L’Asie mineure occidentale au IIIe siècle a.C.

The « long third century » BC forms a bridge between a world resulting from Alexander’s conquests and the arrival of the Romans on the « international » stage (ca 334-188 BC). At this time, the western part of Asia minor was a region where the emerging Successor monarchies that followed the disintegration of Alexander’s empire attempted to consolidate the territories they had acquired. Among them, it was the Seleukids and the Ptolemies in particular who disputed the region. Maintaining existing positions, gaining new ones, administering them, collecting revenues, developing and defending them required that the ties, which the dynasts and the Hellenistic kings forged with Greek cities, be not solely based upon political or military domination. For studying these developments, Asia Minor can be said to be the best-documented laboratory of the Hellenistic world, thanks to the sources at our disposal. 

In the third century, the western fringe was entirely covered with a chain of Greek cities, increasingly better-known through an ever-growing documentation, which shows up the vitality of their civic life, encouraged as it was by new geo-political conditions: monumental buildings were part of urban renewal, inscriptions and coinage both show a remarkable boom.

On a more profound level dynamics were at work that saw local societies change under the effect of new cultural and institutional norms; something that cannot any longer be reduced to a mere process of hellenization, as it used to be explained. The result of an international conference held in Bordeaux Montaigne University, this book offers a collection of current research about these issues, much of it new. Bringing together the contributions of 25 Asia Minor specialists, archeologists, historians, epigraphists and numismatists, it provides a survey that goes well beyond the limits of each discipline.