Hellenistic Anatolia: from Alexander to the bequest to Rome

The frame

Here the site follows the Met's timeline for Anatolia, 1000 B.C.-1 A.D. According to it, the Alexandrian conquest brings Hellenistic Greek art and culture to Anatolia and the Southern Caucasus, "through the rule of Alexander and his Seleucid successors". Within twenty years of Alexander's death (323 B.C.) his empire was divided into four kingdoms, and control of Anatolia was divided between the Seleucids, who dominated Syria and Mesopotamia, and the Ptolemies of Egypt. The chronology chart lists the Alexandrian empire (334-ca. 301 B.C.), the Seleucid empire (ca. 305-60 B.C.) and "many small areas of local rule" (ca. 300-130 B.C.). The site's range, 334-133 BCE, begins where the chart begins the Alexandrian empire and ends in the year in which, according to the same page, Attalus III, king of Pergamon, bequeathed his realm to the Roman people. Source 1.

Boundaries and overlaps

133 is not the end of the period for all of Anatolia. In the Met's words, Greek traditions continue "until the Roman conquest of much of the same area, beginning in 133 B.C, when western Asia Minor becomes a Roman province"; by the first century B.C. the remaining Hellenistic kingdoms became vassal states, and it was Emperor Augustus who annexed Anatolia to Rome. The chart itself extends the Seleucid empire to ca. 60 B.C. In Commagene, a kingdom that UNESCO places north of Syria and the Euphrates and describes as founded after the breakup of Alexander's empire, Nemrut Dağ is the hierotheseion "built by the late Hellenistic King Antiochos I of Commagene (69-34 B.C.) as a monument to himself". A Hellenistic king, in other words, still reigned in Commagene more than sixty years after 133 BCE, and Roman control came there later than in the west; neither source gives the date at which Commagene passed to Rome. The site therefore reads the monuments of Commagene of 69-34 BCE with the Hellenistic period, by the source's period name, although their dates fall after the period's end on this site. Sources 1, 2.

On this site

Three items are placed in this period. "Pergamon: a Hellenistic capital on a hillside" deals with the Attalid capital founded in the 3rd century BC and built into the slopes of Kale Hill on manmade terraces, and with the disagreement between two UNESCO pages over the capital of the province of Asia. "Aphrodisias: a city of marble and sculptors" starts from the temple of Aphrodite of the 3rd century BC and the city-state of the early 2nd century BC; it is also placed in the Roman period, for the buildings erected under Roman rule. "Nemrut Dağ: the temple-tomb of a king of Commagene" deals with the hierotheseion of Antiochos I (69-34 B.C.) and is placed here by the source's period name, not by its date, as explained above.