The history of Roman and Italian businessmen in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, and especially in Asia, during the first century B.C. is a familiar one. There is ample evidence of many kinds for their emigration and activities after the formation of the province of Asia, interrupted by the hegemony of Mithridates, but resumed on a larger scale after he had been driven back from Asia into Pontus. This evidence can be placed into two broad categories. First, there are allusions in the contemporary literature, inscriptions and historical accounts of the period which provide direct information about individuals and families active in the province. Then there is the evidence of inscriptions of the Imperial period, especially the second and third centuries AD., which reveal both established settlements of resident Romans in the cities and an extraordinary number of families with Roman and Italian names, which could clearly trace their origins back to the Republican period of emigration and settlement. Opportunities to study particular families or groups of emigrants at both periods are unfortunately rare, since usually one or the other category of evidence is lacking. Although the record is far from complete, and it is necessary to rely more on conjecture than one would wish, the object of this study is to investigate one such emigrant family, the Sestullii, whose presence in Asia is attested both in Republican literary sources and in Imperial inscriptions. It is clearly impossible to write a continuous history of the gens, or even to reconstruct its stemma in outline, especially since there is a notably large gap in our knowledge between ca 50 B.C. and A.D. 150, a two hundred year span from which only a single relevant inscription survives, but the family name is so rare that it can reasonably be assumed that all its bearers are related to one another in some way. It must be stressed that this assumption underlies the whole reconstruction offered here.

The principal ruin at the site of the city of Alexandria Troas entered the consciousness of European travellers anonymously, and was referred to simply as a castle or palace; when Thomas Coryate saw it in 1613 he was overcome by its magnificence and concluded, since he thought he was at Troy, that it must have been the main castle or palace of the city, but already in Lithgow's time it was known simply as “The Palace of Priam”. The name was to persist for well over a century, but by 1675 Spon had recognised it as Roman work and Wheler, basing his conclusions (as later did Pococke) on a comparison with the Harbour Gymnasium at Ephesus – at that time commonly regarded as the Temple of Diana – thought it might be a temple. Chandler, in 1764, called it a gymnasium; Lechevalier and Clarke, and after them Choiseul-Gouffier, were confident that it was a bath-building, and although Prokesch-Osten eccentrically disagreed and Texier and Napier pointed out that the two functions were not incompatible, Koldewey in his study called it a bath, and that designation is still with us.

The use of an absolute chronological framework based on tree-ring calibrated C-14 dates has been recently proposed by D. F. Easton in his attempt “… to come to grips with the crucial and difficult dating of Troy” (Easton 1976:146). Easton points out that unlike Tarsus, whose relative dating vis-a-vis Mesopotamia and Egypt is stable, Troy's relative chronology is not agreed upon and this “impinges not only on Anatolia, but on the Aegean and Bulgaria as well”.

In establishing his chronology Easton uses, in addition to “the normal comparative methods”, two sources: (a) radiocarbon dates which, after calibration, especially when using Suess's calibration curve, affect both relative and absolute dating, (b) his reassessed stratigraphy of the Bronze Age levels at Troy (Easton 1976; 1977).

Easton in his new chronological structure has not taken into consideration certain facts and opinions surrounding tree-ring calibrated radiocarbon dating. In view of the persisting controversy regarding this scientific dating method, it is premature, at least as far as Anatolia is concerned, to replace the relative dates derived from historical synchronisms with calibrated “absolute” C-14 dates.

All but one of the previously unpublished fragments of Diogenes' inscription presented in this article were discovered at Oenoanda by members of a British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara team in the summer of 1977. The exception is NF 108, which (see under NF 108, Discovery) was recorded by an Austrian epigraphist a mere seventy-five summers earlier.

In 1977 the aims were to carry forward the topographical and epigraphical survey begun in 1974 and continued in 1975 and (in a very limited way) 1976, to study the architecture of the city, and to make plans for a major excavation of the site. The work was again carried out with the kind permission and encouragement of the Eski Eserler ve Müzeler Genel Müdürlüǧü in Ankara and with generous financial support from the British Academy, and it is a pleasure to express sincere gratitude to both bodies.

The members of the team were: Mr. A. S. Hall (Director), Mr. R. P. Harper (Assistant Director), Dr. J. J. Coulton, Dr. R. J. Ling, Dr. Lesley Ling, and three student-members of the Department of Land Surveying, North-East London Polytechnic—Messrs. David Chapman, Simon Dykes, and David Howarth. The representative of the Turkish Government, as in 1974 and 1976, was Bay Osman Özbek.

The funerary banquet, a frequent theme in ancient sculpture and painting, has been thoroughly studied in recent years. The addition to the corpus of a newly discovered grave stele from Sardis (Pl. XIIIa) is of particular interest because it is a demonstrably local piece of work, with a Lydian inscription carved above a figured relief.

The piece was found in the summer of 1977 by villagers and was reportedly discovered in the east bank of the Pactolus river bed, to the south of the area “Pactolus Cliff”. The slab, which is of local whitish marble, tapers slightly toward the top. Its height is 0·41 m., its width at the bottom is 0·30 m., and its approximate original width at the top was 0·26 m. There is no border at the edge of the stone, but a small ledge protrudes at the bottom of the relief stone. The back has been left rough and unfinished.

The Inscribed Pillar of Xanthos is the most elaborate example of the Lycian pillar tombs. It is important for its reliefs preserved in London and Istanbul but particularly for the long historical inscription in Lycian which covers the south, east, and half of the north side of the pillar shaft. This is followed on the north side by a Greek epigram and a moderately long inscription on the remainder of the north and the whole west side in Lycian B or Milyan. The date of the pillar is generally placed around 400 B.C. This is based on the style of the reliefs of the upper burial chamber and on the analysis of the historical inscription.

The name of the author of the pillar appeared three times in the inscriptions – twice in the Lycian historical inscription (south side or a lines 1 and 29/30) and once in the Greek epigram (north side or c line 24, epigram line 5). Yet in the Lycian the name is missing entirely in both cases and in the Greek only the last two letters are preserved: [ … ]ις. The fact that he is called in the Lycian and Greek the son of Harpagos does not help identify him because this Harpagos is otherwise known only from two inscriptions, one still unpublished. Recently it has been argued by Laroche that the author of the inscription cannot be the formerly favoured Kherẽi (χerẽi) because the space for the name must have contained six letters. Bousquet has also shown that a plausible restoration of the name of the author of the inscription in the Greek epigram is [Gerg]is, the Greek equivalent of Kheriga (χeriga).

In an article published in Anatolian Studies XXVI (1976), I have questioned the accepted chronology of level VII in Alalakh, suggesting that four rather than two kings reigned in Alalakh during the period covered by the level VII archive. In the meantime two important works, bearing directly on the subject, have been published by Dr. Dominique Collon. The first is an enlargement of her thesis on the Alalakh seal impressions, including a detailed discussion of the seal impressions as well as of the overall problem of the archive and its inner division into generations (SITA, pp. 143–161). This most welcome contribution to the subject at hand adds much to our understanding of the chronology of level VII, although some of her points might be interpreted in a different way, as I hope to show below.

In her book Dr. Collon accepted the chronological system suggested by the CAH, according to which there were only two kings in Alalakh during the period of level VII. She again summarized her results in Anatolian Studies XXVII (1977), rejecting my suggested reconstruction of the chronology of the kings as well as of the generations in Alalakh.

It is a good maxim that all controversial archaeological issues should be reviewed regularly in the light of new material and/or changing perspectives; and certainly one of the most controversial issues in the history of the early first millennium B.C. in the Near East has been the dating of the reliefs and inscriptions built into the two Citadel Gates at Karatepe.

The site itself, set on the west bank of the Ceyhan River in the northeast corner of Cilicia, sits on a natural hill just south of a spur of the foothills that mark the beginning of the juncture of the Taurus and Amanus mountain ranges (cf. Maps, Figs. 2, 3). It was first discovered and explored in 1946 by a Turkish team, headed by H. Th. Bossert, investigating ancient road systems of the “Neo-Hittite” period. Active field seasons were initiated at Karatepe, along with soundings at the neighbouring site of Domuztepe on the opposite bank of the Ceyhan, and were continued through the mid-1950s, since which time restoration has been in process at Karatepe under the direction of Professor Halet Çambel of Istanbul University.

Two Neo-Hittite rulers occupied positions of authority, the proper understanding of which demands a detailed examination of the textual passages describing this authority. The rulers, Azatiwatas of Karatepe and Yariris of Carchemish, seem moreover to have enjoyed curiously analogous positions. Neither gives in his inscriptions any very exact information on his rank, nor do they record their fathers' names, yet both seem to have exercised a high degree of authority over their cities, Adana and Carchemish respectively, and both refer to their “lords” and their lords' families in ways which have in the past been somewhat misunderstood.

Ever since the discovery of Karatepe in 1946, debate has continued concerning the dating of the monument and its inscriptions, and the position of Azatiwatas is to some extent bound up in this question. Azatiwatas does not directly claim any specific royal title but only the vague religious honorifics “the Sun-blessed(?) man, Tarhunzas's servant” (§ I), adding that he was promoted (“made great”) by Awarikus the king of Adana (§ II) and that Tarhunzas has made him mother and father to Adana (§ III). Although much of the inscription concerns the benefits which he conferred upon Adana (especially §§ IV–VI, XXIV, XXXI–XXXII, XXXVII), he does not claim to have sat on the throne himself — on the contrary, he explicitly, if rather imprecisely, states that he established his “lord's family” on it (§§ XIV–XVI, with the notes on these passages on p. 107). The lord in question must presumably be understood to be Awarikus, and the establishment of his family in Adana must refer to a time after his death or disappearance.

It is hoped that one of the advantages of the creation of the R.E.C.A.M. archives in Ankara and of the eventual publication of the regional catalogues will be that the synoptic study of particular topics in a given region will be made easier. A provisional reassessement of the relations between Jews, orthodox Christians and related groups in two Phrygian cities is here attempted.

Jewish settlements were established in Phrygia as military colonies by Antiochus III, in the last decade of the third century B.C. Evidence from both inscriptions and rabbinic literature suggests that, by the Roman imperial period, these communities were distinctly Hellenized. The Talmud provides an interesting anecdote, which appears to refer to the Jews of Phrygia and neighbouring Lydia: