In the third century BC, the Attalid dynasts of Pergamon in north-western Asia Minor were relatively minor players in Hellenistic great-power politics. However it all changed in 188 BC, when, under the terms of the treaty of Apameia, the Attalids were granted the greater share of the former Seleukid territories in western and inner Anatolia. At a stroke, the Attalids were elevated to the status of one of the major powers of the eastern Mediterranean; but this new-found prominence came at a price. The vast expanse of Attalid Asia Minor had been won not by conquest, but through a pragmatic and...

This is a study of the long-term historical geography of Asia Minor, from the fourth century BC to the thirteenth century AD. Using an astonishing breadth of sources, ranging from Byzantine monastic archives to Latin poetic texts, ancient land records to hagiographic biographies, Peter Thonemann reveals the complex and fascinating interplay between the natural environment and human activities in the Maeander valley. Both a large-scale regional history and a profound meditation on the role played by geography in human history, this book is an essential contribution to the history of the...

The bleak steppe and rolling highlands of inner Anatolia were one of the most remote and underdeveloped parts of the Roman empire. Still today, for most historians of the Roman world, ancient Phrygia largely remains terra incognita. Yet thanks to a startling abundance of Greek and Latin inscriptions on stone, the cultural history of the villages and small towns of Roman Phrygia is known to us in vivid and unexpected detail. Few parts of the Mediterranean world offer so rich a body of evidence for rural society in the Roman Imperial and late antique periods, and for the flourishing of ancient...

A groundbreaking study of the long-term historical geography of Asia Minor from the fourth century BC to the thirteenth century AD.