• DOI:10.1515/9783110186437.239
• Corpus ID: 132741923

Aizanoi and Anatolia

@inproceedings{Niewhner2006AizanoiAA,
  title={Aizanoi and Anatolia},
  author={Philipp Niew{\"o}hner},
  year={2006}
}

• Philipp Niewöhner
• Published 18 December 2006
• Geography

Aizanoi and other Anatolian towns witnessed a last urban building boom around A.D. 400. Colonnaded streets and squares, walls, large houses, and baths manifested urban status and distinguished towns from villages. That changed during the fifth and sixth centuries. Urban building other than churches all but came to a standstill. The existing buildings were allowed to run down and formerly prestigious houses were deserted. At the same time the countryside witnessed an unprecedented boom. The settled area and the number of settlements increased all over rural Anatolia, and the population would have done so too. Rural churches met the same regionally varying standards as the urban ones. The overall result was a convergence of settlement patterns in town and countryside. Where there are no older remains, there is nothing in the archaeological record to distinguish an urban from a rural settlement any more. The conjunction of urban decline and rural prosperity can be observed all over Anatolia and must have had some cause of more than local significance. The last urban building boom around A.D. 400 continued a Roman tradition that was based on the overriding importance of the polis in the political life of the empire. That seems to have changed, after the ‘flight of the curiales’ left the towns with a governing body of ‘notables’, who took little interest in urban affairs. This may explain urban decline as well as rural prosperity: resources that had been concentrated on the towns until about A.D. 400 seem to have been shifted to the countryside in the fifth and sixth centuries. It follows that these resources had not been generated by the towns themselves, otherwise the resources would not have been available any more when the towns were in decline. This lends some new meaning and justification to the old and much disputed label of ‘parasitical consumer city’. Aizanoi and Anatolia 253 58 cf. Schuler (s. Anm. 56) 290; Horden – Purcell (s. Anm. 56) 105–108; B. Dignas, ‘Urban centres, rural centres, religious centres in the Greek East. Worlds apart?’, in: E. Schwertheim – E. Winter (ed.), Religion und Region. Götter und Kulte aus dem östlichen Mittelmeerraum (2003) 77–91; P. Doukellis, ‘Föderalismus in hellenistischer und römischer Zeit. Theorien und Praktiken’, in: L. Aigner-Foresti – P. Siewert (ed.), Föderalimus in der griechischen und römischen Antike (2005) 43–79, 79.