The earliest Christians of Phrygia were the nameless converts made by Paul the Apostle when he preached to a congregation of Jews and “Godfearing” gentiles (the latter being Greek or Greco-Phrygian incolae or cives of the colonia and Greek-speaking members of Roman colonial families in the synagogue at Colonia Caesareia Antiocheia in A.D. 49; and before Paul's death the Christian mission to Phrygia had been launched from bases both in the east (Iconium and Antioch) and in the west (Laodicea, Hierapolis and Colossae). Between the middle of the first and the end of the second century, five generations of Phrygian Christians (as Paul expressed it on the same occasion) “fell on sleep and were laid unto their fathers”—in surface family sepulchres along the roads outside the cities and in country graveyards throughout all the hellenised districts of Phrygia. During this period the strong conservatism of Phrygian sepulchral custom, reinforced by the prudence in the face of persecution or proscription held to be enjoined by Scripture (had not Jesus himself withdrawn into Gethsemane?), precluded the open display on tombstones—in all ages the consecrated tokens of sorrow and of hope—of any trace of the Christian profession.

Beycesultan Hüyük is situated three-and-a-half miles south-west of the kaza town of Çivril in the vilayet of Denizli, and about one hundred and thirty miles east of Smyrna. The Çivril valley, of which Beycesultan must in ancient times have represented the provincial capital, is watered by the upper course of the Meander River and has an elevation of some three thousand feet above sea-level. Its length is traversed by a modern road, taking the line of a very ancient trade-route, which, at the south-west end of the valley, leaves the upland country and drops down suddenly, some two thousand feet, into the great rift of the lower Meander, whose olive groves slope towards the Aegean Sea. This must always have been one of the traditional approaches to the Anatolian Plateau from the west. The climate of Çivril is accordingly that of central Anatolia: very low winter temperatures, succeeded by perpetual summer sunshine and moderate heat.

The peculiar document here studied is an example of what has been called the “narû literature”. A narû was an engraved stele, on which a king would record the events of his reign; the characteristic features of such an inscription are a formal self-introduction of the writer by his name and titles, a narrative in the first person, and an epilogue usually consisting of curses upon any person who might in the future deface the monument and blessings upon those who should honour it. The so-called “narû literature” consists of a small group of apocryphal narû-inscriptions, composed probably in the early second millennium B.C., but in the name of famous kings of a bygone age. A well-known example is the Legend of Sargon of Akkad. In these works the form of the narû is retained, but the matter is legendary or even fictitious.

Of the many Byzantine churches in Cilicia which have survived, in a greater or lesser state of ruin, to the present day, there can be no doubt that the best known and most remarkable is the monastery church at Alahan in Isauria. During July, 1890, Professor W. M. Ramsay, D. G. Hogarth and A. C. Headlam visited the site, and in 1892 published their results under the title “Ecclesiastical Sites in Isauria (Cilicia Trachea)” in Supplementary Papers No. II of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies. This publication completely superseded that of Laborde who had been at Alahan in 1826, and to-day it is still the only authoritative work on the subject of the architecture and relief sculpture of the monastery.

Headlam's description of the site is brief and accurate. “The ruins of Koja Kalessi (i.e. Alahan) are situated about 3,000 feet above the Calycadnus valley and 4,000 feet above the sea, facing south and southwest and looking over the junction of the two great river valleys through which the branches of the ancient Calycadnus run. They consist of a large monastery with buildings of various characters too much destroyed to be easily identified, and a church in very good preservation. They are built on a terrace running due east and west, partly cut out of the side of the hill, with the ground falling away very steeply below and rising almost precipitously above.” (Pl. IX, b).