Harnessing Mountain Power in Ancient Anatolia
Author(s): Felipe Rojas
Year: 2015
Summary
For the inhabitants of Bronze and Iron Age Anatolia, nearly every feature in the landscape was a god: rivers and springs, trees and rocks, lakes and mountains—mountains above all. Kings in Hattusas swore oaths by them. Luwian rulers claimed mountains as their own with conspicuous rock-cut reliefs and inscriptions. According to ancient sources, a mountain was among the earliest Lydian kings; that very mountain once acted as judge in a musical duel between Apollo and Pan! But how did people in Greek and Roman Anatolia interpret and manipulate this rich (and sometimes bizarre) legacy? Who cared to harness cultural mountain power in Western Anatolia especially when the great political and financial centers on the peninsula were mainly on the coasts and plains? How did they do so? Why? I use a combination of material and textual evidence to tackle these questions.
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Cite this Record
Harnessing Mountain Power in Ancient Anatolia. Felipe Rojas. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 396482)
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Keywords
General
Anatolia, landscape mythology
Geographic Keywords
West Asia
Spatial Coverage
min long: 25.225; min lat: 15.115 ; max long: 66.709; max lat: 45.583 ;