University of Southern Denmark The corners of a Pontic world An essay in the history of spaces Bekker-Nielsen, Tønnes Published in: Orbis Terrarum Publication date: 2018 Document version: Final published version Citation for pulished version (APA): Bekker-Nielsen, T. (2018). The corners of a Pontic world: An essay in the history of spaces. Orbis Terrarum, 15 (2017), 23-69. http://www.steiner-verlag.de/titel/61524.html Go to publication entry in University of Southern Denmark's Research Portal Terms of use This work is brought to you by the University of Southern Denmark. Unless otherwise specified it has been shared according to the terms for self-archiving. If no other license is stated, these terms apply: • You may download this work for personal use only. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying this open access version If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details and we will investigate your claim. Please direct all enquiries to [email protected] Download date: 04. Oct. 2021 shares its name 'iron,65 Gangetic Jangetic cloth,66 na. 67 Thina was THE CORNERS OF A PONTIC WORLD: oth were can·ied AN ESSAY IN THE HISTORY OF SPACES the Ganges Riv­ :ath Ursa Minor, to reach, and it Tt)nnes Bekker-Nielsen !en. We may in­ Abstract India when the y termed an em­ The Iris-Lykos basin is often treated as a single historical space called 'Pontos'. tors such as the The frequent revisions of political boundaries during the early centuries of Roman >ve all, the vari­ dominance suggest, however, that the Iris-Lykos basin contained several 'soft' or ade so as to en- 'functional' spaces. This hypothesis finds support in the writings of the church 1ow of in detail fathers of the third to sixth centuries AD which seem to reflect a difference in out­ strongly related look between western and eastern 'Pontos', between Amaseia and Neokaisareia. various Indian ough the taxes, Keywords: Pontos, Roman Empire, soft space, epigraphy, hagiography. t the ports each )ducts traded in the commercial Where nature hath made the bounds of Countries, they remain always the same; ... But where limits are arbitrary, and depend only upon the agreement of men, they are frequently changed: and a Country may still retain the same name, though the limits have been often altered. 1 The main hindrance to the movements of people and goods by land has usually been social rather than physical. 2 Manuel Albaladejo e Historia Antigua :rsidad de Valencia a Blasco Ibanez 28 l. Introduction3 E-46010 Valencia [email protected] At an idyllic spot in the verdant north Anatolian plain known to ancient writers as the Phanaroia, the Lykos and the bis rivers meet (fig. 1). The Lykos river (mod. 4 cinnamon tree. L. Kelkit 9ay1) flows on a more or less direct course from east to west along the 've Per�pectives on , Nat. XII, 129 and MAURICE 1691, 410. 2 HORDEN & PURCELL 2001, 132. :h unified China in 3 The present study was made possible by a fellowship from the Fondation Maison des Scienc­ , although in other es de !'Homme in the spring semester of 2016. The author is grateful to the FMSH for their 1ari I y used to refer generosity, to the Ecole Normale Superieure, to UMR 8546 CNRS/ENS-AOROC Archeolo­ oceanus Sericus in gie & Philologie d'Orient et d'Occident, the Universite Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne and the I, 6, 14; 6, 67. Maison des Sciences de !'Homme, as well as to Prof. ALEXANDRU AVRAM, Dr. ANCA DAN, Prof. FRANCOIS QUEYREL and Prof. STEPHANE VERGER for their hospitality; and to Dr. KHERJEE, "Routes, JESPER MAJBOM MADSEN (Odense), Dr. VERA SAUER (Rangendingen) and Dr. S0REN LUND J.-FR. SALLES - J.­ S0RENSEN (Berlin) for constructive criticism of a draft version of this paper. 330--2. 4 Like the Greek Lykos, Kelkit, derived from Armenian, means 'wolf . 24 Tfi)nnesBekker-Nielsen southern flank of the great range lmown as the 'Pontic Alps' which separates in­ land Anatolia from the Black Sea coast. In its upper reaches, the Lykos is a turbu­ lent mountain stream, but for the last forty to fifty kilometres before the conflu­ ence, its waters flow slowly along its wide, shallow river bed meandering through the Phanaroia. The Iris (mod. Ye�ihrmak) follows a much longer and more circuitous route. At first, its waters flow from east to west on a course more or less parallel to that of the Lykos, which at this point is less than fifteen kilometres distant. The river then diverges towards the south-west, threading its way between the mountains of the Lithros massif to reach the plain of Amaseia (mod. Amasya) where it is joined by the Skylax (mod. yekerek). Having passed the city of Amaseia it turns east, tracking a second course through the mountains, and returns to the Phanaroia where it finally meets the Lykos. Immediately after their confluence, the waters enter a narrow gorge leading through the Pontic Alps and into the plain of Themiskyra (mod. <;ar�amba), legendary home of the Amazons,5 before they eventually reach the Black Sea (map fig. 2). To historians of the Hellenistic era, the Iris-Lykos basin is known as the core region of 'Pontos' or 'the Pontic kingdom',6 the tenitory ruled by the Mithradatic dynasty from c. 301 to c. 66 BC. According to STEPHEN MITCHELL, however, 'what we now call the Pontic kingdom never described itself in terms of any geo­ graphical designation or limitation - Lineage, not territory, was the key to the ti­ tle'. 7 The realm of the Mithradatids was a dynastic state held together by the per­ son of the king, his 'ancestral dominion'.8 Not until the Roman period does 'Pon­ tos' emerge as a clearly defined space - or rather, spaces: for the province Pontus created by Pompey after the defeat of Mithradates was soon broken up, and in the centuries that followed, it underwent a succession of territorial redivisions. 2. History and space This raises the question whether it is possible, or indeed meaningful, to write the history of spaces without 'any geographical designation or limitation'. Most stud­ ies of history view the world as composed either of teITitories delimited by politi­ cal borders or of spaces definedby the natural features of the landscape. The founding fathers who established the historical geography of the ancient world as a separate academic discipline - HENRICH KIEPERT,9 WILLIAM M. RAM- 5 Hdt. 4.110; Strab. 12.3.15; ApoU. Rhod. 2.964-1000; BEKKER-NIELSEN & JENSEN 2016, 232-3. 6 E.g., 'noyau central' (REINACH 1890, 9); 'Herzstiick des Landschaft Pontos' (OLSHAUSEN 1980, 903); 'the Pontic heartland' (BOYCE & GRENET 1991, 3:293). 7 MITCHELL2002, 51; see also DAN 2013, 27-8. 8 App. Mithr. 15: 1t6:rprotO\; lipx;T]. 9 It is instructive to compare KIEPERT (1878) to the latest monograph on ancient geography by ROLLER (2015). Whereas ROLLER'S book is mainly concerned with ancient geographical ex- The Corners of a Pontic World 25 1ich separates in­ SAY10 and HEINRICH NISSEN,1 1 to name only three - saw the task of the historian­ Lykos is a turbu­ geographer as analogous to that of geographers describing the contemporary •efore the conflu­ world. Starting from the features of the physical landscape and mining ancient andering through texts - narratives, inscriptions, itineraries, geographical descriptions and in RAM­ SAY'S case, the Bible - for data, they strove to establish the locations of ancient circuitous route. cities, the boundaries of tenitories and provinces, the correct names of natural ss parallel to that features such as rivers and mountains, just as historians, through critical examina­ jistant. The river tion of their texts, strove to establish reliable chronologies of ruling dynasties and the mountains of historical events. where it is joined The interwar generation of French scholars which came to be known as the ;eia it turns east, Ann.ales school (from the title of the journal which they established in 1929) re­ to the Phanaroia jected the positivism of their predecessors as well as their preoccupation with po­ tence, the waters litical history. One of the stated aims of the Ann.ales was to break down the divi­ nto the plain of sions between disciplines and serve as an 'agent de liaison' between geographers, ns, 5 before they economists, historians and sociologists. 12 Their approach inspired researchers in 3 many other countries, not least in the UK, t to explore the interplay between his­ 1own as the core tory, archaeology and geography in the ancient world. The Annales school priori­ , the Mithradatic tized the study of economic relations, agricultural regimes, inherited traditions and ::HELL, however, mentalities, none of which were bound by the shifting political borders of medie­ !rms of any geo­ val and early modern Europe. Its emphasis on the physical environment as 'ena­ :he key to the ti­ bling and constraining' human choice and action did, however, carry the risk of ether by the per­ lapsing into geographical determinism, a danger of which the Annales scholars eriod does 'Pon­ themselves were well aware. t4 province Pon.tus By contrast, another important new paradigm of the interwar period, Central '!n up, and in the Place Theory, almost entirely ignored the physical environment. In his ground­ ivisions. breaking study Die zentralen Orte in Siiddeutschland (1933), the German eco­ nomic geographer WALTER CHRISTALLER analyzed the emergence and develop­ ment of urban settlement networks as the product of human behaviour and the inherent complementarity of 'central' (urban) and 'dispersed' (rural) economic systems.