xenophon cairn  330; Trabzon airport  329; battle, in Maçka  340; at gunpoint 219 ‘gun road’ (Top Yol), near Zeugma  14; wheel tracks, over Antitaurus, to Russian front  133; and Sipikör pass  221; Russian road below Çimen yayla 256 kaleş (Kalashnikov), and village guards  63, 194; machine-guns  192, 226, 239; sub-machine guns  304; machine-pistol  231; pistol  171, 273, 315; shotguns  40, 315; in fountain pen  112; Hommaire de Hell, weapons and armed guards  173; von Moltke, guns from Eski Malatya, by raft through Taurus  32, 47, 87; shells 197–8. See also Artillery Gunwales, of brush wood, on rafts  177, 179 Hamam: Hamamlık, named from hot spring  57; at Refahiye  222; and see Bath-houses Hans: marking caravan routes  190, 277–8, 296, 305, 395; Selcuk, Karahan at Eski

Malatya  92; and ? Denizli  112; built by Sultan Mehmet, the Conqueror,  82; on route from Trebizond to Tabriz 261 1. Adıyaman to Trebizond: see Caravan Routes, minor (1): Adıyaman to Eski Malatya, by Eski Kâhta,: in bed of Kâhta Çay  31, 39; Sultan Murat Han, at Tepehan  31, 38–9; below Kubbe Tepe  42; Halikhan  42; Karahan, in Eski Malatya 92 Eski Malatya to Kemah, by Eğin and over Hostabeli pass: at Mutmur, and Salkı Çiftlik  105; Denizli  112; Albanian han  145; Hanı Deresi  147; Hosta Han 159 Eski Malatya to Kemah, by Arabkir and over Antitaurus: Handeresi  132; Burmahan (Urumia)  169; Nezgep  195 Kemah to Harşit, through Erzincan and Sadak: in Euphrates valley  206; Hanarde  207; below Ardos  209; above Mecidiye  219; above Sipikör  212, 220–1; below Ağlık 276; in valley of Sadak Çay  220, 220; at, and near Bandola  222; Eskiyol  223; AlışYer  223; below Sadak (Sadakhanları)  222, 262, 288; north of Sadakhanları  288; beside Han Dere, below Sökmen  288; above Kılıççı  288; Köse 293; Pirahmet 293 Harşit to Maçka, by Harşit valley and Transit Road: Murathanoğulları 296; Pirahmet,  293, 301; Karagözhanı  301, 314; Tekke (Sindi)  304; Gümüşhane (Büyük Han)  306; Haciemin hanları  306; Harava hanları 307; ̇ Ikisuhanı  307; Demirciköy hanları  307; Ardasa Han  307 n. 4; Köprübaşı hanları 307; Tanırahanı  307; Zigana  308; below Zigana  293, 308, 310; Maden hanları  308; Barutcu  310; near Bekçiler 311; Hamsiköy 311–12; Küzhanları 312; Kiremitlihanı 312; Kirlikilisehanı 312; Meksilahanları 312; south of Maçka  339 Harşit to Maçka, over Pontic mountains: Zindanlar  298.; Leri  314; below Uzun

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

Bayır  317; Maden hanları  322, 324; Anzarya hanlar  325; (and thence by Acısuhanı and Larhan 325); Kolat hanları  325, 327; Hocamezarı hanları 334; Karakaban 338; Meşeiçihanları 335–6; Hortokop 337; south of Maçka  339 Maçka to Trebizond: Maçka  340; Atlıkilisehanı 341; Kanlıpelithanı 341; Ayvasilhanı  341; near and above Hoşoğlan 341–2 ̇ through Refahiye and over Çimen 2. Iliç, Dağları, to Sadak: see Caravan Routes, minor (1): Kuruçay, El Khan  229; Mezraaıhan  231; above Kurugöl  252; ? Çimen yayla  255; by Balahor Dere 257 ̇ to Suşehri: see Caravan Routes, minor 3. Iliç (14): Armudan  183; Aşkar 183 4. Kemah to Suşehri, by Refahiye: see Caravan Routes, minor (17): near Elmalı Çay  243; Elmalı  244; Koçevi 244; Kürelik 250; Alacahan 250 5. Suşehri, by Koymat köprü, to Kurugöl: see Caravan Routes, minor (24): below Kökseki 253 6. (Kayseri), to Eski Malatya: see Caravan Routes, major (1): Sultan Murat Han  94–5; Karahan, in Eski Malatya 92 7. (Tokat), through Kelkit and below Sadak, to Erzerum and Tabriz  394: see Caravan Routes, major (3): below Sadak (Sadakhanları)  222, 262, 288 8. (Sivas), through Eski Malatya, to Harput 394: see Caravan Routes, major (4): Hekimhan  108, 394; Karahan, in Eski Malatya  92; ? Yazıcıhan  87; Yarımca Han  87; Şişman 87; Pirot 85; ? Caferhan  79; Sultan Murat Han (near Caferhan)  79; Sultan Murat Han (near Butan) 72; Zeyikhan 78; Kömürhan  77, 82, 84 Harbours: Trapezus  349–51, 405; Hyssou Limen  364; Rhizaion  364; ? Apsarus  365; Phasis  367; below Caucasus  376; on Adriatic  347; Boulogne  352 n. 24; Dover  352. See also Quays

505

Post  700: on Black Sea, Samsun  99, 212; Trabzon, at Daphnous  342, 349; and ‘Genoese’, at Molos  349–50; Araklı  364; Rize, Pazar and Hopa  362 n. 4; Limani  367; Poti  368 Harvest: at Arabkir  112; Gemho  137; Erzincan  210; Sadak Çay and Çiftlik 282; Zindanlar 297–8; harvesters, and garlic  173 Hazel nuts: by mules, from Giresun to Eğin  163; at Maden hanları, drying  322, 324; above Değirmendere 342; exported from Trabzon  356 Health Centre, at Mülk  252 Hellenism: extended by Antiochus IV  5; Nicopolis, remote bastion of  185 Hellenistic: kingdom of Commagene  4; and coins, at Perre  25 n. 21; palace, at Samosata  4; site, near Kocan  22; watch-tower, near Taraksu  53 and n. 4; Kırman Tepe  43 and n. 7; ? bronze head of Aphrodite, at Satala  278; foundations of bridges, at Trapezus 354 Helmet: of Ammianus  59 Herring-bone, courses: at Zindanlar  297; Tekke 304 Hierothesion, at Karakuş 23 High priests: Armeniarch  185 Hippodrome, at Apsarus  363 Hittite, Hittites: see Index 2. 1 Holy: men, from Horasan, in türbes near Ziyaret Dere  24 n. 20; and at Eski Kozkışla and Kirzi  229–30; man, advising restoration of Ulucami, in Eski Malatya  92; places, on Muşar Dağ  101; trees and bushes  101; water, at Çit Harabe  129; hill, of Three Holy Children, at Pingan  175– 6; Rock, Cengerli Kale  245; tomb, ‘Dervish chapel’, at Tekke  304; Cape, west of Trebizond  352, 354. See also Armenians, pilgrimages: Türbe: Ziyaret Horses: cavalry, of Xenophon  329; in snow and ice  397; inspected by Arrian  375; pack-horses, on Çünküş ferry  59; river crossings  9, 119; supporting Roman armies  165; Sarmatian horsemen  379; legs of bronze statue, at Satala  265,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

506 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Horses (Cont.) 278. See also Cavalry: Distance: Speed of march: Travel times Post  700: Taurus gorge impassable  46; constricted, in Antitaurus gorge  144; below Ardasa  307; and from Trebizond to Erzerum  342; fords, Çaltı Çay  169; Karum Dere  326; snow, in Antitaurus  132; on Zigana pass  310; over Pontic mountains  326; east of Satala  399; east of Erzerum  399; mud  401 pack-horses, in Taurus  32; supply train, by Eğin, to Russian front  144; on Silk ̇ and Road by Hosta han to Iliç Kemah  159; in trade between Eğin and Giresun  163; in Kerboğaz 239; Trebizond to Tabriz, by Transit Road  261, 301, 304, 341; Erzerum, over Pontic mountains to Trebizond  296, 313, 326–7, 337–8; from Leri, by Larhan, to Trabzon  314; in winter, east of Erzerum  398–9; and death at Aşutka  144; Zigana pass  310; and around Erzerum  399; rate, 15 miles a day,  261; loads  327, 338; carrying rafts to Eğin  149; stables, at Trebizond 347 in caravans, on Malatya plain  87; from Aleppo to Trebizond  395; at Kara Baba Kaya  105; passing Dostal  180; on Silk Road from Giresun, Şebinkarahisar and Aşkar to Sivas  183; below Ardos  209; Silk Road from Malatya to Trabzon, over Sinibeli ̇ at pass  230; and from Kemaliye to Iliç, Mezraaıhan  231; over Çimen Dağları to Kelkit, at Söğütlü  252; Smyrna to Erivan  261; Trebizond, by Erzerum, to Tabriz  261, 345; at Turnagöl  334; below Karakaban  335 post-horses: at Eskiyol  223, Köse  293; Trebizond  342; and system 398. See also Post carriage-horses: from Tiflis to Poti  368 on horseback, time and distance  385: from ̇ Izolu crossing to Eski Malatya  75; Tohma Su to Kuru Çay  99; Ağın to Bademli  124; Nicopolis to Aşkar 183; Hasanova to Kemah  191; Kemah to Erzincan  206; Erzincan to Sipikör

pass  219; and to Satala  223; Refahiye to Kemah  244; Melik Şerif to Sadak  259; Aşkale to Sadak Çay  262; Sadak to Köse  293; Xenophon cairn to Trabzon  334; Constantinople to Tehran 398–9 beside Samosata aqueduct  18, 21; on ferries, at Samsat  6–7; Birecik  15; Keban  110–11; stocks, around Kelkit  282; high pastures  313, and see Yayla; peril above Bademli  124; north of Eğin  165; led on foot, in Kerboğaz  237–8; and on Koros Dağ above Beşkilise  326; refused for Ainsworth, by kaymakam of Eski Malatya  46; villagers from Zımara, and body of brigand  171; Türkmen  165; pie-bald 232; kulat in colour  325 Hospitality: see Index 1, at Kocan; Venkuk; Killik; Adış; Hirso; Haşkento; Kömürhan; Pirot; Zabulbar; Eğin; Gemho; Abrenk; Navril; Zımara; Mengut; Sadak; above Tekke Hospitals: near Malatya  43; at Kemaliye  154, 162; Russian garrison at Sukhumi  375. See also Health Centre Hot springs: Direk Kale  36; Hamamlık  57; Tilek  67; Çermik (Sartona)  105; Zımara 171; Tekke 304; Ilıca 262 Humidity: Değirmendere valley, and Trabzon  331–2, 345, 401 Hüyüks: Commagene: Horum, near Zeugma  14 Malatya plain: Ağıyabuşagı  78, 84; ̇ Pirot  84–5; Kuluşagı (Ikizhüyük) 86; ̇ Değirmen Tepe  86; Imamoğlu 87; Furuncu 43 north of Malatya: Hüyük Köy  105; Karahüyük  107 n. 5; twin, above Deregezen valley  109; Seracık  112; Körpinik 113–14; Kültepe 119 north of Antitaurus: Şeker Suyu (? Pittiyariga)  143, 176–7; Altın Tepe  177 Hyenas, below Pürk  185 Ibex, in Keban gorge  109 Ice: above Dioscurias, spiked discs and sledges  37, 378; Lucullus, and horses  397; frozen pond at Sebasteia, and Forty Martyrs  91

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

Post  700: Euphrates, frozen at Keban Maden  397; ice cold below Karakaya dam  56; springs, at Direk Kale  35; and Kemaliye  153; track blocked, on Harmancık Dağ  162; in valley below Sipikör pass  219; Fraser, east of Satala  399; route blocked, below Zigana pass  310; on Pontic mountains  325; at Xenophon cairn  333; at Pontic Sebastopolis  397. See also Winter ̇ Imam: of Çatbahce, at Direk Kale  37 Infantry: exercised by Arrian  363; at Hyssou Limen  364; Apsarus  366; Phasis (picked soldiers)  368; Sebastopolis (part-mounted)  375; space for cohort at Cengerli  246; but not at Zindanlar  297; protected in river crossings  119; spearmen, from Rize  364 n. 10. See also Cohorts: Auxiliary garrison Post  700: battalions at Hozat  393. See also Jandarma Infidels: houses (of Armenians)  217; passage of Christians  105, 193–4, 217; writing  270; Taylor at Gemho  137. See also Gâvur Inscriptions: Latin, thus military  175, 270; lost, at Samsat  8 n. 6; and around Nicopolis  187–8 and n. 12; effaced, at Euphrates Gates  11; found and buried, at Killik  55; rumoured, at Midye  64; disappeared, on Körpinik Hüyük  114; turned inwards, or hidden  175, 272, 278; smashed for gold, and built into a wall, at Nicopolis  187; by tradition, on Kurtlu Tepe  247; prized for building, at Sadak  271, 283; removed, to Erzurum museum  272, 283; stolen 272–3. See also Milestones Assyrian: of Shalmanezer III, at Ayni  13 Urartian, cuneiform: of Sardur II, at Hızırtaşı  77, 82, 101 n. 2 Hellenistic: Antiochene, at Gerger Kalesi and Nemrud Dağ  5 and n. 2, 50 n. 8 imperial: Nero, near Harput  95 and n. 20; Vespasian, at Harmozica  263–4 and n. 4; Domitian, at Dascusa  120; and beside Caspian  263 and n. 4; Trajan, at Artaxata  15, 264 and n. 8, 405; and

507

Iron Gates, on Danube  11; Hadrian, at Trapezus  352 and n. 26; and Sebastopolis  375 and n. 21; Severus, at Chabina bridge  31–2 and n. 1, 406; and Melik Şerif  248 and n. 8, 406; to Julia Domna, at Nicopolis  187; and Satala  264 and n. 11; Decius, at Sabrina bridge  181 and n.  9; Gallienus, at Satala  265 and n. 12, 272; Aurelian, at Satala  265 and n. 12, 270; Justinian, at Trapezus  352 and n. 33 governors: of Cappadocia: Corbulo, near Harput  95 and n. 20; Pompeius Collega  122 n. 3, 249, 404; Caesennius Gallus, at Dascusa  120 and n. 3, 405; Catilius Severus, at Zimara  175, 405; Arrian, at Sebastopolis  375 and n. 21; of Galatia, Rutilius Gallicus  207 legionary: altar at Samosata (XVI FF)  6 n. 6; opus cochliae, at Ayni (III Gallica)  13; bridge over Karasu, at Habeş (IV Scythica)  13 and n. 9; quarry, at Ehnes (IV Scythica)  14; castellum at Eski Hisar (IV Scythica)  15; Chabina bridge (XVI FF)  31–2 and n. 1; below Harput (III Gallica)  95 and n. 20; stelae at Satala (XVI FF, XV Apollinaris)  264 n. 7–8; Trapezus (XII Fulminata, XV Apollinaris)  352 and n. 25; Kainepolis (XV Apollinaris, XII Fulminata)  263, 406; Artaxata (IV Scythica)  15, 405; Harmozica (? XVI FF)  263–4 and n. 4, 404; above Caspian, at Büyük Taş (XII Fulminata)  263 and n. 4, 405; Syrian Apamea (II Parthica)  97 n. 17. See also Tiles auxiliary: at Dascusa  120 and n. 3; Zimara  176 and n. 7; Cengerli  246; Melik Şerif  248 and n. 8; and see Alae: Cohorts: Tiles other: to god of Doliche, at Pirun  25; altar of Apollo, rebuilt by Candidus, and statue of Zeus, statue base of Apollo Epekoos, and treasury built by priests of Zeugma, at Direk Kale,  33, 35–6 and n. 3; at Melitene  93 and n. 17; fragments at Pağnık Öreni  120 and

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

508 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Inscriptions (Cont.) n. 3; altar of Jupiter, at Zimara  175; at Nicopolis  187 and n. 12; at Satala  264–5, 270–3 and n. 16; at Trapezus  345, 349, 354, 357 and n. 32 metrical: at Direk Kale  36 rock-cut: at Ehnes  14–15 and nn. 12–13; Habeş bridge  13 and n. 9; Euphrates gates  11; at Pirun  25 and n. 21; Arsameia ad Euphraten  5 and n. 2, 50 n. 8; ? castle above Killik  56; tomb of Athenais, at Hastek Kale  116; Eski Arabkir  126 n. 2; Sabrina bridge  181 Christian: on Kara Mağara köprü 116; above Bademli  124; Mendürgü  141; Nicopolis  187; Satala  270; Trapezus, of Justinian  352, 357.and n. 33. Byzantine: Kara Magara köprü  116; at Satala 270 Post  700: Ottoman, outside Eski Malatya  44; Arabic, han at Denizli  112; bridge at Bismişen  162; fragments at Erzincan Kale  214; Turkish, church at Kemaliye  154; Cufic, fragments at Erzincan Kale  214 Insects: cicadas  191; fleas  143; flies  124; locusts 165; mosquitoes 207–8, scorpions 154 efficacy of garlic, against lice, nits, and scorpions  173. See also Bees Iron: chain of Alexander’s bridge, at Zeugma  14; mined by Chalybes, in Pontic mountains  306, 356; anchor of the Argo, at Phasis  368; Gates, on Danube  11, 239 Post  700: bridges, over Değirmendere 71; over Euphrates, near Albanian han  145; and at Lordin  177; stained rocks, in Taurus  41; mines, at Maden hanları  322; roofs, galvanised and corrugated, at Kemaliye  153; and Sadak 283 Islands, islets: appearing in Euphrates, an omen for Lucullus  80; meeting of Gaius Caesar and Parthian king  404 Post  700: tall, and permanent beside Malatya plain  75, 80; shifting, at ̇ Imamoğ lu  87; below Morhamam  101, 103; shifting, opposite Muşar Dağ 80, 103; numerous, at Çermik  105

Jandarma, commandos: Ahmet Demirtaş, guide and escort, in Erzincan  190, 205, 257; arrest, with lunch, at Ermelik  204; and with tea, at Vazgirt  219; avoided, below Kerboğaz  236; and at Sadak  273; questions at Kemaliye  166–7; nervous above Diştaş and below Kurtklu Tepe  226; too close at Zindanlar  298; worried, at Zigana pass  333; accident on Acemoğlu bridge  206; death in Dersim 152 operational areas and boundaries  182, 225–6, 238, 244; training, duties, and fitness  194, 226, 244; nervousness of PKK, on Vank and Gülan Dağ  198; ambushed by PKK near Alp Köy  207; attacked at Balahor  257; maps  3, 226 commanders,  271: host, at Kömürhan  78, of mounted operation in Sarıçiçek ̇ and map  226; at Dağları  152; at Iliç, Kuruçay, and wild boars  227; lunch at Ermelik  204; tea and cakes at Armudan  183; with Special Team, at Monkare, above Kömür Çay  205; reluctant approval at Refahiye  226, 238–9; at Kelkit, acting kaymakam  271, 288; Gümüşhane 330 sergeants  226: with Special Team in Gâvuroluğu, and village guards  194–6; above Diştaş  226, 239, 241; at Gümüşakar, and picnic at Diştaş 231, 239, 241; below Kurtlu Tepe  226, 244; above Melik Şerif 251 ̇ 226, 233; escorts  226, 244, 251; from Iliç  Kuruçay  226; Gümüşakar 226; Refahiye  226, 233; and Kemah  226; at Hasanova  191–2; towards Kerboğaz  233, 236, 239; around Refahiye  226; above Melik Şerif  251; at Sadak  272 road blocks, at Gümüşakar 231; Dumanlı 207; Dörtyol 222 See also Karakol: Special Teams Javelins: of cavalry, at Hyssou Limen  364 Post  700: of Kurds  391 Jeep: in Taurus  46; at Ağın  112–13; in Antitaurus  131, 162 Jewish revolt, and siege of Jerusalem  5, 50 n. 7, 90, 114 and n. 3

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

Journeys: from Sardis to Susa  80, 389; of nomads across Caucasus  377; of Hadrian  185, 264 and n. 9, 327, 349; Arrian  327, 349, 361–2, 406; Constantius II  33 Post  700: from Constantinople to Erzerum and Tabriz  260–2; and of Consular Tatar  389; by raft from Murat to Gerger  49; from Erzincan to Persian Gulf  149 and n. 10; annual, of Dürsü Nezir, with bees, from Maçka to Sipikör  221; of bee-keepers from Trabzon to Yurtlar Dere  294–5; of Hacar Akyüz, with flocks, from Trabzon to Tekke yayla  317; of Celal Yılmaz, from Trabzon to Kolat  327; of families, with hazel nuts, from Çağlayan to Maden hanları  322; of father of Abdurrahman Yavuz, with horses, from Trabzon to Erzerum  337–9. See also Travel times, and Annex D (Travellers) Kaldırım, agger: known as ‘Sultan Murat Caddesi’  181; of Aleppo road, lost, in Çermik Mahallesi  105; near Deregezen  108; above and below Körpinik Hüyük  113–14; above Bademli  124; in Antitaurus  133, 193; of Silk Road, ‘red cobbled’, and stepped, below Hapanos  140, 145–6, 148; over Pelitsirti pass  182, 190; over Sinibeli pass  182; above Kökseki  254; eastern slopes of Çimen Dağları  182, 258. See also Agger: Sultan Murat Caddesi Post  700: Greek, near Zindanlar  298; Russian, at Meşeiçihanı  336; Boztepe ridge  342, 347–8. Kale (castle): Commagene: Rum  14; above Eski Kâhta  5 n. 2; Direk  33–7 and n. 3, 406; Gerger  5 and n. 2, 46 and n. 3, 50–1 and n. 8 Taurus: Peraş  39 n. 5 Cappadocia: Sis  79; Cafer  79; Battal Gazi  103; Hastek  116, 118; opposite Egin, Venk  159 Armenia Minor: Cengerli  246; Erzincan  211–14; Ağa 295 Pontus and coast: Kale (Kovans)  295–6; Şon  315; Hortokop  337–8; Araklı  364 n. 9

509

Kaleş (Kalashnikov): see Guns Karakol, jandarma barracks  225: in Commagene, above Ziyaret Dere  24; in Cappadocia, guard post at Kömürhan  79; at Furuncu  43; and Kemaliye  166–7; beyond Euphrates, at ̇ 225; in Armenia Minor, at Iliç  Armudan  183, 225; Kuruçay  225–7; Gümüşakar  225, 231, 239; Refahiye 225, Kemah  201, 225; Ermelik  204–5, 225; Alp Köy 225; Erzincan 219; Dörtyol 222; Kelkit  271; in Pontus, at Gümüşhane  330; Zigana pass  308, 310; Trabzon  332, 342. See also Jandarma Kayik crossings: see also Ferries: and Maps 5–6, 8–13 (Kayik geçidi) Commagene: east of Kâhta Çay  22 Taurus gorge: at Taraksu  53; near Killik  54–5; below Deyro  57, 61; Çünküş ferry, north of Haburman  58– 9, 61; below Midye  64 Cappadocia, 104: Zeyikhan 78; Pirot 75, 85; Kuluşağı  75, 86; Kilisik  75, 86; Sinanlı  99; mouth of Kuru Çay  100; and of Eleki Çay  104; north of Çermik  105; mouth of Söğütlü Dere  108; below Levenge  108 Antitaurus gorge: Eğin 155 Kaymakam (district governor): absent, at Pütürge  42; Ağın  112; Kemaliye, ̇ 10; formerly, at Namik Günel  154; Iliç  Kuruçay  226; and at Gercenis  232; Refahiye, Cahit Iş̇ ik  226, 232, 238, 249; Kemah  201; acting, at Kelkit, Ali Yalınkılıç  271, 273. See also Kaza Kaza (district): Pütürge  42; Ağın 112; ̇ 225; Kuruçay, and Kemaliye  162; Iliç  villages  225, 229, 392; Gercenis, and villages  232 and n. 4; Refahiye  225, 246, 392; Kemah  226, 244, 392; Divriği  225, 392; Koçkiri  225, 231 n. 2, 392; elevation of Kale  78. See also Kaymakam Kelek: see Rafts Kermanji: Kurdish dialect, spoken between Tillo and Tohma Su  63, 104. See also Zaza Kervansaray (caravanserai): Karahan, at Eski Malatya  92, 394

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

510 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Kidnapping, by PKK  172 Kings: see also Client kings Assyrian, Shalmanezer III  13, 81, 89, 403; Tiglath-Pileser III  77; Urartian, Sardur II  82, 89, 403; and of Militia  82, 89 Parthian,  389; Phraates IV  403; Phraataces  404; Vologaeses I  5, 379, 404; Artabanus V  406 Sassanian (Persian),  378; Narses  407; Cavades 407 Armenian, Artaxias II  404; son of Sapor  406; and (Post 700)  397 Iberian,  379, 403, 406 Albanian 403 of Batanaea and Trachonitis, Iulius Agrippa II  50 n. 7; Edessa, Abgarus  17; Sophene,  80; Cappadocia, Ariobarzanes  80; Pontus, Mithridates I  345; Mithridates VI Eupator  199, 345, 403; and Polemon I and II  346; Bosporus, Pharnaces  367 River Euphrates  13; ‘king’s grave’, at Diştaş 239 Kızılbaş (Alevi Kurds): ‘redhead’  391; Ali, and head of Hussein  210; Aghas of village below Muşar Dağ  101; north of Kuru Çay  104: in Antitaurus, encamped above Gemho  136–7; Dersim tribes  203, 391; and brigands, near Zımara  171; in mountain villages, around Erzincan  210; at ? Gemho  227; Çalolar  236; Diştaş 239; and Mecidiye  219; children  289; cemevi in Çimen yayla  255; mistrust of Sunnis in Erzincan vilayet 219; character, and violence  104, 137, 171, 203, 391; mounted, with weapons  391; chiefs, seyyids and feads  101, 391; religion, and sympathy to Christians  391–2; favoured by Bektashi Dervishes 129. See also Kurds Korean War: veterans  71, 112 Kurds, Kurdish: Carduchi, and Xenophon  391; indigenous population in Dersim, from pre-Christian Pagan stock  226, 391 Post  700: Alevi Zaza villages beside Samosata aqueduct  18, 21; Samsat  7; Hallan  17; below Taurus  25; at Direk Kale  35–6; ? Aliçeri  38; ? Kanigol  41;

Deyro  57; Haburman  57–8; appearance  21, 25, 36; Sunni, at Alidam  50; Pütürge  46; Haşkento  66; Husukani  67; Şiro Çay to Kömürhan  70; Kuluşağı 86 Alevi in Dersim  391; watched from Erzincan  211; and ‘work of death’  152; depredations, at Eski Malatya  91; raiding corn, below ̇ 193; driving off sheep and Iliç  buffaloes, at Karakulak  262; rebellion in Taurus  46; astride road from Eski Malatya to Sivas  99; uprisings, Koçkiri-Dersim (1921)  225–6, 392, 408; Sheikh Seyyid Reza (1937)  392, 408; SOE interest  392 rafts of logs, and skins  73, 106; tribes and summer grazing, in Antitaurus  134, 152, and see Index 2. 4; dialects  391; Zaza spoken south of Tillo, and opposite Kuru Çay  63 104; Kurmanji, between Tillo and Tohma Su  63, 104; tensions with Turks  63; and fear  68; concern about western support  271–2; chief, sympathetic to Armenians at Eğin  154; politician, Hayrullah Temur  71–2, 78–9 and n. 2, 81–2, 85–6; guides, Ahmet Aykan, in Taurus  38–40; Aziz Aydoğmuş, below Morhamam  99–101, 104–5; muleteer, Hasan Atmaca, in Taurus gorge  46, 55, 65, 67. See also Kızılbaş: Shia: Sunni: Tribes: Villages Lamps, and gas bottles: on camels from Trabzon to Erzincan  293 Landslides: above Şiro Çay  40; below Bekiran  71; above Çanakçı  135; Nezgep, and above Kürtler Dere  195, 197; Sinibeli pass  231; valleys above Zevker Dere  251; opposite Mecidiye, below Sipikör pass  215; Harşit valley and Transit Road  301, 305, 307; above Leri  314; Tekke  317; Hortokop  337; and Trabzon  347 Language: Armenian, spoken at Nicopolis and Arauraca  186, 207; three hundred Caucasian languages spoken at Dioscurias 374. See also Greek

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

Post  700: German, spoken at Rişkân 251; Greek-speaking Muslims, in valley of Karum Dere  324, 326; Turkish, poorly spoken by Kurds in Taurus gorge  45–6; in description of Greek inscriptions  114, 247; and of Latin  247; Kurdish, see Kermanji: Zaza Lant (Landrover), of jandarma  191, 244, 251, 272 Lead, argentiferous: mines, at Keban  111; in Pontic mountains, and at Eski Gümüşhane 356 Legates, of legions: Licinius Mucianus, in Dersim  170, 176, 404; Bruttius Praesens (VI Ferrata)  37; Severus (IV Scythica)  6, 15; Fabius Cilo (XVI Flavia Firma)  6 and n. 4; ignotus (IV Scythica), at Nicopolis  15 and n. 13; prefect, Trocundus (I Pontica)  356 Legends: Argonauts, in Colchis  394; and anchor, at Phasis  368; Castor and Pollux, ancestors of the Heniochi  374; head of Hussein  210; Prometheus, on Mt Strobilos  374; and Titans, passing Phasis  367; Rain Miracle  91, 406; Forty-Five Martyrs  185; St Orentius and six brothers  265 See also Martyrs Post  700: stones, bleeding on Fridays, near Keferdis  68; tunnel under Euphrates, from Körpinik Hüyük  113; churches, at Tanusa  121; wooden bridge, and ‘hill of the Three Holy Children’, at Pingan  173, 175; treasure, and ‘king’s grave’, near Diştaş  239; structures and inscriptions on Kurtlu Tepe  247; treasure beneath Tekke  304; descendents of the Ten Thousand, in Karum Dere valley  326 Legions: I Minervia: Verus’ Armenian war and across the Darial pass  380 and n. 26, 406 I Pontica: raised by Diocletian  407; in Cilicia  356; at Trapezus  354, 356 and n. 29 II Parthica; inscriptions at Syrian Apamea  97 n. 17 III Gallica: opus cochliae, at Ayni  6, 13; ? stationed at Zeugma  27 n. 4 IV Scythica: transfer from Moesia  14, 28 n. 7; at Zeugma  14; under Nero, crosses Taurus to join Caesennius Paetus  14;

511

under Trajan, at Artaxata  15, 264, 405; commanded by Severus at Zeugma  6, 15; legate, at Nicopolis  15; constructs Habeş bridge, over Karasu  13, 15; stele at Samosata  15; ­vexillations, ? with Virdius Geminus  346 and n. 17; in Ehnes quarries  14–15; and building castellum at Eski Hisar 15 VI Ferrata: ? at Samosata  6 and n. 4; Trajan’s Armenian war, under Bruttius Praesens 37 XII Fulminata: transfer from Raphaneae, to Melitene  89–90, 404; fortress  92–3; stamped tile  90 and n. 13; legionary ­cemetery  93; veterans, and colony  90; Velius Rufus, primus pilus  5 and n. 3; centurion above Caspian Gates 263and n.  4, 405; work on road from Caesarea  94 and n. 18; Trajan’s Armenian war  264, 405; detachment in Dacia, and Rain Miracle  91, 406; Christian soldiers, revolt in Melitene, and Forty Martyrs  91, 407; vexillations, ? with Virdius Geminus  90 and n. 12, 346 and n. 17, 404; in Arrian’s army, against Alani  264 406; at Trapezus  352; and at Kainepolis  263– 4 and n. 4, 406 XV Apollinaris: transfer from Carnuntum, to Satala  264; replacing XVI Flavia Firma  405; fortress  267–70; stamped tiles  264, 270, 375–7; coin and emblem  265; countermarks  121, 264; personnel  264 and n. 8; inscriptions, and cemetery  270–1 and n. 16, 281; ? at Rişkân  251; veterans, and ? colony  264–5; Trajan’s Armenian war  264; core of Arrian’s army, against Alani  264, 406; Severianus  264, 406; vexillations, at Trapezus  264–5, 352, 355, 406; ? Apsarus  366 and n. 13; ? Sebastopolis  375–6; Pityus  375, 377; Kainepolis  263–4 and n. 4; Christian legionaries, St Orentius  265; and at Nicopolis 186 XVI Flavia Firma: transfer from Syria to Satala  263, 404; canal, at Antioch  263 n. 6; personnel  264 and n. 6, 285 n. 16, 366; walls at Harmozica  404; road

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

512 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Legions (Cont.) building, in Armenia Minor  264; Trajan’s Armenian war  264; transfer to Samosata  6 and n. 4, 264, 405; altar, and stamped tiles, at Samsat  7; and Tille  50 and n. 7; repairs Chabina (and ? Singe) bridge  13, 21, 31 and n. 1, 406; legate, Fabius Cilo  6 and n. 4 Levies: Syrian  5; from Rize  364 n. 10 Liburnians: see Ships Lice, and garlic  173 Lighthouses (pharos), at Trapezus  351–2; Alexandria  352; Boulogne  352 n. 24; Dover  352 and n. 24 Lime, and cement: ‘Horasan mortar’, in Venk bridge  155; cement, at Satala  267, 269; and bed for mosaics  273; lining of cisterns, at Tekke  304; scale, on water pipes  222, 275 Post  700: covering inscription, at Nicopolis  187; quarry, above Değirmendere 342; shore-side factory, at Trabzon  327, 331; disease of bees  221 Limes: see Frontier Limestone, outcrops, rubble and sarcophagi, at Samosata  4; 6, 9; below Gerger Kalesi  50–1; in Taurus gorge  45; cliffs, at Kırman Tepe  43; Keban gorge  109; olive presses, above Bademli  124; blocks, on Mamahar pass  135; Antitaurus gorge  149, 163; foundation blocks of Kemaliye Çay and Venk bridges  152, 157; column bases, at Kemah  201; blocks, inscriptions, and Victory, at Sadak  271, 281; black blocks, at Trapezus  353 Linen, from Colchis  394. Post  700: Zaza smocks  20 Locusts, above Sandık  165 Lycus (Kelkit Çay): see Index 1 ‘Mad honey’: see Bees Maize: fields, below Pürk  185 Manna: oak forests east of Palu, and ? above Hirso  63; and in Kurdistan, sold in Mosul 63 Mansions: Armenian, at Eğin 154; Kuruçay 229; Refahiye 244 Maps: Antonine Itinerary  385–6, 406; Peutinger Table  385, 387, 405; Ptolemy  388, 406

Post  700: reproduced maps: WO, Map  1; AWMC, Maps  2–4; GSGS, Maps  5, 16, 24; Turkish Army, Maps  6–15 and 17–23; place-names  1, 3 other maps: Ottoman surveys  3; travellers (Blau; Brant; Cumont; Hogarth and Yorke; Humann and Puchstein; Huntington; Lehmann-Haupt; Maunsell; Molyneux-Seel; Percy; Strecker; Sykes; Taylor)  419; Deutsche Heereskarte  382 n. 15, 383 n. 20, and see Abbreviations; Pachulia  383 n. 20; Barrington Atlas (Talbert)  428; and see Vilayet, gazetteer: Treasure, hunters Marble: fragments of columns, and block with lost Latin inscription, at Samsat  6–7 and n. 6; fragments, below Nicopolis, and lid of sarcophagus  187; blocks, in houses at Cengerli  245; ’structures and inscriptions’ on Kurtlu Tepe  247; plaque and blocks, at Melik Şerif 248; columns from Giresun, and architrave fragments, at Trapezus  354–5; plaque, at Sebastopolis  375; pits, Marble Gates, and Road east of Gâvuroloğu  190–1, 194–6, 239; bands, above Sandık  165; strata above Kürtler Dere, ̇ and east of Ihtik  195, 199; wall of Munzur Dağları  210; quarries, below Halkevi 289 volcanic marbles, at Kerboğaz  238; and Ağyarlar  318, 321 Marcus’ Column: bridge of boats  8–9; boats and barges  9 Markets: Phasis, for Colchians  367; Aquincum  90 and n. 13 Post  700: at Çanakçı  134; Kemaliye  154; Erzincan  211; for caravans, at Hasanova  191; Alış Yer, by Sadak Çay  223; Mezraaıhan  231; and Beşkilise 306; Constantinople 277; Mosul, and manna  63 Martyrs: St Eugenios  347, 357; St Lucian  6; St Mamas  95 n. 20; St Orentius  265, 362 and n. 4; with Eros  364; Pharnakios 365; Firmus 365; Firminus  365; Kyriakos  371; and Longinus  377; Four, of Sebasteia  211; Five, of Armenia  207, 265; St Eustratius, and St Mardarius  207;

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

Forty, of Sebasteia  91; Forty-Five, of Nicopolis  185–6; martyrion, at Arsamosata  21 n. 17; monastery, at Nicopolis 186. See also Saints Massacres: of Romans, by Mithridates  403; Artaxias I  403; and Anicetus  346, 404 Post  700: Armenian (1895 and 1915)  167 n. 12, 408; near Girik  26; at Çünküş  59; Arabkir  129; Eğin, and surrounding villages  153–4; Gemirgap  154; Pingan  154, 173; district of Kuruçay, eight villages  187– 8; including Armudan  182–3, 227; and Tut and Hasanova  182–3, 192; of Gercenis, five villages  187, 232, 248; including Melik Şerif 248; Kökseki  253; Çatak  254; and Horopol  248; of Kemah, fifteen towns ̇ and villages  204; including Ihtik 198– 9; Sağ  204–5; and Ermelik  204; Kemahboğazı  210; implicit, at Kilisik  86; Kilisilik  103; Ağin 116; around Çit Harabe  126, 129; Babsu Köy  183; Nicopolis, and villages in Aşkar Ova  185; Ardos  208–9; Erzincan  210–11; cities, see Deportations, and convoys; places, see Churches: Treasure Hunters Mass graves: below Girik  26; at Killik  55; Tepehan 39 Mausoleum: at Elif  13–14 Meat, in military diet  400 Post  700: eaten on Muşar Dağ 101; water-buffaloes, at Sadak  283; and altitude sickness  400 Medallion: inscribed, at Tsebeldağ 373 Medicine: miles medicus, of XV Apollinaris, at Trapezus,  264 n. 10; physicians, Dioscorides, ? under Corbulo  173; Crateuas, to Mithridates VI  173; herbs, and plants 173 Memorials: of assassination, at Kemaliye  154; feast, at Kılıççı  288; of defence of Maçka 337 Metropolis: Samosata  6; Melitene  90; Nicopolis  21 n. 17, 185 Post  700: bishop, at Erzincan  211; Colonia 186; Phasis 371 Milestones: Kızılburç  17; Bibo  23, 26, 93, 406; between Melitene and Tohma

513

Su  98; Aşkar  183, 185, 405; Sevindik  250; Ağvanis  250, 407; Sipdiğin (Kondilia)  122 n. 3, 185, 232–3, 249, 405; above Melik Şerif  122 n. 3, 249, 404; Ararat  263, 406 on roads: Apamea to Edessa (Kızılburç)  17; Perre to Melitene (Bibo)  23, 26, 406; Caesarea to Melitene  94 and n. 18; Caesarea to Cilician Gates  94 n. 18; Melitene to Sebasteia (near Tohma Su)  98; Ancyra to Nicopolis, by Neocaesarea, and by Sebasteia  185; Sebasteia and Zimara to Nicopolis (Aşkar)  183, 185, 405; Nicopolis to Karayakup (for Satala, and, by Melik Şerif, for Carsaga) (Sevindik, Ağvanis)  250 and n. 9, 407; Zimara, by Melik Şerif, to Satala (Sipdiğin, Melik Şerif )122 n.  3, 185, 232–3, 249, 405; Satala to Kainepolis (Ararat) 263 Emperors: Vespasian (Melik Şerif); Titus and Domitian  94 and n. 18; Domitian (Sipdiğin); Nerva  94 and n. 18, 185; Trajan  185; Hadrian (Aşkar, Sipdiğin); Marcus and Verus (Bibo, ? Ararat); Severus, Caracalla and Geta (Kızılburç) 94; Diocletian 94; Maximian  94; Constantius Caesar  94; Constantinus junior, Constantius II and Constans (near Tohma Su)  98; Valens (Ağvanis)  250, 407 Governors: Pompeius Collega (Melik Şerif)  122 n. 3, 249, 404; Caesennius Gallus  94 and n. 18, 405; Antistius Rusticus (Sipdiğin)  405; Pomponius Bassus  94 and n. 18, 405; Statorius Secundus (Sipdiğin, Aşkar)  405; Aelius Ianuarius (Kızılburç) uninscribed columns: see Columns Mills: at Eğin 153; Babsu 183; Dersim 392; Cengerli  247; cotton, Armenian, at Vazgirt  215; saw, at Trabzon  356; ‘mill peak’, above Direk Kale  35–6; ‘snake mill’, near Ayvas  70; ‘mill river’  71, 341. See also Water Mines: see Coal: Iron: Salt: Silver Missionaries, at Sivas  59; Harput  59 MIT, in Taurus  41; ridgeway above Melik Şerif 251; Zindanlar 298

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

514 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Monasteries: of Forty-Five Martyrs at Nicopolis 186 Post 700: Armenian, at Venk, opposite Eğin 155; ̇ 161; Surp Krikor Surp Tavor, above Iliç  Lusarovich, south-east of Erzincan  211 ̇ Greek, at Imera 313; Vazelon 337; Trebizond  357; of the Pharos  351–2 Mosaics: south of Zeugma  13; at Zeugma  15; Perre  25; Satala  211, 265, 273–4 Moslem, Mohammedan: sacrifice by, on Muşar Dağ  101; at Eğin  153; exchange of populations 326 Mosques, cami: see also Cemevi at Eski Malatya, Ulucami  92; Eski Arabkir  126 n. 2; Eğin, Ortacami and others 153; Pürk 187; Boyalık 193–4; Kemah, Gülabi Bey Cami  201; Erzincan  211; Sadak  279; Köse, Merkez Cami  293; upper Hurusüfla  295; Meşeiçihanı 336; Hortokop  337; Boztepe, Muradiye Cami  342; Trabzon, Tabakhane  349, 355 converted churches, at Hasanova  192; Leri  314; Trabzon, Yeni Cuma Cami, once St Eugenios  347; Ortahisar Cami, once Chrysokephalos  349, 355 constructed with stones from churches, at Babsu Köy  183; Kirzi, from Bazgu church  230; Refahiye, from Greek church 232–3 new, at Tillo  59; Hanado  72; Erzincan, on Kavakyolu 210; Köse 293; Boztepe 342 Mountains  385, 389. See Index 1, Taurus: Antitaurus: Çimen Dağları: Munzur Dağları: Otlukbeli Dağları: Pontic mountains: Caucasus Mud, muddy,  401: insulation for wooden walls, undamaged in earthquake, at Çukurçimen  251; mud-brick and stone houses, Taraksu  53; Yeni Levenge  108; mud-brick houses, kerpiç, below Samosata aqueduct  18; at Hirso  63; Çermik Mahallesi  104–5; villages around Çit Harabe  126; Lordin  177; Sadak  283; hundreds of villages, destroyed in earthquake  212; roofs, at Eğin  153; and Sadak  283

roads in spring and autumn  396–7; tracks in winter, east of Pirun  26; by Aşutka  144; near Amaseia  398; blocked by mudslides beside Mecidiye Çay  215; by liquid mud beside Harşit  310; girth/deep in autumn, above Maçka  335 in rivers, Euphrates  170; Kuru Çay, ‘muddy river’  99; Söğütlü Dere  108 holy platform, on Muşar Dağ  101; petroleum tar  26 n. 24 Muezzin, at Trabzon  349 n. 21 Muhtar (village headman): at Herdiyan  18; Alaköprü Köy  20; Keferme  27; Seküyan  27; Başmezraa, Hasan ̇ Inanç  40–1; Killik (Barzalo)  55–6; Hirso, Cemal Ay  63; Haşkento, Derviş Muslu  66; Bekiran, Zeyner Bürütekin  70–2, 85; Bademli, Sadettin Özden  124; Hinge  143; Hapanos, Hasan Kızılkaya  145–6, 148, 159; Sandık, Turan  163–5; Zımara, Hasan Demir  172; Dostal, muhtar’s daughter  180; Pürk (Nicopolis) Zikar Koç  187; Hasanova (Analiba)  192; Atma, muhtar’s brother  195; Alp Köy 207; Vazgirt 215; Sipikör 221; Melik Şerif (? Haris), Süleyman Polatlı  226, 241, 249, 251; Kirzi, Murat and Mustafa  230; Gâvuryurdu, Hüseyin Sevin  231; Diştaş  239; Cengerli, Salih Kutlu  246–7; Sadak  272–3, 288; Hurusüfla, Mesut Gök  295; Bahçecik, Rahmi Okur  304, 315, 317; Tekke, Hasan  315, 317; Mollaali (Mochora)  326; Meşeiçi, Şefik Ofluoğlu 336; informant of Strecker, in Erzincan  191 Mulberries: at Midye  64; Kerkinos  64; Haşkento  66; Bekiran, ‘honey mulberries’  71; Eski Malatya  92; below Ergü  146, 148; Eğin 152–3 Mules: on Çünküş ferry  59; pack-mules  165; muleteers’ road through Kerboğaz 234 Post  700: post-mules  70; and snow tunnels 71; baggage-mules 119; speed  163, 261; loads  71, 134, 146, 163, 230–1, 295, 327, 337; hans and stables  338, 347; pack-mules  165; pack-mule villages, Pegir  132–3, 161–2; and Sandık  133, 161, 163, 165; river

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

crossings, of Euphrates, by ferry at Çünküş  59; and Keban  111; by bridge at Pirot  85; and at Eğin  155–6; and by ford, at Pağnık  119; by ford, Şiro Çay  70; engaged in harvest, at Gemho  137; ‘big as a mule’ olive, at Bahce  33 in caravans and trains  146, 163, 230–1, 244, 296, 327; from Pirot to Eski Malatya  87; Aleppo to Arabkir  105; and to Erzincan and Trebizond  395; Sivas to Harput  111; in caravans, Erzerum, by Maden hanları, Kolat, and Karakaban, to Trabzon  296, 298, 321, 327, 335, 337–8; and by Tekke and Harşit valley  304, 312, 345 on roads and tracks: Commagene, on ‘Old Adıyaman Road’  24; Pirun to Cendere bridge  25–6; in Taurus above Avbi  37 Taurus gorge  31, 45, 71–2; at Alidam  50; by Çünküş ferry, and up to Tillo  59; Tillo to Keferdis  63; and, Freya Stark, to Pütürge  46, 60; Keferdis to Kale and Pirot  70–2 Antitaurus gorge, supply train, by Eğin, to Russian front, death at Aşutka, and track  144, 146–8 Antitaurus, near Çanakçı  131; tracks, from Eğin, over Harmancık Dağ, towards Çaltı Çay  136, 162–6; and to Pingan  173; continuing past Dostal  180; and to Armudan  182 Armenia Minor, Silk Road, from Eğin to ̇ 159; continuKemah  392; and to Iliç  ing to Giresun  163; and by Sinibeli pass and Mezraaıhan, to Refahiye  230–1; tracks, from Hasanova, by Kerboğaz and Diştaş, to Refahiye  193, 225, 233–9; from Kemah, by Kömür Çay, to Refahiye  201; by Salt Road and Melik Şerif, to Giresun and Gümüşhane 244–5; and, over Pelitsirti pass, to Erzincan  209; track above Vazgirt  215; and to Sipikör pass  217; beside Sadak Çay  288; and by Köse and Yurtlar Dere to the Harşit 295 Dersim, north of Hozat  392 Pontus, tracks above Cönger  315; and above Tekke  315–17; and from Maden hanları, by Larhan  313–14

515

Silk Road from Giresun, by Şebinkarahisar and Aşkar to Sivas  183. See also Caravan Routes (minor) Murder, of Hussein  210. See also Martyrs Post  700: Col. Atilla Altıkat, remembered at Kemaliye  154; at Acıhalılan  18; Zımara  172; of Armenians, at Armudan and Hasanova  182–3; of travellers by Kurds, east of Satala  262. See also Massacres Museums: Elazığ  116 n. 6; Malatya, Baki Yığıt  44, 92–3 and n. 17; Kemaliye, ethnographic 154; Erzincan 265; Trabzon, Ayasofya  354–5; and new  355; Erzurum, Mesüt Güngör  272 and n. 16, 281, 283; Sukhumi  375; British  277–8; acquisition of inscriptions, and fraud,  272 Muslim: shrine, above Keklik Pınar Mevki  42; travellers  105; theological colleges, medrese, at Eğin  153; households, and villages of Kuruçay  183, 187–8; and of Gercanis  188; inhabitants and burials at upper Ardos  208–9; families at Melik Şerif  248; Greek-speaking, in valley of Karum Dere  326; resettled from Greece  185, 408; non-Muslims, Armenians, at Armudan  188; invited to convert, at Kemah  230 Nails: in construction of pontoon bridges  81; salvaged from shipwreck, by Arrian 356; camarae, built without  361 n. 2 Navigation: Euphrates: Hittite boat and ships  143, 176, 403; Zimara to Melitene,  86–7, 105, 116, 119, 149–50, 176, 404; Taurus Gorge  47; from above Samosata  8–9; under oars  9; absence of towpath  9; rivers in Colchis  362 Euxine: ships under sail, seen by Xenophon  344; aids, and lighthouses  352; by night  367, 374; day and night  367; under oars  365; under sail and oars  362 and n. 5, 365; Adriatic 347. See also Index 1, Euxine Post 700: see Rafts (kelek): Rapids; Sea routes: and Index 1, Black Sea: Euphrates: Murat N.: Tigris

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

516 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Necropolis: at Turus (Tarsa)  11; Perre  24–5 and n. 21; Pağnık  118; Tsebeldağ 373 and n. 20 No-roz (Nowruz), vernal equinox  399 Notitia Dignitatum  264, 407; units in Taurus gorge  70; Cappadocia  103, 129; Armenia Minor  176, 207, 214, 264; Pontus  310; Pontic coast  363–4 Nuts: gall-nuts, from oak forests above Commagene  4; and east of Palu,  63; hazel nuts, from Giresun  163; Çağlayan  322, 324; Black Sea  231, 357; walnuts, at Midye  64; and Ergu 148 Nymphaeum, at Trapezus  353. See also Index 1, Arsameia ad Nymphaeum Occupation: evidence of Roman, at Barzalo  55–6; no trace, in Malatya plain  75; layers, at Samosata  4; and Eski Malatya  92, 94; Trabzon  344; burned,at Direk Kale  36 Oil: see Greek fire: Olives Post  700: oilfields, north of Samosata  4, 26 and n. 24; at Baku, Majkop and Grozny  380; oil seeds, in Aşkar Ova  185; fish oil, at Trabzon  357 ‘Old . . . Road’ (‘Adıyaman’, ‘Baghdad’, ‘Russian’, ‘Samsat’, ‘Water Buffalo’). See Roads Olives: tree, at Çatbahçe  33; at Direk Kale  33; around Melitene  89–90; oil presses, and ancient cultivation, near Ağın, and at Bademli  90 n. 10, 116, 124; wild, oleasters, at Eski Malatya  90; and above Ağın 116 Omens: at crossing of Euphrates, Lucullus  80; Lucius Vitellius  13 Oppida: celebrated in Armenia Minor, Caesarea, (H)aza and Nicopolis  247; Trapezus  356; Pityus  356, 376 and n. 22 Opus cochliae, at Ayni  6 n. 4, 13 and n. 10 Oracle, ? at Direk Kale  36; Hierapolis  36 Orchards: plain of Ermelik  203; below Ardos  207; beside Harşit and Baghdad bridge  299; apricots, near Kale  78; apricots and peaches, at Eski Malatya  90; mulberries, below Ergü  146; apples, above Tekke  317

Ottoman: place-names  1; maps, and surveys  3; script, and inscriptions  44, 326; ? vanished town near Rustuşağı  86; tax, and exemption, at Melik Şerif 248; empire  89, 306, 391; 4th Army Corps, at Erzincan  89, 211; battalions, at Eski Malatya  89; and Hozat  392; irregulars  204, 248; army defeated at Sarıkamış  408; interests in the Caucasus  211; security of route to Tabriz  308; wagon road from Harput to Mesopotamia  389. See also Bridges: Caravans: Caravan Routes: Cemeteries, Moslem: Crossings: Hans: Post, roads: Sultans: Turks Oxen, Ox: at Nicopolis  21 n. 17, 186; ox-hide, in shields captured by Xenophon  329; plates, as snowshoes, above Dioscurias  37, 378 Post  700: drawing carriages, over Surami pass  368; drawing carts  133 n. 8; and at Sadak  283; vast herds, in plain of Çiftlik  282; ox-dung (tezek), at Rişkan  251; Sadak  283, 399; Erzerum  283, 399 Pack animals: see Camels: Horses: Mules Pagan worship: populations converted to Christianity, and sites marked by churches  188; ? tropaeum Neronis (at Kesrik, below Harput)  95 and n. 20; Sabus (Çit Harabe)  127, 129, 131; Teucila (Geruşla)  152; Zimara ̇ (Pingan)  175; Sinervas (Ihtik) 188, 198–9; Carsaga (Sağ)  188, 204–5; Arauraca (Ardos)  207–9; cults, at Trapezus  357; Dersim Kurds, and Kızılbaş 391 Papyrus: mention of cohort, at Apsarus  367 ̇ Pasha: Hafiz, Ibrahim, and Reshid Mohammed, see Index 2. 3; Paşa mezraası, below Mamahar pass  135–6; Pasha of Sadak, and milk pipes  276; pashalik of Sivas  182; and of ‘Erzeroom, Kharpoot, Diarbekir, Moosh and Van’  284 n. 15; harem of Pasha of ‘Moush’  310; caravan of Pasha of ‘Erzeron’  345 Passes, see Index 1 Sophene: Ergani

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

Taurus: Kubbe Tepe Antitaurus: Mamahar Armenia Minor: Sinibeli; Arpayazıbeli; Savaşgediği; Ziyaret (above Refahiye); Pelitsirti; Çardaklu; Ahmediye; Sipikör Dersim: Hostabeli; Ziyaret (above Kemah); Mercan; Boğazvankomu Armenia: Kop; Vavuk Pontus: Zigana Iberia and Colchis: Surami Caucasus: Achun Dara; Anchxa; Maroukh; Klukor; Passimta; Mamisson; Darial; Kodor; Salavat Alps Pastures: see Yayla Peoples: see also Arabs; Assyrians; Persians; Urartians, Index 2. 1; and Mongols, Index 2.  4 Persecutions, of Christians: Decius (AD 249-51)  406; in frontier garrisons, Diocletian (AD 303)  91, 207, 357, 407; Galerius Maximianus (AD 306-11)  265, 362, 407; Licinius (c. AD 320)  91, 186, 407 Post 700: see Armenians Persian Royal Road: see Roads Peutinger, Peutinger Table  385, 387, 405; roads, from Ancyra, by Comana Pontica and Lycus valley, to Nicopolis  259; from Nicopolis, by Draconis (Çimen Dağları) to Satala  259; from Samosata to Zeugma  11; and to Perre  23; through Taurus Gorge  22, 45, 50, 70; over Antitaurus  122, 126, 138, 165, 169; Zimara to Nicopolis  182–3; and through and over mountains, to Satala  182, 225, 227, 229, 231–2, 243, 247, 249–50, 252, 254–5, 259, 393; Satala, by Domana and over Pontic mountains, to Trapezus  287, 293, 296, 309, 313–14, 317, 321, 323, 325, 336, 339, 393; Trapezus, along coast, to Sebastopolis  362, 364–5 and n. 13; Sebastopolis to Artaxata  375; Satala to Artaxata  260, 263; Armenian ­villages  188 Pilgrimage, and veneration: of Euphrates  13; and Dioscuri  374 and n. 21 Post  700: Armenians  129, 204, 209, 274; Kızılbaş  391; Kurds 56; Muslims 24;

517

40–1, 229–30, 274, 304; ‘men of all religions’  101. See also Türbe: Ziyaret Pipes, terracotta: at Pirun (Perre)  25; Killik (Barzalo)  55; Zabulbar  140; Çit Harabe (Sabus)  129; Hasanova (Analiba)  192; Cengerli (? Caesarea)  247; Sadak (Satala)  275; and pressure junctions  275; Hurusüfla  295; Hortokop  337; ‘Milk pipes’, leading to Sadak  221–3, 275–6 and n. 17; at Pergamum  276 n. 17; Argentoratum  277; not at Eski Malatya  92; and Lordin  177; ? siphon, at head of Samosata aqueduct  21; drain, at Gonio  367 Pirates: on Euxine  346; ? looters at Phasis 367. See also Ships, camarae PKK  408: transit routes from Dersim  226; by Kerboğaz  234, 238–9; north from Horopol  244–5; across Çardaklu pass  243; active below Sipikör pass  271; refuge on Gülan Dağ 198, 239; ambush near Alp Köy  207, 246; and at Balahor  246, 257; battle at Alidam  50; and in Maçka  340; prison near Zindanlar  298 task of jandarma  226; wary of Harmancık Dağ  167; nervousness in Erzincan  190 and n. 1; real threat  226; operations in Dersim  244; alarm at Gümüşakar 231; suspicion, at Sadak  283; not PKK, but village guards, above Boyalık  194; and boar hunters, above Lycus  292 See also Jandarma Place-names: Hittite  126, 143, 176–7; ancient survivals, in villages  3; geographical features  3, 254; in geographers, confirmed by Ptolemy  227, 296, 385 Post  700: spelling  1, 340 and n. 1: old names on maps, and suspicion  226; new names, and confusion  1, 3, 26, 50; above Tekke  317 and n. 3 Plains: glacial  162; summer heat  395; flood  132, 219; Urfa  56; Cilician  94; Harput  80, 95, 118, 120 Commagene and Taurus: at Samosata  7, 32; north-eastern Commagene  22, 25, 27, 390, 396; Avbi  37; beside Gerger Çay  54 and n. 9 Cappadocia: Malatya, east  42, 49, 75, 78–9, 86–7, 390, 394; west  95; around Eski

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

518 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Plains (Cont.) Malatya  90–1; and north  101, 103–4, 106, 108, 119, 390; below Aşutka 126 Antitaurus: above Ösneden  132–4, 162; above Hotar  165 Armenia Minor: significance of Armenian villages and plains  188; mouth of Şeker Suyu (? Pittiyariga)  177; Armudan  182–3; Tapurs  183; Babsu  183; Aşkar Ova  183, 185, 250, 283, 393; below Gemho  227; Refahiye  225, 232, 393; Gâvuroluğu  190, 193–4, ̇ 234; Ihtik 198–9; Ermelik 203–4, 243; Ardos  209; Sürerek  209; Erzincan  122, 177, 190, 206–7, 210–13, 215, 217–19, 225, 251, 259, 267, 392–3, 395, 403; above Mecidiye  219; Satala  267; Kelkit  267, 279, 282–3; Mormuşdüzü, between Lycus and Acampsis  293 Pontic mountains: Karabağa düzü, west of Turnagöl 334; Karakaban 334–5 Pontic coast: Devedüzü, near Trebizond  342; not continuous  344; Gonio 367; Phasis 369–71; Colchis  362, 366, 369, 373, 377, 378–9, 393–4 Erzurum  260, 262, 264; Pasinler  263; Armenian, around Artaxata  263 Plans, and operations: Wonderful  75 n. 1; Case Blue  379; Operation Barbarossa 379; Edelweiss 380–1; military, in winter  397; around Sarıkamış 398 Poison: Mithridates VI, and Crateuas  173 Police: post, Antitaurus, at Mamahar pass  135 Post  700: involved, with Representative  330; side-lined, in Malatya  42; and Gümüşhane  330; on horseback, Sarıçiçek Dağları  152; informer, at Ermelik  204; suspicious, in Erzincan  226; seize coin, at Sadak  265; Gümüşhane  306 n. 2; secret escort, on edge at Maden hanları  322; and Kolat  330; House, and suspicion, in Trabzon  329, 355; following car, in Georgia  363 Pontic tribes: clients: see Index 2. 1, Colchi (king, Aristarchus); Sanni, Drillae; Machelones

(Anchialus); Heniochi (Anchialus); Zydreitae; Lazi (Malassas); Apsilae (Iulianus); Sagrae; Abasci (Resmagas); Sedochezi; Sanigae (Spadagas); Zilchi (Stachemphax); in Cimmerian Bosporus (Cotys) other: see Index 2. 1, Tzani; Macronians; Heptokometae Porcupines, above Sandık  165 Post: establishment, and system  398; with horses  223, 293, 342, 398; ­camels 293; mules 70; swimming 70; snow tunnels  71; hours and speed  398; post houses, east of Sadak  262; post roads and tracks, Keferdis to Malatya  70; Kemah to Kuruçay and Zara  201, 229, 233–4 and n. 5, 236; Erzincan, by Sadak and Köse, to Trabzon  215, 219–21, 223, 288, 290, 293–4, 301, 307 (known as ‘Old Russian Road 220, 294); Constantinople to Teheran  398 and n. 15; Samsun to Baghdad  89 Pottery: Neolithic: at Seracık  112 Bronze Age: at Samuka  143; Sağ (Kömür Köy)  205. See also Hüyüks Roman, and undetermined: at Samsat  7; around Taraksu  53; above crossing of Şiro Çay  40; Eski Malatya  92; Karahüyük  108 n. 5; Körpinik Hüyük  113; guard post, above Bahadın bridge  116; Pağnık Öreni  120; Kilise Yazısı Tepe  121; Bademli  124; Ençiti  141; Çit Harabe  129; Handeresi 132; Hasanova 192; ̇ Ihtik  198; Sağ (Kömür Köy)  204–5; below Pürk  187; Cengerli  246; below Halkevi  289; northern hillside, at Satala  280; tower above Lycus  290; Şon Kale  315. See also Pipes none at Midye  64; in Kuluşağı and adjacent villages  86; on mound above Deregezen valley  109; at Tanusa  121; Çanakçı (? Vereuso)  135; Yürük camp (? Zenocopi)  136; Canlı Çeşme 137; inside Erzincan Kale  214; in gordin above Diştaş  240; Ağa Kalesi  295 Post  700: Byzantine, at Samuka  143; Selcuk, near Rustuşağı  86; Sağ (Kömür Köy) 204

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

Praesidia: castra, Barzala and (C)laudias  46 and n. 2, 56–7, 61; on Corbulo’s supply route, in Pontic mountains  263, 297; ? Ağa Kalesi  295. See also Forts Prefects: of ala I Dacorum, Iulius Crispus  214 and n. 14; coh. I Bosporiana, Aemilius Pius 207 and n.  9; Lamprocles  207; IV Raetorum, Daphnis  193; royal fleet, Anicetus  346; I Pontica, Trocundus  356; fire brigade, at Aquincum  90 n. 13; slain by barbarians 361 Procurators: of Osrhoene  17 Provincial: forces  404; boundaries  182, 304; ? Gopal Tepe  38; stone, in Osrhoene  17; coins  25 n. 21: capital, of Commagene, Samosata  4; Cappadocia, Caesarea  94; Galatia, Ancyra  185; Pannonia Inferior, Aquincum  90 n. 13 Quarries: at Ehnes  14–15; for Samosata aqueduct  18; worked rocks, above Şiro Çay  40; from Kırman Tepe, for Melitene  43; blocks at Satala  269; and in tower above Lycus  290; columns, from Giresun  354 Post 700: robbing, of walls, at Samosata  7; of Samosata aqueduct  21–2; of agger, above Körpinik Hüyük  113; and below Antitaurus 132 modern: near Horopol  245; marble, below Halkevi  289; Cinderek  291; Keci Dere, above Harşit  296; lime, above Değirmendere  342; source of dynamite 114 Quays: at Horum (? Urima), near Zeugma  14; and probably at Samosata  9; ̇ Imamoğ lu, for Melitene  14; Sartona  105; Dascusa  119; and Zimara  176; ‘Genoese harbour’, Molos, at Trapezus  350 Rafts (kelek): used by Hittites  143, 176; Corbulo  47, 176, 404; transport of grain and timber  7, 54, 87, 90, 143, 172, 176, 206; of stone  7, 18. See also Navigation; and Index 1, Euphrates

519

Post  700: construction, and size  47, 49, 149–50, 177–9 and n. 8; limited by rapids, above Pağnık  106; breastworks  177; skins  47, 49, 53, 149, 177; logs  73, 87, 149, 176; for fishing, in Euphrates  20, 47, 144; and Murat  47; in river crossings  75, 85; times  176; through Antitaurus gorge, from Pingan to Eğin  177; Keban gorge  109; Taurus gorge  45, 47, 49; capacity  177; cargoes, of grain  177; charcoal  177; guns  32; stores  47; on Murat  47, 49, 188; and Tigris  178 and n. 8. See also Rapids: Index 1, Euphrates, navigation; and Index 2. 3, Perry: Yarbrough: Boats: Ferries: Ships Railway: Sivas to Malatya (completed 1937), and Malatya to Diyarbekir (1935)  86; bridge over Tohma Su  96 n. 1; and Euphrates  80, 86, 88 Malatya to Cilician plain (1935), Aleppo, Mosul and Baghdad (‘Baghdad Railway’) (1918)  94, 392 Sivas to Erzurum (1939)  260, 345, 356, 390, 392, 394; Pingan  175–6; ̇ 185; Gullubağ Bağıştaş  177; Iliç  gorge 191; tunnels 191; Kemah 244; Hanarde  207; Pelitsirti pass  209; Kemah boğazı  210; Erzincan station 212 Leninakan to Erzerum (1916)  392 Georgia 381 Rain; height of Euphrates, without rain  13; ‘Rain Miracle’  91 Post  700: eastern Anatolia, summer and winter  396, 398, 401; autumn and spring  40, 46, 51, 73 n. 4; Euphrates’ level  106, 110, 170, 177; navigation  106; in Pontic mountains, ravine below Kolat  326; Xenophon cairn and descent to Maçka  330, 332; at Trabzon  344, 352; and in summer  332, travelling conditions  396, 401 Ramazan 47 Rapids: Pliny’s cataracts  45, 47 and n. 5, 50: Taurus gorge, saxosus et violentus 46–7, 49, 63, 69–70, 73; dangers  46–7, 59, 68, 119, 149; Keban gorge  109;

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

520 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Rapids (Cont.) Antitaurus gorge  119, 149; Keban  176; Pağnık to Kömürhan  106; Erzincan to Kömürhan  176; Regiment: Ottoman, at Kökseki  253; mounted, leaving Sivas for Erzerum  398; at Hozat 392 Reinforcement: remote, on Euphrates west of Erzincan  207; at Trapezus  356; by sea, along Pontic coast  362; demanded at Zımara 171 Reliefs: Assyrian, of Shalmanezer III, at Ayni  13; Antiochene, on Nemrud Dağ 5; and at Gerger Kalesi  50 n. 8; river-god, at Ayni,  13; Victory, at Satala  265, 281. See also Friezes: Statues Religion: see Christianity: Cults: Pagan worship Representatives, temsilci: in Taurus, Adil Evren (1989)  40; Gümüşhane, Atalay Bayik (1996)  272, 292, 295; Refahiye, Fahriye Bayram (2000)  182, 190 n. 1, 191, 226, 241; skills  226; and hidden duties  182, 272, 330, 355 Retirement: of auxiliaries, at Phasis  368; of legionaries, see Colonies: Veterans Rhododendrons: below Zigana pass  310; and Karakaban 335; zifin, healing epilepsy  310, 356. See also Bees, ‘mad honey’ Rice: in caravans, from Trabzon to Erzerum  327, 337 Ridgeways, and military roads: open June to September  396; closed for six months by snow  132, 396 Taurus: above Kâhta Çay (from Avbi, over Gopal Tepe, to Tepehan)  37–9 Antitaurus: approach, above Çit Çay  124–6, 132, 143; climb, above Arabkir Çay  131, 133–4; descent, above Çaltı Çay 135–8 Armenia Minor: above Karabudak  181–2, 227; between Halys and Nicopolis  183; Amperi, above Refahiye  232; Kerboğaz, above Kuruçay, Kürtler Dere and Kömür Çay  225, 233–4, 236, 240–1; above Melik Şerif, to Kürelik  250; and towards Rişkan, and Kurugöl  225, 250–1, 256; from Kökseki to Kurugöl  254, 256, 259; over Çimen

Dağları  244, 254; and descent  256–7; between Satala and Lycus  288; PKK transit routes  226 Pontus: above Tekke  314, 317–18; Ağyarlar ̇ ridge, above Imera Dere  313; over Pontic mountains  297, 313, 323–5, 393, 395 See also Watersheds Rings: in mail armour, at Satala  279; and ring stones  281; at Tekke  304 Ripa: flooded  390; forts  170, 183, 188, 205; villages, Sartona, Pağnık, Samuka, Pingan 176 riparian road, or track, in Commagene  11, 18–20; Taurus gorge  45–6, 50 and n. 7, 53–7 and n. 11, 63; Malatya plain  79, 86–7; north of Malatya  98– 101, 103–5, 107; around Dascusa and Sabus  112, 118, 122, 126, 140; Antitaurus  138; Antitaurus gorge  151; Armenia Minor  169–70, 176–7, 180, 183, 203 Antonine road per ripam, from Melitene to Erzincan,  122, 182, 190; in Cappadocia  98, 126, 138, 140, 143, 152; 165; Armenia Minor  159 n. 13, 169, 190–1, 222, 227, 234, 239, 249, 259–60. See Maps 5–6, 8–15; and also Dams: Forts River-god: Euphrates, at Ayni, and south of Zeugma 13 Rivers: known to Pliny  47, 61, 170; and Arrian  362, 393; swollen in spring  397, 401; basin of Euphrates  390; strategic routes from west 389. See Index 1, Euphrates (Kara Su); and Marsyas (Merzumen); Karasu; Singe (Göksu); Capadox (? Çakal Dere); Chabina (Cendere Su); Nymphaeus (Kâhta Çay); Şiro Çay; Melas (Tohma Su); Arsanias (Murat); Arabkir Çay; ? Lycus (Çaltı Çay); Halys (Kızıl Irmak); Sabrina (Karabudak); Kömür Çay; Lycus (Kelkit Çay); Harşit; Phasis (Rioni); Cyrus (Kura); Araxes (Aras). See also Bridges, stone: Crossings, technique Road blocks: see Jandarma Roads: Byzantine: from Harput, over Kara Mağara köprü  116; joining Silk Road

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

from Arabkir to Eğin  143; viaduct and roads in Dersim  203, 391–2; route beside Kanis (Harşit) 296 Armenian: near Aşutka  132, 140, 143; above Erzincan  217; causeway, Eğin to Surp Tavor  160–1, 163–4; ‘infidels’, recalled in Gâvur Dere  105, 193; Gâvuroluğu  190, 193–4; gâvur yolu, at Hortokop 337; and see Gâvur named roads: ‘Old Samsat’, by Yeni Kâhta and Karakuş, to Eski Kâhta  22–3 and n. 19; and to Adıyaman  23 ‘Old Adıyaman’, to Karakuş 23–4 ‘Sultan’s’, at and above Hasanova  191, 193 ‘Expeditionary’, at Kökseki  253; and over Çimen Dağları 259 ‘Old Baghdad’, from Koymat Köprü, to Kökseki  253–4; and over Çimen Dağları 259 ‘Old Water Buffalo’, from Sadak, over Çimen Dağları, to Suşehri 258–60, 395 ‘Old Russian’, over Çimen Dağları 254, 256, 258–9, 395; Sipikör pass  190, 219–21; to Sadak  221–2, 288; Köse Dağ  294; Cönger ridge, and Şon Kale  314–16, 318 See also. ‘Baghdad Road’: ‘Caravan Road’: Post, roads: Salt, ‘Salt Roads’: ‘Silk Roads’: Sultan Murat Caddesi: Transit Road Roads, and Trade routes 1. Persian Royal road, from Sardis, by Caesarea and Eski Malatya, to Susa:  27 n. 1, 80 and n. 3, 86, 389, 403 2. from Ganges, across Euphrates and by Caesarea, to Spain  80 3. from Colchis, to Iberia, Caspian and India  368–9 and n. 15, 394, 403 Roads, supporting and along the frontier.  See also Caravan routes 1. support roads to Melitene: from Ancyra, by Caesarea  94–5 and n. 18, 33; and by Sebasteia  95 and n. 19 2. support roads to Satala: from Ancyra to Nicopolis, by Tavium, Sebasteia and Zara  183, 185, 259; and by Amaseia, Tokat, Comana Pontica, Neocaesarea and Lycus valley  185, 259; 394, 398;

521

from Nicopolis to Satala, in summer by Koymat Köprü, Kökseki, Ad Dracones and over Çimen Dağları  251, 252–4, 256–7, 259; in winter by Haris (Melik Şerif), Carsaga (? Sağ), Suisa (Erzincan Kale), and Sipikör pass  207, 249–50 and n. 9, 250, 259, 393 3. main frontier road, from Syria to Cappadocia, Armenia Minor and Euxine  385, 395: construction, see Agger; change of, ? at legionary boundary  182; see also Sultan Murat Caddesi: Ripa: Caravan Routes, minor (1): Milestones Zeugma to Melitene: to Turuş 11–14; direct to Perre  11, 13; or by Euphrates Gates and Samosata  11, 23–4; from Perre  13, 24–7, 406; by Cendere (Chabina) bridge  27, 31–2; over Taurus  33–44, 407 Melitene to Karabudak (Sabrina),  95, 98–109, 112–13; Bahadın bridge  114– 16; division of roads  121–2; over Antitaurus  124–6, 131–8; from Çaltı Çay  169, 176–7, 180–2 Karabudak to Satala: per ripam  393, 395; by Erzincan  190–9, 204–7, 209–10; and Sipikör pass  215–23, 259; through and over mountains  393, 395; by Kuruçay  227–9; Sinibeli pass  229–32; Melik Şerif  248–9, 251–2, 404–5; Ad Dracones, and over Çimen Dağları 254–9 Satala to Trapezus  395: to Köse  288–9, 291–3; to Harşit, and Baghdad bridge  293–6, 299; through Pontic mountains  393, 395; by Zigana pass  296, 301–12; over mountains  393, 395; by Kolat  296–7, 313–27, 330, 334–9; from Maçka  341–3, 347–9 4. Zimara to Nicopolis  182–5, 395 5. Trapezus to Sebastopolis  347, 362 Roads, other: 1. Ancyra, by Caesarea, to Cilician Gates  97 n. 18 2. Apamea to Edessa  17 3. Zeugma to Germanicia  13 4. Samosata to Edessa  15 5. Samosata, by Eski Hisar, to Apamea  15, 17

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

522 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Roads (Cont.) 6. Samosata, to Germanicia  11 n. 9, 13; and Doliche  11 7. Sebastopolis, by Caspiae, to Artaxata  375 Rock-cut: bridge foundations, at Kemah  203 inscriptions, Euphrates Gates  11; Habeş bridge  13; Ayni  13; above Killik  56; Hastek Kale  116; Mendürgü  120, 141; Sabrina bridge  181; none in Antitaurus gorge  163 tombs, near Samsat  9; at, and east of Pirun  25; Bademli  124; Eski Arabkir  126 n. 2; Tekke  287, 304; sarcophagus, Bademli  124–5; necropolis, near Pirun  24–5 platforms, depressions, trough, steps, on Dulluk Tepe  88 and n. 8; Cengerli Kale  88, 246 cisterns, Kırman Tepe  43; Tekke  304 roads, Marble  195–6; above Hortokop  337; below Boztepe  347–8; trench, below Kubbe Tepe  41, 195; cutting, below Keklik Pınar Mevki  42–3; gates, to Ağyarlar ridge  318–19; shelf, above Euphrates  107; at Sabrina bridge 181 tracks, above Midye  65; below Eskiya Taşı, at Kerboğaz  238; above Vazgirt  215; above Tekke  317 Routes, ancient: see also Caravan Routes, minor: Mule Tracks: Roads 1. Amida, by Çünküş ferry, to Melitene  59 2. Samosata, by Karakuş, to Eski Kâhta (‘Old Samsat Road’)  23 3. Ziyaret Dere to Karakuş (‘Old Adıyaman Road’) 23–4 4. Melitene to southern Armenia, and northern Mesopotamia  80, 95 5. Dascusa to Arsanias valley, vicinity of Rhandeia, and central Armenia  118 6. Satala, over Otlukbeli Dağları, to Erzerum  260–3, 398; and, by Araxes valley, to Artaxata  260, 263; Iberia, and Albania  259–60 7. Trapezus to Erzerum, Assyria and Urartu  301, 345, 356 8. Colchis to Iberia  368–9 and n. 15, 394, 403 Russians: fortress, at Poti  370; garrison, at Sukhumi 375

front (1877-8): between Kars and Erzerum, in winter  397; cavalry reinforcements from Sivas (January 1877)  398 front (1914-15): supply train at Aşutka (January 1915)  144; supply base at Trabzon  346; Sarıkamış  398, 408 landings, advance and retreat (191618)  408; landings (March 1916), at Pazar  365; and Trabzon  337; memorial, defence of Maçka (May 1916)  337; attack at Pirahmet  301; and Tekke  315; at Hurusüfla  295; roads engineered for artillery  315, 336, and see Roads, ‘Old Russian’; railway to Erzerum (1916)  392; campaign in Dersim (July 1916)  391; ceased in winter (1916-17)  398; advance (1916)  131; in Euphrates valley  191, 197; and Çimen Dağları  258; front (1916), in Euphrates valley  133, 197–8; and Ottoman response, supplies and guns  131, 133; Colonel Ali  197– 8; on Çimen Dağları  254; spotting, on ̇ Ikisivri  254; Kurtlu Tepe  347; retreat (early 1918)  327 oil, and German objectives in Caucasus (1942) 380 Rye: grown at Çiftlik (Kelkit)  282 Sacrifices: to propitiate Euphrates, by Lucullus (sacred heifer)  13, 80; and by Lucius Vitellius (boar, ram and bull)  13; Danube. by Trajan (bull)  158 Post  700: by Armenians and Mohammedans, on Muşar Dağ (sheep and goats)  101; by crypto-Armenians on Feast of Assumption, beside Söğütlü Dere (goat)  252; Dersim, Kızılbaş at river sources  391; and Turks on leaving safely (lamb)  391; at start of tasyolu project, Kemaliye  163; at türbe of Abuzergafarı 24 Saints: see Index 2. 1 Andrew, Ange, Basil the Great, Eros, Eugenios, Eustratius, Firminus, Firmus, Gregory the Illuminator, Gregory the Thaumaturge, John Chrysostom, John Prodromos the Baptist, Kyriakos, Longinus, Lucian, Mamas, Mardarius, Michael (Mihal), Nicholas, Orentius, Pharnakios. See also Martyrs

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

̇ Salt: pans, below Ihtik  199; mines, at Kömür, near Kemah  243; ‘Salt Roads’, higher, from Kömür to Çimen yayla (for Kelkit and Sadak)  243–4, 250, 255; lower, to Melik Şerif (for Suşehri)  205, 226, 243–5; or over Ziyaret pass  247; caravans, from Sivas  27; mules, from Malatya  71; camels from Kemah  99; traded to Colchis  369, 394; salted fish 144 Sanctuaries: of Mithridates Callinicus, at Arsameia ad Nymphaeum  5; ? Apollo, at Direk Kale  35; Anaitis, at Eriza  211, 278; Fortuna, at Aquincum  97 n. 13. See also Temples Sarcophagi: above Samosata  9; rock-cut, at Bademli  124–5; lid, at Nicopolis  187; above, and (lid) at Satala  265, 272, 281; Halkevi  289 Satellite: aerials, at Yeni Levenge  108; imagery, Erzincan Kalesi  214 Satraps, satrapies: of Commagene  4; Lydia  80 Sea routes: trade, from Trapezus to Miletus  345; ships under sail, seen by Xenophon  344; voyage from Phasis to Amisos and Sinope  367; shipping, to Trapezus  352, 362; Arrian, voyage to Sebastopolis  362; commerce between Lazi and Romans  394 Post  700: Brant, Trebizond to Çoruh  362; Turkish Maritime Lines  381 n. 4. See also Navigation: and Index 1, Euxine Selcuks, Selcuk: Manzikert, and arrival in Anatolia  187, 408; Balak, emir, at Harput  205; Battalgazi, above Şiro Çay  40, 130; at renamed Eski Malatya  92–3; and remembered at Morhamam  101, 103; Alaeddin Keykubad, sultan, at Erzincan  211 fortresses and structures: ? Cafer Kale  79; Eski Malatya, remains  91–2; Gemirgap, castle  148; Erzincan Kalesi  211–13; Zindanlar 298 bridges: Kırkgözköprü  98; ? Hapanos  145; Geruşla  152; Alp Köy  206; Baghdad 298–9 cemeteries, ? near Hallan crossing  81; Ermelik  203; upper Ardos, of Akkoyunlu  209; below and at Kökseki 253; Çatak 254

523

bath house, at Kilisik  24; han, at Denizli  112; pottery, near Rustuşağı  86; and at Sağ 204 destruction of Samsat  6, 9; Arauraca  207 Seyyids: see Kızılbaş Sheep: Xenophon, and Armenian houses  398; skins, in pontoon bridge  80 n. 4 Post  700: hundreds grazing east of Kemah  206; in plain of Erzincan  210; Mecidiye  219; Devekorusu yayla 222; plain of Kelkit  282; five or six months at Kolat yayla  325; on Zigana ridge, below Ayaser  332; at Turnagöl  334 exported from Erzurum  356; sacrifices, on Muşar Dağ  101; driven off by Kurds, at Karakulak  262; tied on camels  134; skins, see Rafts Shia: religion of Dersim tribes  391; cemevi, in Çimen yayla  255. See also Kızılbaş (Alevi Kurds) Ships: on Euphrates, Hittite  143, 176, 403; on Trajan’s Column  347; on Euxine, coastal sailing, seen by Xenophon  344; voyage from Phasis to Amisos and Sinope  367; Servilius, waiting for Pompey 368 biremes (Liburnians)  346–7 and n. 16, 349, 361; with sail  347 trireme ‘Euphrates’  13; Arrian’s flagship  346–7, 349, 362 and n. 5, 374; under sail and oars  362 and n. 5, 365; by night  352; at anchor  365 camarae, of Pontic pirates and barbarian tribes  346, 361. See also Classis: Boats: Ferries: Rafts Shoes, boots: factory at Erzincan  215; frozen in snow  399. See also Snowshoes Signalling: mounds: Husukani  67–8; Malyan  107; Vahsen  121; foundations, above Maskir  141; above Bademli  124; above Çit Harabe  125, 129; on ridge below Zımara  171; near Dostal  180; Monkare, near Ermelik  205; tower, above Lycus  289–91 long-range system: Gopal Tepe  38, 42; Kubbe Tepe  42; Dulluk Tepe  42, 87–90 and n. 8; Kara Tepe  109; skyline above Deregezen valley and Seracık  109, 121–2; ridge above Vahsen  121–2; mound above

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

524 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Signalling (Cont.) Arege  138, 171, 247; Kurtlu Tepe  89, 247; Mantartaşı  89, 247, 267, 281, 291 local system: Körpinik Hüyük  113–14, 121–2; hillock at Vahsen  121; Kalecik fortlet  141; ? Kemik Tepe, above Samuka  143; hilltop above Çit Harabe 129 beacons: platforms and depressions on Dulluk Tepe  88–9 and n. 8; structures on Kurtlu Tepe  247; buildings on Mantartaşı 281 Post  700: signals: fire, smoke, or white cloth, below Sipikör pass  221 Signiferi: at Ehnes quarries  15; Satala  264 and n. 16; praetorian  158. See also Standards Silk: at Eğin 154; Erzincan 212 ‘Silk Roads’: from Harput to Eski Malatya  87; from Zabulbar to Aşutka  140; from Eski Arabkir, through Eğin and over Hostabeli pass,  116, 126, 132, 140, 143–8, 150–2, 155, 158–9, 392; to ̇ Kemah  159, 203, 392; and to Iliç, Sinibeli pass and Refahiye  159, 230–1, 233; and Trabzon  230: above Vazgirt  219; over Pontic mountains, by Kolat, Meşeiçihanı and Boztepe, to Trabzon  326, 335, 342; from Sivas, by Zara, Aşkar and Şebinkarahisar, to Giresun 183 Silver: carried from Militia by Sardur II  89; mined in Pontic mountains, by Chalybes  306; mines, at Keban  111; and Eski Gümüşhane  306, 356; inscribed cup, looted from Phasis  367; filigree work, at Trabzon  357; teeth, at Direk Kale  37. See also Coins, types Skins, hides: as bridge for Xenophon  80 n. 4; ox-hide, covering wicker shields captured by Xenophon  329; and cut in plates as snow shoes, above Dioscurias  37, 378; traded, from Colchis  369, 394 Post  700: inflated for rafts  47, 49, 53, 149, 177–9 and n. 8; rapids and leaks  59; for swimming, at Kocan  20; Malatya plain  75; Çermik  106; in trade, between Eğin and Giresun  163; and at

Trabzon  356; diseases of,  67; for manna 63. See also Bridges, pontoons: Rafts Slaves: of Anaitis  211; traded, from Colchis  369, 394 Post  700: of Ottoman official, travelling to Erzerum 326. Sledges: above Dioscurias  378 Post  700: threshing (döven)  166, 175, 282–3; discarded, used for insulation 231 Snakes: block Pompey’s advance to Caspian  403; repelled by garlic  173; gold necklace, at Satala  281; kerykeion, beside statue, at Trapezus  355 Post  700: ’snake mill’, below Ayvas crossing  70; on track above Savaşgediği  234; and below Şon Kale  316; lake above Ardos  208 Snow: conditions, for Xenophon  333, 398, 403; buried in blizzard  397; sufferings of Lucullus  397; Antony  397, 403; Corbulo  397, 404; Palmatus  307; Bruttius Praesens, in Armenian mountains  37; precautions for caravans, in avalanches  397; under Armenian kings  397 Post  700: depth, and duration, Taurus  397: Nemrud Dağ 38; Avbi 37; Haburman  58; track above Tillo  59; Bekiran  71; Şakşak Dağ  68, 73, 77 Cappadocia: Malatya  397; Keban  111, 397; Arabkir 112; Sivas 401 Antitaurus  101; Handeresi  132; Aşutka  144; Hapanos  145; Silk Road, and mountains above Eğin  148, 152, 162–3 Dersim: Munzur Dağları  101, 114, 190, 390; Ziyaret pass, above Hozat  392 Armenia Minor: plain of Armudan  182; per ripam to Erzincan  190; Gâvuroluğu  194; Sinibeli pass, cleared with shovels  231; Kerboğaz 234, 239; Diştaş  239; Refahiye  232; Kar Yatağı, above Mülk  252; Çimen Dağları  205, 207, 259–60; Çimen yayla  255, 398; summit of Kara Dağ  243–4, 255–6, 398; Çardaklu pass  201; Sipikör pass  217, 219, 221, 398; Eskiyol  223; Sadak (Satala)  282, 399; Köse  293

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

Pontus: caravan road beside Harşit 306; Transit Road  301; Zigana pass  310, 397; Zigana Dağ 398; Hamsiköy 312; over Pontic mountains  313, 393; Deveboynu Dağ  332–3; Karayayla  322; Kolat  325–6, 331–3, 339; Karakaban 335 Armenia: Bayburt  397; Kop pass  397; Erzurum  399; between Kars and Erzerum  397; Erzerum to Persian frontier 398–9 Caucasus passes  377, 380 melt, and river levels  6, 40, 86, 105–6, 170, 397, 401; earthquake and blizzard 212; tunnels 71; bridges 32; Euphrates frozen  397; highlands, and ridgeways  396–7, 400; eastern passes  398; underground houses near Kelkit  398; dangers, of blizzard and avalanche, in Armenia Minor and Armenia  397, 399; on Zigana pass  310; Kop pass  397; winter travel, by small groups  396, 398; by large bodies of men, and caravans  396, 398; military operations  397–8; at Sarıkamış  398; Fraser’s journey, Amaseia  398; after Niksar  399; Sadak Çay, east of Satala, and Elmalı Dağ 399; Erzerum 398. See also Avalanches: Climate: Snowshoes: Storms: Winter Snowshoes: travellers, above Dioscurias  37, 378; Bruttius Praesens, in Armenia  37, 398 Post  700: in Taurus, at Avbi  37, 402 n. 14 SOE: Tohma Su railway bridge (Plan Wonderful)  96 n. 1; resistance force in Dersim  381, 392; Turkish neutrality, and plans  381 and n. 26 Special Teams: in Gâvuroluğu, and village guards  194, 196; Monkare, near Ermelik  205; Diştaş and Kerboğaz  226, 239; forest above Melik Şerif  244; task, training and sensitivities  226, 244. See also Jandarma Speed: army  385, 389; legion (of Caesar)  385, 389; on foot ?  95 and n. 20, 385; on horseback, Mithridates, and Vardanes’ cavalry  165, 385, 389; despatch riders  389, 398; mounted

525

regiment  398; caravans and pack animals  112, 165, 327, 338–9, 385. See also Tatars: Travel times: and Index 2. 2, Fraser Springs: mineral: Ayvaz suyu, below Niksar  74 n. 18; below Zigana  308; at Acısuhanı 325. sacred: at Çit Harabe (Sabus)  127, 129 thermal: Hamamlık  57; ? Çermik  105; near Samuka 143; Zımara 171; Ilıca 262; smelling of gunpowder, below Direk Kale  36; sulphurous, at Tilek  67; and Tekke 304 Squeezing, of inscriptions: at Erzincan  246; Satala  272; Trabzon  349 n. 21 Standards: legionary, depot at Melitene  90; praetorian, wreathed, at Danube bridge  158. See also Signiferi Stations: trading, in Greek colonies  345 Geographers: on road to Zeugma  11; intermediate, in Taurus  40; ? in Medio, at Midye  64; east of Euphrates  95; west of Melitene  95; in Antitaurus  126, 135, 151; Zimara to Nicopolis  185; locations of Armenian villages  188; Zimara, through mountains, to Satala  227, 229–32; Cengerli  247; Nicopolis to Satala  253, 257; Akşehir and Dracones, as refuges  254–6; Satala to Artaxata  263; Satala to Trapezus  287, 293, 304, 327; by Harşit  296, 306; and Zigana  308, 312; and over Pontic mountains, as refuges 296–7; Kolat 326; Maçka 340; coastal 361–2 Post  700: Eski Malatya, half way, on Samsun to Baghdad post road  89; Makriyali  367; Batumi  366. See also Forts and fortlets: Jandarma: Railway: Signalling Statues: gods: deified Antiochus I, on Nemrud Dağ  5; Zeus, at Direk Kale  35; Apollo Epekoos, at Direk Kale  36; golden, of Anaitis, at Eriza  211, 403; colossal bronze, of Anaitis (Aphrodite), at Satala  211, 265, 277–8; Hermes, at Trapezus  355; Mithras, at Trapezus  357; gods, in niches above Trebizond  357; Phasiane, at Phasis, and Rhea, in Athens 368

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

526 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Statues (Cont.) imperial: of Aurelian, at Satala  270; Hadrian, at Trapezus  333, 349, 351, 357, 405 daughter of Antiochus I  23 n. 19; life-size female, at Direk Kale  36; head, at Hinge  143; mutilated, at Nicopolis  187; life-size bronze horse, at Satala  278; Belisarius, at Trapezus  354–5; ? in nymphaeum, at Trapezus 353 bases: at Direk Kale  36; ? on Körpinik Hüyük  114; ? at Pingan  175; Nicopolis  187; Satala  265, 270, 278; Trapezus 351 relief of Shalmanezer III, at Ayni  13; and of river-god Euphrates, at Ayni  13 Post  700: of Barbarossa, in Trabzon  349 Stele, stelae: military, at Melitene  44; at Pingan  175; of XVI Flavia Firma, and XV Apollinaris, at Satala  271 and n. 16; of Aquila, on Körpinik Hüyük  114; Bato, at Vahsen  121; son of Sextilius Valens, at Cengerli  246; uninscribed, west of Havcış 292. See also Tombstones Stoas: at Melitene  90 Storms: Lucullus, snowstorm in Armenia  397; Arrian, and thunderstorm, at Athenai  362, 365; at sea, St Longinus 377 Post  700: at Trabzon  345, 401 snowstorms: on Kara Dağ  398; Köse Dağ  293; Kop pass  397; at Kale (Kovans)  296, 397; Harşit valley  301; Zigana pass  310; Hamsiköy  310; in Armenia  398; at Erzerum  399; between Kars and Erzerum  397 thunderstorms: around Dascusa  401; Antitaurus gorge, and kelek  165; at Kemah  199; Gâvuryurdu  231; ridge above Tekke  317 Strongholds: Taochian  315; Trapezus  355; Sanni  364, 366. See also Praesidia Post  700: Kurds, at Eski Kâhta and Gerger Kalesi 46 Sultan Murat Caddesi; road from Samosata to Zeugma  14; at Avbi  37; Pirot to Eski Malatya  87; Aleppo to Arabkir, Erzincan and Trebizond  105, 395;

above Körpinik Hüyük  113; above Bademli  124; Antitaurus  122 n. 13, 251; near Çanakçı  134; above Gemho  135 and n. 9; above Çaltı Çay  138; below Zımara  171; above Karabudak  181; to Gâvuroluğu 193; Melik Şerif to Kurugöl  251 Sultan Murat IV, from Kayseri to Eski Malatya  94–5; at Yürük camp in Antitaurus 136 See also Caravan Routes, minor (1); Agger ‘Sultan’s Road’: see Roads Sultans: Alaeddin Keykubad (1219–36)  211; Mehmet II, the Conqueror (1451– 81)  82, 222, 408; Cem (1481)  40; Selim I (1512–20)  163, 253; Murat IV (1623–40)  136; Abdul Hamid  II (1876–1909)  149, 198. See also Index 2. 3 Summer: palace, at Arsameia ad Nymphaeum  5; Euphrates, crossed by Lucullus  80; Arrian’s voyage  333, 361 n. 3; travellers above Dioscurias  378; St Basil, visit to Satala  265; Kurtlu Tepe  247; ? route through Kerboğaz  234; over Pontic mountains 297 Post  700: anchorages  393; bee-keepers 294; deportations 39; feuds 18; noon, Turkish time  385; during Ramazan  47; rain  396; houses, above Şiro Çay  41, at Bekiran  71–2; Çit Harabe  129; below Ergü  148; inhabited, at Helameti  197; Ardos  208; Mecidiye  219; Maden hanları 323 heat, in valleys  396; at Herdiyan  18; Keban  111; Keban gorge  109; Larhan  325; warm, at Trabzon  345 cool, at Arabkir  112; Bademli  124; Eğin  152–3; Zımara  171; ridgeways and communications  396; Erzurum  399; stream above Ağyarlar  320–1; snow pockets on Munzur Dağları  190; pastures, yaylas  42; Antitaurus  131, 133; east of Kemah  206; Pontic mountains, Karayayla 321; Kolat 327; Turnagöl  334; Hocamezarı hanları  334; and see Yaylas

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

rivers: forded, shallow or dry  22, 26–7, 78, 152, 183, 390; Euphrates  390; at Tomisa crossing  80; Keban gorge, rapids  109; ford, for cavalry, at Pağnık  119; by raft, from Eğin 119, 143, 149; time, from Zimara to Kömürhan  176; at Erzincan  212; Tohma Su  98; Kuruçay  191; Murat  177; and ford, for cavalry, near Pertek  119; Harşit 297 springs and fountains: in Antitaurus  131–2; at Zımara  171 roads and routes: from Taurus gorge, around Şakşak Dağ  70; from Keban to Aşutka  116; Antitaurus,  132–3, 135; Kerboğaz  159, 234; from Kemah, over Munzur Dağları, by Ziyaret pass  203, 391–2; and from Erzincan, by Mercan pass, to Harput  392; higher Salt Road  243–4; Melik Şerif, by Çardaklu pass, to Erzincan  250, 395; route by Harşit valley  301; east of Satala, over Otlukbeli Dağları  260; inland, from Sürmene, Of and Rize  364, 393; Caspian Gates  378, 380 travel: caravans, day and night, from Aleppo  105; through Helameti, above Kürtler Dere,  197; day and night, at Mezraaıhan  231; constantly, over Pontic mountains  296–9, 306, 309, 313, 318, 389, 393, 395; below Karayayla  321–2; Maden hanları  323; shortcut by ̇ Istavri  326; above Karakaban  335; and Meşeiçihanı 336; Hortokop 337 pack animals: in Antitaurus  132–3; mules, northwards from Eğin, by Pegir  162; and by Hostabeli pass and Kerboğaz, to Refahiye  159; mules and horses, day and night, from Eğin to Giresun  163; camel trains, continuously day and night, at Eskiyol  223; on horseback, Refahiye to Kemah  244 campaigns: Arabs  91. See also Climate: Disease, fevers Sunni: Kurds, at Alidam  50; villages, in northern Taurus gorge  70; Turks, at Alp Köy  207; mistrust of Alevi  291; and Kızılbaş 391–2. See also Mosques Suspicion, and mistrust; between Sunni and Alevi in Erzincan  291: of Armenian

527

research, at Ermelik  204; and strangers in mountains, at Vazgirt  219; maps  226; of police, in Erzincan  226; muhtars, at Alp Köy  207; and Sadak  273, 283; village guards  194; villagers, at Alidam  50; Sitemi  236; Halkevi 289. See also MIT: Police Swimming, trained Roman soldiers  70; at Kocan 20 Tatars, tartars: guide, for Ker Porter, east of Satala  262; and for Fraser, from Constantinople to Erzerum  398; river crossings, Kuru Çay  99; rapid journey from Constantinople to Demavund 389 Tax: exemption, at Melik Şerif 248. See also Tribute Teachers: at Harput, Huntington  415; Aliçeri  38; Venkuk  51; Haburman  57–8; Tillo  59; Keferdis  69; Pirot, Şinası Karaman, headmaster  85; Malatya plain  86; Rustuşağı, Yılmaz Ertuğrul, headmaṡ ter  86; Kilisik, Ilyas Alp, headmaster  86; ̇ Imamoğ lu, headmaster  87; Sandık, Hamid Yailan, retired  165; Diştaş, Şamil Işıkcevahır  239; Sadak, Dürsün Göz  270–1 and n. 15; and Abdullah Nahir, headmasters 272 Tekke (Dervish chapel): at Erzincan  211; Tekke 304 Temples: see also Sanctuaries Urartian, at Cengerli  88, 246 gods and goddesses: of Apollo, on Hieron Akron  354; Hermes, at Trapezus  349, 355, 405; ? others, at Trapezus  357; Apollo Hegemon, and Artemis, at Phasis 367–8 imperial: of ? Hadrian, at Trapezus  354, 357 sites: Direk Kale, and treasury  33–6 and n. 3; Nicopolis  187; ? Melik Şerif  248; Satala  278–9; Trapezus  349, 354–5, 357 Ten Thousand: buried in Armenian blizzard  397; route from Gymnias, over Pontic mountains  297, 306, 314; ‘The Sea’  328–9, 331, 333, 403; cairn, on Zigana Dağ  329–30; approach to Trapezus  340, 343, 345, 347–8; mad honey  310, 333; route to west  344. See also Index 2. 1 Xenophon

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

528 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Ten Thousand (Cont.) Post  700: descent claimed from ­stragglers  326 Tents: cohorts at Apsarus  366 Post  700: of Hogarth, at Kilisik  103; Kurds and Yürüks, on Antitaurus  134, 136; Taylor, near Gemho  136–7; at Tepte  227; and upper Ardos  208; of caravans, at Hocamezarı hanları 334 Tezek, at Rişkan  251; Sadak  283, 399; Erzerum  283, 399 Theatres: at Melitene  90; Apsarus  363, 365; Aquincum  90 n. 13 Theft: of inscriptions, at Sadak  272, 274 Threshing, and floors, at Abrenk  166; Zımara 172; Pingan 175; Mezraaıhan  231; Sadak  270–1, 278, 281–3; sledges (döven), at Gâvuryurdu  231, 282; machine, at Sadak 283 Tiles, legionary: at Zeugma (leg IIII Sc) 15; Eski Hisar (leg IIII Scyt)  17; Samosata (leg XVI FF)  6–7; Tille, and Akcaviran (leg XVI FF)  50 n. 7; Melitene (leg XII F)  90 and n. 13; Satala (leg XV Apol)  264, 270; Sebastopolis (leg)  376 and n. 21; Pityus (leg, leg XV)  264 n. 10, 375–7 auxiliary: at Tille (al Fl Ag)  50 and n. 7; ? Pingan  175; ? Cengerli  247; Gonio (coh II)  367 and n. 14 fragments, at Direk Kale  33, 35; near Bahadın bridge  116; at Çit Harabe 129; Pingan 175; ̇ Hasanova  192; Ihtik 198; Cengerli  246–7; Düvermezraası harabe, near Melik Şerif 245; Satala  265, 280–1; Hortokop  337 hypocaust  129, 247, 280; floor  247, 280; roof  35, 129, 192, 245, 247, 265, 280, 373; ridge  337; in walls, at Satala 269 Post 700: Kiremitlihan 312 Time: reckoned from sunset  385; for journeys  385, 389, 398–9. See also Travel times Tobacco: beside ‘Old Samsat Road’  23; in Taurus gorge, at Zengeto  59; exported from Samsun  212; and Trabzon  356; illegal, from Akçaabat  295; smuggler 37

Tombs: of Isias, at Karakuş  5; Antiochus I, on Nemrud Dağ  5; Roman, above Pağnık  118; of St Gregory, near Erzincan  211; Athenaia, at Athenai 365 rock-cut, north and west of Samosata  9; in necropolis, at Turuş  11; in necropolis, and at Perre  25; beside road to Cendere bridge  25; at Killik  55; of Athenais, at Hastek Kale  116; of Marcellus, at Mendürgü beside Çit Çay  120, 141; above Bademli  124; of Pomponia, at Eski Arabkir  126 n. 2; at Tekke  287, 304 slab-lined, on Seracık Hüyük  112 Post  700: of caravans, near Kömürhan  82; of holy men, near Ziyaret Dere  24 n. 20; at Tekke  304; and, by name, at Hocamezarı hanları 334. See also Graves: Türbe Tombstones: of soldier, at Samosata  15; signifer, at Ehnes  15; legate, at Nicopolis  15; near Eski Malatya  93; of decurion, and in Armenian cemetery at Pingan  118 n. 8, 175–6; near Hinge  143; of decurion’s son, at Cengerli  246 and n. 7; legionary, ? at Rişkân  251; of signifer, legionaries and centurion, at Satala  44, 264, 271 and n. 16; 281 and n. 20. See also Stele Post  700: cemetery at Kerboğaz  239; in Armenian cemetery at upper Ardos  209; Ottoman, at Mollaali  326 Towers: at Apamea (Syria)  92 n. 17; Burç  11; Mesırı  14; Direk Kale  35–6; Pürk (Nicopolis)  185; Rhizaion  364; Kız Külesi, west of Pazar  365 and n. 12; Abkhazian wall  371–4 nd n. 19 wooden, on assault bridge  81; replaced with baked brick, at Phasis  363, 368 rectangular corner, and intermediate, at Eski Hisar  17; square, below Gerger Kalesi  50; rectangular and pentagonal, at Eski Malatya  92; semi-circular, projecting, at Pagnık Öreni  119–20; rectangular, inwardly projecting, at Kilise Yazısı Tepe  121; square, at Çit Harabe  127; hexagonal corner, and square intermediate, projecting, at Satala  260, 268–71; round, at

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

Zindanlar  297–8; semi-circular, and gate, at Hortokop  337; curved, in walls of Ortahisar, and on hillside above Trapezus  353, 357; circular corner, projecting, at Phasis  370; square corner, at Sebastopolis  376; corner and intermediate, at Pityus  377 watch, guard or signal: at Yukarı Çardak  14; east of Eski Hisar  17; Kızılburç  17; near Tille  50; near Taraksu  53 and n. 4; Kerefto  66, 140; west of Pirot  86; above Maskir  141; rounded, below Aşutka  144; ? Gemirgap  148; Monkare  205; above Satala, and on Mantartaşı 281; rectangular, above Lycus  290–1; on Danube 88. See also Signalling maritime: ? on moles of Hadrian’s harbour, and lighthouse, at Trapezus  350–2; Boulogne  352 n. 24 Post  700: Selcuk, at Eski Malatya  92, and Erzincan Kale  213; above Zigana Çay  308; in Caucasus defiles  379 Tracks: see Pack animals Tractors: arrival, and effects, at Deregezen 109; Satala 283. See also Ploughing Trade, traders: Samosata  6; Commagene to Black Sea  395; through Claudiopolis, to Cappadocia  61; Greek colonies to Miletus and Aegean  345; Trapezus with Urartu  301, 345; and Assyria  356; with Phasis and Colchis  346; at ? Apsarus  367; Phasis  363, 367–9; Dioscurias, with Caucasian tribes  374; Colchis to Iberia  369, 394; Artaxata  403. See also Roads, and Trade routes: Routes, ancient Post  700: Samsun, through Eski Malatya, to Baghdad  89; Bademli  125; Eğin, by pack-mules with Giresun  149, 163; Erzincan  212; water-buffalo, from Sadak, over Çimen Dağları, to Suşehri  260; Trebizond to Malatya  231; and to Armenia, Kurdistan and Persia  301, 345; from Samsun 212; Trabzon 356. See also Caravan Routes Trajan’s column: bridge of boats  81; signal towers  88; Danube bridge  158–9;

529

Victory 281; trireme 346–7; bireme  346 n. 16 Transit Road, route: ‘of Xenophon’  347–8; Trebizond to Erzerum, carriage road (1872), and importance  341, 395; modernization (1931), construction and difficulties  301 and n. 1, 395 n. 11; course  299, 305, 307–8, 310–11, 326, 339, 393; coastal road  351; Samsun to Georgia  354; of deportations, by Tepehan, to Syrian desert  26. See also Caravan Routes, Major (5) Transport: see Boats: Carts: Pack animals: Rafts: Ships Travel times: messages, on Persian Royal Road  389; Xenophon, from Gymnias to Kolat, and Maçka  328, 334; Paetus, flight to Euphrates  95; Hadrian, in Asia Minor  264 n. 9; voyage from Phasis to Amisos and Sinope  367. See also Speed Post  700: see Pack animals: Post: Rafts: Speed Treasure: Seracık hüyük  112; Pürk (Nicopolis)  187; Armenian, at Tanusa  121; and upper Kürtler Dere, south of Kerboğaz  226, 236, 238–40; maps  226, 238; hunters, at Kilisik  24; Değirmen Tepe, above Direk Kale  35; Deregezen valley  108; Ermelik  204; Kerboğaz  226; Diştaş 238; Tekke 304; han below Zigana  308; Xenophon cairn  332 Treasury: at Direk Kale  33, 36; of ̇ Mithridates, at Sinoria (Ihtik) 198–9; epigraphic, at Sadak  266, 283 Treaty: Nisibis (AD 297-8)  407; Theodosius II, guarding of Caucasus passes, (AD 442)  407; Justinian (AD 561)  407 Post  700: Lausanne (1923)  326, 408. See also Greeks, population Trees: holy  101; worshipped by Kızılbaş 391 Tribes: see Index 2. 1 across Caucasus: Alani; Aorsi; Sarmatians Armenian highlands: Carduchi; Mardi coastal: Pontic tribes; attacks on Pompey’s army above Colchis, Heptakometae  361; on Trapezus, Anicetus  361, 404. See also Barbarians: Pirates Post  700: Kurdish, see Index 2. 4

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

530 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Tribunes: defending Euphrates bank  57; commanding garrisons beside Phasis  368; at Kainepolis  264 Tribute: paid to Shalmanezer III, by Melidian king  89; to Sinope, by Trapezus  345; formerly paid by Sanni  344, 364; not paid by Lazi  379 Triumvir: Crassus  403 Tunnels: aqueducts, to Samosata  17–19; Kocan  22, Geruşla  151; cistern, at Nicopolis  187; Körpinik Hüyük, under Euphrates, to Süderek  113; ‘milk pipes’, or tunnels, to Sadak  276 Post  700: snow, and post  71; Taşyolu, at Kemaliye  163 and n. 16; railway, ̇ and Erzincan  191, 209, between Iliç 392; GAP  46; Zigana (1983–4)  307 Tunny: fishing, at Trapezus  356 Türbe: of Abuzergafarı, above Ziyaret Dere  24, 230; Mahmut-el-Ansarı, near Ziyaret Dere  24, 230; Piriz Baba, below Girik  26; Abdülwahab, on Muşar Dağ  101; at Yürük camp in Antitaurus  136; Mehmet Ali Bey, near Gemho  227; Şeyh Hasan Baba el-Kirzi, at Eski Kozkışla and at Kirzi  229–30; Poruk Baba, above Diştaş  239; at Melik Şerif  248; Pir Ahmet, Bey of Karaman, at Pirahmet  301; Seyid Mahmut Çağırgan, at Tekke  304; Ahi Evren Dede, above Trabzon  342 Turks, Turkish.  See also Ottoman: arrival  187, 248, 350, 408; holy place, grave of Hassan on Muşar Dağ  101; writing  114, 247; measurement of distance  385; posting establishment  398; enterprise and virtue, Mustafa Uslu  129; energy, Recep Yazıcıoğlu  219; Oktay Okur  313 n. 1; strength, Ahmet Kara  141; hostility of Kurds, in Dersim  391–2; and troubles  63; suspicion and mistrust of Kızılbaş 219 Second Army, at Malatya  89; Fourth Army Corps, and Third Army, at Erzincan,  89, 211, 215; Hafiz Pasha, and Nizam battalion, at Eski Malatya,  32, 89, 91–2; infantry battalions and cavalry, at Hozat,  392; brigade, in Korea  71, 112; castle at

Gonio  367; irregulars  204, 248; warrior  341; fronts, see Russians population: pre-Turkish  49, 172: placenames  3; retained, at Berzelo  55; ? Gopal Tepe  38; Zımara  171–2; Tapurs  183; ? Monkare  205; Sağ 204; ? Ahi Dağ 219; Mochora 326–7; Zigana  296, 310; dwindling  38, 154, 163, 230, 275, 295 Turkish: at Mezraa, in Taurus gorge,  68; villages beside Euphrates, Malatya plain  86; east of Çit Çay  140; Aşutka  143; villages in districts of Kuruçay and Gercenis  187–8 and n. 8; Pingan 175; Nezgep 185; Sipikör 220; Sadak 267 with Kurdish: at Pütürge  46 with Armenian: at Adıyaman  23; Eski Malatya  91; Ağın 116; Arabkir 129; Eğin  154; Musağa 159; Armudan  182; Kuruçay and district  187–8 and n. 8; Kemah  201; Gercenis and district  187–8 and n. 8, 232; Melik Şerif  248 and n. 8; Erzincan 211 with Greek and Armenian: at Keban Maden 111 with Greek: at Tekke  304; Gümüşhane  306; exchange  326, 408; resettlement, from Thessalonica, at Pürk 185 occupation layer: at Eski Malatya  92 n. 26 plans and neutrality (1942-3)  96 n. 1, 379–81 and n. 26 Vali (provincial governor, of vilayet): of Adıyaman, deputy  37; Malatya  42; ̇ Erzincan, Metin Ilyas Aksoy  190, 226, ̇ 245; Halil Ibrahim Altinok  226; and Recep Yazicioglu  145, 219; Gümüşhane, Salih Iş̇ ik 329–30; Trabzon  329; Rize and Konya, Namik Günel 154; council 78 Vegetables: in military diet  400; Çit Harabe  129; around Kelkit  282; beans, at Zindanlar  297–8; exported fro m Trabzon  356 Veterans: looter of Anaitis statue  211; settled around Melitene  90; colonies, at Arca  90; and Nicopolis  185; ?

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

association, at Satala  264; ? settlement at Apsarus  367; Phasis  367–8. See also Colonies Post  700: of Turkish Brigade  71, 112 Vexillations: IV Scythica: at Ehnes quarries  14; Eski Hisar  15; ? under Virdius Geminus  346 n.17 XII Fulminata: at Trapezus  352; Kainepolis  263, 406; ? under Virdius Geminus  346 n. 17 XV Apollinaris: ? at Apsarus  363, 366 and n. 13; ? Sebastopolis  375–6; Pityus  377; Trapezus  264, 352, 355, 400; Kainepolis  263, 406 XVI Flavia: ? atAntioch  263 n. 6 Victory: of Pompey, over Mithridates  185; under Claudius, near the Don  361; of Nero, in Armenia  120; and ? tropaeum, below Harput  95 and n. 19; over Anicetus  90 n. 12; relief, at Satala  265, 272, 281 Post  700; of Selcuks, at Manzikert  187–8, 408; Mehmet II, the Conqueror, at Otlukbeli  222, 408; expected, of Germans in Caucasus  380 Vilayet: boundary, in Taurus, between Adıyaman and Malatya  38, 63; Cappadocia, between Elazığ and Erzincan  125; Armenia Minor, between Sivas and Erzincan  182, 191; and ? between legions  182; demands of Koçkiri-Dersim uprising  225, 392; suspicion and mistrust in Erzincan  219, 245; maps  3, 50; gazetteer, of Erzincan  246; and Gümüşhane  282–3; unavailability of records, Erzincan and Sivas  188; prison, Adıyaman  18; martial law 63; Tunceli 172; Trabzon 329 Villages: Xenophon and underground houses, in Armenia  398; and shown to ? Turnagöl  334; raided by Heniochi,  361 n. 2 Post  700: names: ancient, at Berzelo  55; ? Gopal Tepe  38; Zımara  171–2; Tapurs  183; ? Monkare  205; Sağ 205; ? Ahi Dağ 219; Mochora 326–7; Zigana  296, 310; changes and confusion  3, 50 population: see Armenian; Greek; Kızılbaş; Kurds; Sunni; Turks; Zaza; exchange of  326, 408

531

positions, as indicators of ancient occupȧ tion  188; raft traffic, Imamoğ lu 86–7; Sartona, Pağnık, Samuka, Pingan  176; new, Yeni Samsat  23; Çermik  98, 105; Levenge  99, 107–9 claims of antiquity, at Başmezraa 40; Babsu  183; descent from Ten Thousand, and Greek-speaking Muslims 326 houses, mud-brick, below Samosata aqueduct  18; at Taraksu  53; Hirso  63; Çermik Mahallesi  105; Lordin  177; Sadak  283; wood and mud, at Çukurçimen 251–2 electricity, above Erzincan  215; at Sadak 283 elders, at Keferme  27; Seküyan  27; Avbi 37; Killik 55; Haburman 58; Aşkar  183; Kemah, and El-Kirzi  230; Diştaş 239; Sökmen 288; Cönger 313–14; Leri 314; Karayayla  321. See also Muhtars: Teachers guards, at Alidam  50; Boyalık  193–4; Çalolar 236; and see PKK particular activities: rafts and fishing, at Akhor  47, 49; pack-mules, at Pegir and Sandık 161–3 Vines, vineyards: at Trapezus, and Xenophon  356; not in Colchis  394 Post  700: along ‘Old Samsat Road’  23; at Kerkinos  64; Eski Malatya  90; Tepte, on Bademli ridge  125; Çit Harabe, Armenian  129; Eğin 153; Sandık 163; Pingan  175; beside Kürtler Dere  197; ‘Infidels’, near Vazgirt  210, 217; Trebizond 356. See also Grapes: Wine Violence: villages below Samosata aqueduct  18; Taylor, at Gemho  137; and in Dersim  203. See also Kızılbaş: Kurds Walls, wall: Colonies 345 Cities: Ancyra  353; Samosata  5, 7–8; Perre 24; Nicopolis 186–7; Trapezus  349–51, 352–5; and hillside tower 357; Rhizaion 364; Apsarus  365; Tigranocerta  26 n. 24; Aquincum  90 n. 13 Town: Kemah  201

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

532 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Walls (Cont.) Fortresses: Melitene/Eski Malatya  44, 88, 91–3, 127, 407; Satala  260, 265–71, 277, 279–80, 304, 394, 407; outlying structure  280–1; water junction block  275 and n. 17 Forts: Eski Hisar  15, 17; Cafer Kale  79; Pağnık Öreni  119–20, 128; Çit Harabe  127–9; Erzincan Kalesi  213– 14; Zindanlar  297–8; coastal, inspected by Arrian  363; Apsarus  366; and Gonio  367; earth, replaced with brick, at Phasis  363, 368; Sebastopolis  375–6; Pityus 376–7 Fortlets: Kerefto  66; Ağa Kalesi  295 Fortification: below Gerger Kale  50; Kilise Yazısı Tepe  121; Abkhazian Wall  371–4 and n. 19, Harmozica  263–4, 377 and n. 23, 379, 404; Caucasus passes  379; Terek  379; Derbent passage  377–8 Watch and signalling posts: west of Taşbaşımalyanı  107; Körpinik Hüyük  113; above Lycus  290–1 Sanctuary: Direk Kale  35 Other: quarry, at Ehnes  14; Samosata aqueduct  17; pits on Dulluk Tepe  88; castle at Kala, below Muşar Dağ 101; Zımara  171; Şon Kale  315; Tekke  304; ford, below Mecidiye  219 Post  700: of mediaeval castle, at Samsat  4; castle, above Killik  56; Handeresi  132 and n. 7; Canlı Çeşme  137; at Pingan  175; above Alp Köy  206; at Erzincan  211; Erzincan Kalesi  213; of threshing floor and han, at Mezraaıhan  231; supporting road, below Kerboğaz 237; gordin, guardpost above Diştaş  240; wooden and mud, of houses at Çukurçimen  251; buildings in Çimen yayla  255; Sadak, of pool  274; and houses  278, 281, 283, 399; of hans, below Sadak, and Sökmen  288; Bayburt  395; caravansaray and castle, below Zigana  308; shelter or shop, beside Xenophon cairn  329, 333; Turnagöl  334; Hortokop  337; Trebizond, lighthouse  351; and Leontokastron  352; Anaklia 371

Warehouse: ‘Roman bonded warehouse’, at Cengerli  246; at Trabzon  351 Wars: see also Expeditions Mithridatic  263; of Sulla  403; Lucullus  26 n. 24, 80, 397, 400, 403; and Pompey  185, 199, 211, 263, 403 Armenian, of Nero  86, 170, 263, 278, 346, 352, 377, 400, 404; Trajan  15, 263–4, 405; and Verus  263–4, 380 and n. 26, 406 Jewish, and Jerusalem, of Nero  5, 50 n. 7, 90, 114 servile, of Vespasian, against Anicetus  346 and n. 17, 404 Commagenicum, of Vespasian  5, 404 Dacian, of Trajan  11, 81, 158–9, 239, 347 Parthian, of Trajan  6, 264, 405; Verus  50; and Severus  6, 15, 406 Marcomannic, of Marcus  91, 406 Persian  6; of Valerian  6; Theodosius II  265; Anastasius  91, 246; Justinian  246, 376–7 Post  700: Enver, and Sarıkamış 398; Germans 379–81. See also Russians Watch houses and towers, Yukarı Çardak  14; east of Eski Hisar  17; Kızılburç  17; near Tille  50; Taraksu  53 and n. 4; Kerefto  66–7, 140; west of Pirot  86; above Maskir  141; below Aşutka 144; Gemirgap  148; Monkare  205; above Lycus 290. See also Signalling Water: mills, below Nemrud Dağ  21; at Çiftlik, north of Kuru Çay  100; above Murathanoğulları  296; millstream, above Midye  64; wheel, in Hastek gorge 116. See also Cisterns: Fountains: Pipes: Springs: Wells Water buffaloes: numbers  258, 283; at Sadak  258, 282; and surrounding villages  283; driven off by Kurds, at Karakulak  262; carts  133 and n. 8, 283; ‘Old water buffalo road’, from Sadak to Suşehri  258–60, 395 Watersheds: between Black Sea and Persian Gulf, above Refahiye  225, 232, 389; Lycus and Acampsis  395. See also Ridgeways Wax: salvaged by Arrian  356, 365 Post  700: exported from Trabzon  356

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

INDEX 3: GENER A L 

Weapons, and equipment: of Haldi  82; boulders, of Taochians  315; stones, of Macronians  340; pitch  26 and n. 24; javelins, of auxiliary cavalry  364; inspected by Arrian  363[ 366, 375; spearmen, from Rhizaion  364 n. 10; artillery, on ripa near Barzalo  57; ballistae at Phasis  363, 368; arms, manufacture  345; bronze conical points  120; shields, captured by Xenophon  329, 331 Post  700: of Kurds, rocks and stones  63, 152; rifles  152; javelins  391; armourpiercing arrows  391; shotguns  40, 315; dynamite  18, 51; rifles  152, 208; and epigraphy  272; travellers and escorts  173, 312; guns, of Hafiz Pasha, by raft through Taurus  32, 47, 87; artillery, of Reshid Mohammed Pasha  110; Russians  247, 254, 315; jandarma  192; village guards  194; Ali  238; gun battle, at Maçka  340; armoured cars  226. See also Guns Wells: perhaps Roman, at Killik  55; villages below Samosata aqueduct  18; Dostal  180; saline, at Erzincan  210 Wheat: in military diet  400; traded to Colchis 369 Post  700: fields, around Tillo  59; on Şakşak Dağ, high above Pirot  77; plain of Erzincan  210; around Sipikör  220; plain of Çiftlik (Kelkit)  282; carried by pack mules, Eğin to Giresun  163; and as bulgur on horses, from Erzerum to Trabzon 337. See also Corn: Grain Wheel ruts: see Carts Winds: Xenophon, in Armenia  397; Arrian, voyage along Pontic coast  362, 365 Post  700: north, in Commagene  396; at Kara Baba Kaya  105; violent, at Erzincan  210; Anzarya hanlar  325; Xenophon cairn, above Kolat  329; north, and humid  332, 334, 345; south, with clear visibility  264, 310, 331–2, 401; Trabzon and eastern Black Sea  344–5, 351, 362; Sarıkamış 398. See also Ships Wine: given to Xenophon, in Armenia  398; and at Trapezus  356; Monarite, of Melitene  89; Eski Malatya  90. See also Grapes: Vines

533

Winter: terrible cold and heavy rain, in mountains and highlands  396–7; altitude  397, 399–400; blizzards, in Armenia Minor and Armenia  397; Caucasus peaks, impassable  378; Strabo, and caravans  397, hardships, of Xenophon, snow and frostbite  397; Lucullus, ice, and horses  397, 400; Antony  397; Corbulo  397, 400; Paetus, in extrema Cappadocia  404; Bruttius Praesens, and snowshoes  37, 398; Palmatus  397, 406; capture of Sinoria  198–9; Trajan’s legions at Ancyra  264; Lysias’ route from Satala, by Arauraca, to Nicopolis  207, 225, 249–50, 252, 260, 393; Danube bridge  158 Post  700: military activity, movement, and large caravans  397–8; soldiers, between Kars and Erzerum  397; Erzerum  399; pack-animals  144, 310, 397; and food for Erzerum  337; Kop pass  397; Zigana pass  310, 397; nomadic Kurds, at Direk Kale  35; fishing by raft, from Murat to Kömürhan  47; salted fish  144; Euphrates frozen, at Keban Maden  397; mud  26; warming houses at Çukurçimen  251 conditions in winter Taurus: above Avbi, and snowshoes  37; snow on Gopal Tepe  38 Taurus gorge: at Haburman  58; Tillo  59–60; Midye  64; northern villages  70; Bekiran, and snow tunnels 71 Cappadocia: at Eski Malatya  90–1; Malatya  397; caravans, shelter near Kara Baba Kaya  105; harsh, at Keban Maden  111, 397; mild, at Ağın 116; Arabkir  112; danger above Aşutka  143–4; Antitaurus, snow at Handeresi  132; Eğin, and Harmancık Dağ  152, 162 Armenia Minor: fountain, at Zımara  171; Nicopolis, and ? Hadrian  185, 405; Gâvuroluğu, choked with snow  194; Kürtler Dere, raging  197; Sinibeli pass  231; Kerboğaz, ridge above Ceker  236; Diştaş  239; on horseback, from Refahiye to Kemah  244; Munzur

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/21, SPi

534 

INDEX 3: GENER A L

Winter (Cont.) Dağları, and Ziyaret pass  392; Rişkân, and deserted villages  251; Çimen Dağları  260; Kara Dağ  255–6, 397; Çardaklu pass  243 and n. 6; temperate, at Erzincan  210; Mecidiye, abandoned  219; Sipikör pass, snow  398; caravans, passing continuously at Mezraaıhan  231; Cengerli  246; and Eskiyol  223; Sadak  271, 399; Köse 293 Pontus: Keci Dere  295; Zigana pass  310; ̇ Hamsiköy  312; Imera yayla, as refuge  321; Kolat  325–6, 339; Trabzon, and Black Sea, mild and stormy  344–5, 349, 393, 401 Sarıkamış  398, 408; German assault on Caucasus 381 routes, in winter, Pirun to Cendere bridge  26; ridgeway above Avbi  37; Keferdis and Şiro Çay, to Kömürhan  70–2 Arabkir and Eğin, to Kemah, and ̇ Armenian highlands  144; and, by Iliç, to Refahiye  231 Erzincan, by Kemah and Refahiye, to Suşehri  201, 225–6, 241, 243, 246, 248, 393, 395, and see Roads, supporting (2); Erzincan and Kemah, by Hostabeli pass, to Harput  119, 203, 207, 391–2, and see Caravan Routes, minor (10) Amaseia, by Lycus valley and east from Sadak, to Erzerum  260, 398–9, and see Caravan Routes, major (3) Trebizond by Erzerum to Tabriz  261, 395, and see Caravan Routes, major (5); through Pontic mountains  296, 299, 301, 306, 309, 314; Zigana pass  310; over Pontic mountains  313 track, from Sürmene, by Kara Dere, to Bayburt 364; See also Avalanches: Climate: Ice: Snow: Snowshoes; and Index 2. 2 Barkley; Bishop; Burnaby; Fraser; Hepworth Wolves: below Tepehan  38; Harmancık Dağ, above Kemaliye  162, 165; approach to Kerboğaz  234; Çimen Dağları 256;

Mecidiye gorge  215; Sipikör  221; Eskiyol  223; Zigana Dağ  332; Turnagöl  334; ‘peak with wolves’, Kurtlu Tepe  247; ‘wolf river’, Lycus  289 Wool: exported from Samsun  212; and Trabzon  356; ‘ball of wool peak’, Yumak Tepe 234 Yayla, summer pastures  131; Armenian  314; Uzunhüseyin  71; Sarıçiçek Dağları, Kurdish tribes  131, 134; and Hotar  164–5; above Kirzi  235; Kerboğaz, and Diştaş  236, 238–9; above Horopol, and PKK  244; above Akşehir  254; Çimen  243, 252, 254–7, 398; Vazgirt  215, 217; Rumsaray  219; Devekorusu and Ağlık  222, 276; Tekke  304, 317; above Asağı Kermut  317; Hayekse  317; east of Gümüşhane  297; above Zigana karakol  308; and Ayaser  309; ̇ Leri  314–15; Imera  318–19, 321; Karayayla 321–4; Kolat 325; Turnagöl, and village  333–4 Yürüks, nomads: Yorke Dağ  86; camp above Gemho  132, 136 Zaza Kurds: dialect, Persian and Armenian,  45; in Taurus south of Tillo and Hirso ridge  45, 63; at Kocan  21; Venkuk  51; Killik  55; Haburman  58; Adış 59–61; Husukani  68; Direk Kale  35–6; below Muşar Dağ  104; appearance  21, 25, 36. See also Kermanji: Kurds Ziyaret, place of pilgrimage: Armenian: of Arakel, near Arege  138 and n. 11, 162; at Çit Harabe  129; Zımara  171; high above Ermelik  204; upper Ardos  209; springs and basin above Sadak  274 Muslim: türbe of Abuzergafarı  24; Battalgazi, above Şiro Çay  40, 136; Ali Baba, high above Şiro Çay  41; türbe of Şeyh Hasan Baba, at Eski Kozkışla 229; türbe of Şeyh Hasan Baba el-Kirzi, at Kirzi  230; Nesin Baba Kirzi, by Diştaş  239; springs and basin above Sadak  274; rock-cut tomb, at Tekke 304. See also Pilgrimage: Türbe