Fortress Cilicia: Megastructures in the Near East

The Ancients

History Hit

History

4.7 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 21 September 2021

⏱️ 55 minutes

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Summary

In the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s death, his empire became the subject of a series of titanic clashes: the Wars of the Successors. In this episode of the podcast, Dr Nick Rauh takes us through some of the monumental Hellenistic super fortresses built during this period in ancient Rough Cilicia, modern day southeast Turkey, along the Northeast Mediterranean shoreline. He also highlights the importance of this area of the ancient world to preceding superpowers such as the Assyrians and the Persians. Nick is a professor of Classics at Purdue University.

Fair warning, we nerd out quite heavily in this podcast, so below are some references to help!

Map of ancient Anatolia (Asia Minor), with place names mentioned in the podcast: https://www.worldhistory.org/img/c/p/1200x627/253.png

The Ptolemaic Kingdom - Hellenistic kingdom centred around Egypt that emerged in the aftermath of Alexander the Great's death.

The Seleucid Kingdom - Hellenistic kingdom centred around Syria / Mesopotamia, that emerged in the aftermath of Alexander the Great's death.

Antigonus the One Eyed - Prominent general during the Wars of the Successors. Father of Demetrius. Enemy of Eumenes of Cardia (Alexander the Great's former secretary).

Demetrius - Son of Antigonus and another prominent general during the Wars of the Successors.

Ovacik Peninsula - Cape Tisan

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's the ancient on history hit, I'm Tristan Shuse your host, and in today's podcast
0:08.0	where we are going to South Eastern Turkey to an area of the ancient world which was known
0:13.8	as psilicia or psilicia to talk about a set of fortifications constructed most likely
0:21.4	in the Hellenistic period as the wars of the successes raged. This is a gruesome, horrible,
0:30.0	but remarkable period in ancient history, the aftermath of Alexander the Great's death,
0:35.5	and to talk about the archaeology that survives from South Eastern Turkey that may well relate
0:40.2	to this period and why control of this area was so important, so significant, I was delighted
0:47.4	to get on the show. My good old friend, Dr. Nicholas Rao from Purdue University in the USA.
0:55.0	Nick, he's a lovely chap, it was wonderful to chat to him all about this, he's been going
0:58.8	out to South Eastern Turkey for many, many years now doing a lot of archaeological excavation
1:04.1	on the remains, on the ancient remains that survive there. He's a fellow Hellenistic geek
1:10.2	like myself, great minds think alike, so without further ado, here's Nick.
1:23.7	Nick, it is great to have you on the show. Well thanks for having me. No problem at all,
1:28.8	fortress psilicia, I mean this is a region of the ancient Mediterranean, that seems to be
1:33.8	just covered with the remains of awesome ancient fortifications, like a Mediterranean sea wall.
1:40.2	Fortresses? Yes, and there's an interesting component to this, there are many more than I have seen,
1:48.0	and I've probably visited maybe 40 in all along the South Coast, and then the locals will show me
1:54.3	photographs of more, but they're almost inaccessible, many of them. So it's an imperfect picture
2:00.2	that we're organizing here, but there's seen to be sort of two particular phases. There is this,
2:06.8	what I call pre-Helenistic phase, Persian era phase, that we see of various kinds of fortresses,
2:14.6	and they're mazingry techniques can vary, but it looks like for the most part these were Persian
2:21.1	garrison places, and in Lissian particular, there's been a big study about this, these tower farms.
	...

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