Roman Cibyra: Retrieving the Local from the ‘Classical’

Human beings belong to a number of communities: they are born into families and start their own, they have friends, they get involved in clubs and societies. They follow international fashion trends. Maybe they have come to a new home from somewhere else. In all these cases, human beings signal to others to which communities they belong, and they do that in various ways sometimes deliberately, sometimes without even noticing themselves. For these ways of signalling, they recur to certain models. Young people dressing up for a village fair may ask: should I wear white sneakers like my idols on social media, or traditional clothing like most people at the fair? Or should I wear both? Everyday, all of us constantly choose between such global and local forms of expression in order to show the loyalties and affiliations that we feel. The need to express affiliations is shared by people of all times and origins. However, the means of expression differ. Inscriptions are one of the most important sources to learn about the cultures of the Mediterranean world in Antiquity. People in the Ancient World set texts into stone on all sorts of occasions. These texts are still preserved today. In this project, we study inscriptions that were discovered at excavations at the site of the ancient city of Cibyra (in the South West of modern Turkey). Cibyras inhabitants were originally settlers belonging to the Pisidian people. At Cibyra, they formed an independent city state in the 3rd century BCE, and adopted elements of the dominant Greek culture. In the 1st century BCE, they became part of the Roman Empire. The modern traveller encounters at Cibyra monumental ruins, which in many aspects represent a typical city of Roman Imperial times, and which one can find throughout the Mediterranean. On reading the inscriptions from Cibyra, however, one is stunned by the fact that people refer to themselves by indigenous, Greek, and Roman names interchangeably. One might want to think that the inhabitants of Cibyra were Pisidians, who first became Greeks, and then Romans. However, they were all of these things at the same time and even used different versions of their names in one single inscription. They carefully considered which aspect of their identity as a citizen of Cibyra to highlight most: Were they particularly proud of their local origins? Of the fact that they had successfully adopted Greek education and culture? Or of the fact that they had risen through ranks of the administration of the Roman Empire and had become part of the elite? In the use of their various names, and in many other specifics of their inscriptions, the citizens of Cibyra fused local and global forms of expression into an independent and distinctive cultural habit. When researching a city as distant in time and space as Cibyra, we also research human creativity in expressing affiliations. This creativity is timeless.

If we as historians want to learn something about history and about life in a city in ancient Greece and Rome, inscriptions carved in stone are our most important source for this. People honoured officials, kings or emperors by erecting stelae or statues with inscriptions on them. They provided their public buildings such as theatres, porticoes, temples or city walls with inscriptions of various kinds. However, most of the inscriptions we still have today are funerary inscriptions, full of names, professions and kinship designations. The subject of this project was inscriptions that have survived from Kibyra, that is, an ancient city located in the southwest of present-day Turkey. The city was founded by Lydians and Pisidians. Later they became Greeks, and still later, when the city became part of the Roman Empire in the 1st century BC, Romans. They began to put up inscriptions in public spaces, as was the custom of the Greeks and Romans. At least they pretended to have become Greeks and Romans. In their inscriptions, in fact, we continue to find a pronounced local colour, for example in local names or through allusions to the landscape of Kibyra. The citizens of Kibyra have, as it were, put on a Greek petasos hat and a Roman tunic. Nevertheless, they have retained the peculiarities of their origins. To investigate these peculiarities in the inscriptions of Kibyra was the aim of our project. In doing so, we immersed ourselves in a prosperous urban society where we encountered wealthy families who rose to the elite of the Roman Empire, but also Roman businessmen who married local citizens' daughters, doctors, mathematicians, policemen and their widows, public slaves who cared little for their unfree status, illegitimate children who were adopted as foster children, or female friendships. All together, they were proud to continue bearing their ancient Lydian and Pisidian names, erecting inscriptions in Greek and belonging to the Roman Empire.