Cremna in Pisidia : An Ancient City in Peace and in War

by Stephen Mitchell

Cremna, a ruined city of southern Turkey, has one of the most spectacular sites in Asia Minor, high in the Taurus mountains. For a long time a stronghold of hellenised Pisidians, Cremna was refounded as a veteran colony by the emperor Augustus. From the age of Hadrian until the early third century AD the colony enjoyed a boom in public buildings, whose remains still adorn the site. Disaster struck in the late third century when Cremna became a centre for a regional insurrection against Roman rule. Roman forces staged a major siege of the city, and recaptured it in AD 278. A bishopric in Late Antiquity, Cremna was abandoned in the sixth or seventh century. This book gives a detailed reconstruction of Cremna's life and history, based on an intensive survey of the archaeological remains between 1985 and 1987. There is a lively account of the survey itself. The book also traces the story of the rediscovery of the site in 1833 and the contribution of early travellers and archaeologists. There is a full study of the public building programme of Cremna from the first century BC to the third century AD; of the aqueduct, water supply and domestic housing; and of the church building in Late Antiquity. The highlight of the archaeological survey was the discovery of numerous remains of the Roman siege of AD 278. The siege of Cremna demonstrates classical techniques of Roman siege warfare, which hitherto were best known from Josephus' account of the Jewish Revolt in AD 66-73. Cremna in Pisidia is written in a style accessible to general readers as well as to specialists. It is not only a definitive account of an important city of the Roman East. It is also a case-study exploring many of the common characteristics of civic life in the Roman world.

Hardcover

First published December 1, 1995

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.

"I was Leverhulme Professor of Hellenistic Culture from 2002 in 2011 and am now emeritus during an active retirement. I was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 2002 and served for some years on its Council. Most of my published work has been concerned with Asia Minor in antiquity, explored through texts, inscriptions and archaeology, with a particular emphasis in recent years on religious and cultural history. The bench-mark publication of my earlier career was Anatolia. Land, Men, and Gods in Asia Minor (2 vols. OUP 1993). During my time at Exeter I directed an AHRC-funded research project on Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire, which led to two important conference volumes, including One God. Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire (CUP 2010) and two CUP monographs written by the project's post-doctoral and doctoral researchers, Peter Van Nuffelen and Anna Collar. I received an honorary doctorate in 2006 from the Theology Department at the Humboldt University in Berlin and this has led to close involvement in an ongoing project to study the history of early Christianity in Asia Minor, part of the Berlin TOPOI initiative. In due course I plan to write a book which will follow the non-Pauline tradition of the earliest Christian communities in Asia relating them to their Jewish and pagan contexts. I was a founder member and first director of Exeter Turkish Studies, and am now Honorary Secretary of the British Institute at Ankara, which provides the focal point - and some of the funding - for British academic research in Turkey in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Another major project has been to prepare the corpus of Greek and Latin inscriptions of Ankara. The first volume has been published, and the second, which was advanced during a semester at the University of Cologne in 2012, is in preparation. At Exeter I wrote A History of the Later Roman Empire 285-641 (Blackwell 2007, second edition in preparation)." http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/classi...